Reframing the Luddites: Materialist and Idealist Models of Self in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley

Abstract

Early in Charlotte Bront?'s Shirley, heroine Caroline Helstone criti cizes her cousin, mill-owner Robert Moore, for behaving as your living cloth-dressers were all machines like your frames and shears (72). Coming on heels of her declaration to him, there is something wrong in your notions of best means of attaining (72), Caroline's analysis of Robert's faults of manner resonates with larger debate in 1840s over sufficiency of utilitarianism, and materialism more generally, to ensure the greatest happiness for greatest number of British men and women. Central to this debate were materialist and idealist conceptions of individual character and its formation: for materialists, character was at once determined by circumstances and devoid of any metaphysical dimension; for idealists, by contrast, character was product of individual choice and could not be fully understood apart from inef fable spiritual ends. From Caroline's idealist perspective, her cousin's materialist attitude towards his workers he neither expects nor wishes for them to love him signifies screw to be loose some where . . . out of her reach to set it right (73). However, there is a double irony in her critique: first, her disapproval is, itself, registered in mechanistic terms she thinks he has a screw loose; and second, if Robert devoted to his workers even half of fierce protectiveness that he reserves for his grim, metal darlings (384), if, in other words, he treated his workers more like his machines, then Caroline wOuld have significandy less ground for her disapprobation. The vulnerability of Caroline's idealist position to materiahst tropes