Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature through the Lens of Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies Marion Gymnich 1 Introduction The history of literary and cultural studies has shown time and again that theoretical concepts provide new insights and raise innovative questions. By directing scholars’ attention towards hitherto unexplored aspects of literature, new concepts often change the ways literary texts are read. This effect could for instance be observed when scholars started analysing literature from the point of view of feminist literary criticism. In the wake of the Second Women’s Movement, groundbreaking publications like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of their Own (1977), and many others propagated innovative ways of interpreting and contextualising literary texts. Feminist scholars called for new reading strategies, questioning for instance the complex of metaphors and etiologies [that] simply reflects not just the fiercely patriarchal structure of Western society but also the underpinning of misogyny upon which that severe patriarchy has stood. (Gilbert and Gubar 2000 [1979]: 13) Postcolonial studies have likewise explored alternative ways of reading fiction. Edward Said was among the first to highlight the ways in which imperialist thinking is entangled with literature. In Orientalism he argues that “philology, lexicography, history, political and economic theory, novel-writing, and lyric poetry c[a]me to the service of Orientalism’s broadly imperialist view of the world” (Said 1994 [1978]: 15) by constructing and disseminating stereotypes about the Oriental Other. Feminist and postcolonial literary criticism are just two of many theoretical approaches that have introduced new concepts and innovative ways of reading literature. I have singled out these two approaches 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 1 The disciplinary affiliations of the current members of the BCDSS include Ancient History, Islamicate History, Early Modern History, Eastern European History, Global History, History of the Law, Egyptology, Tibetan Studies, Anthropology of the Ameri‐ cas, Japanese and Korean Studies, German Medieval Studies, North American Studies, English Studies, Sociology, Art History, Archaeology, Protestant Theology, and Catholic Theology. As this list of disciplines shows, the BCDSS is not a centre for literary and cultural studies; nevertheless, it provides an ideal framework for an interdisciplinary collaboration in which literary scholars can forge new, productive alliances. 2 Terms like ‘freedom’ and ‘agency’ should be used cautiously. Regarding them as neutral, purely descriptive terms would be a misconception since they have acquired strong ideological implications in post-Enlightenment discourse. Joseph C. Miller (2012: 12) for instance stresses that slavery has traditionally been defined by scholars “as the opposite of, or absence of, a particular kind of political freedom implicitly derived from the civic polities unique to the Americas and, increasingly, western Europe, and also only by the nineteenth century.” The fact that the modern term ‘freedom’ has been shaped by post-Enlightenment ideas and thus proves to be anachronistic for an analysis of pre-modern contexts is one of the reasons why the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies proposes an approach that challenges the idea of a straightforward binary opposition between ‘free’ and ‘unfree’. In the following, I will use the term ‘agency’ to refer to “the ability of the subject to resist, negotiate and transform certain forms of power that work on the subject both internally and externally” (Hinterberger 2013: 7). Similar to the modern concept of freedom, this notion “is rooted in Enlightenment understandings of the individual” (Hinterberger 2013: 8), i.e. in the idea of “the individual as a free agent whose actions and thoughts were based on rational choices” (ibid.). Since I will focus on post-Enlightenment literature in this article, it seems appropriate to use the term ‘agency’. For a discussion of the problems associated with the term ‘agency’ specifically in the context of slavery studies, see Johnson (2014). because their interests overlap to some extent with the concept I will discuss in the following as well as with the framework in which it is embedded. Though the concept of strong asymmetrical dependency can presumably not be expected to have the far-reaching, paradigm-changing impact on literary studies that feminist and postcolonial criticism have had in recent decades, it promises to complement existing approaches by offering new perspectives on literary works, which also provide information on the production of knowledge about social relations. The concept of strong asymmetrical dependency has been developed and tested in numerous case studies by scholars from a wide range of disciplines in the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS). 1 The concept denotes a type of social relation that is shaped by an extreme power imbalance which causes an individual or group A to experience a lack of freedom/ agency due to an individual or group B exerting a considerable amount of power over A. 2 Such asymmetrical relations can be observed throughout human history and in very different types of societies (see Miller 2012: 36); they have often been institutionalised and stabilised by laws. The concept of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 152 Marion Gymnich strong asymmetrical dependency is not supposed to work as a substitute for existing concepts, such as slavery, serfdom, debt bondage, and unfree labour; nor is it supposed to “erase the manifold differences between historically specific conditions of enslavement or other forms of dependency” (Bischoff, Conermann, and Gymnich 2023: 1). Instead, it has been conceived as an overarching concept that can be used to analyse social