Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form (review)

Sandra Macpherson’s Harm’s Way is nothing less than brilliant and original, a remarkable study of the relationship between law and literature, in this case the effect of changing concepts of liability on the novel as it emerges in eighteenth-century Britain. Macpherson has immersed herself in the history of Anglo-American liability law, and her discussion of its development is rigorous and authoritative, indeed intimidating for a layperson, in its detailed grasp of the law as it evolves in the eighteenth century and into the twentieth. The results are fascinating and provocative, if difficult to follow and, for me at least, difficult to accept. Although it is impossible to paraphrase her results in a short compass herein, I will try to summarize her view of how the history of legal liability changes our understanding of the eighteenth-century novel (and especially of the characters who inhabit it) and turns it into what she insists is a tragic form.

She begins, innocently enough, by remarking that the novel is obsessively focused on “bodily injury rather than conjugal affection” (3). There is certainly plenty of violence in eighteenth-century novels and resulting bodily injury, but the opposition between such injury and conjugal affection is puzzling. What Macpherson means becomes clearer when she announces that her book “addresses the centrality of accident and injury to the realist novel by shifting attention away from contract—and from the marriage contract as the paradigmatic form of modern belonging—to liability” (4). She goes on to say that the realist novel “is a project of blame not exculpation” (13), and she takes the position that novelistic characters owe their being to their implicit conviction under the evolving law of liability. Thus, she argues, new interpretations of “strict” liability, which made masters responsible for the acts of their servants, led Daniel Defoe to expand the blame (oddly enough, she never calls it “guilt,” which is how they define it themselves) attached to his characters, just as legal developments later in the century, in the 1730s and 1740s, led Samuel Richardson to a similar broadening of responsibility whereby persons could be held accountable for the unintended consequences of their actions and also for the consequences of acts that they did not commit. Lovelace’s rape of Clarissa by this definition makes him responsible for her “murder,” and as Moll Flanders considers Mother Midnight’s negligence of the children left in her charge, she reasons in terms of liability law that the mothers who leave them with her are guilty of murder. So, too, in A Journal of the Plague Year, as one might predict, infected individuals are responsible for the harm they do “insensibly” to others, and Macpherson notes that H.F. finds culpable negligence to be the case among those stricken by the pestilence who innocently infect others. And in Roxana, for Macpherson, the titular heroine is in legal fact responsible for the murder of her jeweller-husband because she persuades him not to take valuable jewels with him on a trip, and she is also responsible for the murder of her daughter that her servant Amy seems to commit. The organizing claim in all these discussions of how blame operates in eighteenth-century fiction is that these novels ask readers “to think of responsible persons as causes rather than agents” (57), which strikes me as an extremely elusive distinction, since agents can presumably also be causes. How this formulation differs from the classic terms in which novelistic exploration is evoked—freedom versus necessity whereby characters (or readers) come to see that freedom, as Marxists used to say, is the recognition of necessity—is not something I fully understand.

To her credit, Macpherson lays all her cards on the table right at the outset. She espouses what is to me a bleak materialistic anti-humanism that “conceives of persons as matter in motion” (23), and in so doing she rejects without...