Life After Death: Widows and the English Novel, Defoe to Austen by Karen Bloom Gevirtz

Abstract

R e v i e w s Gevirtz, B^en Bloom. LifeAfter Death: Widows and the English Novel, Defoe toAusten. Newark: Uof Delaware P , 2005. 218 pp. Midwaythroughthefamoussoliloquythatconstitutesthefinal,“Penelope chapterofJamesJoyce’sUlysses,MollyBloommusesforamomentonher ownnameandontheliterarycharacterswhoshareit,concludingherreflec¬ tionwithanutterrejectionofassociationwithoneinparticular:“Idont likebookswithaMollyinthemlikethatonehebroughtmeabouttheone fromFlandersawhorealwaysshopliftinganythingshecouldclothandstu andyardsofit”(622).CaughtinMolly’smemoryofthebooksshehasread is Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, whose eponymous heroine consistently and skillfullymanipulatesahostofidentitiesasrichasMolly’sowninner^wor Mollfirstassumeshermostinfamouspseudonym,“Mrs.Flanders,wen she impersonates arich widow after her debtor husband has fled to the ^n tinent.Widow-whore-thief:thefluid,opportunisticfigureofMollFlaners hasretainedherslippery,dangerous,anddisreputablestatusferintoe imaginations of twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers.As aw atleast,asacharacterwhoexploitstheliminalstatusofwidowsdunnge eighteenth century by professing to be awidow—Moll figures pronunen y among the multitude of widows in eighteenth-century fiction “^° Karen Bloom Gevirtz’s recent book. Life After Death: Widows ^ lish Novel, Defoe toAusten, is devoted. Neither tied to ahus an nor feminine wild cards in eighteenth-century in their own nght. father/guardian, widows were society: sexually experienced, able to own property mobile in ways that wives and daughters were not. LifeAfterDeatharguesthatthepotentiallysubversivefigureottne widow was mobilized by writers of eighteenth-century prose ction in Britain to reflect and shape contemporary anxieties about the emergent mer¬ cantile,capitalisteconomy,andtolimitwomen’sparticipationinttasnew economicsystem.Sensibility,vtithitsprivilegingoffeelingandItsrei ofcharitablebehavior,iscrucialtothisargument;since“[h]owcharacters disposeoftheirmoney”isonewayofdefining“correctsentimentalbehavior at the same time that it defines class differences and financial values, eigh¬ teenth-centurynovelsparticipatedincontemporarysocialandeconomic debatesby“encouragingwomentoavoidusingthepowerinherentinwid¬ owhood, and with it active, commercial activity. ..the novel’s virtuous widows tend to eschew profit-oriented commercialism or employ commer¬ cial activity for altruism or dependence” (22). Gevirtz argues that the atti¬ tudes towards widows that eighteenth-century novels exhibit were consistent throughout the century, despite the diversity of authors and hisIntertexts ,Vo\. 11, No. 12007 ©Texas Tech University Press 8 0 I N T E R T E X T S torical moments in which they were written: taken together, they constitute aconsistent effort to “control female economic activity” (17) by limiting women’s acceptable participation in the emerging capitalist system, ensuring their firm ensconcement within the domestic, rather than the commercial, sphere. She thus aligns the depiction of widows in eighteenth-century fic¬ tion with the overall “separating and gendering of the public and private, the commercial and domestic” (19) assumed by many historians and literary scholars to have developed over the period. Life After Death organizes its literary widows thematically rather than chronologically further to underscore the consistency of their depictions across the century. Virtuous, affluent widows reinforced emerging notions of femininity by exemplifying “either arejection of capitalism as asystem, or of women’s participation in it” (27) through their maternal, benevolent, and community-oriented behavior; their nonvirtuous counterparts (like Fielding’s Ladies Booby and Bellaston) use their affluence and autonomy to indulge in lecherous behavior and selfish economic activity. Working widows were only acceptable insofar as “readers never see them exchanging their products or services for repayment”(69), as in the case of the upright ladies of Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall {1762)-, or insofar as their monetary ambi¬ tions are limited to providing for children, or benefiting acommunity as a whole (as with Pamela's dairywoman Mrs. Dobson). In the case of working widows, Gevirtz invokes the ideology of sensibility as “a useful tool for stabi¬ lizing asociety unbalanced by rising commercialism, particularly as it described proper female behavior as removed from economics” (93). If women had to work, it should only be out of necessity or care, and most emphatically not for profit or self-aggrandizement. Sensibility is also key for understanding eighteenth-century authors’ treatment of impoverished widows, representations of whom were “one part of sentimental fiction’s contribution to efforts to stabilize society through justifying amoral class inequality” (99); as acharitable object, the figure of the widow reinforced “traditional associations of power and action with men, and passivity and gratitude with women” (101). The anxieties about widows thatsuchsentimentaldepictionsattemptedtoassuagereturnwithfullforce in the case of criminal widows like Defoe’s Moll Flanders, who in their con¬ flation of sexual and economic desire “exemplify attributes of unregulated, emergent capitalism that particularly would have made people fearful, including the satiation of one’s individual appetite regardless of the cost to others, the ability to change self and class rapidly, the ability to buy the hall...