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ENVISIONING FEMALE SPECTATORSHIP:
VISUALITY, GENDER, AND CONSUMERISM
IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

By

Kyung Eun Lo

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
English

2010

ABSTRACT
ENVISIONING FEMALE SPECTATORSHIP:

VISUALITY, GENDER, AND CONSUMERISM IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
BRITAIN

By

Kyung Eun L0

This dissertation investigates the complex relations among visuality, gender, and
consumerism in a diverse group of texts from eighteenth-century Britain: Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters (1716-1718), Daniel Defoe’s Roxana

(1724), Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744-46), and The History of Miss

 

Betsy Thoughtless (1751). This dissertation seeks to engage the ongoing debates about
female spectatorship and political agency by focusing on each writer’s engagement with
questions of seeing in relation to the radical changes brought about by an emergent
consumer revolution in the eighteenth century. Rather than offering an overarching,
essentialized reading of female spectatorship, my goal is to recover a rich and varied
discursive history of female vision in English culture that engages with contemporaneous
discourses of consumerism, domesticity, orientalism, and nation etc. I contend that what
is often characterized rather monolithically as the rational, impartial, disinterested scopic
regime of the Enlightenment is in fact heavily shaped by anxieties and ambivalences
within consumer culture. The contradictory roles women assumed as both subjects and
objects of consumerism enabled them to gain and claim authority as both spectators and
spectacles. Challenging the simple opposition between the female object and a

monolithic, universalized ‘male gaze’ that is so often provided by psychoanalytic ﬁlm

theorists, I argue that women’s uses of consumption became the basis for their formation
as active and desiring visual agents.

My claim for the importance of the female consumerist gaze is concerned with
greater understanding of active female agency and potential for resistance. By focusing
on complex ways women’s experiences of gender, class, race, and nation in the '
eighteenth century are mediated by their consumer subjectivity, I am preoccupied with
exploring how female consumers manipulate their specular roles to challenge and subvert
dominant gender, social, political, and economic structures. My two chapters on
Montagu and Defoe focus on British women’s consumption of foreign luxuries and their
scopic desires in relation to their sexual, domestic, national, and imperial identities. My

chapter on Haywood examines how The Female Spectator and The History of Miss

 

Betsy Thoughtless critique and revise the visual authority of Addison and Steele’s
Smctator papers through women’s fashionable consumption and strategic self-display
both in private and public spheres. My chapter on my; interrogates the various ways
in which women’s increasing visibility and public mobility played an increasing role in
shaping feminine subjectivity and spectatorial agency. By concluding with the example
of the female consumer’s boycott of sugar in the 17905, my study insists that female
consumerism in the eighteenth century opens up space for cultural and political agency.
An understanding of eighteenth-century consumerism in relation to visuality is crucial
because it helps to challenge the workings of male visual dominance. It also underlines
how the eighteenth-century female consumers had the capacity to disrupt stable notions
of gender, class, nation and subjectivity through the production of new and more mobile

forms of identity and pleasure.

Copyright by
KYUNG EUN L0
2010

To my parents, Heung Sik Lo and Ai Ja Han

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation would not have been possible without the help of my adviser,
Professor Ellen Pollak. I am very grateful for her encouragement, support, and
intellectual guidance. 1 am equally thankful to the members of my dissertation
committee—Prof. Scott Juengel, Prof. Stephen Arch, and Prof. Judith Stoddart—for their
helpful suggestions. Heartfelt thanks to my family members, including my parents and
my husband for their loving support. Most of all, I am indebted to my daughters, Paige,

Megan, and Sarah, for their patience.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1

CHAPTER 1

The Female Traveler’s Gaze and Consumerism

in Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters ...................................................................... 37
CHAPTER 2

The Pleasures and Perils of Female Consumption

in Defoe’s Roxana ................................................................................... 96
CHAPTER 3

Contesting The Spectator’s Disciplinary Gaze in Haywood’s The Female Spectator

and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless .................................................... 148
CHAPTER 4

The Politics of the Female Consumerist Gaze in

Bumey’s Camilla and Conclusion ............................................................... 214
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................... 232

vii

INTRODUCTION

“1 consider Woman as a beautiful Romantick Animal, that may be adorned
with Furs and Feathers, Pearls and Diamonds, Ores and Silks.”
Joseph Addison, The Tatler '

“Every sign or shop was a gazing-trap.”

John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure 2

 

Joseph Addison’s observation about a fashionable woman in The Tatler (N o. 116)
and Fanny Hill’s remark on her ﬁrst stroll through the streets of London provide us with
meaningful points of departure for my study of gender identity, spectatorship, and
consumption. In both passages the female body is linked closely with consumerism
through the workings of the gaze. Joseph Addison depicts the woman as a consumer with
undisciplined desire for exotic, luxury products. The female ﬁgure disappears behind her
conspicuous consumption to the extent she becomes identiﬁed with the commodities
themselves. Under male scrutiny, the adorned female body becomes a “beautiﬁtl” item
of display. In contrast to being an objectiﬁed spectacle, Fanny, however, is portrayed as
the paradigmatic female consumer who indulges in visual pleasure as she looks around
London. Fascinated by the display of merchandise, the female shopper becomes a
powerful spectator who examines the spectacle of goods around her.

Both passages indicate how the ﬁgure of the female consumer occupies dual

positions: she is addressed as both an agent and an object of commercial exchange, both

 

' Joseph Addison, The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford Univ.
Press, 1987), No. 116. '

2 John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Sabor. (1749; New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1985), 6.

invited to be a spectator and a spectacle within the visual ﬁeld. The female consumer is
ﬁgured as a powerfully paradoxical presence: she is depicted as unruly and threatening to
male power, yet manageable and controllable thorough the male gaze. This dissertation
argues that the contradictory roles women assumed as both subjects and objects of
consumerism enabled them to gain and claim authority as both spectators and spectacles.
I examine the complex relations among visuality, gender, and consumerism in, a diverse
group of texts from eighteenth-century Britain: the epistolary travelogue of Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, novels by Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood, and the periodical
writings of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, and Eliza Haywood. Over the course of
the long eighteenth century, the consumer experience was fundamentally altered in scale
and scope through the availability of greater variety of consumer goods, revolution in
retail practices and spaces, and related socioeconomic developments such as the opening
of new global trade routes and the rise of new credit arrangements. My dissertation seeks
to situate female spectatorship within this complex and fraught cultural and material
context, since discourses of seeing cannot be understood separate from other political,
social, economic and ideological practices at any time. By focusing on each writer’s
engagement with questions of seeing or looking in relation to the radical changes brought
about by an emergent consumer revolution in the eighteenth century, I argue that
women’s uses of consumption became the basis for their formation as active and desiring
visual agents in the eighteenth century.

My attempt to conceptualize female spectatorship in relation to the emerging
consumer culture of eighteenth-century Britain seeks to challenge fundamental

assumptions about vision, gender, and political agency. First, I contend that what is

often characterized rather monolithically as the rational, impartial, disinterested scopic
regime of the Enlightenment is in fact heavily shaped by anxieties and ambivalences
within consumer culture. By linking women with the corrupting inﬂuences of
consumerism, eighteenth-century culture sought to repress and contain uneasiness about
female consumption through a reifying gaze that reduced women to commodiﬁed
spectacles. These tensions over female consuming appetites in turn had a powerful
impact on the construction of female subjectivity. By tracing how these concerns over
female consumerism became increasingly mapped onto other discourses of gender,
domesticity, nation, and empire, this dissertation argues that women took advantage of
the contradictions within competing ideologies to explore radical female desires and
negotiate women’s assigned place within a visual order. Using their paradoxical status as
both agents and objects of market exchange, women manipulated and reconﬁgured the
inherent instability of subject/object relations to challenge patriarchal visual authority
and to redeﬁne themselves as active, even transgressive agents.

Second, my dissertation also underscores the degree to which consumerism
becomes central to the ideological construction of the female subject in eighteenth-
century Britain. 3 Rather than dismissing female consumerism as trivial or valorizing it
as simply emancipatory, my study takes the often overlooked and underestimated activity
of consumption as a potentially transformative form of cultural production. By focusing
on complex ways women’s experiences of gender, class, race, and nation in the

eighteenth century are mediated by their consumer subjectivity, this dissertation

 

3 While the deﬁnitions of consumption, consumerism, and commodity culture are varied and often
overlap with each other, I use the notion of consumer culture to refer to a range of human investments in,
attitudes toward, and behaviors around consumer goods in contrast to commodity culture, a term derived
from a Marxian theory of commodities.

illustrates that women’s pleasure and desires are formed within the marketplace rather
than outside of it, thus challenging the notion that subjects are situated prior to or outside
of consumerism. While literary critics have often seen only limited forms of agency and
subjecthood in the act of consumption, I am preoccupied with exploring how female
consumerism opens up a space for alternative models of female identities beyond the
prescribed norms of femininity.

Lastly, my claim for the importance of the female consumerist gaze is concerned
with greater understanding of active female agency and potential for resistance. Rather
than seeing the female consumer as complicit with capitalist economy, my readings
explore the extent to which female consumers manipulate their specular roles to
challenge and subvert dominant gender, social, political, and economic structures. I will
demonstrate that while both Montagu and Roxana take advantage of their consumerism
to fashion mobile identities for their own pleasure, they also participate actively in
commodifying and domesticating the foreign ‘other’ for the consolidation of British
identity and domestic economy. Haywood also challenges the disciplinary patriarchal
gaze in Addison and Steele’s periodical through strategic manipulation of female
visibility, thus making a radical intervention into empowering women in both private and

public life.

Politicizing Visuality
My dissertation is primarily concerned with issues of seeing, spectatorship, and
visuality in eighteenth-century Britain. This study partly draws from the recent growth of

theoretical interest in visuality in a wide range of disciplines, including art history, ﬁlm,

media, philosophy, cultural studies, and critical theory. With its unprecedented wealth
of new imaging technologies and complex visual information in many different aspects of
our daily lives today, human experience is increasingly more visual and visualized than
ever before. Such heightened fascination with various modes of seeing and visuality in
everyday life may well be indicative of the paradigm shift that W. J. T. Mitchell has
referred to as the “pictorial turn” from the earlier “linguistic turn.” 4

Historically, images have always played an important role in western culture,
often accompanied by general anxiety about their power. The visual, because it was so
tangibly, sensually direct, had been consigned ever since Plato’s cave to the lowest rung
in the traditional intellectual hierarchies of Western philosophers. Plato also denounced
the visual arts as mere copies of the original ideal of perfection and banished them from
his Republic, perceiving pictures and images as suspect and treacherous. 5 In fact,
Western culture and its philosophies have consistently devalued visual representations as
inferior, secondary illustrations of ideas while privileging the spoken and written word.

Nevertheless, with the proliferation of visual experience over the course of recent
years, it is no longer possible to understand and deﬁne culture in purely linguistic terms,
and thus scholars have demanded more focus on visuality as an object of study. Rather
than supplanting a textual with a pictorial view of the world altogether, this rediscovery

of the visual foregrounds the complex interplay between visuality and textuality, images

 

’ Although “linguistics, semiotics, rhetoric, and various models of ‘textuality’ have become the
lingua franca for critical reﬂections on the arts, the media, and cultural form,” W. J. T. Mitchell argues that
there is a shift to the visual and the increasing recognition that language is no longer paradigmatic for
meaning. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1994), l 1.

5 According to Plato, “Painting and imitation are far from the truth when they produce their
works;. . .moreover, imitation keeps company with the worst part in us that is far from prudence and is not
comrade or friend for any healthy or true purpose.” Plato’s Republic. trans. Allan Bloom (New York:
Basic Books, 1991), 286.

and words, and viewing and reading. W. J. T. Mitchell points out that “spectatorship (the
look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure)
may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherrnent, decoding, ‘
interpretation, etc) and that visual experience or visual literacy might not be fully
explicable on the model of textuality.” 6

One of the principal tasks of the study of visual culture is to highlight the
importance of the visual as a place where meanings are created and contested. If the
‘linguistic turn’ has shown that what appears ‘natural’ is highly contingent upon
textuality and discourses, visual culture attempts to understand and interpret not only how
images operate as ‘sign systems’ but also the constituted nature of seeing itself. Instead
of presupposing a pure, unmediated vision that is ‘natural’ or ‘universal,’ theories of
visual culture propose that what we see is ideologically and historically constructed.

In this regard, much of the discussion of visual culture has often taken the form of
a critique of representation itself, emphasizing the role of sight as a powerful organizing
principle in Western epistemology. In particular, scholars have been strongly suspicious
and critical of hegemonic visual paradigms underlying what appears to be ‘true’ or
‘natural’ vision and perception. Visual culture scholars like Martin Jay and Norman
Bryson have shown how the Cartesian perspectivalist tradition, especially its
“ahistorical, disinterested, disembodied” subject’s monocular gaze, becomes closely

associated with the ‘natural’ experience of sight, which in turn is complicit with

scientiﬁc discourses and the bourgeois ethic of the modern scopic regime.7 Similarly,

 

6 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Es_says on Verbal a_nd Visual Rppresentation , l6.

7 Martin Jay, “Modern Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” Vision m Visualig. ed. Hal Foster. (New
York: The New Press, 1988), 9-10.

Guy Debor ’s “society of the spectacle” denounced the dominance of a visual regime in
which individuals are reduced to a passive existence by postmodern life that presents
itself as “an immense accumulation of spectacles.” 8

Indeed many critics have insisted that Western philosophy and culture can be
considered broadly ‘ocularcentric’ in its privileging of “a vision-generated, vision-
centered interpretation of knowledge, truth, and reality.” 9 Perhaps it can be argued that
the eighteenth century, more than other eras, is resolutely ocularcentric in the
preeminence that Enlightenment thought gives to sight. More than other senses, the
faculty of seeing reigns supreme in the eighteenth century, as sight becomes crucial in the
philosophical project of the Enlightenment towards human understanding and rationality.
Just as John Locke celebrates vision as that which can distinguish “the Bounds between
the enlightened and dark Part of Things” in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
the trope of sight comes to stand for enlightenment itself. 10 If to enlighten is to deﬁne,
uncover, and clarify the unknown and the unfamiliar by means of penetrating sight, the
visual organization of knowledge can be seen simultaneously as control and hegemony.
The rational vision of the Enlightenment conceptualizes, classiﬁes, and systemizes its
knowledge of the world through processes of standardization and normalization.

This emphasis on the problematics of vision has profound implications for our

understanding of how vision can be an ideological means of control and power, and much

 

8 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectam. trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone
Books, 1995), 12.

9 David Michael Levin, ed. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), 2.

'0 John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Alexander Campbell Fraser (New
York: Dover Publications, Inc, 1959), 32.

scholarship on eighteenth-century literature, particularly the novel, has been heavily
informed by Foucaldian notions of visuality as a key instrument of social control and
self-regulation of the subject. In The Order of Things (1970), Foucault insists that
looking and being looked at are deeply implicated in relations of power and knowledge
and identiﬁes the eighteenth century as a period when “a new ﬁeld of visibility was being

constituted in all its density.” H For example, in The History of Sexuality (1990),

 

Foucault describes how confession and later the medical and psychiatric professions
increasingly governed sexuality through the pressure on the subject to tell all under an
enlightenment scopic regime. He claims that examination—medical, psychiatric, or
religious—is “at the center of the procedures that constitute the individual as effect and
object” of both power and knowledge. '2 In Discipline and Punish (1979), he offers
another compelling example of the effect of surveillance in his discussion of Bentham’s
Panopticon, where prisoners never know when they are being watched, yet know that
they can be watched at any time. The result, according to Foucault, is that they

internalize the sense of being watched and willingly subject themselves to the norm:

He who is subjected to a ﬁeld of visibility, and who knows it, assumes
responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously

upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he

 

” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. (New York: Pantheon, 1970), I32.

'2 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexualiﬂ: An Introduction. Volume I. (New York: Vintage
Books, 1990), 192.

 

simultaneously plays both roles; be becomes the principle of his own

subjection. '3

For Foucault, this ambiguous position of man as both a subject and an object of
knowledge under the Panopticon’s diffused modes of visual surveillance marks a shift
toward the order of modernity. Yet, for all his attempts to problematize the place of the
visual in knowledge and power, he ends up presenting a rather totalizing account of sight
solely as control and discipline. As Martin Jay points out, Foucault’s model ultimately
offers “one hegemonic ocular apparatus” which fails to account for any genuine means of
resistance or positive alternative.” '4
Following Foucault, other important studies of visuality in the eighteenth century
have focused mainly on how Western culture deployed ‘sight’ as a primary mechanism of
control and power. Using Foucault’s panoptical conception of authority, in her Qgsjrg
and Domestic Fiction, Nancy Armstrong demonstrates how eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century domestic ﬁction and conduct books paved the way for the rise of domestic
woman as a modern bourgeois subject. In her reading of Richardson’s Raine—la,
Armstrong explains that Pamela’s rise to middle-class power involves a “shift in the
direction and dynamics of gazing,” a transformation from an earlier form of aristocratic

power based on scandalous display to a middle-class moral authority based on d6mestic

surveillance and self-monitoring. '5 Armstrong explains that “[s]e1f-regulation alone

 

'3 Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punﬁ. (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 202-203.
'4 Jay, “Modern Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” 415.

'5 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987), 123.

 

 

 

 

gave a woman authority over the ﬁeld of domestic objects and personnel where her
supervision constituted a form of value in its own right and was therefore capable of
enhancing the value of other people and things” (81). Thus, Armstrong insists, the power
of domestic surveillance is instrumental in constructing female power; instead of being
objects of knowledge, women become subjects of the gaze. For Armstrong, visuality
remains an apparatus of self-regulation and control within a middle-class, bourgeois
imperative.

Also using Foucault’s model of the disciplinary gaze in the construction of human
subjectivity, John Bender examines the convergence of the eighteenth-century
penitentiary and the novel. In Imagining the Penitentim, which explores the link
between the role of literature and visual culture of eighteenth century, Bender contends
that novelistic discourse about prisons enabled the conception and construction of actual
penitentiaries. He ﬁnds a parallel between the workings of the inspecting gaze of the
modern penitentiary, which he describes as a form of “impersonal, yet god-like
supervision,” and the transparent omniscient view of the narrator found in the free
indirect discourse of early realist novels. '6

While these studies demonstrate the importance of the visual in the eighteenth
century, they tend to focus predominantly on how seeing was complicit with middle-class
bourgeois hegemony. Such widespread distrust of the visual poses the danger of
reducing the question of vision and spectatorship into a monolithic and totalizing
narrative. As Alison Conway puts it, “[i]n embracing Foucault’s compelling analysis of

the Panopticon, we have imposed our own disciplinary gaze on the eighteenth-century

 

'6 John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction apd the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-
Centgg England. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 203.

10

novel;” for Conway, this practice “empties out the eighteenth century of both in its
counter-discourses and moments of resistance.” '7

Important recent works in visual culture that have explored visuality in
connection with other scientiﬁc, medical and physiological discourses also end up
providing rather broad schematizations about eighteenth-century scopic regimes. In
Techniques of the Observer, for instance, Jonathan Crary traces a radical reconﬁguration
of vision from a classical ‘camera obscura’ model of seeing and its stable space of
representation to a modern corporeal seeing that took place in the nineteenth century.
Crary’s preoccupation with a “hegemonic set of discourses and practices in which vision
took shape” and with a “dominant model of what an observer was” tends to relentlessly
reduce “marginal and local forms by which dominant practices of vision were resisted,
deﬂected, or imperfectly constituted” to a single rigid model. '8 Ultimately, his neatly
oppositional models of camera obscura and stereoscope, which are “paradigmatic of the
dominant status of the observer” (8), are unable to account for other heterogeneous visual
experiences which fall outside the binary. Despite his attempts to theorize the “corporeal
subjectivity of the observer” (69), the observer remains a singular, undifferentiated
subject, unmarked by gender, class, or ethnicity.

Some of the more recent work being done on eighteenth-century visuality, like

Alison Conway’s Private Interests, attempts to challenge and correct Foucauldian

accounts of the rise of the novel. Rejecting the totalizing tendencies of Foucault’s

 

'7 Alison Conway, Private interests : Women, Portraiture, amd the Visugl Culture of the’English
Novel, 1709-1791. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 5.

'8 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision a_nd Modernity in the 19th Century.
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 7.

11

 

paradigm, Conway argues that the eighteenth-century novel’s use of portraiture and its
mode of beholding are “important means of assessing how the eighteenth century
understood women’s connection to the cultural power.”19 Like Conway’s work, this
dissertation aims to complicate and add nuance to these monolithic and totalizing
conceptions of eighteenth-century visual regimes. Instead of framing eighteenth-century
visuality through a single monocular lens that ends up conﬂating vision with tools of
domination, I seek to explore the possibility of alternative ways of viewing within the
eighteenth century. How might vision be conceptualized as more than a mode of
domination and control? How does gender or sexual difference, race, or class intersect
with a subject’s viewing practices and assumptions? How might the sites of these
differences offer loci for resistance to or challenge dominant eighteenth-century scopic
regimes? If the very act of viewing is often seen as a male prerogative, how might
women’s gaze be theorized? Within the complex power relations of looking, how might
women’s gaze be related to female subjectivity, agency, and power?

To consider the question of female visual agency seems especially important in
light of ongoing scholarly debates within feminist criticism about female spectatorship.
Feminist theories have long been suspicious of what seemed to be ‘natural’ vision and
have questioned the operations of a dominant Western ocularcentricism complicit with
phallocentricism. Feminists insist that the sight is one of the primary mechanisms by
which oppressive patriarchal relations are naturalized and maintained, arguing that
the power dynamics of the knowing gaze are gendered in that the bearer of the powerful

gaze has been coded as male and the object of the gaze as female.

 

'9 Conway, Private Interests, 4.

12

Psychoanalytic theories, chieﬂy those of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, have
been signiﬁcant in illustrating the central position of the gaze in the formation of gender
identity. Of course, one of the central principles upon which psychoanalysis has'been
constructed depends upon the explication by Freud of visual phenomena: the recognition
by boys and girls that their genitals are fundamentally different from one another leading
to penis envy in girls and to the castration complex in boys. While for Freud this
traumatic yet crucial recognition determines a child’s development into a gendered
subject, his phallocentric premises have been heavily critiqued by feminists. Luce
Irigaray, for instance, emphasizes the gendered nature of the gaze in the Freudian
framework in her essay “Another ‘Cause’—Castration”: in the Freudian narrative, the
men claim the signifying power of the phallus and “the omnipotence of gazing,
knowing. . .the eye-penis. . .the phallic gaze,” whereas women are assigned the place of
lack and the object of male desire. 2° Lacan also stresses the importance of the gaze in
the formation of the ego at the mirror stage, the moment when the child becomes
conscious of its specular image. Here the infant learns to distinguish between itself and
the mother’s image by becoming aware of sexual difference. The gaze brings into being
recognition of self and other in relation to what Lacan calls the Name of the Father or the
phallus, the realm of signiﬁcation and language. Although Lacan’s model of gendered
subjectivity has been quite inﬂuential in theoretical discourses about the gaze, especially
in ﬁlm criticism, his schema has also been criticized for its phallocentric assumptions,

especially in regard to how women are deﬁned as lack and as Other. As Laura Mulvey

 

2° Luce Irigaray, “Another “Cause” — Castration.” Feminis_ms: An Anthology of Literary and
Criticism. eds. Robyn R. Warhol & Diane Price Hemdl. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1997), 431.

13

sharply points out, the “paradox of phallocentricism is that it depends on the image of
the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world.” 2' Working out of and yet
to some extent against the psychoanalytic theories of both Lacan and Freud, feminist
theorists like Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, and E. Ann Kaplan, to name a few, have
focused on the gender implications of this power imbalance in which the viewer is
constructed as the active male gazer, while the object of his gaze is the passive female.
Furthermore, they have striven to demonstrate what political consequences ensue from a
masculine spectator who occupies a dominant subject position in relation to his objects of
vision.

In her groundbreaking 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”
Mulvey draws attention to the cinematic male gaze in classic Hollywood ﬁlms, where the
viewer is constructed as the active male and the object of his gaze as the passive female.
Insisting that “Women are simultaneously looked at and displayed. . .so they can be said
to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (19), Mulvey reveals how the gaze objectiﬁes women
by making them no more than the locus of scopophilic pleasure. Mulvey’s essay was an
important feminist intervention that illustrated the gender, political and ideological
dimensions of visuality. Yet her notion of the obj ectifying ‘male gaze’ is a focus of
debate. For Mulvey, the gaze is always male, and it is this male gaze with which the
spectator, whether female or male, is made to identify. The gaze becomes an instrument
of objectiﬁcation and control by the powerful male subject but fails to account for any

visual agency or pleasure on the part of women.

 

2‘ Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Visual and Other Pleasures.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14.

 

14

Subsequent feminist critics—such as Mary Ann Doane, E. Ann Kaplan, and Teresa
de Lauretis—have attempted to challenge and revise Mulvey’s model of masculinized
spectatorship, but their own dependence on a psychoanalytic framework has proven
problematic and limiting in their efforts to theorize female spectatorship. For instance,
Doane argues that women are constructed differently from men in relation to the
processes of looking and that women have difﬁculties achieving the distance needed for
cinematic pleasure, since “[f]or the female spectator, there is a certain overpresence of
the image—she is the image.” 22 Doane proposes that the concept of masquerade can
allow the female spectator to create a distance between herself and the image on the
screen through a certain excess or self-conscious use of femininity. She is able “to
manufacture a distance from the image, to generate a problematic within which the image
is manipulable, producible and readable by the woman” (143). On the one hand, Doane
extends and challenges Mulvey’s model of masculinized spectatorship by framing binary
oppositions of masculine/subj ect and feminine/object into a question of proximity and
distance. Yet her theorization of female spectatorship, which she describes in terms of
deﬁciency, “absence” or “lack,” reinstates a subject/object dichotomy into sexual
difference and does not go beyond Mulvey’s dyad to offer an alternative theory of
spectatorship. That is to say, psychoanalytic feminist ﬁlm theories working within the
binary framework of a masculine/active/sadistic gaze and a feminine/passive/masochistic
object ultimately do not allow a woman a subject position except as an object of the

masculine gaze.

 

2‘ Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” Feminist Film
Theog. ed. Sue Thomham. (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 128.

15

Although psychoanalytic theory’s formulation of the gaze has substantially aided
in our understanding of the formation of gender, I believe that it is crucial to surpass the
simple opposition between the female object and a monolithic, universalized ‘male gaze’
that is so often provided by psychoanalytic ﬁlm theorists. This dissertation seeks to
engage the ongoing debates about female spectatorship and female agency by
historicizing female spectatorship in an eighteenth-century context. In doing so, it
reﬂects recent shifts within feminist scholarship on female spectatorship, moving from a
focus on the psyche to an examination of how gender intersects with other cultural and
historical speciﬁcities such as class, race, nation etc. The work of Jackie Stacey and
Miriam Hansen represents recent efforts to integrate psychoanalytically grounded textual
analysis with more contextual approaches, such as ethnographic and cultural media
studies based upon reception and audience methodology. Not only do they dismantle the
totalizing notion of Mulvey’s gaze by accounting for a variety of complex viewing
practices, but they are able to reconceptualize female spectatorship in a way that
accommodates diverse forms of female desire, power, and agency. In Star-Gazing,
Stacey examines the relationship between female spectators and Hollywood stars in
relation to “general shifts in gender, glamour and commodiﬁcation which accompanied
the expansion of consumer markets and impacted upon spectators and star relations” 23
expanding the concept of female spectatorship to include “an analysis of historical
discourses, institutional changes and the social relations of spectatorship” (l3). '

Similarly, Miriam Hansen’s Babel and Babylon investigates Hollywood’s ﬁlm-viewer

 

relations during the silent era to demonstrate that the very notion of the classic spectator

 

23 Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. (London:
Routledge, 1994), 62.

16

is a historical construct that emerged around 1909. Hansen radically alters the concept of
female spectatorship by tracing cinema’s pivotal role in transforming women’s access to
the public sphere to allow “redemptive possibilities as an inclusive, heterogeneous, and at
times unpredictable horizon of experience.” 24 Furthermore, she suggests that cinema
ﬁmctioned as counter public sphere, which was “not overtly oppositional, [but] still
presented an alternative to dominant social norms,” including a potential site for female
‘heterotopia.’ 25 Recent cultural critics like Hansen and Stacey move away from the
notion of a textually constructed female spectator to one who is actively engaged within
complex networks of cultural discourses and social relations. In doing so, they have
successfully shown how women’s viewing may be historicized by placing viewing
practices in speciﬁc contexts. They are thus able to account for a more active female
viewer whose agency is related to her activities as an active participant in consumer
culture.

Using the redeﬁned notions of female spectatorship offered by Hansen and
Stacey, I will attempt to theorize and conceptualize female spectatorship in accordance
with female power and agency by situating it speciﬁcally in the historical and cultural
context of eighteenth-century Britain. While the dissertation relies on important
psychoanalytic concepts of subjectivity and identiﬁcation, 1 wish to consider
spectatorship in a broader context by positioning it within complexly constituted and
historically speciﬁc networks of discourses and experiences. As much as the experiences

of women were often distinct from those of their male counterparts and their relation to

 

2“ Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. (Cambridge:
University of Harvard Press, 1991), 19.

 

 

25 Ibid, 105.

17

 

visuality constituted profoundly differently, it is important not to take gender as a sole
category of analysis at the risk of essentializing a singular, feminine experience that
speaks for all women. I seek to explore female spectatorship without privileging gender
as its only social determinant but rather attempt to account for those multiple,
interlocking categories of difference, like class, race, nation, and empire that complicate
and inﬂect the mode of seeing itself. Indeed, spectatorship is not independent, but part of
a complex web of political, social, economic and discursive practices and their

accompanying ideological values at any given time.

Consumer Culture and Gender

In order to offer a critical reevaluation of the various ways female spectatorship is
implicated in historically changing forms of social power, I will be centrally concerned
with how female spectatorship is inextricably tied to the growing emergence of consumer
culture in eighteenth-century Britain. Although its precise deﬁnition varies, the term
‘consumer culture’ is often used to refer to a range of human investments in, attitudes
toward, and behaviors around consumer goods. 26 As the thriving body of scholarship on
consumerism in eighteenth-century Britain has clearly shown, once neglected economic
changes that stress commercialization during the eighteenth century have emerged as an

important historical phenomenon that deserves greater recognition. 27 Of course, the

 

2" Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the
Eighteenth CentuLy. (New York: Columbia Press, 1997), 5.

27 see Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society:
The Comericalization of Eighteenth-Century Englgmg. (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1985);
John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption m the World of Goods. (New York: Routledge, 1993);
Ann Bermingham and John Brewer. The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800: lmpge. Obiect. Text.
(London, Routledge, 1995).

18

desire to consume was not new to the eighteenth century, but historians like Neil
McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb argue that there was a dramatic turning point
as early as 1711 with the introduction of marked changes such as unparalleled spending
available for a wider range of people, different attitudes to goods, luxury, and fashion,
and increased tendency toward ‘conspicuous consumption.’ 28 Indeed, the consumer
boom of eighteenth-century Britain ushered in a new economy and a new demand
structure, along with unprecedented intellectual, social, political, and cultural shifts for
eighteenth-century Britain and its people. 29 Whereas before spending was limited to the
very few, in the wake of British commercial expansion and growing prosperity, rapidly
expanding consumer practices enabled a wider range of people to pursue a newer and
wider array of consumer goods. These socioeconomic changes raised key issues in
eighteenth-century British culture, including the place of commerce and commodities in
culture; the standards of power and status; the formulation of taste and aesthetics; ethical
debates about fashion and luxury; and revised models of subjectivity and gender.
Feminist scholars have often remarked on the paradoxical way women were seen
in relation to the world of goods. Women have long been perceived as mere objects, with
their bodies and sexuality seen to exist in relation to male needs and desires. While
women were conventionally viewed as circulating goods within economic systems,
feminist historians like Rachel Bowlby and Anne Friedberg also point out that the

spectacularized urban culture of arcades, boulevards, and department stores in the late

 

2" Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, eds. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The
Commericaliza_tjon of Eighteenth-century England, 10.

29 John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds Consumption and the World of Goods. (London: Routledge,
1993)

19

nineteenth century enabled women shoppers to emerge as a powerful ﬁgures complicit
with bourgeois capitalism. 30 This dissertation argues that long before the rise of modern
retail and marketing in the nineteenth century, the emerging consumer culture of‘the
eighteenth century illustrated the paradoxical and complex ways in which visual
experiences play an ever-increasing role in shaping female subjectivity.

Often marked culturally both as commodities and consumers, women, of course,
have been perceived as having a special relation to consumerism. Depictions of the
female subject in eighteenth-century literature reveals the extent to which women were
aligned with the commodities as well as acts of consumption. While spending was seen
as necessary for economic expansion and global trade, luxury items often associated with
female consumption were generally seen as both a moral and economic threat.
Eighteenth-century British society oﬁen deployed the female body in debates about the
beneﬁts of consumption. For instance, Bernard Mandeville’s 1714 “The Fable of the
Bees” registers the complexities of a world in which the new values of the marketplace

associated social good with traits long deemed world vices: 3 I

.. Luxury

Employ’d a Million more.
Envy it self, and Vanity
Were Ministers of Industry;

Their darling Folly, Fickleness

 

30 Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser. Gissing and Zol_a. (New York:
Methuen, 1985).

3' Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees. ed. Phillip Harth. (New York: Penguin, 1970).

 

20

In Diet, Furniture, and Dress,
That strange ridic’lous Vice, was made

The very Wheel, that turn’d the Trade. (180-88)

Mandeville proposes that “personal vices” such as luxury, ﬁckleness, vanity,
acquisitiveness, and the pursuit of pleasure were necessary for a thriving national

99

economy and the generation of “publick beneﬁts. Although he deplored women’s
undisciplined desire for luxuries and the means they employed to consume, he
nonetheless sanctioned women’s spending as a necessary evil in consumer society. He
insists that “a considerable Portion of what the Prosperity of London and Trade in
general, and consequently the Honour, Strength, Safety, and all the Worldly Interest of
the Nation, consist in, depends entirely on the necessary and vile Stratagems of Women”
(238). Mandeville’s critique of female consumerism reveals the extent to which the
female body becomes a key site for theorizing the very nature of consumerism and the
questions raised by commercial society. In fact, women’s increasingly active
participation in processes of production and consumption within the economic, ﬁnancial
and literary marketplace in the eighteenth century was manifested in a national debate
where women’s spending was seen with ambivalence and contradiction. Women’s
acquisitiveness was seen as necessary to the strong growth of the domestic British
economy and its imperial mercantile expansion at the same time that the licentiousness of
female appetite was perceived to be threatening to male control.

Several feminist scholars, including Laura Brown, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace,

Erin Mackie, and Deidre Lynch, offer insights into the ways the ﬁgure of the woman was

21

 

crucial to how eighteenth-century culture experienced and negotiated the pleasures of and

fears about consumerism. Both Erin Mackie’s reading of The Tatler and The Spectator

 

periodicals in Market A La Mode and Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace’s Consuming

 

Subjects, an analysis of eighteenth-century literary texts and consumption in the
eighteenth century, examine the deﬁnition of gender identity, especially female
subjectivity, in a commercial context by focusing on such aspects of consumerism as
fashion, shopping, and commodities. 32 They both emphasize that women’s close
afﬁnity to consumption is not natural or inevitable but produced by speciﬁc historical
conditions. Kowaleski-Wallace demonstrates how the notion of a gendered consumer
appetite ﬁrst appeared in the eighteenth century, as appetite “was diverted toward goods,
shopping became gendered as feminine, and women’s bodies became conﬁgured in
relation to consumption” (13). Women’s paradoxical status as the agent and the object of
consumption is a discursive construct that emerged when “British culture projected onto
the female subject both its fondest wishes for the transforming power of consumerism
and its deepest anxieties about the corrupting inﬂuences of goods” (5). In E_nds_of
Em, a study of eighteenth-century imperialism, Laura Brown argues that “[t]he
female ﬁgure, through its simultaneous connections with commodiﬁcation and trade on
the one hand, and violence and difference on the other, plays a central role in the
constitution of this mercantile capitalist ideology.” 33 She reveals how eighteenth-century

culture sought to deﬂect anxieties about imperialism by scapegoating the ﬁgure of the

 

32 Erin Mackie, Market a la Mode: Fashion. Commodity. and Gender in The Tatler and The
Spectator. (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997); Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace,
Consuming Suljects: Women. Shopping. and Business in the Eighteenth Century. (New York: Columbia
Press, 1997).

33 Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English
Literature. (Ithaca, Cornell University, 1993), 3.

22

 

woman as representative of accumulation and consumption. Similarly Deidre Lynch’s
study of literary character in relation to Britain’s commercial economy in The Economy
of Character has convincingly shown that the notion of interiority was shaped by
negotiation with the emerging market culture of eighteenth-century Britain. Her
sophisticated analysis validly points out how the interiority of modern subjectivity is
constituted by the fashionable world of commerce as a “pragmatics of character” for
readers to accommodate and renegotiate their relationships to a rapidly changing
consumer culture. 34 She does not, however, explicitly mention how these strategies of
deciphering characters to cope with the “crisis of legibility” brought about by the new
consumer revolution may have affected eighteenth-century visuality, especially its
implication for female spectatorship.

What these works share is the recognition that gendered subjectivity is produced
in relation to multiple discourses of consumption. While they have successfully shown
the various ideological and cultural processes whereby British culture projected its
desires and anxieties about commodities and consumption onto a female subject, they
tend to overlook the complex yet contradictory nature of the specular economy in which
women’s subjectivity is deﬁned. Despite the role of gender in the new visual economy
of commodity culture, past scholarship does not go far enough to connect the visual
aspects of the consumer revolution to wider issues of spectatorship and visuality in
eighteenth-century Britain. Accordingly, I am indebted to the insights of critics who
have addressed female consumerism in the eighteenth century, I hope to extend them by

considering how the new economic, political, cultural and epistemological shifts

 

3" Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Ch_ar_acter: Novels. Ma_rket Culture. and the Business of Inner
Meaning. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4.

23

precipitated by emergent consumerism in the period affected and shaped methods and
practices of seeing. In other words, this project will attempt to show that to understand
the experience of seeing is also and necessarily to inquire into some of eighteenth-century
Britain’s most pivotal economic, cultural and epistemological struggles. How did the
radical transformations of the eighteenth-century consumer revolution impact how
individuals perceived and conceptualized the experience of seeing? Given women’s
often paradoxical relationship to commodity culture, how was gender implicated in the
experience of seeing? Most of all, how did these radical shifts and transformations
brought about by commodity culture deﬁne and shape female spectatorship?

Although the eighteenth-century discursive construction of femininity focuses the
male gaze on the body of the woman as an as object of display, this dissertation argues
that the powerful yet threatening role women had in deﬁning and supporting the
economies of consumer culture enabled women to subvert the scopic regime and to claim
visual agency. One of my fundamental assumptions is that, just as individuals do not
have prediscursive, presocial selves outside the marketplace, visuality is not naturally
given and thus cannot be conceived outside the context of the social and economic
transformation that provide an arena for the circulation of goods and bodies, exchange,
and the exercise of consumption.

Previous scholarship linking visual culture to commodity culture has mainly
focused on postmodern, late-capitalist society. Cultural critics like Guy Debord and
Jean Baudrillard have sharply criticized the pervasiveness of images in today’s
spectacular consumer society, where all aspects of everyday life, including the process of

looking itself, have become commodiﬁed to the extent that individuals inevitably become

24

reduced to passive masses enslaved by hyperreal images or sirnulacrum. 35 In some
respects, the eighteenth century, with its proliferation, exchange, and circulation of
images and readily available goods, can be seen as an incipient “society of the spectacle”
grounded in and inscribed by the speciﬁc contours of the economic and material world.
Thus, Barbara Stafford in Body Criticism claims that eighteenth-century culture was
deeply dependent on the visual, in that “the problem of imaging what was ‘out of sight’
became critical in the ﬁne arts and the natural sciences” as part of the Enlightenment’s
systematic effort to visualize all aspects of the invisible and the unknown. 36 Although
Stafford aptly points out that eighteenth-century culture was image-oriented, she
overlooks how the Enlightenment’s project of visualization is also closely tied to the
period’s commercialism. I suggest that the very visual strategies for imaging the unseen
during the Enlightenment can be crucial in dealing with problems arising from the
consumer revolution. As I will demonstrate subsequently, the proximity of the wide array
of novel commodities and innovations in retail practices and spaces enabled female
consumers to explore ﬂuid, mobile modes of looking for their own pleasure and to take
advantage of commercial exchanges in a world which was increasingly deﬁned by the
production and consumption of images.

By drawing attention to the ambiguities of female visual experiences formed in
and through a new world of consumerism, this study contends that the unprecedented

shifts brought about by commodity culture were fundamental to how eighteenth-century

 

35 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectpcjg trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone
Books, 1995); Jean Baudrillard. “Simulacra and Simulations” from Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster
(Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), 166-184.

36 Barbara Stafford. Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine.
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), xvii.

 

25

culture experienced and deﬁned its social and epistemological categories. These changes
also brought into view the problematic and often contradictory nature of eighteenth-
century visuality, which belies what is commonly referred to as the Enlightenment gaze.
By speculating on the implications of women’s vision and their participation in
alternative ways of seeing, this dissertation insists that eighteenth-century visuality
cannot be seen simply as a uniﬁed or single scopic regime, but is rather complex and
contradictory, fraught with anxieties and problems linked to its speciﬁc cultural and
historical conditions.

In fact, the problematic nature of seeing in the eighteenth century is evident in
widespread debate over the proper role of seeing itself. In Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, John Locke rejected the concept of innate ideas and grounded all
knowledge on the sensory perception of external objects. Locke emphasized
disinterested observation and physical sensations as sources of knowledge, yet he deemed
such ‘sensations’ inferior to what he perceived as important ‘ideas.’ Even though Locke
acknowledged that ‘sensations’ or ‘impressions’ were an important source of
transcendental ‘ideas,’ he struggled to distinguish ‘ideas’ from ‘sensations.’ 37 This
distinction suggests that Locke remained skeptical about seeing as a reliable source of
knowledge, just as Western philosophers had long devalued visual phenomena and
images as affording the mind only superﬁcial access to reality. Yet, under the sway of
empirical science, and with the invention of the microscope and telescope, seeing
paradoxically became an end in itself. In her study of eighteenth-century curiosity,

Barbara Benedict argues that seeing as a source of information became an end in itself to

 

37 Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 121.

26

the extent that seeing became equated with curiosity, a “transgression visually received.”
38 Curious seeing embodied the threatening and unstable essence of inquiry itself, often
accompanied by visual delights and unregulated appetite.

Indeed, the proliferation of novelties and exotic or strange imported goods into
Britain from newly opened global trade routes made everyday life a spectacle for middle
and upper-classes, pulling spectatorship into the center of the culture. Discoveries of new
species and lands overseas and the appeal of new commodities available in newly
conﬁgured marketplaces provided eighteenth-century viewers with sources of visual
pleasure, intensifying acquisition and stimulating consumption. As Britain made the
transition to commercial capitalism, the consumption of luxuries was no longer limited to
an elite few. Instead, the increasing availability of goods, the rapid spread of new
fashions, and the growth of emulative spending helped to destabilize ﬁxed social
categories and transform identities. As a result, the need to redeﬁne and enforce social
divisions and class relations often led to preoccupations with questions concerning
spectatorial comportment and behavior in a time of conspicuous consumption. Not only
did the acceleration of material accumulation provoke debate over luxury, pitting self-
interest against the public good, but it radically transformed how people conceptualized
themselves and the world. The proliferation and circulation of new exchangeable forms
of goods, currency and credit, as well as new retail practices and systems of ﬁnance
undermined prevailing norms and the categories that people had formerly invoked to
explain their world. As I will develop ﬁrrther in my analysis of Daniel Defoe’s m

the increasing centrality of speculative investment, credit, and currency shifted the nature

 

’8 Barbara Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Lmly Modern Inquiry. (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2001), 3.

27

of property from visible, material forms to ﬂuid, intangible and unsubstantial ones.
Furthermore, there was a deep anxiety about being consumed by market relations as
objects and individuals seemed to become increasingly undistinguishable under the logic
of exchangeability and commodiﬁcation, just as gender identity and class relations
became more ﬂuid and uncertain. Through my close readings,.I explore how female
consumers exploited these contradictions and manipulated the terms of their specularity
for their own interests.

The instability and mobility that characterized eighteenth-century culture, in fact,
seem to counter what Crary claims as the visual paradigm of the period: a classical model
of vision typiﬁed by the camera obscura and offering “stable and ﬁxed relations” that
guaranteed access to an objective truth about the world. 39 Indeed, Crary risks
subsuming the “singularities and immense diversity that characterized visual experience”
(7) into a binary model when he argues that the camera obscura was a dominant visual
paradigm from the late 15005 to the end of the 17005, when nineteenth-century ,
developments in science and technology, particularly physiological optics, gave way to a
more subjective and corporeal account of perception. Rather than equating eighteenth-
century visuality with a camera obscura model that assures an infallible vantage point on
the world with a monocular perspective in which “any inconsistencies and irregularities
are banished to insure the formation of a homogeneous, uniﬁed, and fully legible space,”

it seems that eighteenth-century visuality can be better understood as contested and

 

’9 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision a_nd Modernity in the 19th Century.
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 14.

