Jane Eyres Purse Womens Queer Economic Desire in The Victorian Novel

Victorian Literature and Culture (2016), 44, 741759.
Cambridge University Press 2016. 1060-1503/16

doi:10.1017/S1060150316000206
JANE EYRES PURSE: WOMENS QUEER

ECONOMIC DESIRE IN THE
VICTORIAN NOVEL
By Meg Dobbins
Who holds the purse will wish to be master . . . whether Man or woman
Charlotte Bronte, Letter to Ellen Nussey, 1845
YOUNG LADIES DONT UNDERSTAND political economy, you know, asserts the casually
misogynistic uncle of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliots Middlemarch (1871) (17; bk. 1,
ch 1). Although Eliots heroine resents both her uncles remark and that never-explained
science which was thrust as an extinguisher over all her lights, her attempt to teach herself
political economy in the novel only seems to confirm her uncles assessment (18; bk. 1, ch.
1): Dorothea gathers a little heap of books on political economy and sets forth to learn the
best way of spending money so as not to injure ones neighbors, or what comes to the same
thing so as to do them the most good (805; bk. 5, ch. 48). Naively likening spending
money so as not to injure ones neighbors to do[ing] them the most good, Dorothea fails
to grasp the self-interest at the core of nineteenth-century political economic thought and so
misunderstands the subject matter before her: Unhappily her mind slipped off [the book]
for a whole hour; and at the end she found herself reading sentences twice over with an
intense consciousness of many things, but not of any one thing contained in the text. This
was hopeless (805; bk. 5, ch. 48).
Women are often depicted as poor students of the dismal science in Victorian literature.
In Margaret Oliphants Miss Marjoribanks (1866), Lucilla atypically learns political economy
alongside other, traditional feminine subjects (She had taken her French and her German and
her singing and her political economy [18; ch. 1]). Yet because, in this instance, political
economy is portrayed as part of a ladies education, Lucilla acquires only a superficial
knowledge of the subject. While Middlemarch depicts economics as an exclusive, masculine
realm of knowledge from which women are excluded, Oliphants novel satirizes the female
student of economics who do[esnt] pretend to be better than other people but repeatedly
boasts that she has gone through a course of political economy and thought it all over
(60; ch. 8). Despite their reputations as innately domestic angels, women in Victorian
fiction often prove poor economists in the home as well. While Charles Dickenss fiction
praises dutiful housekeepers such as Agnes Wickfield in David Copperfield (1850) and Esther
Summerson in Bleak House (1853), his novels also contain memorable portraits of womens
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742 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
failed domestic management. In Our Mutual Friend (1864), for example, the impetuous Bella
Wilfer is found studying a cookbook with her elbows on the table and her temples on her
hands, like some perplexed enchantress poring over the Black Art (682; bk. 4, ch. 5). Bella
eventually masters the Black Art, yet the same cannot be said for David Copperfields first
wife, Dora Spenlow, who, we can only conclude, would rather die than learn the principles
of proper home economy. As David reports, [t]he cookery-book made Doras head ache,
and the figures made her cry (645; ch. 41). Rather than crunching the numbers, Dora prefers
to draw little nosegays and portraits of David and her dog Jip in the margins of her tablets.
What are we to make of mid-century depictions of women as amateur, marginal, and
failed participants in nineteenth-century economic thought? When Dorotheas mind slip[s]
off the page of her book on political economy, where does it go? When she reads sentences
twice and fails to grasp the singular, proper object of political economy, what are the many
things not contained in the text to which she turns her attention? For, despite her heroines
failure to grasp the principles of political economy, Eliot foreshadows early in the text that
Dorothea will prove an economically disruptive force, the sort of woman who might awaken
you some fine morning with a new scheme for the application of her income which would
interfere with political economy . . . a man would naturally think twice before he risked
himself in such fellowship (10; bk.1, ch. 1). In its own way, even Doras idle doodling
in the pages of her cookery-book indicates her resistance to the principles of moderate
consumption. Her spoiled dog who must have a mutton-chop every day at twelve, or hell
die expresses Doras own resentment at being turned into Davids pet to perform the little
tricks of housekeeping that a good wife should. Thus, on the few occasions when Dora does
manage to enter two or three laborious items in the account-book, David laments that Jip
walk[s] over the page, wagging his tail, and smear[ing] them all out (689; ch. 44).
Taking scenes such as these as a starting point, in this article, I reassess the marks
Victorian women make in the nineteenth-century account-book. More than simply satirizing
womens economic abilities or anticipating the economic emancipation of women later in
the century, I argue that the figure of Economic Woman in mid-century fiction emblematizes
a specific, queer moment in the history of modern economic thought. Over the course of the
nineteenth century, rapid changes in Englands economy put pressure on existing structures
of class, gender, and family. Popular fiction helps take stock of these developments by
telling stories of economic change in social terms. If the middle-class form of the Victorian
novel often seems to promote dominant ideologies of modern, economic progress, fiction
simultaneously illuminates queer sites of mobility and fluidity within Englands emergent
capitalist society. Here, I consider how the uncertain economic position of Victorian women
in the latter half of the century rendered Economic Woman a figure through whom mid-
century authors critically reappraised heteronormative imperatives of emergent capitalist
ethos and explored the social possibilities of other, queer economic desire.
I. Recovering Economic Woman
DANIEL DEFOES 1719 DEPICTION of Robinson Crusoe is often cited by economists as the
first portrayal of economic man: a model of economic individualism, as Lana L. Dalley
and Jill Rappoport describe him, who exemplifies the virtues of prudence, production, and
power (1). In fact, the economic term homo economicus only entered common parlance
later in the nineteenth century in response to an 1836 essay about political economy written
Jane Eyres Purse: Womens Queer Economic Desire in the Victorian Novel 743
by John Stuart Mill. There, Mill posited a definition of an arbitrary economic subject who
invariably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences,
and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self-denial with which they
can be obtained in the existing state of knowledge (Mill). While the notion of this abstract
yet implicitly masculine homo economicus shaped and continues to determine conceptions of
the self and desire in a capitalist economy, in recent decades, a number of scholars have noted
the conspicuous absence of women in the history of modern economic thought. The Marxist
