“No Woman, Much Less a Woman of Fortune, is Ever Fit to Be Her Own Mistress”: Gender, Wealth, and Agency in Inheritance Novels from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

Abstract, This article compares the agency of heiresses with that of male heirs in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels focused on inheritance to investigate whether heiresses faced more restrictions on their financial and personal freedom compared with other characters from the period due to their fortune. We test James Thompson’s claim that “inheritance is enabling or authorizing for male protagonists and disabling for female protagonists” using computational analysis of a corpus of twenty-nine novels and combine our results with close reading of the novels from our corpus. We found that the representation of heiresses’ and heirs’ agency varies according to genre. Heiresses had more agency than expected, this was especially the case for heiresses in gothic fiction. We noticed a decline in the agency of male heirs in the nineteenth century compared with the eighteenth century, while the agency of other character types such as unmoneyed characters appears to increase.

Keywords:

• inheritance
• heiress
• heir
• gender
• novels
• genre
• eighteenth century
• nineteenth century
• agency
• digital humanities

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank our talented student assistants Karen Pedersen and Jonas Dejgaard from the Department of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, who performed manual cleaning and checking of data. We also want to thank the following individuals: Dennis Yi Tenen (Columbia University) who first presented the method adopted in this paper; Jakob Ladegaard (Aarhus University) for his feedback on early drafts of this paper; our anonymous reviewer, and Emma Clery (Uppsala University) who expressed interest in this project during its early stages and provided valuable feedback and advice.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Our research was funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark as part of the project “Unearned Wealth: A Literary History of Inheritance, 1600-2015” under Grant number DFF – 6107-00301.

2 Cortese and Hastrup-Markussen wrote the article and Deans Kristensen-McLachlan carried out the data extraction, computational analysis, visualizations, and authored the sections “Annotation Overview” and “Data Extraction.”

3 This changed after 1882.

4 Mona Scheuermann, “Women and Money in 18th Century Fiction,” Studies in the Novel 19, no. 3 (1987): 311.

5 Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 8–11.

6 Elsie B. Michie, The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 3–5.

7 James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 174; Emma Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 126–27; Cheryl Nixon, The Orphan in Eighteenth Century Law and Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 192. We use Nixon’s reference to domestic novels here, but in the rest of the article we refer to courtship novels, in line with Katherine Sobba-Green’s identification of this as an eighteenth-century genre: Katherine Sobba-Green, The Courtship Novel, 1740-1820: A Feminised Genre (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991).

8 Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Enquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 793.

9 Laura M. Ahearn, “Language and Agency”, Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 112.

10 Matthew Jockers and Gabi Kirilloff, “Understanding Gender and Character Agency in the 19^th Century Novel,” Journal of Cultural Analytics 1, no. 1 (2016): 4.

11 A more detailed collection of data and results including the full meta data table with character lists and types can be found on the Github repository for this project: https://github.com/centre-for-humanities-computing/HeiressAgency.

12 Northrup Frye, “The Archetypes of Literature,” The Kenyon Review 13, no. 1 (1951): 104.

13 The idea for this paper was developed by work done by Dennis Tenen, as yet unpublished.

D. Gildea and D. Jurafsky, “Automatic Labeling of Semantic Roles,” Computational Linguistics 12, no. 3 (2002): 245–88; D. Jurafsky and J. H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing. 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2006).

14 M. Palmer, D. Gildea, and P. Kingsbury, “The Proposition Bank: An Annotated Corpus of Semantic Roles,” Computational Linguistics 31, no. 1 (2005): 71–106; C. Bonial, O. Babko-Malaya, J. D. Choi, J. Hwang, and M. Palmer, Propbank annotation guidelines, Version 3.0, Center for Computational Language and Education Research Institute of Cognitive Science University of Colorado at Boulder, (2010), http://clear.colorado.edu/compsem/documents/propbank_guidelines.pdf (accessed March 2020).

15 David Dowty refers to these categories as proto-agent and proto-patient respectively. See D. Dowty, “Thematic Proto Roles and Argument Selection,” Language 67, no. 3 (1991): 547–619.

16 It is important to note that what we consider to be the agent of a verb need not necessarily align with the grammatical subject of a sentence. Instead, we use the semantic roles filled by characters to provide insight into who has the greatest linguistic agency in a text. In this respect, we are following the likes of Laura Ahearn (2001), who argues that the ability to act is what characterizes agency. This ability encompasses not only physical actions but also mental activity such as thinking, feeling, emoting, and perceiving.

17 R. Collobert, J. Weston, J. Bottou, L. Karlen, M. Kavukcuoglu, and P. Kuksa, “Natural Language Processing (Almost) from Scratch,” Journal of Machine Learning Research 12, (2011): 2461–505.

18 All relevant code and data for this project can be found at the following Github repository: https://github.com/centre-for-humanities-computing/HeiressAgency.

19 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (London: Collins Classics, 2010), 3.