28

problematic. 40 Although Locke’s empirical methods maintained faith in Cartesian ideas
of rationality and lucidity, persistent uncertainties and doubts remained about seeing as a
source of truth. In fact, seeing failed to guarantee immediate, true transmission of the
outside world and objects, especially when increasing consumerism with its new- logic of
commodiﬁcation and exchangeability destabilized and cast doubt over the notion of
vision as absolute and stable.

By drawing attention to multiple and competing modes of female spectatorship in
eighteenth-century Britain, this dissertation attempts to complicate and add nuance to
totalizing theories about eighteenth-century scopic regimes. Instead of providing
sweeping schematization about female spectatorship, I suggest that complex and often
conﬂicting dynamicsof the female consumer’s gaze in relation to other discourses of
gender, domesticity, class, race, nation, and authorship can be seen as alternatives to
dominant masculine ways of seeing. By highlighting how the ﬁgure of woman forms a
crucial nexus in the representational systems supporting consumer culture, this study
proposes that eighteenth-century women were able to take advantage of their dual roles
as consumers and commodities in the marketplace in order to destabilize and challenge

oppressive scopic regimes.

Methodology
Using feminist and cultural studies approaches, 1 follow a materialist
methodology by presuming that visuality is mediated and shaped by material culture,

cultural discourses, and social experiences. Whereas other studies of eighteenth-century

 

4° Jonathan Crary, “Modernizing Vision” Vision m1 Visualig ed. Hal Foster. (New York: The
New Press, 1988), 33.

29

visuality —such as those by Crary, Conway, and Stafford—have focused on optics, visual
technologies or visual arts, 1 am more interested in the imbrication of visuality and
textuality in which eighteenth-century literary texts represent and deploy various visual
discourses in connection with other discourses of eighteenth-century consumer culture.
Just as individuals do not have prediscursive or presocial selves, so our visual
experiences are at any given time part of a complex web of political, social, economic
and discursive practices and their accompanying ideological values. Implicit in this
project is the assumption that both visuality and textuality are historically contingent
discursive practices which are essential to our understanding of how a speciﬁc culture
operates, particularly with respect to the complex interplay between representation and
cultural power. By examining how eighteenth-century writers deployed various
discourses of seeing to address political, social, and economic changes arising from the
consumer revolution, I will be tracing not only how the enmeshing of visuality and
textuality is shaped by historical conditions, but the extent to which this imbrication can
recreate and intervene in relations of power and ideologies.

Whereas previous scholarship on eighteenth-century visuality has tended to
privilege the novel, my aim is to examine a variety of popular genres including .
travelogues, periodicals, and novels, which comprise early eighteenth-century English
print culture. This thesis suggests that the proliferation of printed materials in eighteenth
century, such as the periodicals, the travel narrative, and the novels considered in this
dissertation, relied on the overarching concept of spectatorship to engage with the
problems and fears arising from commercial culture. Through readers’ imaginative

participation in the private consumption of these texts, readers could visualize themselves

30

differently and reinvent themselves. It is a commonplace that the eighteenth century was
a period preoccupied with questions of how to see or how to be seen in every aspect of
life ranging from public masquerade to the most popular periodical entitled ﬁg
Spectator. At the same time, the period provides a rich site for inquiries about visuality,
gender and consumerism because it was a pivotal moment when new practices of
consumption and gender identity mutually constitute each other. The primary texts I
have chosen to examine are signiﬁcant in that they foreground the complex relationships
among visuality, gender, and commodity culture, and offer a fertile ground for exploring
and reconceptualizing female spectatorship in the eighteenth century. While I try to
ground my arguments historically by juxtaposing literary texts with other relevant
philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic texts of the period, my practice is mainly grounded
in close reading.

My dissertation explores the female consumer’s gaze in the following texts
written between 1711 and 1796: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy

Letters (1716-1718), Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724), Eliza Haywood’s The Female

 

Sp_ectator (1744-46), and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751). My conclusion
provides a brief reading of Frances Burney’s Mia (1796) and ends with a discussion
of British female consumers’ role in the antislavery movement. 1 have chosen to order
my readings chronologically in order to trace a genealogy of the female consumer: from
an aristocratic traveler to middle-class shoppers, from transgressive coquettes to domestic
spenders, from shopgazers to political radicals. 4' Whereas my two chapters on Montagu
and Defoe focus on British women’s consumption of foreign luxuries and their scopic

desires in relation to their sexual, domestic, national, and imperial identities, my chapter

 

4' Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader. ed. Paul Rabinow. (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 88.

31

on Haywood concentrates on her critique of Addison and Steele’s domestic surveillance
through women’s fashionable consumption and strategic self-display both in private and
public spheres. While the arrangement of the chapters suggests that female consumerism
became increasingly conﬂated with domestic ideology by the turn of the nineteenth
century, my conclusion nonetheless proposes that female domestic consumers were able
to exercise their visual authority and political agency through their power to shop and
boycott speciﬁc colonial products. Using Foucault’s idea of genealogy, the chapters do
not offer a progressive narrative of female spectatorship and resist the tendency to
reproduce history as continuous and totalizing. Rather than offering an overarching,
essentialized reading of female spectatorship, my goal is to recover a rich and varied
discursive history of female vision in English culture from the early eighteenth century
forward that engages with contemporaneous discourses of consumerism, domesticity,
orientalism, and nation etc.

My ﬁrst chapter addresses how the female traveler’s gaze is intertwined with
other eighteenth-century discourses of commerce, orientalism, and British imperialism by
examining Montagu’s attempts to establish visual authority as a female consumer in her
Iuikish EmbassyLetters. Recent studies of travel writing have pursued the question of
whether women travelers experience and write differently from men. If the viewing
subject, whose powerful survey subjects the landscape to an imperial gaze, is assumed to
be predominantly male, then the very act of seeing becomes problematic for the woman
observer/traveler. Montagu deliberately deploys the material and economic discourses
available in an increasingly commercialized eighteenth-century culture to fashion herself

as a powerful viewing subject in a way that enables her to contest the spectatorial

32

paradigms of male travel narratives. Simultaneously, I argue that Montagu’s
preoccupation with the accumulation and consumption of commodities ranging from
exotic luxury items and foreign goods ultimately implicates her within the consolidation
of British national identity. By foregrounding the material aspect of Montagu’s visual
authority, I argue that her spectatorial authority is linked more closely with the
commercial values of the marketplace and with emerging bourgeois domestic ideals than
has been generally recognized. I will demonstrate that Montagu’s consumer gaze in
Europe, Asia, and Africa underscores her active involvement in commodifying foreign
‘others’ for British domestic consumption and ultimately validates British identity.
Chapter 2 considers how discourses of female consumerism and visuality are
related to English domestic identity by focusing on Roxana’s masquerade in Defoe’s
_R_og._n_§ in conjunction with his other writings on credit and commerce. Defoe’s active
engagement with the broader economic issues of eighteenth-century Britain is well-
known. His numerous polemical writings and tracts reﬂect his complex views on the
signiﬁcant economic developments of the ﬁnancial revolution in early eighteenth-century
Britain. Rather than oversimplifying Defoe’s economic stance, my aim is to explore how
Defoe deploys the visibility of the female body to express his profound anxiety about a
newly emerging credit culture and women’s growing presence in what he sees as a
masculine public space. Roxana’s display of clothing and her accumulation of material .
goods not only testify to the power of English mercantile expansion and imperial
expansion but also epitomize the speculative and contingent nature of a credit-based
economy that threatens to be uncontrollable. While Roxana’s masquerade exempliﬁes

the ways she uses foreign consumption to fashion and empower herself, her failure as a

33

mother dramatizes Defoe’s fears about foreign trade’s corrupting inﬂuence on English
domestic virtues. While Roxana’s masquerade has often been discussed in moral or
sexual terms, my aim is to show that Roxana’s foreign consumption and her manipulation
of visibility has a wider signiﬁcance in the context of economic, political, and cultural
concerns about English national identity.

Chapter 3 analyzes how Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744-46) and The
HISIOQ/ of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) critique and revise the visual authority of
Addison and Steele’s The Spectator papers (1711-14). My ﬁrst objective is to delineate
in speciﬁc terms the conﬁguration of eighteenth-century Visuality by insisting that Mr.
Spectator, the narrator of Addison’s periodical, can be seen as paradigmatic of the
profound ways the act of seeing functions as an organizing trope in eighteenth-century
culture. While Mr. Spectator’s privileged and all-knowing gaze aligns him with a
Cartesian position, his disciplinary model of seeing relies on women’s visibility for
consolidation of the bourgeois public sphere. I will claim that his scopic power becomes
problematic and uncertain at best, since his disciplinary gaze cannot help but be indebted
to the feminine properties of fashionable display and the marketplace that he attempts to
contain and exclude from the public world. In fact, such ambiguity and anxiety
underlying the Enlightenment’s scopic regime enable the female subject to assume a
viewing position from which a dominant male perspective and ideology could be
challenged. In The Female Spectator, I argue that Haywood deploys commercial and

market discourses to fashion a different way of seeing that contests The Spectator’s

 

model of domestic surveillance. Haywood suggests that women can become powerful

discerning spectators through the strategic use of fashionable display and the

34

manipulation of their status as objects of commercial exchange. Haywood also explores
the possibilities for a radical female vision through the coquette’s fashionable
consumption in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. While Haywood’s latter works
are often viewed as endorsing domestic ideals, my purpose is to demonstrate that neither
The Female Spectator nor The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless are part of
conservative conduct literature but are, in fact, radical in their critique of masculine
visual authority.

My conclusion takes up Burney brieﬂy to consider female spectatorship within
the rapidly changing realms of shopping and the retail trade at the end of the eighteenth
century. Bumey’s novels are preoccupied with women’s economic and social status, the
institution of marriage, the distribution of property, fashion and consumption. Yet it is
perhaps Bumey’s third novel Qa_m_iﬂa (1796) that depicts the most powerful picture of the
emergent consumer culture in which consumption in the marketplace provide women
with opportunities to negotiate and transform modes of subjectivity. Whereas Camilla’s
victimization by the fashionable world’s demands is generally seen as Bumey’s critique
of a commercial society that often reduces women to objects of male exchange, I will
show that Camilla’s subjectivity is in fact not constructed in opposition to the effects of
consumer culture, but rather is secured through her experiences of dealing with the
commodities that surround her. Through examples of Mrs. Arlbery and Mrs. Mittin, I
will also interrogate the various ways in which women’s increasing visibility and public
mobility played an increasing role in shaping feminine subjectivity and spectatorial
agency. I conclude with a brief but hopefully suggestive discussion about female

consumers and their active involvement in the abolitionist movement of the 17905.

35

Whereas Qa_nlil_la exempliﬁes how female consumerism becomes circumscribed within
the domestic sphere by the turn of the nineteenth century, my purpose in ending with the
female consumers’ boycott of sugar is to reveal the crucial role played by British female
consumers in the domestic sites of their consumption. By tracing how female consumers
deployed their sympathetic gaze and consmnption to undermine the institution of slavery,
my dissertation highlights how female consumers successfully exercised the privilege of

seeing for political ends.

36

CHAPTER 1
THE FEMALE TRAVELER’S GAZE & CONSUMERISM IN MONTAGU’S
THE TURKISH EMBASSY LETTERS

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embam Letters, written during her
journey to the Ottoman Empire (1716-1718) and posthumously published in 1763, raises
many vexed questions about travel and gender, the politics of visual representation of the
cultural and racial other, women’s roles and implication in colonial discourse, and the
orientalist assumptions underlying European narratives of the East. Accompanying her
husband, the British ambassador, through Europe to Turkey, Montagu is regarded as one
of the ﬁrst European women to write extensively about her experiences in the Ottoman
Empire on her actual travel. ’ Montagu, who had access to realms forbidden to male
travelers and was privileged on account of both her class and gender, is particularly
interested in making systematic observations related to Turkish women and their
everyday conditions. She is recognized as one of the ﬁrst European women to provide a
glimpse into Turkish women’s baths and the interiors of several harems and to celebrate
Turkish women’s beauty and freedom in a way that challenged earlier male voyage
writers working in the orientalist tradition, most of whom depicted Turkish women as
enslaved and corrupt.

Unsurprisingly, much of the past scholarship surrounding Montagu’s letters has
centered on feminist and postcolonial perspectives: the overlapping discursive

formations of gender and orientalism, and Montagu’s negotiation of these discourses in

 

' Billie Melman, Women's Orients. Engliﬂ women and the Middle East. 1718-1918: Sexualigy,
Religion. and Work. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 78. Billie Melman contends her
letters are “the ﬁrst examples of a secular account, by a woman, on the Muslim Orient.”

37

the text. Critics have primarily diverged on the question of whether Montagu is
orientalist or feminist or both. Joseph W. Lew contends that her letters are “powerful
critiques of both Ottoman and British culture,” a subversion of both orientalist discourses
and the eighteenth-century patriarchy.2 Lisa Lowe also argues that Montagu makes use
of a feminist discourse which “speaks of common experiences among women of different
societies” to disrupt the monolithic narrative of orientalism. 3 On the other hand, Meyda
Yenenoglu emphasizes how western feminism is inevitably implicated in orientalism. 4
She points out that Montagu’s positive representation of oriental women, however well-
intentioned, replicates orientalist /phallocentric discourses, as Montagu ultimately takes a
masculine position in relating to a feminized orient. Similarly focusing on the complicity
between orientalism and Western feminism, Srinivas Aravarnudan maintains that
Montagu’s masquerading as a Turkish woman is at best “partial identiﬁcation.” 5
While scholars have been inﬂuential in showing how discourses of gender and
imperialism can be mapped onto each other, they have largely ignored the economic and
material context of both these discourses of orientalism and feminism. Despite the fact
that eighteenth-century England in general witnessed a vast expansion of wealth and
luxury that was accompanied by the production of new desires and the accelerating

demands of consumption across classes, there has been to date no signiﬁcant work

focusing on Montagu’s relation to the eighteenth-century’s emergent commodity culture.

 

2 Joseph Lew, “Lady Mary’s Portable Seragio.” Eighteenth-Century Studies (24: 1991), 433.

3 Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and Britiﬂr Orientalim. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,
1991).

4 Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).

5 Srinivas Aravamudan, “Lady Mary Wortley Montague in the Hammam: Masquerade,
Womanliness, and Levantinization” ELH. (62: 1995), 69-104.

38

Rather than reductively generalizing Montagu as unquestionably orientalist or feminist,
my examination of the role of consumerism in Montagu’s text attempts to illuminate the
paradoxical construction of the modern female subject in relation to the discourses of
consumerism, and to undertake the project of conceptualizing Montagu’s female
consumer gaze. While this chapter will delineate how Montagu constructs herself as a
viewing subject by confronting Western patriarchal discourse, it will also foreground the
complicity between the eighteenth-century European feminist position and western
commercial interests, which are both a product of and at the same time constitutive of the
scopic regime of the eighteenth century. In doing so, I will suggest that Montagu’s
consumer gaze appropriates the active spectatorial subject position culturally assigned to
the man, even as this privileging of seeing was inextricably tied to the dominant Western
scopic tradition which is characterized by a desire to know, control, and master the world
through a scrutinizing and objectifying gaze.

In seeking to draw attention to the ways in which Montagu’s travel experience is
bound up with the material conditions of the eighteenth century’s culture of consumption,
I am particularly interested in how Montagu’s spectatorship is shaped by the larger
discourses of consumerism in the eighteenth century, particularly its concerns about
fashion, clothing, and commodities in her interactions with women from different parts of
the world, both western and nonwestem. Critics have tended to focus exclusively on
Montagu’s letters written within Turkey but have paid relatively little attention to her
letters written during her journey through continental Europe. Rather than privileging
Montagu’s “Turkish” letters over her “European” counterparts, this chapter suggests that

Montagu’s letters written in various western cities such as Rotterdam and Vienna are just

39

as crucial to understanding her paradoxical role as a female consumer who attempts to
negotiate the tensions between women’s power as agents in the consumer environment
and their subjection to a logic of commodiﬁcation that reduces them to objects of
exchange and possession in the eighteenth century. The vexed condition of the woman
shopper in Montagu’s “European” letters also anticipate the ways in which the delights
and dangers of female consumerism become ampliﬁed in Montagu’s “Turkish” letters,
changing the way we read the “Turkish” letters so as to foreground women’s involvement
in commodifying the foreign ‘other’ for western consumption.

Through a careful examination of the commercial discourses of exchange and
consumption interwoven in Montagu’s observations throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa,
I will trace how Montagu fashions herself as a powerful viewing subject with a uniquely
female authority that enables her to contest the spectatorial paradigms of male travel
narratives. Travel writing is often inextricable from the powerful shaping force of
mercantilist and colonial expansion, as travel accounts by Europeans about non-European
parts of the world often constructed the rest of the world as a form of domestic
consumption for European readers. At one level, Montagu’s preoccupations with
commerce and commodities (from exotic luxury items to household goods) can be seen
as participating in the project of British economic expansion and mercantile imperialism.
Montagu, nevertheless, deliberately deploys fashionable commodities to explore,
destabilize, and renegotiate sexual, national, and imperial identities. By focusing on how
commodities serve as important sites of exchange between self and other, the civilized
and the primitive, the familiar and the foreign, East and West, I will argue that

Montagu’s engagement in consumerism represents a feminist departure from previous

40

orientalist patriarchal discourses that are dependent on an objectiﬁed other, even as her
newly conﬁgured visual mastery as a female British consumer ultimately implicates her
within the consolidation of British national identity. By acknowledging the complex
dynamics of voyeurism, pleasure, and commodities in Montagu’s letters, I attempt to
underscore the centrality of the discourses of female consumerism in the debates about
British women’s complicity in the formation of empire and nation, and stress how these
female consumers were active agents in the political arena, not only as shoppers, but also

as observers.

“Handsome clean Dutch citizen’s wife” and the “Poor town lady of pleasure”
Montagu was a member of the aristocracy, recognized by her peers in her lifetime
for her literary and intellectual discernment. Although she admits that “the silly
prejudices of my education had taught me to believe I was to treat nobody as Inferior,” it
is evident that her station and aristocratic privileges shaped her perspective throughout
her life. Montagu insisted that she had found “the greatest examples of Honor and
Integrity amongst those of the highest Birth and Fortune,” 6 and her strong
admiration of Turkish women as the “only free people” restricted itself to wealthy
Turkish women. She rallied against the social upheaval she observed in her society
brought on by the foundational changes in the structuring of the English economy and
social relations. Opposed to the increasing commercialism and the growing economic
success of the middle class, she complained that the “confounding of all Ranks and

making a jest of order has long been growing in England.” (35) She also considered

 

6 The C(ﬂplete Letters of Lady Montagu, ed. Robert. Halsband (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965),
36.

41

writing for money beneath her station: “If writing for publication was unfashionable
among the aristocracy, writing for money was considered even worse, as it turned one of
‘the most distinguishing prerogatives of mankind’ into a ‘trade’ and thus demeaned it.” 7
Yet as this chapter will argue, as much as she sought to distance herself from the
commercial changes she witnessed around her due to an increasingly commercialized
market society, Montagu’s writing is shaped by and produced in the broader material
context of the eighteenth-century’s market economy. Critics for the most part have
focused on Montagu’s relationship to feminist and orientalist discourses while largely
ignoring the role of commerce or economics in her writing. Some critics, such as Anita
Desai, have even argued that Montagu “took no apparent interest in the politics of the

8 Yet it is evident that the very nature of her

place or period” except to aestheticize.
journey to a distant Ottoman Empire is closely bound up with the interests of British
commerce, since the purpose of Montagu’s travel was to accompany her husband, who
had been appointed British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1716. His diplomatic
mission was to negotiate peace between the Ottoman Empire and Austria. Although
Montagu’s travel letters contain no reference to her role in her husband’s political
negotiations, her texts can be seen as intimately engaged with the market forces of
eighteenth-century mercantile capitalism that deepened British-Turkish diplomatic and
commercial ties in the period. Wortley’s diplomatic task was particularly important

because it was directly related to maintaining British commercial and naval interests in

the East. England needed to have Austria in the Mediterranean to offset Spanish power

 

7 Robert Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956),
255.

8 Anita Desai, “Introduction” to The Turkish Embassy Letters. (London: Virago Press, 1994),
xxxi.

42

in an effort to ensure British commercial monopoly of overseas trade and the
transportation of goods between England and its expanding foreign markets. 9 Moreover,
Wortley was to represent the Levant Company that held the charter for trade in the Near
East. Founded in 1581, the Levant Company was one of England’s most important
commercial ventures, like the East India Company and the Royal African Company, that
seemed England’s domain over the eastern trading routes and helped to usher in
England’s ﬁrst empire. Wortley’s diplomatic goal was also to maintain open trade with
Ottomans. Anglo-Turkish diplomatic and commercial ties allowed the import of luxury
goods (including silks, spices, cotton, soaps, oils, carpets from the East) for its consumers
in their expanding domestic market in promotion of free trade and its mercantile
expansion. Montagu makes the journey to Turkey as the “obedient, invaluable wife” 10
who accompanied her husband on his diplomatic post, yet it is evident that her travel
supported British commercial interests implicitly, given the fact that her husband’s task
of negotiating peace between the Ottoman Empire and Austria helped to safeguard
British commercial and naval interests in the East and to promote British mercantile
expansion and imperialism.

Montagu also expresses a keen interest in the public issues of her era, for she was
very conscious of the operations of commerce and the politics of female consumption in
domestic and global market. While Montagu’s letters are mostly well known for her
detailed account of female society and customs in the Ottoman Empire, critics have

largely overlooked how her travels through continental Europe also contain many rich

observations about female fashion, commodities and commerce which become a

 

9 lbid., xvi.

'0 Isobel Grundy. Lady Margy Wortley Montagu. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 114.

43

powerful locus for her self-deﬁnition as a female subject. Through her encounter with
various female consumers in Rotterdam, Germany and Austria, Montagu foregrounds the
paradoxical status of the female consumer as at once feared and necessary. While female
consumers were indicted for their unscrupulous appetites and degenerate sexuality,
women were also expected to serve the interests of the nation by controlling their
consumer behaviors through disciplinary practices. By focusing on the intersections of
femininity, appetite, and the commodity, Montagu’s letters written before her arrival in
Turkey demonstrate how female subjectivity is mapped onto anxieties about
undisciplined female desire for material objects and thus aligned with a culture’s larger
economic and political imperatives.

From the beginning, Montagu’s letters reveal her preoccupation with the growth of
expanding commerce and the proliferation of consmner commodities. Her opening account of
her visit to Rotterdam not only establishes the close relation between her experience and the
world of goods, but also exempliﬁes how her encounter with other cultures and with women in
particular is mediated by the discourses of consumerism. When Montagu arrives at Rotterdam,
she is not only “charmed” but struck with “a new scene of pleasure” at the sight of the little town.

She is fascinated by its strong economy, material prosperity and its vibrant commercial activities.

Tis certain no town can be more advantageously situated for commerce.
Here are seven large canals, on which the merchant ships come up to the
very doors of their houses. The shops and warehouses are of a surprising

neatness and magniﬁcence, ﬁlled with an incredible quantity of ﬁne

44

merchandise, and so much cheaper than what we see in England I have

much ado to persuade myself I am still so near it. . .(3)

Here Rotterdam is depicted as a quintessentially thriving center of mercantile capitalism
where consumers can ﬁnd a vast variety of merchandise for their cultural consumption.
Its canals and ships provide access to world trade and serve as conduits for transactions in
luxury goods. When Montagu marvels that “the shops and warehouses are of a surprising
neatness and magniﬁcence, ﬁlled with an incredible quantity of ﬁne merchandise,” she
becomes fascinated by the visual allure of sensuous objects and fashionable goods. At
ﬁrst glance Montagu seems to epitomize a particular eighteenth-century discursive
construction of femininity: as a shopper who becomes enthralled by her innate female
desire for material objects and easily lured by the display of commodities.

Such a close relationship between women and commodities has been noted by
many historians of the emergence of modern consumer society. Thorstein Veblen’s
Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) is widely regarded as the foremost study articulating
the contradictory relation of women to modern consumer culture. According to Veblen,
the wife has “become the ceremonial consumer of goods” that the husband produces, so
that her “conspicuous” spending provides tangible evidence of his wealth and status.ll
Woman becomes identiﬁed as the primary consumer of Western society and acts of
consumption usually are gendered as female. Woman’s consumption also demonstrates
her status as a property in that her spending is for her husband, not her. Woman becomes

marked culturally both as consumer and commodity.

 

” Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. (New
York, 1972), 65.

45

 

 

Although women’s unruly impulses and prodigious appetite had long been
asserted, it was not until the birth of a consumer culture and the vast expansion of
commerce in the eighteen century that the speciﬁc connection between female
consumption and the world of goods was made. Questioning the ‘natural’ link between
women and the commodities they buy, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace documents how
women’s “appetite was diverted toward goods, how shopping became gendered as
feminine, and how women’s bodies became conﬁgured in relation to consumption.” '2
She reveals the contradictory position of women, who were presumed to desire
fashionable and foreign luxury goods, while their appetite for such goods was denigrated
as voracious, disruptive, and a threat to the patriarchal order. This contradictory
representation of the female consumer was pervasive in eighteenth-century literature.
Moralists like George Berkeley deplored women’s propensity to consume luxury goods,
inquiring “whether a woman of fashion ought not to be declared a public enemy?” '3
Similarly Jonathan Swift denounced female consumers for employing “their stock of
invention in contriving new arts of profusion, faster than the most parsimonious husband
can affor ” and identifying their desire for imported luxuries as a feminine propensity. '4

Although Montagu is fascinated by the allure of commodities, she does not
represent herself as an irresponsible consumer with an unscrupulous appetite. As seen in

several of her letters, Montagu presents herself as a careful shopper who does not engage

in mindless spending but constantly compares the price of merchandise she desires. She

 

'2 Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women. Shopping, and Business in the
Eighteenth Century. (New York: Columbia Press, 1997), 13.

'3 T. E. Jessop, The Works of George Berkelay, Bishop of Cloyne, 8 vols, (London: Thomas
Nelson, 1953), 6: 117. '

"I Jonathan Swift, “A Letter to the Archbishop of Dublin, Concerning the Weavers.” Herbert
Davis, ed., Irish Tracts, 1728-1733 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), 67.

46

is unwilling to be controlled by the market price in Rotterdam and turns out to be a
powerful consuming subject who can negotiate and “make a good bargain” (4), while she
apologizes to Jane Smith for not being able to send her the lace she ordered: “upon my
word I can yet ﬁnd none that is not clearer than you may buy it in London” (5). Montagu
abstains from shopping in Vienna where “all things of that kind [are] at least double the
price” (34), but seizes the opportunity for “buying pages’ liveries, gold stuffs” for herself
in Leipzig. Like Montagu herself, who resists giving in to dissipated desires for luxury
goods, Montagu’s travel letters suggest that women’s consumer behavior can be
controlled and regulated.

Just as Montagu approves of women who regulate themselves in the consumer
economy, she emphasizes the importance of order and discipline in civic economy. In
the passage below, Montagu is foremost struck by the cleanliness of Rotterdam, the
“neatly kept” streets and the “surprising neatness” of its shops, as she notes the absence

of poverty or “loathsome cripples” like those who beg in the streets of London:

Here is neither dirt nor beggary to be seen. One is not shocked
with those loathsome cripples so common in London, nor teased
with the importunities of idle fellows and wenches that choose to
be nasty and lazy. The common servants and the little shop
woman here are more nicely clean than most of our ladies, and the
great variety of neat dresses (every woman dressing her head after

her own fashion) is an additional pleasure in seeing the town (4).

47

While Montagu’s condescension towards poor and disabled people seems
strangely at odds with the “compassion” she shows to the poor “wretches” she later
encounters in Missa, the capital of Serbia (56), her contempt of the beggarly and idle
body is consistent with her critique of those who “choose to be nasty and lazy” (4) and
fail to manage themselves properly. Her strong disgust towards the vagrants and cripples
veils her sharp criticism of a dysfunctional English economy which has failed to produce
docile and useful subjects. Through her juxtaposition of active, industrious, and efficient
Dutch workers and the delinquent and lazy English, Montagu illustrates how commerce
plays a vital role in shaping of bodies, manners, and morals to produce ideal bourgeois
subjects.

Foucault has argued that the human body has no intrinsic meaning but is subject
to various forces: social, economic, political , and sexual. Just as one is subject to
changing economic interests and pressures, the capitalist marketplace becomes an
important instrument in the regulation of the body and its behavior. The body, placed
within an economic system that both interprets it and inscribes it with meaning, is not
only expected to be an active participant in the capitalist economy, but also to be subject
to (and in need of) internal disciplinary processes: the exclusion of laziness and
unruliness is necessary to the production of diligent, sensible and productive members of

the system. Foucault explains:
The body is also directly involved in a political ﬁeld; power relations have

an immense hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it

to carry out tasks to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. This political

48

investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex
reciprocal relationships, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of
production that the body is invested with relations of power and
domination; but on the other hand, its constitution as labor power is
possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection. .. the body
becomes a useﬁrl force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected

body. ’5

While both men and women are disciplined to become docile, as resources to be tapped
for commercial economy, Montagu especially emphasizes the female body through the
image of a female consumer displaying a “great variety of neat dresses.” In this display of
conspicuous consumption, the female body, instead of being “nasty and lazy,” regulates
itself to become the site of decorous restraint in which the disruptive potential of
feminine appetite is controlled and regulated. By emphasizing the opposition neat/clean
versus dirty/nasty, Montagu’s letters reveal the cultural process whereby women are
constructed as self-regulating subjects who support an industrious, commercial economy
by means of proper consumption. The neatly dressed female shoppers who carefully
manage their consumption of “fashion” and the “nicely clean” shop women with their
diligent labor are praised as compliant, respectable female bodies. Their controlled
consumerism allows them to become productive members of the society in contrast to the

“nasty and lazy wenches” who are condemned for their self-indulgence and impropriety.

 

'5 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. trans. Alan Sheridan
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 26-7. While my approach stresses Foucault’s concept of disciplinary
gaze from his ‘middle-works,’ such as Discipline and Punish. Foucault’s later works offer a number of
issues related to feminist agency and identity politics. Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges, eds. Feminism
and the Final Foucaalt. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).

49

Here the binary between ﬁlthy and clean distinguishes the virtuous domestic woman from
the wench.

Similarly, it is through the female body that civility is deﬁned when Montagu
makes observations about women’s fashion from various parts of the world. Tropes of
gender and commerce become interlinked as Montagu, traveling through Germany,
employs the ﬁgure of a “handsome clean Dutch citizen’s wife” to describe a “free” town,
with an “air of commerce and plenty,” while the city of “vice and poverty” is ﬁgured as a

“lady of pleasure.”

I have already passed a large part of Germany. I have seen all that is
remarkable in Cologne, Frankfurt, Wurtzburg and this place, and ‘tis
impossible not to observe the difference between the free towns and those
under the government of absolute princes, as all the little sovereigns of
Germany are. The streets are well built and full of people, neatly and
plainly dressed, the shops loaded with merchandise and the commonality
clean and cheerful. In the other a sort of shabby ﬁnery, a number of dirty
people of quality tawdered out, narrow nasty streets out of repair,
wretchedly thin of inhabitants, and above half of the common sort asking
alms. I can’t help fancying one under the ﬁgure of a handsome clean Dutch
citizen’s wife, and the other like a poor town lady of pleasure, painted and
ribboned out in her headdress, with tarnished silver-laced shoes and a

ragged under-petticoat, a miserable mixture of vice and poverty (8-9).

50

 

 

 

Here, commerce becomes synonymous with prosperity and civility, as Montagu depicts
the difference between the “free” towns and those under the tyranny of “absolute princes”
in terms of “commerce and plenty.” Like England, where people “are blessed with an
easy government under a king who makes his own happiness consist in the liberty of his
people and chooses rather to be looked upon as their father than their master” (5 7),
Montagu associates “free” towns with the Enlightenment values of liberty, civility, and
progress associated with industry and trade. Furthermore, by depicting the contrasting
towns in gendered terms, Montagu links the ideal of a rational, civilized commonweal
with appropriate female consumer behaviors, so that female consumption becomes a
visual marker for a civilized society.

By equating “free” towns with “neatly and plainly dressed” people, Montagu’s
letters seem to valorize moderate consumption that shows decorous restraint over
uncontrolled spending. The people who reside in the city of vice and poverty, in contrast,
are shown to be engaged in excessive and unregulated spending for inappropriate
commodities, making a spectacle of themselves with cheap, gaudy and hideous
ornaments. Ultimately, the ﬁgure of the “handsome clean Dutch citizen’s wife”
emblematic of the “free” towns epitomizes an eighteenth-century discursive construction
of femininity that suggests an ongoing effort to deﬁne and control feminine desires and
female spending and dressing practices. By drawing attention to the class difference
between the “lady of pleasure” and the Dutch wife, Montagu’s letters suggest that this
attempt to discipline female bodies aligns with middle-class values and domestic ideals.
Belonging to the aristocratic or the upper class, the “lady of pleasure” spends

extravagantly—her appetite for fashion and luxurious commodities like headdresses,

51

shoes, under-petticoats, and ribbons is out of control. Not only is the “lady of pleasure”
vain and indolent, but she is also morally corrupt. Turning herself into a spectacle with
ﬁ'ivolous omamentations and gaudy clothing in her narcissistic display of her body, the
“lady of pleasure” becomes commodiﬁed within a consumer transaction. Montagu
furthermore implies that upper class libertine ladies are no different from the lower class
cheap prostitutes who are reduced to an object of consumption in the marketplace,
offering “tarnished” sexuality for the male gaze.

Just as Montagu insists on curbing female sexuality, she celebrates the virtuous,
chaste Dutch wife with exemplary spending habits, endorsing an emerging bourgeois
domestic ideal instead of decadent aristocratic values. If aristocrat women were expected
to display signs of status in public and their bodies and wealth as public spectacle,
Montagu rejects such lavish aristocratic display in favor of new domestic ideals which
combine inner virtues with proper consumption. The impetus toward disciplining the
female spectacle seems to participate in the rise of domestic ideology in the eighteenth
century England. Nancy Armstrong argues that middle-class women gained more
cultural agency as they were encouraged to relinquish their desire to become part of a
public spectacle and instead assume power over the domestic realm. Montagu’s
comments can be seen as consistent with the new cultural shift which depended on
denigrating “the ornamental body of the aristocrat to exalt the desiring and yet ever
vigilant domestic woman.” '6

Montagu’s valorization of the middle-class ideal of industry and cleanliness

presents an interesting tension with her own aristocratic class status. She herself was

satirized by Pope and others for being slovenly. Although Valerie Rumbold points out

 

'6 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 71.

 

52

that “there is no good reason to doubt that she [washed and changed her smock] as
frequently as other people,’ '7 Montagu was often viliﬁed as being dirty and sordid.
Consider Horace Walpole’s comment on her in 1740: “She wears a foul mob, that does
not cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose, never combed or curled; an old
mazarine blue wrapper, that gapes open and discovers a canvas petticoat.” In his “An
Epistle to a Lady,” Pope also ridicules Montagu through an image of Sappho that
represents a stark contrast to what he sees as the ideal, virtuous woman, embodied by
Martha Blount, to whom the poem is addressed. In now well-known lines, he offers a

series of grotesque images comparing:

...Sappho’s diamonds with her dirty smock;
Or Sappho at her toilet’s greasy task,

With Sappho fragrant at an evening mask:
So morning insects that in muck begun,

Shine, buzz, and ﬂy-blow in the setting-sun. (23-27)

As seen in Sappho’s “greasy task,” which amounts to “muck,” Pope repeatedly stresses
that there is something fundamentally unclean and morally corrupt about Montagu and
women in general. Yet ironically Montagu resorts to the same kind of rhetoric when she
describes the dirty “lady of pleasure” in her letters. Pope’s negative comments about
Montagu’s uncleanliness and suspected of sexual laxity clearly demonstrate how

Montagu was often subjected to being an object of vision, rather than a privileged viewer.

 

'7 Valerie Rumbold, Women’s Place in Pope’s World, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1989), 158-159.

53

Montagu seems to be particularly aware of ways in which fashionable aristocratic women
were in danger of being reduced to a scandalous spectacle so that their bodies become
synonymous with the corruptions of femininity. For Montagu, being seen was
particularly crucial. Not only was she an aristocrat who had to appear at the right
occasions in court society, but she was also painfully conscious of her appearance due to
her scarring from smallpox. As I will elaborate later, Montagu was acutely aware of the
need to maintain a balance between controlling how one was seen and appropriating the
right to look, which also becomes manifested in her travel letters from Turkey.

While Montagu is primarily concerned with the visual nature of female
consumption and its political signiﬁcance, it is important to note that she does not limit
her analysis of consutnption to women, but extends it to both men and women, as her
letters from Nuremberg demonstrate. As seen in the passage below, Montagu critiques

the folly of overconsumption that can lead to extravagance and economic misery:

When one considers impartially the merit of a rich suit of clothes in most places,
the respect and the smiles of favour it procures, not to speak of the envy and the
sighs that it occasions (which is very often the principal charm to the wearer) one
is forced to confess that there is need of an uncommon understanding to resist the
temptation of pleasing friends and mortifying rivals, and that it is natural to young
people to fall into a folly, which betrays them to that want of money which is the
source of a thousand basenesses. What numbers of men have begun the world
with generous inclinations that have afterwards been the instruments of bringing

misery on a whole people, led by a vain expense into debts that they could clear

54

no other way but by the forfeit of their honour, and which they would never have
contracted if the respect the many pay to habits was ﬁxed by law, only to a

particular colour or cut of plain cloth! (9)

Montagu’s reﬂection on fashion and excessive spending situates consumption within a
wider economic context while drawing attention to class implications. Although
Montagu acknowledges the “temptations” of social emulation through dressing, she
argues that this desire to surpass one’s peers or imitate one’s superiors can be disastrous.
Social emulation is not only damaging to one’s honor or ﬁnances, but also can endanger
society. Sounding rather puritanical, Montagu urges people to abstain from luxuries and
wear “plain cloth,” apparently inculcating the recognizably middle-class values of
modesty and frugality.

Montagu’s negative View of lavish spending and inordinate appetite is also
reﬂected in her stance on sumptuary laws. Upon seeing that sumptuary laws are in
effect in Nuremberg, Montagu points out the beneﬁts of sumptuary laws: “They have
sumptuary laws in this town, which distinguish their rank by their dress and prevents that
excess which ruins so many other cities and has a more agreeable effect to the eye of a
stranger than our fashions” (9). Consistent with her disciplinary gaze towards female
consumption, Montagu suggests that it is necessary to curb the “excess” -- which is
often associated with femininity and regulate one’s spending, underscoring the gender
aspect of consumption. At the same time, Montagu’s endorsement of sumptuary laws
also reﬂects her class interests. Lamenting the fact that English sumptuary law had

lapsed, Montagu declares: “I need not be shamed to own that I wish these laws were in

55

force in other parts of the world” (9). Montagu’s biographer Grundy elaborates that
Montagu supported sumptuary laws to “prevent many self-inﬂicted debt crises.” '8 Yet
she overlooks how Montagu’s validation of sumptuary display is bound up with her
aristocratic class status. Sumptuary laws, which forbade dressing above one’s station,
become important for Montagu because clothing is a visual marker of rank that can
prevent “disorder” between classes. Most importantly, Montagu’s comments suggest an
underlying anxiety over rampant consumption activities that might result in blurring the
hierarchies between classes, especially through middle-class women aping aristocratic
fashion instead of observing decorous spending and sensible fashion. As an aristocrat, she
may have been uneasy about the potential threat middle-class consumers posed to the
existing ruling class. Her defense of sumptuary laws, in other words, can be seen as
conservative and self-serving, as she believed that consumption should not level the
traditional social structure through manipulation of fashion and conspicuous spending.
Even when she observes how some ladies in Prague imitate the ladies at Vienna, she

argues that the imitation is inferior to the original and condemns its derivativeness:

I have already been visited by some of the most considerable ladies, whose
relations I knew at Vienna. They are dressed after the fashions there, as people at
Exeter imitate those of London; that is, their imitation is more excessive than the

original and ‘tis not easy to describe what extraordinary ﬁgures they make (31).

Just as Montagu perceives conspicuous consumption to be an important signiﬁer

of class, she also perceives how fashion can be crucial in the construction of national

 

'8 Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu- 121.

56

identity. She regularly makes unfavorable comparisons between the bizarre fashion of
other countries and decorous English fashion, provided that the “excess of British
fashions” (9) that causes “misery and debt” is kept in check. Hence, Montagu forms a
judgment of Austrian fashion as “monstrous, and contrary to all reason and
commonsense” (17), and French ladies as “nauseous [and] fantastically absurd in their
dress” (161) while she extols the British as “dear pretty country women” (161).

Montagu addresses the same concerns in a periodical called “The Nonsense of
Common—Sense” (1737-3 8), where she brings one of England’s most basic economic
problems, “the present pressure of national debt,” to the attention of her female readers,
“the Fair Sex.” She urges female consumers to purchase English wool, instead of
imported foreign goods, to promote Britain’s wool manufacture. '9 Using the fashionable
lady, dressed in expensive imported cloths, as her central image, Montagu criticizes the
habit of mimicry that drives excessive consumption. By miming each other and the
decadent rich, “Ladys” ultimately spread poverty -- “the poor [are ] reduc’d now to low
ebb by the Luxury and ill taste of the Rich, and the Fantastic mimicry of our Ladys, who
are so accustomed to shiver in Silks” (106-7). In “The Nonsense of Common-Sense
No.2,” Montagu juxtaposes feminine interest and that of the nation, as she deplores how
these fashionable ladies who buy foreign goods only care for their “imaginary Empire of
Beauty” without any regard for worsening government debts or the decline of domestic
industry. While Montagu complains about the vanity and self-indulgence of English

ladies of fashion, she attributes these female deﬁciencies to “the Foibles to which

 

'9 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, “The Nonsense of Common-Sense.” Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu: Essays and Poems and Simplicity. A Comedy. eds. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 105-149.

 

57

Education has enclin’d them” (109), and thus attempts to instruct and reform women. As
Sandra Sherman rightly points out, Montagu “appeals to women’s latent rationality,
offering an alternative to irrational attire that is good for the nation and for women.” 20
By suggesting the signiﬁcant impact women’s dress codes can have on pragmatic
economic and trade policies, Montagu’s letters reiterate that fashion and taste are
necessarily linked with “the common Welfare of the Nation” (109). In other words,
Montagu’s emphasis on the politics of female fashion suggests that women’s
consumption is not merely about female vanity but a means for women to participate in
the domestic economy and national prosperity of England. By purchasing English rather
than foreign goods, she suggests, women can participate in national politics and thus
“ﬁnd in the imaginary Empire of Beauty, a consolation for being excluded every part of
Government” (1 09).

As seen in various comments made by Montagu linking women to consumption,
Montagu makes it evident that female consumption is not limited to the private arena but
clearly operates within a broader economic and political framework. As female
consumers come to see themselves capable of choosing among a multitude of goods,
female consumption is no longer simply equated with excessive appetite but can
potentially redeﬁne women’s socioeconomic status. As Charlotte Sussman and Moira
Ferguson have shown, female consumers’ boycott of sugar and tea was an important act
of political activism and challenged cultural constructions of unscrupulous female

appetite. From women consumer’s participation in abolition campaigns and in economic

dynamics of colonial trade, female consumption becomes reimagined as a new form of

 

20 Sandra Sherman, “Instructing the “Empire of Beauty”: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the
Politics of Female Rationality.” South Aﬁmtic Review (60: 1995), 4.

58

political agency- consumer power — that can have a direct effect on commerce and
politics. 2’ Likewise, Montagu calls into question the ‘natural’ link between women and
commodities, and exposes how the process of female consumerism entails ideologically
fraught notions about gender, revealing cultural anxieties about the female consumer’s
relationship to the vicissitudes of female appetite. As the opposition between the
compliant Dutch wife and the disruptive lady of pleasure demonstrates, the female
consumer is ﬁgured as an ambiguous presence: she is sometimes depicted as disciplined,
at other times threatening to the social order. The female consumer’s desires were
perceived as potentially unruly and disruptive in the culture at large, yet indulged when
they contributed to the commercial and political interests of its nation. In this connection,
my next section will argue that Montagu’s encounter in Turkey as a female consumer
exempliﬁes both the dangers and the delights of an English shopper who comes to
identify with Turkish foreign consumer goods and female consumption practices. While
most scholarship on Montagu has largely ignored Montagu’s travels through continental
Europe and concentrated exclusively on her Turkish experience, it is crucial to recognize
the continuity between these experiences and corresponding texts. Montagu’s
understanding of the paradoxical aspects of female consumption in Europe prior to
visiting the Ottoman Empire allows her to reconceptualize the idea of consumption for

her visual agency through her relationships with Turkish women and their fashionable

 

2' Moira Ferguson, Sigb'ect to Others: Britis_h Women Writers aad Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834.
(New York: Routledge, 1992), 182-83; Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties. (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000), I29. Moira Ferguson argues that white women’s participation in the sugar
boycotts of the 17905 helped to advance a discourse of rights and helped to dismantle the blanket of
objectiﬁcation of Aﬁicans and African-Caribbean slaves. On the other end, postcolonial approaches like
Charlotte Sussman argue that consumer behavior in England cannot be separated from the more
complicated structures of the British Empire as a whole, for “women’s political power--—lay in their ability
to regulate the domestic space, keeping its contents separate from the economic dynamics of colonial
trade.”

