돌봄 빚의 미로: 『리틀 도릿』이 그리는 확산적 경제공동체와 모성서사의 기만

Abstract

This article examines the emerging peculiarities of mid-nineteenth-century economic communities as depicted in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit by introducing the concept of “care debt.” The novel has often been read as a critique of debt-based finance capitalism, and William Dorrit has been understood as the victim of the “wiles of insolvency” which epitomizes the economic system of the era. I attend to the sense of inadequacy that lingers even after Mr. Dorrit pays off his debt to emphasize the significance of the incomprehensible network of care debt in Little Dorrit. This article defines care debt as the communal anxiety generated by the injustice of failing to acknowledge the care work that sustains communities. Care work in this novel is part and parcel of the monetary economy, and it operates as the unseen layer that enables financial exchanges and other material circulations. In particular, this article points to Victorian expectations of motherhood as the major communal understanding that immediately contributes to obfuscating the economic value of care work. While the norms of motherhood facilitate exploitative practices, care debt continues to accumulate in the narrative and protrudes in the form of interpersonal conflicts. Characters futilely try to pay off the debt or obnoxiously pretend that no such debt exists, but care debt persists as a communal feeling that is to be distinguished from personal ethics. By narrativizing the insolvency via the trope of a mother with a secret, Little Dorrit successfully demonstrates the intimacy between care debt and monetary debt. My analysis of the collective chaos caused by the financial system in Little Dorrit eventually involves pushing against the idea of communities―especially family and country―as coherent, comprehensible units. Care debt operates as a useful critical concept that allows us to understand the expansive nature of communal boundaries which coincides with the historical perplexities of capitalist development in nineteenth-century England.