Supritha Rajan, “The Epistemology of Trust and Realist Effect in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House” (pp. 64–106)
This essay argues that the narrative structure of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–1853), which repeatedly shifts from the omniscient narrator’s skeptical stance to Esther’s trusting disposition, demonstrates how skepticism is ultimately grounded in an epistemology of trust. Trust constitutes a non-skepticist, affective attitude whose certitude in the phenomenal world is not subject to demonstrative proof. The latter model of trust is not only fundamental to epistemology, but also to ethical relations and practical life. The important role that trust plays in everyday life also poses relevance to our understanding of realist representation. Using Bleak House as its novelistic example, this essay considers realism as a mode that achieves its effect by inviting readers to adopt an attitude of trust. Such an account runs counter to traditional epistemologies of realism, which have typically aligned it with post-Cartesian skepticism.
At the heart of Dickens'sDombey and Son (1846–48) is a woman who is both the central problem that the narrative seeks to manage and its solution to that problem. Florence's position as heiress to Dombey and Son enables her entry into the marketplace as an independently wealthy woman who disrupts the patriarchal transmission of property and money. Dombey and Son diverts attention from Florence's position as heiress by providing a sentimental lesson on the economic importance of the domestic woman, who grounds intrinsic value and is essential to the reproduction of the patriarchal family and economy. Dombey's domestic and financial failures, the novel would have us believe, stem from his initial devaluation of Florence and overvaluation of Paul. Hence, at the novel's close, Dombey learns that the foundation of the family and firm is not a son but “a Daughter after all.” Dickens thus presents Florence's intrinsic value and inalienability as the resolution to the very problem of alienability and unstable values that her position as heiress encodes. Yet this lesson regarding Florence's value conceals the novel's central anxiety, what Robert Clark refers to as “the arbitrary taboo on women's participation in the economic order” (73). If the novel accords insubstitutable value to the domestic woman as the keystone of the family and economy, it does so to dramatize the threat posed to patriarchal structures of kinship, property, and capitalist expansion if all women were to enter the marketplace and become, in a sense, heiresses.
This article examines Andrew Lang’s anthropological writings on magic and religion in relation to a broader network of literary and sociological discourses. Lang’s work, along with that of others, highlights the labors nineteenth-century anthropologists expended to segregate magic from science, religion, and utilitarian action in the capitalist public sphere. Despite such efforts at segregation, however, nineteenth-century anthropological writings expose the genealogical continuities between magic, science, religion, and self-interest. These continuities, the essay contends, also surface in anthropology’s sibling discourses: literature and political economy. Lang’s contemporaries, such as H. Rider Haggard and Thomas Hardy, drew on anthropological findings in their fictional representations of magical rites and beliefs either in rural Britain or at the colonial periphery. Magic’s proximity to science, religion, and capitalist self-interest also undergirds Herbert Spencer’s systems theories and reverberates in the political economists that drew on Spencer’s work. The essay thus demonstrates not only how Lang functions as a node within a broad disciplinary network, but also how the concept of magic traverses numerous discursive fields
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