Abstract: This essay argues that Wilkie Collins's Armadale (1864–66) theorizes liberalism in relation to Caribbean apprenticeship (1834–38). Intended to enact a transition between slavery and contractual wage labor, apprenticeship represented an anomaly for liberal contract theory, as it rendered freedom of contract the means by which freedpersons were forced to continue performing unpaid work. Armadale registers this paradox by analogizing apprenticeship to the legal mechanism of conditional gift, a structure that creates a liminal zone between contractual exchange and benevolent gratuity. In demonstrating how conditional gift embeds extra-consensual elements into consensual contract to create new forms of authorized bondage, Armadale discloses how apprenticeship provided post-emancipation liberalism with an enduring model for integrating coercion into the infrastructure of liberty.
Abstract: This essay investigates Vernon Lee's struggle to define love, why we have struggled to describe her relationship to love, and why love operates as a point of difficulty in her writing across genres by focusing on four well-known texts from the 1880s and 90s in which she talks at length about love and actually deploys that term: the chapter "Mediæval Love" in Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediæval in the Renaissance (1884), A Phantom Lover: A Fantastic Story (1886), the story "Amour Dure" (1890), and the dialogue on friendship in Althea (1894). In these key works from the first phase of her career, she develops and repeatedly recasts, fine-tunes, and reconsiders a queer theory of noble love, working within the affordances of the essay, the short story, and the dialogue form to reflect her increasing awareness of the difficulty of the task she has set for herself, turning increasingly to ambivalent or dialogic forms that might assist in the expression of this uncertainty.
