Nickolas Herman

Prof. Joel Reed

Master's Dossier

May 1, 1998

The Terms of Exchange: Gender, Commerce, and the Public

Sphere in Two Eighteenth-Century English Narratives

The eighteenth century was a time of sweeping change in the economic, social, and intellectual foundations of English society. Propelled by the massive expansion of trade and the role of the press, the cultural formation Benedict Anderson defines as "print capitalism" came to replace the old order of landed interest and aristocratic privilege. The broad range of upheavals this transition brought forced diverse changes in the basic paradigms of English life and identity; Anderson writes, "the slow, uneven decline of...interlinked certainties....[meant that] the search was on...for a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together" (36) in the service of commercial culture. This search led, in Anderson's analysis, to the new imagined community of nation.

This community was not manifested exclusively in economic and political structures, but spawned powerful new definitions of an English national character. P. G. A. Pocock calls this cultural ethic "commercial humanism," in which "a right to things became a way to the practice of virtue" (50). Articulated and developed in rapidly expanding discursive spaces like the periodicals, coffee houses, social clubs, and the theater, this ethic situated commercial culture in a framework of emerging concepts of virtue, reason, and Englishness.

Jurgen Habermas, in his critical theory that views the historical moment of eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought as a crucial origin of both modernity and structures of "communicative reason," argues that the culture of print capitalism and its ethic of commercial humanism gave rise to and were profoundly shaped by the discursive formation he calls "the bourgeois public sphere" (STPS 27). With this theoretical approach, Habermas articulates a systematic relation between political-economic conditions and cultural discourse:

It is through this concept of nascent communicative rationality that Habermas interprets the economic, political, and cultural conditions of Western Europe in the eighteenth-century.

Habermas' mode of inquiry leads to two pressing questions: How do we reconcile the existence of longstanding, systemic inequalities of power with the hypothesis that the eighteenth century saw a new birth of Enlightenment and equality? Moreover, how can the study of literary texts, legitimately concerned in the postmodern era with the analysis of how representation creates and sustains systems of domination, continue its critique if Enlightenment texts are presumed to articulate an ideal public sphere of communication free from coercion? I will explore these questions by examining the relationship between gender and commerce as represented in two eighteenth-century dramas: George Lillo's The London Merchant and Richard Cumberland's The West Indian. Articulating a concept of great relevance to eighteenth-century dramatic narrative, Michael McKeon asserts "the emerging novel internalizes the emergence of the middle class and the concerns that it exists to mediate" (McKeon 22). By defining these concerns as "epistemological and socioethical" (McKeon 22), this model closely parallels Habermas' assertion that "public reason" (as epistemology) came to engage the "rules governing relations" (as socioethics) and offers a powerful means of integrating an analysis of communicative reason and the bourgeois public sphere with an analysis of literary narrative. Moreover, this integration allows a critique of gender's representation in narrative to illuminate a gender-based critique of Habermas' hypotheses of the public sphere. In other words, the role of gender in narrative as a site of cultural struggle can (and should) inform our inquiry into the bourgeois public sphere as a site of cultural struggle.

In examining these two plays I will argue that the marginal status offered women in the texts is in keeping with the overall project, as described by Habermas, of creating discourses that seek to preserve relations of domination by forestalling the realization of a fully inclusive public sphere. Furthermore, while the plays undoubtedly represent gender and commerce in ways that seek to legitimate English imperialism and nationalism, these same narratives--as sites of conflict--contain fissures that offer space to discourses of resistance. I will conclude by discussing how a synthesis of the work of Habermas, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno generates a critical methodology that can theorize structures of domination in literary texts, recognize discourses of dissent, and preserve Habermas' theory of a public sphere based on uncoerced communication. These narratives of empire thus become, like the bourgeois public sphere itself, "ideology and simultaneously more than mere ideology" (STPS 88).

