Asymmetrical Gender-cross "Gift Exchange" In Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline

Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) is one of the most famous women novelists ineighteenth-century England. She inherits the tradition of sentimentalism, and her earliernovels mainly concern domestic issues, especially on the obedience to authority, the controlof powerful feelings, the reliance on reason, parental responsibility, and the propriety ofbehavior and so on. Her novels mostly reveal her hope of sexual equality and the rebellionagainst traditional moralism. Emmeline (1787) is such a kind of novel.Since the publication of Emmeline, it has attracted wide concern from home and abroad.The critics study it from such perspectives as gothic element, feminism, and historicism. Inlight of this, this essay tries to apply the category of “gift exchange” to analyze how the menand women exchange what they need in marriage, friendship and kinship, to explore theunderlying factors that result in these asymmetrical exchanges.According to the famous modern French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu,“gift exchange” isa social practice which mediates the domination relationships through “guaranteedmisrecognition.” The exchange of gift requires a counter gift, thus the continuous cycle of theexchange demands that each gift exchanged is mutual beneficial. Functioned as adisinterested gesture,“gift exchange” can mediate non-material values, such as love, sacrifice,and friendship. The real nature of the obligation to reciprocate must go misrecognized toprevent the gifts from functioning as coercive. The “misrecognition” of gift exchange aims at“transmuting the inevitable and inevitably interested relations imposed by kinship,neighborhood or work, into elective relations of reciprocity, through the sincere fiction of adisinterested exchange, and, more profoundly, at transforming arbitrary relations ofexploitation (of woman by man, younger brother by elder brother, the young by the elders)into durable relations, grounded in nature.”In Emmeline, the gift exchange in marriage begins at the woman’s dowry which is totallytransferred to her husband after marriage. Through marriage, men obtain women’s fortune byproviding them with protection in a misrecognized way. And what women get from thehusband is misrecognized protection, but as a return, they sacrifice their fortune and self. Thewife should be loyal to her husband and her family in any condition; otherwise, she would be despised by both her family and the society. On the contrary, the sexual experience beforemarriage is allowed to man, and not punished by the society. Deserted by her husband, LadyAdelina Trelawny has adulterous affairs with Fitz-Edward and has an illegitimate child. Shegoes into mad, and nearly dies, but the child is legally adopted by Adelina’s unmarried brotherGodolphin, which is allowed at that time.The unbalanced gift exchange in friendship is obvious in the novel. Men are ready tohelp their female friends, and offer spiritual support and practical help; however, the real aimis selfish interests. Fitz-Edward helps his married friend Lady Adelina, but the purpose is toobtain her body. As a return, Adelina satisfies his sexual desire, but suffers condemnationfrom both society and family.In kinship, the father gives the daughter parental benevolence, but this has the daughter’stotal submission as the absolute condition. As Emmeline’s surrogate father and guardian, LordMontreville provides her with financial help and parental protection. Getting thismisrecognized benevolence from her uncle, Emmeline, as the gift recipient, has to obey anyof his commands and promises constantly to him that she deserves his protection.The asymmetrical gift exchanges in marriage, friendship, and kinship in the novelEmmeline shows that the gift is continuously exchanged against the background of theheroine’s illegitimate identity. Though it appears that by adhering to female virtue andfemininity Emmeline can resist the patriarchy and gain an upper class husband, the unequalideology of obligation reveals the fiction of reciprocal feelings between men and women: theseemly equal exchange masks the true nature of the “mis-” in “misrecognition” and the factthat Emmeline can not escape the asymmetrical exchange in this society.