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From Love of Money to Love for Love

Beth Cortese, ‘From Love of Money to Love for Love: Heiresses on the Long Eighteenth-Century Stage’, Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research Journal 32:2 (2020), pp. 29-46

Abstract

The heiress is a character who endures in comedy throughout the long eighteenth-century stage and whose shifting representation provides insight into emergent discourses of sentiment, family, and economic attitudes. While a lively subject of scholarship on the novel, the heiress has been overlooked in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theatre criticism. When the heiress is discussed, it is usually within the context of the prodigal hero’s resolution of both his financial difficulties and rakish behavior through marriage (Canfield, 1997 249, McKenzie 274). Financially independent, young, previously unmarried, and in possession of monetary wealth and/or an estate, the heiress is desirable in contrast to the more sexually experienced and often slightly older widow. While a widow was entitled to only a third of her husband’s estate under the Statute of Distribution Act (1670), an heiress had entire possession of her fortune, which could easily be transferred to her husband upon marriage.[1] Therefore, it is important to consider the heiress as a high-status, desirable, and powerful character in her own right, one who plays an integral role in the plot, with the ability to disrupt or resolve the marriage and inheritance plot. Though the heiress remains a constant figure who facilitates the transmission of wealth in the comic plot, her representation and role in the marriage plot shifts according to attitudes in relation to wealth, sentimentality, and family over the period. Drawing on Richard Kroll’s point that late seventeenth-century comedy focuses on “market relations informing […] correspondence between men and women, […and] people and nations more largely,” this article considers what the representation of the heiress in the long eighteenth century revealed about attitudes toward wealth and marital relations on stage (246).

Link to the Journal Website: https://rectrjournal.org/


[1] Susan Staves states that the amount a widow inherited from her husband depended on her social status. Under the Statute of Distribution Act, a middle class widow was entitled to one third of her husband’s wealth. Under the Statute of Uses Act (1536), an aristocratic widow’s “entitlement to a life estate in land was transformed by equity into an entitlement to a jointure that could be a smaller estate in less secure personal property for less than the term of her life” (28). “Between 1692 and 1725 the series of statutes followed which abolished the practice of providing ‘reasonable parts’ for widows and children. The four different statutes were hailed by contemporaries as a way to give the individual more rights in bequeathing his property, but by giving individual men more rights, it took away the few legal rights that women had to financial protection once their husband died” (Staves 28). As Misty G. Anderson points out, a husband had to lay claim to his wife’s portable property to establish his right of ownership, but moveable goods were generally easier for a husband to claim than real property (2002 52).