An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Jolene Zigarovich (University of Northern Iowa):
Necropolitics: Legislating the Dead Body and the Victorian Novel
Abstract:
Why do dead bodies command forms of regulation? How does law account for the suspended or unresolved? Why are certain nineteenth-century legal structures spectral and uncanny? How are economies of death unique to narrative? As it investigates these broader questions, this project considers the posthumous life of characters uncannily bound by regulation. To do this, it interrogates the economic and political instrumentalization of death, and legal features that historically aimed to promote yet in many ways also inhibit reliability. I argue that while the Victorian novel upholds legal authority, it simultaneously critiques it, affording a strategy for advocacy against normative regulations through the symbol of the untraceable or dead. Drawing on the theory of power and death termed “necropolitics,” I investigate how contemporary legal issues are transformed into haunting aspects of Victorian narrative jurisprudence. Contributing to a deeper understanding of the suspension of truth in law and legal structures, this project illustrates ways in which the complex examination of human character from two centuries ago can instruct social values and challenge established positions today.
My IASH work-in-progress talk will specifically examine insolvency laws and bodily governance, including the remarkable edicts that enabled creditors to exploit Victorian sentimentality by interrupting funerals and “arresting a corpse” until the debts of the dead were paid. I claim that the debtor’s dead body–what should be a valueless commodity–has temporary exchange value as it is circulated back into the market as a symbolic remainder of over-consumption, demonstrating the larger public and moral issues of credit and national debt within the capitalist cycle.
Biography: Jolene Zigarovich is associate professor of English in the Department of Languages & Literatures at the University of Northern Iowa. She has also taught at Cornell University, Claremont Graduate University, and Scripps College. She is the author of Writing Death and Absence in the Victorian Novel: Engraved Narratives, and editor of Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature as well as TransGothic in Literature and Culture. She recently completed the monograph Death and the Body in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Culture which had the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Please email iash@ed.ac.uk for a link to join the session.