Joseph Addison's Spectator Number Sixty-Nine, published in 1711, is one of the seminal texts of the new English community formed around the ethic of virtuous commerce. Appearing in the emergent periodical form (one of the primary media of the imagined nation Anderson describes) this short essay spoke to and for the increasingly powerful middle class. Habermas writes, "In the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian the public held up a mirror to itself....The public that read and debated this sort of thing read and debated about itself" (STPS 43). Certainly, Spectator Sixty-Nine draws a powerful--and fundamentally humanist--picture of the value of commerce and the crucial role of the merchant in English life. Addison declares

there are not more useful Members in a Commonwealth than Merchants. They knot Mankind together in a mutual Intercourse of good Offices, distribute the Gifts of Nature, find Work for the Poor, add Wealth to the Rich, and Magnificence to the Great. (64)

This essay defines commerce as not only beneficial to the English nation, but to the broader sphere of "Mankind"--humanity as such. Trade serves as the medium of connectedness among diverse peoples and comprehends the advancement and well-being of the diverse classes of English society, rich and poor alike. With this all-encompassing vision of beneficent commerce, which Addison cannot witness without "expressing...Joy with Tears" (63), commercial society is conceived by a sensitive intellect (Mr. Spectator) as a providential gift delivered to all Englishmen through the good offices of the merchant class.

The widespread influence of this essay, and of Addison as a towering figure in early eighteenth-century letters, testify to his views' congruity with the emerging social confidence in the merits of trade. George Lillo's The London Merchant was performed yearly for the edification of apprentices for decades after its appearance in 1731 (Olaniyan 43), and in this drama the wise and patriarchal merchant Thoroughgood virtually paraphrases Spectator Sixty-Nine:

the method of merchandise....is founded in reason and the nature of things...it has promoted humanity as it has opened up and yet keeps up an intercourse between nations far remote from one another...by mutual benefits promoting mutual love from pole to pole. (Lillo 40)

Here Lillo's play equates trade with reason, community, and human progress. Elsewhere he adds the further advantages of state security --"honest merchants, as such, may sometimes contribute to the safety of their country" (Lillo 11)--and the cultivation of honorable young men through "business, the youth's best preservative from ill" (Lillo 29), fully elaborating a national ethic of commercial virtue.

Despite the basically positivist and optimistic tenor of this new creed, the origins of the commercial ethic lay in the uncertainty and disruption trade brought to English life. The rise of commerce eroded the moral and cultural pre-eminence of the aristocracy as well as its economic power, and English polity required new value-systems to legitimate trade both as a mode of production and as personal behavior. Concerning this instability of virtue during the era of commercialization, Pocock writes that prior to commercial society

the function of ['real' or landed] property remained the assurance of virtue. It was hard to see how [the British subject] could become involved in exchange relationships...without becoming involved in dependence and corruption. The ideals of virtue and commerce could not therefore be reconciled to one another. (Pocock 48)

But as the wealth brought by commerce increasingly became the defining purpose of the English state, and the inevitability of the imperial project settled into political consciousness, the idealized British subject completely disengaged from commerce came to seem "so much of a political and so little of a social animal as to be ancient and not modern, ancient to the point of being archaic" (Pocock 48). The task facing English culture, and its literary producers, was to adjust concepts of English identity and its attendant code of virtues. A new, more modern Englishman had to be articulated, a person both active in the world of commerce and assimilable into a unified, coherent framework of national virtue.

Because of the diffused and individualistic nature of trade, in contrast to the centralized and hierarchical agrarian economy, commercial virtue needed to be articulated in the "private" language of personal character and not merely in terms of economic necessity or loyalty to King and country. Pocock writes:

Virtue was redefined...with the aid of a concept of “manners”....[T]he individual...entered an increasingly transactional universe of “commerce and the arts”...in which his relationships and interaction with other social beings, and with their products, became increasingly complex and various, modifying and developing more and more aspects of his personality." (48-49)

Again we find this socializing process articulated in the theater. In Richard Cumberland's 1771 play The West Indian, Belcour, who inherits wealth earned in the sugar and rum trade of the Caribbean, is an exemplum of how cultivating manners inculcates virtue. The Prologue states quite clearly the play's intent to make Belcour acceptable the English audience and to reconcile him to their standards of Englishness, while redefining those standards in the process: "noble game and new;/ A fine West Indian started full in view.../Bag him, he'll serve you for another chase;/ For sure that country has no feeble claim,/ Which swells your commerce and supports your fame" (RC 713). The value of commerce is asserted as a first reason for admitting this colonial into the realm of English virtue, but his admission requires a training and polishing of rough good nature: "we hope you'll find/ Some emanations of a noble mind/....Laugh, but despise him not, for on his lip/ His errors lie; his heart can never trip" (RC 713).