 

59

activities. As I turn to her account of her Turkish travels, I will demonstrate that
Montagu’s experience as an English female shopper in the eighteenth century enables an
active, even transgressive agency in the marketplace, through her appropriation of the
foreign goods and emancipatory consumption behaviors of aristocratic Turkish women.
Furthermore, as consumerism becomes productive of female pleasure and freedom for
Montagu, her consumer gaze ultimately participates in the commodiﬁcation of non-
European bodies to reconstitute her as an English subject and to afﬁrm the importance of

the English nation.

“New Scene of Pleasure”: Conceptualizing the Female Consumer Gaze

Just as her letters foreground the paradoxical status of the female consumer in
emerging consumer culture, Montagu’s depiction of her encounter with material culture
during her travels abroad reﬂects a similar tension, positioning her simultaneously as a
desiring female subject and a passive object in the world of goods. Montagu’s
observations about female consumers in Europe emphasize the extent to which women
were increasingly being placed under the disciplinary gaze of domestic ideology in the
eighteenth century. Because of their proximity to commodities, female consumers were
often reduced to objects on display, and denied their own viewing experiences. The

difﬁculties women faced as viewing subjects are illustrated in Addison’s The Spectator

 

letters No. 10. Addressing a male audience of “Polite Imagination,” Addison states that
women, the “Fair ones,” cannot help being positioned as desirable objects to be viewed
by “male-Beholders” due to their love of “Triﬂes,” and that their “principal

Employment” consists of their Toilet and “Ornaments of Dress.” Montagu, on the other

60

hand, challenges what Addison sees as women’s liabilities by exploring the power and
pleasures of looking entailed in women’s consumption. I will argue that Montagu
conﬁgures her travel experiences as a shopping expedition in which she seeks to gain
experiences and fulﬁll desires through her elations with the commodities she encounters
on her trip. That is, by deploying the Shopper’s gaze—in taking in foreign sights and
commodities—Montagu is able to carve out forms of scopic desire that transcend the
dominant patriarchal limitations imposed on women.

For a long time, traveling the Continent was primarily regarded as a male preserve,
since the Grand Tour was initially viewed as rite of passage for men of leisure. It was
only when travel became easier and safer that recreational traveling become more
available for the leisured middle classes, a trend that culminated in the tourism of the
later eighteenth century, when the consumption of culture abroad was becoming
increasingly fashionable. Although women have always traveled, women travelers were
less common than men in the eighteenth century and were mostly accompanied by their
husbands and families. Because the circumstances, motivation, and signiﬁcance of travel
were different for women than for the ‘stronger sex,’ many prejudices stood in the way of
women traveling and writing about their experiences. Traveling for women was-seen as
more problematic than for men because their departure from the domestic sphere
demanded greater justiﬁcation and management. As such, most female travelers were
met with resistance, especially if they ventured forth unchaperoned, for they were seen as

traversing the boundaries of sexual propriety. As Barbara Korte notes, women who

61

travelled in the eighteenth century were associated with the dangers of “sexualization,
moral risk and uncontrolled freedom.” 27‘

Montagu’s letters demonstrate a deep awareness of how women travelers have
always been subject to a range of constraints that differ from those affecting the behavior
and writing of men. From the start, Montagu emphasizes the gendered nature of travel,
calling attention to herself as a female traveler who is undertaking a task which has been
deemed inappropriate and even dangerous for a lady. In her letter to her friend Jane
Smith, Montagu declares, “after all the dreadful fatigues you threatened me with, I am
hitherto very well pleased with my journey,” (4) and promptly eliminates any doubts that
women may be incapable of handling the difﬁculties of traveling. Not only does she
reassure her female readers from the beginning that she is capable of overcoming the
strenuous physical nature of her travel, but she also self-consciously fashions herself as a
bold, intrepid traveler in her attempt to overcome her anxiety about being dismissed as an
inept female traveler. During her sea passage to Rotterdam, she even goes so far as to
reverse gender hierarchies by suggesting that she may be more masculine than the male
captain in terms of bravery and physical strength. Addressing her sister Lady Mar,
Montagu mocks the idea of travel as a symbol of masculine power, thereby effectively
emasculating the male captain: “I never saw a Man more ﬁightened than the Captain.
For my part I have been so lucky neither to suffer from fear or sea-sickness” (3).

While Montagu recognizes how traveling women can unsettle traditional

assumptions about femininity, it is predominantly through her engagement with the

material world and indulgence in visual pleasures that she challenges the patriarchal

 

22 Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations. (New
York, St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 111.

62

constraints around her. For her, shopping is not just about physical appetite; it is about
fantasy and desire. As Erin Mackie notes in her examination of the early eighteenth-
century commodity culture, the “links between commerce and fantasy, pleasure and
amusement were forged well before the nineteenth century” (53). Like a typical shopper
who longs to purchase goods on display, Montagu wields the power of the consumer’s
gaze to incorporate the pleasurable experience provided by the very goods it beholds.
Hence, when Montagu arrives in Rotterdam, the sight of the commercial activities
of the town offers a “new scene of pleasure,” (3) just as the very sight of fashionable
goods and “great variety of neat dresses” gives her “an additional pleasure in seeing the
town” (4). Interestingly Montagu’s pleasure derives not just from contemplating
purchases, but from the act of looking itself. The act of browsing through lace and Indian
goods is inextricably linked with the “same pleasure” of seeing “every agreeable novelty
or pleasing prospect.” Here, female consumption converges with spectatorship, as the
transformation of merchandise into a desirable display enables the female consumer to
become a spectator, rather than a spectacle. This experience of shopping as a visual
activity is investigated by Rachel Bowlby in Just Looking, where she describes how
“modern consumption is a matter not of basic items bought for deﬁnite needs, but of
visual fascination and remarkable sights of things not found at home.” 23 Bowlby’s
study is focused on nineteenth-century consumerism and identiﬁes the emergence of the
department store as the crucial setting for the beginning of modern consumer culture.
The nineteenth century’s modern department stores with their large expanses of display

windows become the new location of consumption, offering women the pleasures of

 

23 Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreisier, Gissing, and Zola. (New York:
Methuen, 1985), l.

63

escape from dull domesticity. 2" Montagu’s pleasurable identiﬁcation during her
window-shopping suggests that shopping for goods was increasingly transformed from
an everyday task to a leisure activity, from duty to pleasure. Montagu’s emphasis on
consumerism and the structure of looking suggests that this particular modem connection
between looking, desiring and buying can be seen in place as early as the eighteenth
century.

When Montagu arrives in Rotterdam, the entire town becomes a “celebrated fair,”
as she examines the spectacular goods on display. She remarks: “The town seems so full
of people, with such busy faces, all in motion, that I can hardly fancy that it is not some
celebrated fair, but I see it is every day the same.” (3). Eighteenth-century places like
fairs, bazaars, and marketplaces were among the few public spaces where female
shoppers were able have somewhat unrestricted movement and relative freedom to
browse at various sights. Observing the constant movement and ﬂuidity of the space “all
in motion,” Montagu walks among the streets and exercises the privilege of looking,
ﬁnding pleasure in the ﬂow and exchange of the city. Similarly when she strolls through
the oriental bazaar ﬁlled with exotic commodities in Turkey, her new-found mobility
allows her to participate vicariously in the public realm of commerce and exchange, very
much as the persona of Mr. Spectator (N o. 69 of The Spectator) does at the Royal
Exchange.

The experience of being a shopper provides Montagu an unprecedented freedom
of movement in public space, allowing her to exercise a visual prerogative traditionally

marked as masculine, namely, “the opportunity of making an observation” (11) in a

 

2’ See Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1983), 1034. He writes, “What was sold in the Passages were souvenirs [Andenken]. The [Andenken] was
the form of the commodity in the Passage.”

64

foreign environment. Emphasizing how she “take[s] pains to see everything,” and is the
“ﬁrst foreigner ever to have had the pleasure” (132), Montagu is primarily concerned
with establishing her position as a mobile, active observer of the non-English world. For
Montagu, this desire to see is primarily motivated by curiosity: she seeks to satisfy “a
very diligent curiosity” (29) and is ready to “see all that is curious in the town.” In
Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry, Barbara Benedict examines the
relations between curiosity and empire, curiosity and travel, and, especially, curiosity and
commerce. While curiosity was for the most part prized as a desire for knowledge, it was
also seen as threatening. Curiosity was increasingly represented as an aggressive visual
mode inseparable from imperialistic ambition that “arrogates the power to determine
value and subordinates the observed as object.” 25 Curiosity’s desire for novelty
encourages the acquisition not only of material objects but of observations, experiences,
and the facts of immaterial culture. As collecting spread from the social elite to the
newer moneyed classes, objects of curiosity inevitably became commodiﬁed in
eighteenth century’s new commercial culture.

This sort of consumerist curiosity has a profound inﬂuence on the way Montagu
relates to the unfamiliar people and landscapes she encounters. For Montagu,
Nigmegen’s tower, rather than a fortiﬁcation or a rampart, becomes a “pretty walk,” a
female territory for women like a tea table, where “people go to drink coffee, tea, etc.,
and enjoy one of the ﬁnest prospects in the world.” (6). By aestheticizing and then
idealizing the view, Montagu domesticates it, removing any potential threats from the

martial scenery. More importantly, she objectiﬁes'what she beholds by making the

 

25 Barbara Benedict, Curiosity: a Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry. (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2001), 5.

65

foreign landscape more ‘familiar’ to her English consumers. Additionally, Montagu’s
desire of “seeing all that is curious in it” reiﬁes the object of her vision by fetishizing the
sheer extravagance of commodities. For instance, her admiration of the magniﬁcence of
the Catholic churches is equally driven by the allure of the sensory pleasures associated
with looking at precious commodities as by her Protestant curiosity about the Catholic
church. The Reformation opposed iconic and idolatrous Catholic beliefs and practices
which invested inanimate objects with sacred meanings whereby the aura and fantasy of
the spectacle became consumable commodities for worshippers. Although Montagu
remains skeptical of the Catholic church’s worship of relics and rituals, she cannot help
being mysteriously attracted to the sight of the “profusion of pearls, diamonds and rubies
bestowed on the adornment of rotten teeth, dirty rags, etc” as she gazes at the ostentatious
display of Catholic relics. Sacred religious objects become mere ornaments for women
when Montagu expresses desire to acquire curiosities for her own possession, admitting
for example that she had “wickedness enough to covet St. Ursula’s pearl necklace” (7).
Similarly, her elaborate description of an apartment in Vienna lists a catalogue of
an incredible quantity of ﬁne merchandise and riches brought together from all comers of

the world.

....the hangings of the ﬁnest tapestry of Brussels, prodigious large looking glasses
in silver frames, ﬁne Japan tables, beds, chairs, canopies and window curtains of the
richest Genoa damask or velvet, almost covered with gold lace or embroidery, the
whole made gay by pictures, and vast jars of japan china, and almost in every room

large lustres of rock crystal. (13)

66

These commodities of “good taste and magniﬁcence” are the signs and products of global
trade and mercantile expansionism. Because these fashionable objects - looking glasses,
ﬁrmiture, clothing, china — are inseparable from women’s adornment, they also reﬂect the
acquisitive nature of a speciﬁcally female sensibility that is inextricable from the
enterprise of mercantile commerce. As Laura Brown has shown, the commercialized
materiality of the accumulated objects adorning the female ﬁgure serves primarin as a
synecdoche for mercantile capitalist accumulation as well as imperialist exploitation. In
this regard, Montagu’s emphasis on the connection between female consumption and
mercantile capitalism suggests the complicity between the woman and trade in such a
way that she becomes a proxy for male acquisition and commercial exploitation. As such,
Montagu’s admiration of fashionable items reveals the process of fetishizing goods in
which the economic realities of commercial exchange and violence are mystiﬁed under
fashionable appearances.

Just as Montagu’s observations of Vienna are grounded in mercantile imperatives,
so is her treatment of landscape situated in an economic context. When she admires the
view across the Bosphorus, her depiction of the scenic view departs from traditional
landscape aesthetics that distance the beholder from any economic and material concerns

associated with the prospect. Elizabeth Bohls in her book Women Travel Writers and the

 

Language of Aesthetics 1716-1818, demonstrates how the aesthetic experience of the
landscape came to be understood as disinterested and virtually disembodied. 26 Similarly,

when Addison declares in paper No. 411 of The ﬁrectator in 1712 that “A Man of a

 

2" Elizabeth Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics. 1716-1818
(Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1995), 159.

67

Polite Imagination, is let into a great many Pleasures that the Vulgar are not capable of
receiving,” he makes it clear that the aesthetic subject is none other than a property-
owning gentleman who can afford to be autonomous and detached from material needs or
interests. Montagu, however, challenges such masculine modes of aesthetic
contemplation in her admiration of the landscape when she beholds Constantinople
across the Bosphorus. In contrast to conventional picturesque, which insists on the
typically masculine viewer and his distance from the scene, Montagu takes on a powerful
role as a female spectator, asserting her feminine aesthetic authority forcefully by
unsettling the distancing of the practical and feminine as well as domesticating the

landscape by reimagining it as a British interior:

The Asian side is covered with fruit trees, villages and the most delightful
landscapes in nature. On the European, stands Constantinople, situated on seven
hills. The unequal heights make it seem as large again as it is (though one of the
largest cities in the world), showing an agreeable mixture of gardens, pines and
cypress-trees, palaces, mosques, and public buildings, raised one above another
with as much beauty and appearance of symmetry as your ladyship ever saw in a
cabinet adorned by the most skillful hands, jars showing themselves above jars
mixed with canisters, babies and candlesticks. This is a very odd comparison; but it

gives me an exact image of the thing. (127)

Montagu’s treatment of “the most beautiﬁrl variety of prospects” at ﬁrst glance follows

the neoclassical ideal of moderation and harmony in its “agreeable mixture” in that the

68

perceiver frames what she sees into “much beauty and appearance of symmetry.” As
evident in the process in which the exterior world becomes subordinated to the domestic
interior scene, Montagu’s prospect succeeds in domesticating the unknown foreign
landscape into a familiar “thing” for English consumers. The open prospect consisting of
nature and monuments becomes contained in an enclosed domestic interior, just as the
foreign world becomes encapsulated in small household objects commonly found in
England. In this way, Montagu’s prospect tames unfamiliar sights into objects that can
be easily enjoyed and consumed by English readers. Here, any potential anxieties
associated with “one of the largest cities” is removed from the landscape, just as
“unequal” aspects become tamed into a scene of “beauty and appearance of symmetry.”
She also profoundly revises the conventions of the picturesque by deliberately
including domestic consumer objects —which were seen as inappropriate subjects for
pictures— as seen in her catalogue of household items like jars, candlesticks, and cabinet.
If William Gilpin’s stricter picturesque is typically devoid of traces of human life to
ensure the viewer’s distance from the concrete particularity of the place, Montagu’s
“delightful landscape” deliberately transgresses this convention of detachment by adding
details that reﬂect the material needs of its inhabitants. 27 By shifting the viewer’s
attention from an exterior landscape to interior domestic objects which represent human
habitation, industry, or commerce, Montagu foregrounds human activities, especially the

importance of the body’s labor. In doing so, she emphasizes women’s primary activities

 

27 William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales. &c. rela_tiya
chieﬂy to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Yeap 1770, ﬁlth ed. (London, 1800); Three
Essays, (London, 1792). According to William Gilpin, the eighteenth-century tradition of viewing a picture
relied on a model of detachment and disinterested contemplation on the part of the viewer. The eighteenth
century picturesque viewing tradition is closely connected to a tradition of estate gardening that constructed
its subject as masculine and property-owning, foregrounding the nexus of vision, power, and possession.
Figures in picturesque landscape are typically peripheral, faceless, and grouped without individuality.

69

as consumers and emphasizes practical considerations, which were previously excluded
from conventional landscape. By stressing both domestic and feminine elements in the
her prospect, Montagu not only reveals the underlying assumptions that belie the
supposed disinterestedness of landscape aesthetics but also situates visual pleasure in the
realm of female consumption. In doing so, Montagu proves herself to be an active agent
in appropriating male visual prerogatives for her own pleasure.

By taking account of these feminine domestic concerns, Montagu’s subjective
approach undermines masculine viewing assumptions. Many male travel writers of the
eighteenth century modeled their writing on objective information and disinterested
description where personal impression played a secondary role. 28 Joseph Addison’s
Remarﬁ on Several Parts of Italy (1705), which Montagu had read, exempliﬁes the early
dominant eighteenth-century tradition of describing in detail classical art and monuments
as well as its trade, historical and political organizations. 29 In sharp contrast to such
objective, detached modes of description, Montagu’s mode of spectatorship is more
subjective and empathetic. Instead of distancing herself from what she observes and
portrays, Montagu is sometimes deeply affected by what she experiences. She reaches
out with an empathy that is incompatible with the conventional disinterestedness of the
aesthetic perceiver, as she expresses genuine concern for the conditions of the poor she
encounters during her trip. For example, she expresses “remorse” when the poverty and
unhappiness of the “oppressed people” of Serbia prompt “a new occasion for [her]

compassion” (56).

 

2" Paul Fussell, Aboard: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1980), 354.

29 Korte, English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations.. 49.

70

Ultimately, Montagu’s letters draw attention to the fact that travel writing is an act of
representation that is mediated by the viewing subject. Travel can be a radically
liberating experience that allows the viewer to explore the positionality that determines
perception. Montagu’s observations inevitably reﬂect and reinscribe her feminine
concerns that partake in the emerging consumer culture and mercantile economy. Mary
Astell was one of her contemporaries who noticed that Montagu’s travel writing was

radically distinct from accounts written by men. Astell notes:

I confess I am malicious enough to desire that the World shou’d see
to how much better purpose the LADYS Travel than their LORDS,
and that whilst it is surfeited with Male Travels, all in the same Tone
and stuft with the same Triﬂes, a Lady has the skill to strike out a
New path and to embellish a wom-out Subject with variety of fresh

and elegant Entertainment. . .. ’0

Astell insists that Montagu’s writing is superior to men’s accounts, which often suffered
from predictable materials and dullness of style. But most signiﬁcantly, Astell suggests
that the greatness of Montagu’s writing lies in her ability to produce a commodity that
can arouse pleasure by incorporating new and unique female perspectives. Astell’s
comments parallel Montagu’s attempt to carve out an alternative way of seeing, to
provide “an account so different from what you have been entertained with by the

common voyage writers, who are very fond of speaking of what they don’t know” (85).

 

3° Quoted in Cynthia Lowenthal, Qdy Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Centug
Familiar Letter. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 93.

71

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Through its articulation of feminine, domestic concerns, her consumerist gaze effectively
subverts the transparent, disinterested or autonomous mode of masculine visual
perception. Montagu’s reinvention of spectatorship seeks the potential for power and self-
expression through its manipulation of the discourses of consumerism, even as it reveals
the conﬂict between woman’s conventional role as a commodity and her potential for

agency as a consumer.

“Pleasure in Looking”: Feminist and Orientalist Gazing

Perhaps the single feature of Montagu’s letters that has attracted the most
attention is her description of Turkish women. Famous for her claim that Turkish women
have more liberty than British women, her letters are well-known for her portrayal of the
beauty and hospitality of the Turkish women she encountered. Privileged by her gender
and status as the wife of the British Ambassador, she was one of the ﬁrst European
women writers who was allowed access into their private quarters, including harems and
women’s baths, while providing an unprecedented glimpse into intimate everyday rituals
of Turkish women and their society. Here, I argue that many of Montagu’s perceptions
of Turkish women are framed through her consumer subjectivity, at the same time that
her keen interest in consumer goods and fashion permeates her mode of observation
during her journey through Europe and powerfully revises male viewing assumptions. If
consumerism is about the pleasure and wish-fulﬁllment that go along with fantasies of
shopping, Montagu’s experience in Turkey allows her to conceive and mobilize a
potentially subversive desire to challenge traditional patriarchal assumptions about

femininity.

72

Using her power as an agent in the consumer environment, Montagu can be seen
as a prototype of a female consumer who goes out shopping for different experiences and
tries on a variety of identities without obligation. Most notably, in her masquerade in
Turkish dress, she utilizes a commodity to create a transgressive space where she can
identify across ethnic and cultural divides while also imagining an alternative space of
female freedom. If her letters foreground the pleasures and mobile possibilities of an
identity forged through commodities and consumer practices, they also reveal underlying
anxieties about undisciplined female appetite for ‘other’ commodities and foreign
experiences. For while her identiﬁcation with Ottoman women and their consumer
practices allows her to indulge in feminine desires that subvert English patriarchy, she is
simultaneously threatened by the very excess of those desires and her letters are
increasingly characterized by efforts to curb and regulate her own vicarious consumption
of ‘other’ subjectivities. Despite her admiration of Turkish women and their society,
Montagu distances herself from the objects of her consumption and ultimately ends up
commodifying Turkish women as consumable images for a British domestic audience.
Although she goes farther than other male travel writers in counteracting traditional
orientalist stereotypes, I will argue nevertheless that Montagu’s observations partake of
an objectifying consumerist gaze that ﬁnally reafﬁrms her English identity.

Upon arriving in Adrianople, “the ﬁrst European seat of the Turkish empire,”
Montagu becomes acutely conscious of the sense of novelty in her encounter with
Turkish culture, as she exclaims excitedly : “I am now got into a new world, where
everything I see appears to me a change of scene” (57). The sight of the uncommon and

the unfamiliar brings Montagu visual pleasure, and this pleasure in visual novelty helps to

73

characterize her as a female consumer whose fascination with variety creates a desire for
more consumption of the latest fashion. Although Montagu views Turkey as totally
distinct from Europe, with its strange and “odd” “Eastern manners,” her preoccupations
about consumerism inform and ﬂame her depictions of both cultures. Her letters written
in Turkey contain elaborate and detailed accounts of Turkish female culture ranging from
women’s beauty, hair, and dress to their consumer practices.

Much as Montagu’s shopping experiences allowed her to roam the streets of
Vienna on her own, Montagu’s Turkish encounter is characterized by the itinerant
looking facilitated by consumerism. Even before she reports on her visit to the women’s
baths in Adrianople, her detailed description of her Turkish coach dramatizes how
commodities help to construct a mobile spectatorship. The Turkish coach decorated with
“scarlet cloth, lined with silk, and very often richly embroidered and fringed” is a
luxurious commodity, but serves a “more convenient” purpose for Montagu as a
consumer. It allows her to look out and see the world while remaining entirely
concealed: “it entirely hides the persons in them, but may be thrown back at pleasure, and
thus permits the ladies to peep through the lattices” (58). Like Montagu’s exhilarating
experience of walking “incognito” in Rotterdam, her Turkish coach allows her freedom
to gaze outside anonymously and to indulge in pleasures associated with female viewing.

By the same token, Montagu’s admiration of the Turkish dress and its ferace
attests to her interest in the concealment that allows women freedom to venture into the
public realm. Fascinated by the liberating sense of freedom offered by the Turkish veil,
Montagu takes advantage of the anonymity provided by Turkish women’s clothing for a

masked performance of her own that grants her visual agency. She puts on the “Turkish

74

veil” and masquerades as a Turkish woman to explore and to walk around the city
without being perceived as a foreign traveler. In one sense, Montagu becomes a
prototype of a female ﬂaneur who is able to move with ease around the urban space with
increased mobility and is endowed with an empowered gaze. Like the all-seeing Mr.
Spectator, who surveys London from his privileged position as an invisible “Looker-on,”
(N o 1), Montagu roams freely disguised in her Turkish habit and offers vivid depictions
of the new landscape, mosques, gardens, palaces, furnishings, and fashions she
encounters, while demonstrating her ﬁrsthand knowledge of Turkish politics, religion,
culture, and literature.

What seems to interest Montagu particularly, however, is the commercial aspect
of Turkish culture, which offers a new visual spectacle, and she devotes an extensive part
of the letter to describing the bazaar of Constantinople in detail. Like Mr. Spectator, who
claimed that "There is no Place in the Town which I so much love to frequent as the
Royal Exchange,” Montagu is captivated in the Turkish marketplace by the sight of a
vast array of magniﬁcent merchandise from around the world, all arranged in a

“wonderfully neat” manner:

The exchanges are all noble buildings, full of ﬁne alleys, the greatest part
supported with pillars, and kept wonderfully neat. Every trade has their
distinct alley, the merchandise disposed in the same order as in the New
Exchange at London. The Bedesten, or jewellers’ quarter shows so much
riches, such a vast quantity of diamonds and all kind of precious stones,

that they dazzle the sight. The embroiders’ is also very glittering, and

75

people walk here as much for diversion as business. The markets are most

of them better than in any other part of the world (130). 31

As seen in her celebratory depiction of the Turkish bazaar and its commerce, Montagu’s
sheer delight at the sight of the proliferation of commodities in the marketplace
emphasizes how shopping allowed not only consumer access to goods but also the
opportunity to look with pleasure. Montagu clearly enjoys eye-shopping as she engages
in speculative consumption in “three hundred and sixty-ﬁve shops, furnished with all
sorts of rich goods, exposed to sale in the same manner as at the New Exchange in
London” (92). Just as Montagu enjoys looking without purchasing, being surrounded by
consumer goods can be seen as part of the pleasure of consuming, for one can enjoy a
display of merchandise, but not necessarily buy. Montagu’s visual consumption, like
window-shopping, reveals the extent to which female consumers can formulate desires
and fantasies of their own from visual acquisition of goods while disrupting the
masculine logic of capitalist exchange which reduces women to objects of male desire in
the visual ﬁeld.

Because Montagu’s use of Turkish clothing leads to increased mobility and visual
authority, she observes that the ferace used by the Turkish women allows Turkish women
to enjoy independence and freedom. As evident in Montagu’s remark that “[t]his
perpetual masquerade gives them entire liberty of following their inclinations without

danger of discovery” (43), the disguise of the veil allows them to confound categories of

 

3 ' The New Exchange took over business from the Royal Exchange after the ﬁre of 1666. It
contained two long and double galleries, with hundreds of shops distributed in several rows, from very rich
shops of drapers and mercers ﬁlled with goods of every kind, to products of the most beautiful description.

76

difference so that “there is no distinguishing the great lady from her slave and ‘tis
impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her. . ..” (71 ). Of
course, Montagu’s reference to masquerade suggests the transgressive aspect of
masquerade, a popular form of public entertainment in eighteenth-century Britain. By
deﬂecting the male gaze, veiling allows women to enjoy greater sexual freedom and to
undermine patriarchal restraints. Montagu is chieﬂy interested in the speciﬁc ways in
which the consumption of fashion enabled women visual agency and access to the public

realm. She proceeds to discuss the freedom of Turkish women:

Turkish Ladies, who are (perhaps), freer than any ladies in the

universe. . .are the only women to live a life of uninterrupted pleasure,
exempt from cares, their whole time being spent in visiting, bathing or the
agreeable amusement of spending money and inventing new fashions. A
husband would be thought mad that exacted any degree of economy from
his wife, whose expenses are no way limited but by her own fancy. ‘Tis
his business to get money and hers to spend it, and this noble prerogative

extends itself to the very meanest of the sex. (134)

Here, Montagu suggests that fashion, leisure, and consumption can be harnessed as sites
of female empowerment, as she portrays the Turkish woman as an ideal consumer,
whose “spending money and inventing new fashions” become transformed into a
positive virtue, a “noble prerogative.” Turkish women possess greater autonomy than

British women over their consumption; “expenses are no way limited but by her own

77

fancy,” without her husband’s control. Moreover, Montagu implies that practices often
viewed in England as frivolous feminine diversions, such as the “agreeable amusement of
spending money and inventing new fashions,” can be effectively deployed for women’s
own advantage.

Furthermore, Montagu comments on how shopping allows Turkish women a

convenient alibi for discreet affairs without the “resentment of their husbands”:

The perpetual masquerade gives them entire liberty of following their
inclinations without danger of discovery. The most usual method of
intrigue is to send an appointment to the lover to meet the lady at a Jew’s
shop, which are as notoriously convenient as our Indian houses, and yet,
even those that don’t make use of them do not scruple to go to buy
pennyworths and tumble over rich goods, which are chieﬂy to be found

amongst that sort of people. (71)

In the passage above, Montagu points out how the “Jew’s shop” ﬁlled with “rich goods”
provides opportunities for Turkish women to enjoy sexual liberties beyond the bounds of
patriarchal constraint, just as English women were able to engage in illicit encounters in
luxury shopping emporia such as Indian Houses, which offered the exotic pleasure of
imported oriental goods to eager consumers. If shopping allowed women to indulge their
desires for material goods, it simultaneously enabled them to explore and pursue sexual
agency in the gratiﬁcation of other forms of desire. According to Jennifer Jones,

shopping in the eighteenth century can be seen as a form of “male entertainment in which

78

the line between the shopping for licit pleasures of luxury consumption and the illicit
pleasures involved in the sexual consumption of women was often blurred.” By
foregrounding the proximity of female desires to the world of consumer goods,
Montagu’s letters suggest that women, just as men, were able to take advantage of these
prerogatives of consumption by frequenting “shops [that] spatially linked licit and illicit
pleasures” to formulate and gratify their own desires outside the constraints of

patriarchal authority. 32

Turkish Bath Letters: Exploring Female Visual Pleasure

Another liberatory aspect of female consumption is exempliﬁed in Montagu’s
oft-cited depiction of the women’s bagnio in Turkey. Many scholars have repeatedly
discussed Montagu’s well-known account of her visit to a Turkish bath in the context of
interlocking discourses of gender and orientalism. Montagu has been praised as one of
the earliest travel writers to challenge the common representation of Turkish woman as
oppressed and licentious by presenting them as free and civilized in that scene. Teresa
Heffernan views Montagu as a progressive feminist ﬁgure who promotes cross-cultural
understanding by “challenging... voyeuristic tales about Turkish women and their
enslavement” (207). Similarly Lisa Lowe proposes that “Montagu’s interventions in the
orientalist tradition are primarin articulated in a feminist rhetoric” (49), citing especially
Montagu’s rhetoric of identiﬁcation with Turkish women’s culture. While these critics
read Montagu as a progressive feminist ﬁgure for her “reciprocal or dialogic” relationship

with another culture, critics working within the post-colonial paradigm debate the

 

32 Jennifer Jones, “Coquettes and Grisettes” Victoria de Grazia, ed., The Sex of Things: Gender
and Consumption in Historical Perspective. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 32.

79

question of Montagu’s complicity with western European imperialism in the bath scene.
Yegenoglu, for instance, has sharply criticized Montagu’s positive images of Turkish
women as merely repeating and reproducing “all the existing tropes and concerns that
characterize the Orientalist/phallocentric discourses.” 33 Aravamudan also insists that
Montagu’s cultural identity, though unsettled, is not reversed by foregrounding her return
to “cultural reaggregation” after the gesture of levantization exempliﬁed by her partial
identiﬁcation with aristocratic Turkish women. 3 4

While these critics have not paid much attention to various aspects of female
consumerism in the scene, except with respect to Montagu’s strategic uses of clothing,
my reading of the letters focuses on Montagu’s female consumerist gaze to demonstrate
the crucial role of female consumption within the workings of the intertwined discourses
of feminism and orientalism. Female consumerism becomes the frame through which
Montagu views the cross-cultural encounter itself in her effort to experiment with and
reforrnulate different subjectivities and modes of spectatorship. Although Montagu’s
consumerist gaze in the Turkish bath letters serves feminist liberatory ends, it also
highlights her participation in the project of British mercantile imperialism. Her
objectifying consumerist gaze ultimately helps to reafﬁrm her British identity and thus
implicates her in the larger aims of orientalism, particularly in its privileging of the
Western “1” in representing and knowing the Orient.

Montagu’s bath house scene exempliﬁes the problematic of female spectatorship

in Which woman becomes both the subject and the object of looking. When Montagu

Surveys the bodies of Turkish women in the bathhouse, she ﬁnds herself too close to the

 

 

33 Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies, 93.

3’ Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 184.

80

object of her vision. Montagu’s female consumerist gaze raises issues important to
feminist ﬁlm criticism, which has struggled with the problem of female spectatorship.
Heavily inﬂuenced by the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan, feminist
investigations of Hollywood ﬁlm have claimed that spectatorship is fundamentally
masculinized regardless of the actual sex of the person watching the ﬁlm. Laura
Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) has emphasized the masculine
system of looking, one which inevitably makes the woman a passive object of the
aggressive male look. Mary Ann Doane also points out that female spectatorship is
especially difﬁcult because of the woman’s proximity to the image itself. 3 3 When a
woman looks, she is typically given an objectiﬁed image of a woman to look at. Because
the female spectator lacks the distance from what she sees, she often becomes the image
itself rather than the viewer. Likewise, although Montagu’s afﬁnity with Turkish women
in the bathhouse puts her at risk of becoming the spectacle she her views, she ultimately
manipulates her proximity to the world of commodities so as to unsettle the male gaze.
As I will elaborate next, Montagu’s bathhouse letters suggest the possibility of
constructing a female spectator who explores transgressive pleasure outside the
heterosexual economy of men looking at women.

Montagu’s depiction of the bathhouse scene breaks with the scopophilic
masculine gaze by highlighting the ways in which female consumption may be deployed
to articulate desire and pleasure for women. Reversing the conventional patriarchal order
in Which the woman is only an object, Montagu presents the Turkish women in the

bathhouse as powerful subjects of desire. “Without any distinction of rank by their

33 Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” Feminist Film
My. ed. Sue Thomham. (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

81

dress,” the naked Turkish women form a female community where they can engage in
many forms of cultural consumption and fashionable activity, while enjoying freedom
from patriarchal authority. Turkish women in the bathhouse scene are emblematic of
how women’s consumption and leisure can be crucial in establishing a female domain, a
“feminotopia,” or “idealized world of female autonomy, empowerment, and pleasure.” 3 6
For Montagu, the liberty and independence of Turkish women is inextricable from their
delight in the material of commodities they consume.

By comparing the Turkish bathhouse to a “women’s coffee house, where all the
news of the town is told, scandal invented etc,” Montagu makes a radical claim for an
exclusively female space where women can actively socialize and engage in
conversations as freely as men assembled in London coffeehouses for the exchange of
ideas. Coffee was a popular foreign luxury in the eighteenth century, and coffee
consumption was bound up with sociability, free conversation, and urban civility.
Coffeehouses in the eighteenth century offered “a radically new kind of social space, at
once free from the ‘grotesque bodies’ of the alehouse and yet (initially at least)
democratically accessible to all kind of men---though not, signiﬁcantly, to women.” 3 7 If
coffeehouses were often associated with the exclusively male domain in which men
promoted sociability through their ideal of polite conversation and egalitarian dialogues,
Montagu insists that women’s consumption of coffee can also be a scene of

conversational, dialogic sociability for. women. The inclusive all-women community

becomes an act for women to freely communicate, socialize, and engage in productive

 

 

3" Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transeulturation. (London: Routledge,
1992), 167; Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones. (Baltimore: The Johns HOpkins Univ Press, 1995), 139.

 

 

 

U . 37 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell
nrversity Press, 1986), 96.

82

leisure activities wholly devoted to their pleasure. Similarly, the nudity of the women
lends itself to an egalitarian atmosphere where everyone is civil and tolerant of others
regardless of fashion. Turkish women possess, as Montagu points out, “all the obliging
civility possible” without “surprise or impertinent curiosity” (58) with “none of those
disdainful smiles or satirical whispers that never fail in our assemblies when anybody
appears that is not dressed exactly in fashion.”

Montagu’s appreciation for the civility and excellence of Turkish women in
manners and etiquette evidently leads to Turkish women’s possession of a degree of
freedom not available to Western women, as she comments: “Tis very easy to see [the
Turkish women] have more Liberty than we have.” Critics generally acknowledge that
Montagu’s account of Turkish women’s freedom challenges much travel writing by men,
such as the familiar stories by Dumont and Aaron Hill about the oppressed, veiled
Turkish women and their enslavement in harems that satisﬁed the western reader’s desire
for tales of an‘exotic’ east while stereotyping the orient as barbaric, irrational, and in
need of rescue by civilized and rational westerners. While these oriental tales enabled the
typical English reader to satisfy his “fantasies of penetration and domination” 3 8 by
labeling the Ottoman empire as uncivilized and corrupt, Montagu’s reappraisal of Turkish
women and their culture primarily stems from her understanding of and identiﬁcation
With their female consumer practices. Turkish women’s consumption reveals them as
reﬁned and autonomous individuals who can actively fulﬁll their desires, overturning

earlier travel writers’ cliche’s about Turkish women as exotic sexual objects.

\

L 38 Teresa Hefferman, “Feminism against the East/West Divide: Lady Mary’s Turkish Embassy
ett91‘s.” Eighteenth-Centug Studies. (33: 1999-2000), 205.

83

Just as consumption becomes profoundly empowering for Turkish women, so the
consumption of Turkish culture becomes a source of power and pleasure for Montagu. If
Montagu enjoys increased freedom in public by her deployment of Turkish clothing and
carriage, she also ﬁnds it liberating to survey Turkish women. Montagu’s admiration of
Turkish women in the bathhouse has often been read in the context of homoeroticism by
critics. Aravamudan, for instance, has called attention to the “lesbian possibilities”
despite Montagu’s attempts at “ladylike disavowal.” (179). In his study of sapphism and
Montagu, John Beynon also argues that Montagu’s encounter with the women of the
Levant develops an erotics of female vision that challenged both masculine norms of
female sexuality and orientalist assumptions about Islamic culture. These readings are
helpful in accounting for Montagu’s gaze and her sapphic pleasure, yet they fail to
consider that Montagu’s delight in looking at Turkish women is informed by her
consumer subjectivity formed in and through the new world of consumerism she
encounters in her journey overseas. By demonstrating that Montagu’s pleasures are
formed within the marketplace rather than outside of it, my reading invites us to view
Montagu less as an aristocratic intellectual than as a skillful female observer who self-
consciously deploys commercial discourses to renegotiate rigid gender boundaries. Like
a shopper who is fascinated by the sight of exotic goods, Montagu ﬁnds pleasure in
Observing foreign cultural practices which allow her to explore fantasies and desires that
depart from normative models of British femininity. Montagu’s consumption of
idealized images of Turkish womanhood not only acknowledges the legitimacy of female
SCOpic agency but also constitutes her as a powerful desiring subject who can imagine

freedom that challenges the prescriptions of British gender norms.

84

As such, Montagu’s heightened admiration of Ottoman women’s consumption
activities enables her to explore transgressive pleasures and try on alternative experiences
unavailable to British women, recapitulating the ways female consumers were able to
indulge in unfettered desires concomitant with the experience of shopping for exotic
commodities. Nonetheless, Montagu’s letters do not offer an unequivocal vision of a
female utopia, as Montagu is preoccupied with keeping those desires for transgressive
consumption at bay, perhaps for fear of turning into the very objectiﬁed spectacle with
which she identiﬁes. If these tensions result in part from the female viewers’ close
identiﬁcation with the object of her gaze, Montagu’s identiﬁcation with the Turkish
women leads to a reminder of her status as a spectacle. Even if she entertains fantasies of
alternative sexual desires through her identiﬁcation with the Turkish women, she remains
anxious about how she might appear to English readers. Concerned that she might be
perceived as sexually immoral, Montagu preemptively disavows eroticism early in the
bathhouse letter, remarking that “there was not the least wanton smile or immodest
gesture amongst” the women she encounters. She also insists on her modesty in
recounting that she refused to remove her English stays, and she appears to be submissive
to her husband’s authority. “I was at last forced to open my skirt, and show them my
Stays, which satisﬁed them very well, for I saw that they believed I was so locked up in
that machine, that it was not in my own power to open it, which contrivance they
attributed to my husband” (59-60)..

Nevertheless, Montagu’s effort to maintain a proper British femininity can be
Seen as part of a conscious masquerade. By intentionally producing herself as a spectacle

that enacts a submissive female role, she exploits her specular status for her own

85

subversive ends. In fact, despite her protestations about the sexual impropriety of the
Turkish bathhouse, Montagu remains quite playful about the homoerotics of the baths,
especially when she confesses the “wickedness” of her thoughts about the scene.
Montagu’s refusal to undress farther emphasizes her sexuality by titillating readers with a
display of her corseted body. Throughout her intentional production of a spectacle that
“satisﬁe[s]” the desires of her Turkish hosts and English readers at the same, she
maintains her guise as a proper English lady while simultaneously offering radical hints
of female desire, authority, and emancipation. In this regard, Montagu can be seen as a
strategic shopper whose consumer gaze enables her to exercise powerful agency while
she successfully manipulates her status as a spectacle to gratify her desires.

If Montagu’s delight in seeing the naked women of the Turkish bathhouse is
inﬂected by self-conscious reﬂections on her own status as an observer, Montagu is also
interested in destabilizing the male gaze in order to appropriate the look for her own
pleasure. Upon Montagu’s entrance into the bathhouse, her frank admiration of the
physical beauty of the Turkish women, especially her anatomizing perception of their
“[ﬁne] skins and most delicate shapes” and their naked, reclining postures, appears to
replicate the masculine voyeuristic gaze that panders to male desire by reducing women
as beautiful sexual objects. When Montagu admits that she “had wickedness enough to
wish secretly that Mr. Gervase could have been there invisible,” she is not merely
appropriating a masculine voyeuristic position but calling attention to gendered power
relations of aesthetic experience within the eighteenth century, where the privileges of
100kng belonged to male artists while women were often reduced to objectiﬁed

SPeCtacles. Also, women did not have the privilege of subjecting other women to an

86

erotic gaze. Her invocation of Mr. Gervase paradoxically foregrounds her status as a

mere art object, for Mr. Gervase whom she invites to observe the Turkish women is the
very male artist who had painted her. Montagu’s ambiguous position as both the
spectator and the spectacle within this scopic economy leads her to reject the masculine
paradigm of aesthetic contemplation altogether. When Montagu speculates, “I fancy it
would have very much improved his art to see so many ﬁne women naked, in different
postures...” (59), she radically points out the deﬁciency of his artistry. She then proceeds
to exclude Gervase and the masculine aesthetic tradition from the scene, warning that
“’tis no less than death for a man to be found in one of these places” (60). While Jill

Campbell maintains that Montagu can only take up a position as a male gazer and

99 39

“fantasizes herself replaced in the baths by an invisible male artist, it seems that

Montagu only invokes his presence in order to critique and to discredit the model of the
male gaze altogether.

Another way that Montagu rejects this model of the “invisible” male gaze is by
disrupting its mastery of the ﬁeld of vision. The reiﬁed look operates very much like the 3
camera obscura, which Jonathan Crary has identiﬁed as the paradigmatic structure for
scopic relations in this period. The model of the camera obscura constructs the observer
as the embodiment of an autonomous, disinterested gaze that neatly separates from “the
physical body of the observer, to deeorporealize vision.” 4" Rather than assuming a

framing vision with a disembodied authority, Montagu disrupts the distance between the

 

 

. 3 9 Jill Campbell, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Historical Machinery of Female Identity.”
Wm Eighteenth-Century Literature. ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin. (Athens: Georgia University
Press 1994), 80.

 

4° Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteeth Centtﬂ.
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 39.

87

framed scene and the perceiver by intentionally becoming a spectacle herself,
foregrounding her English attire in sharp contrast to the naked Turkish women. Instead of
viewing through the dominant frame belonging to the privileged male artist, she sees
herself through the eyes of the women she describes, remaining conscious of the fact that
she appears just as foreign to the Turkish women as they appear to her: “I was in my
traveling habit, which is a riding dress, and certainly appeared very extraordinary to
them” (5 8). The scene in which Montagu refuses to undress hints at the status of English
women’s oppression under British patriarchy, by recounting that the Turkish women
believe that “she was so locked up in that machine, that it was not in my own power to
open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband” (60). Nonetheless, her refusal
to undress and her deliberate display of “stays” can be attributed to her unconscious
desire to maintain her English femininity intact from the potential leveling effect of the
Turkish baths. If her appropriation of the Turkish dress enables her to experience the
possibilities of “becoming” (69) or self-fashioning by trying on a Turkish identity
temporarily, her deployment of English clothing functions to reassert her Englishness.
As Aravamudan correctly observes, Montagu’s “cautious celebration of heterogeneity is
tempered by a fear of the loss of an Englishness that she still prioritizes as prima inter
pares” (187). By keeping herself partially dressed, she strategically keeps her opacity
and refuses to allow others to read “her beauty” or “defects.” 4' Rather than being a
tranSparent object to be seen or a text to be read, Montagu carefully manipulates the

terms of how she is observed and controls the terms of her own representation.

 

 

4' Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Centug
w. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 152-54. Marcia Pointon points out that because
Montagu had a severely disﬁgured face by smallpox in 1715, the notion of an opaque society in which “the

ce wOuld be hardly observed” would have personal relevance to Montagu herself.

