The Economics of Ethical Conversation: The Commerce of the Letter in Eliza Haywood and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Historians and literary critics alike recognize the post-Lockean empirical world of eighteenth-century England as a world where the nature of "commerce," whether financial or ethical, is always under investigation.¹ It may look as if, during the period, interest in the "personal" and "private" increased, as did a sense that virtue should be measured by the quality of personal relationship rather than loyalty to an absolute authority, whether in the shape of a feudal lord, a monarch, or the republican state. Michael McKeon complicates this impression by reminding us that this is not so much inventing a new category in the eighteenth-century understanding of subjecthood, but rather making explicit what was previously tacit, separating out and "naming" or "characterizing" a certain kind of experience that had previously been understood as a "hidden" pressure or presence. This process of achieving a categorical stability around the value of what is termed the "private" or "domestic" is, as McKeon and others such as Nancy Armstrong have recognized, often articulated through a preoccupation with the experience of women precisely because of their alienation from the overt centers of political power.² As McKeon puts it, "The wholesale deprivation of women in the polity makes it possible to imagine a different kind of subject hood, one not of the political but of the ethical subject" (150).

To imagine the ethical subject is then to imagine a woman. Modern criticism has been most attentive to male constructions of female voice that both display and examine the ethics of commerce in the imaginative literature of the period: Daniel Defoe's Roxana, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Clarissa, and Harriet Byron. However, women of letters and women with commercial literary aspirations were not only represented in literature, but were also, themselves, powerful participants in this "conversation" about the ethical subject, that is, the subject who pursues a moral engagement with others. And it is the mode of the familiar letter, as a form of commerce with an other, a co-respondent with whom the letter writer already shares an affective bond, which both communicates and displays women's distinctive ethical charms.

Yet the exact nature of the letter's "commerce" is both difficult and possibly invidious to identify, given the enormous capaciousness, versatility, and flexibility of the form. As Clare Brant puts it in her recent and many-layered study of the eighteenth-century letter, "One is looking at innumerable texts which share identifiable markers of genre yet do not make a stable genre"; she warns against the tendency in literary criticism to take the amatory letter as the generic norm.³ At the risk of establishing another generic norm, I would like to focus here on the "familiar" letter. The familiar letter may be viewed as a written mode that expands or confines the boundaries of the "family" and "familiar." It makes nonfamily members familiar with information and norms of social behavior within the family, as in the popular mode of the instructional letter from one family member to another, or in the publication of correspondence of the famous or influential. And it maintains the familiarity of family members with the business of those considered to be a part of the family when absent from it. Whether familiar or not, letters might be seen as: a form of gift (requiring no answer); a form of exchange (requesting a response of equal measure); a medium of expression (communicating feeling to a correspondent); a form of performance (shaping identity through iterative custom and citation of a certain kind of speech or conversation in correspondence with a particular addressee to pass from hand to friendly hand); or letters can be a commercial product, published as a conduct book, or amatory fiction, or as confessional biography, capitalizing on a literary or political reputation. The two dominant modes of the fictional letter in the early eighteenth century, the amatory letter and the spy letter, may be seen as exploiting the letter's capacity to convey to its reader a sense of being made privy...