The play thus sets out to integrate this foreigner through a process of adding a knowledge of "art" or conventions of behavior to existing nature. As Pocock describes this newly moralizing social model, "it was preeminently the function of commerce to refine the passions and polish the manners" (49); and this relation can be read as a symbiotic one: it was conversely the role of manners--not law or politics--to render commerce virtuous. The proper functioning of commerce served such a socializing end; in its corrupt forms (widely feared and bemoaned) it did quite the opposite. Admitting Belcour to respectable bourgeois society requires his education. After meeting Stockwell (his long-lost father) for the first time, Belcour acknowledges to him "did you drive a trade to the four corners of the world, you would not find the task so toilsome as to keep me free from faults," to which Stockwell replies, "was I to choose a pupil, it should be one of your complexion; so if you'll come along with me, we'll agree upon your admission, and enter upon a course of lectures directly" (RC 717-18). The metaphor of trade is used parallel to the concept of instruction, and suggested as the means of Belcour's eventual socialization through the attainment of suitable manners.

The synthesis of these diverse assertions about virtue and commerce--that trade can strengthen the English nation while benefitting all its members; that trade will unite and improve all humanity; that the practice of trade can instill personal virtue and that this virtue will reciprocally moralize commerce--gave commercial humanism its internal logic and cultural force. The legitimacy of trade as a national mission lay in its supposed capacity to reconcile seemingly intractable conflicts--between rich and poor, merchant and noble, self-interest and public good--and thereby fulfill the noblest potential of collective humanity. As Addison writes of the Royal Exchange, "I am wonderfully delighted to see such a Body of Men thriving in their own private fortunes, and at the same time promoting the Publick Stock" (63). To prevent commerce from destroying English polity, that polity was reconceived with commerce as its most fundamental purpose.

The critique of Enlightenment thought is largely a critique of the various certainties set forth in the ethos of commercial humanism. Eighteenth-century Western Europe's concepts of progress (such as the reification of reason, faith that the expansion of capital brings unity and prosperity to all, and the legitimation of colonialism as the advancement of "mankind") are by no means the unassailable parameters of human advancement they once were. Habermas' particular critique of Enlightenment in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere offers a very evocative statement to juxtapose against the unity of commerce, virtue, and human progress that forms the basis of commercial humanism:

The fully developed bourgeois public sphere was based on the fictitious identity of the two roles assumed by the privatized individuals who came together to form a public: the role of property owners and the role of human beings pure and simple [italics his]. (STPS 56)

Under this critique, the ethos of commerce as virtue errs precisely in its purported resolution of social divisions through the false identification of the advancement of the property owner (i.e., the merchant class) with the advancement of humanity as such. As we saw in our discussion of texts like Spectator Sixty-Nine and the plays of Lillo and Cumberland, this false equivalence was developed in what Habermas calls the bourgeois public sphere of letters; it is therefore highly useful to consider the ethic of commercial humanism to be the insufficiently self-critical statement of the ideology of the bourgeois public.

To identify the commercial ethic as a manifestation of bourgeois ideology calls the very category of the public sphere into question. It becomes necessary in pursuing this line of inquiry to determine whether communicative reason and ethics are--both as eighteenth-century social practices and late twentieth-century critical concepts--merely reifications of the ideology of commercial nationalism. Habermas offers a convincing explanation of this dilemma: the institutions and practices of the bourgeois public sphere were to a great extent legitimate expressions of communicative rationality; but precisely because of the need to protect the newly-won political and economic power of the bourgeois state, the public sphere was sharply curtailed and submerged within the ideology of commercial humanism.

The first part of this hypothesis asserts that communicative reason was in fact implemented and realized--to some meaningful degree--by the bourgeoisie in its effort to consolidate its power. The rising merchant class needed to articulate and legitimate its claims to authority, and "publicity" was a crucial means to this end. This effectiveness derived from the significant, though limited, advantage communicative practice offered the bourgeois in its early political struggle against monarchic and aristocratic domination. Habermas writes,

The acceptance of the fiction of the one public [i.e., the bourgeois public sphere as universal]...was facilitated above all by the fact that it actually had positive functions in the emancipation of civil society from mercantilist rule and absolutist regimentation in general. Because it turned the principle of publicity against the established authorities, the objective function of the public sphere in the political realm could initially converge with its self-representation derived from the categories of the public sphere in the world of letters; the interest of the owners of private property could converge with that of the freedom of the individual in general. (STPS 56)

Because the ideals of communication free from coercion served to advance the political goals of the merchant class, they became current in the realm of public discourse during the original pursuit of those goals.