scholar David Harvey, for example, points out that although economists prefer Robinson
Crusoe for naturalizing capitalism, Defoes second novel, Moll Flanders (1722), would
actually provide a more accurate model for the speculative capitalist market (43-44).
In the early nineties, feminist economists more forcefully began to challenge the
androcentrism of modern economics, most notably Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson
in their Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (1993) and Feminist
Economics Today (2003). In the introduction to the latter text, Ferber and Nelson point out that
culturally masculine topics, such as men and market behavior, and culturally masculine
characteristics, such as autonomy, abstraction, and logic tend to define economic discourse,
while topics such as women and family behavior as well as characteristics of connection,
concreteness, and emotion are all considered feminine (1). Economist and transwoman
Deirdre McCloskey further interrogates the ideal of homo economicus by breaking the figure
into masculine and feminine elements: vir economicus, whom she jokingly describes as
a cross between Rambo and an investment banker, and the figure of femina economica,
an economic subject more concerned with solidarity with others (79).1 McCloskey argues
that economists and humanists alike would benefit from efforts to combine the traditionally
masculine and feminine traits of their respective disciplines, to develop what she calls a
conjective viewpoint, a subjective as well as objective understanding of what we know
together, by virtue of a common life and language (76).
Despite successful efforts to complicate the rational, autonomous figure of Economic
Man, as scholars such as Dalley and Rappoport have recently pointed out, Economic Woman
remains, at best a liminal figure (1). In part, the history of Economic Woman has proved
difficult to recover because of the system of coverture, a common law arrangement which
considered women legally and economically covered by their husbands under marriage.2
The Married Womens Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 are generally cited as watershed
events in the economic history of women.3 While there can be no doubt that the Property
Acts granted women important new economic freedoms, other scholars have suggested that
an overemphasis on womens property laws inadvertently contributes to an overdetermined
understanding of the separate spheres ideology, the notion that Victorian women were
isolated from everyday economic activities when in fact they were not.4 As an exciting and
growing body of research by literary and economic historians reveals, women played active
and diverse roles in the nineteenth century economy as laborers, investors, consumers, and
beneficiaries of money.5
Because it remains difficult to study womens independent economic activity with any
certainty in the nineteenth century, however, Victorian fiction has played a particularly
important role in learning more about the various ways women participated in nineteenth-
century economic culture as both readers and writers.6 For example, George Robb reveals
that even when women were barred from direct participation in the Stock Exchange, fiction
allowed them vicariously to partake in the excitement of trade (131). In the latter half of
the century, a popular genre of melodrama about finance and business by women authors
such as Catherine Gore and Charlotte Riddell emerged alongside new capitalist board games
whereby players achieved success through competitive capitalist behavior (Robb 131).7
As recent scholarship contends, economic and literary discourses in the nineteenth century
overlapped and shaped one another.8 Even in texts which do not ostensibly depict financial
topics, Anna Kornbluh argues that economic ideas are reflected in the financial formalism
of the novel itself (13; 15).
In the economic culture of nineteenth-century England, a number of women writers
joined public intellectuals in shaping economic ideas for the broader public through fiction.
To cite one important example, Harriet Martineau taught readers the theories of Jeremy
Bentham, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo in her popular, multi-volume series of
novellas Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-1834). In a preface to the work, Martineau
explains her stories are not a trap designed to catch idle readers (a device she claims
she detests), but simply the best [form] in which Political Economy can be taught
(Martineau). More than merely entertaining, in Martineaus view, fiction proves the
most faithful and the most complete way to illustrate economic principles. Martineaus
work is often taken as the precursor to the more well-known industrial novels of Elizabeth
Gaskell. Like Martineau, Gaskell sees her work in conversation with political economic
discourse. In the preface to Mary Barton (1848), Gaskell explains her interest in writing
about the unhappy state of things between employers and employees who need to work in
cooperation (3), but she goes on to disclaim that she know[s] nothing of Political Economy,
or the theories of trade, and that if [her] accounts agree or clash with any system, the
agreement or disagreement is unintentional (4). These prefatory remarks help capture the
complicated relationship between economic and literary discourse in the period: on the one
hand, Gaskell professes ignorance of the science of political economy, yet she simultaneously
signals the importance of engaging, in fiction, ethical questions absent or marginal in that
science.9
Further complicating a recovery of womens economic history is the role the abstract
figure of Woman played in shaping economic ideas in the Victorian era. As Deanna Kreisel
reveals in her pioneering Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in
Eliot and Hardy (2012), fears pertaining to capitalist growth were often represented vis-`a-
vis metaphors of womens sexuality. In Kreisels view, Economic Woman mobilizes a set
of metaphors common to political economy and the realist novel whereby the idealized
model of feminine sexual restraint and wise domestic management is always shadowed by
her opposite: the degraded prostitute whose sexual excesses and economic mismanagement
seem to threaten the very stability of the young capitalist economy (14).10 Yet if women are
often abjected in the Victorian novel for their economic desires, other research calls attention
to how depictions of womens economic activity in fiction promote alternative forms of
social exchange. In Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture (2012),
Jill Rappoport challenges the dominant view that womens acts of giving in the nineteenth
century are selfless acts of charity or sacrifice (4). Instead, Rappoport shows how gifts
enabled women to overcome political and economic limitations in the nineteenth century
and resist dominant cultural understandings of intimacy and community (4).
Here, I argue that it is vital not only to recover the figure of Economic Woman,
but the queer moment in mid-century economic culture which seemed not to fear, but
rather to urgently desire her difference from Economic Man. In what follows, I chart how
Economic Woman emerges in the fiction of one canonical women writer, Charlotte Bronte.
While the myth of Charlotte Bronte as an intuitive genius isolated from broader social,
