Abstract:

The bigamy plot—the courtship's evil twin—involves characters marrying, then marrying again, a phenomenon rife across Victorian novels. This repetition creates redundancy, both in terms of spouses and, from an informatic perspective, reinforcing the marriage plot's importance. In contrast to a regulated feedback loop that generates stasis, the bigamy plot accumulates more of the same, emphasizing the ongoing centrality of marriage plots in the Victorian novel. This essay argues that this redundancy within the bigamy plot mirrors the emerging imperial information systems and realist aesthetics of the time. With the rise of data management systems like censuses and registries, both literature and empire wrestled with representing individuals both as unique entities and as interchangeable units. Through a reading of the proliferation of records in Jane Eyre (1848), this essay demonstrates how bigamy and its imperial records emerge as a way to understand the struggle for representation, a brief moment in which personhood is extended across the system while also being retracted.

摘要：

重婚情节——求爱的邪恶双胞胎——涉及人物结婚，然后再结婚，这种现象在维多利亚时代的小说中普遍存在。这种重复造成了冗余，无论是在配偶方面，还是从信息学的角度来看，都强化了婚姻情节的重要性。与产生停滞的受监管的反馈循环相比，重婚情节积累了更多相同的内容，强调了维多利亚时代小说中婚姻情节的持续中心地位。本文认为，重婚情节中的这种冗余反映了当时新兴的帝国信息系统和现实主义美学。随着人口普查和登记等数据管理系统的兴起，文学和帝国都在努力将个人代表为独特的实体和可互换的单位。