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- Title
The Authoritative Medium: George Eliot, Ruin, and the Rationalized Market.
- Authors
Hunt, Aeron
- Abstract
This essay analyses the competing dynamics that shaped the formation of market relations in mid-nineteenth-century Britain: abstraction and rationalization, on the one hand, and embeddedness and personalism, on the other. It takes as its central case the mid-century debates over bankruptcy reform, focusing in particular on two textual representations of ‘ruin’: the system of certificates classifying bankrupts according to their culpability of character, established in 1849 and abolished in 1861; and Eliot's 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss, with its account of financial and sexual ruin. I argue that the debates surrounding the character certificates' intervention in market relations, and Eliot's explorations of abstract and embedded or sympathetic modes of knowledge were part of a larger concern to negotiate the tensions produced by the contemporary impulse toward market rationalization. Eliot's mode of omniscient narration – her construction of a simultaneously interested and disinterested, authoritative and sympathetic narrative voice – represented, I suggest, a novelistic instance of a broader cultural fantasy that an approach to character representation could be found that would mediate the changing marketplace. At the same time, her narration of the story of debt through familial and sexualized representations highlights the way that the personal continued to pose a challenge to the establishment of market rationality. However, despite the generic distinctions that can be traced, I argue that their shared interest in character provides grounds for the project of reading across genres, and suggest that the cultural history of the Victorian credit economy requires attention to what different genres have in common, as much as how they have diverged.
- Subjects
UNITED Kingdom; MILL on the Floss, The (Book : Eliot); ELIOT, George, 1819-1880; BANKRUPTCY; LAW reform; 19TH century English literature; LITERARY criticism; LITERATURE &; society
- Publication
Journal of Victorian Culture, 2012, Vol 17, Issue 2, p164
- ISSN
1355-5502
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.1080/13555502.2012.670370