SOURCE: Hobart, Ann. “Harriet Martineau's Political Economy of Everyday Life.” Victorian Studies 37, no. 2 (winter 1994): 223-51.

[In the following essay, Hobart examines portions of Martineau's works that deal with economics and capitalism in England.]

In her celebrated Autobiography, Harriet Martineau traces the real beginning of her literary career to the collapse of her father's firm in 1829. Before that happy “calamity,” Martineau claims to have effaced the signs of her professional ambition in compliance with the conventional standards of domestic propriety on which her mother insisted: Jane Austen-like, she wrote only “before breakfast or in some private way” so as not to disturb her family and their visiting acquaintance with an unwomanly display of intellectual application. The ruin of the family fortune, however, canceled the Martineaus' expectations of leisured domesticity for their unmarried daughters. As her father, Thomas Martineau, had died several years prior to the failure of his investments, Harriet found herself, following this final disaster, with only her own resources to depend on. She consequently claimed to have felt justified, from that point, in doing “my own work in my own way.” Over a career spanning fifty years, this work came to include voluminous writing in many genres: in domestic fiction, for example, which will be my final focus here, but also in the conventionally masculine discourses of history, economics, and sociology. Surveying the better part of this remarkable achievement as she composed her autobiography in 1855, Martineau could conclude with satisfaction that she had “worked hard and usefully, won friends, reputation and independence, seen the world abundantly, abroad and at home, and, in short, had truly lived.” Yet she also ruefully acknowledges the deep contingency of this accomplishment. “But for that loss of money,” Martineau admits, “[I] might have lived on in the ordinary method of provincial ladies with small means, sewing, and economizing, and growing narrower every year” (1:142).

The story that Martineau tells of her life relies on a series of hierarchically ordered oppositions: the superiority of self-realizing effort to unearned ease, intellectual work to manual (and particularly domestic) labor, a cosmopolitan or universalized perspective to a provincial or particularized one-in general, the individual freedom that is the pledge of the liberal public sphere to the various obligations and dependencies that encumber the private realm of familial relations. The inveterate tension between “circumstances” (Martineau's term for historical determination) and the force of individual will or character is also inscribed here, though it is not at all clear which term of this binary emerges preeminent in her “luck and pluck” narrative. In the final instance, can Martineau credit her success to her own determination—her own hard work—or to the vicissitudes of the English market for bombazines in the 1820s, or perhaps to the specificities of her case as a single woman? If the latter circumstances predominate, what shadow does that cast on the individual liberty she assumes that she secured in the public sphere? Is a hostage price paid for Martineau's freedom? And if so, by whom, and in what currency?

The oppositions—whether decided or not—that structure this portion of Martineau's life story are roughly congruent with basic axioms of classical political economy, the theory of capitalist development that collineated the expansion of commerce “both abroad and at home” with the augmentation of civil liberties. This fit is not surprising: to say that Harriet Martineau, cultural critic, was made by the study of this foundational social science is hardly a metaphor. Indeed, Martineau represents her brainstorm of 1830 to popularize the theorems of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo in the form of monthly issued didactic tales as the turning point in her struggle to refashion her life after the failure of her domestic expectations. Her Autobiography details the application and entrepreneurial daring required to complete this project, as well as the considerable returns received on her psychic investment. Capitalizing on sympathies for liberal reform in the 1830s, the Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-34) found a market, and secured Martineau's professional future. The success of this series earned her a commission for its sequel, Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated (1833-34), and, having already brought her to London from her provincial home in Norwich, won her a celebrity's welcome to the United States, where she gathered impressions for works that have recently been described as ground-breaking texts in the discipline of sociology: Society in America (1837), Retrospect of Western Travel (1838), and How to Observe Manners and Morals (1838).¹

Yet however profitable it eventually may have been, Martineau's identification with political economy was initially a kind of scandal. For many of her contemporaries, Martineau's affiliation with the Malthusian strain of the “dismal science” was profoundly incongruous with their assumptions about the social implications of sexual difference. The review of Martineau's Illustrations published in Fraser's was typical of this kind of critical reaction:

What a frightful delusion is this, called, by its admirers, Political Economy, which can lead a young lady to put forth a book like this—a book written by a woman against the poor—a book written by a young woman against marriage! And what is more, where a long tirade against all charity, and an elaborate defence of the closest selfishness is received with acclamation by those who profess themselves the friends of the people and the advocates of the distressed.

(“On National Economy” 403)

In exhorting the working classes to enhance the value of their labor by controlling their numbers via Malthus's “preventive check”—celibacy and late marriage—Martineau violated what contemporary domestic ideology defined as gentlewomen's “natural” commitments: the family in any of its class-inflected forms and charity toward the poor. In the terms of this ideology, which voiced both political conservatism and humanitarian sympathies, the altruism of the domestic sphere—the site of women's activity and influence—offered a much-needed corrective to the frequently callous pursuit of self-interest characteristic of the male-dominated market. Upper- and middle-class women were thus charged with an historic mission: to mediate the social dislocations of the early phases of industrialization, primarily by practicing local philanthropy, but also by persuading male family members to support state forms of paternalist intervention. From this perspective, Martineau's utilitarian critique of the working-class family made her appear unwomanly, unnatural—a kind of moral monster.²

From another angle, Martineau's refusal to enact the social role scripted by the discourse of “women's mission” can be interpreted as a feminist gesture. She repudiates women's essential difference, their “natural”—and exclusive—affiliation with the family and its specialized ethic of care. Instead, Martineau asserts a singular standard of socially responsible behavior, defined by the axioms of political economy, which all persons—workers, women, and middle-class male theorists alike—are capable of apprehending by virtue of their common rationality. Martineau's rejection of “sexualized virtues,” her insistence on fundamental human equality, aligns her with the tradition of liberal feminism that advanced the Enlightenment principle of universal reason as an argument for extending civil—and eventually political—rights to women, workers, and slaves.

But as historians have persuasively demonstrated, the late eighteenth-century cultural and political movements that produced the feminist treatises of Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft also generated the ideology of republican motherhood, which assigned distinct civic duties to men and women on the basis of natural differences. Indeed, as Joan Landes argues, Wollstonecraft herself helped to define the terms of this ideology. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), to take one example, projects the following as a desirable social future:

Society will some time or other be so constituted, that man must necessarily fulfil the duties of a citizen or be despised, and that while he was employed in any of the departments of civil life, his wife, also an active citizen, should be equally intent to manage her family, educate her children, and assist her neighbors.

