Her Bread to Earn: Women, Money and Society from Defoe to Austen (review)

Reviews Mona Scheuermann. Her Bread to Earn: Women, Money and Society from Defoe to Austen. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993. ix + 284pp. US$20.00. ISBN 0-8131-1817-4. Mona Scheuermann's account of images of women from Defoe to Austen moves against the prevailing direction of many current studies of her topic. Her opening observation makes her own view clear: "The recent critical emphasis on images of women in the works only of women novelists—this category has come to include Richardson as a sort of honorary member of the women's group—distorts the reality of how women are perceived in the eighteenth-century novel. For one thing, it overemphasizes the view of woman as victim; for another, it emphasizes the image of the woman as a nonfunctioning member of society, essentially excluded from any but the role of sufferer." Her reading— and one of the most positive features of the book is her extended reliance on the text (not subtext) of the novels themselves—persuades her that the range of women's experience is much more varied than we have been told. Women, she argues, are often in positions of power, and that power has, not surprisingly, often to do with money and with the practical business of earning (and preserving) their bread. Hence her title, from Emma, about Jane Fairfax, finally rescued from earning, as women of the period often were, by marriage to a man who is already well provided with the bread and power she lacks. Scheuermann begins with Defoe, a natural subject, with single (or apparently single) women as heroines of two of his six novels. This fact in itself suggests a preoccupation, not surprising given Defoe' s concern with women, marriage, and conjugal lewdness in his other prose. I confess to having been a reader of Roxana more taken with the passivities of the "Beautiful Lady," with her giving up her many children, with her allowing herself to be supported by a variety of men and by Amy, that "skin to her back," and with her teetering, in latter days, on the brink of madness, even going over her life in melancholy dreams. I have not entirely given up that reading, especially with respect to Amy, who might, I think, have figured more in Scheuermann's account of resourceful women. She has persuaded me that I have, at the very least, to see Roxana as, for most of the novel, a considerable survivor, with business sense and business success; in her own phrase, a EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 7, Number 2, January 1995 204 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:2 "Man-Woman." (Is any of this, however, Defoe, rather than his heroine, speaking in his own modern voice?) As we know, Moll goes from the needlework she does reluctantly "at her finger's ends" to a different kind of subversive stitching in the world of thievery. An enterprising student of mine once worked out her financial status in comparison with those of much higher social standing and concluded that, although Moll frets over money, her tally puts her up with baronets. Moll is even more a survivor than Roxana. Although she has no Amy, there is Mother Midnight, another helping and resourceful woman. Both pairs reflect Defoe's frequent pattern of partners, here rendered in what we might now call sisterhood. With a predilection for women as doers rather than as sufferers, Scheuermann is not fond of Clarissa, whose daily accounts, she thinks, amount in large part to a record of the trivial life of a privileged woman. While I found it hard to deny her view, I thought that something might have been done to relate Clarissa to another active female tradition which would in fact support her central thesis about women and power, especially women in community. At one point Clarissa wishes that her family were Roman Catholic. Then there would be a place for her outside money and marriage. Jocelyn Harris has reminded us that Richardson did in fact have plans for a Protestant monastery. Clarissa's vocation to the single life (of which Scheuermann is aware) is also in embryo a vocation to that active female (even...