cultural, and political goings-on in the nineteenth century has long been challenged, Brontes
engagement with economic matters has only garnered scholarly interest more recently
(Shuttleworth 1).11 As Nancy Henry points out, Bronte was in fact among a growing
number of women who supplemented their income by investing in companies that funded
railways, canals, and public utilities (Ladies do it? 111). Indeed, many of the funds Bronte
invested were profits she originally earned from her fiction. Although Bronte is most famous
for her vivid depictions of brooding psychological interiority, all of her novels are more
concretely about the economic challenges that face middle class men and women in the
nineteenth century.
From her first novel The Professor (published posthumously in 1857) to her more
famous portrayals of Victorian women in Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853), Brontes
fiction revises homo economicus, gradually adapting the masculine business mind to her
female heroines and later more radically overturning economic narratives of self-help, upward
social mobility, and heterosexual partnership common to the Victorian bildungsroman and
capitalist ethos. In Jane Eyre, Bronte revises the economic plot of The Professor by exploring
the story of individual economic prosperity within a different emotional economy, one which
invests the Victorian heiress in queer possibilities of consuming and redistributing wealth.
As an economic protagonist, Jane differs from Economic Man not simply by her gender,
but more crucially, in the instability of her economic position a material and affective
precariousness which not only unsettles but begins to redress errors in the normative account
of homo economicus. In Brontes final novel, Villette, Economic Woman emerges as a
queer economic subject whose unstable and diverse investments challenge conventional
notions of domestic security. As I will show, Bronte first imagines Economic Woman as
a figure whose economic story necessarily departs from the realist plot of the Victorian
novel. Yet, in revising the narrative of homo economicus, Brontes novels ultimately produce
queer accounts of nineteenth-century social mobility: more complete economic stories
of the costs, perks, benefits, and liabilities of life and love in an unpredictable capitalist
society.
II. The Hill of Difficulty and The Wheel of Fortune: Economic Plots in The Professor and
Jane Eyre
BRONTE S FIRST NOVEL, THE PROFESSOR, tells the story of a mans gradual rise to professional
and personal prosperity. As an orphan with few prospects, William Crimsworth begins
working as a clerk in his brothers mill, and eventually pursues a teaching career in Brussels.
Over the course of the novel, Crimsworth falls in love with and marries a sewing teacher
named Frances Henri. The two remain in Brussels long enough to earn money to return
to England and start a family. The novel was never a success, failing to find a publisher in
Brontes lifetime and perplexing its readers since its posthumous publication. Yet if the novel
is a dry read, it perhaps sets out to be. In the preface, Bronte delineates her goal:
I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real
living men work theirs that he should never get a shilling he had not earned
that no sudden turns should lift him in a moment to wealth and high station; that
whatever small competency he might gain, should be won by the sweat of his
brow; that, before he could find so much as an arbour to sit down in, he should
master at least half the ascent of the Hill of Difficulty. (Preface 37)
Brontes interest in tracing a real mans ascent of the Hill of Difficulty reflects what Ellen
Moers has called the quest for fact that characterizes women writing about money in the
nineteenth century (86). More than the novels boring plot, however, readers find Brontes
male narrator particularly off-putting. As Heather Glen observes, [t]here is something oddly
disagreeable, even repellent about Crimsworths story. It seems altogether more disturbing
than one might expect . . . full of suggestions of a barely suppressed violence, a peculiarly
sadistic sexuality (11). Judith Mitchell concurs that The Professor is a strange novel with
an eminently unlikable as well as unreliable narrator (31).
Early in the novel, Crimsworth notes that his self-denying economy isolates him from
his peers (55). Crimsworth regrets that his friends view him as a miser, yet he persists in
husbanding [his] monthly allowance with anxious care, in order to obviate the danger of
being forced, in some moment of future exigency, to beg additional aid (55; ch. 3). At first,
Crimsworth claims his stinginess is a temporary necessity, an anxiety he endures in youth
for the sake of future happiness, yet his chilly approach to personal finance only increases
over the course of the novel. His narrative concludes with all the excitement of a well-drawn
ledger, detailing his and his wifes return to England:
Accounts being wound up, and our professional connection disposed of, we both
agreed that, as mammon was not our master, nor his service that in which we
desired to spend our lives; as our desires were temperate, and our habits
unostentatious, we had now abundance to live on abundance to leave our boy;
and should besides always have a balance on hand, which, properly managed by
right sympathy and unselfish activity, might help philanthropy in her enterprises,
and put solace into the hand of charity. To England we now resolved to take wing. (280; ch. 25)
In The Professor, accounts wind up with unnerving simplicity, yoking together Victorian
ideals of economic, national, and domestic stability. Crimsworth attains the perfect balance
of funds to start a homegrown English family and live a moderate life by repudiating
ostentation and excess. The unselfish activity of philanthropy may receive an obligatory
line in the budget, yet Brontes hero stresses, to the very end, the importance of temperate
moderation above all else.
Despite the failures of her first novel, in writing and seeking a readership for The
Professor, Bronte first seems to have recognized the limitations of homo economicus and
his story. As she muses, Men in business are usually thought to prefer the real; on trial
the idea will be often found fallacious: a passionate preference for the wild, wonderful, and
thrilling the strange, startling, and harrowing agitates divers souls that show a calm and
sober surface (Preface 37). In her second and most successful novel, Jane Eyre, Bronte tries
her hand at a more wild economic plot, and in producing an alternative story of social
mobility, begins to contest both the gender and the genre of homo economicus. At first, Jane
Eyre seems to prepare for a traditional plot of womens upward mobility through marriage.
After the tribulations of her early childhood, living as a penniless orphan with her wealthy
but coldhearted aunt, Jane is sent to Lowood charity school for girls where she works her
way up to the position of teacher. Upon advertising for work as a governess, Jane attains a
position at Thornfield where she begins to accrue a small amount of wages at the same time
that her courtship plot with Rochester begins. Yet the Victorian heroines quest for economic
self-sufficiency inevitably juts up against the plot of marriage:
And where is Mr. Rochester?

