For late-Victorian authors, representations of bonds between women offer an important way to redefine women’s relationship to economics. Such efforts to link gender and economics were made increasingly difficult following the 1870s “Marginal Revolution” and its revelation of competing economic models. This revolution marked a paradigm shift in economic thought from classical political economy—that saw market exchange as grounded in labor and production—to a new theory of neoclassical economics—that understood market exchanges as motivated primarily by the consumer’s pleasures and desires. Fin-de-siècle representations of bonds between women not only interrogate the terms of gender difference, but they also find a way to mediate between these competing economic models and to rewrite the female body as both a pleasured and a productive entity.
My first and second chapters look at representations of female bonds in New Woman fiction, a genre that most critics align with political economy and productive bodies. Working against this criticism, my first chapter considers Olive Schreiner’s representation of a kind of female union wherein women take pleasure in and lobby for a communal economy of affective labor. My second chapter examines Grant Allen’s efforts to teach New Women the pleasures of the reproductive maternal bond. My third chapter shifts the discussion from fiction to Michael Field’s collection of poetic translations, Sight and Song. In these poems, Field explores non-possessive consumption between women (a lesbian marriage) as the means to a new economy of unalienated aesthetic production. Throughout, I argue that all three late-Victorian authors blend together economies of production and consumption in a way that anticipates the kind of microeconomic strategies described by modernist writer Virginia Woolf. Consequently, my fourth chapter considers Woolf’s representation of women’s ethical consumption and cultural production. By thinking about gender and women’s relationships with one another, all four fin-de-siècle authors overcome the split between classical political economy and new theories of neoclassical economics and consumption. More importantly, however, these authors demonstrate how women might, through the collective bond, redefine the terms and structure of the gendered marketplace.
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