(146)

By conferring civic purpose on the activities of mothers within the home, Wollstonecraft's rhetoric challenges the traditional republican construction of women's everyday life practices as fundamentally “other” to politics. At the same time, however, it also implies that women should “come to be satisfied with a domestic rather than a public existence” (Landes 129).³ Indeed, Wollstonecraft suggests that the national good, of which improved education would make women more generally aware, required it.

For Landes, the consequence of identifying women's civic virtues with their maternal duties was to offer them “political representation” but in a “‘mediated’ fashion” (138). Such was the case in the new republic of post-revolutionary France. But more importantly for my purposes, this was also the argument among liberal theorists of British political reform in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most notable of these was James Mill, whose treatise “On Government” maintained that women's interests could be adequately represented through a household franchise, to be exercised by their husbands or fathers, though subject to women's indirect “influence.” The family thus defined as an individual political entity was understood to be an economic unit as well; married women were to transfer their property to their husbands and devote their energies to the proper care of their families. Indeed, as Jane Rendall argues, this sexual division of labor and property, in which women were associated with social reproduction exclusively, was represented among liberal theorists as the model of familial relations. Though initially possible only for the upper and middle classes, with the more general distribution of wealth that would follow the growth of industry and commerce, even working-class women's participation in the productive economy would in time be curtailed.⁴ As her autobiographical reflections on domestic life in Norwich suggest, the professional activity of a woman like Martineau was therefore as anomalous in the context of liberal political culture as her skepticism about material charity was from the vantage point of the social paternalist.

The effects of Martineau's paradoxical affiliation with political economy on her writing of the late 1830s, a period when, as she claims in her Autobiography, her thought was dominated by the “metaphysics” of that social science, will be the focus of this essay. On the one hand, I will argue that Martineau there attempts to imagine political economy as a theory for feminism, that she tries to build a case for extending its promise of liberty to women as well as to male workers or slaves. In this mode, she challenges the various ideologies that prohibit women's participation in the productive economy and right to property, for these are the sources of an independent civil and political existence. On the other hand, she never directly confronts—indeed, she frequently claims to find “natural”—the sexual division of labor and property in the discourse of political economy and in the liberal theory of political representation. To the extent that this fundamental distinction remains uncontested, the negative valuations proceeding from it tend to color her representations of women and their everyday life practices. In this mode, rather than confront the social arrangements that limit them, Martineau figures women themselves as a social problem. Far from the moral and sentimental complement to the commercial and political public sphere pictured in domestic ideology, the private sphere often appears in Martineau's writing as a disruptive or deadening liability, an arena where domesticated women, absorbed by the minutiae of daily life, play out petty jealousies to the detriment of any standard of the general good. The diction of Martineau's writing of the late 1830s is consequently divided between demands on behalf of women and a rhetoric of reproof or admonition in which women are urged, to borrow a phrase from Wollstonecraft, to “labour by reforming themselves to reform the world,” that is, to align their domestic behavior with the exigencies of public progress. Roughly speaking, the first modality is most clearly instanced in the relatively abstract formulations of Society in America, the second in the more intimate discourse of Martineau's domestic novel, Deerbrook (1839).

But I will also maintain, in contrast to some others, that there is no striking discontinuity between the conceptualizations of women found in Martineau's sociology and in her fiction.⁵ I will argue instead that the devaluation of a daily experience conventionally, indeed normatively, associated with women that is typical of Deerbrook is implicit in the political theory espoused in Society in America that privileges the life activities—the “productive” work—of men. Martineau's writing on women figures the theoretical and practical paradox of female citizenship that much recent feminist research describes as the legacy of post-Enlightenment political philosophy and reform movements. Faced with the persistent disjunction of “woman” and “citizen,” the languages and political strategies of post-1790s feminism have tended to oscillate between insistence on virtual gender equality, which involves the repudiation of feminine particularity in order to lay claim to the “universal” perspective of the liberal political subject, and counterinvestment in sexual difference, which challenges the liberal concept of citizenship by revaluing the qualities of its most central “other.”⁶ Articulated as it is in the language of political economy, Martineau's feminism perhaps inevitably gravitates toward the first pole of response, thus exposing the high cost of a politics of masculine identification.

I. MARTINEAU ON WOMEN, IN AMERICA AND ELSEWHERE

In Society in America, Martineau takes as her object of study an achieved revolution of the kind Wollstonecraft attempted to influence through A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The Americans had established their government according to what Martineau calls the “a priori method”; it recognized “the great principle of indefeasible rights; human equality in relation to these; and the obligation of universal justice” (1:2,4). Yet, again in the mode of Wollstonecraft, Martineau acknowledges the triumph of this political theory only to signal the injustice—as well as the logical inconsistency—of practically excluding women and people of color from its universalizing claims.

Martineau traces the contradictions of American political culture to the economic classifications of women and slaves within the original Constitution of the United States. She cites Thomas Jefferson's list of groups to be excluded from participation in the democratic process:

1. Infants, until arrived at years of discretion; 2. Women, who, to prevent depravation of morals, and ambiguity of issue, could not mix promiscuously in the public meetings of men; 3. Slaves, from whom the unfortunate state of things with us takes away the rights of will and property

and comments on it as follows:

If the slave disqualification, here assigned, were shifted up under the head of Women, their case would be nearer the truth than as it now stands. Woman's lack of will and of property is more like the true cause of her exclusion from the representation than that which is actually set down against her.

(1:201)

Temporarily setting aside the effects of gender ideology, Martineau attributes the disenfranchisement of women to the same material liabilities that exclude slaves from the political privileges of liberal individuals; both groups are denied the right to property, including property in their own productive capacities, and are consequently prohibited from achieving the personal independence that both Martineau and the founding fathers presumed necessary for citizenship.

Martineau spells out the implications of these economic arrangements for America's democratic pretensions in her comparative discussions of society in the southern and northern United States. The social typology that she develops in this comparison is familiar from her Illustrations of Political Economy, where she also correlated the economy of a region, and particularly the organization of its human productive forces, with its people's capacity for self-government. Like the British colony she characterized in her political economy tale Demerara, the southern United States still employed slave labor, while the North was populated by freely contracting, socially mobile individuals of roughly the kind she represented in A Manchester Strike—if indeed the conditions of their lives did not make them superior. For if the provision for slavery in the original Constitution of the United States demonstrated a “low degree of ancient barbarism in relation to labour,” the direct relay established between free labor and political privilege in the northern states displayed a singularly “high degree of the modern enlightenment” (2:302).

