ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the scenarios that Jane Marcet and Harriet Martineau depict both refuse in their literariness to be reduced to the certainties of “laws,” and evoke parallels with the fictionalizing process of the models of political economy. In rejecting women’s invisibility within the practice and discourse of political economy, this passage attempts to correct the SR’s reading of the term “man” in political economic language. George Eliot’s novel registers a response to political economy in women’s writing in the nineteenth century that commonly recurs. The EWJ’s invocation, therefore, of Marcet and Martineau in the mid-nineteenth century was important not only in showing women’s ability to understand political economy and in suggesting its application to women, but also in identifying female writers within the discipline of political economy itself. The laws of political economy must start from somewhere; terms like “worker” must be fixed in order for the processes of the laws to act “universally.”.
