Property, Education, and Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Heroine of Disinterest (review)

Reviewed by: Property, Education, and Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Heroine of Disinterest Kathryn Ready (bio) Virginia H. Cope. Property, Education, and Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Heroine of Disinterest. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. viii+180pp. £50. ISBN 978-0-230-22023-2. “Disinterest” is a term of multiple meanings and complex history. Defined in the OED in one sense as “that which is contrary to interest or advantage,” alternatively it signifies “disinterestedness, impartiality,” or, again, “absence of interest, unconcern.” All of these meanings can be seen as coming into play in the context of the popular eighteenth-century character type that Virginia H. Cope dubs the “Heroine of Disinterest” (identifying the figure most closely with the domestic novel in which the main plot centres upon a contested female inheritance). In the work under review, Cope traces the development of this character type from the proto-example of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela to Jane Austen’s female protagonists (the end point, she argues, of the Heroine of Disinterest), with middle chapters treating relevant novels by Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, Ann Radcliffe, and the Godwin-Wollstonecraft circle. A general aim of the book is to contribute to a growing recognition of the “cultural work” (to employ the author’s own phrase) being performed by the eighteenth-century domestic novel. Without denying [End Page 723] the substance of many feminist objections to the eighteenth-century domestic novel, Cope rightly cautions against a straightforwardly negative reading of its gender politics. Building on the work of scholars such as Helen Thompson, she aims, as she states, “to recover ... forms of [female] agency not immediately recognizable to the modern reader” (4) within the domains of the genre. She identifies the domestic novel as performing “an extraordinary ideological reversal” during the eighteenth century in its “reconstitution of disinterest,” formerly “the linchpin of civic virtue in the classical tradition” but increasingly regarded “as impossible, insidious, or, most damningly, irrelevant” (4). By her account, in its “feminization of disinterest” the domestic novel “naturalized a previously unthinkable idea: that the ability to comprehend the greater good, rising above personal and particularly economic concerns, is born out of suffering and economic uncertainty—the province of women rather than of aristocratic men” and “preserved ... virtue as a human possibility by isolating it, like the domestic woman, in the home” (4). As she emphasizes, the value of the Heroine of Disinterest “is determined not by the property she (may) hold, but by her attitude toward that property” (5) and recognition of “property rights as earned rather than bequeathed” (6). As well as the political and ethical dimensions of disinterest, Cope considers its connection to identity and the pursuit of knowledge. Within the process of feminizing disinterest she discovers “surprising correlation” with “the cultural, legal, and intellectual trends that galvanized modernity: the reconceptualization of identity as internal and self-determined; the expansion in concepts of what constituted property; and the exploration of education’s potential to transform individuals and cultures” (5). While Cope’s main materials are literary and her book will no doubt be read primarily by eighteenth-century literary scholars, its scope and significance extends much farther, with particular implications for the field of economic history, which the author recognizes has often ignored gender concerns. Indeed, in the course of engaging with eighteenth-century literary history and gender politics, Cope speaks to a wide variety of subjects related to the cultural history of the period. As indicated by her title, she ambitiously draws upon economic, legal, political, philosophical, and educational discourses to direct her literary and feminist analysis. Ultimately, the interest of this work extends be yond the eighteenth century and into contemporary theoretical debates. As many readers will be aware, the term “disinterest” enjoys important currency both in eighteenth-century and contemporary discussions of ethics, and Cope posits a number of suggestive connections between past and present deployments of the term “disinterest,” with references, for example, to the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Thomas Nagel. [End Page 724] Evidently, no work of criticism (particularly one as ambitious as this one) can cover every relevant ground to its argument. Even those who accept Cope...

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