ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 examines the liberal association of contract with freedom. With George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge we see a move from the mid-century project of pressing on readers the importance of relationality for individual agency and for the morality of choice, toward explorations of the constraining implications of living in a web of relationships. The consciousness of constraints highlighted relationality as the basis of the contractual order, yet reversed associations of contract with freedom.
