Content area
Abstract
Victorian scholars have investigated gender theory in varied and complex ways, and recent financial scholarship on Victorian fiction calls for an interdisciplinary approach to close textual analysis of finance and economics, in particular the stock market; however, despite the marked scrutiny of the relationship of women and money in the Victorian period, the work of combining current gender theory and the burgeoning financial theory has only recently been inaugurated. This dissertation will contribute to the body of scholarship which seeks to explore the multifaceted relationship of women and money represented in the Victorian novel. In particular, I analyze Becky from William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Gwendolen from George Eliot's Daniel Deronda , and Hester from Margaret Oliphant's Hester. These narratives, imbued with the language of finance, speculation, gambling, and investment, demonstrate the acquisitive natures of their central female characters, who employ the ideals of gendered virtue in order to attain financial security. In their imitation of the angel the house ideal, these female capitalists concomitantly participate in and contest the very ideology that would diminish their ability to negotiate in the social and economic marketplaces of Victorian culture. Typically portrayed more complexly than their virtuous idealized counterparts, these female characters seek financial security in the form of wealthy husbands, but typically reject the virtuous ideals stipulated for women, even as they imitate the ideals to achieve their ambition. These avaricious female characters, traditionally vilified by Victorian concepts of virtue associated with the woman, argue for a wider understanding of Victorian womanhood and exemplify the pervasive influence of the capitalist culture of exchange in the Victorian period.
