Plebeianizing the Female Soldier: Radical Liberty and The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies

This article examines the work-related dimensions of The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies (1740). A rollicking account of a plebeian female soldier, the Life is a key document for the history of eighteenth-century working women and their representation in narrative. By portraying both the industriousness and the radical liberty associated with the lower-class milieu of real-life female soldiers, Davies's narrative challenges the depiction of plebeian identity in numerous early eighteenth-century fictions of low-born women, whether picaresque like Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders or sentimental like Samuel Richardson's Pamela. Drawing on genres such as jest-books, criminal biography, and amatory fiction to break with heroic images of well-born women warriors (including those in popular ballads), it voices a resistant outlook on the regulation of women's labour and sexuality. And, with a social perspective springing as much from class status as sexual identity, Davies's Life marks a literary epoch in which female soldiering is plebeianized in plays and novels as diverse as John Gay's Polly and Tobias Smollett's Ferdinand Count Fathom.