Abstract: “Reclaiming Value after the Fall: Mary Hays’s Renegotiation of Sexual and Economic Value in The Victim of Prejudice”
Mary Hays’s novel The Victim of Prejudice (1799) challenges the overwhelmingly predetermined outcome of the forced seduction plot and the fate of the fallen woman, made commonplace in eighteenth-century novels by the success of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Hays explores the value placed on women’s sexual reputation, both morally and in the marriage market, and uses Victim of Prejudice to articulate alternatives to death after rape. The novel explores how women might take part independently in the economic market and how they can create financial, artistic and intellectual value through work, outside of the commodification of their sexuality. The work that the protagonist engages with is varied: teacher, engraver, botanical illustrator, domestic service, and farm work. In this paper, I will show how Hays examines, through different forms of labour, the hierarchical, gendered order of work and the limited availability of ‘valuable’ work to women as a function of systemic oppression. The different trades and types of labour in the novel intersect with contemporary discussions of women’s work, its relationship to productivity and the anxiety that women could increasingly only contribute ‘value’ as consumers in the developing market economy.
As Mary Poovey discusses, literary and economic writing had in the eighteenth century not yet gone through the coming ‘generic differentiation,’ and the novel was a medium where political and moral economy could be, and was, explored. I will also argue that Hays’s text attempts to renegotiate the forced seduction plot as part of thinking about women’s place in the economic market. The novel challenges the inherent assumption, present in both plot and narrative structure, that a woman’s true value—her sexual purity, connected both to economy and morality—is impossible to recover after a fall. Hays consciously reshapes the narrative of a woman’s life after rape, presenting a middle-class heroine who does not simply fade away but instead confronts the broader social consequences of trying to live and work. These consequences are shown in what Hays views as a realistic depiction of her contemporary society, yet within the confines of the eighteenth-century novel form, defined by the same gendered understandings of value that Hays wishes to expose.
Bio: Lund University, Sweden
Mari Komnæs is a third-year PhD student at Lund University. Her dissertation examines class, gender, and education in the texts of British women writers such as Wollstonecraft, Hays, Mary Robinson, Mary Ann Radcliffe, and Priscilla Wakefield. She has an MA in Literature of The Romantic Period from The University of York, where she wrote her thesis on Scottish Romantic writer James Hogg’s work and witches.