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    Courting Equity; or Moral Sentiments in the Law and British Fiction

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    Genre
    Thesis/Dissertation
    Date
    2017
    Author
    Kropp, Colleen Mary
    Advisor
    Newman, Steve, 1970-
    Committee member
    O'Hara, Daniel T., 1948-
    Singer, Alan, 1948-
    Ganz, Melissa J., 1972-
    Department
    English
    Subject
    Literature, English
    Equity
    History of the Novel
    Law and Literature
    Marriage
    Moral Philosophy
    Permanent link to this record
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12613/3142
    
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    DOI
    http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/3124
    Abstract
    This dissertation explores the relationship between the ‘rise’ of the British novel and the critical changes happening in contemporary English marriage law from early eighteenth-century to the end of the nineteenth-century. While citing landmark legal treatises and acts and positioning these novels as the medium through which to see the way these legal moments significantly shaped British culture and society, equity is ultimately at the heart of this study, with equity functioning as part of law but a corrective to it. Running parallel to this protocol of reading through equity is a reading informed through moral philosophy, drawn predominantly from the work of Adam Smith and other thinkers from the Scottish Enlightenment. They encourage us to think about obligation, and the relationship between intentions, expectations, and consequences on the point of promise and contract. Beginning with Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), I show the moral and legal difficulties that arise when promises are based purely on verbal contracts. I then move to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Pamela in Her Exalted Condition (1741) to address the importance and utility of contract, but also the need to outline and endorse a system—introduced through Hardwicke’s Act (1753)—that would provide a more reliable structure for the marriage narrative. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria (1798) and Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), both of which I call historical novels, pinpoint legal structures that are both oppressive and obsolete, and those who fall victim to the insufficient common law require a more equitable judgment. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) encourages readers to think about the potency behind intentions, both expressed and implied, and how resulting consequences can often run counter to the original intentions and expectations. I posit each text as a ‘case’ warranting treatment and judgment in a court of equity, where the particular details are judged in and of themselves but then stand as an offering for ways to continue to think about the general pattern and evaluation of human nature and morals.
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