Managing and Marketing Virtue in Sarah Fielding's History of the Countess of Dellwyn

Abstract

Managing and Marketing Virtue in Sarah Fielding's History ofthe Countess ofDellwyn Sara Gadeken In her penultimate novel, The History of the Countess of Delluryn (1759), Sarah Fielding explores the power that accrues to women in the newly developing commercial culture. In contrast to her first novel, David Simple (1744) , and its sequel, Volume theLast (1753) , Delluryn emphasizes women's responses to victimization rather than the suffering occasioned by it, and Fielding stresses their limited but real power as managers and marketers of consumer goods. In Delluryn, virtue is not figured sexually but economically, as the familiar dichotomy ofwoman as virgin or whore is replaced by another dichotomy ofwoman as lavish consumer or prudent domestic manager. The two figures, Fielding demonstrates, are dependent on each other; the luxury-loving aristocrat is necessary to establish the industrious and frugal domestic paragon, just as the sexually transgressive female is necessary to establish that of the chaste woman. By casting female virtue in an economic mode, Fielding is able to manipulate the contradictions of eighteenth-century attitudes towards consumer consumption, which condemn increased consumption of goods because it contributes to morally dangerous luxury, and, at the same time, admire the industriousness of those who produce such goods and the prudence of those who manage them well. Linda Bree notes these contradictions in Delluryn, but dismisses their importance: "it is an ironic touch that honest livings can be made by EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 15, Number 1, October 2002 20EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION providing the commodities that the rich ... so recklessly consume."1 However, Gillian Skinner criticizes Delluryn for ignoring the inherent contradictions ofthese ideas, objecting that Fielding disapproves "strongly of luxury in the civic humanist manner in one breath, while lauding it in another."2 In this essay I hope to show that, in Dellwyn, Sarah Fielding, far from ignoring these contradictions, deliberately manipulates diem in order to create a new and uneasy space of female empowerment. She finds in these conflicting ideas an opportunity for impoverished gentlewomen to achieve economic security. One of the ideas to which she appeals is that of civic humanism, an important segment of eighteenth-century political thought that derives from the Renaissance political ideology that posits man as a political animal who most fully realizes himselfby participating in government. In contrast to the changing class relations and complex commodity exchanges that mark the commercial society, civic humanism posits a hierarchical society offixed and unchanging status, with a clear economic function separate from the market, embedding all social relations within a self-regulating system. Frugality, as opposed to luxury, is essential to this paradigm, for it guarantees the economic and moral health of the nation. According to such moralists as George Berkeley, "Frugality of Manners is the Nourishment and Strength of Bodies politic. It is that by which they grow and subsist, until they are corrupted by Luxury."3 Benevolence towards the needy is also an essential part ofcivic humanism, in which ownership of property carries social obligations and in which owners and workers are mutually dependent. Frugality makes benevolence possible, as Wetenhall Wilkes explains: "Frugality is the support of generosity. Constant inquietudes ... prevent a profuse person to do many noble and generous things."4 Frugality enables benevolence, luxury prevents it. 1 Linda Bree, Sarah Fielding (London: Twayne, 1996), p. 129. 2 Gillian Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1 740-1800: The Price ofa Tear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 32. 3 George Berkeley, An Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721), cited in Stephen Copely, Literatureand theSocial Orderin Eighteenth-CenturyEngland (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 90-91. 4 Wetenhall Wilkes, A Utter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young ¡Mdy (London: Hawes, 1766), p. 201. SARAH FIELDING'S HISTORY OF THECOUNTESS OF DELLWYN 21 In contrast to civic humanism's association of virtue with moral autonomy, constancy, and a fixed and constant value, the commercial notion ofvirtue is fluid, its value depending on serial exchanges in the marketplace. Liz Bellamy calls it "a tradition of economic thought which was based on the assessment of the economic consequence of individual actions [which assume that] the maximisation of material wealth was the primary function...