| Like the novel itself, the 'Art' of bookkeeping was a new phenomenon in early eighteenth-century England. This work argues that the 'realistic' novel implicates financial accounting in order to reflect contemporary economic thought, to metaphorize widespread domestic and social concerns, and to stage subjectivity. Examining the cultural and historical factors behind accounting's rise, I show that the targeted household 'accountant' was typically female. At a time when 'to tell' could mean either to count or to narrate, women were seen as financial accountants even as they were being associated with an altogether different kind of property, and indeed a different kind of telling: the literary accounting inherent in first-person narratives of letters and journals.;Within the context of Behn's 1668 imprisonment for debt, I study her novel The Fair Jilt for its use of mutable currency and the 'blank' bill of exchange, and maintain that her feminized 'eyewitness' narrator actively rejects the paradoxical rigidity and insubstantiality of accounting, along with the economic landscape it symbolizes, and presents instead an alternative, pre-capitalistic world of barter and fluid valuation. Chapter three examines Defoe's Moll Flanders alongside a new sensibility of enumeration and calibration. The near-quantiphrenia that swept England is embodied in Moll, who articulates herself and the world around her through a form of narrativized financial accounting. Accounting in the novel is shown to be more than a mnemonic or system of notation; rather, it embodies a necessary system of definition in relation to identity.;My final chapter moves from thematic to generic issues, and explores the connections between women narrators and the property they accumulate. I suggest that the novel undergoes a narrative transformation based in part on extrinsic economic factors, and that two sub-genres--the picaresque and 'the novel of personality'--reveal unexpected cultural anxieties about eighteenth-century ideologies of gendered property. Highlighting the relationship between personal property and originality, I suggest that the copyright act of 1710 brought with it an implicit acknowledgement of both the legitimacy and distinctiveness of female-owned narrative. |
