Gendering

Both the novel and the Bank were attacked as female in attempts to demean them. Catherine Ingrassia summarises the discourse on feminisation in the introduction to her book Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth Century England:

As Pope subsequently indicates in Epistle to Bathurst (1733) and the 1743 edition of the Dunciad, the commercialisation of literature and the growth of speculative investment, and the participants in each phenomenon, hacks and stockjobbers, were both for him symptomatic of a larger cultural problem. His representation of the intertwined activities of the literary and financial spheres emphasises what he

regards as the absence of masculinity, indeed the feminisation of a new breed of economic, literary and political subject. Gendering the participants and their practices, Pope attempts to diminish them by highlighting the stereotypically feminised characteristics that he feels influenced their actions and the direction of culture as a whole.203

Writers and stockjobbers, or those involved in the money markets were feminised in an attempt to disempower. Nicholson notes that the new financial forces were often depicted as female:

They (people of the time) encountered what we now term finance capitalism as a system of credit that expanded and shrank as developing stock and money markets rose and fell. Public Credit, sometimes perceivable as ‘the business confidence’ or ‘market forces’ of the time, seemed to them a most mysterious entity that would or would not manifest itself; appearing to possess a will of its own yet apparently open to coaxing into a participatory and enabling movement. As a way of negotiating and controlling this new agency, the representation of Credit as an inconstant, often self-willed but sometimes persuadable woman gained a certain cross-party currency. In literary texts already celebrated for their articulation with a public awareness of far-reaching changes in the organization of society, the rhetoric of eve as fateful temptress survives in altered usage. 204

This pattern of representation is not unique to Pope but appears in numerous other texts relating to the emergent financial and literary activities.205

Liz Bellamy in Commerce, Morality and the eighteenth century novel, also draws out the connections made between the new financial forces, the novel and immorality, or the unleashing of female desires as dangerous:

Other writers of early tracts invoked the language of morality, condemning luxury and effeminacy in order to buttress the case against consumption. The author of

Britannia languens: or, A Discourse of Trade (1680) presents a catalogue of vice and debauchery that is liable to result from a consumptive trade, including drunkenness, idleness, ‘promiscuous copulation’ and ‘claps and poxes’. This locates the danger of luxury firmly within the lower class and it reinforced the concept that the purpose of trade was to strengthen the nation, rather than to satisfy the greed of individuals, for since economic theory disavowed individual spending, the only justification for economic expansion was the consolidation of the interests of the state. Thus within these early works the interests of the public were identified with the interests of the state.206

The historian J.G.A.Pocock asserts that economic man was perceived as feminized or even an “effeminate” being “still wrestling with his own passions and hysterias and with anterior and exterior forces let loose by his fantasies and appetites’.207

Given this battleground, Defoe’s creation of Moll is an audacious act which seems to take the battle head on and is almost as brave as his famous experience in the pillory as a punishment for writing The Shortest way with Dissenters, a satirical attack upon the high clergy. Defoe could have expected a painful and ignominious event, to be pelted with rotten food or even bricks and to hang in the pillory defenceless. Instead he turned the

event into a public triumph, challenging the mob to understand the politics of punishing those like him who dare to speak up against a privileged elite:

Tell them ‘twas because he was too bold,

And told those Truths, which shou’d not ha’ been told. Extoll the Justice of the land

Who Punish what they will not understand. Tell them he stands Exalted there

For speaking what we wou’d not hear: And yet he might ha’ been secure,

Had he said less, or wou’d he had said more.208

Novak comments that ‘If it did not create a revolution, it helped preserve his life from the ‘Fury of the Street’.209 Similarly in this situation, far from flinching at the notion of writing and the novel being feminine, Defoe chooses to write about a woman, a whore no less, and to write in her voice, thus writing as if he is a woman. The situation is even more complex. The novel was attacked as being written merely for women when, as discussed above, it is highly likely that many readers, given sales figures and literacy figures of men and women, were in fact men. Moll seems to imply a male reader in its coquettish tone and in its plot. Moll leaves children behind with a carelessness that may alarm a generally female audience for example. Thus Defoe can be seen as pretending to be a woman writing for an audience that is pretending not to read the novel while reading it in secret. This is directly comparable to the double dealing in regards to financial investments discussed above. Swift and others invested in the new joint stock companies in secret while appearing to deride them.

The Bank of England herself works this demeaning imagery to advantage. The projectors use a female icon for the new Bank, Britannia, as discussed in Chapter two. She is seen as an emblem of Britain, and as a strong woman who cannot be demeaned. The Bank later becomes known as ‘The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street’. No one can be sure when and how this nickname arose but it can be tracked as far back as 1797 when a cartoon by James Gilray depicted an old lady sitting on a chest full of gold, marked ‘Bank of England’, while being addressed by William Pitt, the younger. The cartoon is entitled ‘Political Ravishment: or, The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street in Danger.’ Giuseppi suggests that this cartoon may have been inspired by a speech made by Sheridan in the House of Commons in which he referred to ‘an elderly lady in the City, of great credit and long standing who had...unfortunately fallen into bad company’.210 When I first worked with the Bank in the mid 90s, the house magazine was still entitled The Old Lady, a name not dropped until 2007. This image of the elderly lady in charge of her credit very much parallels the narrative figure of Moll, the older, wiser woman, now in charge of her own credit. Desire is managed in these metaphors; the unruly female is under control. It is interesting to reflect on whether this gendering remains in projections of the novel and the modern English organization. The novel still carries this gendering reflected so clearly in the ‘bookclub’ phenomena. A local man recently tried to set up a bookclub for men, but take-up has been slow, men apparently feeling that bookclubs are a female activity. The women in bookclubs, and publishers, know however that their male partners read novels. The Bank of England still uses Britannia as its emblem. It may be that the modern English organization’s difficulty in developing women in leadership positions is influenced by this gendering. If the modern English organization is experienced as in some way female, representing unruly and chaotic desires that need to be mastered, the role of women leaders becomes problematic. This gendering may be left over from the reactionary argument martialed against the revolutionary forces of the Bank and the novel. However, no revolution is pure,

and the particular examples of Moll and the Bank are no exception. The next section details the extent of the compromises each involved.