Invisible and Indispensable: Women and the Gift

Though the novel-writing careers of Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen span more than seventy years, their works have often inspired scholarly comparisons. Some of their finest editors and critics, such as Margaret Anne Doody, Jocelyn Harris, and Peter Sabor, are specialists in all three authors. These comparisons have emerged alongside burgeoning interest in the field of gift relations, from Marcel Mauss's foundational study Essai sur le don (1923–24) to later work by cultural anthropologists, including Pierre Bourdieu, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar's edited collection, The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England (2009), is the first work to apply theories of the gift to eighteenth-century literature and culture in order to

reconstruct the function of the gift at a crucial point in its history—the period from 1660 to 1800 in England—and to demonstrate how gift transactions both produced and responded to changes in traditional concepts of class, gender, national and personal identity, social authority, and property during this time.¹

Zionkowski's Women and Gift Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Richardson, Burney, Austen builds on her essay collection to connect the study of gift relations to the work of Richardson, Burney, and Austen. Her book is a thoughtful intervention in gift theory and the study of eighteenth-century prose fiction, and her synthesis of these hitherto unconnected fields is both welcome and necessary.

In her introduction, Zionkowski contextualizes the gift alongside eighteenth-century economic theories and charitable practices. She argues that changes affecting the balance between the commercial and moral economies influenced the depiction of the gift in eighteenth-century literature, which was linked to discussions of gender identity, property, and community. By comparing twentieth-century cultural anthropologist accounts with late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sermons and conduct books, Zionkowski formulates a series of arguments about giving and charity during the eighteenth century: gift giving was a form of paternalism that supported class stratification, which was ultimately rejected by eighteenth-century economic and social theory, although it was essential for preserving human connections. Consequently, women acted as agents of gift giving or charity; their real and symbolic gifts "paradoxically secure[d] the stability of the social institutions that enable[d] the market to function" (22). Zionkowski's largest contribution may be her final counterintuitive claim that gift giving and charity invested women with a relatively large degree of agency despite their abject status during the period.

The first chapter analyzes Richardson's Clarissa (1747–48) and begins with an account of Richardson's work as governor of Magdalen House, a charity that targeted seduced women. Clarissa, Richardson's defense of an idealized "fallen" woman, troubles accepted notions of male gifting. On the one hand, Clarissa is treated as an object in a gift exchange between men, though she repudiates her status as a commodity by refusing to marry the odious Mr. Solmes, but on the other hand, she is invested with power through the gift she receives from her grandfather, which "threatens to destroy the hierarchy of the parent/child exchange that was naturalized and celebrated in both conduct literature and legal theory of the time" (36). The emasculation of the Harlowe men following Grandfather Harlowe's bequest is one of the reasons they insist upon her marriage to the inferior and hence unthreatening Solmes. Lovelace, in contrast, initially appeals to Clarissa because of his own giving and his approval of Clarissa's charitable projects; however, Zionkowski argues that "Clarissa quickly discovers in Lovelace a 'cynical giver'" and finds that his participation in the network of obligation is a means of ensuring "status and control" (48). After Lovelace has kidnapped and raped her, Clarissa's refusal of gifts from him and his family "guarantees the validity of her account of the rape and justifies her unequivocal dismissal of him" (51). Clarissa is possibly the novel that best illuminates Zionkowski's thesis, and her interpretation...