Debating Difference in an Age of Reform: Liberal Praxis and Representation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain
Kohn, Jenny
2019
Abstract
“Debating Difference in an Age of Reform: Liberal Praxis and Representation in mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain” explores the function of difference and the nature of equality in Victorian Britain. Focusing on the 1850s and 1860s, the dissertation offers a distinctive account of liberal thought, organizing, and aesthetics at a key moment of historical transformation. It identifies how the expansion of the citizenry and the public sphere of readers revealed the fact of difference and why difference challenged democratic ideals of equality. The central question is this: how did liberal thinkers, organizers, and writers navigate the contradiction between equality’s unrealized promise and the actually-existing hierarchy of differences in which they lived? Scholarship on Victorian liberalism often prioritizes liberal over liberal action. This dissertation seeks to redress the imbalance by focusing on the strategies and forms of representation that evolved in order to accommodate new sets of people as political actors. The first chapter sets the parameters of liberal thought by presenting an analysis of the way J. S. Mill’s conception of difference informed his political practice. I argue that in his political speeches, “The Negro Question” (1850), On Liberty (1859), and The Subjection of Women (1869) Mill’s empirical uncertainty about the cause of difference – whether it was natural or socially constructed – underpins the liberal equality that he worked to bring about throughout his political career. The second chapter turns to an account of the way that difference structured the organizing work of the feminist collective known as the Langham Place group. My analysis of the group’s letters and articles from their mouthpiece, the English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), shows how the group represented an attempt to expand the democratic public sphere through the production of difference as the basis for forging collective bonds. The third chapter considers the strategies of representation in three novels of reform – George Eliot’s Felix Holt, The Radical (1866), Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks (1866), and Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn (1869). The novels thematize ideas about difference, commonness, and publicity in an age of reform. I argue that the representation of liberal equality they formalized left a legacy that was in many ways more enduring than the liberal action I discuss in Chapters One and Two. The aim of my dissertation is to offer a comprehensive picture of the political claims it was possible to make in response to difference as the basis for and challenge to the liberal public sphere in the mid-nineteenth century. Each chapter provides detailed analysis of the ways in which liberals came to terms with an expanded sense of plurality as the political condition of life, and how they worked to represent and live with the fundamental condition of difference structuring life in common. Ultimately, I argue that the novel offered a unique solution to the problem of how to live with difference because, in formalizing a structure that demands the reader encounter the text as a mass subject, it relied on disidentification and detachment as much as sympathetic identification. By revealing the common project underlying diverse forms of liberal action and representation – political campaigns, activist organizing, and literary works – I therefore show how publics, as politically effective social spaces, engaged in definitional struggles over ways of organizing, representing, and imagining a form of citizenship in its expanded sense.Subjects
Nineteenth-century liberalism cultural history Victorian election novels public sphere theory
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