Second-Sex Economics: Race, Rescue, and the Heroine's Plot

Complicating Simone de Beauvoir's famous argument that "women do not say 'we,'" "Second-Sex Economics" explores the eighteenth-century marriage plot through rites of rescue: novels in which female characters attempt to extricate more vulnerable heroines from damaging patriarchal attachments. In so doing, these novels lay bare the rescue plot at the heart of the heteronormative "heroine's text," in which the ideal rescuer is the would-be husband. The novel's experiments with women as rescuers emerge in the early eighteenth century, intensifies in the Revolutionary period, and ebbs in what we might call the Age of Austen, not least in the novels of Austen herself. Novels of rescue also argue for extending Barbara Johnson's distinction between the lyric and legal person to recognize the economic person, the subject whose agency depends on her means. But the dynamics of same-sex rescue, and the marriage plots with which they engage, also rely on a tacit whiteness that becomes explicit in novels that deny both rescue and marriage to women of color. Moreover, conventional narrative practices such as the representation of interiority obscure the extent to which the "heroine's plot" relies on economic and social inequality and the colonialist production of wealth. Interrogating the eighteenth-century European novel through the lens of "second-sex economics" thus provides a space for theorizing gender, race, and class, along with the implications of conventional fictional practices.