Liberalizing Contracts by Anat Rosenberg

Author:Anat Rosenberg [Rosenberg, Anat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, General, Modern, 19th Century, Law, Contracts, Legal History, Literary Criticism, Political Science, Essays
ISBN: 9781317410492
Google: lsEtDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-20T01:30:48+00:00

Negotiating the Web: Dependence and Difference

Beer draws out connections between the web metaphor and Darwin’s work, and points to a passage in The Origin of the Species which is particularly important here:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner ….16

(my emphasis)

This imagery – incredibly widespread as Regenia Gagnier shows in her work on conceptions of individualism17 – provided a way of seeing. It replaced the categories of social status with intricacies too complex to claim holistic views, and crucially, at once interdependent and different. Far from optimistic visions that political-economic models and later evolutionary biology associated with this complexity, whereby the ever increasing differentiation resulting from the modern division of labor signaled progress,18 Middlemarch relied on promises to explore the unhappy implications of dependence and difference in the web.

“It will be treating me as if I were a child. Promise that you will leave the subject to me.” … and thus the discussion ended with his promising Rosamond, and not with her promising him. In fact, she had been determined not to promise … She meant to go out riding again … and she did go on the next opportunity of her husband’s absence.

(549)

Promissory struggles are the symbolic locus of Lydgate’s and Rosamond’s quickly deteriorating marriage. When Rosamond rides again Lydgate realizes that what he sees as “[h]is superior knowledge” is “set aside on every practical question” (549). The loss of Rosamond’s baby, which Lydgate attributes to horse-riding and Rosamond insists was inevitable irrespectively, clarifies how unbridgeable the gap is, as contestation dominates over a common grief. The pattern repeats itself. When Lydgate wants to let their house Rosamond revokes his instructions to the auctioneer. Lydgate is again painfully amazed but she does not see his point:

“It cannot be good to act rashly … Promise me that you will not go to him [auctioneer] for a few weeks, or without telling me.” Lydgate gave a short laugh. “I think it is I who should exact a promise that you will do nothing without telling me.”

(620–1)

Lydgate’s bitterness signals a new awareness of difference between him and Rosamond within a structure of mutual dependence. The marital unit, that “terribly inflexible relation” (621), is the par excellence case of interdependence in which irreconcilable difference yields suffocation. Daniel Malachuk suggests that marriage is a prime location of Eliot’s development of a liberalism influenced by republican traditions of civic virtue, and particularly the notion of sociable individuals.19 Marriage, however, is but an extreme form of a persistent condition of dependence within difference, fundamental to Eliot’s resort to promises in the novel.

Dependence within difference is a broad theme in Middlemarch scholarship, most extensively explored through work on sympathy, central to the novel’s content as well as to Eliot’s own understanding of novels’ ethical significance.

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