phenomena that are historically and culturally distinct but still share certain basic characteristics. The introduction of this concept has encouraged collaboration across disciplinary borders and has brought together different fields of research with their traditions, theoretical approaches, and methodologies. Strong asymmetrical dependency is the core concept of the “emerging discipline” (Winnebeck et al. 2023: 22) of dependency studies. In terms of the phenomena dependency studies is interested in, there is of course a considerable overlap with established fields like labour history (see 11) and slavery studies (see 8). The emerging discipline of dependency studies seeks to combine the expertise of these and further fields. In the following, I will first present the concept of strong asymmetrical dependency in more detail, in particular the features that make it possible to categorise a social relation as strong asymmetrical dependency (section 2). In a next step, I will try to show what re-reading nineteenth-century British literature through the lens of strong asymmetrical dependencies may look like. For this purpose, I will touch upon three different literary phenomena: (i) direct references to (transatlantic) slavery in literary texts (section 3), (ii) instances where slavery is used metaphorically or as analogy (section 4), and (iii) direct references to other types of asymmetrical dependency, including borderline cases (section 5). In this way I hope to provide a first glimpse of what literary and cultural studies stand to gain from integrating the concept of strong asymmetrical dependency into their repertoire of analytical tools. The nineteenth century promises to be an interesting context for drawing upon this concept since this is the time when laws abolishing the slave trade (1807) and slavery (1833) were passed in Britain, which also meant that intense debates on slavery can be traced in the political sphere. These political developments can be expected to have had an impact on literature. 2 The Concept of Strong Asymmetrical Dependency: A Definition According to sociologist Rudolf Stichweh (2021: 4), strong (or pervasive) asym‐ metrical dependencies can be defined on the basis of a “hierarchy of five conditions” that takes different dimensions of social relations into consideration: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature 153 3 Slavery is a prototypical form of strong asymmetrical dependency, but even slavery is a heterogeneous social phenomenon. Enslavement in the Ottoman Empire, for instance, differs in several regards from transatlantic slavery. On Ottoman slavery, see Conermann and Şen (2020) and Czygan (2023). (i) resources: “[T]he control a person has over resources another person wants to own or to use” (4) may be part of a social constellation that is defined as strong asymmetrical dependency. However, since “[t]his situation is near to market exchange” (ibid.), Stichweh assumes that “as long as there are effective markets, no significant dependencies will probably arise on this basis” (ibid.). In other words, asymmetrical control over resources in and of itself is not a sufficient criterion for categorising social relations as strong asymmetrical dependency. Being deprived of resources (e.g. food, clothes, housing, etc.) is a feature that is often part of the experience of strong asymmetrical dependency, but that is by no means associated with all types of asymmetrically dependent positions. (ii) actions: A stronger criterion is “the existence of rights of control (some‐ times only the facticity of control) that someone exercises over the actions of another person” (ibid.). Chattel slavery in the American South is a prime example of this feature of strong asymmetrical dependency since it was typi‐ cally shaped by “the possibility of pervasive rights of control over nearly all the actions of another person” (ibid.). 3 Control over someone’s actions may encompass various dimensions, ranging from forced movement (e.g. abduction), forced immobility (e.g. captivity) to sexual abuse. Complete control over another person’s actions is difficult to maintain, however. In other words, at least a limited amount of agency may often be achieved even in strongly asymmetrical social relations. (iii) lack of voice: Individuals who can be categorised as being in a situation of strong asymmetrical dependency typically lack “the possibility of conflictual communication”, as Stichweh (ibid.) puts it. There are usually no provisions for voicing protest or showing resistance without running the risk of extreme forms of punishment. This lack of voice is also the reason why accounts of enslavement (‘slave narratives’) are typically written by formerly enslaved people, i.e. after having either been manumitted or having escaped from enslavement. Thus, they should strictly speaking be called ‘ex-slave narratives’, as Vicent Sanz Rosalén and Michael Zeuske (2019) stress. (iv) exit: The abovementioned features (i)-(iii) are in and of themselves not necessarily sufficient for categorising a social relation as strong asymmetrical dependency. The feature ‘exit’, by contrast, tends to make a straightforward categorisation of a social relation as strong asymmetrical dependency possible, as Stichweh (2021: 4) points out: “if there are strategies that effectively block exit, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 154 Marion Gymnich 4 On Stichweh’s criteria (iii) and (iv) see also Winnebeck et al. (2023: 8): “Asymmetrical dependency is usually supported by an institutional context in such a way as to ensure that the dependent actors cannot simply change their situation by either going away (‘exit’) or by articulating impactful protest (‘voice’).” 5 Winnebeck et al. for instance claim that “the ability of one actor to control the actions of another actor and/ or their access to resources” (2023: 8; emphasis added) is typical of strong asymmetrical dependency. 