In Martineau's analysis, southern society was divided into two classes: “the servile and the imperious.” Under this dispensation, in which the ruling class exercised absolute control over the persons and resources of the subject class, labor could neither test or realize human potential, nor could it require or reward independent thought or personal initiative. As Martineau writes: “The servile class has not even the benefit of hearty toil. No solemn truths sink down into them, to cheer their hearts, stimulate their minds, and nerve their hands. Their wretched lives are passed between an utter debasement of the will, and a conflict of the will with external force” (2:307). Rather than foster a sense of self-reliance and a capacity for self-government, then, life in a slave economy alienates and demoralizes the laboring population.

The northern states, by contrast, were in Martineau's terms virtually classless but functioned instead according to a meritocracy of labor in which all men worked and virtually any level of political or professional distinction was accessible. Because there were few private fortunes in the North, all young men had to work hard not only to establish themselves in their professions but also to earn the means to educate themselves. As a result, professional men who had worked their way through country colleges were generally capable of all kinds of manual labor. But what was more significant for Martineau, men who made their livings as artisans or laborers did not feel themselves excluded from the realm of ideas. In the North, labor was not the province of a politically degraded class but the common inheritance of all. Indeed, in Martineau's terms, the call to labor was the foundation of northern democracy, the sense in which all men were created equal. All laborers shared the rights and responsibilities of citizens and, to meet those responsibilities adequately, a degree of reflection was required. The remarkable consequence was that

Not only are all [men in the North] capable of discharging their political duty of self-government; but all have somewhat idealised their life. All have looked abroad at least so far as to understand the foreign relations of their own country: most, I believe, have gone further, and can contemplate the foreign relations of their own being.

(2:304)

In the North, then, all men experienced the benefit of citizenship in intellectual growth, which for Martineau was simultaneously the end of and the means to a well-organized polity.

Within this schizophrenic national culture, Martineau suggests that women fared about equally badly in the North as in the South, owing largely to the constitutional provision that permitted white women's “slavery” everywhere. Across America, women were excluded not only from the franchise but also from the kind of productive economic engagement that was necessary to qualify them, as it did white men, to exercise political rights. The manner of this exclusion varied, however, according to the ideology of work obtaining in the region in which women lived. The devaluation of labor in the South, which proceeded from its association with a degraded race and class, was also peculiarly limiting to white women, for whom both domestic labor and work for wages were consequently considered a disgrace. Martineau reports that among school-aged girls of the southern “imperious” class, lifting a poker (much less any more substantive domestic duty) was as scandalous as going out to teach for a living, which prompts her to conclude:

The vicious fundamental principle of morals in a slave country, that labour is disgraceful, taints the infant mind with a stain which is as fatal in the world of spirits as the negro tinge is at present in the world of society. … When children at school call everything that pleases them “gentlemanly,” and pity all (but slaves) who have to work, and talk of marrying early for an establishment, it is all over with them. A more hopeless state of degradation can hardly be conceived of, however they may ride, and play the harp, and sing Italian, and teach their slaves what they call religion.

(2:307-08)

On this account, the domesticated woman of the slave-owning class bears a strong resemblance to the aristocratic fine lady of Wollstonecraft's Vindication. Her energies are devoted to acquiring the spurious “corporeal accomplishments” that will make her a desirable object on the marriage market but that go no way toward developing her “human” (that is, her “spiritual” or rational) as opposed to her “sexualized” virtues; hence she is unprepared to contribute, in even a mediated capacity, to the transactions of the public sphere.

The women of the North, on the other hand, resemble a second type of unregenerate woman found in Wollstonecraft's treatise: “the mere notable woman” or “square-elbowed household drudge” (66, 67). Pragmatic and capable regarding the material maintenance of her home and family, Wollstonecraft's “mere notable woman” lacked the intellectual cultivation required to form a more liberal conception of her duties. In Martineau's analysis, northern women typically suffered the same liabilities; they participated in their region's ethic of labor but in a limited, unconscious way. The absence of slavery ensured that they had “the blessing of work … [but this] was not of the extent and variety … necessary for the happiness of their lives.” Though their “hands” may have been “full of domestic occupations,” these were not of a kind to stimulate their minds or enlarge their views (2:305-06).

Paradoxically, the household drudgery that Martineau claims to have observed virtually everywhere in the North was wholly suppressed within the gender ideology that prevailed in that region, with damaging implications for the extradomestic employment of women. In the “chivalrous” terms of that ideology, which Martineau implies were conceivable only in an economy where a favorable market for labor made a family wage available to virtually all working men, women were considered too fragile to work in the world. And “where it is a boast that women do not labour,” Martineau observes, “the encouragement and rewards of labour are not provided. … It is difficult, where it is not impossible, for women to earn their bread” (3:147). Instead of equitable training and access to available job opportunities, Martineau maintains that the typical northern white woman is offered

the best place in stage-coaches: … she hears oratorical flourishes on public occasions about wives and home, and apostrophes to woman: her husband's hair stands on end at the idea of her working, and he toils to indulge her with money: she has liberty to get her brain turned by religious excitements, that her attention may be diverted from morals, politics, and philosophy; and, especially, her morals are guarded by the strictest observance of propriety in her presence. In short, indulgence is given her as a substitute for justice. Her case differs from that of the slave, as to the principle, just so far as this; that the indulgence is large and universal, instead of petty and capricious.

(3:106)

Hence, despite the North's commitment to liberal economics and to democratic political theory, Martineau implies that the conditions of daily life are hardly more enlightening or enabling for its women than are those typical of the southern slave states.

The rhetorical association of women and slaves that recurs throughout Martineau's discussions of American culture is a trope familiar from Wollstonecraft's writing as well. But while in A Vindication it generally appears as a metaphor to represent a condition of psychic or moral debility, as when women are described as “slaves of opinion” (50) or slaves “to their senses” (61), in Society in America, the analogy between women and slaves has a clearly indicated referent in the economic and political circumstances of the United States. This textual difference indicates a significant shift of emphasis in the conceptualization of women's oppression between the two analyses. Both A Vindication and Society in America insist on women's degradation under existing patriarchal conditions, but whereas the former attributes this to cultural causes and primarily to the deplorable system of female education in place in late eighteenth-century Europe, the latter points to women's exclusion from the productive economy, participation in which—in the American context—was also the relay to political rights. For Martineau, therefore, remunerated work in the world was as important to the reformation of women as improved education. Indeed, she characterizes the “discipline of circumstance,” or the necessity of earning one's own livelihood, as a form of moral education preferable to “express teaching” merely (3:107).⁷ For this reason, she can imagine with relative complacency those “unfortunate” fatalities that enforce women's economic self-reliance by expelling them from the family structure. With regard to southern society, for example, Martineau quotes a gentleman of her acquaintance who maintained that “‘There are but two ways in which woman can be exercised to the extent of her powers; by genius and by calamity, either of which may strengthen her to burst her conventional restraints’” (2:340). While this man regretted that genius was rare and claimed that catastrophe should not be hoped for, she counters that “there are … some who would scarcely tremble to see their house in flames, to hear the coming tornado, to feel the threatening earthquake, if these be indeed the messengers who must open their prison doors, and give their heaven-born spirits the range of the universe” (2:340).