 

88

 

 

But despite Montagu’s dismantling of the male gaze through her rejection of Mr.
Gervase, her assumption of visual authority inevitably ends up reproducing the dominant
masculine structure of the western gazing eye/I. Her depiction of the Turkish women’s
“shiningly white” skin fetishizes the ‘whiteness’ of their skin color; it also shows how her
praise of their physical beauty is dictated by standards of European taste. Even when
Montagu valorizes Fatima’s beauty as superior to that of Europeans, asserting that“...
our most celebrated English beauties would vanish near her” (81), it is the norm of
European beauty that is being invoked for comparison. Additionally, Turkish women
become located in the distant past within the world of European classical tradition, as
they are likened to Milton’s Eve or to goddesses drawn by Guido and Titian. In this way,
Montagu’s treatment of Turkish women participates in what Johannes Fabian calls a
“radical contemporaneity” whereby Western travelers place alien cultures in the distant
past of their own culture’s history and deny the contemporaneity of those cultures. 42
Similarly when Montagu foregrounds the commonalities between Turkish and English
women, claiming that Turkish women’s “morality or good conduct... ‘tis as ‘tis with
you” (71), this “rhetoric of similitude” does not merely function as a “means of

” 43 as Lowe argues, but functions

intervening in the differentiating rhetoric of orientalism
as an appropriative gesture where observations of cultural otherness are always registered
and deﬁned in one’s own cultural terms. As Meyda Yegenoglu asserts, Montagu’s

deployment of the positive images of Turkish women stems from “its power to construct

the very object it speaks about and from its power to produce a regime of truth about the

 

 

42 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983), 95.

43 Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, 51.

 

89

 

 

other and thereby establish the identity and the power of the subject that speaks about it.”
44
As Montagu draws near the end of her stay in Turkey, she relies on such a
rhetoric of similitude and difference to consolidate her position of power as an English
observer. Although she insists that “the manners of mankind do not differ so widely as
our voyage writers would make us believe” (72), suggesting her Enlightenment belief in
constant and universal principles of human nature, she ends her letter with an assertion of
nationalistic identity that valorizes Englishness above other national identities. In sharp
contrast to the “most beautiful prospects in Europe and Asia” (140), African Tunis
becomes a “very disagreeable prospect to the eye” ﬁlled with monstrous images of mixed
“mulatooes” (149) and the “most frightful creatures that can appear in a human ﬁgure,”
creatures marked by “natural deformity.” Similarly, the Tunisian women are denigrated
as having the appearance of “baboons”: ‘tis hard to fancy them a distinct face, and I could
not help thinking here had been some ancient alliances between them” (151). This
ultimately leads to her celebration and validation of an English identity that appropriates
the powerful discourse of the prospect in surveying the non-European landscape: “And
after having seen part of Asia and Africa and almost made the tour of Europe, I think the
honest English squire more happy” (165). Crossing Dover, she ends up valorizing British
national identity, as she comments to Abbe Conte that “I cannot help looking with partial
ey€S on my native land” (164), and celebrates the idyllic life of her home country: “[i]n
short, there is no perfect enjoyment of this life out of Old England” (165).
Montagu’s reafﬁrmation of her Englishness suggests that the project of
representing the ‘other’ woman is inseparable from the mechanism of an objectifying

\

4” Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, 90.

90

gaze that is driven by the desire to know her. As Homi Bhabha insists, the visual or
scopic drive implicit in all representation is more evident in the ﬁeld of colonial power:
“in order to conceive of the colonial subject as the effect of power that is productive...
one has to see the surveillance of colonial power functioning in relation to the regime of
the scopic drive.” 45 Although Montagu strives to correct the accounts of men who “can
only speak of the outside” (85), her consumerist gaze, which attempts to provide an
accurate portrayal of Turkish women’s lives and to reveal what has been forbidden to
western men, ultimately participates in a larger orientalist project buttressed by a
Western scopic regime. While Montagu’s strategic deployment of fashionable
commodities at times explores alternative cultural identities and sexually liberating
possibilities, it ends up serving her interests as an English female consumer for the
beneﬁt of the English nation.
Montagu’s cross-cultural experience in Turkey allows her to explore and celebrate
a utopian vision of female power while it simultaneously represents a ‘safe’ form of
display whose unruly elements are domesticated and appropriated in validation of British
identity. Yet Montagu’s letters simultaneously suggest that her desires for the
dangerously seductive ‘other’ may destabilize her English self, just as she is deﬁned by a
foreign world of consumer goods and practices. The threat of the “daily decay” of her
English identity leads Montagu to reassert herself as an English consumer preoccupied
with transforming Turkish culture into commodiﬁed images for the pleasure of English
readers. As Ruth Yeazell has documented, it is known that Montagu’s descriptions of the
Turkish women’s baths became the basis for Ingres’s painting Le Bain Turc (1862),

whose exotic images of oriental women became proﬁtable commodities for the popular

 

 

*

45 Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question,” Screen 24/6 (December 1983).

 

91

consumption of western orientalist consumers. 46 Even as she negotiates between the
tensions of being both spectacle and spectator in the Turkish bathhouse episode,
Montagu’s newly found visual authority underscores the status of Turkish women as a
commodiﬁed spectacle for the consumption of European viewers.

Montagu recognizes, moreover, that the primary aim of a traveler’s account is to
“entertain [her reader’s] curiosity” even as she professes to tell “a plain truth” that does
not “attempt to entertain with as many prodigies as other travelers use to divert their

readers with” (41). Her letters thus indicate the contradictory position she is placed in:

We travelers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what
has been said before us we are dull and we have observed nothing. If we
tell anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic, not
allowing for the difference of ranks, which afford difference of company,
more curiosity, or the changes of customs that happen every twenty year

in every country (1 18).

Although she is careful to distinguish her travel account from those of others who have

exaggerated and perpetrated lies about “anthropophagi and men whose heads grow below
their shoulders” (44), Montagu is anxious that her account might not measure up to
reader’s expectations. She is therefore careful not to be tedious for fear that she might
write “a whole quire of the dullest stuff that was ever read, or printed without being rea ”

(26). She is concerned that her “Letter out of Turkey that has nothing extraordinary in it

 

 

_ - 46 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “Public Baths and Private Harems: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the
Orrgrns of Ingres’s Bain Turc.” Yale Journal of Criticism (7: 1994), 111-38, 122.

 

92

 

III

1112

31

h:

CU

would be as great a Disappointment as my visitors will receive at London if I return
thither without any rarities to show them” (82). Thus even as Montagu denounces male
travelers who have been motivated by commercial proﬁt to exaggerate and falsify their
travel accounts, her “enquiries and observations” (83) cannot help being embedded in the
same rhetoric of commerce that privileges novelty: “Tis certain we have but very
imperfect relations of the manners and religion of these people, this part of the world
being seldom visited by merchants, who mind little but their own affairs, or travelers who
make too short a stay to be able to report anything exactly of their own knowledge.” (61)
Similarly, when she vehemently objects to other male travelers like Hill, Rycault, or
Dumont, who write with “equal ignorance and conﬁdence” and are “so far removed from
Truth and so full of Absurdities” in order to provide an alternative “account of the
women” (104), she relies on the novelty and uniqueness of her experience to legitimize
her rendition: “I have now, madam, passed a journey that has not been undertaken by any
Christian since the time of the Greek emperors” (55).

Montagu’s commodiﬁcation of the non-western world as both desirable and
potentially dangerous for domestic English consumers ultimately suggests that her travel
is implicated in the larger discourses of orientalism. As Aravamudan points out,
Montagu’s travel abroad provides a “symbolic inoculation” against the temptation of
cultural passing by reidentifying with Englishness; “travel narrative, after ﬂirting with

cultural crossover, becomes a complicated acknowledgement of the superiority of the
return home,” 47 in much the same way that the technique of inoculation, which she was
instrumental in bringing to England, protects the body against disease through exposure

to a weaker version of it. Yet Aravmudan suggests that Montagu’s “return” to her

 

 

i

47 Srinivas Aravamudan, W. (Durham, Duke University Press, 1999), 184.

93

 

b1
61

C0

('9

English self is bound up with her afﬁnities for “classicism and cultural antiquarianism,”
48 privileging her aristocratic afﬁliations rather than her status as a consumer governed
by bourgeois taste and an emphasis on practicality and modesty in contrast to aristocratic
excess and personal ostentation. Just as Montagu had praised female shoppers in
continental Europe for their pragmatic, self-disciplined consumer behaviors, Montagu
values goods for their utility. Thus, inoculation, for Montagu, consists of bringing a
“useful invention into fashion in England” for English consumers. For example, she
considers importing stoves from Hanover for the beneﬁt of the English people: “I am
surprised we do not practice in England so useful an invention.” (3 8).

In short, in spite of her attempts to demystify and to instruct her readers about
foreign culture and its scenes, Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters underscore the extent
to which travel writing is bound up with consumerism, offering wondrous and novel
impressions and accounts that themselves become cultural objects to be consumed. By
addressing her letters to various personages, Montagu capitalizes on the sense of novelty
her travel account promises and affords her readership a vicarious role in the appreciation
and consumption of her cultural product. As seen in Montagu’s emphasis on the
‘pleasure’ of seeing, it is the pleasure of novelty that motivates the production and
consumption of travel writing, just as Montagu’s letters suggest the process by which the
eighteenth century’s curiosity about foreign lands and exotic objects incites European
consumers to desire and consume more imported goods. Despite Montagu’s well-

intentioned depictions of Turkish women and Turkish culture, her female emancipatory
vision is inevitably caught up in and empowered by an English consumerist gaze that

produces and commodiﬁes its knowledge about the alien other for its own interests. By

 

 

48 Aravamudan, 187.

94

recognizing how Montagu’s consumerist gaze accommodates both radical female desires
and the “charm of novelty” (29), my discussion provides a reassessment of Montagu as a
skillful spectator who consciously deployed commercial and mercantile discourses to
subvert patriarchal viewing assumptions and establish the legitimacy of women’s scopic

desires in marketplace.

95

 

 

CHAPTER 2
THE PLEASURES AND PERILS OF FEMALE CONSUMPTION
IN DANIEL DEF OE’S ROXANA

With the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694 and the increase of the
National Debt, early eighteenth-century British society witnessed the explosive growth of
a credit-market economy. The development of credit relations from the seventeenth
century onward entailed a new speculative sector that included the stock market,
promissory notes, paper notes from countless government funds and the stock exchange.
These unprecedented transformations in the ﬁnancial economy brought radical shifts to
sociopolitical relations and individual consciousness. Under the inﬂuence of modern
ﬁnance and rapid capitalization, participation in exchange, rather than the possession of
real property, became the foundation of economic advancement. ' Wealth was
fundamentally changed from a concrete material to a mobile, exchangeable form of ‘
capital. Amidst Britain’s struggle with the National Debt, liquidity crises, foreign wars,

international markets and bankruptcies, the pervasiveness of credit and debt brought forth
a highly speculative and volatile economy with constant fears of uncertainty on the part
of early eighteenth-century contemporaries.

Perhaps no writer of the early eighteenth century was more proliﬁc in the
production of evolving discourses of capitalism than Daniel Defoe. Generally considered
the preeminent economic, political, and social commentator of the early part of the

century, Defoe vigorously expressed his views on the extraordinary development of

English commerce and ﬁnance in his voluminous writings. In his political pamphlets and

 

 

_ -' J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History,
Ch reﬂ y 1n the Eighteenth Centuay. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 103-124.

 

96

periodicals — including A True State of Publila Credit (1 721), The Complete English
Tradesman (1726), A Plan of the English Commerce (1728) and The Review (1709),
Defoe promoted the wonders of trade and other types of mercantile commerce over an
agricultural system of wealth production. Unlike many Augustan satirists (which
included Tory intellectuals like Pope, Swift, and John Gay) who were openly opposed to
the ﬁnancial revolution and the commercial middle class—at least the “money’d

” 2 Defoe had faith in the new ﬁnancial institutions and the superior energies of

interest,
the commercial economy. Indeed, many critics have associated Defoe with the triumph of
capitalism itself. Ian Watt, in his famous The Rise of the Novel, celebrates Defoe as the
“optimistic spokesman of the new economic and social order” (89), while Bram Dijkstra
considers Defoe an apologist for capitalism who “rejoiced” in “the exploitative and
predatory aspects of the capitalist experience.” 3
Scholars have similarly emphasized the economic underpinnings of Ragga, a
novel that has most often been appraised as a story in which the heroine progresses from
poverty to prosperity. The novel’s keen attention to the workings of capitalism as well
as Roxana’s preoccupation with material wealth and her insatiable appetite for
commodities have invited many critics to investigate Defoe’s complex treatment of the

emergent commercial economy in relation to gender. Laura Brown, for instance, has

addressed the logic of commodiﬁcation in Roxana within the larger framework of a

 

2 Colin Nicholson. Writing and the Rise of Finance. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 63-71. Tory satirists considered aristocratic social and political order undermined by money and
complained about the commodiﬁcation of their literature. Despite their attacks on the “money’d interest,”
they Willingly and unwillingly participated in aspects of the ﬁnancial revolution, by investing money in the
South Sea Company.

3 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Noygl. (Berkeley: The University of California, 1957), 89; Bram

Dijikstra, Defoe and Economics: The Fortunes of Roxana in the History of Intergpretation- (New York: St-
. Martm’s Press, 1987), 23.

97

mercantile imperialist economy; Carol Flynn has discussed Roxana’s consuming desires
in terms of the female body. 4 While these approaches are useful in foregrounding the
extent to which women were constructed in relation to the capitalist logic of
accumulation and consumption, they do not fully account for the vexed issue of female
consumption in the context of the rapidly developing consumerism of the eighteenth
century. To emphasize only women’s afﬁnity with the commodity is to risk identifying
women as no more than objects of exchange and thus to limit the agency and subj ecthood
women often exercised through the act of consumption.

Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace’s work on eighteenth-century consumer culture has
called into question the essentialist conﬂation of women’s bodies, appetite, and
consumption. 3 Kowaleski-Wallace demonstrates how the notion of gendered consumer
subjectivities ﬁrst emerged at this historical moment, as appetite “was diverted towards
goods” so that “women’s bodies became conﬁgured in relation to consumption.” As
historians such as Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb have documented in
The Birth of a Consumer Society, a greater variety of goods, including non-European
imported luxuries, was newly available for consumption to an unprecedentedly broad
segment of society in the period from about 1720 on. 6 This new culture of consumption
provided more opportunities for women to assume an active status as consuming subjects

of material goods, both in the purchase and use of commodities. At the same time,

 

4 Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English
Literature. (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1993); Carol Flynn, The Body in Swift and Defoe. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990).

3 Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace. Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the
Eighteenth Century. (New York: Columbia Press, 1997), 13.

6 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The
Commericalization of Eighteenth-century England. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).

98

women were increasingly aligned with the commodity and equated with excessive
consumer appetite, as British culture’s “fondest wishes for the transforming power of
consumerism and its deepest anxieties about the corrupting inﬂuences of goods” were
displaced onto women. 7
This chapter seeks to address Roxana’s paradoxical relationship to the world of
goods by examining how her consumption of material goods deﬁnes her subjectivity. By
highlighting Roxana’s ideological construction as both a consumer and a commodity in
the broader framework of emergent commodity culture in the eighteenth century, I will
consider how Roxana can be seen as the paradigmatic female consumer in the new
economic order in which she becomes both a subj ect and an object of exchange. By
emphasizing consumerism as productive of pleasure rather than seduction or loss, I will
argue that Roxana becomes an active, even transgressive, agent in the marketplace, one
who uses the delights of commodities and consumption to fashion and empower herself,
even as she often becomes reduced to an object of exchange. My aim is to analyze the
diverse ways in which Roxana’s consuming desires intersect with questions of gender
and visuality to reveal a deeper understanding of the ways in which female subjectivity
and spectatorship become newly conﬁgured in relation to consumerism in the early
modern period. Through Defoe’s conﬂicting treatment of consumption, RM
dramatizes radical new possibilities for female spectatorship and agency within

developing consumer culture, yet it also attempts to contain and regulate these

transgressive female desires within a prescribed ideal of domesticity.

 

7 Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth
Centagy, 5.

99

My reading of Roxana is deeply inﬂuenced by Kowaleski-Wallace in its emphasis

 

on the ideological construction of the modern female subject in relation to emerging
consumer culture in the eighteenth century, although Kowaleski-Wallace does not discuss
Defoe’s Raaaaa in her Consuming Subjects. Kowaleski-Wallace illustrates how early
modern society projected its own ambivalence about consumer culture onto women in an
effort to regulate unruly appetites. My reading, however, suggests that Roxana’s
consumerism is not easily contained, because her consumption activities, particularly her
masquerades, invoke the perceptual instability and uncertainties associated with
speculative economic practices. At the same time, I argue that Defoe’s attitude to the
changes wrought by the commercial and ﬁnancial revolutions is more complex and
ambivalent than is acknowledged by critics like Watt and Dijikstra, who consider Defoe
as an unequivocal champion of capitalism. Defoe sees the transformations as necessary
and desirable, yet nonetheless hazardous and subversive to traditional class and gender
relations.

By highlighting Roxana’s engagement with credit and debt discourses through an
exploration of her close afﬁnities with the ﬁgure of Lady Credit —a powerful allegory
with rich cultural implications, I contend that Defoe deploys the ﬁgure of woman to
express his ambivalence about female consumption and to negotiate the experience of a
speculative marketplace that was pervaded by a sense of ﬂuctuation and indeterminacy.
By representing the British economy in the imaginary female ﬁgure of Lady Credit,
Defoe was drawing upon an already familiar trope that can be traced to the tradition of

female F ortuna, a ﬁgure associated with the unpredictability of history. Indeed, the

100

 

 

eighteenth-century’s credit economy was often represented as feminine, with all the
connotations of fantasy, instability, and danger that attend that assignation.

R_9_xa_ra depicts Defoe’s implicit anxiety about what Craig Muldrew has identiﬁed
as a “culture of credit.” 8 For the development of eighteenth-century economic ideas,
credit—with its problematic ﬂuidity and insubstantiality—played a key role in part
because it was interwoven with and inseparable from major epistemological
considerations: questions of credibility, value, and truth. How far and upon what basis to
trust ——how much “credit” should be accorded—was problematic. Aligning ﬁnancial
credit with epistemological credit, J. G. A. Pocock has shown how notions of speculative
and “imaginary” value destabilized questions of truth and produced unstable perceptual
paradigms, contrary to the assumption that Enlightenment culture expressed an
undistorted faith in rationality and reason. 9 RaLana, written in 1724, likely reﬂects the
growing concern caused by the ﬁnancial crisis of the “South Sea Bubble” of the 17205,
when the disastrous collapse of stock suggested the dangers of a weak economy built on
new credit properties that were potentially fertile but empty and hazardous.

Defoe’s 1710 pamphlet “An Essay upon Publick Credit” provides insight into the

paradoxical nature of ﬁnancial credit as Defoe perceived it:

Like the Soul in the Body, it acts all Substance, yet is it self Immaterial; it
gives Motion, yet it self cannot be said to Exist; it creates Forms, yet has it

self no Form; it is neither Quantity or Quality; it has no Whereness, or

 

3 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Eaaly
Modern England. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 4.

9 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chieﬂy in the

Eighteenth centugy. 69.

101

...—-_-- map—-.v- w -r

Whenness, Scite, or Habit. If I should say it is the essential Shadow of
Something that is Not: should I not Puzzle the thing rather than Explain it,

and leave you and my self more in the Dark than we were before? ‘0

Credit is vexing to Defoe, as it embodies many contradictions. He attempts to explain the
elusive nature of credit, not by offering positive deﬁnitions, but through negative
examples. Indeed, it can only be deﬁned by its lack—“something that is not.” Credit has
insubstantial existence, yet it has real tangible effects. Credit is the “assurance of things
hoped for, evidence of things not seen” (51). Defoe furthermore elaborates on the
generative power of credit. Like a wild plant, credit springs up from natural causes and

has the power of “quickning”:

Credit is a consequence, not a Cause; the Effect of a Substance, not a
Substance, ‘tis the Sun-shine, not the Sun; the quickning SOMETHING; call
it what you will, that gives Life to Trade, gives Being to the Branches, and.
Moisture to the Root; ‘tis the Oil of the Wheel, the Marrow in the Bones, the
Blood in the Veins, and the Spirits in the Heart of all the Negoce, Trade,

Cash, and Commerce in the World (53). H

As seen above, Defoe ﬁgures credit as a life-giving, creative energy much like the power

of the imagination. Although Defoe clearly recognized the liberating possibilities offered

 

'0 Daniel Defoe, “An Essay upon Publick Credit.” Political and Economic Writings of Daniel
Defoe. (London : Pickering & Chatto, 2000), 51. All future references will be indicated by page numbers
inserted parenthetically in the text.

 

” According to Oxford English Dictionary, ‘negoce’ is deﬁned as business, commerce. (1617)

102

by the notion of credit as a productive force, he was nevertheless suspicious about the
speculative nature of an increasingly credit-dependent economy. This can be seen in his
criticism of stock-jobbing in the summer of 1719, before the South Sea stock mania
reached its height. In “The Anatomy of Exchange Alley,” Defoe insisted that trade
itself was a “compleat System of Knavery. .. founded in Fraud, born of Deceit, and
nourished by Trick, Cheat, Wheedle, Forgeries, Falsehoods, and all sorts of Delusion. ” ‘2
His sharpest attack on the illusion of substance upon which so many stock-jobbing
schemes were based is also seen in a pamphlet of 1719 entitled “The Chimera,” where he
criticized the French government’s ﬁnancial scheme to raise “an inconceivable Species of
meer Air and Shadow, realizing the F ancies and Imaginations, Visions and Apparitions,
and making the meer Speculation of Things, act all the Parts, and perform all the Offices
of the Things themselves.” '3 After the frenzy of wild speculation and investment in the
rapidly inﬂating shares of the South Sea Company, the disastrous collapse of the South
Sea Bubble as it has become known, dramatized the dangers and vicissitudes of an of
unpredictable credit-based economy.

Recently, scholars have explored the complexity of credit in Defoe’s ﬁction by
linking the idea of ﬁnancial credit to the problematic of belief or credibility. By focusing

on “the question of epistemological credit” in Defoe’s ﬁction, Patrick Brantlinger

suggests that Defoe approves and even champions the concept of credit, as his novels are

 

’2 Daniel Defoe, “The Anatomy of Exchange Alley.” Political and Economic Writings of Daniel
Defoe. (London : Pickering & Chatto, 2000), 130.

'3 Daniel Defoe, “The Chimera.” Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe (London :
Pickering & Chatto, 2000), 160-161.

103

resented as “unironic narratives for readers to credit as uite sirn 1 true.” 14
P Y

Similarly
Sandra Sherman dramatizes how credit represents “a new kind of narrative” in Defoe’s
ﬁction by drawing a homology between ﬁnancial credit and textual ﬁctionality in his
writing. '5 While my chapter shares the aims of these scholars in extending the economic
to other cultural discourses, my reading of Roxana diverges from them in its greater
emphasis on gender relations. Focusing on the intersections between economic and
gender discourses, I seek to demonstrate how Defoe deploys the visibility of the female
body to reﬂect and reinscribe his underlying anxiety about women’s growing
participation in consumerism, which he links to the unstable perceptual paradigms of the
newly emerging credit culture. Roxana’s masquerade, I shall argue, becomes a crucial
site where the complex relationships among visibility, the female body, and the material
world converge. If Roxana articulates the condition of the commercial market through
her proliferation of various displays and impersonations, the text as a whole attempts to

control unruly consumerist desires through the monitoring gaze represented by Susan,

who would ultimately limit Roxana to a private, domestic role.

“Speaking Sight”: Becoming a Female Consumer

It is commonplace to praise Roxana as a successful entrepreneur who possesses
economic prowess in amassing substantial wealth by mastering emerging capitalism’s
market forces and exchange economy. Some critics, however, have criticized Roxana’s

moral failin s as she moves from "virtuous ove to corru t wealth" with the cold,
g P P

 

'4 Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State. (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996), 75.

'5 Sandra Sherman, Finance aid Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for
Defoe. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5.

104

relentless possessive individualism of a woman who transgresses the bounds of morality
through her avarice and materialism, turning her back on “her honest, middle-class
background to step into the world of riches and high ﬁnance.” '6 Nevertheless, despite
their differences, both approaches draw attention to the central issue of Roxana’s pursuit
of wealth and preoccupation with goods, while overlooking the ways in which Roxana’s
relations with the commodities around her become the basis for her formation into an
active and desiring consumer.

Roxana begins the story of her life wanting “neither Wit, Beauty, or Money” with
“all the Advantages that any Young Woman cou’d desire” while “living in good
Fashion.” Prepared only for the “social Part of the World,” Roxana subsequently ﬁnds
herself paralyzed by destitution after she is deserted by an incompetent husband with “no
Genius to Business. ..[and] no Knowledge of Accounts” (42). 17 Not only is her husband
“a Fool” (40) who fails miserably in his business; he also turns out to be a “weak, empty-
headed, untaught Creature” (40), an effeminized ﬁgure who is more interested in keeping
up appearances with his “Equipage, his Horses or Servants” (43) and more concerned
with frivolous pursuits than with tending to his own business. He is criticized not simply
for being a “Fool” who merely puts on a “Face of Business” (42) and “could not carry his
Business” (42), but also for his undisciplined practices of consumption: his excessive
appetite for trivial things and his proﬂigate spending habits. Indeed, Roxana’s husband

ironically exempliﬁes the very characteristics typically associated at the time with the

 

'6 Maximillian Novak, Economics and the Fictions of Daniel Defoe. (Berkeley, University Press
of California: 1962), 128. '

'7 Daniel Defoe, Roxana. ed. David Blewett. (London: Penguin Books, 1982), 38. All future
references will be indicated by page numbers inserted parenthetically in the text.

105

undesirable ﬁgure of a the female consumer: an inordinate appetite and an unchecked
desire for material goods. .

Unlike her husband, who becomes a victim of his insatiable desires, Roxana
learns to master and manipulate the world of commodities surrounding her in order to
escape from her “Wretched Condition” and attain ﬁnancial independence (44). When
abandoned with ﬁve children and faced with debt, she ﬁrst turns to household goods and
tries to pawn them: “I began to make away one Thing after another, till those few Things
of Value which I had, began to lessen apace” (46). When her aunt and an acquaintance
come to see her, Roxana positions herself among “a great Heap of old Rags, Linnen, and
other things”(50) and deliberately uses her body as a spectacle, drawing attention to the
extremely hon'iﬁc nature of the situation. Here Roxana does not allow herself to become
reduced to a mere object, but rather deliberately uses the close link between the female
body and the world of commodities (the disorder and confusion of things strewn on the
ground) to illustrate her predicament. She carefully dramatizes her “Distress,” staging
herself in “that Posture” of poverty and putting on “the Face of Ruin.” As Roxana
recounts, there was no need of discourse about her situation as the “Thing spoke itself”
(50). She consciously transforms herself into a “speaking sight,” a spectacle to fascinate
viewers while she carefully controls the terms in which she is viewed.

The striking parallel between the female body and a commodity becomes more
evident in what follows. The house is compared to a ravaged woman’s body—“[t]he
House, that was before handsomely furnish’d with Pictures and Ornaments, Cabinets,
Peir-Glasses, and every thing suitable that was now stripp’d, and naked” (50), suggesting

a close relationship between women and goods, spectacle and eroticism, and between

106

sexual and commodity fetishism. The description of the house, which goes from being
richly decorated to barren, parallels the transformation of Roxana’s body, which goes
from “fat and beautiful” to “thin, and looking almost like one Starv’d” (50). The
sexualized depiction of the house reinforces the afﬁnity between women and objects and
highlights the status of women as marketable commodities whose value can easily
depreciate. As Laura Brown has pointed out, there is a close proximity between the
representation of women and their things in mercantile capitalist discourses, to the extent
that “female adornment becomes the main emblem of commodity fetishism.” '8 The
threats posed by newly available goods and the inﬂux of commodities brought about by
the expansion of mercantile trade are often equated with the problematic issue of female
appetite. Brown has argued convincingly that mercantile imperialism deﬂected or
displaced its desires and fears onto women, who were ultimately held responsible for
imperialism through their identiﬁcation with insatiable desires. In keeping with these
tendencies, Defoe’s representation of the female body as an eroticized commodity
underscores the aspects of feminine sexuality that are bound up with unruly appetite and
uncontrollable desires, for which female consumers were often indicted within the
discourses of mercantile capitalism.

The overwhelming nature of Roxana’s consumerist desires is also seen when she
deliberately brings up the image of a mother devouring her own children. While her
afﬂiction is genuine enough, it is also elaborately staged. Her allusion to traditional
ﬁgures of suffering mothers exaggerates her emotional state, as she performs the role of

a helpless, victimized mother who has no choice but to “harden [her] heart against [her]

 

’8 Brown, Ends of Image: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Englis_h Literature,
119.

107

own ﬂesh and blood”(51). Roxana stresses the performative nature of her display in
order to achieve the most sensational impact on her spectators, the two women in the
scene: “both of them cry’d as fast and as heartly as [she] did” (50).

At the same time, this scene underscores the potential danger of female
consumption. Roxana’s dire hunger leads to cannibalizing of her own children. While
the potential cannibalism of Roxana’s consuming appetite heightens the despair and
extremity of her predicament, it also anticipates how her all-consuming desire may be at
odds with a society that prescribes her role as that of a mother. If eating can be seen as a
form of consumption, Roxana suggests that the very deprivation may produce excessive
appetites that are unnatural and even violent. Roxana’s extreme hunger drives her to
abandon her children who become a liability to her, just as she refuses to acknowledge
Susan as her daughter at the end. In her study on the impact of consumerism on
European colonialism, Charlotte Sussman draws attention to the ways the rhetoric of
cannibalism articulates the anxieties about the consumption of commodities, although she
does not discuss Defoe’s works. '9 Sussman shows that cannibalistic consumers can
carry the reiﬁcation of human relationship to an extreme in the capitalist society
increasingly invested in things. For instance, her examination of Jonathan Swift’s “A
Modest Proposal” foregrounds the association between the Irish and cannibalism by
representing the Anglo-Irish as cannibalistic consumers and the native Irish as
“dehumanized and exportable commodities” more “valuable as things than as laborers
who produce things” (77). Likewise, Roxana’s consumption perverts the conventionally
nurturing relationships between mother and child and even leads to the possible murder

of her own daughter Susan. Defoe links excessive economic consumption with gluttony,

 

'9 Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties. (Stanford: Stanford Press, 2000).

108

when Roxana proceeds to devour “a small Breast of Mutton, and two great Bunches of
Turnips, which she intended to stew for [her] Dinner” (51) to satisfy her appetite. The
consuming nature of the self’ 5 own desires in a capitalist society may be seen as part of a
dysfunctional society. This is seen when Roxana’s overwhelming hunger leads her to
“prostitute her Virtue and Honour” (63). Here Roxana seals her unnatural relationship
with the landlord with a meal of a “large very good Leg of Veal; the other a Piece of the
Fore-Ribs of Roasting Beef” (59), collapsing economic consumption and oral
consumption.

For Roxana, the dispossession of her consumables is not just a loss of things for
survival, but also a loss of her former self. With an explosion of new goods and a spirit
of emulation which stimulated people to buy more commodities, Britain’s rapidly
expanding middling classes in the eighteenth century increasingly came to identify
themselves with the nature and quantity of their possessions. Thus, Roxana’s
preoccupation with material things around her—“Household-Stuff, [and] Plate, &c.” (85)
—is not simply a “Necessity” (46) for her basic needs, but also an attempt to reconstitute
her previous self. Whereas the landlord “had tom the Goods out of [my] House like a
Fury” (59), Roxana seeks out “Bounty” (59) from her landlord, attempting to redress her
needs through material fulﬁllment: “so the House began to look in some tollerable Figure,
and clean” (66).

Just as Roxana depends on the close connection between the individual and the
world of goods for her survival, she also exploits this marketplace logic by consciously
presenting herself as a commodity. When she ﬁnally decides to become the landlord’s

mistress, she successfully controls her transactions with careful calculations, successfully

109

 

 

taking advantage of the commercial system. Despite her belief that “a Woman ought
rather to die, than to prostitute her Virtue and Honour, let the Temptation be what it will”
(63), Roxana knowingly chooses to be a whore, being fully aware that showing an “Air
of Tenderness” (67) and compliance to her landlord will “recover” her from the “Brink of
the Grave” and that “Expectations of what he might still do for [her] were powerful
things” (67). Hence, the language of business dominates the novel, in which terms like
‘business,’ ‘advantage’, ‘proﬁt,’ and ‘loss’ are insistently deployed to describe people
and relationships. She recognizes that her relationship with the landlord is a business
transaction, an exchange relation in which the consumer purchases the item from the
seller in terms advantageous to both parties: “Thus, Amy and I canvass’d the Business
between us; the Jade prompted the Crime, which I had but too much Inclination to
commit. . .and I even resolv’d, before he ask’d, to give my Virtue to him, whenever he
should put it to the Question” (75). The transaction is, further, sealed by “a Contract in
Writing”(76). Roxana presents herself as a desirable object to the landlord using her
sexuality in exchange for food and lodging, while he “restores” her “great House” to
plenitude and turns her “Wilderness” (66) into a garden.

Certainly one might argue that Roxana’s whoring objectiﬁes her as a commodity,
reinscribing her within an endless cycle of capitalist exchange, where she is unable to
alter the economic construction of femininity. Roxana’s vacillation between her status as
a subject and an object of consumption reenacts the conditions of market capitalism,
which are closely bound up with consumerism. As Karl Marx reminds us, capitalism
produces commodiﬁcation in which the individual becomes reduced to its price in the

market and alienated from its true nature: “Since money, as the existing and active

110

concept of value, confounds and exchanges all things, it is the general confounding and
compounding of all things — the world upside-down—the confounding and compounding
all natural and human qualities.” 20 In a sense, Roxana undergoes such alienation, for as
she admits late in the novel, she “was very far from knowing [herself],” and had become
reiﬁed as a “meer Roxana” (223).

Yet to posit Roxana’s commodiﬁcation as entirely negative seems to neglect the
speciﬁc conditions under which market capitalism emerged and does not fully account
period’s understanding of the relationship between economics and the self. Althdugh he
does not analyze Defoe’s novels, Ross Pudaloff offers an alternative approach to seeing
commodiﬁcation as damaging to selfhood. He points out that eighteenth-century
narrators often deployed newly emergent consumerist discourses to empower themselves.
For instance, Equiano achieves a “newly produced I” through processes of exchange and
commodiﬁcation, just as female narrators of published captivity narratives deploy
exchange as the means by which they were able to achieve public and recognizable
identity. 2' Women, especially those who had difﬁculty possessing a public identity,
were able to draw upon consumerism’s logic of exchange and consmnption to redeﬁne
themselves.

My reading of Raaana similarly argues that public access to a greater variety of
commodities and a growing acceptance of consumption for women in the early
eighteenth century were crucial in deﬁning female identities in Ma. Boasting that

she lived “in a very good Figure, and might have liv’d higher if [she] pleas’d” (86),

 

20 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

2' Ross Pudaloff, “No Change without Purchase: Equiano and Economics of Self” Early American
Literature (40: 3, 2005), 499-527.

 

111

Roxana derives deep pleasure from her material possessions so that dress, equipage, and
house become important material adjuncts to her identity and status: “Never Woman, in
such a Station, liv’d a Fortnight in so compleat a fullness of Humane Delight.” (193). At
the same time, she organizes selfhood around moveable goods, just as she quickly learns
to convert her material goods into more portable forms of wealth. Upon hearing of the
jeweler’s death, she quickly assumes the role of the jeweler’s legitimate wife, by means
of possessing the jeweler’s riches — his “Jewells, his Ring, . .. his Watch; the 700
Pistoles” that “amounted to a very considerable Value” (90), even though she had
scruples against calling herself a wife when he was alive. With her newly acquired
wealth, Roxana puts on another public identity; taking care to “appear” as a Widow in
“Affliction,” she succeeds in constructing a “very publick” identity, as she becomes
known by the “Name of La Bella veuve de Poictou; or The pretty Widow of Poictou”
(93). She announces that she “did not forget to set [her]self out with all possible,
Advantage, considering the Dress of a Widow, which in those Days was a most frightful
thing”(93). Just as she is quick to convert her possessions into cash, she is adept at
producing different new personas by virtue of the acquisition, possession and sumptuary ’
display of goods.

If Roxana fashions new selves through her use of commodities, her skillful
adoption of various elusive personas also demonstrates her mastery of the marketplace.
Roxana’s masquerades recapitulate the unpredictable and uncertain logic of the
eighteenth-century British market and its discourses, making it possible for her to
manufacture and circulate different selves for her own proﬁt. In short, Roxana

reinscribes the ﬂuidity of the market through her self-conscious role-playing and

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dissembling. Like a credit-based economy which defers what it promises, Roxana does
not remain constant or static, but her identity remains suspended, indeterminate and

contingent.

“Object Perfect”: Female Adornment

If she employs a self-conscious display of commodities to signify her status as a
widow in public, Roxana’s relationship with the Prince is also governed by a similar
concern with the public gaze. As his secret mistress, she is careful to keep her
relationship with the Prince private by maintaining a modest display of her wealth to the
public. She lives in “Conﬁnement” (103), in her “Dwelling” safe from prying eyes of
her “Neighbours” (102) and agrees to forgo “any more Servants, or set up any Equipage”
(102) during her discreet long affair with the Prince. Yet, despite this modest facade, she
cannot repress her consumerist desires. Even though her collection of j ewelry, china, and
clothing cannot be openly displayed in public, the “unparalell’d Bounty” from a “Prince
of such Grandeur, and Majesty, so inﬁnitely superior to me” bolsters her vanity and
arrogance. She asks, “what could be more inexpressibly pleasing, and especially, to a
Woman of a vast deal of Pride, as I was?” (104) For Roxana, commodities are not merely
objects but extensions of herself. Through the spectacle of wealth, Roxana not only
afﬁrms her position as a satisﬁed female consumer but also seeks to emulate the
aristocratic society she aspires to: “[h]e. .. bought me a Suit, or whole Piece, of the ﬁnest
Brocaded Silk, ﬁgur’d with Gold, and another with Silver, and another of Crimson; so
that I had three Suits of Cloaths, such as the Queen of France would not have disdain’d to

have worn at that time; yet I went out no-where” (106).

113

More importantly, the intertwined nature of commodities and female identity
becomes central in the dressing room scene where Roxana invites the Prince to rub her
face to satisfy himself that she wears no paint. As Laura Brown has demonstrated, the
question of female identity in the eighteenth century was primarily negotiated through the
representation of the female toilet, often through the lady’s dressing room or through the
list of objects adorning the female body. Appealing to the Prince, Roxana asks, “Have
you kiss’d me so often, and don’t you know whether I am Painted, or not? Pray let your
Highness satisﬁe yourself, that you have no Cheats put upon you; for once let me be vain
enough to say, I have not deceiv’d you with false Colours” (108). Urging the Prince to
wipe her face with a “Handkerchief,” Roxana attempts to seduce the Prince with “an
undeniable Demonstration” of her physical beauty. Roxana also proceeds to wash her
face with water, as she seeks to prove to the Prince that her beauty “is the meer Work of
Nature” (108). These actions of wiping and washing her face conﬁrm that Roxana wears
no “Paint,” but the scene nonetheless evokes objects necessary for female adornment —
e.g., “Paint” or cosmetics —and thereby links the world of commodities and female
identity. Even in the act of asserting her authenticity, Roxana displays herself as a
beautiful “Object” that strikes the Prince with speechless admiration and “astonishment”
(107). Despite Roxana’s disavowal of “Paint,” this toilet scene draws attention to
complex issues of commodiﬁcation and female adornment, implicating Roxana in the
material world.

As Brown points out, moreover, the act of wiping alludes to the word “sponge”

which had a concurrent meaning as a toilet accessory and ﬁnancial payment in the

114

eighteenth century. 22 Defoe describes in his Ram how Lady Credit refers to the word
“Spunge” to express her despair that Parliament might postpone or stop the payment of
interest on government securities: “And now my Face is Threatened to be wash’d with a
Spunge.” (535) 23 Unlike Lady Credit who views the act of having her face washed as a
threat to her identity, Roxana uses the same act to empower her identity. By presenting
“an undeniable Demonstration” of her genuine beauty, she maximizes her value as a
commodity. Although she afﬁrms her authentic nature and insists that she has not
“deceiv’d him with false Colours,” it is nevertheless through her carefully orchestrated
artiﬁce that Roxana deliberately turns herself into an object of beauty in which she
becomes a commercialized fetish of his desire.

Despite her insistence that she is a “Meer Work of Nature,” Roxana’s
commodiﬁcation is evident when her beauty is reduced to bodily parts only: “a ﬁne lac’d
Head; a ﬁne Face and Neck.” Her transformation into “the Object perfect” is complete
when the Prince clasps her neck with a “ﬁne Necklace of Diamonds.” Nevertheless, it
should be emphasized that Roxana’s self-commodiﬁcation is accompanied by her newly
gained visual power. She deliberately displays herself in the most advantageous terms,
as she allows the Prince to take “his View of [her]” as she boasts: “Nor was I a very
indifferent Figure as to Shape; tho’ I had had two Children by my Gentleman, and six by
my true Husband, I say, I was no despicable Shape.” Roxana even becomes enamoured
with herself, as she ﬁnds pleasure in her appearance: “I was now become the vainest

Creature upon Earth, and particularly, of my Beauty” (97). Roxana’s response to the

 

22 Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity. (Ithaca, Cornell University Press: 2001), 117-118.
According to Oxford English Dictionary, “sponge” can be deﬁned as to deprive, to press for money, to
drain or empty, or to divest debt.

23 lbid., 117.

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reﬂection of herself in the “Peir-Glass” reafﬁrms her identity as female consumer with
powerful desires: “I was all on ﬁre with the Sight, and began to wonder what it was that
was coming to me” (109).

Just as Roxana feels empowered by her commodiﬁcation, sheumaintains control
over the commercial exchange relationship she has established with the Prince. As seen
in the passage below, Roxana contemptuously points out the shortcomings of men like

the Prince:

They raise the Value of the Object which they pretend to pitch upon, by
their Fancy; I say, raise the Value of it, at their own Expence; give vast
Presents for a ruinous Favour, which is so far from equal to the Price, that
nothing will, at last, prove more absurd, than the Cost Men are at to

purchase their own Destruction (110).

By arguing that men pay more “Value” for an object than it’s worth, Roxana criticizes the
men for their foolish and reckless habits of consumption. In short, men become “absurd”
consumers, for they end up purchasing their “own Destruction” (110). In addition,
Roxana learns that if she masquerades as a subservient female, she can manipulate the
system that depends upon women submitting to men in power. Even as she commits to
prostitution, Roxana feigns the submission of a “Woman of Virtue and Modesty” (67).
Just as she had dressed up for her landlord, Roxana feigns a submissive, compliant
femininity for the beneﬁt of the Prince. Her impersonation of proper femininity is also a

commodiﬁed form of femininity that trades on stock images of women. Dressed up in

116

clothes he likes best to please the Prince, she is careful to restrain her “avaricious” (112)
appetites and makes it a policy to ask for nothing directly in order to obtain generous gifts

from the Prince:

His Presents were, after that, in Gold, and very frequent, and large; often a
hundred Pistoles, never less than ﬁfty, at a time; and I must do myself the
Justice, that I seem’d rather backward to receive, than craving, and

encroaching; not that I had not an avaricious temper (1 12).

Here, Roxana’s masquerade of hyperfemininity does not simply reveal the constructed
nature of gender. It also shows how she can achieve autonomy and control over the
Prince through her “Harvest” (112) of goods. In contrast, the Prince exempliﬁes the
potential pitfalls of consumerism by excessive spending and undisciplined urges: Roxana
draws a picture of him as “a man enslav’d to the Rage of his vicious Appetite; he
defaces the image of God in his Soul; dethrones his Reason; causes Conscience to
abdicate the Possession, and exalts sense into the vacant Throne; he deposes the Man,
and exalts the Brute” (111).

Roxana’s practice of feminine mimicry can be illuminated by Joan Riviere’s
concept of “Womanliness as a Masquerade.” Riviere theorizes that the female
masquerade occurs when a woman adopts exaggeratedly feminine gestures—such as
helplessness, deference, coquettishness—to compensate for the need to act out the

prerogatives of masculinity. She argues that “women who wish for masculinity may put

117

. . . . 24

on a mask of womanlrness to avert anxrety and the retrrbutron feared from men.” In the
same manner, Roxana’s performance of submissive femininity becomes an effective
means of disguising her transgressive desire for the prerogatives of masculinity, the

privileges of independence and agency.

