'The Duchess' and women in the eighteenth century

At the end of the seventeenth century, Robert Burton said that England was “a Paradise for women and [a] hell for horses”. At first sight it is not easy to understand where the incongruity of this statement is, until one realises that women and horses were both living according to the way in which their masters wanted them to live. Evidently, some women did not find England such a paradise as men like Burton believed. In regards to this fact, scholars like Tanya Evans, in her article “Women, marriage and the family” stated that, even after ‘Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753’, which transformed marriage into a contract,

women continued to be defined as the property of their husbands and at no time during this period was the sexual double standard threatened. The adultery of a woman was always treated with more severity than that of a man. (64)

(Eighteenth-century typical woman)

This connects with the movie The Duchess or, generally speaking, with the story of Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, an English aristocrat who married at a young age and suffers a variety of struggles in her marriage.

The movie, focused on her marriage to William Cavendish and on the crisis point of Georgiana’s affair with Charles, second Earl Grey, can be compared to Daniel Defoe’s Roxanna and the philosophical writings of Mary Astell, paying attention to the situation of women during the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.

Right from the beginning one appreciates in Georgiana values such as youth, joy and naivety when she is told by her mother that she is going to get married. Such values would not be values for a character like Roxanna or for Mary Astell; both of them support experience and empirical knowledge as one of the only weapons that women can hold against oppression.

Some of the moments of the film let the audience to compare between Georgiana herself and her mother, for instance, when Georgiana’s mother told her to have patience, fortitude and resignation. This kind of values are important in order to understand Defoe’s Roxanna, because these are the type of qualities that a experienced woman has to understand –but not tolerate– in order to be integrated into society.

Finally, it is important to highlight Georgiana’s change in her way of being –and above all, of acting– when she realises that her husband only wants her in order to have a male heir. It’s then when the Duchess became more active, practical and decisive. This new female role is more similar to the one supported by Mary Astell in her essay “Some reflections upon marriage”.