This is not to say that improving educational opportunities for women is not a priority for Martineau. Indeed, she sometimes argues for educational reform in terms reminiscent of the ideology of republican motherhood familiar from Wollstonecraft's Vindication. She apparently confirms the sexual division of labor that ascribes “productive” work for wages to men and the care of home and family to women. “No one in the world,” she concedes, “questions … that masculine and feminine employments are supposed to be properly different” (3:115), and she challenges American educational arrangements on the grounds that they left women poorly equipped to fulfill their domestic duties as befitted women citizens:

It must happen that where all women have only one serious object, many of them will be unfit for that object. In the United Sates as elsewhere, there are women no more fit to be wives and mothers than to be statesmen and generals; no more fit for any responsibility whatever than for the maximum of responsibility.

(3:131)

But while the rhetorical strategies of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman imply it was enough to claim that women were unfit for their civic duties as wives and mothers to initiate change in the system of female education, in Society in America Martineau suggests that the normative identification of women with domestic employment in fact provided a rationalization for the inferior education they received. “As women have none of the objects in life for which an enlarged education is considered requisite,” Martineau observes, “the education is not given” (3:107). An education suited to subordinated creatures was offered women precisely because they were assumed to be protected from the economic and political demands of the public sphere by their dependent position within the family structure.

By that token, the women best situated to demonstrate their need for improved education were not wives and mothers but those who, unsupported by fathers, husbands, and brothers, were required to support themselves through independent industry. For this reason, Martineau regrets the overall prosperity that made marriage practically universal in the States. She fears that the prosperity of America is a “circumstance unfavourable to its women” as it will “be long before they are put to the proof as to what they are capable of thinking and doing: a proof to which,” she goes on to observe, “perhaps thousands of English women have been put by adversity … the result of which is a remarkable improvement in their social condition, even within the space of ten years” (3:118).

What by 1837 English social critics identified as the “problem” of female redundancy is thus interpreted in Martineau's analysis as a general boon for women. According to the theory of “surplus women,” the periodic economic crises attending rapid industrialization and a disproportionately low percentage of men in the overall population of Great Britain threatened the independent fortunes of single women and made marriage among middle-class women much more rare than in the United States. Consequently, despite the pretensions of domestic ideology, British women of the middle classes, like Martineau herself, were frequently forced to rely on their own labor for a maintenance. Martineau implies that the enforced self-reliance and indeed the exceptional accomplishments of single women like herself were promoting reforms that would benefit women generally. As it became impossible to conceive of women as wives and mothers alone, it became increasingly difficult to treat them as a dependent and protected class. When women demonstrated the same economic needs as well as the same capacity for achievement as men, equal opportunities, including an improved system of female education, would follow in course.

Implicit in Martineau's analysis of the oppression of women in the West—and in her vision of its ultimate undoing—is an optimistic interpretation of the economic crises that rocked England in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The positive implications for women that she derives from the vicissitudes of capitalist development are in part grounded in axioms of classical political economy. They consequently set her at odds with both working-class and Tory critics of industrial capitalism who viewed the ongoing economic transformation of Great Britain with much greater skepticism than did Martineau. As Noel Thompson argues, socialist political economists of the early nineteenth century understood “contemporary economic crisis as a permanent and worsening phenomenon” and warned that “general economic depression and impoverishment must be a permanent feature of competitive capitalism” (217). Conservative critics, concerned less with the material than with the moral impoverishment of the working classes, foresaw dire consequences for the nation in the economic dislocation of traditional institutions, such as the working-class family, that they understood to be the source of its ethical and social order. In this spirit, Evangelical writers like Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna excoriated the employment of women in the expanding textile industries, a development that in the terms of domestic ideology compromised their “natural” maternal functions within the home and prepared the way for general social disaffection (see also Fryckstedt, Gallagher, and Hobart).

In contrast to the working-class political economists, Martineau assumed that glutted markets or crises of overproduction were a partial and impermanent feature of capitalist development. Subscribing to a version of Say's Law, she held that a surfeit of capital and labor applied to the production of one good necessarily entailed a deficiency of capital and labor in another and that temporary crises would consequently be resolved as resources migrated from one domain of production to the next. The feminist spin that Martineau put on this hopeful principle was to suggest that the migration of human resources could occur between the private and public spheres as, for example, when bourgeois daughters like Martineau managed to capitalize on the business failure of their fathers. Moreover, as opposed to conservative critics of economic development like Tonna, she looked favorably on the industrial employment of working-class women as well. Indeed, she cast the factory system at Lowell with its many female employees as a liberal feminist oasis, the only site in the United States of the 1830s where women had the opportunity to develop “human” virtues on the idealized model of the American artisan/citizen, the sole arena in which “universal” values were distributed across gender lines.

This is not to suggest, however, that Martineau supposed that eventually economic development would—or should—dissolve the division between the public and private spheres or indeed the sexual division of labor that structured it. Her arguments picture some women crossing from one sphere to the other, but they do not positively envision any blurring of the boundary that would threaten the hierarchical relationship between the two. This much is clear from Martineau's discussion of the American boardinghouse, which as a long-established source of remunerated occupation for its women keepers serves as a counterpoint to the more “progressive” relations of production she describes at Lowell.⁸ In this analysis, the boardinghouse appears as one of the great evils of American culture. The work of the hostess and her hired employees frees women to establish a semipublic sphere of their own in the boardinghouse parlor, where domestic privacy and a secure environment for child rearing are sacrificed to a spurious conviviality that is peculiarly damaging not simply to the morality of young married women but to serious public business as well. “There the ladies sit for hours,” Martineau complains,

doing nothing but gossiping with one another, with any gentleman of the house who may happen to have no business, and with visitors. … They find a dear friend or two among the boarders, to whom they confide their husbands' secrets … [causing] no end of difficulties to their commercial and domestic affairs.

