Carleton, Mary

Mary Carleton was a notorious Restoration celebrity who sparked a concatenation of pamphlets surrounding her wildly popular criminal trial and acquittal for bigamy in 1663, and then ten years later to mark her execution at Tyburn for petty theft. Carleton’s own autobiography, The Case of Madam Mary Carleton (1663), is a multigeneric narrative constructed from older romance and picaresque traditions in dialogue with contemporary Restoration comedies about witty heroines, elusive fortunes, and marital discord. In her critique of women’s subordinate status in marriage, Carleton asserts herself as “meerly my own free Agent,” thus evoking contemporary political debates about self-determination, contracts, and property rights. By emphasizing her innate talent and enterprising nature in successfully constructing, narrating, and performing a foreign gentlewoman, Carleton points to fundamental incongruities between fixed, inherent identity and the forms of behavior that uphold systems of social differentiation based on gender, class, nation, and race. The Case of Madam Mary Carleton therefore foretells and promotes important cultural changes in England: feminist philosophical critique of domestic patriarchy, political and social theories of human subjectivity and the individual, early capitalist ideology, and the rise of the novel. For contemporary feminist critics, it is Carleton’s role as an improviser, performer, and writer, rather than a criminal type or object of inspiration, that has been the focus of fruitful inquiry.