The Economic Mistress: Fallen Gender and Fallen Economy in Eliza Haywood's Cleomelia and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flander's Anonymous College

The ultimate irony of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders is that the apparent good circumstances protagonist Moll arrives in by the end of the novel - the accumulation of money and materials - are precisely the results of the criminal practices of those who were typically without wealth and social capital. Moll's adoption the practices of the upper middling class in the marriage market, although it gives her the appearance of wealth, ultimately results in little actual capital. This blurring of class boundaries throughout the novel is one that I tie to another form of trade in England, the "culture of credit", as Craig Muldew calls it, and the emergent 18th century form of the stock market. Daniel Defoe in Moll Flanders and Eliza Haywood in Cleomelia; Or the Generous Mistress parallel the play of truth within both the marriage and stock market. I use Defoe to illustrate the ways in which this metaphor was set up in both economic writings and the novel, and then move to Haywood to show how she both propagates and subverts these tropes.

Like the assortment of "cloathes, rings, plates" that spring fourth in the quotation, biological and financial reproduction consistently double in Moll Flanders; Moll's first sexual encounter is focused...