Introduction: Writing Inheritance in European Literature

Abstract

This introduction presents the rationale behind this special issue about European literature’s engagement with modern inheritance practices. It introduces some of the fundamental conceptual, legal, and historical aspects of inheritance in Western modernity, and outlines how the articles in this issue address them. The articles deal with literary and historic materials from the seventeenth century to the present, and the introduction stresses both the historical changes and continuities in their treatments of inheritance.

Keywords:

• Inheritance
• modern literature
• inheritance taxation
• inheritance law
• legacies
• property
• patrimonial capitalism
• family
• testaments
• heirs

This special issue deals with modern European literature’s engagement with inheritance from around 1600 to the present. Conflicts over inheritance have fueled countless narratives from Shakespeare’s King Lear (1605–6) through canonical novels like Balzac’s Père Goriot (1835) and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) to contemporary TV-series like Succession (2018-). Works like these use legacies and last wills to explore ethical dilemmas about the limits of filial duty and the responsibility towards past and future generations. But they also more or less explicitly engage with the historical and material core of inheritance from which these perennial ethical questions can hardly be detached: the transfer of private property mortis causa and the ways it is regulated by cultural and legal norms.

In the modern era, discussions about inheritance law revolve around a few key issues: Do testators have the right to freely determine the distribution of their property after death? Should firstborn and younger siblings, sons and daughters, legitimate and illegitimate children inherit equal parts? And, most recently, should the wider community benefit through inheritance taxation? In a seminal study, Jens Beckert argues that the political actors who seek to resolve these dilemmas necessarily “see the problem of inheritance law within culturally formed orders of justification.”¹ Literature is integral to these cultural formations, and the dramatic and emotional potential of inheritance have resulted in a particularly rich literary contribution to modern discourses about what inheritance is and can be. The eight articles of this special issue explore this contribution.

This is not the first special issue of Law & Literature on inheritance. Joseph Jenkins edited volume 20.2 (2008) under the title “What Should Inheritance Law Be?” We think of the two issues as complementary. The materials and historical periods covered are different. The first issue dealt with a wide array of materials from the Bible to the present. This one has a tighter focus on seventeenth- to twenty-first century European literary writing ranging from drama and novels to life-writing and testaments. The impetus and framing of the first issue was primarily philosophical and theological with a particular interest in the meaning of the last will and freedom of testation.² The contributions in this issue engage a broader set of questions about the economic, political, and legal meaning of various aspects of inheritance. They do so mainly from a literary historical perspective with a shared interest in the ways literary works engage with specific temporally and culturally situated inheritance practices and problems. Methodologically, the two issues also cover different ground with articles in the present issue ranging from richly contextualized close readings of single works to comparative studies of several volumes, a survey of an entire authorship (that of Thomas Bernhard), and computational studies of dozens of dramas and novels.

The chronological structure of this issue with one to three articles for each century serves to illustrate the historical developments of modern inheritance literature. However, it is also true that many concerns and conflicts related to inheritance have changed remarkably little over time, and the same goes for the narrative structures, character types, and rhetorical figures that fiction employs to imagine inheritance. Evidence of this can be found in the many conceptual and thematic connections between articles in this volume. In order to highlight some of these links and historical continuities, the remaining part of this introduction presents a few fundamental conceptual and historical aspects of inheritance in Western modernity and outlines how the articles address them. In doing that, we particularly want to stress the parallels between past and contemporary experiences and challenges. Inheritance is a pressing issue, and although most articles in this volume deal with historic materials, we hope to show in introducing them how they also speak to the present. Looking at modern Western European history and literature from the point of view of inheritance is both to discover the persistence of the past and the legacy of its capacity to imagine change.

It stays in the family: Parental, dynastic, and national legacies

Inheritance is a basic human condition. The dying leave legacies to the living, who in turn must eventually pass on what is theirs to the future. In modern Western societies, the family remains the primary social framework for the generational transfer of private property. Even though the traditional nuclear family is no longer the undisputed norm, many still believe that legacies should primarily benefit close relatives, primarily the deceased's children.³ In this context, inheritance is seen as an extension of the natural parental duty to provide for offspring, although twentieth-century Western inheritance law has also increasingly privileged spouses.⁴