He comes in last . . . . I try to concentrate my attention on those netting-needles, on the meshes of the
purse I am forming I wish to think only of the work I have in my hands, to see only the silver beads
and silk threads that lie in my lap; whereas, I distinctly behold his figure . . . (202; vol. 2, ch. 17)
As the courtship plot approaches its apex, the novel becomes increasingly uncertain about
how best a Victorian woman can form her purse after all.
When Mrs. Reed falls sick and Jane asks Rochester for permission to return to Gateshead,
Bronte pauses to register the intertwining of Janes financial and romantic economies. While
Rochester recognizes that Jane needs funds to travel, he does not want to pay Jane as a
servant, so he attempts to convert her wages into a gift: Here, said he, offering me a note;
it was fifty pounds, and he owed me but fifteen, I told him I had no change (259; vol.2, ch.
21).12 Janes refusal forces her lover-employer to adopt a new tactic:
He scowled at first; then, as if recollecting something, he said Right, right!

Better not give you all now; you would, perhaps, stay away three months if you
had fifty pounds. There are ten; is it not plenty?
Yes, sir, but now you owe me five.
Come back for it then; I am your banker for forty pounds. (259; vol. 2, ch. 21)
The joke of the exchange is predicated on the fact that at the denouement of the marriage
plot, a woman is worth very little and very much at the same time. Because Jane will soon
share Rochesters wealth as his wife, he perceives her salary as a negligible detail. Rochester
ultimately triumphs over Jane by underpaying her. If he cannot be her benefactor, then he
will be her banker. Jane leaves with her dignity intact because it is clear that Rochester still
owes her: a mere five pounds, but also a marriage proposal. Flirtations aside, however, the
exchange also serves to assess the risk of the normative courtship trajectory that would empty
the pockets of the governess with the promise of filling them up as a wife: How much have
you in the world, Jane? [Rochester] asked smiling . . . . He took the purse, poured the hoard
into his palm, and chuckled over it as if its scantiness amused him (259; vol. 2, ch. 21). By
calling our attention to the scant and amus[ing] contents of the womans purse, Bronte
foreshadows that the Bank of Rochester will indeed fail. When Bertha Mason is revealed as
Rochesters wife, Jane is left destitute, bereft not only of the wealth of a Mrs. Rochester, but
also of her wages as a governess.
In a number of mid-century novels, economic disasters elevate women to traditionally
masculine positions of social and economic authority and motivate them to invest in new
social relations.13 To point to a few examples: at the beginning of Gaskells North and South
(1855), Mr. Hale resigns as clergyman in Helstone and relocates his family in the industrial
town of Milton where Margaret is soon overpowered by the discovery of [her] own genius
for management when she takes on a number of new economic and social roles in the Hale
household (60; ch. 7). Later Margaret becomes friends with mill worker and labor organizer
Nicholas Higgins, and she is instrumental in facilitating cooperation between the union and
Mr. Thornton. In Oliphants Hester (1873), the threat of a run on the Vernon Banking House
enables Catherine Vernon to step forward and save her town and the family business from
disaster. Although Catherine never marries, her house becomes gay with young friends and
tender friendship (24; ch. 3). In an establishment called The Vernonry, Hester houses a
number of poor relations, and Oliphant claims that Catherine becomes the first love of more
girls than she could count (24). In Our Mutual Friend, the young, disabled Jenny Wren
identifies herself as the person of the house and tends to her alcoholic father as if her were
her own child (222; bk. 2, ch. 1). Here too, it is only the inversion of traditional familial roles
which allows Jenny to expand her sphere of intimates into Queer Street, supplementing
insufficient paternal care with other domestic and economic partnerships with Lizzie Hexam
and the Jewish moneylender Riah.14
When Janes marriage plot fails, she once again becomes the object of charity at Moor
House, relying on the hospitality of the Riverses to restore her to health and to provide her
with food, shelter, and eventual employment as a schoolteacher. This position affords Jane a
difficult and meager living; yet her suffering is fleeting. When St. John uncovers Janes real
identity, she learns she is actually the heiress of a fortune. Her uncle has died and left her a
sudden windfall. Once again, Bronte pauses to assess the contents of her heroines purse:
Perhaps now you will ask how much you are worth?
How much am I worth?
Oh, a trifle! Nothing of course to speak of twenty thousand pounds, I think they say but what is
that?
Twenty thousand pounds?
Here was a new stunner I had been calculating on four or five thousand. This news actually took
my breath for a moment. (441; vol. 3, ch. 33)
As in the earlier exchange between Rochester and Jane, Bronte again reflects on the difficulty
of assessing the value of the Victorian woman on the rise. At first Jane assumes St. John
[has] read the figures wrong; it may only be two thousand pounds (442; vol. 3, ch. 33). Only
when St. John emphasizes that the sum is written in letters not figures, does Jane believe the
fortune belongs in her narrative (442; vol. 3, ch. 33).
The windfall is a common bookend to the plot of womens economic ruination in the
Victorian novel. In North and South, for example, Margaret suddenly gains an inheritance
from a college friend of her fathers, which she then invests in her fiances failing cotton
mill. In Anne Brontes The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Helen is doubly blessed when her
first husband and her uncle die, and she inherits the estates as feme sole. Anthony Trollope
parodies such plots (and their association with women) in the novel that Lady Carbury is
writing in The Way We Live Now (1875). Mrs. Carbury begins with only a title, The Wheel
of Fortune:
She had no particular fortune in her mind when she chose it, and no particular wheel; but the very
idea conveyed by the words gave her the plot which she wanted. A young lady was blessed with great
wealth, and lost it all by an uncle, and got it all back by an honest lawyer, and gave it all up to a
distressed lover, and found it all again in a third volume. (360; ch. 89)
As Trollope portrays it, the windfall functions as a cheap, novelistic trick a sensational
plot device or a way to reward good characters in the final hour for their hard work, moral
development, and good character. Yet, the unrealistic double plot of bankruptcy and boon
also suggests a crucial difference in the plot of Economic Man and Economic Woman, for the
second half of Jane Eyre is filled with precisely the sudden turns Bronte repudiates in the
preface to The Professor; rather than slowly and steadily ascending the Hill of Difficulty,
Brontes Economic Woman oscillates between more extreme forms of having and not having
wealth. Not only does Brontes portrayal of Janes unstable value upset the realism of the
traditional story of upward mobility but these sudden gains and losses of lump sums of
money render her ascent to economic independence all that lumpier, exaggerating, in the
most extreme terms, what economic excesses and privations feel like from one moment to the
next. In The Professor, after all, part of what enables Crimsworths even-tempered approach
to his personal economy is that he never has very much or very little all at once. Whether
painful or pleasurable, for Economic Woman money incites more feelings, and it is precisely
the queer feeling of money which enables authors such as Bronte to reappraise the terms of
individual economic security within the nineteenth century.
III. A Fact That Still Takes My Breath Away: The Queer Feeling of Money
IN A ROOM OF ONES OWN (1929), when her narrator must pay a bill for tea Virginia Woolf
has an opportunity to reflect on the economic freedom the modern woman enjoys: it came
to five shillings and ninepence. I gave the waiter a ten-shilling note and he went to bring
me the change. There was another ten-shilling note in my purse; I noticed it, because it is
a fact that still takes my breath away the power of my purse to breed ten-shilling notes
automatically. I open it and there they are (37). Later, we learn that this legacy comes from
the narrators aunt who died by a fall from her horse when she was riding out to take the
air in Bombay (37). This everyday scene of consumption and exchange serves to dramatize
the first half of Woolfs now famous materialist thesis that a woman must have money and a
room of her own if she is to write fiction (4). Yet Woolfs description of the modern woman
paying her bill also implies that women have entered into money just as they have entered
into fiction obliquely, carrying the mark of gender and the history of a sex that has been
denied access to that medium.
Like Woolfs modern heiress, Jane approaches her wealth tentatively, with mixed feelings