The public sphere was not, however, in Habermas' view, always already saturated by the strategic interests of the bourgeoisie. Through the press and other forms of public discussion, "the critical judgment of a public making use of its reason" (STPS 24) became a primary means of confronting and legitimating authority. Habermas describes the transformation of the public sphere from the platform of monarchic regulation to an open forum:

The inhibited judgments [i.e., seditious opinions] were called "public" in view of a public sphere that without question had counted as a sphere of public authority, but was now casting itself loose as a forum in which the private people, come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion. (STPS 25-26)

This transformation was neither a complete opening of discourse to all members of society, nor a pure expression of the growing power of the bourgeoisie. The developments in public discourse that the bourgeoisie required possessed structural characteristics that only incidentally served that classes needs exclusively; once realized in practice--if only to a limited extent--these forms entered cultural discourse and thus achieved a degree of autonomy from the purposes to which they were originally put. Habermas writes of the coffee houses, clubs, and salons of the early public sphere

they preserved a kind of social intercourse that...disregarded status altogether....Not that this idea of the public was actually realized in earnest [in the clubs]...but as an idea it had become institutionalized and thereby stated as an objective claim. If not realized, it was at least consequential. (STPS 36)

The dynamic Habermas is describing here is that of unique modes of reason and discourse, without precedent in Western culture, arising within--and hence limited by--the material conditions of their historical context. Of crucial importance to this argument is that despite these limitations in actual practice, these forms of rationality retained significant integrity as concepts and potentials within the discursive sphere. In addition to the ostensible disregarding of status within open debate, “the monopoly of interpretation” which the church previously held over philosophy, literature and art was broken open significantly through the production of cultural works for the market: “as commodities they became in principle generally accessible” (STPS 36). Moreover,

this same process that converted culture into a commodity...established the public as in principle inclusive....However exclusive the public might be in any given instance...it always understood and found itself immersed within a more inclusive public of all private people.

(STPS 37)

It was this capacity of certain principles of the public sphere to resist complete assimilation into bourgeois ideology that gave communicative rationality its latent but persistent force; “the dominant class...developed political institutions which credibly embodied as their objective meaning the idea of their own abolition...the idea of the dissolution of domination” (STPS 88).

Of course the public sphere was nevertheless severely limited by the political and economic power relations of its historical context. Bourgeois society “played precisely its defined role in the process of the reproduction of capital” (STPS 47), and the continued development of the public sphere posed a major threat to the consolidation of this role. “The downfall of the public sphere...[was] demonstrated by its changing political functions” (STPS 142); the critique of royal authority through open debate gave way to the public confirmation of bourgeois authority through a strictly delimited public discourse. The requirements of the bourgeois state to preserve systems of domination forced the direct suppression of communiative rationality: ”Reason...itself needed to be protected from becoming public because it was a threat to any and all relations of domination” (STPS 35). As the bourgeoisie turned against the very principle of publicity that had helped bring them to power,

[T]he contradiction of the public sphere that was institutionalized in the bourgeois constitutional state came to the fore. With the help of its principle, which according to its own idea was opposed to all domination, a political order was founded whose social basis did not make domination superfluous at all. (STPS 88)

As a result, the cultural power of the ascendant merchant classes was redirected toward the suppression of communicative reason through the ideology of commercial humanism.

Eighteenth-century bourgeois ideology was not, despite its vast influence, a seamlessly implemented hegemonic force. The conflicts and contradictions it sought to efface remained, and exerted a constant pressure to surface into public consciousness and undermine the control of the dominant discourse. Not least among the avenues available to dissent was narrative which, in the form of the novel (McKeon writes), had along with the middle class “an institutional and monolithic integrity” (268) by the end of the eighteenth century. Because this form “internalizes the emerging middle class and the concerns that it exists to mediate” (McKeon 22), narrative becomes a primary locus not only of bourgeois ideology but of the discursive threats to and fissures in that ideology.

