Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740-1800

Gillian Skinner's Sensibility and Economics in the Novel makes an important and compelling contribution to the new economic criticism that has gained so much interest in our field in the last few years. While others (perhaps most prominently James Thompson in his recent Models of Value) have observed the disciplinary separation between economics and literature in the eighteenth century, Skinner looks at how those two discourses inevitably overlap. She is not interested in simply exceptional moments, "but rather the idea that sensibility, as a movement, as a discourse, took part in and partook of the very construct and values it is conventionally supposed to have abhorred" (2). She also complicates Robert Markley's foundational essay on the topic, in which he observes that most sentimental texts tend to suppress "questions about how one acquires the wealth to be able to afford one charitable act after another" (qtd.3). Skinner thus disagrees with previous critics about the extent to which sentimental novels mystify the economic; she nevertheless observes, like Markley, the tensions between money and feeling throughout the genre. In most of the chapters, Skinner offers extended comparisons between a sentimental novel by a woman and one by a man, aiming thereby to observe "the extent to which the gender of the author has an impact on the treatment of issues of economics, sensibility, and femininity" (13). She has no particular overarching argument about this difference, but observes how it changes over time and how each of the novels she considers confronts in its distinct way the complexities of virtue, desire, and commerce.

The first two chapters productively compare Henry Fielding to some of his female contemporaries, but primarily to his sister. Whereas David Simple "demonstrate[s] how difficult it is to propose an easy co-existence of the sentimental community and the early modern commercial world, Tom Jones "employs principally the discourse of humanist morality, which, bolstered by the traditional happy ending, can effectively bypass these issues, thus ensuring a far more conservative ideology" (31). In both David Simple and The Countess of Dellwyn, Sarah Fielding identifies and examines "many of the practical, economic problems inherent in the whole sentimental system" (36). The next chapter once again pairs the Fieldings, exploring the ways in which both Amelia and The History of Ophelia represent participation in business as a sign of sexual transgression. Clearly prostitute narratives like Roxana and Fanny Hill, as Skinner points out, link female sexuality to profit. But as Skinner herself observes, often the virtuous heroines of Amelia and Ophelia seem to understand economic practicality as well. To raise, then, the "'always already fallen' condition" of all women as evidence of the unbreakable link between "economic activity and sexually immoral behaviour" (44) misses the opportunity to complicate this standard distinction between virtue and vice not entirely upheld in the novels themselves.

The next two chapters show the parallel discourses between economics and the sentimental novel through different particular issues. Chapter four explores the ways in which the patriarchal ideals articulated in Sir James Steuart's Principles of Political Oeconomy (1767) find parallel expressions in Lady Julia Mandeville, The Vicar of Wakefield, and Humphrey Clinker. While Goldsmith's novel embraces this patriarchal structure, Brooke's offers a scathing critique. Smollet recognizes but ultimately contains the threat that women might pose to this system. Chapter five examines the fantasy apparent in some fiction of living "above economy"; that is, inhabiting "a space where the management of financial resources, private or public, was unnecessary or irrelevant" (91). While The History of Lady Barton and The Man of Feeling indulge in this fantasy, albeit through differently gendered perspectives, A Sentimental Journey, by contrast, "seems to work with a self-conscious awareness of the split between sentimental fantasy on the one hand and practical limitations on the other" (115).

In the last two chapters--and in my opinion the finest--Skinner explores the particular relationship between commerce, heroism, liberty, and the feminine. Here she shows how both novelists and economists saw a relationship between those terms. In Robert Bage's Barham Downs and in Agnes Maria Bennett's Anna: or Memoirs of a Welsh Heiress, Skinner demonstrates, women become the proper heirs of British liberty as a result of the "feminising of commerce, and the view that the development of commerce is an infallible antidote to the progress of tyranny" (140). Further, by the end of the century the condition of women becomes a barometer for the condition of the liberty of the nation in general. While she explores their differences, Skinner sees both novels as implicitly answering Adam Smith's charge that the commercial spirit can diminish the human spirit. While in Bage's novel the civilizing of commerce, though a "feminine" activity," is done wholly through the male representative" (153), in the woman's novel "the display of commercial activity is the means by which Anna's virtuous femininity and freedom from undesirable masculine influence is confirmed" (149). Finally, in the last chapter Skinner astutely observes how commerce held different meanings for radical male writers and their female counterparts. While Godwin, for example, suspected commerce of "fostering narrow self-interest and deadening the finer faculties" (159), some women writers saw commerce as potentially offering a chance for independence. In The Wrongs of Woman, Skinner argues persuasively, Wollstonecraft recovers the radical potential of sensibility itself.

Sensibility and Economics thus ranges widely over a variety of economic literary texts. Skinner demonstrates her argument through a series of contrasts, a strategy that has the advantage of showing the wide range of responses to commerce, the feminine, and sensibility, but at the same time occasionally offers such an array of views on one topic that the chapter's central point becomes diffuse. Further, it seems to me that some of the fascinating connections Skinner makes in response to fiction of the 1780s and 1790s were at least emergent in the earlier fiction. Surely Richardson at least represents the civilizing feminine as holding out heroically against the male tyrant. In fairness, Skinner recognizes Richardson as an omission in her book; nevertheless, Fielding, as the example of Amelia suggests, might be understood to make this connection as well. Still, Skinner demonstrates her central point beyond question--that some novels, rather than eschewing the economic, understand economic relations as central to sentimental ones. What distinguishes Skinner most prominently from many other treatments of economics and the novel is her attention to gendered authorship. Thus, instead of making claims about women writers with scant reference to their male counterparts or claims about the novel in general with scant attention to gender or women, Skinner shows how in several different ways the perspective of women writers can interestingly differ from that of their male contemporaries. In doing so, she makes an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about gender, fiction, and economics.