Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property (review)

Wolfram Schmidgen's book on property law and the British novel addresses issues of more general interest than his title suggests. Although law, particularly property law, is central to the discussions of Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Henry Fielding (Tom Jones), and Walter Scott (Waverley), it is less prominent in the discussions of Henry Mackenzie (A Man of Feeling), Laurence Sterne (A Sentimental Journey), and Ann Radcliffe (A Sicilian Romance and The Romance of the Forest). Even in the former grouping, discussions of property law are more or less substantially subordinate to two other and rather more encompassing arguments, one historical and one literary. The historical argument asks the reader to reconsider both the chronology and the processes of modernization, understood by Schmidgen as the emergence of "objectification" (and all the term entails, such as individualism, bourgeois freedom, alienation). The literary argument, or rather exploration, re-examines the relation of description to narration in eighteenth-century fiction. Rather than description being a stylistic indicator of objectification under capitalism as some earlier Marxist critics have argued—rendering the world as a universe of separate (or "disembedded," in Schmidgen's terms) things—description in eighteenth-century fiction conveys the relational character of all things, both human and otherwise. Schmidgen weaves the historical and literary arguments, often with great sophistication, through six chapters in order to trace how "communal form" (indebted, in the final instance, to property and the law that prescribes its transmission) gets worked into and worked out in the English novel.

At issue in this critical work is nothing less than how current readers understand "lived experience" in the long eighteenth century. Since Ian Watt, at the latest, one important strain in criticism of eighteenth-century fiction has attempted to identify modern forms of individual subjectivity and social being by examining the discourses of sex, gender, the body, political economy, religion, law, popular culture, news, travel, currency, commodities, empire, trade, medicine, and so on. Although many of these studies, if not most, have proceeded cautiously in tracing the birth of modernity by acknowledging the influence of enduring tradition, most nonetheless have come out squarely in favour of finding in the long eighteenth century the full emergence of a proper bourgeois modernity and its answering subject, at least in cultural if not exactly in political terms. In returning to the argument about the rise of modernity, Schmidgen would have his readers understand the eighteenth century as a "transitional culture" rather than a modern one (64–65). For most of the century, he argues, landed property biases the relation between "persons and things" in favour of the local over the universal, the concrete over the abstract, and the grounded over the movable. For Schmidgen, England's "transitional culture" remains stubbornly traditional as the persistence of communal forms rooted in the manor house slows the transition to modernity more than critical accounts of the novel have hitherto acknowledged.

The theoretical core of Schmidgen's study can be found, appropriately enough, in the middle of his book, in the chapter titled "Commodity Fetishism in Heterogeneous Spaces." He argues that "the prevalence of embedding over disembedding modes ... [in] the novelistic depiction of things in the first half of the eighteenth century" (123) proves that a fully developed modernity (characterized by commodity fetishism that dissociates the object from its origin) has not yet arrived. Instead, in the novels of the first half of the century "communal forms embed persons and things in concrete social, economic, and cultural contexts, preventing their emergence as separate objects that could begin to cultivate exclusive relationships and bounded identities and thus escape the condition of groundedness" (134). Rather than experiencing an existential homelessness, characters and things find their place in, or in relation to, the manor house, which serves as a key link in the great chain of social being. That link begins to weaken over the latter half of the eighteenth century. When it is fully broken—as Schmidgen argues it is in Waverley—the "plenitude...