Linda Zionkowski

Clarissa and the Hazards of the Gift

Most modern readings of Clarissa agree that the novel portrays a profound change in social institutions as traditional family life is vitiated by the increasing impetus towards capital accumulation; operating in tandem, the system of primogeniture and the competition for wealth and status undermine cohesion within kinship groups and in particular deny daughters their customary share of emotional and financial resources. Clarissas objectification and exploitation, however, arise not from the ethos of possessive individualism and the pursuit of self-interest, but from the discursive system of moral obligation and gift exchange—the very practices that supposedly establish and maintain affective relationships. In its portrayal of the gift economy, Clarissa investigates the unstable ideological power of donation, obligation, and reciprocity: while this economy supports the patriarchal household and enables its adaptability to changing material circumstances, in the hands of Clarissa herself it eventually serves as a weapon for the destruction of that household.

From the Stage to the Closet: Dryden’s Journey Into Print, Manhood, and Poetic Authority

On May 13, 1700, John Dryden’s remains were interred in Westminster Abbey, and the mourners attending the funeral agreed that the event bordered on catastrophe. Dryden’s admirer, Elizabeth Thomas, recorded the disrespectful treatment supposedly given to Dryden’s corpse (she claims the body was left to rot when the Lord Jeffreys, son of the lord chief justice, reneged on his promise to pay for a lavish burial), while Tom Brown, a long-time antagonist of Dryden, described the scene of the internment with gleeful irreverence. Led by Jacob Tonson (“the Muses Midwife”), the “Rhyming Trade” and its motley attendants (fiddlers, cutpurses, whores, pimps, bullies, and beaux) accompanied the funeral procession with a cacophony of noise:

“A good Poet is no Small Thing”: Pope and the Problem of Pleasure for Sale

In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft repeatedly quotes from Alexander Pope’s “Of the Characters of Women,” agreeing with the poet that women’s love of pleasure and sexual power determines the course of their lives: forbidden by men to direct their energies toward an important social purpose, women of the middle and upper classes immerse themselves in gallantry, ornamentation, and other pursuits that extensive leisure makes possible. Wollstonecraft goes on to declare that “people of rank and fortune” resemble leisured women not only in being preoccupied with self-display and amusements, but also in being exempt from the need to exert themselves in productive, character-building employments. A third category of effeminate, useless citizens, however, includes male writers like Pope himself: “A king is always a king, and a woman always a woman. His authority and her sex ever stand between them and rational converse… And a wit [is] always a wit, might be added, for the vain fooleries of wits and beauties to obtain attention, and make conquests, are much upon a par”1 To Wollstonecraft, wits have much in common with women: lacking any better function, they exist to amuse the idle hours of an audience whose judgment determines their worth.