Novel Addiction: Consuming Popular Novels in Eighteenth-Century Britain By
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Novel Addiction: Consuming Popular Novels in Eighteenth-century Britain by Jayoung Min Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Charlotte Sussman, Supervisor ___________________________ Srinivas Aravamudan ___________________________ Nancy Armstrong ___________________________ Kathy Psomiades Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 ABSTRACT Novel Addiction: Consuming Popular Novels in Eighteenth-century Britain by Jayoung Min Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Charlotte Sussman, Supervisor ___________________________ Srinivas Aravamudan ___________________________ Nancy Armstrong ___________________________ Kathy Psomiades An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 Copyright by Jayoung Min 2011 ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the ways in which British popular novels of the eighteenth century functioned as commodities. “Novel Addiction”, the title of this dissertation has a double meaning: Addiction was a new conceptual framework developed during the eighteenth century in order to manage the increasing anxiety brought upon the culture of consumption, and the novel, one of the most popular commodities of the same period, was addictive. Both as successful commodities and efficient cultural agents, popular novels that were categorized as the sentimental or the gothic participated in the process of creating and disseminating models of addiction that warranted perpetual discipline. However, this discipline does not aim at preventing or eliminating addiction. It rather manages addiction as “habit” in a way that guarantees proliferation of the market economy. By employing the framework of addiction, I intend to reconfigure the role of the novel in the construction of individual and collective models of consumption-oriented subjectivity. The first chapter begins with Eliza Haywood’s Present for Women Addicted to Drinking where the author proposes novel-reading as the best cure for alcohol addiction, which allows me to explore a parallel between the phenomenon called the “gin craze” and the proliferation of print commodities. The second and third chapter discuss the sentimental novel and the gothic novel respectively focusing on the characteristics of each genre that make them addictive. The fourth and final chapter discusses Jane iv Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, which address and attempt to manage “novel addiction,” a problem posed by the popular novels of her contemporaries. v CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………..iv LIST of FIGURES…………………………………………………………….………..viii INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………..…1 The Novel as Commodity, or “Popular Novels” Addiction Novel Addiction CHAPTER ONE: Gin and the Novel………………………………………..…..………25 Consuming Bodies The Gin Craze Consuming Words Addiction and Its Antidote CHAPTER TWO: Sympathetic Consumption and the Sentimental Novel…………..…67 Sentimental Objects and Sympathetic Consumption Consumed by Sentiments Proper and Proprietary Sympathy Ambivalence of the Sentimental Novel CHAPTER THREE: Circulating the Gothic……………………………..……………..102 Gothic Commodity The Monstrous Body Gothic Habit, Gothic Home Inhabiting the Monstrous CHAPTER FOUR: The Novel that is New……………………………………….……136 vi “Only of Novels”: Reality That Addicts “The Common Walks of Life”: Reality That Cures Sympathy for the New Novel REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………171 BIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………..…187 vii LIST of FIGURES Figure 1 “Beer Street” …………………………………………………………………..47 Figure 2 “Gin Lane” …………………………………………..…………………………48 viii Introduction When the word was introduced to English during the seventeenth century, “Addiction” was used as a legal term indicating a formal delivery of a property to an individual. By the eighteenth century, the meaning of the word had gradually changed. In the world governed by commerce, addiction came to signify a state of subjection and attachment to commodities. Alexander Pope, in his translation of Homer’s Iliad (1715), describes Paris as “[the author] makes him [Paris] have a Taste and Addiction to curious Works of all sorts” (121). These “curious Works” seduced people in a way that might endanger the world as the golden apple destroyed Troy. Among them was the novel, one of the most successful commodities that made the printing industries flourish. “Novel Addiction”, the title of this dissertation has a double meaning: Addiction was a new 1 conceptual framework developed during the eighteenth century, and the novel, one of the most popular commodities of the same period, was addictive. This dissertation explores eighteenth-century British popular novels and the form of modern subjectivity associated with this newly emerging literary commodity. Both as successful commodities and efficient cultural agents, popular novels participated in the process of creating and disseminating models of addiction that warranted perpetual discipline. However, this discipline does not aim at preventing or eliminating addiction. It rather manages addiction as “habit” in a way that guarantees proliferation of the market economy. By employing the framework of addiction, I intend to reconfigure the role played by the novel in the construction of individual and collective models of consumption-oriented subjectivity. In this introduction, I work through the two separate conceptual domains of “the novel” and “addiction” to help clarify how this dissertation will discuss the “novel addiction” in the following chapters. The Novel as Commodity, or “Popular Novels” The answer to the question “what was the novel” and “when it arose” varies depending on the institutions within which the answer is produced. Homer Brown maintains in Institutions of the English Novel that a genealogy of the novel that points at one certain “rise” is always imagined retrospectively, legitimizing and being legitimized 2 by later institutions within which the novel has already gained a certain status. 1 There exists an interesting discrepancy between the qualitative approach that views the novel as literature and the quantative approach that treats the novel as commodity of the book trade when it comes to describe the rise of the novel. The novels that gained prominence as commodity remain obscure in the rise narratives produced in the discipline of literature because the value of those commercially successful novels is incommensurate with the valorization system established in the field of literary studies. Traditionally, the “rise of the novel” represents a genealogy created in the discipline of literature that considers the novel as a form of art availing itself of distinctive uses of language, genre conventions, imaginative traditions and discursive power along with other forms of literature. For formalists like Northrop Frye, the novel emerges as a new form in reaction to other literary forms that are either dominant or residual at the time it constitutes itself as a genre. For Ian Watt, who coined the term “the rise of the novel,” the novel is a work of literature produced as a result of a series of historical changes, including changes in the mode of production, ways of living and in philosophical notions of the human subject. Watt explains the “formal” change of the novel initiated by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson as a register of 1 During the last two decades, the selective processes of British literature canonization, including various “rise” discourses of the novel, have been widely studied. Homer Brown’s Institutions of the English Novel from Defoe to Scott (1997), John Guillory’s Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993) and Cultural Institutions of the Novel edited by Deidre Lynch and William Warner (1996) addressed various issues of canon formation in context of British imperialism, American academic institutionalization, and gender politics. 3 social change in the early to mid-eighteenth century. In addition to his emphasis on the historical specificity of the literary form, Watt provides a new way of understanding the “rise” of a literary form in the context of its discursive power. In his view, the novel perpetuates the ideology of capitalism and Puritanism. Watt’s construction of the rise of the novel is thus significant in that the “rise” has to be understood not only by exploring what the novel is but also by investigating what the novel does . Since Ian Watt’s pioneering work on the rise of the novel, the genre has often been understood and studied as a historically progressive, or even evolutionary narrative that began with specific origins and has developed over time to become the genre we now recognize as the novel. The following studies on the novel have questioned and revised various aspects of Watt’s historicization of the novel. One of the most significant revisionist approaches comes from Michael McKeon’s attempt to reframe the “origin” as a moment of struggle (instead of a moment of singular and homogeneous ideology as Watt argues). In The Origin of the English Novel 1600-1740 (1987), McKeon maintains that the novel is a site within which the constant struggles between old and new epistemologies are made manifest.