Economic Women

Economic Women Economic Women Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture e EDITED BY LANA L. DALLEY AND JILL RAPPOPORT THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Economic women : essays on desire and dispossession in nineteenth-century British culture / Edited by Lana L. Dalley and Jill Rappoport. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1236-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1236-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9338-6 (cd-rom) ISBN-10: 0-8142-9338-7 (cd-rom) 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Women and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Women—Great Britain—Economic conditions—19th century. 4. Women in literature. 5. Economics in literature. I. Dalley, Lana L. II. Rappo- port, Jill. PR868.W6E27 2013 823'.8093522—dc23 2013023713 Cover design by Mary Ann Smith Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Granjon Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introducing Economic Women LANA L. DALLEY and JILL Rappoport 1 PART I • THE ETHICS OF EXCHANGE 1 Gentry, Gender, and the Moral Economy during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Provincial England KathrYN GLEADLE 25 2 Women, Free Trade, and Harriet Martineau’s Dawn Island at the 1845 Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar LESLEE THORNE-MURPHY 41 3 Sacrificial Value: Beyond the Cash Nexus in George Eliot’s Romola ILANA M. BLUMBERG 60 PART II • POLITICAL ECONOMY 4 Florence Nightingale’s Contributions to Economics MARY POOVEY 77 5 The Cost of Everything in Middlemarch GORDON BIGELOW 97 6 Demand and Desire in Dracula DEANNA K. KREISEL 110 CONTENTS PART III • FINANCING THE FAMILY 7 “A pauper every wife is”: Lady Westmeath, Money, Marriage, and Divorce in Early Nineteenth-Century England JANETTE RUTTERFORD 127 8 Marriage, Celibacy, or Emigration? Debating the Costs of Family Life in Mid-Victorian England ERIKA Rappaport 143 9 “Absolutely Miss Fairlie’s own”: Emasculating Economics in The Woman in White ESTHER GODFREY 162 PART IV • WOMEn’s BUSINESS 10 “She’d give her two ears to know”: The Gossip Economy in Ellen Wood’s St. Martin’s Eve TARA MacDONALD 179 11 Charlotte Riddell: Novelist of “the City” NANCY HENRY 193 12 A “Formidable” Business: British Women Travelers in the Colonial Medical Market NARIN HASSAN 206 Afterword—and Forward Economic Women in Their Time, Our Time, and the Future REGENIA GAGNIER 219 Contributors 225 Index 229 • vi • ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURE 2.1 Free Trade Bazaar at Covent Garden Theater 42 FIGURE 2.2 Stall at the Free Trade Bazaar 44 FIGURE 2.3 The Leeds stall, using the space of a theater box, with a table set up below 47 FIGURE 2.4 The frontispiece of Dawn Island, drawn and etched by J. Stephenson 53 FIGURE 4.1 Nightingale’s Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army of the East. Left: April 1855–March 1856. Right: April 1854–March 1855. 80 FIGURE 4.2 Nightingale’s Diagrams of the Mortality in the Army of the East. Left: April 1855–March 1856. Right: April 1 1854–March 1855. 81 • vii • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS he scholars who contributed their work to this volume did so T long before we could guarantee publication; we thank them for their enthusiasm, their generosity, and their patience. Sandy Crooms at The Ohio State University Press supported the project when it was still in its infancy, and we are very grateful to have had her encouragement throughout the process. We also thank the (then anonymous) reviewers from The Ohio State University Press, Claudia Klaver and Talia Schaf- fer, who offered such valuable advice at a critical stage of the work, and Michael Genovese, Sarah Hagelin, and Ellen Malenas Ledoux, whose sharp eyes and keen insights improved the volume as well. We are grateful for support from the University of Kentucky, Califor- nia State University, Fullerton, and Villanova University; research assis- tance from Benjamin Raymond, Afton Woodward, Lauren Bailey, and Andrea Holliger; and additional help from Cindy Brightenburg at Brig- ham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library and Florence Gillich at Yale University’s Cushing and Whitney Medical Historical Library. • ix • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FROM L. D.: I’d like to thank Jill for what began as a brief chat over coffee at NAVSA but developed into a lovely friendship and a productive collaboration. My portion of this volume is dedicated to my mom, Lannette Huelson, who provided my earliest and finest lessons on what it means to be an economic woman; my three children—Elijah Grey, Finley Sofia, and Saw- yer August—who fill every day (even the long ones) with laughter and with joy; and, of course, to Tristan, whose patience, generosity, and love are assets of