“A Lady of Pleasure, A Woman of Business”
Up to this point in the novel, Roxana’s construction of self through exchange and
consumption remains largely private in nature and has appealed mostly to her sense of
vanity and pride, yet her consumerism also enables her to produce a public identity when
she transforms herself from “a Lady of Pleasure” to “a Woman of Business” (169).
While Roxana had deﬁned herself previously using commodities and moveable objects
she can hoard and carry, she evolves into a more sophisticated consumer when she
acquires lessons in dealing with the complicated demands of capital management and
commercial transactions through men like the Dutch Merchant or Sir Robert Clayton.
The Dutch Merchant is known to be “a Person of great Reputation for a Man of
Substance, and of Honesty” (149), just as Dutch society was often regarded as a model of
efﬁciency and industry during this period. Joyce Appleby notes that the “sustained
demonstration of this Dutch commercial prowess acted more forcefully upon the English
imagination than any other economic development of the seventeenth century.” 23

Whereas Roxana had been primarily obsessed with objects as a source of wealth, she

soon becomes skilled in the methods of exchange and circulation of capital necessary to

 

2" Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade.” Formations of Fantasy. eds. Victor Burgin,
James Donald and Cora Kaplan, (Methuen: London, 1986), 35.

23 Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 197 8), 73.

118

the workings of consumer culture. Roxana’s consumer activities become more intricate as
she masters the handling for her own purposes of more ﬂuid forms of wealth, such as
credit, banking and investment. Indeed, consumerism in the eighteenth century required
increasingly complex ways of negotiating a radically unstable credit economy with new
mechanisms of speculation, such as notes issued by the Bank of England, promissory
notes, or shares in joint-stock companies.

Roxana realizes that she can’t carry or transport much of the wealth she has
secured in the form of objects and jewels. These things even become a liability to her
when she ﬁnds out to her dismay that her jewels can be easily identiﬁable and traceable:
“As soon as the Jew saw the Jewels, I saw my Folly; and it was ten Thousand to one but I
had been ruin’d, and perhaps, put to Death in as cruel a Manner possible” (150). To
Roxana, tangible objects have limited exchange value, like the “items of value

” 26 whereas newer

representative of pre-capitalist systems of value, wealth and exchange,
forms of wealth—like bills, credit, capital—are seen to be more advantageous: these new
forms of paper money can be easily transformed into money anytime or anywhere, as
long as they are taken at face value or “credited” among trusted parties. Upon
consultation with the Dutch merchant, Roxana proceeds to convert her valuable goods
and material wealth into the elusive form of Bills and paper currency, having been
introduced to the principles of the international transfer of funds and the liquidity of
capital. Such mechanisms of exchange and circulation bound the commercial world

together—money circulated through society in the way objects become exchanged,

swapped, bought by the consumers.

 

26 Dijikstra, Defoe and Economics: The Fortunes of Roxana in the History of Interpretation. 43.

119

Roxana becomes proﬁcient in the workings of high ﬁnance and capital
management under Sir Robert Clayton’s counsel, when she learns successfully to invest
her existing capital for a higher return. Ultimately, her skillful engagement in various
ﬁnancial transactions and in capital management signals her transformation from “a Lady
of Pleasure” to “a Woman of Business, and of great Business too” (169). Roxana
comments, “by managing my Business thus myself, and having large Sums to do with, I
became as expert in it, as any She-Merchant of them all; I had Credit in the Bank for a
large Sum of Money, and Bills and Notes for much more” (170). Regardless of Roxana’s
objection that “I was a young Woman; that I had been us’d to live plentifully, and with a
good Appearance; and that I knew not how to be a Miser” (208), she restrains her
extravagance, lays up “an incredible Wealth” (223) and manages to ﬁnd “Ways to live
without wasting either Principal or Interest” (224).

For Roxana, marriage is a bad business, so she refuses to give up her money and

independence:

1 then did as good as confess, that it was upon the Account of my Money
that I refus’d him; and that tho’ I cou’d give up my Virtue, and expose
myself, yet I wou’d not give up my Money, which , tho’ it was true, yet
was really too gross for me to acknowledge, and I cou’d not pretend to
marry him upon that Principle neither; then as to having him, and make
over all my Estate out of his Hands, so as not to give him the Management

of what I had (186).

120

She rejects the Dutch merchant’s marriage proposal for fear of being in “a State of
Inferiority, if not of Bondage” (211), insisting that she would rather be a mistress than a
wife: a “wife is look’d upon, as but an Upper-servant, a Mistress is a Sovereign” (170).
Thus it is not surprising that Roxana chooses to describe herself in masculine terms
associated with the world of commerce and business, insisting that woman was
“Masculine in her politick Capacity” and “as ﬁt to govern and enjoy her own Estate”
(188). Speaking an “Amazonian Language,” Roxana declares that “seeing Liberty
seem’d to be the Men’s Property, 1 wou’d be a Man-Woman” (212). Here, her self-
proclaimed status as a “Man-Woman,” neither male nor female, suggests the monstrosity
of “something shocking to Nature” (196), for her mastery of the capitalist system also
undermines the patriarchal order which is largely based upon clear gender difference.
Just as Roxana learns the importance of investment in ﬁnancial matters, she also
decides to capitalize aggressively on her marketability. Roxana knows her beauty is her
best physical asset, “the Great Article that supported my interest” (143), yet she becomes
painfully aware that the value of her beauty might decline. Fearing that her multiple
pregnancies and advancing age might cause “scandalous Use of [her] Prostituted
Body”(110), she coldly assesses her pregnancy as a negative factor that would depreciate
her worth: “if I bred often, it wou’d something impair me in the Great Article that
supported my Interest, 1 mean what he called Beauty; that as that declined I might expect
the Fire would abate, and the Warmth with which I was now so caressed would cool, and
in time, like the other Mistresses of Great Men, I might be dropped again”(143).
Realizing that women are especially perishable commodities with a short shelf life,

Roxana is driven to more effective management of her sexuality. If she depicts herself as

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a common household object that has outdone its use—“an old Piece of Plate that had
been boarded up some Years, and comes out tarnish’d and discolour’d’” (224), she insists
that she is “not at-all irnpair’d in Beauty” (224). Rather, she is determined to market her
best assets, using her body as eroticized material in the public realm and turning herself

into a famous whore, or Roxana, ultimately.

“Why am I a Whore Now?”: Redefining Prostitution

At ﬁrst glance, prostitution may seem to present the female body as a product in a
cash nexus wherein female labor is constructed as a commodity for male desire. Roxana,
however, does not merely sell her sexuality but becomes an active agent in marketing her
labor for the sake of economic self-sufﬁciency and liberty. Rather than being subjected
to the terms of the masculine world of business, she single-handedly turns the tables and
becomes an active agent of commercial transactions. She thus successfully obtains
female economic independence and agency in what has traditionally been seen as a
masculine monopoly of the socioeconomic public sphere. Roxana’s ‘business’—a
commercial exchange in which she contractually trafﬁcs her sexual labor for proﬁt--
serves to redeﬁne the nature of women’s work at a time when women were losing
economic ground and becoming increasingly disenfranchised from the labor force due to
the radical shift brought about by male-controlled capitalist production. Roxana’s use of
her ﬁnancial knowledge in the marketing of her physical body warns against
noncontextual approaches that excessively minimize women’s participation in the
economy and overstate their subordination. Maxine Berg, for examples, argues against

“ahistorical assumptions of static structures which entail unidirectional accounts of

122

women’s subordination,” insisting that women’s work “dissected as a changing part of a
dynamic process of industrial and capitalist growth or decline... can help reveal '
undiscovered directions and possibilities.” 27
Historians have pointed out how the business of female prostitution in a newly
commercialized and increasingly urbanized eighteenth century coincided with emergent
consumerism. Along with a growing number of female consumers and with the
codiﬁcation of retail space and advertising, prostitutes were frequently seen as engaging
in public display or advertising themselves in public space, and thus conﬂating the space
of business with their business. This rising presence of women in the city streets caused
deep underlying anxieties among contemporaries. For example, reformer Saunders
Welch complained about seeing “women publickly exposing themselves at windows and
doors of bawdy-houses like beasts in a market for public sale, with language, dress, and
gesture too offensive to mention.” 28 Couched in business terms, Welch’s denunciations
against prostitution suggest that the merchandizing of sex was threatening because it
suggested the possibility of female economic self-sufﬁciency. Prostitution also was
disturbing because it offered for public sale what was ofﬁcially regarded as a private

affair, making the public realm of business indistinguishable from the private realm of

domesticity.

 

27 Maxine Berg, “Women’s Work, Mechanization and the Early Phases of Industrialization in
England,” in ed., Patrick Joyce, The Historical Meanings of Work. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), 89.

2’ Saunders Welch, “A Proposal to Render Effectual a Plan to Remove the Nuisance of Common
Prostitutes from the Streets of This Metropolis.” Quoted from Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Suba'ects:
Women. Shopping. and Busines_s_ in the Eighteenth Centray. I36.

 

123

If some historians, like Janet Wolff, have argued against the female counterpart of
the ﬂaneur, asserting that "women could not stroll alone in the city," 29 others, like Judith
R. Walkowitz and Deborah Epstein Nord have claimed in their work on Victorian urban
female strollers the existence of ﬂaneuses. 3 0 They have identiﬁed prostitutes and
emerging middle-class female shoppers in the late nineteenth century as ‘ﬂaneuses,’ who
were seen as transgressive in their ability to roam outside in public, not just as women of
the streets but as perceiving subjects. The role of the ﬂaneuse was fraught with cultural
contradictions, for women risked becoming spectacles in order to become spectators in
the public realm, traditionally a male domain.

While no scholarship has yet made the connection between Roxana and ﬂanery,
this chapter contends that Roxana can be characterized as a prototype of the transgressive
ﬂaneuse. By being both a prostitute and a businesswoman, Roxana participates in the
public realm and competes with men, as she carefully maintains her consumer activities
and business transactions. Whereas her whoring constitutes her body as a valuable
commodity, Roxana undermines being reduced to a mere object, a “to-be-looked-at,” by
assuming the position of a powerful viewing agent who vigorously exercises the right to
observe. Indeed, Roxana is largely concerned with achieving the role of a powerful
spectator throughout the novel. The scene in which Roxana strips and thrusts Amy into
bed with her landlord “husband” (70) can be seen as an instance where Roxana
demonstrates her desire to assume visual authority. Aware that her whoring has been

reduced her to a dependent position, she makes Amy an objectiﬁcation of her own

 

29 Janet Wolff, "The Invisible F laneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity," The Problems
of Modernity: Adomo and Benjamin, ed. Andrew Benjamin. (London: Routledge, 1989), 148.

3° Judith Walkowich, City of Dreadful Delight. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,) 1992;
Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

124

condition. By placing Amy in her own vulnerable position and watching her, Roxana is
permitted to appropriate the powerful male gaze. Her power comes from standing apart
but nevertheless watching: “She stood-by all the while,” while the landlord did “what he
woul’d with Amy” (81). By instrumentalizing her body, her pleasure, and her experience,
as William Warner rightly observes, Roxana “masters herself and others through a cool
act of voyeurism.” 3 '
Similarly, Roxana becomes a powerful spectator with her itinerant gaze during
“several Perambulations” she undertakes with the foreign Prince. She experiences much
freedom and mobility as she journeys across such metropolitan commercial sites as Paris
and London. Furthermore, her role as the Prince’s mistress gives her the prerogative to
embark on a Grand Tour, an activity usually reserved for men during the eighteenth
century. Despite her disavowal that she has no mind “to write the History of my'Travels
on this side of the World, at least, not now, [as] it would be too full of Variety” (140),
Roxana delights in telling her readers of the cultural differences she encounters during
her travels across the Continent. While she expresses her distaste for Rome with its
“Ecclesiasticks and scoundrel Rabbles of the Common People” (140), her ﬁrsthand
accounts are more concerned with observing female behaviors and manners that later
shape her sense of autonomy. Her roving gaze allows her to make “very diverting and
useful Observations in all these Places; and particularly, of the Conduct of the Ladies”

(139). She becomes proﬁcient in Italian books and language, just as she expands her

knowledge of “all the intrieguing Arts of that Part of the World” (140). But more

 

3' William B Wamer, Licensing Entertainment. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1998),
157.

125

importantly, Roxana’s itinerant consumerist gaze enables her to acquire many foreign

commodities that prove to be instrumental for her transformation:

Here my Lord bought me a little Female Turkish Slave, who being Taken
at Sea by a Malthese Man of War, was brought in there; and of her I learnt
the Turkish Language; their way of Dressing, and Dancing, and some
Turkish, or rather Moorish Songs, of which I made Use, to my Advantage,
on an extraordinary Occasion, some Years after, as you shall hear in its

Place. (214)

With the help of this captured Turkish slave, Roxana masters both the “Turkish
Language” and “their Way of Dressing, and Dancing” (214), that she later makes use of
during her Turkish masquerade in London. Here, her travelling intersects with
proliferating discourses of consumerism and global commerce: Roxana proceeds to
engage in a ﬂurry of shopping activities where she becomes an owner of a Turkish Slave
as well as many ﬁne exotic spoils of mercantile trade. The acquisition of the slave,
captured as one of the spoils of a Turkish ship by a "Malthese Man of War" (140-)
underscores mercantile violence during her travels overseas. Here, the non-European
slave becomes an item of curiosity, a piece of merchandise to be purchased and traded.
Later, Roxana appropriates the exotic other to refashion herself, using consumables like
her Turkish dress to enhance her sexual appeal in English court society.

As a counterpart to the slave she procures, Roxana also purchases a luxurious

commodity, as she reports: "...and with this Turkish slave. . .I bought the rich cloathes

126

too as a Curiosity, having never seen the like" (174). Much like Montagu in her
elaborate description of Turkish dress, Roxana takes pleasure in her sensual description
of the ornate garment: The "dress was extraordinary ﬁne indeed the Robe was a ﬁne
Persian, or India Damask embroider’d with Gold, and set with Pearl in the Work, and
some Torqouis stones." At the same time, Roxana’s “rich Cloaths,” with their display of
valuable gems, are a product of commerce geared towards female consumers who
become proxies for male acquisition and mercantile expansionism, in much the same way
that Belinda in The Rape of the Lora, decked with the "the glitt’ring Spoil" of "India’s
glowing Gems" and all that "Arabia" has to offer, becomes a proxy for the products of
domestic and international commerce. 32 Roxana’s appropriation of these exotic
commodities underlines how her prosperity and independence are intermeshed in
mercantile capitalism and suggests British women’s complicit role in the “male
acquisitiveness” of British mercantile commerce. After all, Roxana ends up marrying the
Dutch merchant, whose wealth is bound up with investment in “stock in the English East-
India Company” (3 02). Her two sons, moreover, become successful merchants who
participate in overseas trade, as Roxana proudly mentions: “I have hinted at large, what I

had done for my two Sons, one at Messina, and the other in the Indies” (311).

 

32 Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock. ”Alexander Pope. ed. Pat Rogers. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 82. Louis Landa, “Pope’s Belinda, The General Emporie of the World, and the
Wondrous Worm,” Essays in Eighteenth English Literature. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980);
Laura Brown, Ends of Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1993). As Louis Landa and Laura Brown have
argued, the woman’s body, “deckt with all that Land and Sea afford,”(Canto V, line 11) provides early
eighteenth-century writers with a convenient trope for both the celebratory and the alarming aspects of
overseas trade. While noting the complaints of those “balance of trade” mercantilists who viewed all
consumption of imported goods as detrimental to the nation’s welfare, Landa sides with those writers who
praise the beneﬁts of what he describes as “economic expansion.” Brown, on the other hand, is focused on
uncovering the ideological underside of those economic relations she deﬁnes as “imperialist”; as “women
become the proxies for men, object and agent of accumulation are reversed, and thus the female ﬁgure is
made to bear responsibility for empire” (16).

127

Turkish Masquerade

Perhaps the epitome of Roxana’s commodiﬁcation of Turkish culture can be seen
in the episode of her “Turkish masquerade.” Both Roxana and Montagu’s masquerades
emphasize the ways in which women’s consumption of exotic, foreign fashion becomes
the basis for their formation as active, desiring subjects. Whereas Montagu disguises
herself in a Turkish habit to gain increased mobility and visual authority as a spectator,
Roxana’s deployment of the Turkish habit is more concerned with manipulating her
status as a spectacle for her own pleasure and interest. “[P]ossess’d with so vain an
Opinion of [her] own Beauty” (212), Roxana maximizes her value by making a
spectacular display of her Turkish “costume” “to all the Advantage possible,” impressing
many “admirers and Persons of very great Figure” (214) from the court. Dressed in the
“extraordinary ﬁne” (215) “habit of a Turkish Princess” (214), Roxana participates in
British mercantilism and consumption of exotic commodities. Her Turkish dress evokes
images of slave trading, violence, and the exploitation of raw materials: “A Malthese
Man of War had. taken a Turkish Vessel going from Constantinople to
Alexandria. . .and as the Ladies were made Slaves, so their ﬁne Cloaths were thus
expos’d” (214).

By performing a dance in her seductive Turkish dress, Roxana not only
appropriates the clothing but literally comes to embody the identity of an exotic
“Roxana,” a term synonymous with a whore: “I had the Name Roxana presently ﬁx’d
upon me all over the Court End of Town, as effectually as if I had been Christen’d
Roxana (217). Throughout the eighteenth century, the name “Roxana,” eastern in origin,

was associated with sexual license and seduction, since the Turkish Empire stood not so

128

much as one colonized by England but as a weakened empire that was seen by Europeans
as synonymous with sexual proﬂigacy and excessive appetites. To the western European
imagination, “Roxana” represented such troubling aspects of the oriental empire as
sexuality, duplicity, and violence. 33 From the historical Roxolona of the sixteenth
century to Defoe’s Roxana, “Roxana/Roxona/Roxolana,” the ﬁgure of an Orientalized,
exotic female with beguiling beauty, was a sign of oriental excess, an embodiment of
both the attractions and corruptions that exotic luxury represented for the eighteenth
century.34

Despite signiﬁcant instances of disguise in Roxana, critics have not paid much
attention speciﬁcally to the relationship between Roxana’s masquerade and the rise of
consumerism in the eighteenth century. Catherine Craft-Fairchild and Mary Ann
Schoﬁeld both uncover many largely neglected works about masquerades by women
writers, but they are solely interested in the women’s treatment of female masquerade and
fail to account for interest in the topic by male writers. 3 3 Terry Castle examines the
function of masquerade scenes in several novels of the period, by both men and women,
but except for few passing comments, she leaves out R_or_ta_na. 3 6 Blewett, in a very short

article, “Roxana and the Masquerade,” is one of the few who have addressed the

 

33 David Blewett, Defoe’s Art of Fiction-Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack and
Roxana. (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1979), 123, 165. David Blewett notes that Roxana is the
rebellious wife who tried to overthrow Usbek’s despotic rule in The Persian Letters. as well as the
courtesan of Alexander who killed his queen Statira in jealousy.

3" Ros Ballaster, “Performing Roxane: The Oriental Woman as the Sign of Luxury in Eighteenth-
Century Fictions.” eds. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, Luxury in the Eighteenth Century (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 176.

33 Catherine Craft-Fairchild, Masquerade and Gender. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State

University Press, 1993); Mary Anne Schoﬁeld, Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind. (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1990).

36 Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986).

129

masquerade in m, which he reads as Defoe’s satiric attack on the decadence of
Restoration court society. 37 Warner in Licensing Entertainment sees Defoe’s use of
masquerade in ngaaa as a part of an effort to rewrite and appropriate the formulaic
convention of the novels of amorous intrigue written by women. 38

But in general scholars have ignored how Roxana’s masquerade is indebted to
consumerism in the eighteenth century. My approach differs from those of the above
critics by proposing to read Roxana’s masquerade within the context of the ongoing
controversies over the pleasures and perils of consumer culture. Against the backdrop of
emergent commodity culture, Roxana’s impersonation of the exotic ‘other’ can be seen as
a consumer practice which depended on the foreign ‘other’ for its sense of novelty and
luxury. By dressing up as the exotic ‘other,’ she transforms herself into a new, tantalizing
commodity that caters to the Orientalist fantasies and pleasures of consumers.

Roxana’s Turkish masquerade corroborates Brown’s argument that English
women’s bodies become an index for material consumption and mercantile capitalism.
Goods for female consumption—dress and omamentations—came to stand for the
economic enterprise of the English empire, in which “the agency of the acquisitive
subject and the urgency of accumulation are concealed and deﬂected through. . .the
dressing of the female body.” 39 Brown explains that the ﬁgure of the woman becomes a
proxy for imperialist acquisition or a scapegoat for imperialistic violence, as she is made

to bear responsibility for the system by which she is adorned. In contrast, I would argue,

Roxana actively participates in the commodifying process which implicates her in the

 

 

 

37 David Blewett, “Roxana and the Masquerades” Modem Langtig Review. 65 (1970): 499-502.
38 Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 154.

39 Brown, Ends of Engire. 1 I6.

130

imperialist aims of mercantile capitalism. She also illustrates how a larger cultural
obsession with consumption operates predominantly through realms of desire, fantasy
and personal identity. In other words, if eighteenth-century’s Britain’s mercantile
expansionism opened up a new world of strange sights and tantalizing goods, Roxana’s
masquerade is deeply embedded in the workings of consumerism, which involves
commodifying herself to emphasize her desirability as a spectacle that offers a sense of
pleasure and wonder to its viewers. In such a spectacle-oriented commodity culture, the
foreign ‘other’ often becomes central in the process of creating consumerist fantasy and
desire.

Dressed in her “extraordinary ﬁne” Turkish dress, Roxana emphasizes her
desirability as a foreign exotic commodity that can be readily purchased and owned, thus
creating and fulﬁlling a consmner fantasy. Fully ensuring that all the people had “full
View of [her] Dress” (215), she pulls off an elaborate and carefully staged theatrical
performance in which she reproduces the foreign ‘other’ for domestic consumption.
Indeed, Roxana typiﬁes an average female consumer when she expresses pleasure at the
bargain price she had paid for her Turkish habit, for she paid “sixty Pistoles in Italy, but
[it] cost more in the Country from whence it came.” She is even more delighted with its
use-value, exclaiming that “little did I think, when I bought it, that I shou’d put it to such
a Use as this” (215). Roxana’s process of identiﬁcation with her Turkish dress is so
complete that she becomes interpellated as Roxana, when one of the Gentlemen cries out,
“Roxana! Roxana!” (217) Roxana’s spectacular display of herself thus transforms her
into a powerful courtesan : “I had the Name of Roxana presently ﬁx’d upon me all over

the Court End of Town, as effectually as if I had been Christen’d Roxana” (217).

131

By positioning herself as a commodity on display for viewers with her seductive
Turkish dress, Roxana self-consciously performs as the ‘other,’ fulﬁlling the exotic
fantasies of her audience. Here, Roxana’s Turkish masquerade is paradigmatic of
growing consumerism in which a taste for exotic luxuries from overseas continued to
arouse consumer desires in the eighteenth century. British consumers coveted these new
foreign commodities which were closely intertwined with their deep desire for novelties
and unattainable luxuries. When Roxana’s dress draws praise from its viewers, it is
because of its novelty and uniqueness, it being “perfectly new”: “The Company were
under the greatest Surprize imaginable; the very Musick stopp’d a-while to gaze; for the
Dress was indeed, exceedingly surprising, perfectly new, very agreeable, and wonderful
rich” (21 6).

Simultaneously, through her display of the non-European ‘other’ for the visual
pleasures of European consumers, Roxana’s masquerade reproduces a type of fetishistic
scopophilia in which viewers are able to gain control of and possess the object of their
gaze. 40 Dressed in a seductive Turkish habit, Roxana transforms herself into a
“admirably ﬁne” spectacle so that “every-body look’d. . . .with a kind of Pleasure...”
(221). Roxana’s masquerade engages her audience in the process of fetishized
scopophilia wherein her spectators, the King and company, obtain pleasure from'the act

of looking. In much the same way that the male gaze could assume control over the

 

4° Laura Muvey “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” eds. Robyn Warhol and Diane Hemdl.
Feminisms. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 444. Although it is primarily concerned
with the male gaze, Laura Mulvey’s discussion of cinematic spectatorship can be helpful in thinking about
European consumers’ spectatorial pleasure in non-European commodities. Mulvey argues that in
mainstream Hollywood ﬁlms that women become objects of male viewing pleasure through scopophilia
and voyeurism. Women are displayed as the objects of fetishistic or voyeuristic gazes, which make them
concurrently alluring and threatening. By substituting the real with its replacement, “a thing satisfying in
itself,” fetishistic scopophilia enables a male or a masculinized spectator to achieve visual mastery over the
‘other’ so that the female ﬁgure becomes “reassuring rather than dangerous” (591).

132

female ‘other’ in classic cinema by fetishizing the image, the European consumer gaze in
Roxana’s account of her Turkish dance gains a sense of control over the foreign ‘other’
by fetishizing the object. If a fetish serves as a substitute for the real, Roxana’s
masquerade exempliﬁes the process in which non-European experiences become
transformed into fetishized objects, in the absence of the real or authentic ‘other.’ In fact,
Roxana’s masquerade becomes a highly desirable commodity for eager European
consumers, because it is only a copy, a substitute for the real. Roxana’s Turkish dance,
like the fake diamonds on her Turkish dress, is fraudulent, for the spectators are
convinced that it is “Mahometan” while, as she tells us, it is actually French in essence
(216).

In fact, Roxana’s dance appeals to European consumers even more than the
authentic “Persian” (215) dances by “Georgian and Armenian” (221) slaves because her
commodiﬁcation of the ‘other’ ultimately also domesticates it into a manageable form
that can easily be circulated and reproduced. As Nussbaum aptly puts it, “Roxana’s
colonizing novelty supersedes the other women’s barbarous nativism.” 4‘ However,
Nussbaum does not consider the role of consumerism that reinforces these oppositions.
Despite its true “Novelty” (221), the authentic dance by slaves is condemned as being
“wild and Bizarre” (211) by the audience. In contrast, Roxana’s imitation of fashionable
Turkish dance is more pleasing to British viewers because its novelty serves to reinforce

Britain’s consumption of foreign goods:

 

’1 Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Matemitv, Sexualig, and Empire in Eighteenth-Centug
English Narratives (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1995), 36.

133

They danc’d three times all-alone, for no-body indeed, cou’d dance with
them: The Novelty pleas’d, truly, but yet there was something wild and
Bizarre in it, because they really acted to the Life the barbarous Country
whence they came; but as mine had the French Behavior under the
Mahometan Dress, it was every way as new, and pleas’d much better,

indeed. (221 )

Roxana’s dance strikes the audience as superior because it adeptly transforms “barbaric,
exotic” experiences into desirable objects for British consumers. In other words, her
Turkish masquerade typiﬁes the process by which foreign experiences and bodies
became potential raw materials to be sold at the European markets in response to
increasing consumers’ desire for the latest fashion and novelty.

Roxana’s Turkish masquerade is exemplary of display-oriented commodity
culture in which foreign ‘otherness’ catered to consumers’ visual pleasure. Through her
appropriation of such “otherness,” Roxana manages to create a voyeuristic spectacle in
which she turns both the foreign ‘other’ and herself into a tantalizing commodity for her
audience’s consumption in a way that gains her currency through the act of self-display.
Although one might argue that such visibility risks Roxana’s reduction to a passive object
within commercial systems of exchange, she undeniably ends up exercising power by
controlling the terms in which she is viewed by others. This agency is enabled by
consumer activities in which she carefully selects and displays novelties in a way that

gives her both a commercial and visual “Advantage” (214).

134

The Domestic Gaze

Whereas the early part of Ema seems to celebrate the heroine’s ability, to forge
new selves through self-commodifying consumerism, its later sequences suggest Defoe’s
reservations about female consumerist desires by setting them in tension with the
imperatives of domesticity. In what follows, I shall argue that the ﬁgure of Susan, who is
obsessed with establishing Roxana’s maternity, represents the domestic gaze that
attempts to discipline the dangerous power Roxana wields as a female consumer. Most
critics have failed to account for Susan’s function as a monitoring gaze for Roxana,
particularly in the context of Roxana’s consumerism, despite the crucial role Susan plays
in revealing Roxana’s past dissolute life and her consumption of exotic foreign '
‘otherness.’ Warner comes close to seeing Susan as serving a policing function for
Roxana by equating Susan with a “remorseless superego, an emanation of a Law that
Roxana cannot elude, because it comes from within the self,” yet he considers Susan
solely as Roxana’s surrogate, “the original unmasked self.” 42 Other recent scholars tend
to view Susan as Roxana’s nightmare reader who is determined to expose Roxana’s
ﬁction no matter the cost. Following David Marshall’s interpretation of Susan as the
“reader” who is intent on detecting the ﬁction of Roxana, 4" Sandra Sherman also
conceives Susan as the reader who “refuses indeterminacy; refuses to accept textuality as
9, 44

the limit case; who penetrates Roxana’s persona despite frantic efforts to elude her.

But while both Marshall and Sherman agree in seeing Susan as an astute reader of

 

’2 Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 170;

’3 David Marshall, The Figure of theater: Shaftesbu_ry, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 132.

’4 Sherman, Finance and F ictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century. 158.

135

Roxana’s history, their preoccupation solely with the relationship between Roxana and
Susan as that between reader and text/author fails to address other larger concerns, such
as gender and socioeconomic context.

My approach seeks to go beyond such forrnalist analysis by emphasizing gender
in relation to consumerism. By grounding Raxaaa in an historically speciﬁc moment of
consumerism and linking it with gender ideology, I seek to emphasize Susan’s function
as a policing gaze intent on containing Roxana as a consumer and exposing her violations
of codes of domesticity. Susan serves to critique Roxana’s female consumption by
revealing the latter’s neglect of domestic responsibilities as a mother. But the idea of
domesticity that Susan represents also takes on added signiﬁcance in the context of
Roxana’s masquerade, which relies heavily on the consumption of foreign goods.
Through her fetishization and commercialization of oriental delights, Roxana’s
masquerade constructs her spectators as domestic consumers who are easily seduced by
the allure of exotic luxuries into a dissolute lifestyle. In this sense, Defoe seems to be
concerned not only with the ways Roxana’s consumer activities challenge emerging
eighteenth-century beliefs about women’s prescribed domestic role, but also with the way
her consumption of foreign goods posed a threat to the prosperity of Britain’s domestic
economy. 45

After her successful career as a courtesan who capitalizes on her exotic image as a
‘Roxana,’ Roxana decides to discard her dissolute past and reinvent herself as a
respectable domestic woman. Determined to “transform... into a new Shape” (251) by

taking up life as a Quaker woman, she admits: “I had begun a little, as I have said above,

 

’5 I understand the term “domestic” to mean both home and nation, and read the domestic home as
ﬁgured in close relation to the domestic nation.

136

to reﬂect upon my Manner of Living, and to think of putting a new face upon it” (250).
The analogy between Roxana’s newly imprinted identity and a freshly minted coin with a
“new face” foregrounds Roxana’s skillful use of the evolving ﬁnancial discourses of the
emergent market society for her own purposes. Along with radical changes brought
about by new systems of ﬁnance and banking that were dependent on paper-money and
systems of public credit, the concept of money was increasingly becoming unstable in the
early eighteenth century. It no longer reﬂected the intrinsic value of real, solid things, but
was contingent upon the uncertainties of a speculative marketplace. Even metallic coins,
which were traditionally seen to have a tangible, solid value, were no longer seen as the
sole legitimate source of worth due to the monetary conversions and different currencies .
entailed in global trade and commerce. In this regard, Roxana’s numismatic trope
illustrates how the ﬁnancial revolution changed in decisive ways how people thought
about themselves and their world. Deidre Lynch, for example, argues that the eighteenth
century’s understanding of character or subjectivity coincided with contemporary
discussions about “legible faces, minted money, and imprinted texts.” Similarly,
Roxana’s ability to acquire, collect and exchange different identities is inseparable ﬁ'om
marketplace discourses. 46 Taking advantage of the volatility and liquidity of currency to
fashion herself, Roxana not only alters her clothing to look like a real Quaker, but also
adjusts her ways of speech and her consumption habits to blend in with the simple ways
of the Quakers. Her transformation into a plain and modest Quaker is so complete that
even her “very Face” (251) appears different to the point of being unrecognizable to her

closest companion, Amy. Indeed her counterfeiting is so effective that she appears even

 

’6 Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 8,
35.

137

more authentic than the actual Quakers: “There was not a Quaker in the Town look’d less
like a Counterfeit than I did: But all this was my particular Plot to be the more
compleately conceal’d, and that I might depend upon being not known” (256).

However, if Roxana’s successive masquerades participate in the ﬂuidity of the
marketplace by taking advantage of uncertain perceptual paradigms in which the line
between the real and the counterfeit is blurred, Defoe’s novel simultaneously betrays an
underlying anxiety about the instability of a system that makes counterfeiting possible.
Whereas Roxana’s Turkish masquerade succeeds in domesticating the ‘barbaric and wild’
elements of the foreign ‘other’ for domestic consumption, Roxana’s masquerade as a
modest, domestic Quaker turns out to be less successful. Accordingly, when Roxana
leads a “life of modest expenditure” as a Quaker in “the delightful Retirement of a
Country-Life” (276) putting on “a scheme of Frugality,” she still cannot abstain from
luxury and conspicuous consumption. She confesses to her “weakest Part, namely, that
[she] lov’d great things, and that [she] lov’d to be ﬂatter’d and courted” (275) and even
considers a marriage to the Prince out of vanity. Despite Roxana’s attempt to maintain a
respectable, domestic veneer, she succumbs to the pleasures of material consumption.
Secretly proud of her past feats, Roxana can’t help displaying herself in her old Turkish

dress in front of her Dutch merchant husband and her Quaker friend:

Amy dress’d me in my old Turkish Habit which I danc’d in formerly,. ..
When all the Dress was put on, I loaded it with Jewels, and in particular, I
plac’d the large Breast-Jewel which he had given me, of a thousand

Pistoles, upon the Front of the Tyhaia, or Head-Dress; where it made a

138

most glorious Show indeed; I had my own Diamond-Necklace on and my

Hair was Tout Brilliant, all glittering with Jewels (292).

When Susan, once employed as a servant in Pallmall where Roxana led a dissolute life as
a courtesan, recounts a story of “how handsome and how ﬁne a Lady this Roxana was”
and of her dancing in a “ﬁne Outlandish Dress” (334), Roxana cannot help but feel
“Please’d and tickl’ed” secretly. But if the extravagant Turkish habit provides an outlet
for Roxana’s extravagant self-display, ironically it is her Turkish dress that ﬁnally makes
Susan suspect her mother’s true identity. To reveal herself as a mother, Roxana would
necessarily have to disclose her past identity as a famous courtesan, and divulge that her
“ill-gotten Wealth” was built on the commodiﬁcation of her own labor and of the image
of the non-European ‘other.’ Roxana fears the moment of recognition: “if the Girl knew
me, I was undone; and to discover any Surprize or Disorder, had been to make her know
me, or guess it, and discover herself” (322). The fear of being exposed as a “counterfeit,”
a “Sham-Lady” or “Cheat” threatens her life of masquerades.

If Roxana purchases and maintains her material prosperity at the cost of the denial
of motherhood, her struggle to keep her identity as a Roxana and mother distinct from
each other suggests that “the impossibility of reconciling motherhood with sexual
freedom is painfully clear in Ragga,” 47 Although Nussbaum overlooks the crucial role
of consumption in forging Roxana’s sexual and economic power, the novel illustrates that
Roxana’s powerful attraction to consumerism may be at odds with domesticity ultimately.
Hence, the novel attempts to contain the extent of Roxana’s consumption by advocating

domesticity through the ﬁgure of Susan. Roxana ﬁnds herself constantly exposed to

 

’7 Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 40.

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Susan’s scrutinizing gaze, a gaze that conﬁnes her both physically and emotionally.
Susan seems to appear everywhere: on the ship, at the Quaker woman’s home, in the
captain’s remarks to the Dutchman, at Tunbridge, and most persistently, in Roxana’s
thoughts and dreams. Like Foucault’s Panoptic gaze, Susan scans and follows Roxana’s
actions despite her mother’s attempts to hide. As Foucault describes the Panopticon, the
inhabitants of the outer ring of the prison never know if they are being watched at any
moment, yet know that they can be watched at any time. 48 In the same manner, even
when Roxana reassures herself that Susan has not “ﬁx’d her Eyes much upon [her]” (325),
she shows that she has internalized the sense of being watched to the extent that she is
constantly in “Disorder” (324) and “Uneasiness” (358), even frightened and threatened.
Even after Susan disappears mysteriously from the story, Susan continues to dominate
Roxana’s consciousness: “As for the poor Girl herself, she was ever before my Eyes; I
saw her by-Night, and by-Day; she haunted my Imagination” (3 74).

Finally, it is Susan’s perspective that ﬁxes Roxana into a patriarchal framework.
John Richetti has rightly argued that Susan thus functions as a monitory gaze that “marks
the re-establishment of a biological and psychological necessity.” 49 Nevertheless while I
fully share the view that Susan’s role is to reinforce gender ideology, I am more
concerned with demonstrating how consumerism plays a crucial role in the construction
of gender ideology. If Roxana’s consumerism allows her to manipulate and master the
exchange economy of eighteenth-century England, Defoe’s novel suggests implicitly that

the threat posed by her ability to exploit the system and to dissemble at will is so great

 

’8 Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books,
1979), 292.

’9 John Richetti. “The Family, Sex, and Marriage in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana, Studies in
the Literary Imagination. (15: 1982), 33.

 

140

that it must be neutralized by reinscribing woman’s role within the dominant patriarchal
system.

While Defoe clearly admired Roxana’s exploitation of shifting market discourses
by portraying her successful rise to material prosperity and ﬁnancial independence, he
was simultaneously troubled about the issues of female consumption. His anxieties are
visible in the Reade—w, as early as 1712, when he expresses his concern about the state of
commerce, "that neglected, sinking, languishing Thing, call'd TRADE, among us." Here
he condemns the greedy and irresponsible behavior not only of stockjobbers but of
fashion-conscious women who are responsible for displacing "True-born English Broad-
Cloth” with exotic imported goods such as "Baubles and ridiculous Knick Knacks," and
"foreign Novelties" of "Vice and Luxury." 50 Invoking traditional debates over luxury in
the early eighteenth century that focused attention on the behavior of female consumers,
Defoe condemns women for their proclivity for foreign luxuries and frivolous items,
associating femininity with uncontrollable desires. In short, women are criticized as
extravagant and irresponsible consumers who indulge in “Vice and Luxury.” More
importantly, women’s consumption of imported goods is seen not only as morally wrong
but as damaging to English trade and economy. Preferring trivial objects and sinful
luxury items to domestic goods, women are depicted as irresponsible and ﬁckle '
consumers whose consumption behaviors undermine domestic economy. Just as Defoe
accuses women of ruining England’s domestic textile industry when he alludes to in
“True-bom English Broad-Cloth,” he continues to attack English female consumers
during the ‘calico crisis’ of 1719-21. In the controversy surrounding the importation of

printed Indian calicoes and chintz in English trade, Defoe also blames “the Folly of our

 

5° Daniel Defoe, The Review. 1:38, 20 December 1712.

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Women” for creating a “trade-Plague among us,” for allowing “the Home-Consumption
of our own Manufactures [to] languish and decay in such a manner, as bids fair to starve
our Poor, and put the whole Woollen Trade of this Nation into the utmost Confusion.”
5 1 He fears that women’s consumption of imported fabrics will ultimately wreak havoc
on the national economy by ruining Britain’s domestic wool manufacturing. Promoting
the craze for foreign goods, women’s wanton spending on imported clothing represented
for him a social, moral and economic threat that placed the nation in peril.

In light of Defoe’s emphasis on the deleterious effect of female consumption of
foreign fashion on the domestic economy, Roxana’s ﬂaunting of her extravagant Turkish
dress in front of English viewers takes on implicit political implications. Indeed, Defoe
seems to be worried that the consumption of foreign fashion could enervate the domestic
economy in a way analogous to that in which Roxana’s Turkish masquerade seduces her
viewers into creating and manipulating a demand for objects of luxury, desire, or fashion
from around the world. In her lavishly decorated Pall-Mall housing, Roxana hosts
luxurious balls and leads an extravagant life as a courtesan, just as the King and the
company indulge in ostentatious wealth and a decadent aristocratic lifestyle. Roxana in
effect embodies two sources of foreign luxury, France and Turkey, as she admits that her
dancing “had the French Behavior under the Mahomatan Dress” (221). At the same time
that Turkey was widely perceived as being a source of sensuous pleasures and indulgence
in luxury during the early eighteen century, France was generally feared and hated by the
English due to its association with Roman Catholics and the Old Pretender, who posed a
threat to the English throne. By deliberately setting the novel in the reign of Charles II,

who was well-known for the extravagant consumption of European luxuries, particularly

 

5' Daniel Defoe, The Just Complaint of Poor Weavers. (1719), 6-7.

142

in clothing styles, music, and the theater, as well as for his decadent and lascivious
lifestyle, Defoe suggests that the widespread consumption of foreign goods had the
potential to threaten English values and the country itself.

The tension between the domestic and the foreign is also repeated at the personal
level within Roxana. Roxana is a hybrid --not quite English and not quite French, for she
was born at the City of Poictiers in France yet raised and educated as English. Although
Roxana deems herself “Natural English, as if [she] had been born here” (38), she tends to
have relationships with foreign men--from the prince living in France to the Dutch
merchant, suggesting her intimate afﬁnity with the foreign ‘other.’ Even when Roxana
settles down to lead a life of a respectable, modest Quaker woman, she has irrepressible
consumer desires for foreign luxuries, just as she ﬁnds pleasure talking about her
previous life as a famous ‘Roxana’ and displaying her extravagant Turkish habit to others.
Indeed, Roxana’s persistent desires for foreign luxury commodities seems to indicate
Defoe’s uneasiness that the contaminating vices of foreign ‘others’ may not be easily
domesticated and serves to register underlying anxiety about the eighteen-century’s
foreign consumption and its inimical effect on the prosperity of British nation.

Despite Defoe’s admiration of Roxana’s ﬁnancial success, her skillful
manipulation of the marketplace is seen as a challenge to patriarchy, to the extent that it
is even seen as monstrous—“something shocking to Nature” (196). Similarly, Roxana’s
Amazonian status symbolizes her transgression against the society’s patriarchal control
over women. Shawn Maurer has shown how Roxana’s close association to Amazonians,
who were regarded as threatening with their martial prowess, economic self-sufﬁciency,

and non-monogamous, matrilineal sexuality, can be seen as a projection of the culture’s

143

and Defoe’s own fears about female independence from men.52 Although Maurer does
not focus on consumption, it is evident that Roxana’s monstrous challenge to the
domestic patriarchal system stems partly from her role as a female consumer. Ro’xana’s
consumption effectively deploys the logic of exchange and commodiﬁcation of capitalist
economy to undermine male-dominated society, where an exchange of women was often
a used to establish relationships among men. Attending to the correspondence between
the larger public economy and the private economy of the family, Gayle Rubin in her
perceptive study “The Trafﬁc in Women” has illustrated the specular logic of patriarchy
that subjects the female to a male system of valuation and exchange. 53 Through her
transactions of selves from an abandoned wife into a “whore,” Roxana exploits a broader
cultural economy predicated on the construction of woman as currency among men and
thereby challenges male dominance.

Simultaneously, Defoe implies that perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the
Roxana’s consumerism is its close connection with the realm of the foreign, which,
according to Defoe, has the potential to alter British domestic economy. In this sense,
Defoe posits that female consumption is not solely concerned with what is the seemingly
private realm of domesticity, but that domesticity exists on a continuum with the larger
public spheres of politics, economy, and trade, and that it is itself political. Accordingly,
if the novel draws attention to the ways in which Roxana’s consumption of foreign goods
may be potentially dangerous to British domestic economy, Defoe, by the same token,

suggests that female purchasing power and tastes in fashion have the power to transform

 

52 Shawn Lisa Maurer, “I wou’d be a Man-Woman”: Roxana’s Amazonian Threat to the Ideology of
Marriage.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language. (46: 2004), 363-386.

53 Gayle Rubin, “The Trafﬁc in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy of Sex” Ed Rayna R.
Reiter. Towara an Anthropology of Women, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210.

144

politics and the nation itself. In this regard, Roxana’s consumption is not only about her
personal moral decline or a failure of domestic virtues, but also has wider repercussions
in economic, political and cultural realms.

As demonstrated in Defoe’s complex attitude towards Roxana’s consumerism,
this reading of Defoe complicates a polarized reading of Defoe as either a staunch
supporter of British trade and mercantilism or (Watt, Dijkstra) or a strong opponent of
speculative capitalism (N ovak). Defoe’s ambivalent treatment of female consumption in
Ram may reveal Defoe’s complex views on a host of social and economic issues in
response to major economic events such as the South Sea crisis and the calico conﬂict.
On the one hand, Roxana at the outset illustrates that consumption can be productive and
potentially empowering for the female consumer. Roxana deftly exploits the world of
commodities around her and negotiates it for her own transgressive ends. Like a savvy
investor who takes advantage of the rise and fall of the speculative market, Roxana
becomes skillful in promoting and marketing herself, manipulating the terms of her own
circulation and transacting her own sexuality. Shifting between different personas and
nations—“Mademoiselle de Beleau, afterwards call’d The Countess de Wintselsheim, in
Germany, Being the Person known by the Name of the Lady Roxana,” the title of Roxana
itself registers the instability associated with the new ﬂuid and mercurial capitalist ethos
in the early eighteenth-century economy, establishing a close connection with the
heroine to the ﬁgure of Fortuna, who typiﬁed the instability of fortune, much like the
ﬁgure of Lady Credit.

