CENTURY LITERATURE A Dissertation by JUNG SUN ... - Repository

Critics of nineteenth-century literature observe that economic normalization
based on moral value of economic relations often takes effect on the individual person’s
level. In Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994, Patrick Brantlinger
argues that money had been successfully placed under governmental care but money
problems were systematically depoliticized and more personalized (139). While later
British society held that money even in the form of credit was crucial to the construction
of a powerful national identity, nineteenth-century society tended to highlight the
individualized and personal aspects of economic problems. The individual is responsible
for the maintenance of the moral currency of money and for the proof of monetary value
of his moral character. In a culture where wealth can be a sign of moral value and moral
character is guaranteed to have monetary rewards, money’s disciplinary influence is
strengthened in dividing and labeling the social value of people. The ultimate use of
money appears at the scene where social marginalization begins (Brantlinger 38).
While novelists take an interest in the moralization of money as a means of
making it socially acceptable, they also often participate in the construction of the
economic norm. As money is known to be problematic because it is susceptible to a
crisis and easily involved with the bankruptcy of monetary values, Victorian economic
society is required to construct consensual rules based on which the society can protect
the economic system from the threats posed by the instability of money. Scholars,
including Jeff Nunokawa, Gordon Bigelow, and Gail Turley Houston, agree that
Victorian novels often concentrate on the establishment of the home as a site of
protecting moral character that might be contained in the business world. In Victorian
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