Coquetry and Consumer Culture in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless
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This essay interrogates the various ways in which Eliza Haywood’s novel The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) redefines coquetry to formulate a form of female agency in eighteenth-century Britain. By contextualizing coquetry within the economic order, particularly its engagement with emergent consumer culture, this essay demonstrates how Betsy’s coquetry allows her to play an active role as a paradigmatic consumer of goods who masterfully exploits the marketplace for her own pleasure and profit. The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, far from being a part of conservative conduct literature that focuses on a plot of a reformed coquette, highlights the ways women can appropriate coquetry to promote their interests and renegotiate their position within the visual order through fashionable consumption such as everyday acts of shopping or choosing fashions in an increasingly commercialized culture, in order to exercise power both within and beyond the constraints of their role as objects of display and exchange in a marketplace culture.
Abstract
This essay interrogates the various ways in which Eliza Haywood’s novel The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) redefines coquetry to formulate a form of female agency in eighteenth-century Britain. By contextualizing coquetry within the economic order, particularly its engagement with emergent consumer culture, this essay demonstrates how Betsy’s coquetry allows her to play an active role as a paradigmatic consumer of goods who masterfully exploits the marketplace for her own pleasure and profit. The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, far from being a part of conservative conduct literature that focuses on a plot of a reformed coquette, highlights the ways women can appropriate coquetry to promote their interests and renegotiate their position within the visual order through fashionable consumption such as everyday acts of shopping or choosing fashions in an increasingly commercialized culture, in order to exercise power both within and beyond the constraints of their role as objects of display and exchange in a marketplace culture.
참고문헌 (15)
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- Mackie, Erin., "The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator" (1998), Bedford
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- Merritt, Juliette, "Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectators" (2004), U of Toronto P
- Nestor, Deborah, "Virtue Rarely Rewarded: Ideological Subversion and Narrative Form in Haywood’s Later Fiction", Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 34, pp.579~598 (1994)
- Saxton, Kirsten, "The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work" (2000), U of Kentucky P
- Schofield, Mary Ann, "Eliza Haywood" (1985), Twayne
- Spencer, Jane, "The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen" (1986), Basil Blackwell
- Stuart, Shea, "Subversive Didacticism in Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless", Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 42, pp.559~575 (2002)
- Warner, William B, "Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750" (1998), University of California Press