“The Spirit of Contradiction”: Ownership and Irony in Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting

• Published in: Eighteenth-century fiction 2023-07, Vol.35 (3), p.355-374
• Main Author: Cortes, Phillip James Martinez
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Emotions; Essays; Ideology; Ownership; Social criticism & satire
• ISSN: 0840-6286; 1911-0243
• DOI: 10.3138/ecf.35.3.355

Jane Collier's An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) satirizes British law's ideology of absolute property, which prescribes that an owner holds dominion over their property and implicitly dispossesses others of any right to this owner's property. Her satire invites scrutiny into how the eighteenth-century British household re-encodes this absolutist ideology's dispossession of married women, hired servants, and unmarried dependents. Collier demonstrates that this absolutism is exclusively ironic through its privileging of husbands and employers while depriving the proprietary agency of legally disadvantaged persons. In response to this inequity, she describes scenes where married women and servants emotionally torment others, so she can insinuate that this abuse is an inclusive mode of irony, wherein to reclaim the agency of ownership they ironically both revel in and resist absolute property's dispossessive apparatus. This article argues that Collier imagines ironic torment as an affective property in which tormenters' malicious emotions can own and undermine absolutist sovereigns.