Yet, even as Defoe recognized that both consumption and credit were central to

commerce, he also considered the ﬂuidity of the marketplace as a potential threat to

145

England’s commercial prosperity. If credit was creating illusions of substance in the
ﬁnancial realm, so was consumption in the social realm. Just as Defoe condemned
greedy stock-jobbers for their irresponsible speculation in the marketplace, he was critical
of the ways consumption promoted pretense and aspiration toward social mobility among

men and women. 54

Although Defoe was not against all social mobility, he was
ultimately anxious about the ways Roxana was able to obscure social markers and even
blur gender boundaries, for she transforms from a whore to a titled lady and a “Man-
Woman.” Furthermore, if Roxana relies upon her consumption of foreign luxuries to
refashion herself and furthermore requires to be seen on her own terms, Defoe
paradoxically attempts to control the ﬁeld of vision by framing Roxana within the
imperatives of domesticity.

This chapter’s focus on female consumption broadens our understanding of the
relationship between the role of domesticity and mercantile capitalism. As Laura Brown
has argued, Roxana’s sumptuary display of herself in foreign luxuries links her to the
imperialist project of mercantile capitalism. Yet Brown’s analysis does not provide an
adequate way to account for the ways consumption and domesticity were mutually
implicated in the project of articulating a coherent British identity. Felicity Nussbaum has
demonstrated the ideological importance attached to female virtue politicized the private
realm of the domestic home. In fact, Defoe’s preoccupation with Roxana’s failure as a

mother reveals that domesticity can be deployed as a strategy to dramatize fears about

growing foreign trade’s corrupting inﬂuence on English domestic virtues. Yet, despite the

 

5" In the summer of 1719, Defoe published anonymously, The Anatamy of Exchange Alley, his most
comprehensive attack on stock-jobbing. He writes that the trade itself was a “compleat system of
Knavery... founded in Fraud, born of Deceit, and nourished by Trick, Cheat, Wheedle, Forgeries, and all
sorts of Delusions.”

146

novel’s attempt to contain and discipline the threats that accompanied female
consumption—such as counterfeiting and excessive desires or the contamination of the
foreign ‘other’——the sudden, incomplete ending of the novel ultimately reiterates that
female consumers cannot be controlled and may not always be domesticated. By
drawing attention to how the domestic home or the nation is inseparable from the female
consumer, Roxana ultimately demonstrates how the discourses of female consumerism
are central to understanding both female identity and British national identity in the early

eighteenth century.

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CHAPTER 3
CONTESTING THE SPECTATOR’S DISCIPLINARY GAZE:
HAYWOOD’S THE FEMALE SPECTATOR AND
THE HISTORY OF MISS BETSY THOUGHTLESS

Eliza Haywood, a proliﬁc British woman writer of the eighteenth century, is a
signiﬁcant ﬁgure in the history of female authorship because of the sheer size and variety
of her canon, and the length of her career as a professional writer over the course of
nearly forty years. In addition to being a celebrated novelist of widely-read novels such
as Love In Excess (1719), she was also a playwright, publisher, journalist, actress, and
the editor of The Female Spectator from 1744-46, the ﬁrst English periodical written by
a woman primarily for women. Despite her solid position within the literary marketplace
and the wide range of her writings, Haywood was often associated with sexuality and
public scandal. Mostly known for her amatory ﬁctions which titillated eighteenth-
century audience with frank and explicit depictions of female sexual desire, she was
dismissed by her male literary contemporaries as an inferior writer and even castigated as
being sexually promiscuous.

When Haywood turned away from scandalous ﬁctions to respectable novels of
domestic sensibility and conduct periodicals, her shift to propriety has generally been
interpreted by her contemporaries as evidence of her own moral conversion. For
instance, in The Progess of Romance, Clara Reeve praises Haywood on her “singular
good fortune to recover a lost reputation and yet a greater honour to atone for her errors,”

establishing a bifurcated view of Haywood’s life and career—a ‘before’ and ‘after’ her

148

moral transformation. 1 Even feminist scholars who have attempted to recover Haywood
from scholarly neglect tend to reproduce this polarized view of Haywood and her career
as a woman writer. Jane Spencer points out that Haywood’s career is “a paradigm for
that of the eighteenth-century woman novelist generally: at ﬁrst praised as amorous, then

,9

castigated as immoral, and ﬁnally accepted on new, and limiting, terms. 2 Despite her
revisionist feminist readings which brought attention to radical female desire in
Haywood’s ﬁctions of seduction, Ros Ballaster also maintains that Haywood’s amatory
ﬁctions—like those of Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley—were “negative precedents”
that needed to be purged for subsequent women writers to gain respectability, implicitly
reinstating the divide between the earlier and the later works. 3

More recently, literary critics have tended to regard Haywood as a skillful
professional writer who was able to achieve a successful career due to her ability to adapt
to changes in the literary marketplace. 4 In addition to feminist reassessment of
Haywood’s amatory ﬁction, recent critics have increasingly attempted to historicize
Haywood’s texts by exploring their engagement with the critical social, aesthetic,
economic and political discourses of her day. These reconsiderations suggest that her
shiﬁ may have been ﬁnancially rather than morally motivated, as the market for

licentious amatory ﬁction was increasingly giving way to a demand for domestic novels

in which female subjectivity was increasingly conﬁgured in terms of private life.

 

' Quoted from eds. Kirsten Saxton and Rebecca Boccicchio, The Passionate Fictions of Eliaa
Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work, (Lexington: The University of Kentucky, 2000), 9.

2 Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1986), 77, I41.

3 Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 3.

 

" Katherine Shevelow, Women in Print Culture. (London: Routledge, 1989)

149

While Katherine Shevelow’s Women in Print Culture (1989) demonstrates how
Haywood took a vital role in print culture as a producer of domestic ideology, William
Warner, in Licensing Entertainment (1998), argues that Haywood, especially through her
amorous intrigue novels, participates in what he calls ‘media culture,’ “the practices of
production and consumption associated with print media.” 5 He insists that Haywood’s
best-selling amorous intrigue novels can be seen as the ﬁrst formula ﬁction in the market
that offers diversion and entertainment to consumers. Catherine Ingrassia in Authorship,
Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England (1998) also demonstrates
how Haywood took advantage of her ‘paper credit’ to negotiate sexual and ﬁnancial
economies: “she capitalized on the allure of her texts and the marketability of her
constructed authorial persona -— both intangible, imaginatively based commodities.” 6 By
drawing an analogy between activities in the new ﬁnancial economy and pursuits in the
literary marketplace, Ingrassia shows how the volatile, speculative worlds of both
Exchange Alley and Grub Street created a signiﬁcant new space for women to gain
cultural agency in the literary market.

My discussion of Haywood has inevitably beneﬁted from scholars like Warner
and Ingrassia who attempt to contextualize her within socio-economic history. Rather
than divide Haywood’s literary works between her early scandalous and latter domestic
texts, it seems more valuable to see a contiguity between them by focusing on
Haywood’s engagement with emergent consumer culture. At the same time, however,

Ingrassia’s argument is beneﬁcial in showing how Haywood’s success as a professional

 

5 William Warner, Licensing Entertainment.(Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1998), 93.

6 Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in EarlyEighteenth-Century England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 12.

150

woman writer depended on her ability to negotiate and reinvest her cultural currency
within print culture, it ignores the ways in which Haywood’s attempt to exploit the
literary marketplace was also limited by a scopic regime in which, as a woman writer, she
was often reduced to an object under the public gaze.

Alexander Pope’s satire on Haywood in his poem “The Dunciad” illustrates the
dangers faced by women writers, for contemporary sexual ideologies dictated that
venturing into print entailed turning both one’s body and one’s work into commodities
for sale in the marketplace. 7 As seen in the passage below, Haywood, though in reality a
successﬁil female author, is reduced to a sexual object under Pope’s objectifying,
specularizing gaze. Instead of being recognized as the subject or producer of literary
commodities, Haywood becomes a commodity for masculine pleasure, a prize in a

urinating competition between rival booksellers.

See in the circle next, Eliza plac’d

Two babes of love close clinging to her waste;

Fair as before her works she stands confess’d.

In ﬂovvr’s and pearls by bountaeous Kirkall dress’d.
The Goddess then: ‘Who best can send on high
‘The salient spout, far-streaming to the sky;

‘His be you Juno of majestic size,

‘With cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes.

‘This China-Jordan, let the chief o’ercome

 

7 Alexander Pope, “The Dunciad. ”Alexander Pope: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. ed. Pat
Rogers. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 411-571.

151

‘Replenish, not ingloriously, at home’ (ii. 149-58).

Pope satirizes Haywood’s notoriety as a proliﬁc author of scandalous writing by referring
to her literature as “two babes of love,” the offspring of illicit sexual liaisons between the
female writer and the corrupt Grub Street. Just as a female writer is seen to prostitute
herself and her works in the literary marketplace, both her body and her productions
become commodities shamelessly exposed to public view to be sold to the highest bidder.
My reading is concerned with examining the ways in which Haywood challenges
the supremacy of the male gaze through her treatment of female consumerism in her
texts, The Female Spactator (1744-46) and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughjess
(1751). Haywood’s preoccupation with seeing and vision has been interrogated recently
by Juliette Merritt in Bayond Spectacle, which focuses on the “visual/linguistic nexus for
its capacity to increase women’s access to knowledge and power.” 8 By exploring how
the “discursive potential of the connection between spectatorship and writing is made
explicit” (141) in Haywood’s texts, Merritt demonstrates that Haywood’s exploration of
female visual agency is closely linked with her discursive authority as a professional
author. Merritt concludes that Haywood’s “conscious effort to capitalize on the authority
of the observing subject” (23) makes her a “committed strategist, both materially, on her
own behalf as a professional writer, and discursively, on behalf of the cause of female
agency” (20). My reading of Haywood seeks to complicate Merritt’s approach by
situating Haywood’s manipulation of the visual order within the context of the age’s

speculative and competitive commercial culture. Such an approach makes it possible to

 

8 Juliette Merritt, Beaond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectators. (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2004), 9.

152

examine how women could take advantage of their material circumstances to exercise
power both within and beyond the constraints of their role as objects of display and
exchange in a marketplace culture. By extending Ingrassia’s concept of ‘cultural credit’
to consumerism, I will illustrate how Haywood negotiates the subject/object relations of
commercialized material culture for female visual authority.

In order to fully understand Haywood’s treatment of spectatorship and
consumption, it is vital to examine Addison and Steele’s The Spectator ﬁrst, since it
becomes the basis of Haywood’s critique of male spectatorial authority. Generally

considered one of the most inﬂuential texts of the eighteenth century, The Spectator

 

addresses a broad range of topics crucial to everyday life in a world of ﬁnancial,
commercial, and sociopolitical transformations. My ﬁrst section will examine how Mr.
Spectator’s male gaze is closely associated with his attempts to regulate female
consumption and fashion. It will treat Mr. Spectator as emblematic of the dominant
masculine mode of viewing that reduces women to commodiﬁed objects. My next
section will focus on Haywood’s Female Spectator and on the complex ways Haywood
challenges and revises the male gaze by exploring how female consumerism can
empower women with visual agency. My last section will continue to explore
Haywood’s preoccupation with the complex relationships among sight, gender, and
power in the marketplace by reexamining the ﬁgure of the coquette in The History of
Miss Betsy of Thoughtless as a consumer who can negotiate the sexual and material

economies of the eighteenth-century for her own beneﬁt.

The Spectator Papers

153

The Spectator has been widely understood in the context of the emergence of
bourgeois capitalism. Jurgen Haberrnas identiﬁes The Spectator as a major institution of
the bourgeois public sphere as it emerged in early-eighteenth-century western Europe. 9
Terry Eagleton, in his book The Function of Criticism, also reaffirms the periodical’s
role in the transformations whereby the “European bourgeoisie begins to carve out for
itself a distinctive discursive space, one of rational judgment and enlightened critique
rather than of the brutal ukases of an authoritarian politics.” '0 In the wake of intensiﬁed
capitalism, popular periodicals like The Spectator play an important part in bourgeois
hegemony by constructing a polite public comprised of citizens with common sense and
good taste. Formulating new codes of conduct and values suitable to the formation of a
bourgeois public sphere, The Spectator served as a model for self-identiﬁcation as well as
for disseminating ideologies for the rising middle-class identity.

Foregrounding operations of taste and style that have been largely unexplored in
Haberrnas’s account of the bourgeois public sphere, Erin Mackie’s Market A La Mode
convincingly demonstrates how fashion and material culture in The Spectator contribute
to the formation of bourgeois identity by shaping “each strand of the fabric of everyday

life through the management of taste, style, and manners.” 1'

Mackie’s argument is
useful in exploring how trivial fashion items or mundane activities—such as fans,

dresses, shops, and masquerades— produce meanings precisely because taste and

decorum are instituted through persuasion, not coercion, as people come to experience

 

9 Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Socigy, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).

'0 Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism. (London: Verso, 1984), 9.

” Erin Mackie, Market A La Mode. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997), 262.

154

choices of style freely and independently (21). According to her, The Spectator takes on
the role of cultural arbiter of bourgeois values by appealing to reﬁned taste that
emphasizes principles of modesty, restraint, and decorum as opposed to vulgarity and
avarice, thereby allowing each individual to identify voluntarily with the ideals of the
public sphere in contemporary everyday life.

Mackie also underscores the profound effects of increased commercialization on
gender and vision in the eighteenth-century. She points out that one of the aims of
bourgeois ideology was to legitimize a proper mode of vision by attempting “to police
boundaries between subject and object, consmner and consumed, spectator and spectacle”
(63), especially when fashion and style were “often negatively evaluated as at best
empty, and at worst deceptive, signs” (147). This project involves distinguishing
between “good and bad sorts of looking and acquiring” (60). On the one hand, the
“good” looking mirrors the workings of the polite imagination, which “guarantees the
mind’s appropriation of objects” (84). Like Addison’s “man of Polite Imagination” who
acquires “a kind of Property in every thing he sees” (No. 411), '2 the spectator assumes
mastery over the spectacle, maintaining the hierarchy between the subject and the object.
On the other hand, the “bad” looking occurs when the spectator loses ﬁrll control of the

objects of desire. This often happens in fashionable consumption, “as is the cases of the

 

'2 References are made parenthetically by the number of the paper. Theﬁrectator, ed. with an
introduction and notes, Donald F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965); The Project Guﬁrberg
EBook of The Spectatg, ed . The Spectator with introduction, notes, and index, Henry Morley, Joseph
Addison and Richard Steele, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 (2004).

“The ‘man of Polite lmagination’ often feels a greater Satisfaction in the Prospect of Fields and
Meadows, than another does in the Possession. It gives him, indeed, a kind of Property in every thing he
sees” (No. 411).

155

beau, the coquette, and the old woman” whose minds become “coloniz[ed] by objects”
(84).

My reading of The Spectator draws on Mackie’s insights in acknowledging the
various ways fashion and consumerism shaped discourses of seeing in the eighteenth
century. Yet even though Mackie’s aim is to “tease out the implications of the overlap
between good and bad sorts of looking and acquiring” (60), she seems more
concerned with making the distinction than with elaborating on the “overlap” between
them. If The Spectator embodies the “good” mode of viewing, I would contend that it
also engages in the very mode of gazing and consuming it condemns. Despite l6.
Spectator’s critique of female consumption and its “bad” viewing, the periodical’s
treatment of seeing is inextricably bound up with the female commodity world it
disavows. Whereas Mackie implies that Mr. Spectator’s gaze is characterized by
“perceptual self-mastery” (84) or full control of his objects of vision, I will show that his
gaze is compromised by his underlying anxieties about female consumption. Mr.
Spectator’s surveillance of women as the proper objects of his visual and moral scrutiny
is crucial because it functions as an imaginative tool to make sense of the realm of
exchange and instability closely associated with expanding commerce. By questioning
The Spectator’s gaze, I agree to some extent with Scott Paul Gordon who argues that it
represents a “disciplinary fantasy” or an imaginary one, which “testiﬁes less to the
success of the spectatorial regime than to the intractability of the readers it hopes to

19913

contro While Gordon suggests that “revolts against the gaze” are possible and that

subjects can resist disciplinary regimes, he overlooks the extent to which female

 

 

'3 Scott Gordon, “Voyeuristic Dreams: Mr. Spectator and the Power of Spectacle.” The Eighteenth
Centargy. (36: 1995), 4.

156

consumers can be resistant subjects of spectatorial control. If Mr. Spectator’s omnipotent
surveillance can be seen as his effort to contain “aggressive spectacles,” I argue that
female consumers who engage in “disguise or strategic self-fashioning” (20) can pose a
threat to such authority. By focusing on the relationship between Mr. Spectator’s gaze
and female consumption, I will show that the scopic authority of Mr. Spectator is
characterized by his own deep-seated anxieties about his ability to control female

consumption, and that female consumers indeed prove resistant to his discipline regime.

“Mere Objects of Sight”: Disciplinary Fantasy

The preeminence of the trope of seeing in The Spectator is indisputable. The ﬁrst

 

number of the journal establishes the unique authority of the Spectator as a “Looker-on”
(No. 1). Mr. Spectator introduces himself in the ﬁrst number of his periodical as rather a
“Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species. . .a Speculative Statesman, Soldier,
Merchant, and Artisan, without ever meddling with any Practical Part in Life” (No. 1).
As evidenced in his reﬁrsal to be seen as “one of the Species,” Mr. Spectator’s
detachment from social and human affairs grants him “more than ordinary Penetration in
Seeing,” an authority to “discern the Errors in the Economy, Business, and Diversion of
others, better than those who are engaged in them” (No. 1).

Although he insists that he is unencumbered by the material world he lives in,
ironically his sight is inextricably bound up with the commercialized culture of the
eighteenth century. As he strolls from marketplace to the Royal Exchange, the sight of
the rich goods on display and various commercial activities provides him with intense

pleasure: “It gives me a secret Satisfaction, and in some measure, gratiﬁes my Vanity, as

157

I am an Englishman, to see so rich an Assembly of Countrymen and Foreigners
consulting together upon the private Business of Mankind, and making this Metropolis a
kind of Emporium for the whole Earth” (N o. 69) For Mr. Spectator, simply looking at
things is synonymous with consumption, as his visual appreciation of the urban spectacle
celebrates the “Beneﬁts and Advantages of Commerce” and gloriﬁes the beneﬁcial,
harmonizing effects of England’s international trade, to the extent that London becomes
an “Emporium” (N o. 69). Mr. Spectator, like a ﬂaneur who can decipher what he
encounters, engages in ordering and classifying the profusion of exotic luxury imports:
“Our Rooms are ﬁlled with Pyramids of China, and adorned with the Workmanship of
Japan... [We] repose ourselves under Indian Canopies... Our Eyes are refreshed with
the green Fields of Britain, at the same time that our Palates are feasted with Fruits that
rise between the Tropicks” (N o. 69). As seen in his cataloguing of goods from all over
the world that converge for domestic consumption, Mr. Spectator’s looking operates as a
mode of acquisition whereby his gaze legitimates England’s global expansion and
commercial activities.

The Spectator’s powerful gaze is also a result of the anonymity that allows him to
be invisible yet discerning. Withholding his own personal identity as to his name, age, or
address, he remains unidentiﬁable: “I have been taken for a Merchant upon the Exchange
for above these ten Years, and sometimes pass for a Jew in the Assembly of Stock-
jobbers at Jonathan's.” His carefully constructed “Obscurity” (1) adds to his capacity to
present himself as a voyeur who can be present everywhere and see everything at all
times, as he admits: “there is no Place of general Resort, wherein I do not often make my

Appearance.” Indeed, he appears to be less human than godlike, an omnipresent ﬁgure

158

whose gaze allows him the penetrating clarity of vision. He boasts that “I have looked
into the Highest and Lowest of mankind, and made shrewd Guesses, without being
admitted to their Conversation, at the inmost Thoughts and Reﬂections of all whom I
behold” (4). While he enjoys the privilege of a panoramic view that can survey all
scenes of urban life—“every Parish, Street, Lane, and Alley of this Populous City” (92),
he even claims that he can read the “inward Disposition of the Mind” of those he sees by
merely observing their “Looks,” “Countenance,” and the “Lines” of the “Face” (86).

In many ways, Mr. Spectator’s detached, critical, and penetrating gaze can be
closely associated with the Cartesian system of vision which emphasized rationality and
objectivity. Martin Jay explains that Cartesian perspectivalism “no longer
herrneneutically read the world as a divine text, but rather saw it as situated in a
mathematically regular spatio-temporal order ﬁlled with natural objects that could only
be observed from without by the dispassionate eye of the neutral researcher.” '4 Similar
to the ways the three-dimensional space of perspectival vision could be rearranged on a
two-dimensional surface by a single viewing eye, the Cartesian perspectivalist tradition
produced a visual take that reduced diverse perspectives into one ‘point of view.’ Mr.
Spectator’s attempt to impose a singular, ﬁxed order of looking can be seen in Spectator

No. 250, which discusses the distinctions between good and bad seeing:

As for the various Turns of [the] Eye-sight, such as the voluntary or

involuntary, the half or the whole Leer, I shall not enter into a very

 

'4 Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modemity,” ed. Hal Foster. Vision and Visuality. (New York:
The New Press, 1988), 9.

 

159

particular Account of them; but let me observe, that oblique Vision,
when natural, was anciently the Mark of Bewitchery and magical
Fascination, and to this Day tis a malignant ill Look; but when tis
forced and affected it carries a wanton Design, and in Play-houses,

and other publick Places, this ocular Intimation is often an

Assignation for bad Practices: But this Irregulan'ty in Vision,

together with such Enorrnities as Tipping the Wink, the Circumspective
Rowl, the Side-peep through a thin Hood or Fan, must be put in the
Class of Heteropticks, as all wrong Notions of Religion are ranked
under the general Name of Heterodox. All the pernicious Applications
of Sight are more immediately under the Direction of a SPECTATOR; and
I hope you will arm your Readers against the Mischiefs which are daily
done by killing Eyes, in which you will highly oblige your wounded

unknown Friend, T. B. (No. 250).

In the passage above, the reader complains about “oblique Vision,” a “malignant ill
Look,” or “Irregularity of Vision,” which all describe the same “bad Practices” of
looking. These improper modes of seeing, mostly found in “publick places” like Play-
Houses, can produce anarchic performative behaviors. Moreover, these disruptive modes
of looking are primarily associated with feminine traits. The imagery of women involved
in “tipping the Wink, the Circumspective Rowl, the Side-peep through a thin Hood or
Fan” emphasizes willful women who indulge in their own pleasurable looking by

engaging in secretive winks, cautious scans, and furtive glances with their use of fashion

160

 

items such as “hoods” or “fans.” '5 These “pernicious Applications of Sight” are even
more threatening because they allow women to dissemble with “a wanton Design.” In
this regard, one of the Spectator’s central jobs is the policing of the look closely
associated with consumption, fashion, and women. If the Cartesian mode of seeing
strives to guarantee access to objective truth about the world, the Spectator’s project
similarly is concerned with ordering and managing “Heteropticks” under “the Direction
of a SPECTATOR,” so that dissimilarities and irregularities are excluded to ensure a
singular and determining way of seeing. Mr.ISpectator’s omnipotent sight is again
afﬁrmed as he compares his ultimate spectatorial privilege to that of the sun, the “First
Eye of Consequence,” as well as to the “invisible Author of all” (250).

Scott Gordon observes that Mr. Spectator’s empirical, detached mode of seeing
can be compared to the camera obscura model of vision that “necessarily deﬁnes an
observer as isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within its dark conﬁnes” and “impels a
kind of withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one’s relation to the
manifold contents of the new ‘exterior’ world.” '6 Nevertheless, when Gordon asserts
that “an isolated and withdrawn technology applies to Mr. Spectator himself,” he seems
to overstate Mr. Spectator’s removal from the everyday material world and overlook the

extent to which Mr. Spectator’s scopic regime is bound up with the rapidly changing

 

‘5 According to Oxford English Dictionapy, “Tipping the Wink” is to direct a wink or to give
someone a piece of secret or private information that might bring an advantage to them. “the
Circumspective Rowl” can be deﬁned as cautious looking around or scanning on all sides. The “Rowl”
(now obsolete) also refers to a round cushion or pad of hair or other material, forming part of a woman's
head-dress.

'6 Gordon , “Voyeuristic Dreams,” 18. See also Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer.
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 39.

 

161

 

commercial milieu around him. In contrast, I will suggest that Mr. Spectator’s powerful
gaze, despite its guise of neutrality and politeness, can be seen as a defensive strategy that
allows him to control what he considers threatening about the ﬂuctuation and instability
of the commercial world, a world intimately tied up in his mind with unmly female
desires.

The Spectator’s disciplinary gaze is foremost concerned with policing women and
their consumption because, unchecked, such consumption represents what is troubling to
him about capitalism. Throughout The Spectator, women are associated with the
fantastic and insubstantial characteristics of fashion, credit, and the market that the
periodical itself attempts to regulate and order. In Spectator No 15, Mr. Spectator
remarks: “I have often reﬂected with my self on this unaccountable Humour in Woman-
kind, of being smitten with every thing that is showy and superﬁcial; and on the
numberless Evils that befall the Sex, from this light, fantastical Disposition.”
Represented as vain and vacuous, women are seen as needing masculine direction. Mr.
Spectator criticizes women for their vanity and frivolity, ridiculing female fashions such
as hoop-skirts, patches, shoes, and hats. By deploring the dangers of the consuming
passions of women and their attempts to emulate the higher fashion, Mr. Spectator draws
attention to the perils of fashionable consumption in which women in turn become
consumed by commodities. In doing so, he afﬁrms men’s need to regulate the female
sex, thereby reiterating the traditional view of women as lacking the rational ability to
control their own voracious appetites.

In Spactator No. 275, Mr. Spectator censures women’s consuming desires by

showing a dissection of a coquette’s heart ﬁlled with inventories of fashionable things:

162

Ribbons, Lace and Embroidery, wrought together in a most curious Piece of
Network... invisible Billetdoux, Love-Letters, pricked Dances, and other
Trumpery of the same Nature... a kind of Powder, which set the whole Company
a Sneezing, and by the Scent discovered it self to be right Spanish. The several
other Cells were stored with Commodities of the same kind, of which it would be

tedious to give the Reader an exact Inventory (275).

By illustrating how the coquette’s heart is full of frivolous things, the Spectator satirizes
the ways these things come to replace human identity. A miniature portrait of a
“Deceased Beau” found in the center of the coquette’s heart symbolizes the reiﬁcation of
human beings insofar as an inanimate object comes to replace a human being. As Erin
Mackie points out, these representations of the anatomized, objectiﬁed heart emphasize
the pernicious effects of consumption and commercialization on human identity: “the
problem with investing too greatly in consumption is that it implicates both men and
women in sexual, social, and cultural networks that produce superﬁcial relationships,
debased, and vacant thoughts” (66). While Mackie is right to point out the dangers of
consumption for both sexes, it is worth remembering that Mr. Spectator has already
announced the primary target of his reforrnative project generally: “there are none to
whom this Paper will be more useful, than to the female World” (10). By subjecting the
coquette’s heart to his penetrating scrutiny, he is primarily concerned with exposing and

managing the female consumption.

163

Female consumers are not only intractable but also consciously use their
fashionable appearances to challenge Mr. Spectator’s visible authority. A female reader
in paper No. 296 reveals that she dresses “often at a Window which fronts the
Apartments of several Gentlemen” to solicit men’s gazes. Instead of being a passive
spectacle, she strategically fashions herself as a spectator who actively looks back at men:
“I must own I love to look at them all, one for being well dressed, a second for his ﬁne
Eye” (N o. 296). Another compelling instance of the female consumer’s capacity to
elude the Spectator’s voyeuristic gaze is when a male reader complains about women and
their use of hoop petticoats in paper Spectator No. 127. Addressed to Mr. Spectator, who
has been absent from the town for a whole month, the reader urges “Revenge” on the
“Fair Sex” for their “great Extravagancies” (No. 127). In the following passage, the
male correspondent scrutinizes the female body and fashion censoriously, objecting

strongly to the extravagance and senseless vanity of female consumption:

You have diverted the Town almost a whole Month at the Expence of the
Country, it is now high time that you should give the Country their

Revenge. Since your withdrawing ﬁom this Place, the Fair Sex are run

Into great Extravagancies. Their Petticoats, which began to heave and

swell before you left us, are now blown up into a most enormous

Concave, and rise every Day more and more: In short, Sir, since our

Women know themselves to be out of the Eye of the SPECTATOR, they will
be kept within no Compass. You praised them a little too soon, for the

Modesty of their Head-Dresses; for as the Humour of a sick Person is

164

 

 

l
w sun-l:
wt.—
'\
‘ .

often driven out of one Limb into another, their Superﬂuity of
Ornaments, instead of being entirely Banished, seems only fallen from
their Heads upon their lower Parts. What they have lost in Height they
make up in Breadth, and contrary to all Rules of Architecture widen

the Foundations at the same time that they shorten the Superstructure.
Were they, like Spanish Jennets, to impregnate by the Wind, they
could not have thought on a more proper Invention. But as we do not
yet hear any particular Use in this Petticoat, or that it contains any
thing more than what was supposed to be in those of Scantier Make, we

are wonderfully at a loss about it (127).

Paradoxically the very insistence on the need for these extravagant women to be
monitored by the “Eye of the SPECTATOR” suggests the potent threat posed by these
fashionable women to men. The women in hoops easily evade male surveillance, as

99

“they will be kept within no Compass. Moreover, the image of “enormous” hoop
illustrates the extent of masculine anxiety about femininity and sexuality. Not only does
the size of the hoop threaten men, but the hoop becomes an object of masculine fear
because it allows women to control their own sexuality. The hoop can serve as a tool for
female autonomy and power; it can be used as an armor to keep men at a distance, as
well as a shield to conceal a pregnancy: “It is generally thought some crafty Women
have thus betrayed their Companions into Hoops, that they might make them accessory to

their own Concealments, and by that means escape the Censure of the World” (127). In

short, The Sgctator is denouncing not simply women in hoops but also the ways female

165

consumerism offers women an arena of empowerment in the public sphere. Constantly
shifting their shapes and creating unsettling effects, the hoops embody the arbitrary,
mercurial ﬂuctuations of a marketplace that can be threatening to male disciplinary
control.

Accordingly, one of the main objectives of Addison and Steele in The Spectator is

 

to curtail female autonomy by replacing the artiﬁcial, extravagant, hooped female body

with a modest, natural woman who abides by domestic values. The Spectator’s efforts to

 

dictate female fashion is, in short, an attempt to regulate “monstrous” female desires into
a manageable form. Here, the ﬁgure of the fashionable woman becomes a focal point for
the discursive construction of domestic femininity, similar to the way the adorned female
body plays a central role for the constitution of mercantile capitalist ideology, as Laura
Brown has shown in her Ends of Empire (3). The Spectator’s attempt to monitor female
consumption through a male disciplinary gaze plays a crucial role in the bourgeois
ideological projects that Kathryn Shevelow traces in the popular print culture of the early
eighteenth-century England. She explains that early periodicals constructed a normative
deﬁnition of femininity by addressing their women readers “not only as consumers, but
also as potential producers of the text.” '7 The Spectator’s effort to regulate female
consumer desires also participates in producing the bourgeois private realm in which
unruly fashionable women of the world are devalued in contrast to modest, sensible,
domesticated women. For instance, Spectator No. 73 sets vain, extravagant ladies of
fashion who “appear in all publick Places and Assemblies, in order to seduce Men to their
Worship” in contrast to sensible women who ﬁnd recognition not through personal

display but instead “by the Education of their Children, Care of their Families, and Love

 

'7 Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, 23-24.

166

 

of their Husbands.” This dichotomy between worldly and fashionable women on the one
hand, and modest and retired women on the other hand, is characteristic of bourgeois
ideologies of domesticity. '8 This construction of a private world of feminized
domesticity ensures that women become identiﬁed exclusively with a domestic realm of
consumption immune from the corrupt public world of the marketplace. Yet even as the
domestic, private sphere is deﬁned as outside the marketplace, the new domestic ideal
depends on the constant supervision and the regulation of female consumption. Thus, m
Spectator participates in consolidating a bourgeois private sphere not so much by
eradicating as taming female consuming desires that threaten male power and by
reforming women as virtuous, domestic beings.

Mr. Spectator’s disciplinary regime testiﬁes less to his power than to the potent
threat which he tries to manage in the world because women can potentially elude his
surveillance through their strategic deployment of fashion. Just as women wearing hoops
can conceal and disguise pregnancy and sexual promiscuity, fashionable commodities
can allow women to dissemble their outward appearance in order to indulge their
transgressive desires. Spectator 41, for example, strongly censures women’s use of paint,
or cosmetics, by referring to fashionable ladies as female “Picts” or primitive Scottish
warriors. Heavily painted “Picts” are threatening because they appear inscrutable and
impenetrable to male viewers. Far from being “the most amiable Object that the Eye of

Man can possibly behold” (No. 435), female Picts “behold all things with the same Air,

 

‘8 Mary Poovey's Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian
England. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) and Nancy Armstrong '5 Desire and Domestic
Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) are two groundbreaking work on domestic ﬁction that
have argued for the centrality of domesticity in eighteenth-century literature. Recent critics, such as Felicity
Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives.
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) have reconceptualized domesticity by linking it to
colonial and imperialistic discourses.

167

 

whether they are Joyful or Sad; The same ﬁx’d Insensibility appears on all Occasions,”
undermining the male gaze through the female capacity to look (N o. 41).

Spectator No. 53 again expresses male anxiety about women who use fashion
items such as wigs or patches. In this letter, a “reformed starer” writes to complain of
“Peepers,” women who deploy “both Fan and Eyes” to actively solicit the male look.
The male writer’s protest against “one of the young Ladies, who is a Peeper, resolved to
bring down [his] Looks, and ﬁx my Devotion on herself. a Peeper works with her
Hands, Eyes, and Fan” recapitulates the male anxiety that comes from women’s
strategic use of fashionable display. Despite his efforts to keep his “Eyes from
wandering,” the writer ﬁnds himself helpless as he becomes transﬁxed by the sight of
her: “It was not in Nature to command one’s Eyes from this Object; I could not avoid
taking notice also of her Fan, which had on it various Figures, very improper to behold on
that Occasion.” Although the peeper’s fan, which contains an erotic scene (showing a
half-naked Venus with a peeping Satyr) seems to reproduce the male voyeuristic gaze,
the fan also functions as a screen to mask her active female desire and to control her own
display. His “[r]esentment” over “an Inundation of Ribbons and Brocades, and many
new Vanities,” and his fear of the “Fascination of the Peeper's Eyes, who had long
practised a Skill in them, to recal the parting Glances of her Beholders” (53) demonstrate
his uneasiness about ways female consumers can undermine and redirect the male gaze
through their fashion choices.

As seen above, The Spectator stands out as a text that consciously attempts to

 

deﬁne spectatorial privilege as male. By directing its penetrating gaze at the adorned

female body, the periodical undertakes the correction and management of excessive

168

consumption. Rather than have women exercise agency through consumption within the

public sphere, The Spectator’s mode of surveillance deﬁnes women as “mere Objects of

 

Sight” and designates the private domestic sphere as a site of consumption rather than
production. When a distraught correspondent in No. 328 complains about the “prospect
of being ruin'd and undone, by a sort of Extravagance which of late Years is in a less ,
degree crept into every fashionable Family,” The Spectator strives to mold female
consumers to an ideal of domestic femininity—modest, restrained, and virtuous women.
Nevertheless, Mr. Spectator’s attempt to contain potentially aggressive spectacle serves
less to establish his scopic power than to reafﬁrm the power of fashionable women who
elude male surveillance through strategic display and deceptive appearances. Addison
and Steele’s periodical demonstrates that women consumers of the eighteenth century
occupy a paradoxical position, for they are both valued as necessary consumers whose
spending provides the rationale for British commercial expansion and trivialized as
volatile consumers whose lavish consumption and sartorial display are potentially
threatening to society. While recognizing the importance as well as the dangers of the
burgeoning consumer revolution, Addison and Steele seek to mitigate their apprehensions
by carefully monitoring the appearances and manners of women and regulating the
excesses of female consumption. Far from being an omnipotent disciplinary regime, Tag
Spectator’s persistent efforts to establish its surveillance over female consumers
demonstrate the authors’ own anxieties about the capacity to control women even as they

reafﬁrm the power of female consumers to resist The Spectator’s scopic authority.

The Female Spectator

169

Among the many journals that imitated the The Spectator papers, one of the most
celebrated was Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744-46). 19 Just as the title of
The Female Spectator itself invokes The Spectator, The Female Sgctator’s persona
explicitly announces her intention to “closely tread in the steps of her late brother and
predecessor, the SPECTATOR” (FS Bk 1). While The Spectator was a daily paper and
The Female Spectator a monthly, both periodicals share common features: the ﬁctional
spectatorial ‘club’ of friends, the correspondence from readers, and the single-essay
format illustrated by anecdotes and short stories. The Female Spectator also claims to
engage in the same program of reforming the manners and morals of its readers and to
target a largely female readership. Most early critics have tended to consider m
Fernale Spectator at best a failed imitation of the period’s most inﬂuential periodical in
terms of purpose, method, and style. For example, George Whicher, Haywood’s ﬁrst

biographer and critic, dismisses The Female Spectator as a “bold attempt to rival Addison

 

upon his own ground,” just as J. B. Priestley mocks Haywood as “an Addison in
petticoats” in his introduction to his sister’s edition of The Female Spectator.” 20
This view of The Female Spectator is now outdated and transformed by an array
of new critical approaches—especially feminist and cultural studies—that have recovered
and reassessed many works by female authors long overlooked or intentionally neglected.

Reappraisal of Eliza Haywood as one of the most proliﬁc and versatile women writers in

the eighteenth century has led to a revisioning of The Female Spectator as deserving

 

'9 Eliza Haywood, The Female Spectator, 4 vols. (London, 1775). The twenty-four books were
collected into four volumes. All references to The Female Spectator are taken from the PAO British
Periodical Collection available online. 1 will refer to the text as F S with book numbers.

 

 

20 George Whicher, The Life and Romaﬂes of Mrs. Eliza Haywood. (New York: Columbia
University Pres, 1915), 144; The Female Spectator,:Selections from Mrs. Eliza Haywood’s Periodical
(1744-1746), ed. Mary Priestley, intro. J. B. Priestley (London: Bodley Head, 1929).

170

more intense critical attention that goes beyond identifying the superﬁcial resemblances
between Haywood’s periodical and its predecessor. Critics—such as Helene Koon and
Ann Messenger—overwhelmingly agree that Haywood was the ﬁrst periodical writer to
address women’s issues from a woman’s point of view. 21 While most critics have
acknowledged The FemaleSpectator’s attempt to correct Mr. Spectator’s representation
of issues, they also ﬁnd Haywood’s focus on the role of domestic women within the
private sphere rather conservative, as she is seldom seen to challenge male authority
openly. For instance, Kathyrn Shevelow argues that The Female Smtator exempliﬁes
how eighteenth-century English periodicals advocated “an ideal of femininity based on
patriarchal conceptions of women’s sphere and women’s nature. 22 Although Mary Ann
Schoﬁeld notes that Haywood engages in “quiet rebellion,” she concludes that Haywood
“does not question the validity and rightness of women’s place in the home” and thus
perpetuates domestic ideology within the patriarchal system. 23 I take issue with the
notion that The Female Spectator functions as a passive conduit for patriarchal norms and
propose in this section that Haywood signiﬁcantly undermines the patriarchal order by
challenging Mr. Spectator’s visual authority. I will demonstrate that Haywood contests
The Spactator’s gender ideology by reinventing a new model of spectatorship which can

disrupt masculine authority. If Mr. Spectator’s supervisory gaze attempts to contain

 

2' Helene Koon, “Eliza Haywood and The F earale Spectator,” The Huntington Libra Quarterly.
(42: I97 8), 45. Koon argues that Haywood’s female perspective “profoundly affects the presentation and
treatment of every subject.” Ann Messenger, His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century
Literature. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 141. By comparing differences in tone,
rhetorical strategy, emphasis, and issues in both The Spectator and The Female Spectatag, Messenger also
stresses Haywood’s emphasis on female education and its role in helping women’s survival in terms of
“what works, what is practical.”

2‘ Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, 2.
23 Mary Ann Schoﬁeld, Eliza Haywood. (Boston: Twayne, 1985), 110; Koon, “Eliza Haywood

and The Female Spectator,” 43-55; Messenger, "Educational Spectators: Richard Steele, Joseph Addison,
and Eliza Haywood," 108-47.

171

women within the private, domestic sphere and exclude them from the public sphere, 13
Female Spectator is deeply concerned with articulating a new way of seeing that can
empower women in both private and public realms. Not only does the Female Spectator
urge her readers to become spectators like herself, she also explores how women can
empower themselves through manipulating their status as objects of consumer exchange

and visibility.

Redefining Spectatorship

As the gendered reversal of Addison and Steele’s title and persona indicates,
Haywood’s periodical begins by drawing attention to the ways female perspectives have
been excluded from The Spectator under the guise of its supposed neutrality. By
replacing the male spectatorial ﬁgure with a female commentator, Haywood legitimates
women’s spectatorial authority in engaging in a similar program of reforming the
manners of readers. Like her predecessor, the Female Spectator aims to be “both useful
and entertaining,” but she communicates her observations about human nature in a
different way so that her audience may learn “to regulate their own affairs (FS Bk 1).
Instead of subjecting her readers to a critical judgment, Haywood asserts that all her
readers, regardless of whether they are men or women, “have it in their Power” to
manage themselves and to become “worthy of that Character which [they] are all
ambitious of attaining” (FS Bk 15). Although the Female Spectator demurs that she is
not so arrogant as “to imagine that any Thing offered by a Female Censor would have so

much Weight with the Men as is requisite to make. . . [a] Change in their Conduct” (FS Bk

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15), numerous letters from male admirers who “confess[ ] the Merit of [her] Writings (FS
Bk 15) testify to the success of her cultural authority as a female author.

The Female Spectator also departs from her brother by redeﬁning the nature of
authority. Whereas Mr. Spectator’s authority is legitimated by his distance from the
transgressions he critiques, the Female Spectator declares her own involvement in
scandalous experiences—the “many Scenes of Vanity and Folly [she had] as the greatest
Coquet of them”—as the basis of her ethical authority. In contrast to Mr. Spectator’s
radical detachment and objectivity, the Female Spectator offers her personal experience
and the knowledge she has gained from it to “teach every one to regulate their own” (FS

Bk 1). She recounts of her past indulgences that:

Dress, Equipage, and F lattery, were the Idols of my Heart.—I should have thought
that Day lost which did not present me with some new Opportunity of shewing
myself — My Life, for some Years, was a continued Round of what I then called

Pleasure, and my whole Time engross’d by a Hurry of promiscuous Diversions” (FS

Bk 1).

If Addison and Steele repeatedly castigate the ﬁgure of the coquette who indulges in the
vices of vanity, overconsumption, and self-display, the Female Spectator relies on her
experience as a coquette to assert her authority. As she tells readers in her introduction, “1
never was a beauty, and am now very far from being young.” The Female Spectator goes
so far as to disclose her private history, her age, and personal appearance in order to reach

out to her readers, in contrast to Mr. Spectator, who acknowledges only a disembodied

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gaze. Unlike her brother whose detached, critical gaze sets him in an elevated position
of moral superiority over his readers, the Female Spectator’s excessive desires and past
“promiscuous Diversions” have endowed her paradoxically with an education far “more
liberal than is ordinarily allowed to persons of her Sex” (FS Bk 2). Although this
admission of her past immoralities may risk her “own interest and reputation,” she self-
consciously deploys this scandalous display of her body so “that the Public may reap
Some beneﬁt from it.” It is her former experience as a coquette who has indulged in
indiscriminate consumption that paradoxically has transformed her into a discriminating
observer with more discerning vision than Mr. Spectator. Hence, she claims that she can
“see into the secret springs which gave rise to the actions I had either heard or been
witness of;. . . judge of the various passions of the human mind, and distinguish those
imperceptible dangers by which they become masters of the heart, and attain the
dominion over reason” (FS Bk 1).

The Female Spectator’s visual authority is also shared and expanded by three
ﬁctional characters, each with a distinct voice representing a different age and social
status—a vivacious widow, the young and happily married Mira, and Euphrosine, the
virgin daughter of a wealthy merchant. By emphasizing the unique opinion of each of
these characters, the periodical relies on multiple, dialogical discourses in a way that
contrasts with the monological authority of Mr. Spectator. Mira tells the readers, “two
Evenings in every Week... we communicate to each other what Intelligence we receive,
and consider on what Topicks we shall proceed... we lay our several Productions on the
Table, which being read over, every one has the Liberty of excepting against, or

censuring, whatever she disapproves; nothing being to be exhibited to the Publick,

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without the joint Concurrence of all” (FS Bk 2). Here, the female community becomes a
space for interactive and egalitarian dialogue, in which women share stories, read letters
collaboratively, and exchange opinions on issues that concern the female world. In
contrast to Mr. Spectator’s all-knowing, neutral, transparent gaze, Haywood foregrounds
mutual, reciprocal visibility in intersubjective exchanges based on the commonality of
lived experiences.

