A comment by Laura Mandell: In the first paragraph, you attribute two functions to conduct literature: it functions to instruct women in how to behave so that they might raise themselves in class, and it functions to "curb" or limit women's activity and/or desires. Notice that these two functions are explicitly asserted by the conduct literature itself: titles such as "The Polite Lady: or, A Course of Female Education" tell readers that conduct manuals will make "polite ladies" out of them; and Halifax is not unusual in telling his daughter how to avoid being "possess'd by a darling Passion." But if we imagine that misogyny is not "natural" but rather ideologically useful, then we can invert the causality here: conduct literature isn't written to control women; on the contrary, the belief that women's unruly passions need to be controlled promotes the writing of conduct literature which is then up to something else. Sure, conduct manuals instruct women in how to rise in class, but mightn't they also be meditations upon class distinctions, the premise of instructing women just an excuse so that writers can think about and work toward forming a new class identity? (See Ann Rosalind Jones, "Nets and Bridles," in The Ideology of Conduct, eds. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse [New York: Methuen, 1987], 39-72).
A comment by Laura Mandell: The notion that conduct literature provides a "narration of what one should not be" is a tremendously interesting way of beginning to think about the ideological work that conduct manuals might be performing independently of their explicitly stated functions. Your notion that women writing such texts might have access to the forbidden could be very fruitful. Mightn't those texts written by men also provide access to the forbidden, or, more than that, provide a place in which some things can get constructed as forbidden, or as not male, or as not English or British? Conduct manuals written by men (and by women) might be constructing bourgeois male and nationalist identities through expulsion, through erecting what men and British people are "not."
A comment by Laura Mandell: You are implicitly making the excellent point here that the proliferation of interest in women's conduct allowed women to remain respectable while writing in what was sometimes considered to be the rather racy new genre of novels because they could claim to be writing for the same reason as one would write a conduct manual, viz. for the purpose of moral instruction. This pretense, you are arguing, allows women writers--e.g., Maria Edgeworth-- to create and identify with characters who are overtly condemned as part of the novel's moral message--e.g., Lady Delacour. Your excellent point here and in paragraph three is that this contradiction, the portrayal of what women should not do or be, gives voice to women novelists. The only caveat I would want to enter here is that one needs to resist the temptation to presume that women have stronger voices once they become professionalized, that being able to write something that is salable to a mass market is strictly equivalent to having more power. (See for example Margaret Ezell's argument against that assumption as it is found in the feminist criticism of Virginia Woolf, Gilber and Gubar, Germaine Greer, Janet Todd, and Angeline Goreau, in Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women's Literary History [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993].)
A comment by Laura Mandell: It probably would not make sense to claim of any marginalized group that there was any period in history in during which they had no power. Women have been oppressed in different ways throughout history: it is important to remember that being oppressed is not the same as having no power. Women have always had some power. The important question to ask would be: at any given time, in what did their power consist? Some people have claimed that women had more power before the advent of capitalism (Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century [Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1919]). Furthermore, did (as some feminists believe) aristocratic women living during the Renaissance have greater access to education? People have also argued that aristocratic women who could leave their children with wet nurses and participate in or organize their own intellectual salons were better off than the domestic angels of bourgeois society (see Ann Rosalind Jones, "Nets and Bridles," in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, eds. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse [New York: Methuen, 1987], 39-72).