6 See Eltis and Engerman (2011: 3), who likewise argue for conceiving of forms of dependency as a continuum: “If we are to gain any insight into slavery […] it must be assessed as part of a continuum of dependency typically seen as occupying the opposite pole from free labor and separated from it by such institutions as indentured servitude, convict labor, debt peonage, and serfdom, to mention just a few of the intervening categories.” this establishes the most complete dependency one can think of.” Institutional‐ ised forms of asymmetrical dependency are typically associated with laws that prevent or at least regulate exit (e.g. by specifying conditions for manumission). The criterion ‘exit’ is thus also directly linked with the durability of strong asymmetrical dependency. 4 (v) the impossibility of inner emigration: The last feature mentioned by Stichweh has a somewhat different status than the ones listed above, since it concerns attitudes and emotional and cognitive experience. Stichweh comments on the feature ‘inner emigration’ as follows: It is difficult to control the way somebody else experiences the world, and this is the reason why this can be seen as the last domain of freedom. It is probably characteristic of totalitarian societies that they try to invade even this domain. Reeducation camps are one of the social institutions by which such societies try to establish this improbable type of control. (ibid.) Whether someone is deprived of “the possibility of retreat into a private way of experiencing the world” (ibid.) is difficult to gauge unless there happens to be data on people’s thoughts and emotions. In the global history of enslavement, such data is a rare exception rather than the rule. While social relations where all of the abovementioned criteria are fulfilled are particularly clear instances of strong asymmetrical dependency, there are also cases where only some of the criteria are fulfilled (or partially fulfilled). 5 Thus, strong asymmetrical dependency should be thought of as a scale which encompasses extreme cases (e.g. chattel slavery) as well as less clear-cut ones and borderline cases. 6 The latter may perhaps prove to be particularly interesting for testing and refining the concept and are arguably also the ones that are most frequently referred to in literary texts. The intensity (in terms of B’s control over A’s actions, voice, exit, experience, and access to resources) and the durability 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature 155 7 See Winnebeck et al. (2023: 7): “whereas some degree of dependency affects every single being all of the time, asymmetrical, i.e., strong or enduring, forms of dependency do not.” 8 On the political processes leading to the abolition of the slave trade, see Drescher (2014). of a dependency relation are what sets strong asymmetrical dependency most clearly apart from the kind of dependencies that shape human life in general (e.g. in the context of relations between little children and their parents). 7 Starting from the premise that different forms of dependency can be thought of as a continuum might suggest that a typology of manifestations of depen‐ dency is possible and perhaps even desirable. The existence of a plethora of dependency relations in the course of human history, however, means that the task of establishing such a typology can only be approached with extreme caution, if at all. Even established terms for strong asymmetrical dependencies - chattel slavery, debt bondage, etc. - are in fact umbrella terms for heterogeneous social phenomena. Joseph C. Miller, who adopts a global approach to slavery, cautions against comparisons of forms of enslavement in different historical contexts. What is called for is contextualisation: “Situating the slavers and the enslaved in the specific contexts in which the innumerable master-slave dyads in the world’s history in fact lived requires precise definition of context” (Miller 2012: 25). Miller’s insistence on historical contextualisation stresses the heterogeneity of experience. Thus, drawing upon the abstract concept of strong asymmetrical dependency as outlined above must not lead to ignoring distinctions between concrete social phenomena, which can be ensured by taking the relevant historical context into consideration. 3 Direct References to (Transatlantic) Slavery in Nineteenth-Century British Literature The abolition of the slave trade and of slavery in Britain were intertwined with prolonged political debates as well as fundamental changes regarding attitudes towards slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 8 This development can be described as part of a process of modernisation if one assumes that one of the characteristics of modern society is that “[i]nto many of its structures and values are built strong biases against asymmetrical dependencies” (Stichweh 2021: 4). Literary texts that address transatlantic slavery join the multitude of voices partaking in the debate on slavery and on the value system that fuelled the abolitionist cause. Since the late eighteenth century, life writing by formerly enslaved people who describe the experience of being enslaved contributed to making criticism of slavery increasingly visible 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 156 Marion Gymnich 9 For an overview of the genre of the slave narrative see the contributions in the handbook edited by Ernest (2020). 10 See the following description of an American enslaver by Mary Seacole, which resem‐ bles the descriptions provided by North American slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861): “A young American woman, whose character can be best described by the word ‘vicious,’ fell ill at Gorgona, and was left behind by her companions under the charge of a young negro, her slave, whom she treated most inhumanly, as was evinced by the poor girl’s frequent screams when under the lash. One night her cries were so distressing, that Gorgona could stand it no longer, but broke into the house and found the chattel bound hand and foot, naked, and being severely lashed” (Seacole 2005 [1857]: 52). 