Money and the Novel: Mercenary Motivation in Defoe and His Immediate Successors by Samuel L. Macey (review)

424 LEITERS IN CANADA 1983 or she requires to be told what a curate is, or what silver plate is, then he is not fully cognizant of what is not being done in the high school or grammar school in the 1980s. Blewett's edition is a reliable and conscientious job well done. (R.H. cARNm) Samuel L. Macey. Money and the Novel: Mercenary Motivation in Defoe and His Immediate Successors Sono Nis Press. 184. $12.00 From antiquity to the Renaissance Fortune meant luck or fate, the fickle arbitress of human destiny; eventually she was enthroned as a goddess, invariably represented with her emblem, the wheel, signifying vicissitude . When in the seventeenth century she was finally dethroned by Providence, she lost her unlucky aspect and thereafter was associated only with good luck, or wealth. As the major modern genre the novel reflects the change. In modern fiction when men seek their fortunes they mean money, often in the form of heiresses, young ladies fortunate enough to possess 'a fortune.' Samuel Macey contends that the novel from Defoe toJane Austen 'was structuredby time and motivated by money' (in the latter case, the protagonist,not the author, is meant). Thirty years ago A.A. Mendilow in his Time and the Novel provided the first important consideration of a subject still very much under discussion. Macey's new book attempts to do for the second part of his equation what Mendilow's did for the first. Money and the Novel is a well-organized and readable survey of 'mercenary motivation' in the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Jane Austen. Macey divides his subject into two main categories and his book into two parts. Part One deals with those characters who seek to become wealthy by accumulating capital; Part Two with those who achieve the same goal by acquiring a dowry or an estate through marriage or inheritance. Defoe is the only novelist treated in Part One and it is clear that Macey, who devotes half his book to him, is more at home with Defoe than with his successors. The novels are interpreted in the light of Defoe's discussions of economic questions in his many non-fictional works, enabling Macey to show, for example, that there is a link between the fate of his protagonists and Defoe's belief that the acquisition of a moderate fortune (one yielding about £1000 per annum) should be followed by genteel retirement. This notion works well for some novels, such as Colonel Jack, and somewhat less well for others, such as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, but, in his desire to show how much the novels are alike, Macey forces Roxana to fit the pattern. He would have been wiser to recognize how startlingly unlike Defoe's other fiction Roxana is, and to HUMANITIES 425 have avoided the absurd statement that Roxana's 'crime of continuing to trade means that she must suffer.' Part Two is necessarily slighter, though it contains new information, such as the section on the increase in the average size of the dowries of heiresses (compiled from an analysis of figures in The Complete Peerage), which gives us a more precise idea of the standing in the social scale of heiresses like Clarissa Harlowe and Emma Woodhouse. (It should be noted, however, that Macey's figures for the earlier period do not accord with those given in the table of 'Marriage Portions offered by Peers, 1474-1724: in Lawrence Stone's The Crisis of the Aristocracy, "558- "64", Appendix xxxi.) As with Part One, however, the focus on monetary motivation, interesting as it sometimes can be, too often appears to fiatten the fictional perspective by downplaying, or eliminating, the moral and psychological dimension of the stories. In the case of Richardson the result is especially unfortunate, as the difference between Pamela and Clarissa is minimized, to the grave detriment of the latter. Because Clarissa is seen (in an unfortunate choice of words)as a young woman 'very much impregnated with the values and concerns of materialism: her careful and macabre - preparations for death, perhaps the finest example of Richardson's mythopoeic imagination at work, are said to 'demonstrate a return...