From Status to Contract: Domesticating Modernity in Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss and Dracula
dc.contributor.author | Foreman, Violeta | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2011-04-04T16:04:43Z | |
dc.date.available | 2011-04-04T16:04:43Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2011-04-04 | |
dc.department | English | |
dc.description.abstract | In England, the nineteenth-century was a time of change. The social developments instigated by the French Revolution in France were making way across the channel, intensified by the technological innovation generated by the Industrial Revolution. As social hierarchies were altered by the rise of the middle class, so too was political organization disturbed with the passage of the Great Reform act of 1832. The final transition to a constitutional monarchy at home, together with the fall of the ancient Spanish, Chinese, Holy Roman, Portuguese and Mughal empires abroad, made the period a time of unprecedented and fundamental change. Modernity, with a unique concentration on the present rather than the glorification of the past found in classicism or romanticism, would become the measure of social life. While the principles that would define modernism were evolving, as Bram Stoker notes, “the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.” The literature of the time reflected the transitional phase within the realism of the newly popular medium – the novel. Exploring the role of self and society, the novel, with the genre of realism as its distinguishing feature, allowed for a theoretic space in which social change could be understood and mastered. With antecedents in autobiographic and epistolary works, the novel offered an intimate and ‘real’ microcosm of the contemporary social landscape, contributing new, or literally novel, case studies that reflect how individuals could, and did, come to terms with modernity.
Literary critics often use twentieth-century theories of social or psychological development to explicate character motivations or plot progression in the nineteenth-century. Yet, would not such analysis be more fruitful if the works were read in context of Victorian theory that is able to offer a glimpse into how Victorians themselves understood their relation to history and their role in society? To capture this very notion I will turn to the Victorian comparative jurist and historian Sir Henry Maine and his book Ancient Law (1861), which will provide the theoretical framework to my analysis. Henry Maine is pertinent to this study because his legal theories reveal how writers of the period theorized the emergence of modernity. The novels I have chosen precede, are concurrent with, and follow the publication of Maine’s work, so that the impact and progression of social development can be perceived over the span of the century. It is known that George Eliot read Maine’s work and thus his influence can be more directly surmised in The Mill on the Floss. By the time Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897, Maine’s theories were ubiquitous and although it is unknown whether the author encountered Maine’s work personally, the ideas put forth in Ancient Law would inevitably have influenced Stoker via popular culture. In the case of Emily Brontë, however, Wuthering Heights predates the insight offered by Maine, but in some ways it follows Maine’s thesis. The work of both authors can be seen as a response to the issues of 1840s-1850s. The move from status to contract that Maine identified, was not isolated to the time of his publication, but was the impetus behind the French Revolution, and the ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité that were expressed almost a century earlier. While Emily Brontë, unlike George Eliot, would not have read Maine’s work, the social changes later identified by Maine could not have escaped her. Wuthering Heights explores concepts later solidified in Ancient Law and thus Maine’s theory is critical in explicating the novel.
The achievement of Henry Maine is perhaps best summarized by John Hartman Morgan who introduced Ancient Law with the following lines:
Published in 1861, it immediately took rank as a classic, and its epoch-making influence may not unfitly be compared to that exercised by Darwin's Origin of Species. The revolution effected by the latter in the study of biology was hardly more remarkable than that effected by Maine’s brilliant treatise in the study of early institutions. | |
dc.identifier.uri | ||
dc.language.iso | en_US | |
dc.subject | Henry Maine | |
dc.subject | Wuthering Heights | |
dc.subject | The Mill on the Floss | |
dc.subject | Dracula | |
dc.subject | Emily Bronte | |
dc.subject | George Eliot | |
dc.subject | bram stoker | |
dc.subject | Contract | |
dc.subject | Status | |
dc.subject | consanguinity | |
dc.subject | Modernity | |
dc.subject | ancient law | |
dc.subject | Family | |
dc.subject | individual | |
dc.title | From Status to Contract: Domesticating Modernity in Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss and Dracula | |
dc.type | Honors thesis |
Files
Original bundle
- Name:
- Final Thesis (combined).pdf
- Size:
- 693.62 KB
- Format:
- Adobe Portable Document Format
- Description:
- Honors Thesis