of desire, curiosity, and shame. Janes breath is t[aken] for a moment when she first learns
of her inheritance, and her initial reaction is not one of excitement: One does not jump,
and spring, and shout hurrah! at hearing one has got a fortune . . . one begins to consider
responsibilities, and to ponder business; on a base of steady satisfaction rise certain grave
cares, and we contain ourselves, and brood over our bliss with a solemn brow (441; vol. 3,
ch. 33). In part, Janes inheritance distresses her because the financial gain entails social
loss. The death of her estranged uncle makes her rich, yet reminds her of her isolation as an
orphan, an outcast, an almost-bride: The words Legacy, Bequest, go side by side with the
words, Death, Funeral . . . . This money came only to me: not to me and a rejoicing family, but
to my isolated self (441; vol. 3, ch. 33). The money also makes Jane feel guilty. As St. John
observes, If you had committed a murder, and I had told you your crime was discovered,
you could scarcely look more aghast (441; vol. 3, ch. 3). Janes inheritance may make her
feel responsible for murdering a number of characters: her uncle, the Riverses (to whom
this sum of money would otherwise have been directed), and perhaps also Bertha Mason.15
Indeed, if we read this scene of assessing Janes worth alongside the earlier scene in which
the contents of Janes purse are first emptied into Rochesters hand, the windfall almost
magically seems to fulfill Rochesters earlier promise to pay Jane what he owes her.
Jane feels herself as gorged with gold that she never earned and do[es] not merit
(447; vol. 3, ch. 33), and she overcomes the new, overfull feeling of economic prosperity not
by refusing to spend, but by indulging herself in turning Moor House into a beau-ideal to
welcome home Diana and Mary, whom Jane insists no longer need to work for their livings
(450; vol. 3, ch. 34). While previous readers have taken Janes excessive investments in Moor
House as a sign of Brontes tacit complicity in imperial exploitation, these readings overlook
how Brontes exaggerated depiction of Jane as gorged heiress revises her depiction of staid
homo economicus in The Professor.16 Much as the Wheel of Fortune plot defies the realist
plot of the Hill of Difficulty, Jane breathless excitement in the renovation of Moor House
flouts the ideals of moderate domestic economy and luxuriates in precisely the ostentatious
details Crimsworth repudiates. St. John (one could say the dour Crimsworth of this novel)
disapproves of Janes domestic frivolities, cautioning her to restrain the disproportionate
fervor with which she throw[s] herself into commonplace home pleasures, and urging
her when the first flush of vivacity is over to look a little higher than domestic endearments
and household joys (451; vol. 3, ch 34). He even attempts to curtail Janes happiness by
fitting it into what he deems a reasonable timeline: I excuse you for the present: two
months grace I allow you for the full enjoyment of your new position, and for pleasing
yourself with this late-found charm of relationship; but then, I hope you will begin to look
beyond Moor House and Morton, and sisterly society, and the selfish calm and sensual
comfort of civilised affluence (451; vol. 3, ch. 34). The lecture St. John gives Jane is
in keeping with his own economization of pleasure. In a particularly cringe worthy (or
we might rather say crims-worthy) scene earlier in the novel, Jane watches St. John set
a watch for fifteen minutes, permitting himself a limited amount of time to daydream
about Rose, the beautiful heiress he wants to marry. As the clock ticks, he breathe[s] fast
and low as that little space given over to delirium and delusion elapses (430; vol. 3,
ch. 32).
By the end of the novel, Jane defiantly rejects St. Johns joyless economy and his
advice to fit sisterly society into its proper little space and time in order to prioritize
what he perceives as more noble investments of the Victorian womans wealth. Rather than
channeling her inheritance into the appropriate, if limited economy of heterosexual marriage
and St. Johns proposal to become a missionarys wife in India, Jane impulsively chooses to
finance the domestic happiness of her female kinsmen by dividing her legacy among them:
Were we not four? Twenty thousand pounds shared equally would be five thousand each,
justice enough and to spare: justice would be done, mutual happiness secured (445;
vol. 3, ch. 33). In her refusal of St. John, Jane exposes what Kreisel has identified as a problem
of private wealth in the nineteenth century, its vulnerability to the whims and fancies of
individual owners and investors who are not acting with the best interest of the system in
mind (4-5). If The Professor concludes by affirming moderation, with Crimsworth setting
aside a small sum of money for helping others while retaining most of his wealth for his
family, in Jane Eyre the bulk of Janes inheritance is transformed into a gift that keeps on
giving: Now the wealth did not weigh on me: now it was not a mere bequest of coin, it
was a legacy of life, hope, enjoyment (445; vol. 3, ch 33).
Jane Eyre does not refuse so much as it radically refunds the marriage plot. By dividing
her legacy, Jane not only invests in sisterly society, but hedges her investment so that she
has other partners if her bank fails again, as a womans bank always might: I will have
a home and connections. I like Moor House, and I will live at Moor House; I like Diana
and Mary, and I will attach myself for life to Diana and Mary (446; vol. 3, ch. 33). Not
everyone is accommodated in the sisterly economy of Jane Eyre (it would be difficult to
imagine Jane giving a fifth and sixth share to Hannah, the domestic servant at Moor House,
and Bertha Mason), yet the extramarital bonds Jane forges with other women undermine the
economic trust of heterosexual partnership. As Jill Rappoport points out, the deferment of
[Janes] wedding makes possible her fleeting possession of 20,000 and her immediate gift
of 15,000. It allows her to benefit her cousins and simultaneously, to limit the wealth that her
(future) husband will acquire (50); Jane condenses and even conceals her inheritance from
Rochester, simply informing him that her dead uncle left [her] five thousand pounds (51).
Even if we leave Rochester out of it, Janes pre-marital gift to her cousins has the ultimate
effect of depriving her future heir the fortune his mother would otherwise have brought into
her marriage.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis contends that Jane Eyre only offers an individual or particularistic
tactic that may succeed in chang[ing] the material basis of marriage but does not change
the emotional basis in romantic love (9). Yet in many novels, womens queer economic
feelings reveal disruptive sites of desire within the Victorian family fortune. In Middlemarch,
for example, it is not Dorotheas desire for Will Ladislaw, but feelings towards Julia, Wills
disinherited grandmother, which first threaten her union with Causabon. As Dorothea comes
to terms with the lonely disappointments of her married life, a miniature of Aunt Julia
hanging in Dorotheas boudoir becomes a companion to her: the colors deepened, the
lips and chin seemed to get larger, the hair and eyes seemed to be sending out light, the face
was masculine and beamed on her (275; bk.3, ch. 28). Dorotheas emotional attachment to
the masculine portrait ultimately leads her to conclude that her husband and his family
have acted unjustly to Julia: What a wrong, to cut off the girl from the family protection
and inheritance only because she had chosen a man who was poor! . . . Was inheritance a
question of liking or of responsibility? (371; bk. 4, ch. 37). Like Jane, Dorotheas wealth
leaves her feeling gorged by gold. As she says, my own money buys me nothing but an
uneasy conscience (372; bk. 4, ch. 37). Eventually, this guilty conscience becomes a third
party in the marital bed, keeping Dorothea up at night, thinking about money . . . that
I have always had too much, and especially the prospect of too much (373; bk. 4,
ch. 37).
To point out that Victorian women are more inclined to act on behalf of poor relations
in the Victorian novel is not merely to imply that women are inherently more generous or
emotional about money than men, but that Victorians imagined the reappraisal of a womans
value as an essential step in projects of redistributive justice. While Jane shares her legacy
only within her larger family network, in other novels, the queer economic desires of women
can lead to more pronounced queer economic partnerships beyond traditional structures of
kin. In Eliots Romola (1862), for example, after Romola becomes a widow, she cares for
her husbands peasant mistress, Tessa, and her two illegitimate children. Instead of living
off of Titos inheritance, Romola surrenders this wealth to the state, choosing to cohabitate
with Tessa and the children under the care of her aunt, the widow Monna Brigida. Romolas
refusal of Titos ill-gotten gains and her commitment to raising the family he swindles reveals
Economic Woman as a corrective figure, intervening on behalf of others and compensating

