Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Laura Mandell (review)

JEMCS 2.1 (Spring/Summer 2002) Book Reviews Laura Mandell, Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. 228 pp. $42.00. Reviewed by James Thompson Laura Mandell's Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature inEighteenth-Century Britain is original, intelligent, and refreshingly aggressive. Mandell's provocative argument is that misogyny is not just incidental or accidental or occasional to eigh teenth-century belles' letters; rather, misogyny is foundational, for the essential mechanism of "readerly desires" depends upon the pleasure derived from various forms of the spectacle of victimized women. For Mandell, then, misogyny is not content, nor a trope (as with Katharine Rogers and Felicity Nussbaum), so much as a gendered process of identification. What others have described as the province of the gothic (Anne Williams) or the literature of sen sibility (Ann Van Sent) or of "she-tragedies" (Laura Brown)?a sadomasochistic structure of scapegoating and abjecting women?Mandell ascribes to the whole canon. This claim is only distantly related to Laura Brown's argument that in figures such as Swift and Pope women's taste for luxury literally becomes the alibi for imperialism. Rather, working with an original mix of Julia Kristeva's notions of abjection and Ren? Girard's ideas of reciprocal violence, Mandell claims that the scapegoating of women in eighteenth-century British literature performs the cultural work of promoting new forms of capitalist exchange. In Otway's The Orphan, for example, Monimia serves as the prototype of a sexualized commodity that is destroyed in a vio lent form of potlatch, as the pleasure is derived from dispossess ing competitors. Or, more directly, in The London Merchant, Millwood is degraded and abjected in the service of idealizing the merchant Thorowgood. What is crucial forMandell is that Lillo's Reviews 139 text encourages disidentification with Millwood, thus enabling the sadomasochistic pleasure in the spectacle of abjecting the female: "eighteenth-century misogynous representations induce abjection in order to make profiteering, consuming, and canonizing into desirable ideals" (7). The titular economies then are thus more psy choanalytic than financial, involving a process or circuit of identifi cation between reader and text, depending upon a certain disavow al of initial sympathy of victimized females: this study "is about the development of affective structures around the emergence of capi talism: the economies discussed here are emotional" (2). There are, as ever, some costs to this psychoanalytic appara tus, forMandell has to proceed as if the same processes of iden tification are still at work, then as now, and so she does not stop to explore why Otway might have worked once with audiences but not for long: "Audiences watching she-tragedies derive a great deal of pleasure from the spectacle of victimized women. Judging from the lyricism of violent scenes in Otway's The Orphan of 1680 and Nicholas Rowe's Jane Shore of 1714, and from the protracted scenes inwhich women chastise themselves for the crime that has been perpetrated against them, the authors obviously enjoy depicting virtuous women who have been raped" (38). Yet neither play in question had a terribly long shelf life, so what happens to this enjoyment over time? We are told that "early in the century, misogynous representations serve to keep open the play of identi fications or the literariness of a text; later in the century, misogy nous representations work in a sadistic economy* (17), but Mandell iswriting of early and late century texts, not considering how the response they elicit may alter over time. There is, in short, occasional presumption of unitary literary effect that is at odds with the theoretical subtlety apparent everywhere else in this study: "Leapor's work is parasitic on literary conventions, but if read properly it can be seen to resist misogyny inhering in them" (10). "Capital" also tends to work as the off-stage motor, which makes the causal part of the argument a touch clunky at times: "With the bourgeoisification of literature, poetry is desexualized" (27). And I am dubious about any argument concerning the his tory of political economy that makes Mandeville representative of anything: "Itappears as though a change has taken place between the wiring...