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Wants and Goods: Advertisement and Desire in Ha)nvood and Defoe BARBARA M. BENEDICT In a word, as the whole relation is carefully garbled of all the levity and looseness that was in it, so it is all applied, and with the utmost care, to virtuous and religious uses. None can, without being guilty of manifest injustice, cast any reproach upon it, or upon our design in publishing it.1 So Daniel Defoe asserts in the preface to Moll Flanders. Reproach nonetheless appeared aplenty, not only for this novel, but for much of the fiction of the 1720s. Despite their moralistic rhetoric and didactic structure, novels by Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood feature scandalous titles advertising erotic contents, and dwell on the pleasures of sin and crime. This ambiguity enraged contemporaries like Swift and Pope, who in Gulliver s Travels and The Dunciad excoriated the authors for pandering to the audience's basest desires from mercenary motives. Modem critics have similarly interpreted it as a methodological error produced by contradictions of point of view, authorial motive, or literary model.2 Scholars of Haywood have also blamed her "non-literary" speed of composition—she completed fourteen novels, along with four other literary works in the two years between 1722 and 1724 alone—and her attempt to 221 222 / BENEDICT please an audience itself torn between a thirst for erotica and an insistence on narrative morality.3 Clearly, both Defoe and Haywood wrote for profit: facile, commercially-oriented writers, they faced similar problems in managing their own beliefs and their audience's appetites in a market rife with publishers' lies, texts of ambiguous factuality, and confusions of morality and popularity.4 The result is an unremitting and destabilizing ironic ambiguity, but this is not a formal failure. Rather, this ambiguity provides a way to negotiate the contradictions of value and meaning in a period of ideological change. These authors' moralism is not merely the trace of a discourse inherited from pre-Restoration religious models, Protestant or Anglican.5 Rather, it is a transformative, new discourse patched together in order to sell commodities, including print, as greater "goods." Ironic ambiguity facilitates the transformation of desire into a commodity. The commodification of desire is the fundamental method of a parallel, burgeoning new form: the printed advertisement.6 Early advertisements employ a rhetoric that uses narrative plots and vague terms conventionally associated with morality—like "preservation," "benefit," "restoration," and "improvement"—in the service of materialism; this familiar rhetoric defuses the audience's resistence to the ideological clash between the physical and the spiritual, and between the promise and the performance. Readers may hold in suspension opposing desires or impulses: skepticism and belief, humor and moralism, advocacy of religious resignation or stoicism and thirst for passion, pleasure in orderliness and pleasure in chaos, care for the body and care for the soul. Similar tonal elisions characterize much prose and satirical poetry of the early eighteenth century, but Haywood and Defoe deliberately exploit it as rhetoric. By incorporating advertising discourse into their works, these authors invite readerly pleasure in a commodified world while condemning moral turpitude; moreover, they tout their own books without compromising their judgment. This irony, however, is more than a trick to sidestep conscience. It is a formal solution to the cultural problem of establishing a fabric of significance in a world crammed with shifting values, material things, and unproven claims: the new consumer world of the eighteenth century.7 By accommodating the inconsistences of value in a society poised between the spiritual and the empirical, advertising established a rhetoric of desire for early eighteenthcentury readers. This rhetoric grants both the comforts of commodified "goods," from sexual satisfaction to clothes and cures, and the simultaneous, implacable and contradictory force of indefinable, immaterial, insatiable desire. Wants and Goods / 223 The Want Ads, or "The sick may have advice for nothing": Advertisement has a complex definition and a long history in English culture. Public advertisements—notices of news—as well as oral and visual solicitations to buy goods and experiences from a pint to a prayer for the King were a feature of Renaissance life. In the Restoration and eighteenthcentury , as the populace grew wealthier and...

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