for damages accrued in the heteronormative economy.
IV. A Woman and Something More: Economic Woman in Shirley and Villette
ALTHOUGH CRIMSWORTH IS Brontes only male narrator, the relationship between economic
independence and masculinity continues to fascinate Bronte and inform her depictions of
Economic Woman in the two novels she writes after Jane Eyre. Bronte sets her third novel,
Shirley (1849), in 1811, a period of economic turmoil when foreign trade was restricted
and Luddite rebellions broke out as new machinery was introduced into English mills. As
Rosemarie Bodenheimer and others have observed, the novel is built on the intertwined
stories of unemployed rebellious workers and idle, suppressed middle-class women (37).17
Shirley focuses on the lives of two heroines: the penniless Caroline Helstone and the wealthy
heiress Shirley Keeldar. Though Caroline lacks an independent fortune or vocation, she
muse[s] over the mystery of business, and trie[s] to comprehend . . . its perplexities,
liabilities, duties, exactions . . . to realize the state of mind of a man of business, to enter
into it, feel what he would feel, aspire to what he would aspire (166-167; ch. 10). Shirley
by contrast has been given a mans name and repeatedly boasts that the business state of
mind has masculinized her: Business! Really the word makes me conscious I am indeed
no longer a girl, but quite a woman and something more . . . . They gave me a mans name;
I hold a mans position. It is enough to inspire me with a touch of manhood (193-94; ch.
11; emphasis added). Insisting that she is more at home in the countinghouse than in her
bloom-coloured drawing-room, Shirley occupies a mans position, but represents, as she
stresses, something more a queer excess in which Bronte begins to trouble the connection
between the masculine business state of mind and the sex of the economic subject (195;
ch. 11).
The masculine Economic Woman Bronte first figures in the strapping Shirley Keeldar
emerges more soberly, if completely, in the stoic heroine of her final novel, Lucy Snowe.
In Villette, as in Shirley, economic independence masculinizes Victorian women. At Rue
Fossette, Lucy admires the cool-headed business prowess of Madame Beck, a character
who, in moments of assertion seems not [to] wear a womans aspect, but rather a mans
(87; vol. 1, ch. 8). Lucy details Madame Becks high administrative powers, running a
pensionnat with more than a hundred day-pupils and a score of boarders, supervising
the work of four teachers, eight masters, six servants, and three children, managing at the
same time to perfection the pupils parents and friends . . . without apparent effort . . . bustle,
fatigue, fever, or any symptom of undue, excitement (81; vol. 1, ch. 8). In the much-discussed
scene when Lucy plays the part of a male suitor in a vaudeville on the occasion of Madame
Becks birthday, Lucy has the opportunity to don the masculine aspect herself. Though
Lucy greatly enjoys her dramatic debut as a vain fop vying for the attentions of Ginevra
Fanshawe, she modifies the male costume to retain elements of her femininity, insisting that
it must be arranged in my own way (159; vol. 1, ch. 14).18 Previous readers of Villette
have pointed to Lucys fluid gender identification and attractions in the novel as signs of her
queerness.19 Yet, if Villette is Brontes queerest novel, it is significant that Bronte herself
considered Villette a sequel to The Professor (Preface, Professor 37). As her husband
Arthur Bell Nicholls noted, though the two stories are in most respects unlike Bronte made
use of material in her first novel in Villette (Preface, Professor 37).
Like Crimsworth, Lucy is a rising character, yet her rise is unpredictable and reflects
the economic precarity of the other Victorian heroines I have examined here (358; vol. 1,
ch. 27). As a child, Lucy suffers unnamed hardships; when we first encounter her, she is
dressed in mourning garb for which she never accounts. At Bretton and again in Rue Fossette,
Lucy finds safe asylum with her active godmother Louisa Bretton (198; vol. 2, ch. 16;
210; vol. 2, ch. 17). While the Brettons offer Lucy friendship and comfort, their support is
unpredictable at best. Earlier in the novel, they lose their money in an unnamed joint-stock
undertaking and while Graham Bretton resurfaces later in the novel as a friend to Lucy, his
attention dwindles when he begins courting the elegant and now-wealthy Countess Paulina
Mary (38; vol. 1, ch. 4). Lucy finds an unlikely benefactor in an elderly spinster, Miss
Marchmont, whom Lucy serves as a companionate nursemaid. Shortly before her death,
Miss Marchmont promises to leave Lucy a legacy; however, when the old woman passes
away before she can put her gift down in writing, the sum is seized by a miserly, second-
cousin (46; vol. 1, ch. 5). At Rue Fossette, Lucy doesnt fare much better. Though she gains
employment with Madame Beck as a nursery-governess and works her way up to an English
teacher, by the end of the novel, Lucys employer turns rival, numbering among the Catholic
secret junta conspiring to keep Paul Emanuel and his money away from Lucy (533; vol. 3,
ch. 38). When Paul Emanuel presumably dies at sea on his way home from the West Indies,
we cannot be surprised; this final stroke of bad luck in the life of Brontes heroine has been
all but preordained by the novels pattern of repeated economic failure.
Because Lucy cannot count on family, benefactors, employers, or lovers to provide her
with consistent emotional and financial support in Villette she retreats inward, becoming an
emotionally repressed and guarded heroine whose day-to-day existence is a kind of living
death (Gilbert and Gubar 400). Enhancing Lucys buried life are the numerous Gothic
elements of the novel the haunting nun, the buried letters, the Catholic conspiracy, etc.
Mary Jacobus has argued that supernatural haunting and satanic revolt, delusion and dream
in Villette disrupt a text which can give no formal recognition to either Romantic or Gothic
modes (41). More recently, however, Gail Turley Houston has shown that Gothic tropes like
those in Villette were common to a broader culture of panic in the mid-Victorian economy.
As Houston explains, Lucy lives with the horrors of PANIC on a regular basis, and this
perpetual state of anxiety leads her to believe that she can survive, only if her emotional
economy is restricted to the lowest possible level (55). In Houstons view, Lucy obsessively
guards her self-interest in an unstable economic environment. At the end of the novel,
when Paul Emanuel leaves Lucy to wait for his return, Lucy is left with no closure but
the promise of being continually accountable for the fluctuations of political and emotional
economy (70).
Restricted as Lucys emotional economy may be, the economic plot of Villette is equally
driven by its heroines insatiable appetite for risk and speculation. As Lucy herself asks when
she first makes the decision to travel to London, Who but a coward would pass his whole
life in hamlets, and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity? (52; vol. 1,
ch. 6). When Lucy first ventures to the city, she is less fascinated by the West-end, the parks,
