View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by The Research Repository @ WVU (West Virginia University) Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2005 Fictions of the gift: Generosity, obligation, and economy in eighteenth-century England Cynthia J. Klekar West Virginia University Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Recommended Citation Klekar, Cynthia J., "Fictions of the gift: Generosity, obligation, and economy in eighteenth-century England" (2005). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 2315. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/2315 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in WVU Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports collection by an authorized administrator of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FICTIONS OF THE GIFT: GENEROSITY, OBLIGATION, AND ECONOMY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Cynthia J. Klekar Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Robert M. Markley, Ph.D., Chair Marilyn Francus, Ph.D. John Lamb, Ph.D. Johnathan Burton, Ph.D. Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, Ph.D. Department of English Morgantown, West Virginia 2005 Keywords: Eighteenth-century, British novel, Gift Economy, Trade, Property, Gender Copyright 2005 Cynthia J. Klekar ABSTRACT FICTIONS OF THE GIFT: GENEROSITY, OBLIGATION, AND ECONOMY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Cynthia J. Klekar Fictions of the Gift: Generosity, Obligation, and Economy in Eighteenth-Century English Literature examines the relationship between generosity, obligation, economy, and the gift in eighteenth-century English literature and culture. The central inquiry of the project investigates the paradoxical nature of the gift and ways in which the politics of a gift economy informed both practical and symbolic relations of domination in the period. Given the widespread nature of the language of the gift in the period, I concentrate on cultural texts and eighteenth- century novels to demonstrate the work of the gift within a number of eighteenth-century institutions, such as international trade, diplomacy, property, marriage, and the family. By analyzing representations of gift economies in social and literary texts, such as Lord George Macartney’s China journal, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Frances Burney’s Cecilia, I demonstrate how the fiction of the disinterested gift underwrites a number of the period’s social and economic concerns. Drawing on the work of Marcel Mauss, George Bataille, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Marshal Sahlins, I locate a specific ideology of the gift during the eighteenth century. The gift serves an ideological purpose specific to the eighteenth century and emerges as a way to ameliorate the conflicts that arose as the patronage system waned and capitalism and individualism became more prominent and seemingly threatened socioeconomic hierarchies. In this respect, the gift becomes a way to maintain relations of domination in a period in which forms of domination were being challenged and changed. Although eighteenth-century texts do not represent a gift economy as the primary system of exchange or acquisition of wealth, the language of the gift nevertheless is adopted simultaneously to disguise and to describe the harsh realities of profit, obligation, and domination by depicting a symbolic exchange of loss. The gift enacts the affective bonds of the patronage system–-of equal and mutual favor and return–-but paradoxically functions to mask the amorality of self-interest and manipulation. The narrative of the gift in the eighteenth century substitutes for the explicit relations of competitive capitalist exchange an implicit and seemingly disinterested ethos of mutual benefit. TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Chapter One: Gifts, Obligation, and Economy in the “Age of Benevolence” 1 II. Chapter Two: "Prisoners in Silken Bonds": Obligation, Trade, and Diplomacy in English Voyages to Japan and China 40 III. Chapter Three: “Comply and Live, Deny and Starve”:Obligation and Asymmetrical Exchange in Defoe’s Roxana 75 IV. Chapter Four: Property, Legitimacy, and Socioeconomic Debt: The Misrecongized Gift in Tom Jones 110 V. Chapter Five: ‘Her Gift Was Compelled’: Gender and the Failure of the ‘Gift’ in Cecilia 145 Works Cited 182 iii 1 CHAPTER ONE Gifts, Obligation, and Economy in the “Age of Benevolence” I. In the closing act of Congreve’s The Way of the World, Mrs. Fainall presents a “gift of deed” to Mirabell, and enacts an important transition within the rhetoric of gift-giving from an ethos of aristocratic patronage to a complex and on-going negotiation of value.1 This exchange is emblematic of the continual and often problematic transformation of social values in the eighteenth century. In this dramatic moment, Fainall, who represents an economy of honor and patronage (he has married both for money and to blackmail Lady Wishfort to hand over more), is displaced by Mirabell, who represents the new economy based on a utilitarian ethic of mutual exchange and contractual obligation.2 Thus, in the presentation of the gift, the play dramatizes the emerging legitimacy of contractual relations underpinning social authority and economic power, as well as Mirabell’s skill in using his emotional and gender-based power over Mrs. Fainall, his 1William Congreve, The Way of the World, ed. Brice Harris, Restoration Plays, (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 1953) 592. 2The complexities of social and economic transition dramatized in The Way of the World are discussed in further detail by Richard Braverman, “Capital Relations and The Way of the World,” ELH 52.1 (1985): 133-58. 2 former mistress, to prosper in his efforts to marry Millamant. The hero’s ultimate control of interpersonal and legal relationships is cast in a language of gift, debt, and obligation that becomes increasingly important later in the eighteenth century. The gift of deed that Mrs. Fainall signs over to Mirabell is indeed in the form of a “gift” that both invokes obligations and is the product of her obligation to her former lover. The gift is represented both as property that can be exchanged and as an embodiment of reciprocity between giver and receiver. Rather than entailing obligations of honor and service, the “gift of deed” represents the enactment of capitalist relations in the form of gift exchange, thereby concealing the negotiation process and the power relations bolstered by the exchange. Significantly, Congreve leaves the audience in the dark about the existence of Mrs. Fainall’s gift of deed to her former lover until Act 5. What seems to be a Machiavellian strategy on Fainall’s part has been rendered irrelevant from before the start of the play because Mrs. Fainall’s “gift” both empowers Mirabell and effectively compels her to aid him in his designs on Millamant. In this sense, Fainall’s impotence emphasizes the fall of courtly obligation and the rise of capital relations. This scene and the play overall mark an acknowledgment of the shift in eighteenth-century social, political, and economic conceptions of debt and obligation. 3 I draw on this scene from Congreve’s play in order to situate the argument of my dissertation historically. My contention is that the anxieties and conflicts that accompanied the cultural and economic changes in the period were dealt with, in literary works, by manipulating the language and practice of gift economy. As Fainall’s fate suggests, the patronage system in 1700 was succumbing to a competitive, market-based economy. Fainall relies on a traditional system that regulates the transmission of landed property–-property follows the legal ties of marriage and blood. He expects to triumph because he believes he can coerce both daughter and mother. Mirabell, on the other hand, represents a system of innovation and status mobility, consummate with the settlement of 1688 which recognized the sovereignty of parliament as well as the prerogatives of property. Thus, the gift exchange permits him to redefine the terms of an old social order within the context of a new economy. Mirabell’s new way of looking at the world stresses the legalization of the prerogative will, the limitations of heroic and courtly conventions, and the triumph of the legal document and negotiated settlement. Such negotiations, however, are always asymmetrical and always reassert unequal distributions of power and property. The future Mrs. Fainall doesn’t give Mirabell her estate solely because she loves him; fearing that she is pregnant with his child, she is coerced by him into marrying “a false and 4 designing lover” and signs her gift of deed over to him to protect the land and her income from her future husband. In this sense, the asymmetry of gift exchange characterizes the action of the play: the exchange of women in the play is disguised by the exchange of gifts, and the commodification of Mrs. Fainall and Millamant is recast in a language of generosity, complicity, and love for love. The significance of this scene is that it recalls a generosity and affective giving that characterized idealized depictions of the aristocratic patronage system in medieval and renaissance societies, but in actuality perpetuates a competitive, market-based system that should benefit women and the lower classes; however, in actuality the gift subverts this possibility through a seemingly selfless gift exchange that creates new relations of obligation and reinforces traditional ones.