Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction Laura J. Rosenthal (bio) Susan Paterson Glover. Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Bucknell University Press 2006. 231. US$49.50 Feminists have long noted the vexed relationship in eighteenth-century writing between the female body and property: the female body secured property, the female body was property, the female body struggled to own property in an unwelcoming environment. While taking up these familiar issues, Susan Paterson Glover breathes new life into them, in part by taking them out of the realm of the strictly literary and into the very literal legal dependence of property on the womb: ‘England’s common law established very visceral, physical, fleshly connections surrounding the transmission of real property and the elaborate legal regulation of what entered and emerged from the womb.’ With clear and useful elaborations of legal discourse, Glover reminds us of the explicit relationship between property and the womb: ‘It was the law of real property, rather than any literary representations of the womb, that had the greater role in the determination of the regulation and identification of its reproductive function.’ Glover connects new legal ideologies of property to the popularity of prose fiction, which, as she demonstrates, show great interest in the problem of ownership, the legalistic investment in evidentiary detail, and a fascination with questions of legitimacy. She shows how these issues emerge in the work of several prominent writers, male and female, of early British fiction. Her most productive insights call attention to the complex and often contradictory way in which these writers processed tensions between mobile and landed property. For example, Glover points out that, even though Jonathan Swift initially advocated the civic humanist stake in real property, he never owned any himself. Later in his career he recorded Gulliver’s extreme mobility: ‘Face-to-face with the consequences of a land governed by its landowners, Swift was forced to abandon earlier convictions, a process that leaves its traces in the composition of the Travels.’ Glover goes on to explore in illuminating detail the ways in which dispossession profoundly shaped Swift’s career and his writing. In a later chapter, Glover makes the equally intriguing case that ‘Defoe’s fiction is not an imaginative visioning of the liberating potential of a new economic order and broader access to property for all, but rather the reverse.’ Mobility tends to damage rather than rescue his characters: ‘Defoe and his narrators are possessed, rather than possessing.’ While her reading of Robinson Crusoe somewhat belabours the classic woman-as-land trope, her discussion of Moll Flanders powerfully observes the way Defoe’s selection of a married woman as narrator fleshes out the limits of contractarian modernity. In her reading of [End Page 249] Defoe’s final novel, the complications of a woman claiming property in her children prove Roxana’s downfall. With property law so profoundly gendered, women writers faced different complications; at the same time, the particular historical relationship between women and property could also generate unique insights and new forms of creativity. For Mary Davys, an exploration of the means of property and legitimacy contributed to the establishment of a new genre. Property relations, she rightly points out, stand at the centre of Eliza Haywood’s fiction. In Haywood, Glover shows, most heroines begin with great beauty, exceptional education, and great expectations; events, however, commonly conspire to deprive them of their property. The fascinating but lesser-read Rash Resolve provides a good example here. For both Davys and Haywood, the possession of property does not necessarily lead to liberty; in fact, in many cases it leads to confinement, misery, and/or death. Both writers, Glover convincingly suggests, explored the vexed relationship to property experienced by women in general and mothers in particular. Through careful explanations of early eighteenth-century property law and perceptive readings of Britain’s early prose fiction writers, Engendering Legitimacy contributes to our understanding of the early novel and its particular concerns. The strength of this work lies in its elaboration of the contradictions and instabilities around land, commerce, and ownership in the culture, the legal discourse, and the writers themselves. As Glover...

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