“Beautiful Moving Corpses”: The “Living Dead” as Anti-Capitalist Critique in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner
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For all its ground-breaking verisimilitude descriptions of the nineteenth century urban working-class living conditions, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner (1871) had long been criticized for utterly excluding the working people’s own attempts to build stable communities and reproduce a distinctive culture amidst the carnage wrought by capitalism and industrialization. Much of the critical response to the novel hinge upon how critics themselves define Phelps’s project: as one of capital versus labor, gender versus class solidarity, changes in characters’ personal consciousness versus changes in their physical conditions, ameliorative social reform versus organized labor activism. And the majority of readings have evinced desire or disappointment that the novel should have gone further in its politics. Through the employment of the modern philosophical notions of the “living dead,” however, it may as well be possible to place the text in a quite different critical domain. Combining close readings of Phelps’s novel with the contemporary philosophical discussions on the figure of the “zombie,” this essay traces the possibility of the nineteenth century pre-figuration of alternative mode of bodily existence, however limited or bleak it may be, in the face of totalizing forces of the modern capitalist system.
Abstract
For all its ground-breaking verisimilitude descriptions of the nineteenth century urban working-class living conditions, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner (1871) had long been criticized for utterly excluding the working people’s own attempts to build stable communities and reproduce a distinctive culture amidst the carnage wrought by capitalism and industrialization. Much of the critical response to the novel hinge upon how critics themselves define Phelps’s project: as one of capital versus labor, gender versus class solidarity, changes in characters’ personal consciousness versus changes in their physical conditions, ameliorative social reform versus organized labor activism. And the majority of readings have evinced desire or disappointment that the novel should have gone further in its politics. Through the employment of the modern philosophical notions of the “living dead,” however, it may as well be possible to place the text in a quite different critical domain. Combining close readings of Phelps’s novel with the contemporary philosophical discussions on the figure of the “zombie,” this essay traces the possibility of the nineteenth century pre-figuration of alternative mode of bodily existence, however limited or bleak it may be, in the face of totalizing forces of the modern capitalist system.
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