McKeon observes that “the very ground of the novel, like that of the world it inhabits and explains, is the fact of division--the division of labor, the division of knowledge” (McKeon 420), and that the most fundamental task of the novel is to mediate “not questions of truth and virtue in themselves but their division, their separation from each other” (McKeon 419). Prior to commercial culture, the aristocratic paradigm of lineage

existed to resolve questions of truth and virtue with a tacit simultaneity, making both a causal claim of genealogical descent attesting to an eminence of birth, hence worth, and a logical claim of testimonial precedent validating all present claims as true.

(McKeon 420)

Not only did bourgeois society undermine this aristocratic unity of truth and virtue, it did so by re-defining truth as the product of the public exercise of reason and virtue as the universal improvement and advancement of humanity through commerce. Habermas has shown how these definitions were irreconcilable given the bourgeois state’s dependence on systems of domination, and were falsely reconciled through the ideology of commercial humanism. The defining contradictions of of bourgeois ideology must therefore be represented symbolically in narratives as the division of truth from virtue, reason from moral integrity. The “fictitious identity” of the role of property owner with that of human being pure and simple can be the subject of fictional narrative; but the form retains the attributes of division and conflict that represent that identity as inherently problematic. The analysis of narrative becomes especially important because the form itself resists the absolute acceptance of any ideology and offers--as a site of struggle--implicit purchase to discourses of dissent.

It is in this context of eighteenth-century narrative as, like the bourgeois public sphere in which it emerged, both “ideology, and more than mere ideology,” that the interwoven representations of gender, virtue, and commerce in The London Merchantt and The West Indian are best understood. I will argue that although these texts seek to use the category of gender difference to consolidate the ethos of virtuous commerce, the inherent instabilities in both of these constructs are preserved by the narrative form. The representation of each serves ultimately to problematize, and not legitimate, the other; this generates a profound and systematic network of instabilities. What Harriet Guest calls the “feminized moralization of commercial culture” (GNS 25), by creating problematic and unstable representations of gender, calls into question the bourgeois state and imperialism; ideologically fissured assertions about commerce and empire reciprocally undermine the gender difference called forth to bolster them; and the representation of women as symbolic legitimation of exclusory economic and discursive structures ultimately leads to an implicit critique of those very structures.

In a concise statement of the broad-based destabilization caused by the rapid increase in trade, Guest writes that the periodical essays of the mid-eighteenth century show prevalent

anxiety about inhabiting a culture dominated by commerce. In this culture, the periodicals suggest, notions of the public become peripheral, almost accidental to the private interests that are the motor of commercial progress, and within the apparently expanding sphere of the private that is governed by commerce, distinctions--between social stations, between national identities, or between vice and virtue--seem increasingly evasive. (GNS 9-10)

Commerce threatens the categories of public authority, class, nation, and virtue.

Guest observes that the periodicals of the era imply that "Gender difference...may provide the means, the basis on which all those other distinctions can be reinstated” (GNS 10). The representation of gender difference in literature thus becomes a central feature of English culture's reorientation around the new realities of national commerce, and this new order rests heavily on what Guest calls the "feminised moralisation of commercial culture'' (GNS 25). Laura Brown concurs, writing in Ends of Empire that “the female figure has a crucial function in [early eighteenth-century] literature, and its consistent efficacy suggests that mercantile capitalist ideology at this point in its development in England is formulated around gender division” (Brown 19).

The representations of gender inThe West Indian certainly confirm this assertion. Moreover, they illustrate Guest's point that in some of the literature of the mid-eighteenth-century there is an underlying implication that "virtue may be peculiarly feminine" (GNS 23), and that for women "to be represented as at once central and peripheral to the workings of commerce gives them a kind of moral ascendancy" (GNS 29). In this trope, virtuous commerce--respectable, temperate, and beneficial to society--is associated with chaste and desirable women of reputation; corrupt commerce--hedonistic, dissipative, and corrosive of the social fabric--is associated with promiscuous, predatory, or ambiguously gendered women. Women must pursue the “double lustre...of luxury and virtuous merit” (GDL 501), in which they display in their dress the wealth gained from trade in a way that articulates their demure and feminine distance from the transactions of commerce.

