“...desire as a decisive step in producing the densely interwoven fabric of common sense and sentimentality...this struggle to represent sexuality took the form of a struggle to individuate wherever there was a collective body, to attach psychological motives to what had been the openly political behavior of contending groups, and to evaluate these according to a set of moral norms that exalted the domestic woman over and above her aristocratic counterpart...domestic fiction unfolded the operations of human desire as if they were independent of political history. And this helped to create the illusion that desire was entirely subjective and therefore essentially different form the politically encoded forms of behavior to which desire gave rise.” (468-69)

(Armstrong, Nancy. “From Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel.” Theory of the Novel. Ed. Michael McKeon. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 467-475. Print.)