Cover of the book under review. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
From elegy to postmortem photography and hair jewelry, Victorian responses to death ran the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous — or at least the grotesque. In nineteenth-century novels, death often drives the plot, but profit is never far behind; characters in the lucrative funeral industry even appear, for example, in the memorable funeral scene for Mrs. Joe Gargery in Dickens’s Great Expectations. Jennifer MacLure’s excellent monograph The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction explores the relationship between economics, affect, and death in the nineteenth century, highlighting the ways in which capitalism, as Friedrich Engels suggested, is murder.
The book is divided into an Introduction and four chapters, which proceed chronologically according to publication date of the writings each chapter examines, and ends with an Afterword. In the introduction, MacLure discusses the question of Victorian fiction and the unstable line between killing and allowing someone to die. As MacLure suggests, capitalism kills, "but it does so in a roundabout, elusive way" (3); even outright murder in fiction, she points out, is often done indirectly, as in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. The idea of "letting die" (or laissez mourir) is related to economic laissez faire. MacLure considers the Victorian anxiety about both laissez faire and laissez mourir: an anxiety that can be traced, she suggests, in the extraordinary lengths to which some characters go to save someone’s life, as, for example, with John Barton in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Esther Summerson in Bleak House.
The capitalist, said Adam Smith, "is led by an invisible hand," hence the title of the introduction, "Death by Invisible Hand." Among the issues that MacLure touches on here are poor relief and "The Population Problem." Thomas Malthus thought that the Poor Laws exacerbated poverty "by encouraging procreation among the poor" (MacLure 7). MacLure examines the idea of "population as peril" and "nonintervention" and argues that these are the main causes of "the Victorian necroeconomic imaginary" (9). Her book she hopes will contribute to the body of "new economic criticism," a field that includes scholarly work by Mary Poovey, Catherine Gallagher, Philip Connell, Gordon Bigelow, Donald Winch, and Anna Kornbluh (10). She also wants to consider biopolitics and Victorian fiction, as well as the relationship between "necroeconomics and race (11-12). At the height of the British Empire, under colonialism, MacLure suggests, passive "letting die" becomes active "making die (13).
Chapter 1, "How to Let Die: Malthusian Medicine in Martineau and Marcus," opens with the debate in the press of the 1820s and 30s, including the "Marcus" pamphlets, regarding the rights of the poor (25). MacLure here talks about Harriet Martineau’s devotion to political economy and her difficult if prosperous upbringing in a middle-class household, as well as her increasing deafness (26). MacLure analyses Martineau’s stories in terms of Malthusian ideas. Martineau was against poor relief and argued for a balance of mouths to feed and resources, a balance to be effected by either reducing the number of people or increasing the wealth of the nation. As MacLure eloquently puts it, "According to Martineau, the working class’s only real means of improving their lot is to exist less" (41). For Martineau, middle-class sympathy and not indifference is the problem (36). "Kindness of heart" becomes "an evil to society" (36). MacLure notes the "emotional flatness" of Martineau’s characters (38), possibly due to her insistence on lack of sympathy for the poor.
Chapter 2 is titled "Making Ill: Pathoeconomics in Gaskell’s Industrial Novels," and here sympathy and affect become central to the novel’s mission. MacLure’s goal in this chapter is "to reveal the radical potential of Gaskell’s depiction of sympathy" (53). She argues that in North and South Gaskell shows the process of "making Ill" the workers’ bodies under industrial capitalism (57). She also suggests that "[f]or Gaskell, sympathy is a visceral response felt by one embodied being in the physical presence of another embodied being" (63). It’s an "impulsive sympathy" (67). In North and South, being vulnerable is presented as not a flaw but a strength (67). In both North and South and Mary Barton, bourgeois women supplement the lack of sympathy under capitalism (79). In Mary Barton, working-class characters embody sympathy in a natural way (81): "the pathology lies in capitalism, not sympathy" (85). She argues that Gaskell presents a new kind of economic system, one run by women and based on sympathy rather than the cash nexus (87), "like an ideal socialist state" (88). At the same time, MacLure concedes that "there is nothing instrinsic in women’s heightened sympathy; it is produced, rather, by socioeconomic structures" (88). It would be interesting to compare MacLure’s argument to that of Lisa Surridge’s insightful 2000 article on motherly fathers in Mary Barton. Surridge traces the ways in which many of the male characters in the novel take on maternal and care-giving roles, an aspect of the narrative that complicates the traditional gender binary of the 1830s and 40s.
Moving away from industrial capitalism and its harmful effects on the working class, Chapter 3, "Letting Die Slowly: Necroeconomic Pleasure in Dickens’s Bleak House," examines the "slow violence" which allows people to die from starvation and other forms of deprivation. Here, MacLure discusses the problem of treating people, such as Jo the crossing-sweeper, as disposable, as well as the issues related to biopolitical racism, a term she borrows from Michel Foucault. The novel shows, she argues, the cruel pleasure of philanthropy — needing and enjoying the suffering of the poor in, for example, Mrs. Pardiggle's visit to a brickmaker's cottage (100-101). It also demonstrates middle-class anxieties about being contaminated by the poor, who were seen as vectors of "violence, filth, disease, animality, sexual promiscuity, 'savagery'" (103). In this "society built on imperialism," only "bourgeois morality" can stave off such threats.
Staying with the theme of affect and capital, Chapter 4, "Unfeeling Capitalism, Future and Past: Middlemarch, Felix Holt, and News from Nowhere," examines two novels by George Eliot in terms of the problems of capitalism and feelings. Finishing with News from Nowhere, MacLure notes that she began her book with the pro-capitalist Harriet Martineau and is ending it with the avowedly anti-capitalist William Morris. However, as she suggests, both Martineau and Morris wrote "overtly political fiction," and both have seen their works fade out of the canon in the twenty-first century (141). She argues that Morris’s novel shows that laissez-faire economics does not actually let things be, but rather must intervene in the interests of the marketplace. The emotions that the utopian News from Nowhere evokes are similar to those, she maintains, that Dorothea Brooke, Caleb Garth, and Felix Holt all evince: a desire to work for the well-being of society with no financial motivation.
In a brief Afterword, titled "Our Necromantic Present," MacLure emphasizes the importance of sympathy in our own time and its relation to political and economic movements. She convincingly suggests that Victorian necrocapitalism, as it is explored in the fiction she considers in her book, is not far removed from our world, which, as she says, "increasingly resembles dystopian fiction" (161). As in the nineteenth century, in our time the comfort and wealth of a few nations rests on the global exploitation and pillaging of many other countries that lack the military and especially the economic power of the West. A thoughtful, nuanced book, The Feeling of Letting Die makes a timely contribution to the field of scholarship in Victorian literature and economics. MacLure leads us to think about how we are still letting die in order to succeed in the capitalist 21st century and demonstrates persuasively that Victorian fiction can provoke debate on how we might, as she says, "imagin[e] the world that we might create."
Bibliography
MacLure, Jennifer. The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction. Ohio State University Press, 2023.
Surridge, Lisa. "Working-Class Masculinities in Mary Barton." Victorian Literature and Culture 28.2 (2000): 331–43.
Last modified 25 July 2024