Managing and Marketing Virtue in Sarah Fielding’s History of the Countess of Dellwyn
Sara Gadeken, Texas Tech University
Volume 15, no. 1, October 2002
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In her penultimate novel, The History of the Countess of Dellwyn (1759), Sarah Fielding explores the power that accrues to women in the newly developing commercial culture. In contrast to her first novel, David Simple (1744), and its sequel, Volume the Last (1753), Dellwyn emphasizes women’s responses to victimization rather than the suffering occasioned by it, and Fielding stresses their limited but real power as managers and marketers of consumer goods. In Dellwyn, virtue is not figured sexually but economically, as the familiar dichotomy of woman as virgin or whore is replaced by another dichotomy of woman as lavish consumer or prudent domestic manager. The two figures, Fielding demonstrates, are dependent on each other; the luxury-loving aristocrat is necessary to establish the industrious and frugal domestic paragon, just as the sexually transgressive female is necessary to establish that of the chaste woman.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Sarah Fielding” include:
Ideal Friendship and the Paradoxes of Narration in Sarah Fielding’s David Simple
by BRYAN MANGANO (ECF 26.2, Winter 2013-14)
Devotional Reading and Novel Form: The Case of David Simple
by TERA PETTELLA (ECF 24.2, Winter 2011-12)
Mourning, Melancholia, and Modernity: Sentimental Irony and Downward Mobility in David Simple
by JAMES KIM (ECF 22.3, Spring 2010)
©McMaster University, 2015. This copyright covers the exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the article, including in electronic forms, reprints, translations, photographic reproductions, or similar. While reading for personal use is encouraged, Eighteenth-Century Fiction articles may not be reproduced, broadcast, published, or re-disseminated without the prior written permission of Eighteenth-Century Fiction at McMaster University. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form, such as on a web site or in a searchable database, or other uses of this material is not allowed. The copyright in this website includes without limitation the text, computer code, artwork, photographs, images, music, audio, video, and audio-visual material on this website and is owned by McMaster University. ©McMaster University 2015.