Moral Management: Spaces of Domestication in Jane Eyre and I Walked with a Zombie
“Moral Management” reads Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) alongside Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943). The chapter begins by contextualizing Jane’s bildungsroman within agrarian capitalism’s connection between land improvements and moral
- PDF / 405,240 Bytes
- 48 Pages / 419.528 x 595.276 pts Page_size
- 5 Downloads / 155 Views
pite their differences, Emma, Bride and Prejudice, and Aisha all register the centrality of time to the conceptualization of improvement in the nineteenth century and its afterlife as development in the twenty-first century. Space, however, provided an equally important conceptual component to Romantic and Victorian improvement ideology. As much as improvement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries relied on a belief in the future as necessarily brighter than the present and the past, it also relied on an understanding of space as limited and bounded. Improvement conceived in temporal terms evinced an optimism about what the most “forward” societies of the world could achieve in all areas of human experience. But improvement conceived in spatial terms was decidedly more measured in scope and expectation: if improvement’s temporality defined a process by which the limitations of the present would be transcended in the future, the spatial conception of improvement relied on a process of contraction, confinement, and the establishment of boundaries that marked off an “inside” of improved space from an “outside” of savagery, waste, and threat. The process of land improvements described by Austen at the turn of the nineteenth century sought to increase the value of private property by landscape design and agricultural modernization that turned waste land into productive land yielding valuable commodities. Such improvements would not have been possible without the land marked out for improvements having first been enclosed, or turned from common fields into © The Author(s) 2020 V. Y. Kao, Postcolonial Screen Adaptation and the British Novel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54580-2_3
91
92
V. Y. KAO
private property. The enclosure movement began informally in the medieval and early modern periods throughout the English countryside and culminated in formal Parliamentary Acts of Enclosure, hundreds of which were passed throughout the eighteenth century. The Acts made what had been a social trend into a fact of law, dispossessing the poor and un-landed of their communal rights to use common and waste lands and open field farms by consolidating such land for the sole use of a single property owner and his descendants. During the Napoleonic Wars, the enclosures of the English countryside represented one manifestation of a national preoccupation—and indeed, a national policy—of contraction and inward withdrawal in the face of international pressures. Colin Winborn’s (2004) study of Austen and George Crabbe argues that the authors’ formal concerns with “spatial economy” reflect the ways in which the Napoleonic trade embargo (1806–1812) invoked a national consciousness about the need to turn England’s limited resources “to the best possible account” (p. 1).1 Winborn argues that Austen and Crabbe saw the process of contraction as necessary and beneficial to the wartime English economy and to literary form: Crabbe’s couplet and Austen’s economic prose reflect the ways in which a lack of freedom, movement, and
Data Loading...
