Redeeming economics: Contract and sacrifice in British literature, 1794--1857

This project examines the nature of contractual obligation in Romantic and Victorian culture, and its capacity for economic and moral redemption, through the overlapping discourses of Christian political economy and Anglicanism. It does so by investigating the ways in which nineteenth-century British literature recognizes and challenges these interrelated discourses from 1794-1857, a period that saw the growing popularity of this economic view and the rise of evangelical thought within the established Church. I focus on the ways in which these discourses mutually authorize each other by borrowing rhetorical habits. The implicit ideological underpinnings of this mirrored syntax compose a contractual structure that, while promising redemption, requires inequitable sacrifice. This economic-moral view employs the rhetoric of contract to explain the status quo as natural order, but in doing so obfuscates material hardship and moral suffering. By anticipating the significance of political economy and religion in literature, my project illuminates the complex discursive function of redemption as contract in nineteenth-century British culture.; My argument concerns the inequities that such contracts mask, but that literary works disclose and render problematic. These inequities reside in the false promise that such contracts benefit all parties. Literature unmasks the lie of this promise through the self-sacrificing individual who does not find personal redemption, or who does so only by hiding troubling social costs. I argue that T.R. Malthus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population , articulates what I call the "redemptive contract," which recasts economic hardship as a moral debt repaid by suffering. I locate literature's challenge to this discourse in its adoption and interrogation of this promissory framework in selections by William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti. In nineteenth-century literary culture, female labor and sacrifice redeem not the individual woman, but rather the authority of economics and religion by masking their social costs. Critical attention to female sacrifice in this period has yet to consider this shared economic-religious discourse that fuels contractual frameworks. Literature uncovers the hidden role woman plays in performing or disrupting the contracts that establish the authority of moral and financial culture.