Book contents
- British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century
- British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 “Every Common Reader”
- Chapter 2 Perpendicular Publics
- Chapter 3 Ambivalence, Survival, and Law in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year
- Chapter 4 The Court of Justice and the Court of Conscience
- Chapter 5 “A Higher Tribunal”
- Chapter 6 Mansfield, Burrow, and the Reformulation of the Legal Decision
- Chapter 7 Novel Subjects
- Chapter 8 Common Law and Cultural Difference in Scott’s Ivanhoe and Chronicles of the Canongate
- Chapter 9 The Legal Character of Paupers in Early Nineteenth-Century England
- Chapter 10 Liberty in “Parenthesis”
- Chapter 11 Yearning for Restriction in the Romantic Novel
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 3 - Ambivalence, Survival, and Law in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 September 2025
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Book contents
- British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century
- British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 “Every Common Reader”
- Chapter 2 Perpendicular Publics
- Chapter 3 Ambivalence, Survival, and Law in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year
- Chapter 4 The Court of Justice and the Court of Conscience
- Chapter 5 “A Higher Tribunal”
- Chapter 6 Mansfield, Burrow, and the Reformulation of the Legal Decision
- Chapter 7 Novel Subjects
- Chapter 8 Common Law and Cultural Difference in Scott’s Ivanhoe and Chronicles of the Canongate
- Chapter 9 The Legal Character of Paupers in Early Nineteenth-Century England
- Chapter 10 Liberty in “Parenthesis”
- Chapter 11 Yearning for Restriction in the Romantic Novel
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter explores the prehistory of ambivalence as an embodied emotion related to human survival by examining the ambivalent reactions to plague law in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Long before the word “ambivalence” appeared in English, Defoe depicts actions and thoughts that we now think of as “ambivalent.” In the face of a deadly plague that resulted in legal regulation enabling government surveillance, Defoe’s narrator shifts loyalties as restlessly as he shifts positions, ambivalently pivoting between loyalty to the larger community as represented by the law and pursuit of his own concerns. The chapter suggests that Defoe presents ambivalence as a mode of resistance to state surveillance and control that avoids the most extreme expression of resistance, that of suicide, or as eighteenth-century law construed it, “self-murder.” Ambivalence, often thought of as a self-defeating emotion, is represented as serving a protective function, creating space for individuals to resist legal authority, neither capitulating to state control nor exercising a fatal form of resistance.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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