Date of Award
2006
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Supervisor
Dr. Tilottama Rajan
Abstract
My thesis is an argument about the repression that enabled imperialism; more specifically, |it tracks the way a class discipline evolves into an imperial subjectivity that is distinctive in * 2 ogupsic •9 its repression of affect and its emphasis on pragmatic co-operation. Following Michel Foucault, I read this repression as a “positivity,” as ambivalently enabling for both the colonizer and the colonized, though the latter must involve themselves in the labour of an intellectual reworking of repression’s conceptual history in order to realize this positive potential. I argue that John Locke, using the idea of the contract as a structuring principle, sets out a disciplinary programme that allows the English middle class to construct what becomes the national sensibility. Identifying Jane Austen as the novelist who most influentially consolidates Locke’s achievement by bringing property and propriety together in a compelling fictional synthesis, I read her as shaping the novel into a model of bourgeois surveillance. The Victorian novelists who follow Austen, deeply involved in a project of national unification and imperial expansion, disavow the “propertied self’ theorized by Locke and Austen, representing it as divisive, shallow, and even immoral. Implicated and emotionally invested in England’s “civilizing mission” and her extensive appropriation of lands outside the nation, Victorian novelists like Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens distance themselves from Austen’s transparent endorsement of a selfhood embedded in property, and lend their approval, instead, to a selfhood that is encouraged to see itself as consummated in growth, maturity, and “deep” feelings; to what is, ultimately, * e vis80 a distinctively nationalist self. In conclusion, I briefly analyze postcolonial responses to this imperial repression, through readings of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin
Recommended Citation
Joseph, Nigel Leo, "DISCIPLINE INTO REPRESSION: CONTRACTUALISM, SELF, AND EMPIRE IN LOCKE, AUSTEN AND THE VICTORIAN NOVEL" (2006). Digitized Theses. 5029.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/digitizedtheses/5029