In some cases, the commitments involved in inheritance extend beyond the immediate family to a longer family history. An emblematic example of this is the crucial role of ancestry for the European aristocracy. The drive to preserve titles and estates in the family traditionally meant that a noble heir ought ideally to think of himself merely as a custodian of an inherited estate. In order to avoid the consequences if heirs had different notions, English landowners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used legal instruments like entail and strict settlement to secure the transmission of family property in the male bloodline, bypassing female heirs and barring male heirs from alienating family estates.⁵ Although these legal instruments are outdated, the values behind their use are not consigned to the past. They surely persist in contemporary noble families, and sociological studies further complicate any assumptions about a neat historical transition from aristocratic models of family wealth to capitalist individualism by finding similar dynastic ideals among ultra-rich heirs of family-owned businesses today.⁶ Now as then, such heirs are mainly men. In Italy and the UK, for example, female inherited wealth currently accounts for less than 15% of total inherited wealth.⁷

One article in this special issue deals with gendered inheritance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In “‘No Woman, much less a Woman of Fortune, is ever fit to be her own Mistress’: Gender, Wealth, and Agency in Inheritance Novels from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Beth Cortese, Julie Hastrup-Markussen, and Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan use an experimental, computational method to compare the agency of heiresses and heirs across twenty-nine English novels. Generally, heiresses turn out to have more agency than literary criticism would lead one to expect, especially in Gothic novels, whose heroines’ development as feeling and discerning moral agents help prevent subversions of legitimate successions.

A different, more metaphorical, and synchronic way in which the modern era has extended the family when it comes to inheritance is found in the legal institutionalization of public patrimony, whereby first national citizens and later the global community became joint heirs of natural and cultural wealth.⁸ This legal codification is a superstructure built on a much broader, common experience of the historical past itself as a kind of inheritance. Thinking about history in these terms does not only or necessarily entail preserving cultural and natural “heirlooms” from destruction, it also involves confronting the difficult choices of how individuals and communities deal with the transgressions and crimes of past generations.

Although all of the meanings of the concept of family mentioned so far are in principle separate, they sometimes come together in conflicting ways in real life and literature. Thus, in “Destructive Legacies: Thomas Bernhard’s Literary Critique of Inheritance,” Ulrike Vedder details how the writings of Austrian novelist and dramatist Thomas Bernhard repeatedly return to a particular inheritance scene: A son refuses to accept the legacy of his parents’ aristocratic estate because he cannot disassociate it from the national “patrimony” of Austrian history, in particular the parent generation’s involvement in the crimes of National Socialism. A parallel refusal is expressed in the author’s own testament which prohibits that “anything written by me be performed, printed or even recited in any form whatsoever within the borders of the Austrian state.”⁹ Vedder’s article explores how Bernhard, in an oeuvre written under the sign of troubled inheritance, thereby links the themes of intimate and national trauma to the question of the literary work as cultural heritage.

Warm feelings and cold cash: The affective economy of inheritance

Bernhard’s heirs are torn between the emotional and economic values of their inheritance. Although their answers to this problem are often radical, the dilemma points to a central aspect of inheritance in general: in addition to its immediate economic value, property transferred mortis causa can evoke strong feelings and take on deep symbolic meaning for testators and heirs alike. As the tangible trace of a lived life and the expression of a last will, an inheritance can be a source of remembrance, acting as a quasi-sacred bridge between the realms of the dead and the living. Feelings of obligation toward past and future generations may thereby determine the use of a legacy in ways that are different from other types of income and belongings. This still holds for many in contemporary Western societies, who think of heirlooms as “inalienable objects”¹⁰ and inherited money as gifts that may only be spent on particular purposes or preserved for future generations.¹¹ At the same time, of course, the economic and emotional stakes along with the unappealable force of a last will can turn inheritance into a site of bitter contestation and conflict within families: a paternal curse rather than a gift, a source of estrangement rather than belonging.

