Jennifer L. Airey

“Abused, neglected,—unhonoured,—unrewarded”: The Economics of Authorial Labor in the Writings of Mary Robinson

This essay examines one of the central preoccupations of Mary Robinson’s authorial career, a concern with the poor financial treatment of authors. Writers, Robinson suggests, are demeaned by predatory publishers, heartless or anti-intellectual aristocratic patrons, and a disinterested, distractible reading public, none of whom care to compensate the author for the labors of her pen. In a culture that neither recognizes nor rewards female intellect, women authors are particularly vulnerable, but Robinson’s criticisms transcend the problems caused by gender alone; male authors, too, could fall into penury when their labor was insufficiently valued. Rejecting the Romantic ethos of the solitary genius dying for his art, Robinson calls for a reassessment of authorship’s value, not only as a social and cultural good, but as a valid form of work; she insists that mental labor is labor in the economic sense of the term, and that it deserves compensation with a living wage. Her writings are thus marked by a keen sense of disgust at a culture that neither recognizes economic value in literary creation, nor feels obligated to remunerate the artist for her creations.

Eve's Nature, Eve's Nurture in Dryden's Edenic Opera

Although Eve of John Drydens The State of Innocence embodies many egregious womanly flaws of misogynist rhetoric, recalcitrant elements of the opera suggest a profound degree of uncertainty about the degree of Eves culpability for the Fall. Eves pride leads to mankinds destruction, but the opera creates a structural parallel between Adam and Lucifer, intimating that Eves disobedience is partially learned. Not all husbands are alike; if Adam is an appropriate ruler over Eve, Lucifer, that other Adam in paradise, is not. Transgressive female behavior may therefore originate in illegitimate domestic rulership, masculine deceit, and intellectual neglect.

Some Current Publications

APHRA BEHN Dickson, Vernon Guy. “Truth, Wonder, and Exemplarity in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.” SEL 47 (2007): 573-94. Although many have sought to discover the objective truth behind Oroonoko’s narrative, Dickson argues that Behn’s piece is “interested in moral more than narrowly factual truth.” Throughout the text, Dickson claims that “Behn uses wonder (especially in the character of Oroonoko) and the current vogue of travel narratives” to “establish moral and royal precedent.” Thus, instead of searching for the facts of the story, the reader ought “to learn from the moral lessons that Behn presents and that Oroonoko embodies.”