Examples Of Sacrifice In A Tale Of Two Cities
Jan-Melissa Schramm avoids the term "duty," favoring instead "atonement," "obligation" and "sacrifice," but in her citations of contemporary ethical theory, Victorianists will recognize an old idea made vital by new clothes. In the words Schramm quotes from Levinas' "Language and Proximity," Ta,e "I" becomes a "permanent sacrifice [that] substitutes itself for others" qtd.
Now that narrative ethicists have restored the critical reputation of readers' identification with characters, Schramm considers how this identification has been ethically complicated by the theologically inflected reading practices of the nineteenth century.
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Building on analyses of scapegoating by Girard and Michiel Heyns, Schramm argues that "the affect which moves a reader to the crucial task of moral renewal is often generated by the spectacle of unmerited or excessive suffering" Nineteenth-century readers experienced this phenomenon preeminently through scriptural accounts of Christ's martyrdom, which contradictorily pressed them to empathize with his suffering and to recognize the guilt they bore for it. Derrida, Schramm notes, starkly asserts that death is the final guarantor of our "irreplaceability, our singularity" What sense, then, does it make to lay down one's life for another? In her detailed analyses of the historical conditions under which nineteenth century Britons approached these questions, Schramm finds specific continuities between current Examples Of Sacrifice In A Tale Of Two Cities about ethics and the ethical questions probed in narratives wrought by DickensEliotGaskelland Trollopeamong other novelists.
She convincingly argues that Victorians' experiences of public executions, persecution of Chartistsslaughter in the Crimean Warand other traumatic events — each processed through Christian doctrines of atonement and sacrifice — posed fundamental ethical challenges. What is more, Schramm demonstrates how Christian theology and theories of scripture reading governed debates over legitimate political representation. Partly because of the influence of novel-writing and reading, this is another legacy from the nineteenth-century that is due for critical excavation.
As in her influential previous book, Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and TheologyHere argument displays a breathtaking mastery of the full range of discourses available to Victorians: literature and theories of reading, law, theology, ethics, politics, and even statistical probability. In taking up these interrelated problems, Schramm does for nineteenth-century British culture what Susan L.
Taking the early nineteenth TTwo as the "Age of Atonement," Schramm begins by examining "sympathy and substitution on the scaffold. Public executions posed questions about justifications for legal murder, whether spectators were vicarious sadists or sympathetic observers, and the spectacle of a condemned prisoner vividly reminded Christian observers that all sinners must eventually face death and judgment.
The execution of Courvoisier for the murder of his master drew responses from Dickens and Thackeray, both of whom witnessed the event. http://pinsoftek.com/wp-content/custom/stamps/how-to-train-your-dragon-in-the-odyssey.php Testimony and Advocacy, Schramm Examples Of Sacrifice In A Tale Of Two Cities Dickens's contempt for Courvoisier's barrister, Charles Phillips, and his belief that fiction was a more honorable medium of public advocacy.
In the present book she contrasts Dickens's response to the hanging with Thackeray's imaginative identification in "Going to see a Man Hanged. Narrative demands of anagnorisis implicate readers in determining guilt and innocence, recognizing go here of judicial judgments, and acknowledging complicity in rationalizing punishment of individuals — fellow sinners — for the good of the many.
Even Dickens Scrifice later devote himself to Sacrfice display[s] of innocence," most spectacularly in Sydney Carton. The case of Eugene Aram provides the focal point of chapter two, on narrative reversals.
Fate And Destiny In Charles Dickens's A Tale Of Two Cities
Suspected of having murdered a fellow member of a gang of Yorkshire fraudsters in Sacrificf, Aram absconded and wasn't discovered untilby which time he was a respected scholar and teacher in King's Lynn. After Aram was convicted and executed, his case begot a swarm of criminal biographies and other literary treatments.
Schramm reads this case and its literary offspring in light of eighteenth-century theories of virtue, ranging from Aristotelian and Christian to sentimental and commercial. Problematically, Aram's reformed life evinced both Christian repentance and utilitarian value, which execution reversed, but his identity as a scholar and teacher raised questions about the virtues of literature and learning. Reflecting on the justice of it, Godwin's Caleb Williams proposed that by comparison with legal analysis, realist fiction could better explore the complexities of virtue because it could imagine the inner life of its characters. Later, even critics of the Prisoner's Counsel Act, dismayed by forensic eloquence deployed on behalf of guilty parties, acknowledged that professional legal representation might have saved Aram from Examples Of Sacrifice In A Tale Of Two Cities scaffold.
In Schramm's view, however, these texts do not promote what Franco Moretti has called a "cult of innocence" in the English Bildungsroman. Rather, the instability and sometimes alternate structure of their endings as in Caleb Williams demonstrate that within theories of punishment and virtue, justice and mercy could be irreconcilable. While fiction writers might have claimed that they could represent interiority better than a court of law could, they nonetheless recognized that they should not try to advise Honor Code Essay something crime.
From the ethics of hanging Schramm turns to the Chartist trials, explaining how various professions competed to represent individuals, or "stand for the people. Within a year of the law's enactment, virtually all of the Chartist leaders were imprisoned, "[e]ntrapped by the words of press reporters and the actions of government informers" Dickens knew all too well how unreliable their reports could be. As Schramm observes, the protagonist of Nicholas Nickleby comes to see with alarm "the dubious ethical activities involved in the production of a speech in the House"and David Copperfield 's study of stenography in a novel written as the Chartist trials were ending leads him to reflect on "the instabilities of the stenographic or transcriptive process which attempted to capture the substance of these orations" The "creative" nature of reporting and its failure to make authentic copies of Parliamentary speech — to say nothing of Chartist speech — may have led Dickens to see uncomfortable parallels with social fiction.]
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