immeasurable value. FROM J. R.: With many thanks to Lana for the pleasure of collaboration, and to Mike for a partnership that exceeds words, I’d like to dedicate my portion of this volume to my parents, whose lives continue to teach me about the power of gifts and the purpose of exchange—Ann L. Rappoport and Paul Rappo- port—in honor of the future that they’ve helped to shape for my children, Isaac Edward Genovese and Max Asher Genovese. • x • Introducing Economic Women G LANA L. DALLEY AND JILL RAPPOPORT n Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, Robinson Crusoe is the proto- I type of “Homo Economicus.”1 King of his island, living (with the help of some scavenged English tools and materials) off of his own labor and that of Friday, Daniel Defoe’s shipwrecked hero exemplifies the traits of prudence, production, and power that made him the model of economic individualism. Despite Marx’s recognition that such extreme isolationism is a fantasy of fiction,2 nineteenth- and even twentieth-century economic phi- losophers looked, like Defoe, for the new spaces of production and trade that would characterize Economic Man. But where, in this fiction, is Eco- nomic Woman? Marx, who considered the family’s division of labor to be a “spontaneously developed system,”3 didn’t bother to look for her, and, for the most part, neither did his contemporaries. Although recent discussions of Economic Man by economists and cultural historians of the period have richly complicated his isolated productive stance, his analogue, Economic Woman, remains at best a liminal figure. 1 “Capital,” in The Marx–Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (1978), 324–25. 2 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2 (2011), 26. 3 “Capital,” 326. • 1 • DALLEY AND RAPPOPORT, “INTRODUCING ECONOMIC WOMEn” By telling Economic Woman’s story, this volume builds on the wealth of interdisciplinary economic criticism published in the last twenty years and also intervenes in its larger narratives of economic subjectivity and the prevailing behaviors that attend it. Crusoe’s economic tale—from his rejection of a middling rank to his claims to sovereignty over a Caribbean island—ignores women almost entirely, and no corresponding female character has personified economic individualism within the popular imagina- tion. Indeed, for much of the nineteenth century, “individualism” itself was a concept at odds with dominant notions of women’s place within domestic ideology. Consigned to the “private” sphere by such conduct-book writers as Sarah Stickney Ellis and fiction writers as Charles Dickens, considered a “relative” creature whose aims were to serve her family rather than herself, she was an unlikely character to showcase the self-interest so cru- cial to political economy.4 Even such economically significant efforts as her household management and reproduction were most frequently detached from the market and characterized as modes of service that privileged the needs of others over the individual economic agent. Writing the history of nineteenth-century Economic Woman requires new modes of conceptual- ization that take into account her carefully circumscribed socioeconomic position and the behavior it elicited; she cannot simply be modeled on Eco- nomic Man. Whereas the familiar fiction of Economic Man posits “a conscious, knowing, unified, and rational subject,”5 this volume argues that more wide-ranging popular representations of Economic Women throw both characters into question. Instead of seeking one solitary, self-serving figure to mirror Economic Man, we do better to recognize the complex and excit- ing set of economic options that were available to a diverse range of nineteenth-century mothers, daughters, wives, and “surplus” women during a period when many women were fighting for economic opportunities. The nineteenth century saw significant changes in economic thought and practice: production and then consumption replaced household management as the focus of economics, various forms of labor were increasingly profession- alized and regulated, and consumer markets drastically expanded at home 4 Of course, in practice women were entering the public sphere and, according to some scholars, even “feminizing” it through their participation. See, for example, Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation (2000). 5 Susan Feiner, “A Portrait of Homo Economicus” (1999), 193. For more on women’s rela- tionship to Economic Man, see Anne Laurence, Josephine Maltby, and Janette Rutterford, eds., Women and Their Money (2009), 1–2; Edith Kniper and Jolande Sap, eds., Out of the Margin (1995); Marianne Ferber and Julie A. Nelson, eds., Beyond Economic Man (1983); and Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic (2008), chapters 5 and 6.

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