In the case of Belcour's integration into the commercial ethic, it is his relationship with Louisa Dudley that illustrates the central moralizing role envisioned for women within the new ideal of virtue. After hearing that Belcour has attempted to gain sexual access to Louisa merely as a "professed wanton," Stockwell utters the threat of the looming but comedic disaster facing Belcour: "if you have done that, Mr. Belcour, I renounce you, I abandon you, I forswear all fellowship or friendship with you forever" (RC 741). This absolute excommunication from bourgeois respectability is the quasi-tragic danger confronting Belcour, and it is precisely his attempt to use "commercial" or exchange principles where traditional honor should prevail that puts him most at risk. However, after the plots of the Fulmers have been discovered and all strife

resolved, Stockwell offers the crowning mark of acceptance and tells Belcour that his "election of this excellent young lady makes me glory in acknowledging you to be my son" (RC 747). It is his bond to female virtue, and his having learned in time how to defer to this ideal femininity's supra-commercial status, that insures Belcour's moral legitimacy and social belonging. In his closing speech, Belcour confirms the equation between the marriage vow and his own moral preservation by making a devout request: "I beseech you, amiable Louisa, for the time to come,

whenever you perceive me deviating into error or offence, bring only to my mind the Providence of this night, and I will turn to reason and obey" (RC 747). Barnwell, the ill-fated protagonist of The London Merchant, is ensnared by the voluptuous golddigger Millwood and finishes on the gallows; as a “woman of pleasure” who machinates to gain income through non-matrimonial affairs, Millwood is denounced as demonic as well as aberrent in gender--”To call thee woman were to wrong the sex, thou devil!” (Lillo 64).

The dilemma of gender difference is used to consolidate still further structures within the ideology of commercial culture. Felicity Nussbaum writes in Torrid Zones that "The nation's interests demanded that England be distinguished from its Other, and the English 'woman' from her sexualized other, in order to maintain national identity and authority" (Nussbaum 95). Belcour, who possesses from his birth the constitution of the tropics--associated with sexuality, impulsiveness, and emotion--declares of his weakness to resist passion "if this is folly in me, you must rail at Nature: you must chide the sun, that was vertical at my birth, and would not wink upon my nakedness, but swaddled me in the broadest,

hottest glare of his meridien beams" (RC 728-29). His innate qualities are incompatible with the behavior necessary to preserve the honor of English womanhood; this obstacle to Belcour's assimilation is overcome through his bond to a woman who will moderate his own behavior: "if ever I marry, it must be a staid, sober, considerate damsel, with blood in her veins as cold as a turtle's" (RC 728). Here we see that to incorporate a dangerous commerce into the English civic ideal requires the presence of a virtuous Englishwoman to counteract the dangerous

tendencies of the commercial colonial. Her status as moral antidote depends on her own preservation from the "torrid zones" of her own physicality and of illicit sex, both of which endanger Louisa in her early encounters with Belcour.

Given these severely limiting constructions of gender, it is difficult not to reject these texts as unalloyed misogynist propaganda. Tejumola Olaniyan writes of feminized commercial virtue that its “celebrated moral assumptions are really components of a mercantilist ideology designed to vaseline the craggy, venal face of the rising bourgeois, consumerist age that was eighteenth century England” (Olaniyan 39). This writer’s analytical approach is to reveal the hidden relations of domination that pervade the text as “precisely the conditions of possibility of its existence” (Olaniyan 45). While this method can certainly elaborate the workings of ideology in literary texts, it does little to theorize the concrete processes of ideology’s development, its relation to critique, or possibilities for present or past dissent.

Similarly, Kathleen Wilson views these “stridently gendered and exclusionary notions of political subjectivity” (Wilson 78) to be above all illustrations of the near-triumphant dominance of bourgeois ideology. In plays like Lillo’s and Cumberland’s, “English women could serve as emblems or tokens of national superiority and civilization, or help purify the morally-dubious public sphere” (Wilson 80), but their “ultimate [italics mine] role was to authorize masculine prerogatives and authority” (Wilson 80). Though Wilson acknowledges a minor subversive potential in the theater, she concludes that the stages were “stridently defended as bulwarks of national character and fomenters of...manly, civilized, and patriotic manners” (Wilson 76).

