Domestic Witches and Economic Mistresses: revolutionary Female Agency in Harriet Martineau's Ella of Garveloch

Abstract

The essay focuses on Harriet Martineau’s (1802-1876) Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-1834), and specifically Ella of Garveloch (the fifth of twentyfour tales, 1832), and the construction of unfixed female identities able to challenge the network of gender stereotypes the patriarchal socio-economic system assigned to women in early nineteenth-century England. In her fictional treatise on Political Economy, Martineau trespasses and hybridizes the rigid borders between public and private spheres, canonical literary genres, different disciplines and discourses. Ella challenges the icon of the powerless, unthinking woman, by proving herself strongminded and independent, a rational economic decision maker, able to voice economic opinions. At the same time, Ella is depicted as an authoritative, motherly self-governing figure who manages selfsufficiently her socially assigned domestic role. The paper considers Martineau as an inclusive, intellectual innovator of nineteenth-century England, who became one of the most celebrated, even if controversial, opinionated women of letters and feminists of the century (Dzelzainis, Kaplan 2010; Peterson 2010; Sanders, Weiner 2017b), able to hybridize the languages of fiction and science (Dalley 2010), and to embody women as economic actors (Bodkin 1999; Dalley 2012). Ella is deemed as a female hybrid identity, a young, authoritative and well-respected matriarch (Heyrendt-Sherman 2019), a revolutionary character who positions herself both as an acknowledged and effective economic actor, and as a symbol of careful autonomous, domestic management.