Book contents
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Political Economy and Commercial Society in the 1790s
- Chapter 2 The Engagement with Burke
- Chapter 3 Property, Passions, and Manners
- Chapter 4 Political Economy in Revolution
- Chapter 5 Property in Political Economy
- Chapter 6 Credit and Credulity
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
Chapter 6 - Credit and Credulity
Political Economy, Gender, and the Sentiments in The Wrongs of Woman
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 February 2024
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Political Economy and Commercial Society in the 1790s
- Chapter 2 The Engagement with Burke
- Chapter 3 Property, Passions, and Manners
- Chapter 4 Political Economy in Revolution
- Chapter 5 Property in Political Economy
- Chapter 6 Credit and Credulity
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
Summary
This chapter opens with an account of the Bank Restriction Act (1797) as marking a crisis in the British credit system on which the economy depended. It reads Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), as investigating the gendered systems of affect, belief, and credit which underwrote both political economy and social relations. Against Adam Smith’s attempt to regulate potentially disruptive forms of affect, including credulity and sensibility, the ‘extreme credulity’ of Wollstonecraft’s protagonist, Maria, rewrites the usual story of irrational femininity as the binary other to masculine rationality. Demonstrating the mutual imbrication of financial and sexual economies in late eighteenth-century commercial society, Wollstonecraft attempts to mobilise an alternative economy of social feeling to reform a selfish, sexualised world of commerce based on self-interest, and to reformulate the relations between morality and commercial society – between affect and money – by asking what else might circulate to social advantage.
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- Mary Wollstonecraft and Political EconomyThe Feminist Critique of Commercial Modernity, pp. 185 - 214Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024