It is important to note that both of these writers give powerful emphasis to the perceived intent of the narratives of a feminized moralization of commerce: Wilson declaims the theater’s “self-conscious effort to socialize audiences into the mores of gender and national differentiation” (Wilson 76); and Olaniyan insists we view Lillo as “an active agent [her italics]” (Olaniyan 36) in the production of his “play’s combative partisanship for this politics [of bourgeois ideology]” (Olaniyan 39). Both of these viewponts verge on intentional fallacy--that we can know the intent of authors or of texts (so to speak), and what is more, that this intent must somehow determine the text’s impact on society.

There are numerous compelling reasons not to assume that narratives of ideology either implement their agendas in the life-world (Habermas’ term) or even exert full control over the discourse they produce. The social functions of texts are varied and complex; McKeon writes

In associating female virtue with chastity, the eighteenth century is thought to mark a low point of careless patriarchal cynicism. But it may be more accurate to see that association in the context of the progressive critique of patrilineal honor, a critique in which women, besieged by discredited aristocratic honor, come to embody the locus and refuge of honor as virtue. (158)

This line of argument does not necessarily deny the presence of misogyny in the representation of women, in my view; rather it insists that eighteenth-century patriarchy is not “careless” or without basis in larger ideological contexts, some of which cannot be reduced solely to the indulged impulse to oppress women.

Amanda Vickery, in her essay “Golden Age to Separate Spheres,” questions the usefulness of rigid binaries to describe complex social phenomena. Taking particular interest in the increasingly popular analytic concepts of “domesticity” and “separate spheres” for men and women in the eighteenth century, she writes “our preoccupation with the ideology of separate spheres may have blinded us to the other languages in play in the Victorian period” (Vickery 401). Based on painstaking research into the actual lived experience of eighteenth-century women, particularly in the Lancashire region, Vickery contends that “the broadcasting of the language of separate spheres [in plays and periodicals] looks like a conservative response to an unprecedented expansion [her italics] in the opportunities, ambitions, and experience of late Georgian and Victorian women” (Vickery 400). Vickery warns against accepting the ideology of complaint literature and misogynist tracts as a description of women’s condition: “The burden of this piece has not been to argue that the discourses of femininity and masculinity, space and authority, found in printed literature are not important. Yet their power to shape female language and behavior needs to be demonstrated and not taken as read” (Vickery 413).

In addition to a sphere of lived experience beyond the gendered ideology of commercial humanism, there is (and was) without question a discursive sphere beyond the control of that ideology. This discourse consisted of various marginalized, unofficial public spheres; it also consisted of the discourse that exploited the contradictions within ideology itself. These contradictions serve as the site of significant, though limited, expression of women's discursive agency and anti-imperialist dissent. Lawrence Klein writes that under new theoretical approaches to the eighteenth century,

women's standpoints are identified as sites that, although they may be infiltrated by formalized and textually mediated forms of discursive consciousness, are also sufficiently autonomous to become sites of difference in which hegemonic paradigms and theories can be contested. (Klein 102)

Guest articulates this potential for anti-hegemonic discourse within the very projects intended most to reinforce hegemony--specifically, its implications for the pivotal category of gender difference:

Alarm at masculine women and effeminate men...[is] a matter of such caricatural representations, such homophobic panic, that it as it were enlarges the imaginary space in which gender difference is subject to renegotiation... [this space] is most obviously defined by its location at what was beginning to seem the permeable periphery between public and private life. (Guest 29-30)

In short, the very pressures that drive the need to fix gender roles more securely, and ensure the systematic agreement between gender and commercial culture, create an environment in which discourse reaches a state of flux and permits the envisioning of alternative configurations. The shift from an earlier civic ideal of a landed public elite to the new ideal of commercial citizen entails the realignment of public/private boundaries; and although the redefinition of gender roles was undertaken simultaneously to control and limit such realignment, the act of change

itself creates a certain potential for dissent.

It is in such a context that Brown asserts that "The enterprise of recovering positions of resistance also addresses the nature of ideology itself; attending to resistance in effect defines ideology as potentially fissured rather than monolithic" (Brown 12). It is in the "implicit dissonances" (Brown 12) within the artifacts of empire that Brown contends we can find a rich illustration of that system's own contradictions, and it is thus that "Through commodification or through difference...women can disturb the coherence of mercantile capitalist ideology" (Brown 21). This concept profoundly affects the import of a speech like that of the supposedly tainted and diabolical Millwood, who claims “I would have my conquests complete, like those of the Spaniards in the New World, who first plundered the natives of all the wealth they had and then condemned the wretches to the mines for life to work for more” (Lillo 16). Such a passage, even to a moderately critical theatergoer of the period, can provoke serious questions about the consistency of an ideology that presents such a character as purely vicious.

