Economics and Ethics in the Victorian Novel

Abstract

BLUMBERG, ILANA M. Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2013. 260 pp. $69.95 hardcover. KREISEL, DEANNA K. Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in Eliot and Hardy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. 309 pp. $65.00 hardcover. SIEGEL, DANIEL. Charity and Condescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2012. 209 pp. $49.95 hardcover. Despite the significant body of dedicated to economics and the history of the novel, there is still much work to be done exploring the dense interconnections between emerging capitalism and Victorian literature. Each of the three monographs that are the subject of this review offers original and important contributions to this critical terrain. All three explore how literary texts negotiate and narrativize complex ideas about economic structures and relationships. Although their theoretical commitments vary--theological and historicist for Blumberg, structuralist for Siegel, psychoanalytic and narratological for Kreisel--each is committed to practices of historicized interpretation, predicated on the assumption that literature contains, as Kreisel puts it, textual symptoms of its cultural and discursive context (15). Thus close textual readings illuminate how self-sacrifice shifts in the nineteenth century from a dominant cultural value to an ambivalent, morally ambiguous one (Blumberg); how condescension begins to take on its modern connotations as a patronizing power play that asserts rather than relinquishes superiority (Siegel); and how fears about the new capitalist system are embodied in novelistic images of feminized sexuality (Kreisel). In Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels, liana Blumberg argues that mid-century Victorians were faced with two competing ideologies--the of self-sacrifice enshrined through Christian theology and the ideal of self-interest promoted by the new capitalist order. The novelistic response, Blumberg argues, was a new ethical realism that incorporated self-interest and sacrifice, a negotiated truce between what Herbert Spencer would call a proper altruism and a reasonable (2). In wide-ranging readings of Charlotte Mary Yonge, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Augusta Ward, Blumberg explores how mid-century novelists developed various iterations of an ethic of mutual benefit (18), a practicable ethics that allowed authors to navigate the new economic realities of capitalism without eschewing the basic value of social generosity. For example, Adam Bede rejects unreasonable guilt and suggests that measured personal benefit is justifiable, in a world where others will continue to suffer (28). Looking back towards the first half of the century, Blumberg argues that the sensibility was dominant, promoted not only by Christian sermons and tracts but also bestselling novels and poetry, published eulogies and biographies of great men and women, accounts of war and empire, self-help manuals and housekeeping guides, treatises of political economy, the history of art, and literary criticism (3). Victorian Sacrifice does a particularly admirable job surveying the religious context of the mid-nineteenth century. The ethics of sacrifice were evident both in the dominance of Atonement theology--the emphasis on Christ's sacrifice to save humanity from their sins--and the pervasive, even ubiquitous, emphasis on personal sacrifice in imitation of Christ. As Blumberg makes a point of noting, even nonbelievers of the period were immersed in Christian ideology and often accepted the Christian value of sacrifice. She reads the Victorian ideology of duty, both Christian and secularized, as an extension of the sacrificial ideal, and describes how many of the new humanists adopted a renunciatory imperative (9) that read any taint of egoism as fundamentally incompatible with the social of altruism. …