Jude the Obscure

Is a really miserable novel, but it's bringing into focus for me how excited the nineteenth-century British novel got about marriage. If the eighteenth century was about how patriarchal family authority will kill you, the nineteenth is about how legally proscribed heterosexuality will probably kill you. (The early nineteenth century, meanwhile—which I'm representing with Waverley and Persuasion—is about the individual negotiating between family and marriage.) There are a lot of economic facts, a lot of details about how to live and where and when, and a sort of grudging acknowledgment that, in the end, getting married and having babies is probably the better option (even though you'll end up hating your spouse and not having enough money for the babies), because single you'll die of loneliness or starvation or being manipulated by more powerful people. So David Copperfield has a terrible first marriage (his wife spends most of their time together dying), Cranford is about how difficult it is for single women to support themselves, Villette is about how Lucy Snowe only wants to marry so she can be a widow, Barchester Tower has a whole catalogue of henpecked husbands and wicked wives (although the Stanhope children might offer a more cheerful non-heteronormative model of adult sexuality, the novel doesn't like them at all), few of the couples in Middlemarch have anyone's idea of a happy marriage (except Will and Dorothea at the end, I guess, and Fred and Mary, except it takes them all a long time and a lot of pain to get there), and Jude—well, Jude is just about misery. By Jude, too, the novel has gotten much more explicit about how terrible the idea of marriage is, how it'll ruin everyone's life, how heterosexuality is dreadful, and how it's also necessary because single women are absolutely fucked. What Maisie Knew is very much anti-marriage, too—the only relationships that novel likes are the completely non-heteronormative ones (Masie's love for her step-parents, her governess's love for her, and for her step-father).

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is my only nineteenth-century British novel that isn't explicitly about marriage, unless Jekyll/Hyde were a sort of queered marriage—in which case it does work as a novel about marriage because, just like the century's other anti-marriage novels, the pair start by making each other miserable and end in a double murder/suicide. Which is essentially, says Hardy, what getting married is about in the first place.

(Helpfully for my theory, The House of the Seven Gables doesn't have much to say about marriage, making it distinctly un-British. Its sense of threat is located around 18th-century-style family-paranoia issues—although it gets over these in the end by making the last descendants of Maule and Pyncheon marry each other—which is nice, I guess? It's a very hopeful novel, anyway.)

Sugar

Here's a list of novels I've been reading that are interested in talking about enslavement:

1) Robinson Crusoe—Crusoe is a slave in North Africa for a while (where he's in charge of catching fish for his master, but then he runs away). He makes his original £200 trading in slaves, then runs his own sugar plantation in Brazil for a while. Even on his deserted island, sugar follows him—he's delighted to find some of it, and some flour, in the last store of provisions he takes off the deserted boat before it breaks up and sinks.

2) The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph—At the end, Sidney's mystery cousin, the one who comes back pretending to be poor and needing charity so he can find which relative is worthy to bestow his fortune on, is fantastically wealthy because he's returned from the Caribbean. One can only assume that what he's been doing there to make so much money is selling and buying sugar and slaves.

3) The Sentimental Journey—Sterne is both more oblique and more obvious. The overt context of the little caged starling that was trained to say "I can't get out! I can't get out!" is to get Yorick to realize that he doesn't really want to be shut up in the Bastille for coming to France from hostile England without a passport. But it's the sentimental 1760's, so the image of the caged starling asking for its freedom is also an image of enslaved people (the caged bird that sings, I guess). The fact that ship's captains keep trading and buying and selling the starling before it's finally returned to Dover and set free emphasize that the starling's a sentimental commodity.

4) Villette—M. Paul Charles David Emmanuel disappears off to the Caribbean at the end to take care of his dead fiance's family's estates there. He dies in a shipwreck, because in Bronte colonial ventures leave people dead or crazy or soon-to-die. (Or he doesn't die in a shipwreck—comes home to Belgium and marries Lucy and they're fantastically unhappy together because they both really just want to be alone and she doesn't seem attracted to him at all, and that's why the period before he's set to sail back is the happiest of her life. But I'm an optimist, so I choose to believe that he dies.) She refers to herself as a Quaker sometimes—because of the plainness of her dresses—but this doesn't seem to get her to think much about Emmanuel's role as colonial hegemon.

5)The Heart of Darkness—Sure, he's about the ivory trade instead of the sugar trade, but Conrad's still deeply interested in racist colonialism, and he gets as much mileage out of the contrast between the moral darkness of what white people are doing to dark-skinned Africans and the white Ivory (and the white linen shirts that that one weird guy at the Inner Station gets his unwilling servant woman to iron for him—Marlowe narrates something like "she didn't want to do it, but she did it) they're doing it for, that eighteenth-century British abolitionists got out of black people being enslaved to produce white sugar. (Did anyone ever connect dental cavities to the slave trade? Because THAT would have been awesome and amazingly overdone...)

5) A High Wind in Jamaica—Slavery's lately been abolished at the beginning of the novel; all the slave's huts are falling down hardly any sugar's being produced. There's that fantastically racist anecdote about the two old white women who're murdered in their beds and eaten (or something, says the narrator) by their former house-slaves. The novel seems to be being ironic about this, but it does it in that 1920's way where it still thinks it's really funny, because it's really interested in it as an image of the pathos of the British Empire going to hell. (Once you shut down slave labor in Jamaica, apparently, nice little English girls will start murdering Dutch sea captains while captive on board pirate ships, and then lie about it later in court in London.)

6) Flush—Elizabeth Barrett's family made their money in the sugar trade in Jamaica. Sterne-like, Woolf ties Flush's captivity in Miss Barrett's room, and Miss Barrett's captivity in her father's house, to the captive labor that made the Barretts' money. Not explicitly—but it's certainly there. Sugar is such a loaded concept in the English novel.