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Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Ann Louise Kibbie
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Abstract

Historians and literary critics alike have emphasized the obsolescence of the antiusury doctrine in the transition in England from a precapitalist to a capitalist society. Instead of viewing the scholastic opposition to usury solely as an impediment to the development of a capitalist ethos, this essay stresses the continuing relevance of the antiusury tradition to an evolving theory of capital increase in the early eighteenth century. Moll Flanders and Roxana are the central texts for a discussion of how the analogies between monetary and biological generation that the antiusury writers developed to regulate capital increase provide the foundation for the naturalization of capital, for the transformation of capitalism from an external to an internal economy. At the center of this metamorphosis is the figure of the woman, whose body becomes the body of capital.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 110 , Issue 5 , October 1995 , pp. 1023 - 1034
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1995

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