Writing the economic woman: Gender, political economy, and nineteenth-century women's literature

This dissertation uses the methodologies of new economic criticism and feminist literary theory to read gender and political economy in nineteenth-century British women's writing. My work situates the rise of liberal economic theory (more specifically, the works of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and J. S. Mill) alongside the development of a feminist economic discourse in women's fiction, poetry, and discursive prose and argues that formal economic writing was dialogically interrelated with other forms of writing in the period. The term dialogically interrelated is taken from M. M. Bakhtin and refers to an understanding that "there is a constant interaction between meanings [of words, discourses, and texts], all of which have the potential of conditioning others." I argue that nineteenth-century women's writing, beginning with Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy (1832), theorizes an Economic Woman who is a counterpart to the rhetorical figure of Economic Man (or Homo Economicus) in classical economic theory. Martineau's rendering of Economic Woman initiated a literary trend in which women, rather than functioning outside the economic system (as classical political economists suggest they do), are represented as shaped by and helping to shape capitalist economics. In addition to probing the fiction of Martineau, this dissertation examines the fiction of Jane Marcet, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Mid- and late-Victorian feminist essayists, like Barbara Smith Bodichon, Bessie Raynor Parkes, Frances Power Cobbe, and Clara Collet, utilize the Economic Woman as a "picture" to illustrate their economic theories. As such, I suggest that the figure of Economic Woman signifies an important female response to economic theory in the nineteenth century.; Recent studies that take up the subject of gender and political economy in nineteenth-century Britain do so primarily within historical and economic contexts; they accordingly do not include analysis of literary texts. This dissertation establishes a much-needed contextual framework and charts a chronology for the study of women's literary engagements with political economy---and the relationship between feminism and liberalism, more broadly---and proposes a new understanding of how women contributed to their own economic liberation.