SOURCE: Cullens, Chris. “Mrs. Robinson and the Masquerade of Womanliness.” In Body & Text in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Veronica Kelly and Dorothea Von Mücke, pp. 266-89. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Cullens examines Mary Robinson's novel Walsingham in light of her Memoirs.

The “real” and the “sexually factic” are phantasmatic constructions—illusions of substance—that bodies are compelled to approximate, but never can. What, then, enables the exposure of the rift between the phantasmatic and the real whereby the real admits itself as phantasmatic? Does this offer the possibility for a repetition that is not fully constrained by the injunction to reconsolidate naturalized identities? Just as bodily surfaces are enacted as natural, so these surfaces can become the site of a dissonant and denaturalized performance that reveals the performative status of the natural itself.

—Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

Sometimes she'd play the Tragic...