The poetics and ethics of things: Sympathetic property relations in "Silas Marner", "Romola", and "The Moonstone"

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Blumberg, Ilana Miryam.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature.

Irish literature.

British literature.

0593.

Local Subjects:

0593.

Physical Description:

203 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 62-02A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

This dissertation analyzes the literary responses of two novelists to the ethical challenges of capitalist exchange at a critical mid-Victorian moment of increased production and consumption. The disappearance of a precious object and the transformation of its value into a symbolic form mark the three novels of this study: George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) and Romola (1863), and Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868). Charting two histories simultaneously, the novels describe both the development of sympathy in individual lives and the evolution of industrial capitalism in the West. These two narrative lines coincide in dramatic moments of theft, when the literal "abstraction" of property and its replacement in changed form come to express the historical move from more concrete to more abstract forms of value. Relatively scarce gold coins yield to easily generated paper money; manuscripts become mass-produced texts; a unique gem is replaced by a collectively composed history of the gem.

In each case, the unique fetish item that spawns contention and competition is replaced by multiple, identical instances of representational value. These latter symbolic forms become characterized as sympathetic forms in their capacity to be multiplied and disseminated among large groups of people rather than being hoarded by private owners. The traumatic loss of hallowed, individualized things is thus more than compensated for by the transmutation of their value into shareable, material form and an excess or surplus form of immaterial, sympathetic value. In their suggestion that technologies associated with capitalism can foster, not hinder, sympathetic human relations, these novels temper their own nostalgia for a vanishing social order. Simultaneously, they challenge Victorian and contemporary associations of capitalism with egoism, alienation, and a driving desire to secure one's own possessions.

Notes:

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 62-02, Section: A, page: 0581.

Supervisor: Nina Auerbach.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 2001.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

ISBN:

9780493125176

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.