Abstract
Using insights from Black Studies and Animal Studies, Higginbotham innovatively reads William Wycherley’s 1675 comedy The Country Wife, demonstrating the way it renders whiteness visible. This essay shows that the representation of women as animals, especially monkeys, depends upon a pre-existing discourse about Africans and African slaves as inhuman beasts, a discourse that receives renewed energy because of the increasing reliance on the labor of enslaved Africans in English settlements in the Americas during the late seventeenth-century. This play then succeeds in distinguishing between the dangerous wildness of women and the wildness of white men by linking women to enslaved peoples, making the servitude of others—women, animals, slaves—distinctively necessary to the whiteness of gentlemen in early modern London.
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Higginbotham, D. (2018). Women/Animals/Slaves: Race and Sexuality in Wycherley’s The Country Wife. In: Smith, C., Jones, N., Grier, M. (eds) Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76786-4_3
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