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This essay examines the theory of leisure that Samuel Johnson presents in his Idler series and that Jane Austen engages in her novel Mansfield Park. Just as productivity and vigilance are becoming unassailable values, Johnson and Austen publish popular works designed to insert breaks into the culture of ceaseless striving. Their theory of leisure revalues idling as a state of beneficial, albeit transient, mindlessness and develops forms of representation that, instead of cultivating an edifying point of view—of refined knowledge, judgment, or feeling—promotes an occasional letting go. Johnson uses the proliferation and Austen the suspension of points of view to defend the value of reading materials that solicit relaxation and afford cheap pleasures for the many, or at least the many more. Both the Idler and Mansfield Park advocate for the redistribution of leisure in time rather than across classes of persons, thus transforming idling from a characterological deficiency into a periodic respite that is necessary for all and that all are entitled to.
This essay examines the theory of leisure that Samuel Johnson presents in his Idler series and that Jane Austen engages in her novel Mansfield Park. Just as productivity and vigilance are becoming unassailable values, Johnson and Austen publish popular works designed to insert breaks into the culture of ceaseless striving. Their theory of leisure revalues idling as a state of beneficial, albeit transient, mindlessness and develops forms of representation that, instead of cultivating an edifying point of view—of refined knowledge, judgment, or feeling—promotes an occasional letting go. Johnson uses the proliferation and Austen the suspension of points of view to defend the value of reading materials that solicit relaxation and afford cheap pleasures for the many, or at least the many more. Both the Idler and Mansfield Park advocate for the redistribution of leisure in time rather than across classes of persons, thus transforming idling from a characterological deficiency into a periodic respite that is necessary for all and that all are entitled to.
This essay identifies symptoms of the historical emergence of generalized scarcity in Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, which grants scarcity's ruthless logic a primary narrative function under the aesthetic cover of suspense. Radcliffe's novels generate occult phenomenologies of scarcity, which manifest as affect, epistemic structure, economic process, social relations, and transcendent force or metaphysic (both natural and supernatural). Suspense replicates the social operation of generalized scarcity by carrying us from one particular “conflict of choice” to the next, keeping a veil over the governing logic that conditions the whole process. If we treat crises as unpredictable and singular events rather than effects of identifiable systems, we avoid reckoning with capitalism's normalization of continual disruption and reorganization, what Marx called its “constant revolutionising of production, [and] uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions.” The scarcity-inflected narrative apparatus privileges personal volition—individual choices that lead to specific outcomes—over collective or systemic determinations, a distinction key to the coercive social power of scarcity. It is not just Radcliffean gothic but narrative in general that comes under the sway of this logic during the last decade of the eighteenth century.
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