Avuncularism: Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Nineteenth-Century English Culture (review)

Academic book titles have a tendency to disappoint. Striving to be broadly suggestive, they are prone to raise expectations of sweep and scope that the studies themselves often fail to satisfy. In this regard, Avuncularism: Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Nineteenth-Century English Culture is exceptional. Eileen Cleere has given us a curious, intriguing, impressively researched, agreeably written, and exhaustive argument for the importance of "uncle" in nineteenth-century England: as concept and symbol, familial presence, social figure, literary character, and economic trope. Indeed, one might say that she has developed a hermeneutics of the avuncular, considering not only the literal, allegorical, and tropological meaning of the word, but also its figurative resonance in both domestic and political registers. Her project is frankly polemical: "a concept of the avunculate . . . has the capacity to dislodge the normalizing dialectic of the nuclear family that has been produced and reproduced by both psychoanalytic and Marxist modes of kinship" (170). And yet, at the same time, it is explicitly conciliatory, committed to finding common ground between warring methodologies: "I am using history to expand and revitalize the rigid paradigms of contemporary theoretical models, and using theory to . . . enrich a set of historical practices that has come to distrust the very possibility of cultural studies" (18).

Cleere's scholarly goals are admirably ambitious. Assessing the conceptual vitality of avuncularism from a number of disciplinary angles, she rethinks "the anthropology of middle-class family life" in nineteenth-century England (7)—such family life being, as she points out, far less nuclear in practice than in theory. The diminishing, but still high, mortality rate in nineteenth-century Britain meant that middle-class families were often fatherless, motherless, or child-bereaved. In this context, "the law of the father" may have retained its legal power, but Cleere questions whether it carried the full psychological weight that twentieth-century feminist and psychoanalytic explanations of the period have accorded it.

So, too, on an economic level, the shadow of the father fell less heavily across the structures of capitalism than it had upon the preceding mercantile order. Cleere discusses how "economic individualism" (17) came to power only after paternalism began slowly to give way to bureaucratic institutions and other forms of political and economic association. "Filiation" (grounded in sentimental and hereditary father-son relations) was replaced by the random, temporary "affiliations" of capitalist exchange as the primary mode of socioeconomic behavior (170). Once mercantilism ceased to be the dominant form of economic practice, "uncle"—a male relative whose impact upon the individual was, generally speaking, more financial, impersonal, and political than it was affective, psychological, and familial—became in turn a more useful figure than "father" for representing subject relations in a system governed principally by commercial interest. "The law of the uncle," that is, more precisely describes the political authority of capitalism than does "the law of the father." She adduces strong evidence for her case not only in the rise of the pawnbroker ("my uncle," in the slang of the time), but also in the introduction of "Uncle John Bull" as an icon of penny-postage reform and in "the most widely familiar and powerful Uncle in Western cultural imagination: Uncle Sam" (208). In novels, too, uncles gain in visibility and stature—from Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park (1814), the Posyers of Adam Bede (1859), and Uncle Ralph of Nicholas Nickleby (1837–39) to the less memorable but nonetheless fate-determining uncles of Daniel Deronda's (1876) Gwendolyn Harleth.

As Cleere argues with particular force in her chapter on Anthony Trollope and penny-postage reform, viewing nineteenth-century capitalist society through the lens of the avuncular allows us to see features of that society that are inaccessible from a perspective that assumes the unchallenged importance of patriarchal privilege. If one familiar story of English democratization describes the breakdown of aristocratic paternalism and family hierarchy as yielding a mass of atomized, self-interested economic subjects, then the avuncular makes visible the continuing importance...