(3:133-34)

Unprepared to see any value for women in the subversive potential she attributes to “ladies' gossip,” Martineau implies instead that boardinghouse life merely reinforces women's political marginality by providing a safe haven for the dissipated idleness that she associated with the Southern aristocracy—the least progressive because the least productive element in American society. Rather than demonstrate women capable of socially productive labor and therefore qualified for full citizenship, keeping a boardinghouse made it possible for large numbers of women to establish themselves as women of leisure, and as such to be constituted as a problem for the democratic and capitalist regime.

The women of Lowell, on the other hand, enjoyed the benefits of productive labor in roughly the manner of the American artisans that Martineau so admired. Though their leisure hours were extremely limited—an average work week was seventy hours long—they were nevertheless at the workers' disposal. Living communally in dorms and private homes and employing a house mother to attend to domestic concerns, Lowell women were independent of both familial support and familial demands. They were therefore free to dedicate their spare time to personal cultivation—to reading, music, and public lectures at the Lyceum—their savings helped to finance. Indeed, in her preface to the Lowell Offering (1844), an anthology of creative writing by women operatives, Martineau maintains that it was in large part the “invigorating effects of MIND in a life of labour” that kept these women cheerfully productive week after gruelling week. “Their minds are kept fresh, and strong, and free by knowledge and power of thought; and this is the reason why they are not worn and depressed by their labours” (“Letter” 161). Though as yet not direct participants in American democracy, these women, like the male workers of the North—and in marked contrast to the frivolous inhabitants of American boardinghouses—had successfully “idealised” their lives. Away from home and its absorbing daily round of diversions and cares, the workers at Lowell had developed the objective perspective generally deemed necessary for political life. Could full enfranchisement in justice be long denied?

While celebrating the relative economic and intellectual autonomy of these factory workers, however, Martineau also insists with remarkable complacency on the ultimate subordination of their aspirations and resources to the needs of their families. Indeed, Martineau appears to admire the self-possession and resolve of these women precisely to the extent that they are deployed in the service of others. “The institution of factory labour,” she observes, not only brought financial independence to many but “to many occasion for noble and generous deeds” (“Letter” 162). For instance,

If one of the sons of a New England farmer shows a love for books and thought, the ambition of an affectionate sister is roused, and she thinks of the glory and honour to the whole family, and the blessing to him, if he could have a college education. She ponders this till she tells her parents, some day, of her wish to go to Lowell, and earn the means of sending her brother to college. … Such motives may well lighten and sweeten labour, and to such girls labour is light and sweet.

(162-63)

Apparently Martineau never encountered a girl whose labor was sweetened by the prospect of attending college herself, and it is quite curious that Martineau does not regret the lack of “such” a girl as she would have been. Instead, Martineau reports with apparent satisfaction that the assurance that they were useful provided a “stronger support” to the labor of factory girls than did their “active and cultivated understanding” (162).

Despite Martineau's general claims about the emancipatory potential of extradomestic employment, therefore, the institution of factory labor appears to have done nothing at all to lift women from their traditionally subordinate position in American society but rather to have exploited and perpetuated it. In Martineau's account, after all, it was women's sense of responsibility to their families rather than a desire for autonomy that sent them to the factories and made them model industrial employees. The ultimate advantage of the factory system was that it provided women an opportunity to be useful, and it was from a consciousness of their utility that the women operatives derived a sense of purpose and self-worth. While life at Lowell may in fact have freed women from the most repressive aspects of life in the family and may have done something to undermine the exclusive identification of women and domestic duties, Martineau does not imply that young women chose factory labor as a gesture of resistance against traditional social divisions. Nor is it apparent that women's extradomestic employment at Lowell was in any way inconsistent with their continued political subordination under the laws of coverture.

The implications of Martineau's diagnosis of the condition of women are therefore as paradoxical as the assumptions that structure it. On the one hand, she characterizes women's exclusion from the productive economy—and the ideology of gendered duties that upholds it—as the cause of both their political subordination and their moral and intellectual debility. On the other, she represents the sexual division of labor, in which the energies and resources of women are subordinated to men's, as a “natural” consequence of sexual difference to which the general good requires that women submit. With respect to the first set of assumptions, Martineau looks to historical forces, that is, the process of economic development that providentially freed some women from dependency on their families, to establish women as individuals qualified for citizenship in their own right. With reference to the latter, she looks to improved education to bring women to a clearer sense of their duties as naturally subordinate members of society even after, as her analysis of the arrangements at Lowell makes clear, they have been admitted to the productive economy. Such education is particularly necessary, however, to the extent that economic development, while forcing some women to earn an independent livelihood, established others as consuming women of leisure whose daily life practices, as in the case of the boardinghouse women, set them at odds with the values of the capitalist public sphere. The conception of history to which Martineau's affiliation with political economy committed her simultaneously produced “opportunities” for women and constructed women as a problem for continued economic and political progress.

If Society in America was dedicated largely to characterizing women's systematic oppression under a representative Western patriarchy and imagining the historic conditions of possibility for their emancipation, the theory and practice of Martineau's domestic fiction takes up more centrally the other side of the “Woman Question” as posed by political economy, that is, the “problem” that unregenerate women constituted for the process of historical development.

II. “THE GRAVER THEMES”: MARTINEAU'S DOMESTIC FICTION

Discussing the composition and publication history of Deerbrook in her autobiography, Martineau relates with some satisfaction that John Murray solicited the manuscript for her novel, claiming, moreover, that he had not done as much for any other writer since the end of Walter Scott's career. That he eventually declined to publish Deerbrook, she is certain, had nothing to do with the novel's “execution” but rather with its “scene being laid in middle life.” As Martineau explains: “People liked high life in novels, and low life, and ancient life; and life of any rank presented by Dickens, in his peculiar artistic light which is very unlike the broad daylight of actual existence, English or other: but it was not supposed that they would bear a presentment of the familiar life of every day” (2:115). But this description of Deerbrook in fact understates the novel's agenda. No mere reflection, much less a celebration of dailiness, Deerbrook holds the everyday life practices of a provincial community up to disciplinary scrutiny. Its particular focus is the community's women, whose exclusion from the productive economy necessarily reinforces their provincial isolation from the national narrative of scientific, economic, and political progress that is the novel's implicit point of appeal. The domestic form of the novel, which Martineau here contrasts to more popular contemporary genres—historical and Newgate fiction, the novel of fashion, and anything by Dickens—extends its disciplinary impulses outward toward the current audience for fiction. Refusing the pleasures of the glamorous, the sensational, or the fanciful, Deerbrook's commonplace setting violated assumptions about popular literary tastes and challenged the audience for novels to alter the escapist character of its “everyday” practice of reading.

