Abstract

To many people living in late nineteenth-century Britain, both economic production and biological reproduction seemed to be in crisis. The radical changes to work and the workforce brought on by the "second industrial revolution," migration to the cities, and global capitalism, signaled the decline of traditional forms of production. Moreover, the defiant challenges to gender roles most pronounced in the "New Woman" and dandyism, combined with the rise of birth control and declining fertility rates, marked what many saw as a threat to biological reproduction and the health of the "English race." Though present-day critics tend to treat these late-Victorian ruptures in production and reproduction as separate concerns of either class or gender politics, many late-Victorian writers saw them as dovetailing components of a coherent political discourse. In order to explore the extent to which the shifting notions of production and reproduction inform one another, "Going into Labor: Production and Reproduction in Fin de Siècle British Literature" examines literature which confronts these conceptual shifts from contending political perspectives. Olive Schreiner, H. Rider Haggard, and William Morris produce literary texts which propose manipulating the relations between production and reproduction in order to restore, reshape, or revolutionize Britain's political and biological character. Schreiner defines artistic creation and maternity as inseparable but competing forms of labor in her protomodernist The Story of an African Farm and her feminist treatise Woman and Labor, each of which scrutinizes imperialism's reliance on women's passive reproductive work. In his imperial romances and his nonfictional studies of England's depressed agricultural regions, Haggard scripts masculinist fantasies in which male heroes reclaim regenerative and economic authority to thwart the enervating effects of an industrial capitalism which he suggests has compromised English virility. Morris, in his communist utopia News from Nowhere as well as his socialist theories of labor and aesthetics, proposes an emancipating account of the role of labor as a reproductive force with which we craft human bodies, but also falls into an unsettling and largely unacknowledged alignment with eugenics. Each chapter assesses formal developments in the authors' figuratively reproductive labor (writing) and the resulting textual offspring.