20 Access date January 10, 2019.

21 This method is hence dependent on having a prior working knowledge of the corpus. Without this, it would not be as simple to catch every mention of particular character or to assign labels based on character type. As such, this approach might not necessarily scale very well – if we wanted to look at an unseen corpus of texts, for example. However, given that we do know the novels in our corpus, we are able to use this method to formalize certain hermeneutic strategies.

22 Thompson, Models of Value, 174.

23 The vertical line on the graph displays the median agency score, which consists of the average of the scores of all the actors in our corpus, and provides an indication of which characters are above and below average in this context.

24 Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 14, 177.

25 We will return to the decrease in heirs’ agency later in the article.

26 Nixon, The Orphan, 192.

27 Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain 1750-1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 54–55; Mary Catherine Harrison, “Reading the Marriage Plot” Journal of Family Theory and Review, no. 6. (2014): 117–122.

28 Sobba-Green, Courtship Novel, 163–4.

29 Mary Vermillion, “Clarissa and the Marriage Act,” Eighteenth Century Fiction 9, no. 4 (1997): 403–4.

30 Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (1980; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 248–9.

31 Marta Miquel-Baldellou, “‘The Wild Unregulated Girl’: Conceiving Vileness in the Victorian Heiress in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Lucretia, or the Children of the Night (1846),” in Sites of Female Terror: En torno a la mujer y el terror, ed. Ana Antón-Pacheco (Navarra: Aranzadi, 2008), 213. Similarly, Ellen Malenas Ledoux argues that powerful heroines in gothic fiction are those who “model a manly sense of agency”, focusing on actions performed by female characters that are depicted by the novelist as transgressive for their gender. See Ellen Malenas Ledoux, “Defiant Damsels: Gothic Space and Female Agency in Emmeline, The Mysteries of Udolpho and Secresy,” Women's Writing 18, no. 3 (2011): 342. Maureen Gokey recently argued that female agency in The Castle of Otranto is confined to subterranean spaces. Maureen Gokey, “Subterranean Spaces and Female Subversion in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto,” The Explicator 77, no. 2 (2019): 43–44.

32 Gillian Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740-1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 10.

33 Clery, Supernatural Fiction, 116–7; Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York: Oxford University Press: 1985), 109.

34 Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, 381–82.

35 Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (London: Penguin Classics, 2001), 23. Italics added for emphasis.

36 See for instance Anny Sadrin’s work on heirs and heiresses in the novels of Dickens: Anny Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

37 The exception being Michie’s study of nineteenth century heiresses as well as Catherine O. Frank’s Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837-1925, (London: Routledge , 2010). Neither of these books, however, discuss the agency of heirs and heiresses.

38 Sobba-Green lists 1824 as the last date of a courtship novel, Courtship Novel, 163–64, and Ulrich Wicks references an anonymous 1867 article that calls the picaresque novel “as dead as the dodo.” See Ulrich Wicks, “The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach,” PMLA 89, no. 2 (1974): 240.

39 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (London: Wordsworth Classics, 2002), 44.

40 Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (London: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), 103.

41 Dickens, Mutual Friend, 14.

42 Alastair Fowler, History of English Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 282.

43 Wicks, “Nature of Picaresque,” 242.

44 Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance, 8.

45 Ibid., 26.

46 Philip Davis, The Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 284.

47 And maybe also the number of characters. This particularly seems to be the case in Dickens’ novels.

48 Davis, The Victorians, 237.

49 Edward Bulwer Lytton, Lucretia (n.p.: Shepperd Publications, 2014), 335.

50 Woloch, The One, 19.

51 The Reform Act was furthermore amended by the Second Reform Act in 1867 that enfranchised part of the urban male working class and doubled the number of voters in England.

52 A. Ricardo López & Barbara Weinstein, The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 58.

53 Thompson, Models of Value, 174.

54 Skinner, Sensibility and Economics, 10.

55 Ledoux, “Defiant Damsels,” 342.

56 William E. Underwood, David Bamman, and Sabrina Lee, “The Transformation of Gender in English Language Fiction”, Journal of Cultural Analytics 1, no. 1 (2018): 1–25.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark under Grant number DFF – 6107-00301.

Notes on contributors

Beth Cortese

Beth Cortese is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Unearned Wealth project at Aarhus University where she researches women and inheritance in drama and prose from the long-eighteenth century. She was awarded her PhD on “Women’s Wit on Stage 1660-1720” from Lancaster University in 2018, and is working on a monograph focused on the same subject. Her most recent publications are “From Love of Money to Love for Love: Heiresses on the Long Eighteenth Century Stage,” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 32, no. 2 (2020) and “Eunuchs, Mutes and the Performance of Anxiety in Orientalist Plays” in Castration, Impotence, and Emasculation in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. by Anne Greenfield (London: Routledge, 2019).

Julie Hastrup-Markussen

Julie Hastrup-Markussen is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Aarhus University. She is part of the research project “Unearned Wealth: A Literary History of Inheritance, 1600-2015” at Aarhus University. Julie is writing her PhD on inherited wealth as an economic, social and cultural phenomenon in English literature between 1837 and 1945.

Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan

Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan is an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Science and Humanities Computing at Aarhus University, Denmark. His background is in computational, cognitive, and corpus linguistic approaches to the study of register, genre, and style.