Beings and Estates: Property, Identity, and Inheritance in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (conference paper)
Beth Cortese
This paper will focus on the intersection between property and identity in the Enlightenment. Namely, the philosophical conversations about property ownership and its impact on the individual and society in the work of John Locke and David Hume. I will consider how Enlightenment debates about ownership of property as obtained through labour for individual benefit and as a social construct necessary for the public good inform representations of inheritance in eighteenth-century novels. I will explore the extent to which property affects the notion of identity in the novel, not only in terms of class status, but also in relation to self-possession or self-assurance and virtue. While Locke’s model of property attained through labour is integral to the formation of identity in Robinson Crusoe (1719), property obtained through merit fuels family conflict in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748-9). In Clarissa, an individual’s right to own property and the criteria that determines their right is questioned when the youngest female grandchild is chosen over her own father and elder siblings to inherit her grandfather’s estate, therefore bypassing the traditional inheritance practices through the testator’s rejection of primogeniture. I argue that the possession of an estate is portrayed as influencing an individual’s self-possession in the novel because the transference of property through the testator’s will impacted a person’s future, financial independence, familial relations, and sense of self-worth.
This paper is scheduled for presentation at the ISECS Enlightenment Identities Conference (University of Edinburgh, 14th-19th July 2019).
