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"The Gift of my Father's Bounty": Patriarchal Patronization in Moll Flanders and Roxana

"The Gift of my Father's Bounty": Patriarchal Patronization in Moll Flanders and Roxana "The Gift of my Father's Bounty": Patriarchal Patronization in Moll Flanders and Roxana William E. Hummel Arizona State University But our tokens of compliment and love are for the most part barbarous. Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. --Ralph Waldo Emerson What would a feminist analysis of Moll Flanders and Roxana--two of Defoe's most anti-institutional novels--look like which presented as its theoretical framework not a Marxian critique of market economies but rather ethnographic studies of gift-based economies? Two points I want to contend in this paper are that such an analysis would both open up new avenues for exploring how female identity is constructed and female experience shared, and would also imme- diately enter into the debate between Marxists and Feminists-- specifically, the issue raised by Marilyn Strathern, "whether primacy should be accorded to class or to gender divisions" (Gender 25). In one of the more popular examples of this debate, Lois A. Chaber shows how Moll Flanders represents Defoe's critique of an emergent capitalist society and the bourgeoisie who inhabit it: the intricacies of marriage laws, the overarching maleficence http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association

"The Gift of my Father's Bounty": Patriarchal Patronization in Moll Flanders and Roxana

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Publisher
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association
Copyright
Copyright © Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association
ISSN
1948-2833
Publisher site
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Abstract

"The Gift of my Father's Bounty": Patriarchal Patronization in Moll Flanders and Roxana William E. Hummel Arizona State University But our tokens of compliment and love are for the most part barbarous. Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. --Ralph Waldo Emerson What would a feminist analysis of Moll Flanders and Roxana--two of Defoe's most anti-institutional novels--look like which presented as its theoretical framework not a Marxian critique of market economies but rather ethnographic studies of gift-based economies? Two points I want to contend in this paper are that such an analysis would both open up new avenues for exploring how female identity is constructed and female experience shared, and would also imme- diately enter into the debate between Marxists and Feminists-- specifically, the issue raised by Marilyn Strathern, "whether primacy should be accorded to class or to gender divisions" (Gender 25). In one of the more popular examples of this debate, Lois A. Chaber shows how Moll Flanders represents Defoe's critique of an emergent capitalist society and the bourgeoisie who inhabit it: the intricacies of marriage laws, the overarching maleficence

Journal

Rocky Mountain Review of Language and LiteratureRocky Mountain Modern Language Association

Published: Jan 6, 1994

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