That Martineau conceived of the novel as an instrument of moral and even political regeneration is clear from her essay, “Achievements of the Genius of Scott,” published on the heels of parliamentary reform in the January 1833 edition of Tait's Edinburgh Magazine. Martineau rejects Scott's historical perspective and demands that “a new novelist” engage topics of contemporary concern. “Instead of tales of knightly love and glory, of chivalrous loyalty, of the ambition of ancient courts, and the bygone superstitions of a half-savage state,” Martineau declares:

We must have, in a new novelist, the graver themes—not the less picturesque, perhaps, for their reality—which the present condition of society suggests. We have had enough of ambitious intrigues; why not now take the magnificent subject, the birth of political principle, whose advent has been heralded so long? What can afford finer moral scenery than the transition state in which society now is! Where are nobler heroes to be found than those who sustain society in the struggle; and what catastrophe so grand as the downfall of bad institutions, and the issues of a process of renovation?

(54)

While Martineau, whose low estimate of her own talent for narrative is a matter of record, would perhaps have denied any comparison between her creative powers and Scott's—the agenda she sets for some “new novelist” is precisely her own.⁹ Written while she was still at work on her Illustrations of Political Economy, this article appears to theorize that project as well as to anticipate the aims of Deerbrook.

Indeed, late in the essay Martineau makes a direct appeal to her women readers—the assumed audience of domestic fiction—for whom, she implies, the works of Scott as yet have more value than most contemporary fiction. Martineau insists that women recognize that, contrary to their representation in fashionable novels, they are not the heroines of a national romance. Nor are they the natural moral force that Evangelical domestic ideology would make them. Women's true relation to patriarchal culture is best represented by Ivanhoe's Rebecca. “Yes,” she writes, “women may choose Rebecca as the representative of their capabilities: first, despised, then wondered at, and involuntarily admired; tempted, made use of, then persecuted, and finally banished—not by a formal decree, but by being refused honorable occupation, and a safe abiding place” (50). She recommends, moreover, that women “not only take her for their model, but make her speak for them to society” on behalf of “the educational discipline which beseems them” and “the rights, political and social, which are their due” (50). Martineau thereby indicates that if women would forego the fantasy consolation of popular fiction and accept “realistic” representations of their current position in society, the novel could become one means of promoting their social and political emancipation. At the same time, the novel could help to realize the more crucial objective of Martineau's feminist agenda: women's re-education or reconstitution as dutiful, self-denying, principled subjects more generally worthy of the “honorable occupation” and “safe abiding place” they were currently denied. She recommends that women “lay to heart” Rebecca's nominally unhappy destiny as “a principle of renovation to the enslaved” (50). Some such principle also structures her own representation of Maria Young, the philosophical governess in Deerbrook.

As is clear from her nonfiction prose, Martineau was acutely conscious of the difficulties that “redundant” middle-class women encountered in a society dominated by domestic ideology and which therefore conceived of marriage and motherhood as the only fitting destiny for women. In Deerbrook she makes the fate of unmarried women a crucial secondary theme. Patterned to a certain degree on the fiction of Jane Austen, Deerbrook is plotted along a sense and sensibility story line, the resolution of which depends on the moral education of an emotionally exacting young woman whose desires must be brought into alignment with the responsibilities of social life in her community. Though for Hester Ibbotson, as well as for her more rational and amiable sister Margaret, a stable social position is eventually secured in marriage, no such “safe abiding place” awaits the morally and intellectually superior Maria. Her uncertain prospects at the end of the novel point to the inadequacy of any fictional resolution that imagined upper- and middle-class women's moral development as the exclusive substance of the social “problem” they posed. Like Martineau's nonfiction writing on women, Deerbrook is divided between representations of women who must be brought up to their crucial duties as wives and mothers and representations of a society insufficiently flexible to accommodate those whom exceptional circumstances have exempted from conventional womanly responsibilities. It idealizes a domestic sphere inhabited by rational, socially conscious women at the same time that it calls into question the ideology of gendered duties that blocked women's access to a personally sustaining position in the public sphere.

Indeed, Maria Young vies with Deerbrook's commonplace setting as the novel's most striking innovation, inaugurating as she does a series of fictional governesses whose appearance during the 1840s and 50s corresponds to a broader sociological interest in the profession. Mary Poovey argues that, as a figure positioned at the boundary between gentility and the world of work, the governess at mid-century was alternately invoked as the guardian of, and a threat to, middle-class values and practices, most centrally the segregation of men and women into the separate spheres of public and private activity and influence. Poovey goes on to claim, however, that by the mid-1850s, when discussions of the plight of governesses had dovetailed with feminist campaigns to improve employment opportunities for women and women's education, the figure of the governess could be deployed to reveal the contradictions inherent in domestic ideology. That ideology, while maintaining that woman's place was in the home, mystified the fact that, for many individual women, it could not be (see Poovey 126-64). Of this last trend, Martineau's representation of Maria Young is arguably an early instance, as indeed her nonfiction writing on women anticipates what Poovey characterizes as 1850s feminism.

But if by the standards of the 1830s the figure of Maria Young makes Deerbrook a feminist text, her punitive treatment within the novel, together with the more than equal time devoted to her two marriageable counterparts, reveals the pressure that domestic ideology continued to exert on Martineau. Maria's departure from the typical lot of women, after all, is hardly a matter of choice or self-affirmation and yields no pleasure, if some satisfaction; it was enforced by a hideous accident that killed her father and crippled her for life, making her capacity to work for a living not only essential but also doubtful in the long term. Achieved at such an exorbitant personal cost, Maria's financial independence and rational self-possession, though honorable, seem to be slight consolation for the happy marriages that were the Ibbotsons' portion. “Philosophical!” exclaims Philip Enderby, who before the accident was considered a likely match for Maria. “It is a happy thing that she is philosophical in her circumstances, poor thing!” and it is difficult for the reader to override his judgment (49). Deerbrook has established such heartbreaking conditions for the construction of its exceptional woman that she appears rather pitiable than admirable. For all her stoicism, for all her service to others, Maria Young can really do very little for herself. As this narrative represents it, the home is indeed the only “safe abiding place” as yet available to women; Deerbrook does little to subvert its normative centrality.

Indeed, when assessing the virtues of Deerbrook in her autobiography, Martineau herself does not mention the kind of argument for greater social opportunities for women implicit in Maria Young's case. She insists instead on its value for the education of women—on the “special application” that could be made of her novel to the “discipline of temper” (2:116). As in Martineau's other writing on women, what can be interpreted as her claims on their behalf are counterbalanced by a strong didactic or disciplinary impulse that takes them as its object. If, as she implied in her essay on Scott, she had assumed the dual responsibility of “speaking to” society on the condition of women and of providing women fictional models of self-denying forbearance in an imperfect world, it is the latter of these two purposes that Martineau claims is best served by Deerbrook.

