The economy of jealousy in nineteenth-century British literature

Martin J Fashbaugh, Purdue University

Abstract

Although some critics have acknowledged the important role jealousy plays in narrative dynamics, jealousy’s specific function in facilitating the interplay between the genres of fiction and poetry has been left unexamined. A study of jealousy in nineteenth-century British literature is particularly important, I argue, because of the various ways in which both poets and novelists benefited from making it a featured emotion in their work. My fundamental claim is that the way poets and novelists use jealousy—or, in the case of Romantic lyric poetry, ignore it—says a lot about their attitudes toward narrative and their relationship with the literary marketplace. That marketplace was founded on the principle of competition, and jealousy and envy are important emotional components to facilitating and sustaining the struggle for economic and cultural capital. In fact, we can view the market itself as a textual narrative of competing authorial rivals for objects of desire that signify economic and political gain. It is the triangular relationship between a subject, object, and rival that organizes the literary market and that—as René Girard has argued—is the essential structure constituting fictional discourse. While this triangular structure has always been a prominent fixture in narrative, by the nineteenth-century authors were much more inclined than their predecessors to pay attention to the actual effect that triangular rivalry was having on the characters within a narrative poem or novel. This shift of concentration to the relationship between a character’s internal and external life was a result of the author being torn between his or her own creative instincts, on the one hand, and consumer demand, on the other. The conflict was born out of the opposing forces of individualism and determinism, a dichotomy on which capitalism is dependent. This conflict frequently manifested itself in poems and novels that featured the dynamic interplay between lyrical and narrative discourse.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Felluga, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Modern literature|British and Irish literature

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