A comment by Laura Mandell: Many women wrote before capitalism (Sappho, the Greek poet; St. Hildegaard of Bingen; Queen Elizabeth, to name a few), so the word you want here is not "authors" but "novelists." In class, and in much secondary literature on the rise of the novel, people notice that the rise of the novel, a literary genre, is coincident with the rise of capitalism, an economic event. How precisely these two things are connected, however, is still open to question. Look at how your sentence connects the two: you say that "capitalism has given women the ability to become" novelists (emphasis added). Can a series of economic changes give human beings abilities that they did not have before? I am not sure that anyone would or could argue that human abilities change throughout history: if it isn't people's ability to do things that changes throughout history, then what is it exactly? Why couldn't Napoleon have been Bruce Springstein (they are both short and charismatic)? Ian Hacking argues that, in any given era, the possibilities of being, "although inexhaustible, are also bounded" (229): Napoleon could have been any infinite number of things, but not a rock star because "human actions must be `actions under a description'" (Hacking quoting Elizabeth Anscombe, 230) and that description, that possibility of being--"rock star," was not available to Napoleon. (See Ian Hacking, "Making Up People," in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, eds. Thomas C. Heller, et. al. [Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1986]). So women could write anything they wanted to before the rise of the novel, but they couldn't be novelists nor rock stars until the 18th and the 20th centuries respectively. In trying to think about the relations between material conditions (a mode of production, a market economy, a mode of consumption) and people's actions in the past, try to avoid giving people of the past any less autonomy from those conditions than you would give yourself (this seems to me the thing that literary historians have the most difficulty doing). Ideally, writing about the relations among literary works and past events will involve revising notions of what kinds of forces inform your own actions as much as it involves thinking more about history.
Comment by Mandell continued: One thing you are getting at in B. is that the rise of the novel, coincident with the rise of capitalism, encouraged many women to become professional writers in the modern sense of the word. Although an early generation of feminist critics did presume that women who became professional writers had greater voice--more power--than earlier women writers who were presumed to have been silenced because their works were circulated in manuscript, recent work has shown that it may be our prejudices about publishing and about the importance of various genres that is in effect silencing a part of women's literary history and thereby disempowering earlier women writers who themselves felt empowered (see Margaret Ezell, Writing Women's Literary History [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993]; also, Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women's Writing 1646-1688 [London: Virago P, 1988]). In some ways, however, debating over whether being a professional author with salable goods gave women power or not might divert feminists from thinking about the exact role that women played in the rise of the concept of the professional author, the novelist, as such. (To think about that question, see Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670-1820 [Berkeley: U of CA P, 1994].)
A comment by Laura Mandell: In the passage you quote, Robinson Crusoe revises the fundamentally religious notion that things of the world are of no use for the salvation of the soul: the "things of this world" are worth "just as much as we can use and no more." He takes a step away from Puritan doctrine on the worthlessness (or worse) of things of the flesh--now they are useful--but does that step get him all the way to a sense of the world as "a capitalist's paradise, full of things to be owned, controlled, cultivated, possessed," as you put it? In other words, Weber's work elucidates the relation between the Protestant ethic and the capitalist's practice of accumulating capital (denying oneself worldly pleasures means putting money back into business, using it as capital, instead of foolishly dissipating it in living a grand lifestyle), but it doesn't tell us much about the relation between the Protestant ethic and the desire to possess (consumption). (The only sociologist who has, as far as I know, made that connection is Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism [New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987]; see Jean-Christophe Agnew's analysis of Campbell's work in "Coming Up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective," in Consumption and the World of Goods, eds. John Brewer and Roy Porter [New York: Routledge, 1993], 25-6). What connection were you making between Robinson's realization that "heaping up things" won't increase his own enjoyment and the "sense of economic duty" you see him getting from God? That is, if his sense of economic duty is, "take only what you can use," how is it also to own, possess, cultivate, control? (This is a big problem in the work done by analysts like Weber and Campbell, not just in your argument here.)
A comment by Laura Mandell: So what you are saying here is that profiteering and sacrificing for the sake of salvation are equated?
A comment by Laura Mandell: If Friday is the ultimate possession because he can be converted (and I presume by "ultimate" you mean to point to the fact that the best possession for Crusoe would unify religious and capitalist aims)--if that is so, are all of Crusoe's possessions, even money, convertible objects, and convertible into what? How do religious and economic senses of conversion converge in the capitalist's possessions?
A Comment by Laura Mandell: If you think about Robinson's relation to Friday as a displaced version of the relation between a captialist entrepreneur and a laborer, then perhaps one way that narratives about missionary conversions help to make capitalist practices palatable is by morally justifying the laborer's treatment as a "trophy," a sign of his own exploitation.