| Summary: | Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess or, The Fatal Enquiry (1719) and Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) speculate the validity of female voice as opposed to women’s suppression and passivity or female conformity as an attitude in-between by presenting various female characters in the patriarchal backdrop of the eighteenth century England through male characters. Employing a male protagonist, D’Elmont and reflecting his transformation along with his eventual maturation through his love affairs with several female characters including Alovysa and Amena, Love in Excess pictures the eighteenth century social, cultural, and economic reality about women who are mostly defined according to their relationship with men. Likewise, A Simple Story recounts different stories of a mother, Millner and her daughter, Matilda. Millner is a woman of challenge and courage while Matilda is lost in a life of submission and silence conducted by her father, Dorriforth. Nevertheless, female characters are not altogether depicted as submissive and oppressed individuals in those novels as some of them still possess female agency to speak their minds while their acts trigger change in male characters, which proves their transgression. On the other hand, other female characters who transgress the boundaries are punished by death or unhappiness, which amounts the idea of female conformity that is most presumably chosen as a safe ground to stand in their novels by Haywood and Inchbald. The aim of this study is to discuss the possibility of female empowerment through transgression pictured with the characters of Alovysa, Ciamara, Violetta and Millner as countered with Amena and Matilda’s silence and passivity, and Melliora’s conformity in the novels, Love in Excess and A Simple Story that represent the social and cultural background of eighteenth century England.
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