11 At the time when Edgeworth wrote this tale (and well into the twentieth century) the noun she used in the title would not have been seen as a racial slur, but as a neutral term. in Anglophone literature. These narratives served as an instrument to convince people of the cruelty of slavery and of the moral necessity of abolishing it. Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) is one of the best-known examples of this type of testimonial text. 9 Two decades after the abolition of slavery, the Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, who had become famous for establishing a field hospital in the Crimean war, used her autobiographical Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857) to attack slavery in the United States in no uncertain terms. 10 Yet, throughout her text she also hints repeatedly at racism in Britain, which she, as a Woman of Colour, was confronted with: “Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? ” (Seacole 2005 [1857]: 73). This serves as a reminder that the abolition of slavery had not led to equality for the formerly enslaved people and their descendants. In addition to testimonial literature by Black authors, there were also literary texts by white authors from the late eighteenth and from the nineteenth centuries that featured slavery more or less prominently. These works range from William Wordsworth’s famous sonnet “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” (1803), which commemorates the Black leader of the Haitian revolution, to Maria Edgeworth’s tale “The Grateful Negro” (1794), 11 which endorses the idea that slavery could be ‘ameliorated’, i.e. made more humane, as an alternative to abolition. Besides literary texts that present enslavement as a prominent theme, there are also works that do not explore this topic in any detail while still including explicit references to slavery in passing. These texts prove to be interesting for an analysis through the lens of asymmetrical dependency since they promise information on how enslavement was integrated into various discourses of the time. Yet, they often confront readers with gaps in their 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature 157 12 See for instance von Sneidern (1995). references to slavery that may turn out to be a challenge for literary criticism. Cases in point include the mysterious origin of Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), which has been read as a reference to slavery due to Mr Earnshaw having found the boy in Liverpool, a city associated with the slave trade, 12 and the attitude towards slavery in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), which I will briefly discuss in the following. Mansfield Park features an upper-class family, the Bertrams, whose opulent lifestyle in the English countryside is made possible by possessing a plantation in the Caribbean, on the island of Antigua, which meant at the time the novel was published that the family profited directly from slave labour. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said (1994 [1993]: 107) famously claimed that “[a]ccording to Austen we are to conclude that no matter how isolated and insulated the English place (e.g. Mansfield Park), it requires overseas sustenance”, which might have been an attempt on the part of the nineteenth-century author to justify colonialism and even slavery in economic terms. Although Said’s remarks on the references to slavery in Mansfield Park are certainly the best-known ones, he was not the first to comment on this dimension of Austen’s novel. In his article “The Antiguan Connection: Some New Light on Mansfield Park” (1982), Frank Gibbon provides insights into biographical contexts that make it easier to gauge to what extent Austen was familiar with plantation owners as well as with the ongoing debates about slavery. Gibbon for instance identified a model for the Bertrams: the Nibbs family. As Susan Fraiman points out, Said’s postcolonial reading of Mansfield Park gave rise to a divided reaction when Culture and Imperialism was published: “while reviewers friendly to Said repeatedly cite Austen as definitive proof of his claims, hostile reviewers invoke her with even greater vehemence as the figure most implausibly tied by Said to imperialist wrong-doings” (Fraiman 1995: 806). Although a widespread consensus that the references to slavery in Mansfield Park are indeed significant for an interpretation of Austen’s novel appears to have been reached by now, it seems to be far less clear which position on enslavement can be attributed to this text. Said regarded the novel as essentially devoid of any criticism of slavery; Fraiman (1995: 807) summarises his conclusions as follows: “Unconcerned about Sir Thomas Bertram’s colonial holdings in slaves as well as land and taking for granted their necessity to the good life at home, Said’s Austen is a veritable Aunt Jane - naive, complacent, and demurely without overt political opinion.” Yet not all scholars agree with Said. Fraiman, for instance, claims that the premise of his reading of Mansfield 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 158 Marion Gymnich 13 See also Rita J. Dashwood (2021: 456), who points out that “Austen’s portrayal of the system of property ownership and management in Mansfield Park is invariably negative throughout the entirety of the novel, with the morality of those responsible for this management being portrayed as extremely defective.” 14 See Boulukos (2006: 371): “The one book about slavery and abolition that Austen is widely thought to have read - Clarkson’s History [i.e. Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, first published in 1808, MG] - supports the idea that outlawing the trade would inevitably improve the condition of slaves.” Park is partially flawed, given that his argumentation rests on the assumption “that Mansfield Park epitomizes moral order and right human relations; thus Sir Thomas’s colonial endeavors, underwriting all this happiness, must be condoned if not actually applauded” (1995: 809). Yet the household of the Bertram family is not idealised, being consistently associated with snobbery and immoral behaviour, epitomising “moral blight” as Fraiman (810) puts it. 13 That scholars tend to struggle with pinning down the attitude towards slavery expressed in Austen’s novel is partially caused by the fact that there are very few direct references to slavery, and even these are extremely vague. The enslaved people remain invisible, they do not have a voice, and what their life might have looked like can only be imagined by readers on the basis of general knowledge about plantation slavery or other sources, such as the above-mentioned slave narrative by Olaudah Equiano. There is no information on Sir Thomas Bertram’s visit to his plantation in Antigua, and a scene in which Austen’s protagonist Fanny Price mentions having asked her uncle questions “‘about the slave-trade’” (Austen 1994 [1814]: 199) remains elusive. The text does not provide any details about this conversation, apart from the piece of information that her uncle was pleased by her questions. At first sight, this appears to rule out an abolitionist tenor of Fanny’s questions. Yet, when Mansfield Park was published, seven years after the Abolition Act of 1807, it is conceivable that criticism of the slave trade might have been applauded even by some plantation owners as long as slavery remained legal. George E. Boulukos for example argues that the uncle’s reaction might indicate an approach towards enslavement that had come to be known as ‘amelioration’. This term denotes “a position on slavery that would have been familiar to Austen’s early nineteenth-century audience” and that suggested “that slavery and colonialism were morally redeemable and potentially even heroic pursuits for men such as Sir Thomas Bertram” (Boulukos 2006: 362). Abolishing the slave trade was in fact seen as an important step towards amelioration, which would supposedly render slavery more ‘humane’. 14 The historical context 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature 159 15 Dashwood (2021: 460) also argues that the obscure conversation between Fanny and her uncle needs to be read on the background of ‘amelioration’. of ‘amelioration’ being propagated as an alternative to the abolition of slavery allows making sense of a scene that might otherwise appear cryptic. 15 An aspect of Mansfield Park that also deserves attention in attempts to determine the stance towards slavery in this novel is the way Fanny feels about her uncle’s presence in his household in England. In addition to being the main focalizer in the novel, Fanny in many regards functions as its moral compass for the readers, being credited with having a fine instinct as far as people’s (lack of) morality is concerned. She for instance dislikes the morally dubious Crawfords, whereas others are easily taken in by their charms. On this background it seems interesting that Fanny’s attitude towards her uncle appears to be somewhat conflicted. She describes Sir Thomas as “honourable” and “good” (Austen 1994 [1814]: 320) and is obviously grateful for having been included in his family circle. According to Dashwood (2021: 460), Fanny is complicit with slavery since she “benefits directly from the wealth generated by slave labour” and condones her uncle’s role as enslaver: Unable to accept the notion that her uncle is not an upstanding person, Fanny’s belief in the beneficial potential of amelioration represents the injurious influence that the moral corruption which characterises the system of property management in Mansfield Park has had on her. (ibid.) Even though Fanny does not refer to her uncle as immoral, she does not feel at ease in his presence. When Sir Thomas greets his niece with particular kindness upon his return from Antigua, she “reproach[es] herself for loving him so little, and thinking his return a misfortune” (Austen 1994 [1814]: 179). Her attitude towards him is even characterised as “habitual dread” (177). Moreover, the presence of Sir Thomas also tends to cast a shadow on his entire household. Fanny observes that “‘[t]here was never much laughing in his presence’” (198) and that she “cannot recollect that our evenings formerly were ever merry, except when my uncle was in town” (ibid.). All of this is conducive to evoking an image of Sir Thomas as a forbidding figure of authority rather than to presenting him as a “benevolent, reforming land-owner” (Ferguson 1991: 118). Fanny’s lack of affection for her uncle and her dislike of his presence are certainly a far cry from anything resembling a fully-fledged critique of slavery. Could Fanny’s dread of her uncle perhaps still have been read by some contemporary readers as being rooted in the revulsion a young woman feels in the presence of an enslaver? Such a conflicted reaction might have been not 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 160 Marion Gymnich 16 See Fraiman (1995: 812): “The barbarity she [Austen] has in mind is not literal slavery in the West Indies but a paternal practice she depicts as possibly analogous to it: Sir Thomas’s bid […] to put female flesh on the auction block in exchange for male status. For this and other domestic tyrannies […] the slave trade offers a convenient metaphor.” that uncommon in British society at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which included enslavers as respectable members of the upper class and which was used to celebrating some of them as benefactors, for example Edward Colston (1636-1721), whose statue was pushed into Bristol Harbour in 2020 in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests after the death of George Floyd. The question whether Fanny’s dread of her uncle (partially) derives from his role as enslaver must ultimately remain open, but her fear of him soon turns out to have been well-founded, since she is about to become a victim of his disregard for other people’s wishes. He attempts to force her to accept a marriage proposal that he deems advantageous, which indicates that he regards her as a dependent relative, whom he lectures on her shortcomings in truly patriarchal manner: ‘I had thought you peculiarly free from wilfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency to that independence of spirit which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women, and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offence. But you have now shown me that you can be wilful and perverse; that you can and will decide for yourself, without any consideration or deference for those who have surely some right to guide you, without even asking their advice.’ (Austen 1994 [1814]: 320-21) While the novel does not pronounce any straightforward judgment on Sir Thomas as enslaver, the verdict on him as family patriarch is quite unambiguous. His notion of patriarchal authority runs contrary to Fanny’s wishes as well as to the critique of marriages of convenience that informs all of Austen’s novels. Mansfield Park invites a comparison between Sir Thomas’s roles as enslaver and as family patriarch and thus uses the reference to slavery as an analogy to the situation of young women in a patriarchal society. 16 While this analogy implies a negative attitude towards slavery, since it “takes for granted - as several scholars have argued Austen did - that slavery is a moral offense” (Fraiman 1995: 812), the fact remains that the main target of criticism is not slavery but women’s lack of rights. The real interest of the novel is the domestic sphere in Britain, and in this context criticism of slavery serves merely as a vehicle for drawing the readers’ attention to the problems young women like Fanny were confronted with in a patriarchal system. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature 161 4 Slavery as Metaphor and Analogy A very similar usage of slavery as metaphor and analogy can be found in other nineteenth-century novels, including Austen’s Emma (1816). At one point, a young woman, Jane Fairfax, likens seeking employment as a governess to being sold as a slave when she observes that “‘[t]here are places in town, […] [o]ffices for the sale - not quite of human flesh - but of human intellect’” and continues with an even more direct comparison: “‘[…] I was not thinking of the slave-trade […]; governess-trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view; widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies’” (Austen 1985 [1816]: 300). An analysis of this kind of comparison requires paying attention to the position of the speaker, as Winnebeck et al. (2023: 32) suggest when they argue in favour of “expand[ing] the triad of two comparata and a tertium comparationis to a tetrad that includes the situational context of the comparing actor”. The character clearly condemns the slave trade as causing “misery”. At the same time, she appears to be unaware of what the slave trade and slavery really meant for the victims. From today’s perspective, the analogy created by Jane Fairfax is bound to appear highly problematic, smacking of ignorance and white privilege. Though she recognises the guilt associated with the slave trade, her comparison all but erases the suffering of enslaved people. Literature is an ideal medium for expressing ambivalent positions, which may also make it easier to begin to understand the mindset of people in a society that profited from slavery despite growing opposition to this institution. The comparison between the situation of slaves and that of governesses is indicative of a pattern that can be observed in many texts from the nineteenth century (and beyond): The categorisation of enslavement as an inhumane prac‐ tice is drawn upon when the terms slavery and slave are used metaphorically or as analogy in order to convey an idea of how terrible a social situation is for an individual. Upon closer examination, these situations typically show at least some of the features that are characteristic of strong asymmetrical dependency (lack of access to certain resources, lack of control over one’s actions, and/ or having no right to express resentment or protest). In addition to using references to slavery consciously to express suffering and social criticism, as in the scene discussed above, texts sometimes feature a more casual metaphorical usage of slavery/ slave. The latter can also be observed in Emma, for instance in Mr Elton’s riddle about courtship, in which he makes use of the trope of being a slave of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 162 Marion Gymnich 17 See Austen (1985 [1816]: 97): “Man’s boasted power and freedom, all are flown; / Lord of the earth and sea, he bends a slave, / And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.” Andrea Binsfeld (2024) shows that the trope of the slave of love can already be found in antiquity. It can also be found in Renaissance texts such as William Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It, where one of Orlando’s love poems contains the lines “Heaven would that she these gifts should have, And I to live and die her slave” (Shakespeare 2006 [1599? ]: III.2.150-51). love, 17 or when Emma tells her brother-in-law, who is a lawyer, that she “had no idea that the law had been so great a slavery” (Austen 1985 [1816]: 137). Comparing slavery and a demanding profession (which was quite lucrative) trivialises the metaphor - an effect that seems to be particularly common in instances where the terms slavery/ slave are used in isolation, without any further (textual) contextualisation. The words slavery/ slave thus at times appear to be mere figures of speech, even before the abolition of slavery, when debates about enslavement were still prominent. Other historically specific forms of enslavement besides transatlantic slavery were also drawn upon as metaphors and analogies in nineteenth-century literature. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), for instance, the autodiegetic narrator repeatedly refers to enslavement in the retrospective account of her development (see Bischoff, Conermann, and Gymnich 2023: 4). When she recalls the first, miserable years of her life, which the orphaned girl spent in the household of rich but hostile relatives, Jane compares her situation to that of a slave. The image Jane conjures up in this context is characteristic of the rebellious spirit she had as a child, since she likens herself to a slave in revolt, i.e. someone who claims agency despite lacking freedom: “like any other rebel slave I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths” (Brontë 1985 [1847]: 44). The reference to a slave rebellion is not historically specific, but it conveys a very different idea of slavery than the one in Emma, where the tertium comparationis was suffering. The information the text provides about the situational context of the comparison specifies the character’s inspiration for drawing upon the imagery of slavery; Jane accuses her cousin of behaving “like a slave-driver”, “like the Roman emperors” and explains: “I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, &c.” (Brontë 1985 [1847]: 43). These references to slavery in ancient Rome exemplify that the usage of slavery as cultural metaphor in the nineteenth century was not only informed by transatlantic chattel slavery. At a later point in Jane Eyre, yet another form of enslavement is alluded to by the narrator when she describes her situation in terms of harem slavery. Newspapers and travel reports, especially those written by women travellers, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature 163 had made British readers familiar with images of harem slavery in the Ottoman Empire (see Gökçe 2024). Jane describes her relation to her employer Mr Rochester, who has declared his love for her and intends to marry the young woman, in a manner that is bound to evoke the imagery of Ottoman harem slavery due to the choice of words: “He smiled; and I thought his smile was such as a sultan might, in a blissful and fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched; I crushed his hand, which was ever hunting mine, vigorously, and thrust it back to him red with the passionate pressure” (Brontë 1985 [1847]: 297). The image of the sultan’s harem is also drawn upon by Mr Rochester when he exclaims: “‘I would not exchange this one little English girl for the Grand Turk’s whole seraglio - gazelle-eyes, houri forms, and all! ’” (Brontë 1985 [1847]: 297). Jane dislikes the sexual connotations of this imagery as the following dialogue with Rochester shows: The Eastern allusion bit me again. ‘I’ll not stand you an inch in the stead of a seraglio,’ I said; ‘so don’t consider me an equivalent for one. If you have a fancy for anything in that line, away with you, sir, to the bazars of Stamboul, without delay, and lay out in extensive slave-purchases some of that spare cash you seem at a loss to spend satisfactorily here.’ ‘And what will you do, Janet, while I am bargaining for so many tons of flesh and such an assortment of black eyes? ’ ‘I’ll be preparing myself to go out as a missionary to preach liberty to them that are enslaved - your harem inmates amongst the rest. I’ll get admitted there, and I’ll stir up mutiny’. (Brontë 1985 [1847]: 297-98) The novel thus perpetuates stereotypical images revolving around “girls and women secluded and seduced in exotic harems somewhere in a sexualized Muslim palace” (Miller 2012: 2) that are steeped in Orientalist discourse. Again, the idea of being in revolt and seeking liberty motivates the references to enslavement. When Jane imagines herself as “missionary” and (female) British saviour who “stir[s] up mutiny” among harem slaves she reproduces Orientalist notions of Eastern ‘backwardness’. A conversation that started by Jane com‐ plaining about experiencing a lack of freedom culminates in her imagining once more a revolt, coupled with a high degree of agency, which is made possible by the allegedly worse dependency of the (Oriental) Others who are supposedly in need of a European saviour. It is perhaps hardly surprising that slavery was used as metaphor and analogy in a century that saw debates about slavery and its abolition in Britain and in many other countries. According to cultural metaphor theory, “people draw on their preexisting cultural knowledge when they use or process metaphors”, as Ansgar Nünning (2002: 110) points out, and for this reason “metaphors are 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 164 Marion Gymnich 18 There are for instance numerous occurrences of the word ‘slave’ in all CLiC subcorpora: 58 occurrences in the Dickens corpus (12 novels), 238 occurrences in the 19 th Century Reference corpus, 98 occurrences in the Children’s Literature corpus. 19 See Liza Picard’s (2006: 93) description of the Victorian workhouse: “To enter the workhouse meant giving up all self-respect, and abandoning family ties. […] Spouses who had lived together for decades were to go into the workhouse and be separated into wards for ‘male paupers’ and ‘female paupers’. Their children were taken from them.” deeply entrenched in the cultural discourses of their age” (102). As some of the examples presented above suggest, using slavery as metaphor or analogy may, however, also give rise to a certain tendency to normalise or even trivialise this field of human experience. Tools provided by digital humanities, in particular literary corpora and web applications like CLiC (see Mahlberg et al. 2020), provide interesting possibilities for further, more systematic studies of slavery as metaphor and analogy in literature. 