Going to market: Credit economies and marriageable women in eighteenth-century fiction

My dissertation argues that eighteenth-century fiction about marriageable women helped create the attitudes and behavior that supported financial credit. Credit, although not new, was an increasingly important part of the economy in the eighteenth century, and its use sparked controversy about the nature of value and representation. Analyzing novels from the early 1700s through the 1780s together with contemporary economic treatises and pamphlets, I show that both novels and economic texts take up the problem of representing immaterial value—whether economic value or the qualities of mind that made a woman virtuous. I claim that the realm of social exchange through which marriageable heroines circulate is analogous to the economic marketplace—in both spheres “value” is arrived at through public consensus and is therefore potentially unreliable. As the century progresses, I argue, novels about marriageable heroines demonstrate an increased confidence in the possibility of assessing virtue through circulating in the marriage market—a confidence also found in economic texts about the processes of economic exchange. I begin with a discussion of Lady Credit, an allegorical figure Daniel Defoe used to explain financial credit in his newspaper The Review; I draw attention to the similarities between credit and a woman\u27s virtue and argue that Lady Credit\u27s adventures anticipate the themes that dominate novels about marriageable women. Chapter One explores the relationship between depictions of a financial crash, the South Sea Bubble, and the marriage market in works by Defoe and Eliza Haywood. Chapter Two demonstrates that Samuel Richardson and writers on trade had similar concerns that signifiers (whether social signs or economic tokens) might misrepresent value. Richardson\u27s female paragon, I claim, functions like currency standards to anchor meaning. My third chapter compares courtship novels by Haywood and Frances Burney to Adam Smith\u27s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations to demonstrate that they present analogous means of determining the value of people and commodities. My conclusion considers Burney\u27s Cecilia with writings on debt from the 1780s, arguing that both accept credit\u27s inevitability at the same time that they fear it may not always be backed by “substance.