A Modest Defense of Gaming Women

A Modest Defense of Gaming Women BETH KOWALESKI WALLACE Nearly two hundred years after her death in 1806, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, is back in fashion. As the subject of Amanda Foreman's best-selling biography, Georgiana holds much fascination for a contemporary audience.1 Many find uncanny parallels between Georgiana and the late Princess Diana to whom she is distantly related: for example, both were exploited by and exploiters of the media. In addition, a growing popular audience for feminist history finds Georgiana an engaging case study. In an age when women were denied direct access to political power, how did they manage nonetheless to effect the course of history? A third explanation for Georgiana's popularity is the fact of the Duchess as a colorful—and sometimes sorry—spectacle. Iconographically rendered by Gainsborough, pornographically caricatured by the political cartoonists of her day, the Duchess remains a fascinating sight today. And nothing rivets attention more than the vision of Georgiana as extravagant, reckless gambler. The sums are astounding: in 1784, her gambling debt was one hundred thousand pounds, or the equivalent of six million pounds today!2 But even more surprising is the recognition that this kind of loss did not actually destroy her marriage. When the "secret" of her indebtedness was finally revealed to her husband, he was angry for a little while, but he ultimately managed to forgive her.3 As we contemplate 21 22 / WALLACE this unfathomable dissipation, we are bound to disapprove. Yet at the same time, we cannot bring ourselves to look away. How could Georgiana have lost so much—and not really have lost much at all? A quick turn back to the eighteenth-century suggests that the Duchess of Devonshire bears resemblance to the fashionable lady gamesters who walked the boards of the Restoration and early eighteenth-century stage. During this period, the lady gambler was a familiar character. In particular, Georgiana's real life escapades have their fictional counterpart in the behavior of Lady Reveller in Susanna Centlivre's The Basset -Table (1706), Lady Gentle in The Lady s Last Stake, or The Wife's Resentment ( 1721 ) by Colley Cibber, and Lady Townley in The Provoked Husband (1728) by Sir John Vanbrugh and Colley Cibber .4 The subjects of my paper, these theatrical sisters to Georgiana were similarly objects of a voyeuristic gaze. Also like their real life counterpart, these dramatic characters are seen as sexually imperiled but ultimately "saved." I will argue here that more than the question of female reputation is at stake in both the plays and in our renewed fascination with Georgiana. All of these women, fictional and non-fictional alike, are not just gamesters, but aristocratic or genteel gamblers. In their proper contexts, they bring to the foreground a class-bound anxiety about the derivations, disseminations, and ultimate destination of wealth.5 As I will suggest at the end of my paper, Georgiana's popularity today may have something to do with the persistence of that same anxiety in a modern context. These three plays capture a moment when an older and powerful way of signifying of rank was increasingly under attack, as we can glean from Thomas Kavanagh's Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance. In France up until the French Revolution, a truly aristocratic identify expressed itself through particular kinds of display and exaggerated social "performance," not only the obvious case of sartorial splendor, but also through such practices as dueling and high stakes gambling. Gaming in particular, writes Kavanagh, "became a token of class affiliation, an affirmation of the individual's superiorify to any change of fortune consisting solely in a gain or loss of money."6 Or, "the noble was noble precisely because he was beyond the power of money to make him more or less than what he was by the unalterable fact of birth."7 The aristocratic willingness to let it all go—in this case, to dissipate vast sums at the gambling table— paradoxically proved who the man was. Kavanagh finds in aristocratic high-stakes gambling traces of a Maussian gift logic at work: such gaming was one of "the primary social practices through which nobles sought to affirm...