Haywood is also aware that a cabal of females can be easily charged with gossip-
mongering and scandalous news. She recognizes that women are both victims and
purveyors of information that becomes the “Talk of the Town,” just as women’s
reputations are easily ruined by “the Mischiefs occasion’d by a Tongue delighting in
Scandal” (FS Bk 1). She carefully distances herself from the type of gossip that ferments
in “a weak and degenerate Mind” and takes “delight in whispering about every idle Story
told.” Likewise, she digniﬁes her coterie of female correspondents as those “who in no
other Respect can be accused of Ill-nature, [and] take a prodigious Pleasure in reporting
every little Scandal they hear, even tho’ it be of Persons whom they have neither any
Quarrel against, nor can any way be supposed to envy” (FS Bk 13). At the same time, the
Female Spectator deploys the scandalous aspect of gossip for her own edifying purposes.
Just as the Female Spectator’s scandalous display of her body stimulates and heightens
readers’ interest, her frequent stories about love, courtship, and suffering aim to
“regulate” and instruct her readers through the “Gratiﬁcation” of their “Curiosity” to be
“made acquainted with other People’s Affairs” (FS Bk 1).

In order to engage her readers’ desire for scandal, the Female Spectator constructs

herself as a spectator who can “secure an eternal Fund of Intelligence” by placing an

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army of spies throughout Europe, such that “nothing curious or worthy of Remark can
escape [her]” (Bk 1). Vowing to “have all the Secrets of Europe... laid open at one
View” in her papers, she appears to be engaged in powerful surveillance that can
penetrate the hidden truth under the surface. While her program seems to be consonant
with Mr. Spectator’s ever-present panoptic gaze, the Female Spectator’s sight is more far-
reaching and ultimately more subversive. By stressing that her spies are to “penetrate the
Mysteries of the Alcove, the Cabinet, [and the] Field,” Haywood implies that she can see
into both private and public realms, including the sexual, political and military forms of
patriarchal power. In other words, her mode of viewing does not extend existing power
relations, but rather seeks to expose the secrets of masculine authority and its various
aspects. By uncovering and publicizing knowledge about these masculine realms, the
Female Spectator aims to serve the potentially critical function of making patriarchal

systems visible, especially to her female readers.

Challenging the “scrutinous” male gaze

Men are so censorious, that they look on all those of our Sex, who appear
too much at public Places, as setting themselves up for Sale, and,
therefore, taking the Privilege of Buyers, measure us with their Eye from
Head to Foot; and as the most perfect Beauty may not have Charms for all

who gaze upon her in this scrutinous Manner, few there are, if any, who

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have not found some who will pass by her with a contemptuous Toss, no

less signiﬁcant than the most rude Words could be. (F S Bk 5)

Haywood’s intense awareness of the gender politics of looking becomes explicit
in her discussion of men’s “scrutinous gaze” in Book 5 of the Female ﬁectator. In the
passage above, the Female Spectator criticizes sharply the way the male look transforms
women who “appear in public” into goods “for Sale” in the marketplace. For women, to
be visible is to be made into a public spectacle, submitted to the male gaze, as the visual
ﬁeld of publicness is fraught with troubling implications for women. Here, Haywood
foregrounds the complex workings of vision, gender, and commerce as the men, powerful
consumers with the “Privilege of Buyers,” scrutinize and objectify women in commercial
transactions. The male gaze not only commodiﬁes women but also disciplines women so
that a woman cannot willingly “set herself up for sale.”

The Female Spectator’s emphasis on the “scrutinous gaze” of men also draws
attention to the ways Addison and Steele’s papers consistently establish women as
objects of the male disciplinary gaze. It is hardly surprising that Haywood calls the
masculine gaze “censorious,” when Mr. Spectator calls himself the great “Censor” of the
British Isles. Often portraying women as coquettes, prostitutes, Amazons and
fashionable ladies, Mr. Spectator calls for the women to be reformed and to fulﬁll “all the
becoming Duties of Virginity, Marriage and Widowhood” (No. 4). Haywood implicitly
warns about the dangerous implications of the masculine look. Under the male gaze, the
woman becomes so thoroughly commodiﬁed that she is reduced to an object. Haywood

also attempts to appeal to her female readers’ experience of the spectatorial

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objectiﬁcation which injures women considerably more than “rude Words,” admitting
that there are “[fjew if any” who have not experienced the critical look of the male
buyer. Consequently, Haywood admonishes those men who “loiter away so many Hours
at Coffee-House Windows merely [sic] to make their Observations and ridicule everyone
that passes by,” fully aware that these men exemplify the “scrutinous” gaze that attempts
to shape women into a patriarchal ideal of femininity.

In order to challenge the pernicious effects of the “scrutinous” male gaze,
Haywood advises women readers to become spectators themselves. Lamenting that
women “have no Ideas of their own, and only through Custom and a genteel Education
are enabled to talk agreeably on those of other People,” (FS Bk 4) Haywood urges
women to interrogate the status quo. Thus, when she is asked about women’s proper
place in society, she retorts in Book 10, “Would it not be better if she performs those
duties more through Principle than Custom?” In order to see clearly, women must be free
from the shackles of “Custom” or “Prejudice.” Haywood provides an account of
prejudice’s effects in visual terms, as follows: “when Prejudice has shut our Eyes against
[truth]:—We are rendered by it wholly incapable of examining any thing, and take all
upon Trust that it presents to us” (FS Bk 21). She thus urges women to see properly,
insisting that “Observation and Discernment [can] point out the present with their
Causes” (F S Bk 4). Haywood’s ultimate objective is not so much to reform “Manners
and Morals” as to effect a fundamental change in how one sees, to “correct those Errors
in the Mind which are most imperceptible, and for that Reason the most dangerous” (FS
4). Rather than “being always concerned with what works, what is practical” (140), as

Ann Messenger argues, The Female Spectator suggests that women must learn to see

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differently ﬁrst before they can take immediate actions. The more women see, the more
they know, and the stronger their judgments become. Haywood’s ultimate objective is to
have women assume the role of spectators who can “divest [themselves]...of the
Prepossessions [they have] received and to examine all Things with the unbiased Eye of
Reason” (TS 633). In short, she is encouraging women to be Enlightenment knowing
subjects.

Lamenting women’s lack of insight, Haywood sharply criticizes the way women
are educated to accept their limited role in society. She points out that “it is entirely
owing to a narrow Education” that women are “insensible of the Injustice which has long
been done them, and ﬁnd a Vacuum in their Minds, which, to ﬁll up, they, of their own
accord, invented the way of sticking little Pictures on Cabinets, Screens, Dressing-Tables,
and other little Pieces of Chamber-Furniture, and then varnishing over so as to look like
one Piece of Painting” (FS Bk 10). Haywood deplores the deﬁciencies of women’s
education that make women vain and shallow. Instead of being critical, discerning
spectators, women are concerned only with the superﬁcial appearances of commodities,
as they turn household objects into display items.

The Female Spectator’s discussion of the microscope is important in this context.
In “The Microscope and English Imagination,” Marjorie Hope Nicolson notes the
popularization of scientiﬁc studies made possible by advances in optic technology and
brieﬂy cements on Haywood’s interest in promoting scientiﬁc study among women. 24

In Book 15, the Female Spectator and her club take advantage of the new optic

technology by taking a microscope into the country, where they use it to study insects.

 

2’ Marjorie Hope Nicolson, “The Microscope and English Imagination.” Smith College Studies in
Modern Language. (16:1935), 428-462.

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The next book ﬁnds the Female Spectator paying a visit to a neighbor whose telescope
affords a clear view of Venus. While it is possible that, as Nicolson suggests, the Female
Spectator’s interest in optical technologies demonstrates her growing awareness that the
“new science” was as readily available to women as it was to men (49), the Female
Spectator’s enthusiasm for these optic instruments mirrors Haywood’s belief in women’s
capacity to be rational spectators as opposed to merely passive spectacles. Urging women
to “throw off those senseless Avocations, that make the ﬁnest among us of no more
Account than a pretty Plaything” (FS Bk 12), the Female Spectator recommends that
women should take advantage of “Science, which has hitherto been looked upon as too
abstruse for Female Observation” (FS Bk 17), so that they can take on the role of
observing subjects with active minds.

Haywood also insists that numerous forms of knowledge ——natural history,
philosophy, astronomy, and geology ——can improve women’s intellectual vision.
Speculative enquiry is fundamental to her program for female education, since books can
allow female readers “to compare past ages with the present; to discover what in [their]
fore-fathers was worthy imitation, and what should be avoided; to improve upon their
virtues, and take warning by their error” (F S Bk 7). The Female Spectator’s own
periodical, of course, is intended to perform this same valuable function, for Haywood
seeks to “improve” and correct the “error[s]” of the widely inﬂuential Spectator papers
for her own purposes. Whereas Mr. Spectator’s notion of female education consists of
“accomplishments’ and “embellishments” in which home becomes “the proper Province
for Private Women to shine in” (SP 81), Haywood insists that masculine “learning” and

rational employments are vital for women. If men deprive women of learning and

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encourage them to “triﬂe away [their] Time in Follies, which renders [women] ridiculous
Abroad and insigniﬁcant at home” (FS Bk l2), Haywood urges women to “make him
asham’d to exert that Authority that he thinks he has a Right to over [them]” (FS Bk 10)
through their capacity for reﬂection, judgment, and discernment, all features of a rational,

observing subject.

Female “Spectatorial Observation” of Consumption

Haywood’s agenda for women to change how they see is also intimately
connected to the problematic issue of increased consumption in her society. She
recognizes the debilitating effects of unrestrained consumption as people blindly become
victims of their excessive consumer appetites for fashionable luxuries and leisure
pastimes: “Diversions in this age of Luxury, serve as Decoys to draw the Thoughtless
and Unwary together, and as it were, prepare the Way for more vicious Excesses” (FS Bk
4). In contrast to Addison and Steele, who repeatedly associate the dangers of excessive
consumption with the ﬁgure of women, the Female Spectator suggests not only that these
vices are not limited to women but that men are more responsible for them and pose a
greater threat to the welfare of English society. If Addison and Steele ridicule women
who value goods above their own husbands in Book 2, Haywood focuses on criticizing
ﬁne gentlemen who wear “foreign Silk Brocades instead of English Cloth” and military
Gentlemen who are “infected” with “Over-Delicacy.” In the “Copy of a Bill” that
contains a detailed list of soldiers’ fashionable items such as cold cream, mask, and
comb, she laments how these triﬂes have become “Ammunition” for men in battles and

“more Concern than the routing of the whole Army” (FS Bk 2). Instead of paying

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attention to their duties or the situation of their nation at war, these military men are more
preoccupied with “the Want of any of those Commodities, [which] the Interruption of our
Commerce prevents from being imported.” This “infect[ion] from “Over-Delicacy” and
“softening Luxuries” causes men to neglect their “Obligations” as soldiers and even
renders them “Effemin[ate]” (F S Bk 2).

Just as Haywood illuminates how the male desire for luxury can be potentially
destructive, she also contends that the “Vice of Gaming” has similarly resulted in
endangering England’s economy so that “so many Shops well stock’d and ﬂourishing,
are now shut up even in the Heart of the City, and their Owners either Bankrupts or
miserable Refugees in foreign Parts” (F S Bk 3). Although Haywood admits that women
are “known to be so fond of appearing ﬁne and gay, that it is no wonder the Tradesmen’s
Wives should even exceed their Husbands in the Article of Dress,” she does not blame
such lavish feminine display for the dire situation. Instead, she accuses primarily the men
who neglect their shops in the hope of “getting more of Play.” As she reiterates in Book
15, men are more culpable than women since “Vanity, Affectation, and all Errors of that
Nature are inﬁnitely less excusable in the Men than in the Woman” in that men have “so
much greater Opportunities than [women] have of knowing better” (FS Bk 3).

Furthermore, Haywood offers broader insight into the ways private gambling and
excessive consumption are tied to the proliferation of speculative investment precipitated
by the South Sea Bubble, but she conﬁnes her attack to men whose fervor for afﬂuence
without the requisite toil has ruined the nation’s economy. The Female Spectator
associates “the extravagant Itch of Gaming” with “the fatal Year 1720,” when the

“alluring Prospect of making a great Fortune at once, and without any Labour or Trouble,

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so infatuated the Minds of all the Ambitious, the Avaricious, and the Indolent that for a
Time there seemed an entire Stagnation of all Business but what was transacted by the
Brokers in Change-Alley” (F S Bk 3). Here Haywood’s main objective is to condemn
male indulgence and idleness, as she is not entirely opposed to the opportunities
generated by the development of speculative investment in a ﬂuctuating market. As I
will discuss later, Haywood takes advantage of the new economic system to invent
herself as a producer of commodities while constructing her readers as consumers in the
literary marketplace.

Another way Haywood objects to Mr. Spectator’s depiction of women as victims
of overconsumption is through her response to a male correspondent whose wife engages
in immoderate tea drinking. Tea, imported from Asia, was expensive and had only
relatively recently become fashionable. By the time Haywood wrote, social tea drinking
had become a common practice for upper-class women in particular. In Book 8, the male
shopkeeper John Careful complains about women’s “immoderate use of Tea,” which he
calls “the Bane of good Housewifery” and “the utter Destruction of all Oeconomy.” He
inveighs against the ﬁnancial extravagance of tea drinking as well as its moral perils as a
form of self-indulgence and laziness that infects servants. The Female Spectator to some
extent shares Mr. Careful’s viewpoint by exclaiming, “But alas! The Passion we have for
exotics [like Tea] discovers itself but in too many instances, and we neglect the Use of
what we have within ourselves, for the same Reason as some Men do their wives, only
because they are their own” (FS Bk 8). Nevertheless, by comparing a wives’ excessive
tea drinking to husbands’ adultery, Haywood calls attention to men’s objectiﬁcation of

women and condemns men’s moral vices. By undermining the legitimacy of husbands’

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complaint against wives’ tea-drinking, Haywood suggests that a husband’s tirade against
his wife’s excessive tea consumption is not so much about tea-drinking or its hazards but
ultimately about his desire to control and monitor his wife. She also addresses her female
readers directly: “I dare say one Half of my Readers will expect me to be very angry at
this Declarnation against an Amusement my Sex are generally so fond of” and
successfully appeals to the interest of women to question the bias that women are often
accused of. In doing so, she produces her own “Spectatorial Observation” on the issue of
women’s much exaggerated tea-drinking, thereby revealing the male anxieties underlying

the representation of female consumption.

The Consumption of Display

Haywood’s interest in the nexus between spectatorship and consmnption also
extends to her text’s relationship to her female readership. Unlike Mr. Spectator, whose
authority is mostly based upon his surveillance, the Female Spectator relies primarily on
the visibility of the female body to engage her readers. Haywood presents lengthy
narratives that she identiﬁes as “true stories” about women to make her periodical more
appealing to her readers. In Book 13, Haywood insists that these sensational stories are a
more successful means of reform than Mr. Spectator’s disciplinary gaze because they

combine both entertainment and instruction:
People, especially those of condition, are more easily laughed out of their

follies, than reasoned out of them. Nothing indeed is more certain, than that if a

gay, thoughtless person takes up a book, which he imagines is composed only for

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amusement, and before he is aware, happens to meet with some favorite vice of

his own, artfully and merrily exposed, he will start at the resemblance of himself,
and perhaps be reclaimed by it: whereas he might hear a thousand sermons on the
same occasion, without being moved, though ever so learned, or with the greatest

grace delivered (Bk 13).

These stories not only allow the instructional identiﬁcation between the reader and the
persona but also construct readers as consumers who can purchase literary commodities
for their pleasure and instruction. Haywood’s periodical promises to gratify her reader’s
voyeuristic desires and “eager[ness] to pry into Affairs of others,” a trait she ﬁnds
predominant in most human beings (F S Bk 13). By illustrating important issues related
to the female world, these sensational “true stories” become a primary vehicle of her

agenda in educating women to become discerning spectators.

 

On the one hand, Haywood engages her readers’ curiosity by drawing attention to
victimized innocent women suffering under the oppression of duplicitous or tyrannical
men. Soliciting readers’ identiﬁcation with the suffering of her wronged female
characters, she hopes they will sympathize with the victims of oppression and question
the injustice that has caused it. Just as the editor of the Female Spectator draws attention
to her now-reformed vice of coquetry for “publick Beneﬁts,” so too the violated female
ﬁgures in Haywood’s scandalous tales stimulate readers’ interest and outrage. Directing
readers’ sympathetic gaze to violated female bodies, masquerade episodes in The Female
Spectator—(such as the story of a woman who is nearly raped at a masquerade by a man

who looks like her husband) or the story of Erminia (who is ruined by a dissembling man

185

 

who looks like her brother) (Bk 1)—warn readers about the dangers of masquerade and ,.
predatory men who practice deception.

On the other hand, these cautionary stories about women’s impropriety and
scandalous behaviors allow readers to explore the transgressive pleasures of female
desire. Perhaps no story in The Female Spectator more clearly demonstrates this model
of female empowerment than does “The Lady’s Revenge,” which is retold by a reader
named by Elismonda. When abandoned by her false suitor, the female protagonist
Barsina does not remain a passive victim but successfully avenges a false suitor through
various visual stratagems and dissimulations. She derives her position of scopic
dominance over her suitor Ziphranes by masquerading as a submissive woman who
“assumed... much Softness in her Eyes and Voice” in order to carry out her revenge (F S
Bk 14). Through her guise of femininity, she tricks him into drinking poison and ruins
his life ﬁnancially, physically, and socially. She also disguises her own death and
carefully controls the terms of how she is seen publicly so that Ziphranes becomes
“confounded at the Sight of her.” By making a public spectacle of herself, Barsina
becomes “the Object of his Terror” and impairs his power to see clearly to the extent “his
Sight forsook his Optics” and he becomes powerless.

Through a rare example of a woman who executes a successful revenge,
Haywood’s aim is to show her readers that women’s strategic self-display can destabilize
the male gaze and maximize female power. The Female Spectator emphasizes Barsina’s
theatricality: “It must be own’d Barsina acted her Part admirably well.” Barsina’s
careful dissembling allows her to reverse the conventional specular relationship between

men and women, so that Ziphranes becomes reduced to “an object of public Contempt.”

186

 

vm-w-L—J .

If Barsina’s conscious self-display empowers her, it also gratiﬁes female readers’
voyeuristic impulses. Barsina’s narrative gains strong approval from female readers as
offering “a double Pleasure in the reading,” and her revenge is deemed fully justiﬁable
by her community: “Those who loved Barsina highly approved of the Method she took to
punish his Inconstancy, and even the Friends of Ziphranes could not condemn it.” The
narrator even suggests that Barsina should be regarded as a role model for female readers,
as she adds: “I Heartily wish... that all Women who have been abandoned and betrayed
by Men... would assume the Spirit she did, and rather contrive some Means to render the
ungrateful Lover the Object of Contempt, than themselves, by giving way to fruitless
Grief, which few will commiserate” (F S Bk 14).

The Female Spectator’s open endorsement of Barsina’s spectacular revenge
seems to be at odds with her observation in Book 6: “when a Woman unwomanizes

herself, [she] renounces the Softness of her Nature, and idly boasts of having it in her

 

Power to conquer” (FS Bk 6). The story of Alithea, a story about an exemplary wife, .
who reforms a philandering husband through an “excelling Pattern of Good-Nature and
Conjugal Love,” seems to support this ideal of submissive, domestic femininity (FS Bk
6). The story appears to vary little ﬁ'om most eighteenth-century conduct books that
instruct women to inﬂuence a “Man of mean capacity” through their feminine virtues
rather than by being “the Virago.” Yet, far from idealizing Alithea, the Female Spectator
cautions her readers that she “would have no husband... depend on this Example, and
become a Dorimon in Expectation of ﬁnding an Alithea in his Wifez—It is putting the
Love and'Virtue of a Woman to too severe a Test.” She acknowledges that only few

women can actually follow Alithea’s example. In the end, Alithea’s story does not

187

instruct women to become unattainable ideals of virtuous women, but only to cultivate
the appearance of being virtuous. The Female Spectator’s well-known comment—“I
again repeat it as the most infallible Maxim, that whenever we would truly conquer we
must seem to yield”—advises women to act in a way that magniﬁes the qualities that
make women desirable. In other words, she asks women to engage in strategic artﬁrlness
that allows them to manipulate outward appearances and exercise power while seeming
to appear as virtuous women.

Just as Haywood urges women to throw off restraints and transgress social
boundaries through their manipulation of display, she engages in theatricality to revise
the role and nature of the female author in The Female Spectator. Whereas one of the
aims of The Spectator was to exclude women from the public sphere, The Female
Spectator is concerned with establishing the legitimacy of the woman writer in an

environment hostile to women writers. Haywood’s proliﬁc career as a professional

writer demonstrates women’s active participation in print culture. Not only did she have

 

 

a successful career as one of the most popular writers of amatory ﬁctions, she also
produced political writings in addition to establishing her own publishing and bookselling
business. The wide range of her literary productions and the versatility of the strategies
she employs as a female writer demonstrate how she capitalized within a marketplace
where aristocratic literary tastes were losing ground on the commercial values of the
middle-class. Women’s involvement as producers and consumers in the market for
literary commodities posed a threat to male writers who, as Addison and Steele’s
Spectator clearly demonstrates, strive to enclose women within the private sphere of the

home.

188

In response to Mr. Spectator who advocates that women should not be “Scholars”
but “better Daughters, Wives, Mothers and Friends” (95), the Female Spectator
deliberately includes one “very angry Letter” from a male reader, Curioso Politico to
challenge Mr. Spectator’s denigration of women writers. The Female Spectator
emphasizes the rude manners of Curioso to reveal his misogynistic attitude as well as the
absurdity of his argument to her readers. Representing the opinion of “most of the Wits,
as well as Men of Fashion,” Curioso accuses the Female Spectator of being “an idle,
prating, gossiping old Woman ﬁt only to tell long stories by the Fire-side for the
Entertainment of little Children or Matrons” (FS Bk 8). Admitting to the Female
Spectator that he “never had any great Opinion of [her] Sex as Authors,” he complains
that her limited focus on feminine issues such as “Home-Amours, Reﬂections on Human
Nature, the Passions, Morals, Inferences, and Warnings to her own Sex” makes her “in no
way ﬁt for the polite Coffee-Houses, or to satisfy Persons of an inquisitive Taste.”
Curioso’s insistence that women authors should “conﬁne [them]selves within [their] own
Sphere” (FS Bk 8) can be read as an attempt by men to seal off the ﬁeld of professional
writing from the incursion of successful female authors like Haywood. This attempt to
construct the world of politics and print as a masculine sphere separate from the
feminine, private sphere is also shared by Mr. Spectactor when he expresses his anxiety
towards the encroachment of the female sex in the public world. As Mr. Spectator puts it:
“[w]e have indeed carried Women Characters too much into publick Life, and you shall
see them now-a-Days affect a sort of Fame” (SP 342).

In addition to using letters purportedly from male correspondents to critique a

masculine ﬁeld of vision that is too narrow and sexist, the Female Spectator also

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undermines male authority by masking her critique by seeming to endorse socially
prescribed feminine conduct. Rather than challenging patriarchal order outright,
Haywood intentionally adopts a submissive, proper femininity to subvert Addison and
Steele’s disciplinary regime. Despite her seemingly modest disavowal that she is not so
arrogant as “to imagine, that any Thing offered by a Female Censor would have so much
Weight with the Men as is requisite to make that Change in their Conduct” (FS Bk 15),
the Female Spectator’s aim is to redirect the focus onto men’s shortcomings by adding
that such “Change in their Conduct” is what “a great many of them stand in very great
need of.” The Female Spectator’s use of the term “Female Censor” also suggests that she
is clearly aware of transgressing the proper domain of women. By describing herself as a
“Censor,” a term that evokes the British government’s Stage Licensing Act of 1737, the
Female Spectator shows that her “Capacity” is not merely limited to feminine matters but
has a larger political signiﬁcance, thus blurring the divide between private/feminine and
public/masculine realms. Just as the Female Spectator had previously shown that male
consumption of luxury can endanger the nation’s strength and English manliness, and had
urged that “those Gentlemen who stay’d at home would. . .exchange their foreign Silk
Brocades for downright English Cloth” (F S Bk 2), she insists that reformation of private
vice can lead to public beneﬁts. Indeed, numerous letters from male correspondents
admiring her as the great female Moralizer and “agreeable Monitor” (FS Bk 15) validate
her role as a critical spectator who can exert inﬂuence beyond the private, domestic
sphere. As she puts it: “The better we regulate our Actions in private Life, the more we
may hope of public Blessings, and the more we shall be enabled to sustain public

Calamities” (FS Bk 8). This emphasis on the connection between private and public

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spheres effectively challenges the scopic authority by which Mr. Spectator attempts to
enclose women within the private sphere of the home.

Throughout The Female Spectator, Haywood is greatly concerned with
undermining Addison and Steele’s spectatorial authority by foregrounding ways in
which the their fantasy of an omnipotent disciplinary gaze is inextricable from their
anxieties over consuming women. Whereas critics have often considered Haywood’s
Female Spectator as promoting the domestic ideology exempliﬁed in the periodicals of
Addison and Steele, I have demonstrated that Haywood’s periodical is not part of
conservative conduct literature but rather a radical intervention in reforrnulating
spectatorship in ways that empower women. Instead of being reduced to passive objects
of the Spectator’s “scrutinizing gaze,” women can take advantage of their conventional
status as both consumers and commodities to gain visual agency. By drawing extensively
on the power of the spectacle to appeal to readers’ voyeuristic desires, Haywood
challenges male perspective and ideology by constructing women readers as active
consumers of her periodical. Through its strategic display of women as spectacle, which
range from representations of scandalous to decorous women, the periodical
demonstrates how women can manipulate their customary position as commodiﬁed
objects of the male gaze to empower themselves. By establishing her authority as a
discerning female spectator who is able to challenge Addison and Steele’s regime of
surveillance, Haywood not only becomes a powerful model for her readers but insists on

women’s participation in both private and public realms.

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ﬂe History of hLiss Betsy Thoughtless

Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), which appeared ﬁve
years after the ﬁnal number of her periodical, can be read as a continuation of her attempt
to challenge Addison and Steele’s surveillance regime. If The Female Spectator
interrupts the fantasy of visual omnipotence that The Spectator strives to maintain, 111a
History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless turns to the ﬁgure of the coquette to further explore
how the masculine reifying look can be disrupted. Whereas The Femﬁe Spectaﬂ is
primarily concerned with redeﬁning spectatorship to legitimate the female writer’s
authority in the public sphere, Betsy Thoughtless is more interested in the ways women
can deploy coquetry to pursue their visual pleasure within the domestic sphere.
Challenging the stereotype of the coquette as a mindless, superﬁcial ﬂirt, Haywood’s
Betsy Thoughtless focuses on the ﬁgure of the coquette to formulate alternative forms of
visual agency for women.

The coquette has long been a familiar ﬁgure in eighteenth-century literature and
culture, along with her male counterparts, the rake and the libertine. 25 With her
predatory sexual behaviors and pleasure-seeking self-indulgence, the coquette was often
reviled as a transgressive ﬁgure during the eighteenth century. As seen in Mary Davy’s
The Reform’d Coquet (Memoirs of a Comet or the History for Miss Harriet Airy) (1765)
and Amelia Opie’s anonymously published Dangers of Coqpetry (1760), the coquette is
frequently satirized or viliﬁed in eighteenth-century literature. Similarly a range of
conduct books or didactic novels feature the coquette as a negative moral example whose

predatory desires must be contained or disciplined.

 

25 According to the OED, the coquette is a woman who “uses arts to gain the admiration and
affection of men, merely for the gratiﬁcation of vanity, or from a desire of conquest, and without any
intention of responding to the feelings aroused.”

192

 

The coquette becomes an object of ridicule in Addison and Steele’s Spectator
essays as well. Addison and Steele’s depiction of the coquette as a voracious consumer
who is preoccupied with fashion is inseparable from their deep-seated anxieties about the
changing and fraught relationships between people and things. For instance, Sp_ectator
No. 281’s dissection of a coquette’s heart, which is found “stuffed with innumerable sorts
of Triﬂes” reveals Addison and Steele’s broader concerns about a society increasingly
invested in acquiring and displaying material goods. The coquette cares more for
fashionable things than for the people around her, as her heart is devoid of “the
Impression of Multitudes of Faces” of men she had seemed to look upon with “an eye of
Kindness” (N o. 281). The coquette is seen as inherently not only deceptive but also as
volatile and capricious; her heart is mercurial, having “all the Qualities of that Spirit
which is made use of in the Thermometer, to shew the Change of Weather.” Despite
their embrace of trade and consumption, Addison and Steele’s critique of the coquette’s
“Passion for Dress and Show” (N o. 15) demonstrates how eighteenth-century society
projected its anxieties about consumer culture onto women. Simultaneously, their
preoccupation with reforming the coquette reveals her threat to patriarchal authority
through her consuming appetites.

Feminist criticism has shown how the coquette poses a challenge to patriarchal
norms of comtship and marriage through her insistence on her own agency. With her
predatory sexual behaviors and self-indulgence, the coquette can be considered a potent
ﬁgure who openly deﬁes the conventional role of a virtuous woman. But these
discussions of the coquette have typically been conﬁned to considering her challenges to

gender norms instead of her relation to the changing economic world. Neglecting to note

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the consistency with which the coquette is identiﬁed as an avid consumer of luxury goods
elides the ways that the discourses of gender intertvvine with debates about emergent
consumer economy. The coquette—acquisitive, ﬁckle, and pleasure-seeking—not only
embodies the worst tendencies of female sexuality but also registers cultural anxieties
underlying emerging consumer capitalism. By allowing women to be subjects within
consumer culture, the market encourages women to desire in ways that threaten the
established sexual order. Ellen Pollak, for example, asserts that coquettes, like prudes,
are denigrated as “stock deviants” because they “are typically women who endeavor to
become subjects of desire within an ideological context that objectiﬁes female sexuality
as property.” 26 The coquette becomes a source of danger because she masterﬁrlly
exploits the marketplace for her own personal pleasure and proﬁt.

This relation between the coquette and consumerism has not been fully
examined in eighteenth-century scholarship. Instead of viewing coquetry as involving
solely moral or sexual behaviors, my reading of The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless
redeﬁnes coquetry as a mode of consumerism. By contextualizing coquetry within the
economic order, I will examine how Betsy’s coquetry allows her to play an active role as
a paradigmatic consumer of goods who masterfully exploits the marketplace for her own
pleasure and proﬁt. The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless illustrates how everyday acts
of shopping or choosing fashions in an increasingly commercialized culture can offer the
coquette an opportunity to deﬁne herself as a desiring subject. Catherine Ingrassia’s
study on the culture of eighteenth-century paper credit is helpful in understanding how

Haywood’s authorship is grounded in “speciﬁc details of material culture” in a way that

 

2" Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 65.

194

 

 

demonstrates how women authors “can control the cturency available to them as they act
as economic and political subjects.” 27 I would add that female coquetry can be seen as
part of the novel’s participation in the new commercial and ﬁnancial milieu that Ingrassia
identiﬁes. Whereas Ingrassia focuses on Haywood’s ability to manipulate the speculative
ﬁnancial economy as a professional author, I am more interested in exploring how her
coquettes use their consumer power as a form of cultural capital to achieve visual agency.
Haywood’s insistence that coquetry can be harnessed for women’s pleasure directly
challenges Addison and Steele, who castigated coquettes and sought to regulate their
consuming desires. I will argue that The History of Miss Betsy Thgghtless, far from
concluding with the happy marriage of a reformed coquette who renounces the art of self-
display, in fact explores the possibilities for radical female vision opened by the
coquette’s consumerism.

By demonstrating the complex ways Betsy’s coquetry functions as a form of
female agency, I align with scholars such as Shea Stuart and Deborah J. Nestor, who
emphasize the subversiveness of The History of Miss BetSy Thougﬂless. Whereas
earlier critics such as Jane Spencer regard Haywood’s later novel as belonging to
conservative conduct literature by focusing on the plot of female education or the
“reformed heroine,” 28 Nestor argues that Haywood’s use of narrative techniques
subverts conventional bourgeois morality. 29 Stuart even asserts that The History of

Miss Betsy Thoughtless can be read as a “feminist message” in its “breakdown of the

 

27 Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in EarlyEighteenth-Century England, 136.
28 Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist, 141.

29 Deborah Nestor, “Virtue Rarely Rewarded: Ideological Subversion and Narrative Form in
Haywood’s Later Fiction.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. (34: 1994), 579-598.

195

current sex-gender system” through the story of a reformed coquette. 30

By focusing on
how coquetry articulates with consumption and visuality, I will claim that Haywood’s
The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, like her periodical, can be seen as radical in its

subversion of domestic ideals through its strategic deployment of coquettry as a form of

female agency.

“the choice of ...cloaths”: Betsy’s Consumer Desires

At ﬁrst glance, Haywood’s novel tells the story of a young coquette who, after her
ﬂirtous relationship with many suitors and a catastrophic marriage to Mr. Munden, is
ultimately rewarded with a happy marriage to her true love, Charles Trueworth.
Portrayed as “too volatile for reﬂection” and “hurried by an excess of vanity, and [a] love
of pleasure,” (56) Betsy Thoughtless appears to conform to the conventional image of the
coquette who is satirized in many texts of the eighteenth century. Betsy starts out as the
quintessentially vain and self-indulgent pleasure-seeker. Rather than “examining the
heart, and what actions are most becoming of the character,” Betsy spends her time at her
toilet or “in consulting what dress is most becoming to the face” (27). The narrator
gently chides Betsy for being a superﬁcial, narcissistic female incapable of serious
reﬂection. While the novel seems to critique excessive vanity and desires of the coquette,
it also illustrates how the profusion of material objects can allow women to become
active, transgressive agents in the marketplace. Although the workings of London’s
commercialized world can be perilous to women, Betsy ﬁnds London, a “great

metropolis” ﬁlled with “promiscuous enjoyment” (33). Through acts of shopping,

 

3° Shea Stuart, “Subversive Didacticism in Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless” Studies in
English Literature 1500-1900 . (43: 2002),559.

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spending, and desiring commodities in the everyday world of fashion, Betsy not only V
experiences pleasure in looking but also learns to manipulate the marketplace for her
own purposes.

The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless is foremost a novel that underscores the

 

importance of economics. Haywood takes care to describe the price and speciﬁcs of
clothing, carriages, and other luxury goods in a manner that emphasizes their signiﬁcance
for women in the novel. For instance, Betsy’s preoccupation with dress and fashion is
intimately linked with her awareness that material commodities can “shape” her in a way
that empowers her: “As she was extremely curious in every thing relating to her shape,
she made choice of a pink-coloured French lustring, to the end, that the plaits lying ﬂat,
would shew the beauty of her waist to more advantage” (62). Ingrassia suggests that this
passage demonstrates Betsy’s understanding of clothing’s “ability to enhance her
desirability as a type of commodity.” 3 I This reading, however, neglects the extent to
which Betsy’s identiﬁcation with dressing signals her desire for power. In the following
passage, for example, she demands to choose her own dress, instead of passively

accepting the silk dress her guardian Lady Mellasin had purchased for her:

The young ladies fell to reviewing their silks; but Miss Betsy was no way satisﬁed
with hers: the more she looked upon it, the worse it appeared to her. “I shall
never wear this with any pleasure.” Said she; “I wish the man had it in his shop
again, for I think it quite ugly.” Miss Flora told her, that she wondered at her, that
the thing was perfectly handsome, and that my lady’s judgment was never before

called in question. “That may be,” replied Miss Betsy, “but certainly every one

 

3' Ingrassia, Authors_hip, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England,129.

 

197

 

 

ought to please their own fancy in the choice of their cloaths; for my part, I shall i

never endure to see myself in it” (61).

For Betsy, selecting her own dress is synonymous with her own independence, as she
insists: “I think I am now at an age capable of choosing for myself, in the article of
dress” (61). Betsy is also sharply aware that her agency is grounded in the material
economy. Her request to keep a part of her income for her own expenditure is indicative
of the degree to which she desires autonomy. She cries out: “twenty pounds for my
pocket expenses, and ﬁfty for my cloaths, I think I ought to have two latter entirely at my
own disposal, and to lay it out as I think ﬁt, and not be obliged, like a charity-child, to
wear whatever livery my benefactor shall be pleased to order” (6).

Whereas her guardian Mr. Goodman dismisses Betsy’s consumer impulses as a
“frivolous matter,” Haywood implies that Betsy’s consumerism is not an idle feminine
indulgence but is crucial in the process of constructing her autonomous self and in her
retaining a measure of control over the marketplace. Mr. Goodman fears that Betsy is a
vain coquette with an undisciplined consumer appetite. He urges her to “lay up” her
money and invest, as he advises against excessive spending: “You shall have the sum you
mention, Miss Betsy. . .but I would have you manage with discretion, for you may
depend, that the surplus of what was at ﬁrst agreed upon, shall not be broke into, but laid
up to increase your fortune, which, by the time you come of age, I hope, will be pretty
handsomely improved” (132). Rather than conforming to the persistent cultural notion of
the coquette as a frivolous spender with uncontrollable impulses for fashionable goods,

however, Betsy proves to be a responsible shopper who demonstrates careful choice over

198

 

her shopping expenses. She returns the dress chosen for her by Lady Mellasin and
acquires more items in exchange—a dress of her own choice, one that would display her
beauty to “to more advantage,” a riding habit, and a silver trimming: “all of which, with
the silk she disliked in exchange, did not amount to the money she had received from Mr.
Goodman” (63).

If Betsy’s use of consumption is intimately linked to her increased agency, her
strategic use of consumerism manifests itself equally in the relationship she maintains
with her suitors. Just as she desires to manage her own monetary capital, she seeks
control over the sexual capital she possesses. While Ingrassia is correct in suggesting
that consumerism is one of the ways “ women can control the currency available to them
as they act as economic and political subjects” (136), her analysis does not go far enough
in addressing how Betsy uses consumerism to alter or manage appearances to increase
her desirability. The pleasure Betsy takes in watching visually delightful fashionable
goods and spectacles of public diversions such as plays, balls, and operas encourages her
to model herself as an object on display while carefully controlling how she is viewed by
others. In other words, her deliberate public display of her beauty is an attempt on her
part to acquire power over her suitors as well as to control the terms on which she is
circulated within the sexual economy. As seen in the passage below, Betsy takes

pleasure in ﬂirting with men, without any intention of marriage:
It was not till after Miss Betsy had reason to believe she had engaged the heart of

her lover too far for him to recall it, that she began to take a pride in tormenting

him... for as she had not the least affection, or even a liking towards him, his

199

 

 

 

 

submissive deportment under the most cold, sometimes contemptuous carriage,
could afford her no other satisfaction, than, as she fancied, it showed the power of
her beauty, and piqued those ladies of her acquaintance, who could not boast of
such an implicit resignation, and patient suffering from her lovers, in particular
Miss Flora, who she could not forbear imagining looked very grave on the

occasion. (39).

Like a female rake, Betsy dominates her “submissive” admirer using the “power of her
beauty” to overturn the conventional power relations between men and women. Her
coquettish behavior, in this regard, is closely tied to her desire to maintain her “maiden
pride” (492), for marriage would mean a loss of her liberty and independence. By
delaying her entrance into marriage, Betsy can also continue circulating as a highly-
sought commodity within the marriage market. As such, she critiques the oppressive
structure of marriage, in which women must submit to male authority. Fully aware of
the ways women become powerless in marriage, she strongly opposes the idea that she

should marry. She exclaims: “what can make the generality of Women so fond of

 

marrying? — It looks to me like an infatuation. —- Just as if it were not a greater pleasure
to be courted, complimented, admired, and addressed by a number, than be conﬁned to
one, who from a slave becomes a master, and perhaps uses his authority in a manner
disagreeable enough” (488).

Instead of choosing a suitable husband, Betsy prides herself on making “new
conquests” of numerous men from Mr. Savings to Mr. Trueworth, Mr. Staple, and Mr.

Hysom, for the pleasure of exercising her power over them: “all the idea she had of either

200

of them served only to excite in her the pleasing imagination how, when they both came
to address her, she should play the one against the other, and give herself a constant
round of diversion, by their alternate contentment or disquiet” (101). Far from respecting
each suitor as an individual, Betsy regards all her potential spouses as the same: “Pleased
with the praise, she regarded not the condition or merits of the praiser, and suffered
herself to be treated, presented, and squir’d about all public places, either by the rake, the
man of honour, the wit, or the fool, the married as well as the unmarried, without
distinction, and just as either fell in her way.” (142) Like coquettes who “value
themselves on the number and quality of their lovers, as they do upon the number and
richness of their cloths,” Betsy treats men like any other fashionable items she can

purchase and collect (142), displaying her power as a consumer.

To “Out-Stand Her Market”: The Power of the Coquette as a Consumer

Betsy’s coquettish behavior toward her suitors coincides with her desire for public
display, for she derives intense pleasure in the responses she elicits from her lovers. She
“wished nothing beyond what she enjoyed, the pleasure of being told she was very
handsome, and gallanted about by a great number of those who go by the name of pretty
fellows” (56). Similarly, she spends most of her time and money either in ornamenting
her body or showing it off at fashionable gatherings. At the same time, Betsy uses her
status as a spectacle to assert power over men. While Betsy notes that married women
are “condemned to a scene of disquiet” (213), she is also fully aware that unmarried
women can deploy “the prerogative of youth and beauty in the one sex” (142) to arouse

male desire by deliberately controlling how they are displayed. The delight she takes in

201

 

 

presenting herself in public places, such as “[t]he court, the play, the ball, and opera,
with giving and receiving visits” makes Betsy very similar to the editor of The Female
Spectator in her early days, when she “should have thought the day lost, which did not
present [her] with some new opportunity of shewing [herself]” (F S Bk 1).

The very characteristics that deﬁne Betsy as a coquette also epitomize the
stereotype of the typical female consumer, who is vain, ﬁckle, acquisitive, and especially
desirous to be admired. Betsy utilizes the world of fashion and her mastery of courtship
to arouse interest and consciously perform desirability within the sexual marketplace. By
extension, Betsy’s ﬂirting with various men also mirrors the unrestrained nature of
female consumer desire, which is deemed excessive, capricious and indiscriminate. By
deliberately choosing multiple suitors for her own pleasure, she subverts the power
dynamics within courtship by positioning herself as the chooser rather than the chosen.
In this regard, the novel’s critique of coquetry also registers anxiety about modern
consumer capitalism in which commodities encourage women to desire in ways that
threaten the established sexual order. The intense pleasure Betsy gains from her
relationship with men and her dominance over her suitors underscores how female
consumers may be seen as transgressive within eighteenth-century society. Like a
“tyrant,” she treats her lovers as mere ornaments or diversions: “she played with her
lovers, as she did with her monkey, but expected more obedience from them” (296). For
Betsy, men become “the most valuable prize of all that her beauty had ever gained”
(349). Through her conﬂation of her suitors with objects that can be bought with capital,
Betsy exercises increased consumer choice, underscoring the sexual and social power

made possible for women by economic practice.

202

 

 

Betsy is also a shrewd shopper who acquires and collects numerous suitors
without committing to marriage. She is more interested in the play of courtship rituals
than in following through on their promise, as seen in her repudiation of marriage.
Moreover, her excessive consumer desire even disrupts the conventional terms of
exchange and “returns” of the established sexual economy in which courtship is
reciprocated with a marriage. She is described as being “covetous, even to greediness, of
receiving all, without any intention of making the least return” (349). Rebelling against
the standard rules of courtship, she refuses to be reduced to an object to be purchased by
male buyers within the sexual market but instead, ﬂatters, deceives, and toys with them
simultaneously.

For example, Mr. Gayland’s letter to Betsy illustrates how he interprets Betsy’ s
coquetry as a transaction gesture in which he must reimburse her “with interest” or a

marriage:

Dear Miss,
I must certainly be either the most ungrateﬁrl, or most consumedly dull fellow
upon earth, not to have returned the advances you have been so kind to make

me... I have found out a way to pay you the whole sum with interest (42).

In the passage above, Mr. Gayland makes it apparent that he perceives his relationship
with Betsy as a transaction in which he should reciprocate the same “favour” he has
received from Betsy. Betsy is conscious of “having, by a too free behavior toward him,

emboldened him to take this liberty,” yet she declines to return the “favour” by persisting

203

 

A

 

in coquetry, thus undermining the patriarchal exchange economy. Similarly, during her
visit to her brother in Oxford, Betsy refuses to acknowledge that she is expected “to pay
the debt, which love, youth, and beauty challenge” (73), when her coquetry provokes her
male company to try to take “greater liberties.” Even though Betsy comes to realize that
her coquetry places her in a compromising position in the sexual marketplace, she
attempts to retain her agency as a consumer by refusing to be considered an object to be
taken advantage of in the established discourse of sexual courtship.

