Progressing in Harriette Wilson and Harriet Martineau

This chapter analyzes women’s life-writing to trace diverging responses to the rhetorical dilemma posed by the patriarchal sense that a woman’s social and sexual capital declines precipitously with age. Through an unusual comparison between the courtesan Harriette Wilson’s Memoirs (1825) and Harriet Martineau’s serious, canonical Autobiography (1877), the chapter argues that these contrasting texts share an interest in an orality that breaks time into discrete, discontinuous pieces. Whereas Wilson’s Memoirs use cyclical and static temporality to avoid grappling with aging, Martineau’s Autobiography defiantly asserts her personal and professional development, informed by Comtean positivism. Although scholarship has emphasized Martineau’s adoption of a male vision of Bildung, this chapter queries this picture by uncovering how she struggles to narrate individual development, and instead represents her life as radically split into distinct phases.