The Feeling of Letting Die

Description

In The Feeling of Letting Die, Jennifer MacLure explores how Victorian novels depict the feelings that both fuel and are produced by an economic system that lets some people die in service of the free market. MacLure argues that Victorian authors present capitalism’s death function as a sticking point, a series of contradictions, and a problem to solve as characters grapple with systems that allow, demand, and cause the deaths of their less fortunate fellows. 

Utilizing Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics, MacLure uses the term “necroeconomics,” positioning Victorian authors—even those who were deeply committed to liberal capitalism—as hyperaware of capitalism’s death function. Examining both canonical and lesser-known works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, William Morris, and George Eliot, The Feeling of Letting Die shows capitalism as not straightforwardly imposed via economic policy but instead as a system functioning through the emotions and desires of the human beings who enact it. In doing so, MacLure reveals how emotion functions as both the legitimating epistemic mode of capitalism and its most salient threat. 

Uses the term “necroeconomics” to conceptualize and explore how Victorian novels depict feelings that both fuel and are produced by an economic system that capitalizes upon death. “In our pandemic present, when marketized states have determined that the premature death of millions is the price of doing business, this book couldn’t be more relevant. MacLure’s analysis of biopolitics highlights the role of affect in capitalism’s cultural history to explain the acceptance (and promotion) of preventable death.” —Emily Steinlight, author of Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life  “Intelligent, well-researched, and situated in the wake of essential critical works of the last decade, The Feeling of Letting Die leaves us with the generally unacknowledged but eminently believable conclusion that the Victorians were as Malthusian as Scrooge before his transformation.” —Audrey Jaffe, author of The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph  Jennifer MacLure is Assistant Professor of English at Kent State University. 

Victorian fiction is haunted by the problem of letting die. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as laissez-faire ideology hardened into economic policy, novelists repeatedly returned to the murky distinction between killing and letting die. Where should the line be drawn, they asked, between outright murder and passive complicity? When Bulstrode, in Middlemarch, discovers that a well-meaning nurse is providing the blackmailer Raffles with the wrong medical treatment, he chooses not to intervene, standing by as she unknowingly hastens Raffles’s death. Dickens’s greedy and irresponsible Skimpole indifferently sells out an ailing Jo for five pounds and contributes to the young boy’s death. Though he never engages in direct violence, Godfrey Cass’s refusal to acknowledge his secret wife Molly leads to her unmourned death by exposure in the snow in Silas Marner. He is followed by a whole spate of Hardy characters—Sergeant Troy, Alec D’Urberville, Michael Henchard, Clym Yeobright—whose actions indirectly lead to the deaths of women they sometimes loved, sometimes despised. The line between “letting die” and killing reads as anxiously unstable in these scenes; the Middlemarch rumor mill interprets Bulstrode as a murderer; Clym proclaims himself the killer of his wife and his mother; in Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth will turn a similar judgment on herself, reading her own hesitation to rescue her abusive husband as murder.

Even outright villains are curiously indirect. Quilp clearly brings about the much-mourned deaths of Nell and her grandfather, but he does so through predatory lending rather than direct violence. The Woman in White’s Sir Percival Glyde goes to absurd lengths to avoid directly murdering his wife Laura for her money; instead, he kidnaps her doppelgänger Anne Catherick, waits for Anne to die, buries her corpse as Laura, gaslights Laura into believing she is actually Anne, and then checks her into an asylum under Anne’s name. Instead of killing the friendless Oliver Twist and claiming the full inheritance, Monks enlists Fagin to turn the child into a criminal so that he will forfeit his claim on his own. On the other side of the coin, guiltless bystanders go to extraordinary lengths to avoid letting others die, even against their own interests and at the risk of their own safety. Walter Hartright makes a desperate attempt to break into a burning church to save a man who is trying to kill him; John Barton pawns his last remaining belongings to help a family he does not even know; Esther Summerson risks her own health to care for Jo. Even the universally despised Rogue Riderhood becomes an object of “extraordinary interest” and keen “anxiety” when on the verge of death; the entire crowd leaps into action around his nearly drowned body, and “everybody present lends a hand, and a heart and soul.”

This trend, I argue, speaks to a particular anxiety about pathological inaction that becomes pressing in the context of Victorian capitalism’s codification of laissez-faire ideology. Even examples that do not seem directly connected to the capitalist marketplace, I suggest, express an anxiety that is at its root economic. The “let alone” capitalism that informed such Victorian economic policy as the New Poor Law of 1834 contains a necroeconomic mandate to let people die in service of market freedom—what I call “death by invisible hand.” This book explores the complicated feelings produced by and circulating around this mandate—the reluctance, fear, sadism, pleasure, sympathy, sadness, guilt, and identification that accompany, motivate, or complicate the act of letting die. Looking closely at these necroeconomic feelings provides insight into how capitalism works with and through feeling—and how the Victorian novel works for and against capitalism.

Victorianists, especially those interested in capitalism and medicine in 19th-century British culture

Acknowledgments

Introduction    Death by Invisible Hand

Chapter 1        How to Let Die: Malthusian Medicine in Martineau and Marcus

Chapter 2        Pathoeconomics and the Radical Potential of Feeling in Gaskell’s Industrial Novels

Chapter 3        Letting Die Slowly: Necroeconomic Pleasure in Dickens’s Bleak House

Chapter 4        Unfeeling Capitalism, Future and Past: Middlemarch, Felix Holt, and News from Nowhere

Afterword       Our Necroeconomic Present

Works Cited

Index

Additional information

Dimensions	1 × 6 × 9 in