Several articles in this special issue deal with this complex and sometimes conflicted entanglement of economy and affect, past and future involved in inheritance. In “‘Twoo muche vayne and idle chardge’: The precision of inheritance in the 1601 will of Bess of Hardwick,” Vicki Kay reads Bess of Hardwick’s 1601 will as both a legal document and a piece of life-writing in which the noblewoman asserts her past personal and dynastic achievements, but also seeks to exert control over the lives of her heirs and her material and intangible legacies. Kay’s reading shows how the will and Bess’s regular revisions of its provisions during her last years reflect changes in her emotional attachments and moral evaluations of her family and kin, one dramatic result of which was the final disinheritance of her oldest son and her granddaughter. In “Disputing the Emotional Estate. Moral and Financial Inheritance in Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament (2016) and Helga Hjorth’s Free Will (2017)”, Bodil Selmer analyzes another, contemporary example of inheritance-related life-writing, Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth’s autobiographical novel Arv og miljø (translated into English as Will and Testament in 2019). The novel recounts a traumatic dispute among four middle-aged siblings over the inheritance of two family cabins, emblematic signifiers of wealth and familial belonging in present-day Norway. The conflict is fueled by the narrator’s allegation that the recently deceased father sexually abused her in her childhood. In response to the autobiographical novel, the author’s sister, Helga Hjorth, issued a novel of her own that details the same events from an opposing perspective, denying her sister’s allegations. At stake in this fierce personal and literary family feud, Selmer explains, is both monetary wealth and a need for private and public recognition, moral vindication, and a place in the family history.

Dead hands: Testamentary freedom and the grasp of the past

Family patterns, social norms, and cultural traditions as well as the legal and political regulation of inheritance are subject to change. For centuries, inheritance was a central guiding principle in the allocation and reproduction of political power and wealth in Western countries. For the noble elites, inherited wealth and power was not only legitimate, it was legitimate because it was inherited. The modern era questioned this principle in the liberal name of individual rights and meritocracy. Accordingly, the reform of inheritance law became a top priority during the American and French revolutions. Both nations abandoned the principle of male primogeniture, and the Napoleonic Code Civil (1804) furthermore limited testamentary freedom and adopted a principle of partible inheritance, whereby the deceased’s children inherited an equal share in a fixed portion of the estate. This introduction of the principle of equality into inheritance law had the political function of forcing aristocratic landowners to split up their estates into smaller units. Most of Western Europe followed this example in the nineteenth century, with the exception of England, which to this day largely preserves the freedom of testation first sanctioned in modern times by The Statute of Wills (1540).

Noa Reich’s article in this special issue, “Victorian Inheritance, Speculation, and Middlemarch’s ‘Dead Hand’” explores Victorian fiction’s critical engagement with an inheritance system based on freedom of testation that allows prospective testators and heirs to engage in “relational speculation,” that is “the manipulation of relations in the hopes of benefiting from the disposition of inherited wealth.” Reading the recurring image of the “dead hand” as an allusion to the legal concept of mortmain, Reich argues that George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2) confronts the practice of relational speculation with a legal principle, whose historic connotations of constraint gestures towards alternative modes of property ownership and transmission. Andrew Counter’s article, “Dead Hands, or, How the French Stopped the Dead Seizing the Living,” also takes up the powerful metaphor of the dead hand. Counter argues that the differences regarding testamentary freedom in English and post-revolutionary French inheritance law explain why certain recurring plot twists in Victorian novels like Middlemarch that hinge on the destiny-like power of the last will are absent from nineteenth-century French fiction. Counter proves this point by exploring the thematization of the French legal resistance to the power of the dead over the living in Honoré de Balzac’s “The Elixir of Life” (1830) and Colonel Chabert (1832; 1846). The article shows that the French author’s handling of this theme ultimately reflects on the difficult relationship of modern France to its Revolutionary and pre-Revolutionary past, as well as on the all-powerful status of the law.

Unearned wealth: The rise and return of patrimonial capitalism

In the first half of the twentieth century, many Western countries adopted a systematic inheritance taxation (and taxes on large gifts inter vivos). Such taxes are often progressive and only apply to legacies and gifts above a certain amount. The main argument for their implementation was to curb the concentration of dynastic wealth, but also to finance social policies and economic redistribution.¹² In recent decades, however, inheritance taxation has become a contested issue with rightist groups successfully fighting for the reduction or abolition of the “death tax”.¹³ Since Ronald Reagan’s 1981 Economic Tax Act, the US federal estate tax rate has gradually fallen from a maximum rate of 77% to 40%.¹⁴ However, since the tax exemption level has reached $11,700,000 in 2021, only a tiny fraction of the population pays any estate tax at all.¹⁵ In the UK, the standard inheritance tax rate is 40% and the tax-free threshold has risen to £325,000 with several legal ways to significantly increase the amount exempted.¹⁶ Sweden and Norway abolished the tax altogether in 2005 and 2014 respectively, while in Denmark the rate has fallen to 15% of estates worth more than the current DKK 301.900 threshold.

