| The possible inheritance of an estate, an income, or a family position drives many nineteenth-century plots. As demographic and political conditions change in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the novel increasingly strives for realism. The earlier reliance on a providential inheritance to resolve the tensions of the plot no longer seems adequate. By mid-century, traditional inheritance fails to satisfy the protagonist's need for social identity and also fails to provide a public sense of continuity when wealth is transferred from one generation to the next. Inheritance in various forms thus preoccupies Victorian novelists. Crucial issues arise: the role of Providence to justify social inequities, the value of activity vs. passivity, the differing roles of men and women as heirs, the excluding and often fictitious nature of legal settlements, and the legal, moral, and narrative authority of the written will.;I first examine how Oliver Twist and Jane Eyre use the conservative pattern of completed inheritance, yet transform its meaning by insisting on a democratic and individualistic content at every step. Oliver passively lets his story be dictated by others; Jane's independent spirit accepts only her own will as final. The expected story line of fortuitous inheritance breaks completely in Great Expectations, revealing the criminal origins of wealth and the delusions of childish fantasy. In No Name, Collins inverts Dickens's pattern: a disinherited woman challenges the masculine control of legal inheritance and pursues her father's name and fortune at the cost of her honor. In Felix Holt and Middlemarch, inheritance becomes charged with political and moral significance. Protagonists must actively reject it in favor of work if they are to be free of the contamination of the past.;Inheritance is a framework within which changing social values contrast with the narrative fantasies of Romance, fantasies that constitute the novel's own literary inheritance. Eventually the novel must reject these fantasies as archaic and unrealistic dreams and find a new narrative pattern to shape the cultural mythos. The end of the inheritance plot marks the beginning of modernism. |
