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CLEERE, EILEEN. Avuncularism: Capitalism, Patriarchy and Nineteenth-Century English Culture. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. 238 pp. $49.50.
With her ambitious book, Avuncularism: Capitalism, Patriarchy and Nineteenth-Century English Culture, Eileen Cleere hopes "to loosen the nuclear family's hold upon Victorian culture..." (210-11). Cleere attempts nothing less than to create a new way of making sense of the past, which neither normalizes father-centered cultural discourses nor elides non-father-centered ones. One of her points is that the nuclear family was more fractured and contradictory and kinship more complex and expansive than previously allowed. Seeking to counter the ways "the nuclear family becomes a practically impermeable axiom of Victorian culture" (2), she employs a term from cultural anthropology, avunculate. In shifting attention to the uncle and to fluid kinship networks, thereby unsettling narratives of the rise of the nuclear family, she wishes to map out exogamous instead of endogamous relations and exchanges, ones not subject to patrilineage and social paternalism. As she recognizes, such relations unfold within the context of another great "rise"-the rise of industrial capitalism. The avunculate "marks an important cultural and historical schism in the concept of patriarchy, a schism provoked by significant historical events from the onslaught of industrial capitalism, to colonialism, to the demands of a newly global economy" (6-7).
Cleere squeezes much out of this term. She uses it to retheorize patriarchy and to dislodge monolithic conceptions of it, deploying the figure of the uncle to reveal the fissures in the seeming seamlessness of patriarchy. Further, she presses it in order to rethink economic, familial, sexual, and cultural exchanges. The uncle, that exogamous element necessary for exchange, stands at the nexus where kinship and commerce intermingle. As the avunculate provided the Victorian cultural imagination with a commercial metaphor, her project necessarily brings into commerce varied discourses, methodologies, and approaches (feminism, Marxism, new historicism, poststructuralism, anthropology) with diverse texts. Key figures for Cleere's project include Mary Poovey, Nancy Armstrong, and Catherine Gallagher, as well as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and Frederic Jameson.
In the five chapters following...