Captain Hysom, an “immensely rich” merchant who has “twenty-ﬁve years in the
service of the East India Company” regards his courtship of Betsy as a “business”
transaction which has gone awry. His request, “[M]adam, I should be glad to know some
answer to the business I wrote to you upon,” indicates that courtship to him is just
another business dealing. He considers Betsy’s rejection of his marriage proposal a waste
of his valuable time and a bad investment. As Ingrassia rightly points out, Betsy
“repeatedly ﬁnds herself owing men sexual currency she is unwilling (often unaware of
needing) to pay.” 32 At the same time, I would add that Betsy’s unwillingness to pay
back the sexual currency she owes to men undermines the courtship economy that
culminates in marriage. By refusing to marry, Betsy consciously arouses desire only to
withhold its ﬁnal satisfaction. Hence, Mr. Goodman’s concern that Betsy’s coquetry will
make her value fall within the heterosexual economy simultaneously suggests his fear
that she will “out-stand her market” (135) and control the terms of the sexual
marketplace.

If coquetry attempts to delay marriage, it is in part because marriage is an

institution that disciplines the coquettish behavior that threatens patriarchal authority.

 

32 Ingrassia, Authogltjp, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England, 134.

204

 

Through her abusive and humiliating marriage with Mr. Munden, Betsy realizes painfully
that she is ultimately an object, “the property of Mr. Munden” (557). Even when she
ﬁnds herself admired by her husband’s patron, Lord _, she soon discovers that she is
reduced to an object of exchange between men, as her husband places her “on the very
verge of ruin”—when he deliberately arranges for her to be seduced by Lord __ for the
“prospect of interest and preferrnent he had ﬂattered himself with from” that gentleman
(556). This incident leads her to a crucial moment when she come to terms with “her

vanity, mistaken pride... [and] false delicacy” (558):

“How strange a creature have I been!” cried she, “how inconsistent with myself! I
knew the character of a coquet both silly and insigniﬁcant, yet did every thing in
my power to acquire it: --I aimed to inspire awe and reverence in the men, yet by
my imprudence emboldened them to the most unbecoming freedoms with me: --I
had sense enough to discern real merit in those who professed themselves my
lovers, yet affected to treat most ill those, in whom I found the greatest share of

n”(558)

According to Spencer, this emphasis on Betsy’s acquired self-awareness is one of the
major achievements of The Histm of Betsy Thoughtless: “By using interior monologue
at this point, Haywood shows Betsy’s reform taking place in her mind.” 33 Her self-
reﬂection, contrary to a coquette’s vacuity, appears to indicate Betsy’s disavowal of

coquetry and its afﬁnities for self-display and artfulness. By the same token, Betsy’s

 

3" Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist, 152.

 

205

 

 

transition from “thoughtless” to “thoughtful” woman seems analogous to the making of
Nancy Armstrong’s “new domestic woman,” in which women were encouraged to
abstain from their desire to become a part of a public spectacle and to assume the
authority of a male disciplinary gaze within the domestic sphere.

Nevertheless, while it may appear that Haywood is endorsing domesticity and
indicting the follies of coquetry though Betsy’s reform, Betsy’s deep reﬂection on “the
errors of her past conduct, in their true light” (557) seems to suggest less her
transformation into a proper, virtuous woman who fulﬁlls the domestic ideal than her
indictment of Mr. Munden’s treachery and tyrannical authority. The narrator
emphasizes Betsy’s lack of culpability, by pointing out that her coquettish desires to be
“admired and loved” were “perfectly uncorrupt and pure” (544). Rather than focus on
the potentially tragic results of Betsy’s coquetry, the novel calls attention to the
dangerous nature of masculine sexuality. Betsy often faces the physical danger of being
raped by men, and her ﬁiend Miss Forward turns to prostitution out of necessity after she
loses her chastity during Mr. Wildly’s sexual assault. Even respectable men indulge in
libertine pleasures and treat women as sexual objects without any moral repercussions:
Mr. Trueworth is easily seduced by Incognita (who turns out to be Miss Flora Mellasin),
and Betsy’s brother, Thomas Thoughtless, keeps a clandestine mistress, Mademoiselle de
Roquelair. More importantly, Mr. Munden fails in his moral duties as a husband, for he
proves to be cruel and domineering and even has an adulterous affair. By turning its
attention from Betsy’s coquetry to the shortcomings of patriarchal authority, the novel

represents men’s scandalous behaviors as a spectacle to the readers’ inspecting gaze and

206

 

 

suggests that proper conduct should not be limited to women only but should be expected

from men as well.

“To indulge herself in looking”: the Visual Pleasures of the Coquette

While Betsy is ostensibly committed to “improving those perfections of the mind
which she was sensible could alone entitle her to the esteem of the virtuous and wise,”
the novel continues to dramatize different ways in which Betsy derives pleasure from
consumption. Even after her disastrous marriage to Mr. Munden, Betsy ﬁnds ways to
increase her value within the novel. Contrary to Mr. Munden’s preconception of her as
“a bad economist” (499), she proves to be an exemplary consumer in her frugality and
home management. Whereas Betsy’s consumerism seems to place her within the
conﬁnes of the domestic sphere, it is also associated with advancing her own personal
interest, as she admits, “I expected that the trouble I have been at deserved at least to be
rewarded with what I have saved by my frugality” (539).

Another signiﬁcant instance of Betsy’s consumerism that affords her pleasurable
voyeurism is when she schemes to gain possession of Mr. Trueworth’s miniature
portrait. For Betsy, the miniature portrait becomes a valued commodity that she must
possess, especially since Mr. Trueworth is engaged to Miss Harriot and no longer
available to Betsy; Betsy thus “longed to have in her possession so exact a resemblance
of a man, who once had loved her” (445). It is a “copy” of Trueworth Betsy can own, an
object she can slip into her pocket and enjoy whenever she wants. It also symbolizes her
power as a consumer, for she behaves “with caprice” and “plotting” (444) to purchase the

portrait intended for Mr. Trueworth’s ﬁance. Like Fantomina, who engages in

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masquerades, Betsy disguises herself to buy the painting so that she will not be
recognized should Mr. Trueworth come to inquire who had taken away his picture. This
incident also gives Betsy intense pleasure that compensates for her previous humiliation
by Sir Frederick Fineer, who had attempted to ravage her: “All her remorse, —- all her
vexation, for the base design laid against her... were dissipated the moment she took it
into her head to get possession of this picture” (444). Not only does the portrait offer
Betsy pleasure in looking at Mr. Trueworth’s image but it also provides a means for her
to exercise her power to control men and their images. It enables her to indulge in her
sexual desire while offering “a possibility of becoming the mistress of what she so much
desired” (445).

Even the novel’s assertion of Betsy’s virtue at the end is undermined by dynamics
of display closely associated with earlier representations of her coquettish behavior.
Betsy rebels openly against the institution of marriage by seeking a legal separation, from
bringing the threat of public scandal against her husband: “when the affairs of a family
are laid open, and every dispute between the husband and the wife exposed before a court
of judicature, or even in a petition to a lord chancellor, the whole becomes a public talk,
and furnishes a matter of ridicule for the unthinking scoffers of the Age” (598). Instead
of being the one at fault, she is seen as the victim of injustice, as she appeals to the
public for her right: “I have discharged the duties of my station; I have fully proved I
know how to be a good wife, if he had known how to be a tolerable husband” (590).

The novel’s emphasis on Betsy’s manipulation of visibility becomes more striking
in her treatment of Mr. Trueworth’s portrait in a garden during her stay at a country home

in Surrey. Remarking that “this private recess seemed a certain defense against the sight

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of Mr. Trueworth,” Betsy refuses to be exposed to Mr. Trueworth’s gaze for fear that he
will discover her theft of the portrait and her feelings for him. She demonstrates her
visual agency by repeatedly gazing at his portrait. “She was rejoiced indeed to have this
picture once more in her possession because she thought she might indulge herself in
looking on it, without any breach of that duty, to which she was resolved so strictly to
adhere” (611). Despite her seeming renunciation of coquetry’s love of self-display, she
remains attached to her old self as the coquette who revels in admiration from the world.
She wonders: “What though my heart was insensible of love. . .my reason.—nay my very
pride, might have inﬂuenced me to embrace a proposal, which would have rendered me
the envy of my own sex, and excited the esteem and veneration of the other” (602).

The novel also undercuts the heroine’s transformation into a modest, domestic
woman with its explicit description of the scantily-clad Betsy standing in a garden, as in
the typical garden scenes of Haywood’s amatory ﬁction. Serving as a setting for Miss
F orward’s ﬂirtation with her lover Mr. Sparkish, the garden is closely associated with
sexuality and seduction in Haywood’s amatory tales. Like a passionate female character
of amatory ﬁction, Betsy becomes an embodiment of female desire and uncontrollable
sexuality when the narrative recounts that “tears ﬁlled her eyes, and her breast swelled
with involuntary sighs” (606) just as she gazes at the portrait of Mr. Trueworth “with the
utmost tenderness” (606). The eroticism of the scene is underscored when Mr.
Trueworth enters into the garden scene and discovers that he is the object of Betsy’s

spectatorial desire:

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El 1
He had a full view of every thing she did—Though she was in the most ‘
negligent nightgown that could be, she seemed as lovely to him as ever; all his
ﬁrst ﬂames rekindled in his heart, while gazing on her with this uninterrupted
freedom,—he longed to speak to her, but durst not, lest by doing so he should be
deprived of the pleasure he now enjoyed, till observing she had something in her
hand, which she seemed to look upon with great attention, and sometimes
betrayed agitations he had never seen in her before, he was impatient to discover
if possible the motive... he had a full opportunity of beholding all that the reader
has been told: —but what was his amazement to ﬁnd it was his own picture! That

very picture, which had been taken from the painter’s, was the object of her

meditations! (607-8)

Mr. Trueworth’s looking at ﬁrst appears to be voyeuristic, when he feels pleasure at

 

“gazing at her with uninterrupted freedom.” Nevertheless, his voyeurism is far from
being domineering or objectifying. Mr. Trueworth’s male gaze is complicated by the
intensity of Betsy’s visual pleasure, unsettling the spectator/spectacle structure beyond
that of male subject and female object. Similarly Mr. Trueworth’s pleasurable
voyeurism is suddenly ruptured by “the ﬁrst glance of [Betsy’s] eyes.” He becomes
conscious of his status as a spectacle when he discovers that he is the object of Betsy’s
gaze. His knowledge that Betsy “well deserved [his] love” (609) derives less from his
spectatorial authority than from the power Betsy commands as a spectacle and her
desiring look at his miniature portrait. In this regard, the portrait becomes the central

focal point in which Mr. Trueworth, Betsy, and the readers’ perspectives merge into one

210

spectatorial position. Just as both Mr. Trueworth and Betsy indulge and conﬁrm sexual

desire for each without actual loss of virtue, so are Haywood’s readers able to be titillated

by sexual intrigue and passion safely within the framework of domestic narrative that
upholds bourgeois morality. The narrator comments that her readers “all in general must
applaud the conduct of Mrs. Munden; till this dangerous instance, she had never had an
opportunity of shewing the command she had over herself” (610). If amatory ﬁctions
typically focus on sexually explicit scenes, Haywood appropriates these scandalous
elements for the readers’ gaze while careﬁilly reconciling these powerful sexual desires
with the female virtues required by conduct literature.

At ﬁrst glance, the ending of the novel stresses Betsy’s transformation as a result
of her understanding of virtue, which is rewarded by her marriage with Mr. Trueworth.
Behaving like a proper conduct-book heroine, Betsy recognizes the importance of self-
restraint and domestic duties over the coquettish love of self-indulgence and vanity.

Admitting that “she ought not to indulge so dangerous an invader of her duty” (612),

she learns to restrain her “excess of passion” (618) until she is married to Mr. Trueworth.

Despite the “extreme force of the passion” (622) Betsy and Mr. Trueworth feel for each
other other, Betsy must endure her unhappy marriage to Mr. Munden and demonstrate
her “virtue and prudence” (619) towards her unfaithful husband. With “all the errors
of her conduct reformed” (619), Betsy is eventually rewarded with a happy marriage to
Mr. Trueworth.

Yet Haywood simultaneously undermines Betsy’s reformation into a virtuous
heroine. Haywood maneuvers the plot so that it is Mr. Munden’s rather timely death,

rather than Betsy’s own decorous conduct, that enables Betsy’s marriage to Mr.

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Trueworth. Even though Betsy seems to have learned the dangers of coquetry, Haywood
suggests that she does not completely renounce the pleasures she derives from her past
coquetry. Although Betsy is praised for “her virtue and her compassion” (615) for the
dying Mr. Munden, Haywood questions whether the “grief [Betsy] appeared in was
undissembled” (616). Even her acquaintance Lady Loveit suggests Betsy’s
“dissembl[ing]” skill, linking Betsy with the coquette’s capacity to deceive through one’s
manipulation of appearance. Lady Loveit addresses Betsy: “I should take you to be the
greatest dissembler in it, ———for it would be very difﬁcult for any one less acquainted with
you. to believe you could be really afﬂicted at the death of a person whose life rendered
you so unhappy” (617). Even after her marriage to Mr. Trueworth, Betsy is still able to
indulge in the visual pleasures she had experienced as a coquette. Upon her marriage to
Mr. Trueworth, she is struck by Mr. Trueworth’s public display of wealth: “The ﬁrst
object that presented itself to [her], was a very neat running footrrran, who on the gate
being opened, came tripping up towards the house, and was immediately followed by a
coach with one gentleman in it, drawn by six prancing horses, and attended by two
servants in rich liveries, and well mounted” (630). In spite of Betsy’s protestation that she
prefers “the soft serenity of a country life” to “all the noisy giddy pleasures of the
tumultuous town” (606), she still derives pleasures from the excessive spectacle of
luxury objects. Haywood also points out that Betsy has “many advantages [from] an
alliance with Mr. Trueworth” (631), since she thereby gains both true love and material

prosperity. 34

 

3" From her marriage to Mr. Trueworth, Betsy agrees to receive a marriage settlement of eight
pounds a year (which is substantially more that she could hope to gain from her other suitors) from her
marriage to Mr. Trueworth (634).

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The novel’s ﬁnal paragraph calls attention to the moral didacticism of the story: iv
“Thus were the virtues of our heroine (those follies that had defaced them being ﬁrlly
corrected) at length rewarded with a happiness, retarded only till she had render’d herself

wholly worthy of receiving it” (634). Nevertheless, The History of Miss Betg

 

Thoughtless undermines its own moral by validating the very characteristics that Betsy
was originally condemned for indulging. Like Female Spectator, which emphasizes the
discerning sight of its editor, the respectable, reformed coquette, The Historyof Miss
Betsy Thoughtless, offers on the surface a conduct novel that insists on the importance of
virtue and the need for a disciplinary gaze. At the same time, the novel complicates the
conservative conduct-book tradition by acknowledging the complex ways that Betsy’s
coquetry, especially her manipulation of her visibility, gratiﬁes her sexual desires even as
she attains the virtue of a domestic heroine. The novel acknowledges the dangers of

coquetry mainly through the example of Miss Forward. Abandoned by her family and

 

educated only to be vain and pleasing to men, Miss Forward is unprepared for the
economic realities of her life and ultimately turns to prostitution. Because Miss Forward
lacks the necessary consumer skills to manipulate the material conditions she confronts in
her life, she ends up in destitution. Betsy, however, skillfully utilizes her coquetry to
negotiate a culture deﬁned by material as well as sexual economies. By highlighting the
ways women can appropriate coquetry to promote their interests and renegotiate their
position within the visual order through consumption, Haywood’s novel redeﬁnes
coquetry and radically challenges the prevailing attitudes toward it found in Addison and

Steele’s The Spectator.

 

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CHAPTER 4

THE POLITICS OF THE FEMALE CONSUMERIST GAZE IN BURNEY’S
CAMILLA AND CONCLUSION

Haywood’s treatment of female consumerism in The History of Miss Betsy
Thoughtless (1751) provides a useful point of comparison to Frances Bumey’s treatment
of the same subject in gamma (1796). 1 Written forty-ﬁve years apart, both stories
illustrate how the consuming desires of women play a crucial role in deﬁning female
subjectivity. The female protagonists of both these coming of age stories must learn the
proper virtues demanded of them as consumers in their society. Like Betsy Thoughtless,
who changes from an acquisitive coquette to a thoughtful domestic heroine, Camilla
learns that she must control her fashionable consumption when confronted with the tragic
consequences of her ﬁnancial irresponsibility and debt. Both narratives seemingly

conform to the conduct novel tradition, concluding with marriages in which the heroines

 

enclose their consuming appetites safely within the domestic space.

As we have seen, while Haywood’s novel purportedly shows domestic ideology
harnessed by patriarchal society’s regulation of female consumerism, it also calls
attention to female consumerism’s more positive, liberating effects. Betsy, even as a
reformed coquette, continues to manipulate fashionable consumption for her own ends,
carefully negotiating her own desires with the demands of her patriarchal society. In
contrast, Bumey’s Camilla exempliﬁes how female consumption is rigorously controlled
by male surveillance and specularization, although Mrs. Mittin remains a more

subversive and empowered female consumer throughout the novel. I would suggest that

 

' Frances Burney, Camilla or A Picture of Youth ed. Edward Bloom. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1972)

214

by the turn of the nineteenth century, the connection between female consumerism and
domesticity becomes more pronounced as excessive female consumption becomes the
target of male surveillance in a period that witnessed more active participation of female
consumers within the rise of retail industry, amusement, and commercial culture.
Bumey’s depiction of the problematic nature of female consumer desires reﬂects her
uneasiness about women’s growing vulnerability in commodity capitalism by
underscoring the correlation between female consumption and the patriarchal gaze.
Nevertheless, Burney simultaneously recognizes how female consumption can

signiﬁcantly challenge patriarchal authority.

QAILlﬂLa

As many commentators have observed, M revolves around a frustrated and
complicated courtship between its heroine and hero.2 Camilla Tyrold, the daughter of the
Reverend Augustus Tyrold and niece of Sir Hugh Tyrold, suffers through a series of
ordeals, both ﬁnancial and emotional, before she ﬁnally marries Edgar Mandelbert, Mr.
Tyrold’s charge and a wealthy heir. Yet what seems to be striking about Camjlﬁ is the
extent of her physical suffering and the psychological torment attendant on her loss of
autonomy as a result of excessive spending. It is especially ironic that Camilla’s debt,
which seems so modest compared to that of the male characters in the novel (who resort

to more despicable actions to resolve their debt), should cause her father’s imprisonment

and cause so much pain to her family. The intensity of suffering caused by Camilla’s lack

 

2 Julia Epstein, F_rances Bumey: The Life in the Works. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1988), 221; Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Being: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 17905
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 142. Julia Epstein notes that “Camilla tells the story of love
postponed, thwarted, frustrated, misled, and deliberately unspoken.” Claudia Johnson even argues that
female suffering in Camilla has a “masochistic edge.”

 

215

WWMﬁ

 

of ﬁnancial knowledge and her irresponsible spending seems to teach the lesson that
female consuming appetites should be carefully controlled. Camilla, who embodies
spontaneity, liveliness and “volatile” spirits at the beginning of the book, realizes the
importance of self-control and restraint under the careful, scrutinizing eyes of Edgar, her
suspicious suitor, and her father Mr. Tyrold, who lectures her on exemplary female virtue
and conduct. What seems particularly signiﬁcant about Burney’s §a_m_il_la, compared to
the other texts I have discussed, is the pervasive nature of male surveillance within it to
the extent Camilla becomes active in regulating her own consuming desires in accordance
with ideal femininity.

Criticism on Camﬂ in general has tended to focus on Burney’s strategies of self-
fashioning or her authorship in the literary marketplace. For example, Kristina Straub
comments that Burney’s texts are marked with cultural paradoxes implicit in the role of a
woman novelist; Burney, Straub argues, is “both an informed and carefully self-
conscious writer and a woman with a commitment to ideologically orthodox femininity.”
3 Catherine Gallagher discusses how Burney’s self-effacing use of “nobody” or the
“explicit ﬁctionality” of her text allows her to build up cultural capital by appealing to the
new readers in the expansion of the literary marketplace in the 17908.4 While these
approaches provide a useful lens through which to contextualize Bumey’s professional
life, they tend to focus solely on her cultural production of literary commodities without
fully addressing the other aspects of female consumerism that inﬂuenced Bumey’s

textual authority. Deidre Lynch’s The Economy of Character, on the other hand, focuses

 

3 Kristina Straub, Divided Fictions. (Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 7.

4 Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplaae,
1670-1820. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), xvii.

216

 

 

on the “reciprocal shaping of eighteenth-century Britain’s market culture and its culture
of character” and illustrates how the new consumer society and its growth of retail
markets produce Camilla’s psychological complexity as a female character. 5 I agree with
Lynch’s assertion that the self cannot be conceptualized as a “presocial, prediscursive
entity located well outside the marketplace” 6 and that Camila allows us to attend to
ways in which female characters deﬁne themselves through their newly intimate
relationship to commodities. While Lynch helps to clarify how a consumer culture is
also a psychological culture, I am interested in exploring the ways in which the new
consumer subjectivity that was emerging in the eighteenth century empowered women,
especially in terms of their way of looking. In this connection, Anne Friedberg’s work on
modern female consumers is useful. F riedberg explains that the rise of metropolitan
urban culture with new retail spaces like arcades, department stores, and new forms of
protocinematic entertainment such as the panorama (1287) and the diorama (1823) at the
tum-of-the-nineteenth-century facilitated a “mobilized ‘virtual’ gaze” for female
consumers. These pleasure venues of eighteenth-century London allowed women not
only increased mobility but also the exercise of a new kind of “virtual” subjectivity
enabling them to shop and gain pleasure beyond the commodiﬁed experience of everyday
life. 7 I will suggest in what follows that the shopping experience of Camilla and Mrs.

Mittin in Burney is linked in many ways to what Friedberg deﬁnes as modern consumer

 

5 Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 19.

‘5 lbid., 169.

7 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993).

217

 

 

subjectivity in its activation of a mobile gaze and its subversion of a masculine o'cular

regime.

“The scrupulous, the scrutinizing”: male surveillance of female consumption

As a tale of a young woman attempting to make her way around the fashionable
societies of Tunbridge, Southampton and London, Camﬂa highlights the problematic
status of the female subject within emerging consumer society. In Bumey’s writings, a
female protagonist enters into the world as a spectacle to the male gaze. Just as Evelina
in the Pantheon is reduced to a silent “sight” by the men she encounters, the female
characters in Camﬂ circulate as objects of male desire. Camilla’s cousin, Indiana, with
“all the secret triumph of conscious beauty” (60), is coveted by men for her physical
beauty while Camilla’s sister, the crippled Eugenia, is regarded as a “valuable
acquisition” (61) by speculating suitors because of her inheritance. As commodities
within circuits of exchange, women are easily interchangeable. Just as Sir Hugh changes
his heir from Indiana, to Camilla and ﬁnally to Eugenia, Edgar substitutes Indiana for
Camilla as his' object of courtship, and Melmond shuttles from Indiana to Eugenia. This
emphasis on the exchangeability of women suggests Burney’s indictment of the way
women become reduced to commodiﬁed objects of transaction within the marriage
market. Like Betsy Thoughtless, who realizes the impropriety of her coquettish ways,
Camilla must learn to repress her spontaneous, “volatile” (52) nature and renounce her
consumer desires in order to comply with the sanctions governing the conduct of the new

domestic woman.

218

I'Rhl

 

 

 

V_ _. .

The narrator’s extensive accounts of the shopping expeditions and ﬁnancial
transactions that entangle Camilla in heavy debt suggest duplicity in the way the female
consumer is inscribed by the commercial culture: she is interpellated as both an agent and
object of commercial exchange. Even though a woman may be economically powerless,
she is expected to spend in ways that fulﬁll the female dress codes of fashionable society.
Camilla is a poor but respectable clergyman’s daughter, yet she is conﬁned by the
imperatives of consumption imposed upon a genteel woman who must maintain her
appearance as a lady and display herself as a valuable commodity in the marriage market.
Aware of the public gaze that continually judges her by her conspicuous consumption,
she is forced to reproduce herself in the image required by fashionable society. Realizing
that her “little wardrobe exhibited a worse quality than that of not keeping pace with the
last devices of the ton” (689), she strives to conform to conventional standards of
femininity by purchasing many fashionable items regardless of her ability to afford them.

Camilla is “too inexperienced to know, that in gay circles, and public places, the
demands for wealth are endless and countless; and that economy itself, which is always
local, is there lavish and extravagant, compared with its character in private scenes and
retired life” (518). Her indulgence in “triﬂing” leads her to incur debts to people around
her, including the rakish Sir Sedley, who calls her his “little debtor” (523) and the money
lender Mr. Clykes, who charges her a “handsome premium and handsome interest” (743).
Nevertheless, Camilla’s debt, which is smaller than those of such male characters as her
brother Lionel and her cousin Claremont, who engage in dissolute and extravagant

lifestyles, leads to a far more damaging outcome in the book. When Camilla fails to pay

her debt, her ﬁnancial disaster ultimately places her family in disgrace; her father is

219

 

imprisoned and her uncle displaced from his estate. Banished from her house, Camilla,
overcome with “self-accusation” (875), suffers a nearly fatal illness: “I have become an
alien to my family, and a burthen to myself! Ordered from my home by my Father, lest
my sight should be destructive to my mother” (839).

By underscoring the destructive effect of female consumer appetites on private
domestic life, CM suggests at ﬁrst glance that female consumption needs to be
managed properly. Through her horrendous ordeal, Camilla realizes the impropriety of
her acquisitive desires and ends up deploring her lack of self-restraint in her purchases.
But revealing the ideological process whereby the female consumer is constructed as an
extravagant shopper with an unruly appetite, C_am_i_l_la also draws attention to the
pervasive ways in which patriarchal culture attempts to regulate female consumption
through the male gaze. The explicit project of surveillance by male characters in .the
novel exempliﬁes the visual technology by which Camilla’s consuming desires become
regulated by patriarchal authority. Edgar, whose gaze is reminiscent of Mr. Spectator in
its power, best represents the repressive role of male surveillance. Appropriately
described by Mrs. Arlbery as “a watcher” (482), he monitors Camilla carefully with
“positively distrustful” eyes that prove him suspicious of her actions and motives. He
constantly scrutinizes Camilla to judge whether she is worthy to be his wife, in the same
way that careful purchaser would evaluate a commodity. Rather than appreciating
Camilla for who she is, he allows his ﬂuctuating, selﬁsh desires to determine her' value.
Inﬂuenced by his misogynist tutor Mr. Marchmont, who warns him that “[w]hatever is
her appearance of worth, try and prove its foundation, ” Edgar becomes “the scrupulous,

the scrutinizing” (I61) observer who attempts to decipher Camilla through his

220

 

 

l
E

penetrating gaze. Edgar seeks to “study her... with new eyes, new cars, and new
thoughts” (158), with scientiﬁc observation and empirical knowledge. Yet despite his
desire for transparency, Edgar’s observation of Camilla is limited by the “mischief of
appearances” in that he is unable to gauge how her actions differ “from the sincerity of
reality” (681). The more Camilla appears in fashionable society, the more Edgar suspects
her of being a “conﬁrmed coquette” (681), who easily manipulates others through
appearances.

Camilla, however, is trapped by a society with strict rules not only about female
conduct but also about the public interpretation of conduct. Because she is instructed by
her father, Mr. Tyrold, to conceal and resist her emotions, her behavior can never be
equated with her inner feelings. Mr. Tyrold’s sermon on female virtues functions as a

form of male surveillance that attempts to discipline female conduct. Not only is Camilla

 

forced to repress her desires but she also is urged to spy on herself. She must monitor
herself so that she can “conquer weak emotion, and no one shall ever know” that she
has “a feeling she ought to disguise!” (345) In short, Camilla must internalize the
patriarchal gaze in policing her own behavior and desires.

Just as Camilla is expected to conceal her desire for Edgar, she is expected to curb
her consumer desires for commodities. Camilla’s episode with the beautiful locket
offered as a rafﬂe object illustrates her struggle over a luxury item which she longs to
possess but is pressured to renounce. The “magnetic power” of the locket, as seen in its
elaborate details, emphasizes the intense pleasure Camilla derives from its acquisition:
“A beautiful locket, set round with pearls, ornamented at the top with a little knot of

small brilliants, and very elegantly shaped, with a space left for a braid of hair, or a cipher,

221

was produced; and, as if by magnetic power, attracted into almost every hand” (92).
While the locket exempliﬁes Camilla’s powerful appetite for commodities, conventional
femininity requires Camilla to relinquish her desire and refrain from even looking at it:
“She knew not, however, till now, how hard to resist was the contagion of example, and
felt a struggle in her self—denial, that made her, when she put the locket down, withdraw
from the crowd, and resolve not to look at it again” (93). When Camilla withdraws her
bid at the rafﬂe for “what she felt an extravagance” (94) and instead donates the
money to “poor starving people” (98), Edgar is pleased by her unselﬁsh gesture. For
Edgar, it is Camilla’s charity, not fashionable consumption, that increases “her value” to

him.

“Routing over every body’s best goods”: the Pleasures of Shopping

Whereas Camilla is urged to repress her desires through self-surveillance,
fashionable consumption offers possibilities for alternatives to this gender ideology.
Edgar’s disapproval of Mrs. Arlbery suggests the male anxiety inspired by the
consumer’s power to disrupt patriarchal control. Criticizing Mrs. Arlbery as an “idle,
dissipated” lady of fashion (202), Edgar deems her a “dangerous acquaintance” for
Camilla, fearing that the “lively, the unthinking, the inexperienced Camilla” will
“degenerate[e] into the character of a coquette” (463). Mrs. Arlbery openly deﬁes
social conventions with her “air of fashion almost to insolence.” Appearing in a
“complete but becoming undress,” she uses her clothing to assert autonomy, displaying
“a decided superiority to all she saw, and a perfect indifference to what opinion she

incurred in return” (73). Mrs. Arlbery not only manipulates attire to pursue her individual

222

 

 

desires but also challenges gender roles by denying her dependence on male approval.
She also criticizes Edgar’s surveillance of Camilla, sharply pointing out that his need to
monitor her stems from his insecurity: “[h]e is a watcher; and a watcher, restless and
perturbed himself, infests all he pursues with uneasiness” (482). She thus advises Camilla
to take on the role of an active consumer within the marriage market by urging her to
exercise her own choice in courtship instead of being chosen by a man. She remonstrates
to Camilla: “This is all the romance of false reasoning. You have not sought the man,
but the man you. You would not have solicited his acceptance, but yielded to his
solicitation of yours” (780).

Camilla also uses fashionable consumption to conceptualize a notion of the self
that accommodates her own desire and agency. In Southampton, she purchases an
expensive dress, hoping to attract Edgar’s attention despite her shortage of money. The
“sight” of her new ball dress, “superﬂuous as it was expensive,” is “sure of a welcome for
Camilla” (710), since she longs to impress Edgar in her new attire. Here, her material
desire for the dress becomes synonymous with her sexual desire for Edgar. The detailed
inventory of her dress also reveals the extent to which Camilla derives pleasure from the
spectacle of her elaborate ball gown: “Her robe was everywhere edged with the ﬁnest
Valencienne lace; her lilac shoes, sash, and gloves, were richly Spangled with silver, and
ﬁnished with a silver ﬁinge; her ear-rings and necklace were of lilac and gold beads; her
fan and shoe roses were brilliant with lilac foil, and her bouquet of artiﬁcial lilac ﬂowers,
and her plumes of lilac feathers, were here and there tipt with the most tiny transparent

white beads, to give them the effect of being glittering with the dew” (721).

223

 

 

 

After being disappointed with Edgar’s absence at the ball, Camilla gazes at her
own image and the “expensive elegance of her whole dress” in front of the mirror, and
realizes the “impropriety of having risked so much” in the context of her mounting debt.
Whereas this scene may be indicative of Camilla’s identiﬁcation with “Edgar’s
reproachful way of seeing --- of glaring at --- her” (183), her ultimate dismissal of the
dress also stresses her capacity to make willﬁrl consumer choices, instead of reinforcing
the conventional notion of a female consumer with an indiscriminate appetite. When
Camilla confronts her attired image in the mirror, she does not merely accept the image
she sees but carefully chooses to be different from what she sees, similar to the ways a
careful shopper might shop around by trying on and discarding different identities.
Deidre Lynch notes that this scene in which Camilla contemplates her reﬂection is
indicative of how a consumer culture mobilizes psychological complexity, signifying
the “momentum of the consumer economy when someone stands in front of a

dressing-room mirror, or contemplates the layout in a fashion magazine, and says, “It’s

 

not me” (182). Camilla’s changing self in relation to the dress suggests that there is no
determinate self but that her identity is always in process.

Burney demonstrates how consumption can enable ﬂuid forms of identity that are
liberating for women, and her extensive account of shopping and retail practices in
Camilla emphasizes the empowering aspects of female consumerism. By the late
Georgian period, increased numbers of shops, spas and resorts, and sightseeing sites
became showcases for a wide array of consumer goods, anticipating the appearance of

8

Victorian department stores and modern pedestrian malls. These public arenas offered

 

8 Britain’s ﬁrst department store opened in 1863.

224

women new opportunities for public mobility and urban spectatorship, resulting in the
emergence of what Anne Friedberg sees as “the female ﬂaneur” who was “free to roam

” 9 When Camilla decides to

the city” and assume “the privilege of shopping on her own.
go shopping in High Street in Southampton with Mrs. Mittin, they behave in ways that
challenge conventional feminine consumer behaviors. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace
argues that, although both men and women were sellers and buyers, the relation between
the seller and the buyer was often seen in gendered terms in the eighteenth century: “In
the language of trade, buyers are most often rendered feminine and submissive, ‘
regardless of their actual gender. The seller, in contrast, assumes a dominant, masculine
position” '0 Instead of yielding to male shopkeepers’ authority, Camilla and Mrs. Mittin
wander around the stores freely and examine goods with pleasure without actually buying
anything. In short, they participate in what may be seen as a radically new practice of
shopping; browsing or window-shopping, which is driven by feminine desire than need.
Camilla and Mrs. Mittin indulge in visual pleasure, seeing “what there’s to see in town”
and “all that was smartest, without the expense of buying anything.” Their shopping
experience makes it possible for them to be powerful female spectators as opposed to
merely “object[s] to be stared at without scruple” (613) by men. Camilla’s act of
“indulging with impunity such unbridled curiosity” (608) and Mrs. Mittin’s free-roving
eyes, which “rou[ted] over every body’s best goods, [without] laying out a penny” (611),

emphasize the undisciplined feminine pleasures women were able to experience as

 

9 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. , 35-36.

‘0 Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace. Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the
Eighteenth Century. (New York: Columbia Press, 1997), 78.

 

225

 

 

shoppers. Here shopping, no longer a chore for necessities, constitutes an enjoyable
diversion in which female consumers can exercise the privilege of looking.

Although Camilla’s shopping episodes in Southampton present a compelling
example of roving female shoppers who elude an objectifying male gaze through their
itinerant spectatorship, Burney ultimately implies that in the public realm, this
empowered female shopper is at odds with prescribed ideals of femininity. The enormity
of Camilla’s debt and the serious consequences of her fashionable consumption suggest
that female consumption needs to be controlled and monitored by society and the self.

Camilla, repentant of her self-indulgent luxuries, returns to the safety of the patriarchal

 

home and marries Edgar in domestic bliss at the ending. But while Camilla illustrates
that female consumption for a respectable middle-class woman like Camilla must be
circumscribed within the domestic sphere, Mrs. Mittin, who comes from the working
class, epitomizes a more transgressive aspect of female consumerism in the novel. Like
Mrs. Arlbery, who uses fashionable consumption for her own advantage, Mrs. Mittin is a
skillful manipulator of clothes, both for herself and others. Not only does she proﬁt from
being a personal shopper for Camilla but she uses clothes to negotiate class boundaries,
in much the same way that Roxana uses masquerade. Having moved up the social ladder
from a “small country milliner” to a “gentlewoman” (688), Mrs. Mittin dresses
appropriately to gain freedom to act as she desires. She remarks: “people take me for a
mere common, and I walk on, ever so late and nobody speaks to me; and so by that
means I get my pleasure, and save my money; and yet always appear like a gentlewoman
when I’m known” (424). Blending into new surroundings, she appeals to “every rank

and class of society,” capitalizing on her knowledge of different fashions. Just as she is

226

 

 

 

able to shift between different classes, she can easily assume different identities: “a
parasite, a spy, an attendant, a drudge: keep a secret, or spread a report; incite a quarrel,
or coax contending parties into peace; invent any expedient, and execute any scheme”
(688). Although the narrator implicitly disapproves of Mrs. Mittin’s “egotism,” which is
“as prevalent in her mind as in that of the more highly ambitious, though meaner and less
dangerous” (689), Mrs. Mittin can be seen as admirable in her extreme adaptability and
versatility, for she freely moves through the streets or social world manipulating the
terms of her appearance without fear of recrimination. In her roving and her gazing, Mrs.

Mittin constitutes a form of urban strolling that circumvents the norms of femininity.

The Politics of the Female Consumerist Gaze

Camilla and Mrs. Mittin’s shopping excursion presents us with a common theme
that runs through this study. The actively desiring gazes of women shoppers of the late
eighteenth—century are seen in Montagu’s admiration for Turkish women and their culture
and in Betsy’s longing looks at Mr. Trueworth’s portrait. These women’s uses of
consumption for pleasure rather than utility enables a new understanding of self, one that
is constituted through material commodities. Shopping is not just about economic
activity but about desires, fantasy, and identiﬁcation, among other things. Rather than
being constituted monolithically as an object of exchange, the ﬁgure of the female
consumer also emerges as an active, even transgressive agent in the marketplace.
Montagu’s shopping episodes in Turkey allow her to explore alternatives beyond the
constraints of the British aristocratic self. Roxana uses her possessions to transgress the

boundaries of class and sexual norms. Betsy’s tactical engagement with coquetry enables

227

 

 

her to disrupt the expectations of proper femininity. Browsing for pleasure without being
compelled to purchase merchandise, Camilla and Mrs. Mittin actively construct
themselves as agents rather than serving as objects of others’ gazes. Through their
mobile, browsing looks, Camilla and Mrs. Mittin challenge the dominant scopic regime
that constructs women as commodiﬁed objects of the male gaze.

Because the female consumer was seen as threatening to male order, eighteenth-
century society sought to control her through disciplinary practices. My discussion
reveals the ideological process whereby the bodies of female consumers become,
increasingly regulated and disciplined into compliant domestic women by male
surveillance. Whereas Montagu’s celebration of Turkish commodity culture is largely
limited to her aristocratic afﬁliation, her consumerist gaze in Continental Europe
valorizes bourgeois domestic ideals. Roxana’s series of masquerades, which is made
possible by foreign commodities, is curtailed by her maternal role, in which domestic
consumption becomes favored over foreign consumption. The most explicit example of
the link between female consumption and domesticity is Addison and Steele’s lha
Spectator papers. Mr. Spectator is paradigmatic of the masculine gaze that attempts to
monitor and contain those threatening aspects of female consumption within the private
domestic world. In contrast, Haywood’s conduct literature rejects the conventional
notion that female consumers have insatiable appetites, and suggests instead that female
consumers can negotiate their visual agency within the private domestic sphere through
the strategic use of coquetry. As the end of the eighteenth century witnesses rapidly

expanding consumer practices against the backdrop of the development of retail shopping

228

 

 

€1.11
t
1

and tourism, Camilla’s ﬁnancial disaster suggests that the pr0per regulation of female E1
consumption is necessary for a domestic woman within patriarchal economy.

There is much at stake for patriarchal ideology in disciplining female
consumption in accordance with domestic ideology, but historical accounts show that
female consumers in Britain nonetheless exercised political power by the end of the
eighteenth century. For example, the participation of British women in the sugar
boycotts of the 17905 provides insight into the crucial role of female consumers in the
abolitionist struggles to end slavery in the British Caribbean. West Indian sugar, a luxury
item which increasingly became an everyday necessity, became an important symbol of
England’s involvement in the slave economies of the Caribbean in the last decade of the
eighteenth century, thus linking domestic consumption with colonial production. The
campaign to boycott slave-grown sugar attests to the power of white female consumers in
convincing the public to abstain from sugar consumption in protest against slavery,
emphasizing the consumer’s discretionary power to buy or not to buy a product. An
antislavery pamphlet clearly acknowledges the domestic power of British women:
“refusing to use any articles which have been cultivated by Slaves, woman, feeble as she
is, may do more for the suppression of the inhuman Slave Trade, than all the ships of war

” ” Here, it is evident that abolitionists

that have ever ranged the coast of Africa.
depended on the female capacity for compassion and moral inﬂuence, for they
consciously called on domestic female consumers’ ability to imagine and sympathize

with colonial suffering. Charlotte Sussman argues that antislavery discourse was

potentially racist in that it often deployed a rhetoric of physical contamination by African

 

” “To the Women of Great Britain and Ireland, on the Disuse of Slave Produce.” London: circa
1828. Quoted in Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Shawna
1713-1833. (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000), 128

229

 

slaves. Domestic consumption of sugar, for example, was represented as equivalent to
ingesting the blood of slaves and thereby incorporating the dangers of the colonial
‘other.’ Thus, the boycott of sugar was simultaneously tied to the making of English
identity in that it consciously called on women’s power to regulate domestic consumption
and to ensure that the domestic space remain distinct from the source and threat of
colonial contamination.

The female consumer’s political power lay not only in purchasing of colonial
products but also in her active consumption of images. As active agents in the market,
women consumers were also responsible for purchasing fashionable items to promote
abolition. According to Thomas Clarkson, it became fashionable for women to wear and

display ceramic medallions created by Josiah Wedgwood in 1788:

Of the ladies, several wore them in bracelets, and other had them ﬁtted up in an
ornamental manner as pins for their hair. At length, the taste for wearing them
became general; and thus fashion, which usually conﬁnes itself to worthless
things, was seen for once in the honorable ofﬁce of promoting the cause of justice,

humanity and freedom. '2

Josiah Wedgewood’s popular medallion features an emblem of a kneeling slave inquiring,
“Am I not a man and a brother?” If women’s consumption of this ornament drew the
male gaze to the body of the woman who wore it, it also redirected male attention on the

medallion representing a black male slave in a suppliant position. By focusing attention

 

'2 Clarkson Thomas, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of
the Aﬁricgr Slave Trade by the Britis_h Parliament. (Philadelphia: J. Parke, 1808)

230

 

 

on the suffering image of the black slave, female consumers consciously deployed the
dynamics of the gaze to promote the antislavery cause as a moral imperative. ‘3 Here,
the consumption of a household fashion item becomes part of a political agenda.
Through their sympathetic identiﬁcation with the suffering of Caribbean slaves, women
not only brought the supposedly feminine qualities of compassion and sympathy to bear
on the colonial world but also urged other consumers to follow their model as a moral
exemplum. As Nancy Armstrong has shown, the rise of the domestic woman by the end
of the eighteenth century revolutionalized the status of women in English culture.
Armstrong underlines the important element of cultural agency that this new domestic
woman exercised: “The domestic woman’s capacity to supervise was clearly more
important than any other factor in determining the victory of this ardently dazzling
creature over all her cultural competitors. For this reason, the peculiar combination of
invisibility and vigilance personiﬁed in the domestic woman came to represent the
principle of domestic economy itself.” '4 If a woman became valued not for her physical
attributes but her inner qualities, these female domestic virtues had a powerful impact on
the economic and political world. Abolitionists consciously called on female domestic
virtues to preserve the home as a symbol of English identity and to ensure that the
domestic sphere remained safe from colonial contamination. Although it can be argued

that the female consumer’s gaze stems from her privileged position as a white domestic

 

'3 For the image of the medallion, see “Slave Medallion,” Josiah Wedgwood. Courtesy of the
Trustees of the Wedgwood Museum, Barlaston, Staffordshire, England. The image of the black slave in
contrast with the white background can be seen as reinforcing the superiority of the white consumers, just
as the kneeling, prostrated position of the black slave’s helpless face raised to the white audience appealing
for help naturalizes the hierarchical relationship between the Caribbean slave and the white.

'4 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987), 80-81.

231

r agar—V.-.- .‘3 _

 

 

"(Ii-3'1"? 4'. . . .

woman and assumes an unequal relation with the black slave, the example of the slavery
medallion is evidence of how female consumers deployed the power of the gaze to
undermine the institution of slavery and to reconﬁgure consumer behavior for political
ends.

By concluding with the example of the female consumer’s boycott of sugar, my
study insists that female consumerism in the eighteenth century opens up space for
cultural and political agency. By negotiating their dual status as both autonomous agents
desiring goods and dependent objects of consumption under the male gaze, female
consumers, like the women in all the texts I have discussed throughout this study,
successfully exercised the privilege of seeing and controlling the terms of being seen by
others. An understanding of eighteenth-century consumerism in relation to visuality is
crucial because it helps to challenge the workings of male visual dominance. It also
underlines how women’s consumption in particular had the capacity to disrupt stable
notions of gender, class, nation and subjectivity through the production of new and more

mobile forms of identity and pleasure.

232

 

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