“Slave(s) of desire”: Representations of the emergent working classes in British Romantic prose

Hilary N Fezzey, Purdue University

Abstract

My dissertation examines the huge outpouring of writing about the lower ranks of society in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century. It makes a significant scholarly contribution because few studies offer in-depth theoretical analyses of the prose written by and about the lower orders of this period. Writers perceived them as a potential political threat due to the revolutionary climate of this moment and the unprecedented growth in population that occurred disproportionately among laborers. I argue that prose writers of this time, including those of the burgeoning working classes themselves, used English, middle-class gender and sexual norms as their model in representing members of the nascent proletariat. This espousing of a middle-class perspective across class lines prevented a working-class subjectivity from emerging. The important changes being enacted in the administration of the poor at this time establishes population as the most fitting debate in which to analyze this problematic. I draw on Michel Foucault's concept of biopower and his late writings on governmentality in order to connect the policing of the social orders and the transition from the community-based to the centrally administered Poor Laws with the highly publicized population debate. I begin by offering a nuanced reading of working-class radical reformer Francis Place's surprising endorsement of bourgeois sexual norms in Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population (1822) and his Autobiography. Place's position in the population debate is particularly significant due to his fluid social position as a tailor. His early days as a breeches-maker made it difficult for him to raise fifteen children but the social mobility he experienced as a master tailor afforded him middle-class sponsorship and political agency. I continue my analysis of the sexuality of the emergent working classes with Anna St. Ives (1792), one of the first Jacobin novels by Thomas Holcroft, an activist and shoemaker. Holcroft's orthodox representations of male English and Irish heterosexuality demonstrate the ideological limitations of Jacobin sexual politics. However, his edifying depiction of male and female homosocial bonding can be read as a counter-response to the Sex Panic of the 1790s. I then demonstrate that scholars need to analyze Amelia Opie's character, Savanna, in Adeline Mowbray (1804) as a slave-servant. In analyzing the character of Savanna in terms of her race and social status, I aim to complicate the equation of race and slavery. Finally, I show how the social and sexual agency of laborers, sailors, and slaves are linked in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), Sir Charles William Pasley's Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire (1810), and Robert Wedderburn's radical periodical, Axe Laid to the Root (1817). Wedderburn draws parallels between the chattel slavery he witnessed his mother and grandmother endure in Jamaica and the wage slavery he experienced in Britain as a sailor and a tailor.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Friedman, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature

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