Accordingly, an equivalent to the punitive impulse that permitted the loss of fortune, health, and lover to be heaped on Maria Young can be seen in the treatment of the more faulty Hester Ibbotson, who must struggle to reform her faults of character in circumstances peculiarly designed to exacerbate them. The self-absorbed Hester falls in love and eventually manages to marry Doctor Edward Hope, who through it all favors Hester's sensible younger sister Margaret. Herself as yet unmarried and in love with another man, Margaret moves in, as was customary, with the newly married Hopes. Such a complicated skein of affect would have provided rich material for a writer interested in the psychology of jealousy and betrayal, in whose hands it would have been treated as tragedy or melodrama. Martineau, however, in a celebrated exchange with Anna Jameson purportedly maintained “that Love, as a passion, is merely one of many—on a par with love of fame, ambition, love of money [or] power & equally capable of being managed, resisted [or] modified.”¹⁰ For her the passions of her characters are of far less interest than the efforts they make to bring them into the social bounds that define her conception of fictional realism.

The problem for both of the Hopes is to align their personal desires with the social roles they find themselves enacting, but the burden of this transformation falls on Hester. The one great duty of her life, after all, is to create a happy domestic environment. Thus, though Hope marries a woman he does not love, we are not invited to question his integrity, so long as he shows scrupulous care in fulfilling the formal requirements—including domestic tenderness—of his marriage. And though Hester in fact has ample cause for suspicion and subjective misery, these passions are characterized as constitutional failings that must be disciplined if not eradicated. In order for Hope to love her, she must make herself amiable. Her struggle throughout the novel, then, is to emulate the even-tempered Margaret, whom Hope—as well as most other reasonable men in Deerbrook—rightly sees as the more desirable woman.

If Margaret represents Deerbrook's feminine ideal, Mrs. Rowlandson emerges, both for Hester and the novel's women readers, as a monitory object-lesson. An idle and self-involved woman, she is allied with the neighborhood's resident gentry against the reform-oriented Hope. As such, she recalls the association of corrupt femininity and aristocratic power that Martineau found already described in Wollstonecraft. Together Mrs. Rowlandson and Sir William Hunter dramatize Martineau's conception of “the transition state in which society [then was]” from an autocratic to a utilitarian and meritocratic, if not fully democratic, regime. The course of progress in England, set by men like Hope engaged in intellectually taxing labor, was as yet still impeded by the entrenched systems of sexual and aristocratic privilege that permitted individuals to mistake or ignore their social obligations. Hence just as Sir William makes a mockery of his role as county magistrate and justice of the peace by inciting the county poor to riot against Hope, Mrs. Rowland, in addition to viciously slandering the doctor, fails in all her domestic duties. She alternately bullies and ignores her chronically ill mother and thus proves herself inadequate to the first responsibility of a good Victorian daughter—nursing near relations—and the antithesis of the healing Hope. Her husband, a generally good-natured but weak man, is continually harassed by her frequent displays of bad temper. She is barely tolerable as a domestic companion and embarrasses his business connection with Mr. Grey and his contribution to the community generally. (Her worries about the material welfare of her children keep him from casting his ballot in support of Hope's parliamentary candidate, for example.) As for her children, in keeping with the model of the “mere notable woman” that Wollstonecraft sketched in A Vindication, Mrs. Rowland's concern for their physical well-being does not extend to their intellectual and moral health. She creates a monster of femininity in her daughter Matilda, who at age ten is obsessed with the material preparations—dancing and deportment lessons—for the day when she will be married. And Maria Young complains to Margaret that her efforts on behalf of the other Rowland children are all but futile, given the frightful moral example their mother provides. Hester's struggle to emulate Margaret must then also be read as a struggle to avoid Mrs. Rowland's destructive excesses and to learn to provide domestic support for her husband's work in the world rather than to join the enemies of progress through her own susceptibility to egotism.

Mrs. Rowland's animosity, along with Sir William's complacent corruption, in fact provide the conditions for the purification of the Hopes' domestic relations as well as the doctor's reinstatement as the intellectual and moral center of Deerbrook. Consistent with Martineau's views on the value of hardship to human development, the persecution and loss of income that the Hopes suffer is tonic to Hester's weak nature. “I fear nothing for Hester but too much prosperity,” (266) the wise Margaret observes, and events prove her insight valid. The difficulties facing her husband, whom she truly loves, provide a “perpetual call out of [herself]” (266) and a stronger motive for self-discipline than she had ever known before. (Indeed, Hester and Margaret must even take on the more drudging aspects of childcare and housework, which, in keeping with the valorization of appropriately motivated labor in Society in America, amounts to a kind of physical therapy for both women.) As the Hopes grow poorer, Hester grows sweeter, happier, and more effectively supportive to her husband, who comes to love and trust her in turn.

Meanwhile, the character of Deerbrook itself must also be reformed. In the grip of a host of archaic influences and removed from the energetic intellectual life and the progressive politics that Martineau typically associates with urban industrial centers, Deerbrook initially threatens to undo Hope and the small circle of metropolitan emigrés that rally around him: the Ibbotsons (from Manchester), Philip Enderby (the virtually full-time Londoner), and Maria Young (whose perspective has been liberalized through suffering). But the community is first impoverished by a drought and then afflicted by a fever epidemic that will be the occasion of Hope's vindication. As Deerbrook sickens, the once-influential Hunters retreat to their lodge, sending some material provisions to aid the poorest members of the community but failing to provide a model of active service to its better-situated members. Gripped by the ravening disease, the community is forced to abandon its faith in the advice of fortune-tellers and quacks and to recognize the folly of its animosity to Hope. Even Mrs. Rowland must acknowledge the value of his superior knowledge and selfless devotion. Having kept her family in Deerbrook to make a display of her faith in Dr. Walcot, a young physician whom she had brought to town to replace Hope, Mrs. Rowland's daughter Matilda falls ill. When the child appears to be dying, Mrs. Rowland is seized with remorse and superstitious dread and allows her husband to call in Hope, who comes from his own sick bed to help her. But Matilda's case is too far advanced, and her death is the last and sharpest blow delivered against the most hardened member of an obstinate community.

