Friendship, Not Freedom: Dependent Friends in the Late Eighteenth-Century Novel

Abstract:This article situates itself among recent work that focuses on the friendship plot. The emergence of the friendship plot in eighteenth-century literature can be attributed to moral sense theorist Francis Hutcheson and his followers David Hume and Adam Smith, for whom friendship was essential to strengthening the moral sense of the individual and for creating a moral society. The prevalence of the trope of friendship and its related virtues of loyalty and benevolence in the late eighteenth-century novel is evidence of this influence. Recent work on friendship in the early novel has emphasized the importance of equality in these friendship tropes. This article contends that these novels often instead represent complicated asymmetry within British society through socially dependent protagonists. In reading Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) and the anonymously written The Woman of Colour (1808), this article shows that although the dependent friend protagonist does not act without self-interest, in her ability to elicit sympathy and forge friendships with characters in more powerful positions, she provides opportunities to unravel gender and racial prejudices.