This development has consequences for the distribution of private wealth. A recent study estimates that inherited wealth accounts for an average 50–60% of private fortunes in 2000–2010 in Germany, England, and France, up from an average below 40% in 1980. The upward trend seems destined to continue and perhaps reach the levels of 1900–1910, where the share exceeded 70%.¹⁷ One of the authors of the study, French economist Thomas Piketty, consequently warns against a return of “patrimonial capitalism.”¹⁸ Much of the public debate following his Capital in the twenty-first century (2014) centered on the increasing share of private fortunes in the hands of the wealthiest 1% and the rising top executive salaries that are in part driving it. But a significant part of the 1%’s share also comes from inheritance. Old money persists and multiplies, especially in Western Europe where, according to another study from 2014, around half of all billionaires have inherited their fortunes, and of those over 20% are fourth generation or older heirs.¹⁹ However, it is not just the super-rich (men) who benefit disproportionally from inheritance. According to Piketty, an increasing share of the total inherited wealth falls to a class of petits rentiers. His estimates show that as much as every sixth Frenchman in the young generations will inherit sums over 750,000 euros, which is approximately what the bottom half of the population currently earns on average through a lifetime of labor.²⁰ In Piketty’s account, increasingly un-taxed inherited wealth thus widens the income gap between the majority who inherit little or nothing, and the upper middle and upper classes. Inherited wealth thereby discreetly bolsters earned income differences, creating a “meritocratic” class system, which is once again increasingly determined by birth.

Capital in the twenty-first century shows that in the longue durée of Western modernity, the current development is much less an aberration than a return to a normal that was interrupted in the twentieth century by the two world wars and the following decades of relative economic equality and growth. The first two articles in this special issue take us back to the origins of patrimonial capitalism in early modern London. In “Risky Business: Con Artists, Speculation, and Inheritance in Early Modern English Drama,” Michelle Dowd explores the links between inheritance and various forms of financial speculation. The rapidly expanding market economy in seventeenth-century London with its opportunities for social mobility would seem to be at odds with the traditional forms of inherited wealth and power underpinned by land ownership. But Dowd shows that in comedies by dramatists like Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and John Cooke, inheritance becomes a site of risk or speculation. Dowd argues that these plays thereby perform the important cultural work of imagining and testing how patrilineal inheritance can successfully adapt to changing socio-economic conditions in England’s emerging capitalist culture. In “Prodigal Heirs and their Social Networks in Early Modern English Drama, 1590–1640,” Jakob Ladegaard and Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan use computational social network analysis to study twenty plays from 1590 to 1640 that dramatize the prodigal use of an inheritance as a source of conflict. By exploring the social networks of the plays and in particular the role of minor characters like stewards and representatives of the law, the study argues that a shift in this dramatic tradition occurs in the 1610s. In line with recent research by Michelle Dowd and others, the study finds that earlier plays tend to link prodigality to risky speculation and the social skills needed to navigate an urban commercial economy. However, later plays from the 1620s and 30 s tend to censure prodigality as a threat to the patrilineal succession of elite households and the social hierarchy it buttressed. These plays might allow commercial wealth to mingle with inherited privileges, but all the more vigorously defend the social boundary between those whom birth and merit allow to spend prodigiously and those who have no right to follow their example. Like the rest of the materials covered in this special issue, the concerns of these plays seem surprisingly contemporary. Taken as a whole, this journal issue thus illustrates that inheritance – at once intimate and public, natural and historical, a source of complex emotions and of economic inequality, a contradictory site of individual freedom, social reproduction, and legal regulation – is one of the great shaping forces of modern Western societies and their literatures.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Most of the contributions to this volume are reworked papers presented at the conference “Passing On: Property, Family and Death in Narratives of Inheritance” organized by David Hasberg Zirak-Schmidt, Julie Hastrup-Markussen, and Jakob Ladegaard with the assistance of Jonas Kirk Dejgaard, Mads Nansen Paulsen, and Karen Kam Wium Pedersen, and held November 13–15, 2019 at Aarhus University. We would like to thank all participants in the event for contributing to an engaging dialogue about inheritance that helped shape this special issue. We also gratefully acknowledge Independent Research Fund Denmark for funding the conference and our editorial work on this special issue through the research project “Unearned Wealth: A Literary History of Inheritance, 1600–2015.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jakob Ladegaard

Jakob Ladegaard is an associate professor in comparative literature at Aarhus University. He mainly works on Early Modern English drama, using qualitative and computational methods. He is the director of a collective research project entitled “Unearned Wealth – A Literary History of Inheritance, 1600–2015,” supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. With Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan, he has recently published “Selfish Bastards? A Corpus-Based Approach to Illegitimacy in Early Modern Drama,” Memoria di Shakespeare, no. 7 (“Stylometry”, ed. Hugh Craig), 2020. He has also recently co-edited Context in Literary and Cultural Studies with Jakob Gaardbo Nielsen (London: UCL Press, 2019).