Thus far in this paper I have tried to establish three major points. The first was that the ethic of commercial humanism can be meaningfully interpreted as the reification of bourgeois ideology. This reification takes the form of a false equation of the role of property owner with the role of human being pure and simple, and the attempt to disguise the inherent contradiction of a social order founded on relations of domination while basing its legitimacy on the free exercise of communicative reason. The second was that because the representational power of the novel lay in its capacity to internalize the divisions of knowledge and labor the middle class existed to mediate, the conflicts and divisions inherent in in bourgeois ideology must be manifested in narrative representation. Moreover, these conflicts could not be resolved one-sidedly in favor of ideology within the narrative form, but must retain the active engagement of ideology with the idea of its dissolution. My third major argument was a specific inquiry into how one particular attempt to efface the contradictions of mercantile ideology within narrative--namely, the moralization of commercial culture through concepts of gender difference-- failed, leaving significant and recoverable fissures for dissent.

Although the strength of the connections among these three assertions warrants serious intellectual inquiry, and certainly rewards analysis with a rich array of insights, the possibility of a highly rigorous and radically unified connection among the three must not be overlooked. If the ideology of commercial humanism depends upon and necessitates the ascendancy of narrative in the novel form as its primary self-representation in discourse, narrative itself--its capacity to articulate meaning--may possess no more legitimacy than the flawed Enlightenment identity of property owner with human being as such with whose emergence narrative coincided.

Both Anderson and McKeon view “seriality” as a necessary condition of narrative’s pre-eminence as a mode of cultural representation. In his description of how the narrative-based forms of the novel and the newspaper were able to construct the imagined community of nation, Anderson cites Walter Benjamin’s concept of “‘homogeneous, empty time,’ in which simultaneity is...transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment [as in religion and myth], but by temporal coincidence... measured by clock and calendar” (Anderson 24). McKeon does not mention Benjamin, but makes a similar connection of seriality to narrative in his discussion of Levi-Strauss: the structure of myth “‘deteriorates into seriality’....At the far end of this process are the origins of the novel” (McKeon 5).

Benjamin is profoundly skeptical of any representation dependent for its force on homogeneous, empty time. He writes that “The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself” (WB 261). The Enlightenment paradigms of human progress are false because they are predicated on a serial conception of time; in Benjamin’s view, no critique of Enlightenment that elides this crucial link is valid.

Benjamin does not believe that homogeneous empty time can be invested with meaning in the fullest sense; rather, it permits only the continual witness of the wreckage of possible meaning which cannot be retrieved. He illustrates this in his discussion of Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus: “Where we perceive a chain of events...[the angel] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage....[A] storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned....This storm is what we call progress” (WB 259). Homogeneous, empty time replaces the Jetztzeit, “time filled by the presence of the now” (HabermasPP 137), with a linearity that can only catalog the loss of past Jetztzeiten. In other words, the precondition of narrative is a conception of time that only permits an awareness--like the Angel’s gaze--of the absence of meaning.

If we accept Benjamin’s assertions about the nature of linear time, narrative itself must come under scrutiny as an integral mechanism of the ideology of empire and the disruption of the public sphere, as well as an obstacle to the complete realization of aesthetic experience. The retrieval of marginalized discourse from the fissures in ideological narrative falls into the category of “rescuing critique” (HabermasPP 146) that extracts “semantic potential” from the artifacts of linear time and revitalizes them in a fully realized discursive Jetztzeit--an aesthetic analogue to the public sphere. Linear time, and narrative representation, must be carefully interrogated as constructs used to suppress the meanings that threaten ideology. If we consider time as a part of the natural world, Habermas’ description of Adorno’s critique of Enlightenment is particularly relevant to this distorted construction of time:

[In] the original Enlightenment....The I acquires its inner organizational form in the measure that, to coerce external nature, it coerces the amorphous element in itself, its inner nature. Upon this relationship of autonomy and mastery of nature is perched the triumphant self-consciousness of the Enlightenment.

(HabermasPP 100)

Enlightenment gazing, like Klee’s angel, upon the accumulating wreckage of history.

Works Cited:

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