18 5 References to other Forms of Strong Asymmetrical Dependency In addition to slavery, various other forms of strong asymmetrical dependency relations are addressed in more or less detail in nineteenth-century British literature. Cases in point include (but are not limited to) representations of the notorious institution of the workhouse, which for example provides an important setting in novels like Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) as well as in numerous street ballads, and images of the equally infamous ‘lunatic asylums’, referred to particularly prominently in sensation novels like Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). Being an inmate in these institutions meant experiencing a lack of control over one’s actions as well as being prevented from leaving on one’s own terms. 19 The decision whether an individual was confined inside these institutions or not was typically based on ‘expert opinions’, on “the diagnosis or attribution of disabilities, deficiencies, and deviances to persons, a diagnosis that is characteristically made by one of the many experts of modern society” (Stichweh 2021: 4). Literary depictions of these institutions provide interesting material for intersectional analyses of specific forms of strong asymmetrical dependencies as well as the value systems and social biases that informed them. While Victorian workhouses and ‘lunatic asylums’ gave rise to social rela‐ tions that can clearly be categorised as strong asymmetrical dependency, there are also borderline cases, such as the situation of domestic servants in private households. Bruce Robbins (1993 [1986]: xi) argues that representations of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature 165 “the largest single occupational group in nineteenth-century England” rely on “much-repeated master-servant tropes and devices”, on literary traditions that can be traced back to antiquity. This, however, does not rule out situating these representations in their specific historical contexts and reading them through the lens of strong asymmetrical dependency. The ubiquity of references to domestic servants in nineteenth-century British literature appears to be at odds with the scarcity of information on individual characters who belong to this group. Though approaching references to domestic servants in literature through the lens of strong asymmetrical dependency does often not mean focusing on complex, fully developed characters and may at first sight bring forth comparatively little information, it may still lead to changes in the overall picture of specific texts or subgenres and offer insights into the ways in which domestic servants were talked about. Having said that, it is necessary to stress that it is of course not a foregone conclusion that all domestic servants in nineteenth-century Britain were in a position that can be categorised as strong asymmetrical dependency. Hierarchies among servants and enormous disparities as far as the five criteria defined by Stichweh are concerned need to be taken into consideration. Thus, domestic service and its literary representations may prove a field where the concept of strong asymmetrical dependency can be put to the test particularly fruitfully. 6 Conclusion and Outlook While direct references to transatlantic slavery in nineteenth-century British literature have already received considerable attention in the context of post‐ colonial studies, there are further literary representations of social relations that likewise benefit from being read through the lens of strong asymmetrical dependencies. Depictions of the workhouse, of ‘lunatic asylums’, and of domes‐ tic servants are just three of many fields which promise to yield interesting results when approached in this framework. Literature responds in manifold ways to “the orders of knowledge that legitimize and naturalize” (Winnebeck et al. 2023: 28) strong asymmetrical dependency, as the examples briefly discussed above illustrate. Metaphors and analogies are among the literary devices that turn out to be particularly significant in this context. They provide insights into discourses about power and dependency that are intertwined with historical developments and turning points. As far as their relation to power structures in a specific historical context is concerned, literary texts should not be seen in binary terms, as being either complicit with power structures or questioning them. Literature may also reveal ambivalences and moral conundrums that 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 166 Marion Gymnich 20 See Vera Nünning’s excellent study Reading Fictions, Changing Minds (2014), which explores the processes underlying the potential of literature to create empathy and further cognitive effects of literary texts. accompany ongoing changes or express conflicted positions. In this way, literary texts may provide inspiration for dealing with questions of guilt and justice as well as with moral conflicts for which there simply is no easy solution. While it overlaps to some degree with postcolonial studies, the newly emerg‐ ing field of dependency studies has a more specific focus, in that it also highlights forms of dependency that are not (directly) linked with colonialism and its aftermath, as the example of the workhouse has shown. Though asymmetrical dependencies have left manifold traces in literature from Antiquity to the present day, these have often been neglected in literary studies. By engaging with the interdisciplinary field of dependency studies, literary studies can contribute to answering urgent questions of the twenty-first century that result from the legacy of slavery and other forms of dependency, but also from the asymmetrical dependencies existing today, which are often referred to as ‘modern slaveries’. 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