| dc.description.abstract | Scholars have long noted that Victorian writing is unique in its preoccupation with the subject of work. This “cult of work” has been largely dismissed as oppressive middle-class moralism or as an ideological apologia for capitalist exploitation. By contrast, this dissertation reads the Victorian attention to work as a multifaceted ethical discourse engaged in the theorization of what Hannah Arendt terms vita activa, the active life. Against the discourse of political economy, which defined work as an individualized scramble for survival or profit, a diverse range of Victorian authors argued that work was not reducible to its economic function. Rather, these authors conceptualized work as a process of meaningful interaction between individuals and their communities, societies, and species: as workers contributed to collective survival and advancement through their daily activity, they forged essential social bonds.
This dissertation finds radical potential in the Victorian discourse of work. This discourse was not often explicitly anti-capitalist; many Victorian authors engaged in critique rather than outright opposition. But at the heart of this discourse were two understandings defying the foundational logics of capitalism: one) that allowing markets to determine what work gets done, by whom, and under what conditions has devastating consequences; and two) that work need not be an oppressive realm of unfreedom. Given these understandings, authors across the journalism, essays, autobiographies, and novels that comprise my archive theorized the necessary conditions for ethical human productivity, a shared vita activa that would both provide for collective needs and allow for individual happiness and development. My dissertation positions this demand for ethical productivity against a long tradition of radical “antiwork” politics, which has argued that any legitimate opposition to capitalism must challenge the “work-centered society.” I argue that Victorian authors may provide language for the development of a twenty-first century “prowork” politics that radically recuperates, rather than abandons, collective productivity. | |
