Life After Death: Widows and the English Novel, Defoe to Austen
Widows have been a source of tension in English literature at least since the Wife of Bath challenged “auctoritee” with her own “experience”[i]; in this pioneering work on widows in the eighteenth-century novel, Karen Bloom Gevirtz argues that this tension regarding widows’ experience is heightened in the fiction of the period. The figure of the widow becomes a focal point for anxieties about changing patterns of economic activity as well as about related changes in expectations regarding gender. To Gevirtz, “experience”—economic as well as marital and sexual—is “a [. . .] tangible part of a widow’s estate” (32) and is systematically negated, demonized, or domesticated in depictions of fictional eighteenth-century widows, effectively serving the interests of an emerging commercial economy which simultaneously denies women’s traditional economic opportunities and relies upon women as consumers. This slender volume makes a cogent and academically significant argument in an engaging and accessible style; it covers a broad sweep of the history of the English novel, usefully organizing literary widows across the period into types, each of which reveal different cultural anxieties regarding the economic participation of women, particularly single, sexually experienced, women, in an era in which the legal and social position of such women is systematically undermined.
Gevirtz’ introduction situates the eighteenth-century literary widow historically as a clear departure from a long tradition of literary widows, all of whom reveal ambivalence surrounding female sexuality and power, by examining the cultural and aesthetic contexts against which the figure of the widow emerges as uniquely fraught with anxiety in this period. Historically, Gevirtz reminds us, the eighteenth century sees the shift from a landed to a commercial economy, a division of male and female activity into public and private “spheres,” a consistent erosion of economic opportunity open to women (17), a revised—because more self-sacrificing—cultural expectation of maternal behaviour (19), and, significantly, a restriction of the traditional rights and freedoms of widows (20). Aesthetically, Gevirtz argues, the influence of sensibility throughout most of the period tends to shape virtuous economic behaviour (21)—behaviour that, increasingly, cannot simultaneously be undertaken by widows and remain virtuous.
The second chapter considers literary treatment of the affluent widows of the landed and mercantile classes—the distinction becomes significant as Gevirtz emphasizes the era’s deployment of “associations of the country as the opposite of the chaotic, iniquitous city” (62) in depictions of widows, who may be depicted as virtuous if they embody traditional values and enact the kind of benevolence that maintains the social order, contrasting with dangerous widows who enlarge their estates through commercial means and with self-interested motives. The third chapter deals with another category of widows with money—working widows, whose depiction in novels corresponds with the historic erosion of women’s rights and opportunities in the workplace. These widows, Gevirtz argues, can only maintain virtue if their work is clearly removed from the commercial sphere and is recast as “maternal and domestic” (69).
The fourth and fifth chapters consider the social problems represented, respectively, by poor and criminal widows. Poor widows, Gevirtz notes, tend increasingly to exist in fiction as pathetic objects of charity, providing opportunities for their social superiors to engage in benevolent sensibility, and then conveniently disappearing, making no demands upon their benefactors. In the fifth chapter, Gevirtz examines the historical record of real criminal widows, with telling results: criminal widows in fiction do not reflect the range of crimes perpetuated by widows on record. Most of the crimes engaged in by widows in fiction—with the significant exception of Defoe’s sympathetic treatment of Moll Flanders driven to theft by poverty—are crimes wherein sexual deviance intersects with mishandling of property. Criminal widows in fiction, Gevirtz points out, are often “adulterers or sellers of innocents” (118) whose sexual crimes are often also tied to fraud. They are deviants, playing out the fears of a culture in which, increasingly, widowhood is “a condition always already transgressing” (136).
Gevirtz concludes with a chapter that explores Jane Austen’s several widows as revealing a “greater comfort with the category of ‘widow’” as well as “a greater comfort with the commercial economy” (139) as economic and cultural conditions which occasioned anxiety in the eighteenth century have settled into social practice. At the same time, Gevirtz considers Austen’s widows more complex than those typical of the eighteenth-century novel: they do not clearly illustrate landed country virtues in opposition to commercial urban vices, but explore the problems, particularly to financially struggling women, attendant upon excesses in both systems, ultimately favoring “a balanced combination of landed and commercial activity” (159), and moving away from the partisanship of the previous century.
Life After Death offers overdue insight into remarkably consistent depictions of widows in eighteenth-century fiction; some further exploration of her subject could make for an even more compelling argument. For example, Gevirtz notes the “considerably different sociopolitical outlooks” of the authors she studies—including “Smollett and Reeve, Scott, Godwin, Davys, and Henry Fielding, who were separated by time, gender, life experience [and. . .] political ideology” (40) but does not explore the possibilities for radicalism offered by sensibility; the exploration would be worthwhile. Still, this book is a valuable addition to studies of gender and economics in the eighteenth-century novel, and a pleasure as well.
