From contact to contract: Colonial enclosure and the gendering of civil identity in eighteenth-century political literature [microform]
- Bib ID:
- 3283568
- Format:
- Book and Microform
- Author:
- Neill, Anna Linda Jane
- Description:
- 266 p.
- Summary:
-
This dissertation examines issues of gender and colonialism in eighteenth-century contract theory, and their impact on the rise of the novel. I begin by identifying how the liberal principles of contract--the rights to liberty, equality, and property--depend on the domination and subordination of those subjects they designate as "non-civil." In the seventeenth-century dismantling of monarchal absolutism and the relocation of sovereign authority in the "people," I argue, two other transformations occur: patriarchal power is secured in the bourgeois domestic sphere (where male children must be educated into civil behaviour); and autochtonous, nonpropertied peoples are constructed as "savages" and enemies to the principles of civil justice. Patriarchal power and colonial appropriation, I suggest, are linked in contract theory's disciplining of "pre-civil" subjects out of their "savage" habits.
My contention here is that liberal political theory introduces the figure of "savage" man into political history in order to establish a connection between civil liberty and the idea of "civilization." The liberal theory of progress is thus developed through philosophical anthropology. Later in the century Rousseau gives a different accent to theories of savage culture by arguing that civilized refinement in fact constitutes a fall into "barbarism." Like Locke, however, Rousseau situates the origins of civil culture in both the appropriation of land and the maintenance of paternal authority in the home. The eighteenth-century novel, I argue, "rises" partly in response to this constructed savage "other" of contractual community. Domestic fiction explores, and finally confirms the need for patriarchal authority in the home in order to ensure the protection of domestic virtue from savage appetite.
The novels I examine here show how any attempt to extend civil rights to subordinate members of the household will expose the latter to the violence of seducers, tyrants and savages--"non-civil" figures which become substitutable in these texts. Virtue is protected by absolute patriarchal law; liberty, equality and property--shared between the male heads of families--are secured by contract. The novel confirms this distinction in scenes of colonial settlement which link the preservation of female virtue to the enclosure of a savage wilderness.
- Notes:
-
- (UnM)AAI9542477
- Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-08, Section: A, page: 3140.
- Thesis (Ph.D.)--Cornell University, 1995.
- Reproduction:
- Microfiche. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International.
- Subject:
- Other authors/contributors:
- Cornell University
- Copyright:
-
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- Material type:
- Literary Dramatic Musical
- Published status:
- Unpublished
- Creation date:
- 1995
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