| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Victorians embraced a logic of differentiation. Social subsystems of law, politics, art, science, education, and religion became self-referential modes of discourse supported by canons of literature. To facilitate this process of differentiation, Victorian society generated binary oppositions of self and other to determine whether normative values and expectations were being satisfied, especially within novels. By employing binary schemes as a means for regulating normative values and expectations, Victorian society enabled the possibility of technological intervention within the bourgeois public sphere. The organization and regulation of labor in the Victorian age, for instance, fixated on binary comparisons of productivity and nonproductivity which routinized tasks and valued technical objectives.
The manual laborer, who once had been able to fulfill the task of spinning several spools of cotton into yarn within a given time, was now able to increase factory productiveness within half the required time with the help of inventions like Reverend Edmund Cartwright's power loom, later perfected by William Horrocks and made more efficient through the use of James Watts's steam engines. Although such innovations accelerated the growth of capital, they also diminished the value of skilled manual laborers, who became insubstantial and interchangeable apparatuses of industrial-technical processes. Expunged from the factory system, the nonproductive laborer experienced separation from technical processes as loss of socialization. But, the presence of belonging had been nothing more than a simulacrum, an illusion of socialization legitimated by epistemes and a priori conditions which abstracted and reduced identity within the technical sphere. Concepts of belonging have been evolving into embodiments of class, gender, and physiognomy. Analyzing and evaluating the evolution of these conceptions through the selected novels of Dickens, Brontë, and Eliot reveal how these embodiments have