and the fine squares than she is by the business, rush, and roar of Londons financial
district (56; vol. 1, ch. 6).20 Later, she buys a small book, a piece of extravagance I could ill
afford, from a dried-in man of business who seems to her one of the greatest of human
beings (53; vol. 1, ch. 6). After witnessing these lively scenes of economic exchange, Lucy
begins to liken her own life to a game in which the player cannot lose and may win (67;
vol. 1, ch. 7). As she contemplates seeking teaching abroad in Belgium, she reasons, I had
nothing to lose . . . . If I failed in what I now designed to undertake, who, save myself, would
suffer? If I died far away from home, I was going to say, but I had no home from England,
then, who would weep? (54; vol. 1, ch. 6).
Lucys independence in Villette often comes at a steep price, yet the thrills of Lucys
independent life ultimately prove too dear to relinquish: to do this, and to do it utterly alone,
gave me, perhaps an irrational, but a real pleasure, Lucy marvels of her self-sufficiency in
London (53-4; vol. 1, ch. 6). Later in the novel, Lucy again asserts an irrational preference
for an independent, if unstable economic life when she refuses a handsome sum (three
times her salary at Rue Fossette) offered by Mr. Home to become a companion to his daughter
Polly (345; vol. 2, ch. 26). Rather than serve as a governess or a companion in a great house,
Lucy maintains that she would deliberately have taken a housemaids place, bought a strong
pair of gloves, swept bedrooms and staircases, and cleaned stoves and locks, in peace and
independence . . . I would have made shirts and starved (345; vol. 2, ch. 26).
In London and again when she first arrives in Villette, Lucy is in danger of being robbed
or swindled out of her money, but on such occasions she console[s] [herself] with the
reflection that such is the price of experience (56; vol. 1, ch. 6). The price of experience
very well characterizes Lucys economic progress throughout the novel as a single, working
woman. As Lucy bounces from one position to the next, she stories up piece[s] of casual
information, as careful housewives store seemingly worthless shreds and fragments for which
their prescient minds anticipate a possible use some day (48-49; vol. 1, ch 5). A housewife
without a house and a businesswoman without a business, it is out of these sundry shreds and
fragments that Brontes heroine eventually fashions a scrappy, if sustainable life for herself
in the economical town of Villette (418; vol. 3, ch. 31). Paul Emanuel plays a crucial role
in offering Lucy an initial financial foothold, yet it would be a mistake to overemphasize the
part the heterosexual partner plays in rescuing Lucy from eating the rust of obscurity. In
the ending of her final novel Bronte rather makes a point of rewarding the diversity of her
heroines investments: while Paul Emanuel provides the start-up funds, in the middle of the
schools second year (a few months before Paul would have been due home), Lucy receives
an additional hundred pounds in the form of a peace-offering from Miss Marchmonts now
contrite cousin (571; vol. 3, ch. 42). With this sum, Lucy is able to purchase an adjoining
building and act on the business model she has borrowed from Madame Beck to expand
her externat into a pensionnat and attract a class of higher-paying pupils. Even the writing
of Villette itself can be seen as part of Lucys business plan. Lucys landlord, we learn, is
none other than M. Miret, the short-tempered and kind-hearted bookseller who assists
Lucy earlier in the novel, and who, we might speculate, lends his assistance a second time
by finding his tenant an audience for her good account after all (566; vol. 3, ch. 41).
In Jane Eyre, Bronte confounds the value of heterosexual marriage by multiplying Janes
partners in the sisterly society she forms with her kinswomen. In the ending of Villette,
Bronte goes one step further to eschew partnership as a requisite for domestic security
altogether. More than documenting how the Victorian woman can survive without marrying,
Villette offers a queer account of upward social mobility in which a single, working woman
profits in an uncertain economy through a series of intimate, temporary, and risky connections
with friends, lovers, benefactors, and employers who come and go. Whereas Jane Eyre defies
the moderation of the homo economicus plot with a flourish of a young womans spending
and gift-giving, in her final novel, Bronte delves further into the business mind of an older
Victorian woman to raise the more fundamental question of who or what, the passionate
woman and something more invests in when she has neither husband, children, nor family
for which to provide.
The uncertain and thrilling economic prospects facing the Victorian woman with
nothing to lose are perhaps the many things Dorothea contemplates when her mind strays
from her book on political economy. For it is here, in the margins of the Victorian novel,
where we see the queer economic desires of women contesting capitalist family values based
on economic self-interest, moderation, and rationality. More than simply anticipating the
economic emancipation of women, in the precarious figure of Economic Woman, novelists
envision how to correct a flawed account of Victorian economic prosperity. A provocative
figure who possesses wealth while emblematizing its vexed nature in the mid-nineteenth
century, Economic Woman furnishes us with a new understanding of the Victorian womans
purse, its power, and its queer economic possibilities.
Washington University in St. Louis
NOTES
1. McCloskey acknowledges that the idea of femina economica raises questions about gender essentialism.
I agree with McCloskey, however, that the fact that feminine qualities are not unique to women
does not prevent an inquiry into a difference, as long as there is a notable difference on average. There
is no need to take a stand on nature versus nurture to admit that for some reason men and women . . .
think rather differently, especially about society (70).
2. In the Commentaries on the Law of England (1756), William Blackstone defines coverture as a system
in which by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal
existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated
into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing (279).
3. The first Act granted women access to their own earnings as well as limited forms of inheritance
(although it did not apply retroactively to money brought into marriage). The later Act of 1882 furnished
married women with the same rights as widows and unmarried women, effectively rendering them
femmes sole rather than femmes covert. Shanley argues that the 1882 Act represented the single most
important change in the legal status of women in the nineteenth century (103). The Womens Suffrage
Journal hailed the Act as the Magna Carta of womens liberties (qtd. in Shanley 124).
4. For more on the separate spheres ideology and subsequent criticism of his model, see Welter and
Vickery.
5. This literature is now extensive. For a well-known summary of the role middle class women played