After the epidemic, the process of healing is ratified by marriages. Sophia Grey marries Dr. Walcot, and Margaret finally comes to an understanding with Philip, an event that had been delayed by the interference of his sister. Any traces of Mrs. Rowland's resentment are thus constrained by a welter of social ties with her former enemies. Hope, properly valued by the town at last, humbles the Hunters, who apologize and invite him and his entire connection—now including the Rowlands and the Greys—to a dinner of state. Thus united, the representatives of science, commerce, and industry gain ground against aristocratic power while Mrs. Rowland's corrupting feminine influence is simultaneously contained. The three brides—Hester, Margaret, and to a lesser degree, Sophia—are better companions to their husbands and promise to be more rational mothers than women of the previous generation have been; they will therefore continue to contribute to the ameliorative transformation of Deerbrook.

Only Maria Young remains eccentric to the generally happy resolution, though she had consistently been allied with the Hopes. As had Scott with Rebecca, Martineau refuses to provide her any exceptional relief—no legacy or suitor, much less a good job, which would have indeed been a novel reward for a woman of competence and devotion. Maria is left solitary, ill, and uncertain about financial prospects—a peculiarly acute example of “the sad majority of cases” in which, as Martineau had expressed it in her Scott essay, “the course [of love] runs not smooth” (54). As such, she acts, as Martineau presumably thought Rebecca acted, as a spokeswoman for greater opportunities in the public sphere—“honourable occupation and a safe abiding place”—to compensate for those not generally available to women in the private sphere. As a spokeswoman for women's rights, however, Maria is extremely patient and humble. Though Margaret assumes that the life of an unmarried woman was essentially an empty and unhappy one, Maria maintains that for her independence is itself satisfying: “If you could, for one day and night, feel with my feelings, and see through my eyes … you would know, from henceforth, that there are glimpses of heaven for me in solitude, as for you in love; and that it is almost as good to look forward without fear of chance or change, as with such a flutter of hope as is stirring in you now” (522). To this extent, she argues against the essential identification of women with their roles as wives and mothers. Yet for Maria the satisfaction of self-reliance is intimately connected with the painful trials against which she struggled and which she is therefore bound to embrace. “If infirmity, toil, poverty and the foibles of people about us, all go to fortify us in self-reliance, God forbid that we should quarrel with them!” (522). To be an exceptional woman in the world of Deerbrook, then, both in the present and for some time in the future, is to be a cripple and a martyr and to expend one's best resources in personally costly accommodation. Such a fate—whatever its consolations—could hardly be chosen, only enforced.

If according to the analysis of the condition of women found in Society in America there is a certain perverse logic to Deerbrook's humiliation of unregenerate domestic gentlewomen like Mrs. Rowland and Hester Ibbotson, its treatment of Maria Young may seem to violate Martineau's previously articulated feminist conclusions. If independent women are indeed, as I have suggested, the vanguard of a more progressive era of gender relations, why should her novel, presumably directed to the women's audience for domestic fiction, sabotage this working woman's future? Given the autobiographical anecdote with which I opened this essay, it is perhaps tempting to read the orphaned Maria Young as a projection of Martineau's self-lacerating guilt over a personal ambition so monstrous that it involved her in the further crime of theoretically celebrating her own father's death. This account becomes all the more plausible when we recall that Martineau opted to write this troublingly punitive women's novel in lieu of accepting an offer to edit a new economic journal—and then retreated into arguably hypochondriac invalidism for the next five years. But I believe my sketch of Martineau's sociological writing on women in the years preceding the publication of Deerbrook suggests another, less Freudian, account of the novel's cruelty. The maimed and isolated figure of Maria Young registers the dangers of attempting to ground a feminist politics in a social theory that privileges a subject-position historically occupied by men. To ratify political economy's valuation of productive labor and competitive individualism—with its concomitant devaluation of women's social contribution through domestic reproduction—refuses the promise and challenge of solidarity among women, and inevitably entails violence against the potentially doubled, maternal body of “woman.” If like Martineau's sociological writing on women, Deerbrook manages to refuse the temptation of womanly identification, its punishing conclusion underlines the menacing implications of a feminist politics that uncritically values liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Notes

1. See the “Preface to the Sesquicentennial Edition” of Martineau's How to Observe Manners and Morals, xi.

2. For historical accounts of the formation of Victorian domestic ideology, see, for example, Davidoff and Hall; Hall, “The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology”; Poovey, The Proper Lady; and Taylor.

3. For an analysis of the discourse of republican motherhood in the context of the American Revolution, see Bloch.

4. See Rendall 44-77, especially 67-72. John Stuart Mill of course did not share his father's views with respect to women, but his contributions both to political economy and to feminist theory came considerably later in the century than the period under consideration here.

5. Deirdre David, to whose work on the ideological tensions and inconsistencies in Martineau's writing I am indebted, is one who claims that Deerbrook represents a break with the strong feminist sympathies of Society in America. For David, the novel reinscribes “dominant ideologies of sex and gender that Martineau elsewhere subverts with great verve and vitality. The strong feminist sentiments of Society in America barely find their way into Deerbrook” (85). I differ from this judgment only in wishing to insist that the feminism of Society in America itself ratifies the hierarchical relationship between “men's” and “women's” work commonly assumed within the discourse of political economy and the gender ideology of separate spheres.

6. For a wonderfully subtle historical account of this oscillation in the context of British feminism, see Riley. Important attempts to deconstruct the masculine subject of Enlightenment political theory and culture in its problematic relationship to feminism include those by Landes, Bloch, Pateman, and Scott.

7. In this new emphasis Martineau demonstrates her indebtedness to classical political economy, which maintained that an individual's placement within the division of labor played a decisive role in the constitution of his or her character. A locus classicus of this claim is the second chapter of Smith's The Wealth of Nations: “The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause as the effect of the division of labor” (1:28).

8. Martineau lists three occupations traditionally open to women in America: “teaching, needle-work, and keeping boarding houses and hotels” (3:147). The two former also confounded the distinction between the public and private spheres, though in Martineau's analysis they left their practitioners considerably more vulnerable than the latter. These occupations essentially required performing domestic duties for wages—a paradox according to the sexual division of labor, which defined such work as “unmarketable.” Consequently, women's work was so badly remunerated that the typical laboring woman could not support herself on her own earnings. The result was radical alienation of either body or mind: the seamstress often turned to prostitution; the teacher went mad from anxiety.

9. I am referring here to the discussion of “plot in fiction” found in Martineau's Autobiography, in which she confesses that her “incapacity in this direction is so absolute that [she has] always worked under a sense of despair about it” (1:238-39).

10. Anna Jameson to Lady Byron, Tynemouth, 1842 (qtd. in Sanders 63).

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