Beth Cortese

Beth Cortese is a postdoctoral researcher on the Unearned Wealth project at Aarhus University where she researches women and inheritance in drama and prose from the long-eighteenth century. She was awarded her PhD on “Women’s Wit on Stage 1660–1720” from Lancaster University in 2018, and is working on a monograph focused on the same subject. Her most recent publications are “From Love of Money to Love for Love: Heiresses on the Long Eighteenth Century Stage”, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 32, no. 2 (2020) and “Eunuchs, Mutes and the Performance of Anxiety in Orientalist Plays” in Castration, Impotence, and Emasculation in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. by Anne Greenfield (London: Routledge, 2019).

Notes

1 Jens Beckert, Inherited Wealth, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 280.

2 Joseph Jenkins, “What Should Inheritance Law Be?,” Law & Literature 20, no. 2 (2008): 129–50; see esp. pp. 139–41

3 Gillian Douglas, Hilary Woodward, Alun Humphrey, Lisa Mills, and Gareth Morrell, “Enduring Love? Attitudes to Family and Inheritance Law in England and Wales,” Journal of Law and Society 38, no. 2 ( 2011): 245–71.

4 Anne Gotman, L’héritage (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), 71–3.

5 See Eileen Spring, Law, Land, and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

6 Hanna Kuusela, “Learning to Own: Cross-Generational Meanings of Wealth and Class-Making in Wealthy Finnish Families,” The Sociological Review 66, no. 6 (2018): 1161–76, esp. 1168–71; see also Michael Gilding, “Families and Fortunes: Accumulation, Management Succession and Inheritance in Wealthy Families,” Journal of Sociology 41, no. 1 (2005): 29–45.

7 Caroline Freund, Rich People Poor Countries: The Rise of Emerging-Market Tycoons and Their Mega Firms (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2016), 126.

8 For more on the modern history of cultural heritage, see Stefan Willer, “Kulturelles Erbe: Tradieren und Konservieren,” in Erbe - Übertragungskonzepte zwischen Natur und Kultur, ed. Stefan Willer, Sigrid Weigel, Bernhard Jussen (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013), 160–201.

9 Quoted from Bernhard Judex, Thomas Bernhard: Epoche, Werk, Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 2010), 28. Translation by Alexander Matschi.

10 Carolyn Folkman Curasi, Linda L. Price, and Eric J. Arnold, “How Individuals’ Cherished Possessions Become Families’ Inalienable Wealth,” The Journal of consumer research 31, no. 3 (2004): 609–22.

11 Bodil Selmer, “How to Exchange with the Dead: The Significance of Heirlooms in Contemporary Danish Inheritance Practices,” in Donations, Inheritance and Property in the Nordic and Western World from Late Antiquity until Today, ed. O.-A. Rønning, H. M. Sigh, and H. Vogt (London: Routledge, 2017), 297–302.

12 Beckert, Inherited Wealth, 170.

13 For more on the rhetoric of recent estate tax opposition, see Michael J. Graetz & Ian Shapiro, Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 221–38.

14 Ibid., 201–8.

15 “Estate Tax,” https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/estate-tax (accessed January 20, 2021); Chye-Ching Huang and Chloe Cho, “Ten Facts You Should Know About the Federal Estate Tax,” The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), October 30, 2017, https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/ten-facts-you-should-know-about-the-federal-estate-tax (accessed January 20, 2021).

16 ”Inheritance Tax,” https://www.gov.uk/inheritance-tax (accessed January 20, 2021).

17 Facundo Alvaredo, Bertrand Garbinti, and Thomas Piketty, “On the Share of Inheritance in Aggregate Wealth: Europe and the USA, 1900–2010,” Economica 84 (2017): 240.

18 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).

19 Freund, Rich People Poor Countries, 38; Caroline Freund and Sarah Oliver, “The Origins of the Superrich: The Billionaire Characteristics Database,” PIIE Working Papers 16, no. 1 (2016): 12, https://www.piie.com/publications/wp/wp16-1.pdf

20 Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 418–21.