as the beneficiaries of trusts, annuities, and various assets, see Davidoff and Catherine Hall. For more
about the role of working class women in the nineteenth-century economy see Johnson and Valenze.
For more on women as investors and speculators see Henrys Ladies do it?: Victorian Women
Investors in Fact and Fiction and Robb. For more on womens consumer culture see Erika Rappaport
and Lysack.
6. As Robb argues, reliable figures on womens capital investment are difficult to come by because they
only count shareholders designated as widow or spinster. In England, married womens shares
would have been listed under their husbands names until 1880s (123).
7. For more on Charlotte Riddell, see Henry, Charlotte Riddell: Novelist of The City.
8. For a general argument about genre, see Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy. Poovey traces the
history of what she claims are three, related genres that mediate value: monetary genres (such as
coin, paper money, or paper forms of credit); writing about the market (economic periodicals, writings
on political economy, etc.), and literature (2). Poovey argues that economic and imaginative writings
were first similar and were only gradually distinguished over the course of the century. See also Gagnier
and Gallagher.
9. Klaver argues that fiction both represented and contested ascendant economic values in the nineteenth
century. In Klavers view, whether as a discarded remainder, as supplemental effect, as disturbing
factor, or as ground for a radical reinvisioning of economic knowledge, the discourse of morality,
ethics, and virtue plays a key and troubling role in the discursive and intuitional foundation of
economic authority in nineteenth century Britain (xii). For more on ethics and economics, see also
Blumberg and Hilton.
10. For a related argument, see Michie. Michie shows how the rich heiress becomes the natural locus
of the nineteenth-century novels exploration of capitalisms loathing of its own propensity to amass
wealth (xii).
11. Bronte mostly invested in railways. See Henry, Ladies do it? 121-22 and Houston 55-60.
12. Poovey notes that because the governess was like the middle-class mother in the work she performed,
but like both a working-class woman and man in the wages she received she ultimately threatened the
naturalness of separate spheres (Uneven Developments 127). The problem of paying Jane reflects
the complications of paying women to perform the duties that all women are supposed to perform
naturally.
13. Hunter argues that bankruptcy narratives become a powerful rhetorical mechanism for promoting
social and economic change, in terms of supporting womens widening engagement in the public
sphere and promoting the social dimensions of economic exchange (138). For earlier discussions of
bankruptcy in the novel, see Weiss and Lester.
14. Tosh observes that to be head of a household in the Victorian era is essential to masculine status
(60-61).
15. The connection between Jane and Bertha has been an ongoing site of critical disagreement. In their
seminal reading of the figure in The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar argue that on a
figurative and psychological level it seems suspiciously clear that the specter of Bertha is a . . .
threatening . . . avatar of Jane, doing what Jane herself wants to do (357-58). In contrast, Spivak
describes Jane Eyre as a cult text of feminism reflective of the British imperial project and argues
that the novel can be read as the orchestration and staging of the self-immolation of Bertha Mason as
good wife (259).
16. Critics have proposed numerous interpretations of domestic interiority in the Victorian novel. Nancy
Armstrong understands the domestic in opposition to the political, exploring how the realist novel
detache[s] sexuality from political history (Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the
Novel, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990, 65). For Armstrong, the domestic is the site in which women exercise
power over aspects of life associated with the private: household management, surveillance, leisure
time, courtship procedures, kinship relations, and the development of human identities (3). Freedgood
points out that Moor House is decorated with the literal and figural proceeds of Atlantic trade (35),
arguing that Janes domestic designs partake of an imperial impulse in which the idea of empty space
invites the exercise of habitation as a demonstration of power (33).
17. Terry Eagleton and Catherine Gallagher argue that class conflict is ultimately a subordinate concern in
the novel. See Eagleton, Myths of Power: a Marxist Study of the Brontes, New York: Palgrave, 2005, 50
and Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form
18321867, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985, xi n1. For a different view, see Herbert Heaton, The
Economic Background of Shirley, Bronte Studies 38. 4 (2013): 29099.
18. Critics have offered differing interpretations of Lucys desires for the masculine role. In their reading
of the scene, Gilbert and Gubar argue that by refusing to dress completely like a man onstage and
by choosing only certain items to signify her male character, Lucy makes the role her own (413).
In Litvaks view, however, the novels motif of female androgyny or transvestism . . . appears not
so much daringly iconoclastic as grimly expressive of the ambitious womans confinement to male
impersonation (85).
19. Weinstone argues that Villette is driven by an anti-straight politic which decenters heterosexual union
while privileging Lucys non-normative partnership with Paul Emanuel. According to Weinstone, Paul
Emanuel offers Lucy a chaste relationship of diffused eroticism with a male brother-mate (367),
which explores queer relationships between men and women outside of heterosexual marriage (369).
More recently, Marcus has studied repressed lesbian desire in Villette in the context of female friendship
in Victorian culture. As Marcus summarizes, Lucy has passionate responses to several other female
characters, takes immense pleasure in partially dressing as a man and flirting with a woman . . . and is
haunted by a nun . . . who ends up in Lucys bed (102). In Marcuss reading, however, it is ultimately
Lucys resistance to female friendship which leaves her a friendless woman . . . perpetually outside
the bosom of the family (108).
20. For more on this passage and the appeal of the City to Lucy and Victorian women see Houston 64 and
Henry, Charlotte Riddell: Novelist of the City.
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Jane Eyres Purse Womens Queer Economic Desire in The Victorian Novel

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Victorian Literature and Culture (2016), 44, 741759.

Cambridge University Press 2016. 1060-1503/16

JANE EYRES PURSE: WOMENS QUEER

I. Recovering Economic Woman

And where is Mr. Rochester?

He scowled at first; then, as if recollecting something, he said Right, right!

Economic Woman as a corrective figure, intervening on behalf of others and compensating

Washington University in St. Louis

Harvey, David. A Companion to Marxs Capital. New York: Verso, 2010.

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