Merchants, Barons, Sellers and Suits : The Changing Images of the Businessman through Literature [1 ed.] 9781443824620, 9781443824194

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Merchants, Barons, Sellers and Suits

Merchants, Barons, Sellers and Suits: The Changing Images of the Businessman through Literature

Edited by

Christa Mahalik

Merchants, Barons, Sellers and Suits: The Changing Images of the Businessman through Literature, Edited by Christa Mahalik This book first published 2010 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2010 by Christa Mahalik and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-2419-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2419-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Christa Mahalik A Gentleman’s Business: Jewish Representation and National Belonging in Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister ................................................. 7 Jessica S. Stock Catching the Elusive Consumer: Trollope’s Adversarial Advertising....... 17 April Toadvine The Soi-Disant Hero’s Suicide: Chancy Speculation in Trollope’s The Prime Minister.................................................................................... 39 Luca Caddia The Consumed Consumer: Business as Usual for Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Men” ............................................................................................ 57 Melanie Hanson Shylock as the American Capitalist ........................................................... 95 Elaine Brousseau Revising Reputations: The Bellmen of England and Oral Culture in the Early Modern Period ..................................................................... 112 Devon McDonald From Optimism to Ennui: The Changing Depiction of the Businessman in American Fiction of the 1960’s and 1970’s......................................... 150 David Simmons ‘But he aint never bin seen!’: The Protean Howard Hughes and Overlapping Capitalist Narratives in Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger ............ 163 Carrie Conners

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Table of Contents

Stock Characters: The Literary Lives of American Businessmen ........... 176 Blaine Greteman The Wall Street Businessman Goes Metrosexual.................................... 204 Zachary Snider The Work of Literature in the Age of the Office ..................................... 219 Christopher Schaberg Denmark Inc.: Artistic Temperament and Anti-Corporate Satire in Three Film Adaptations of Hamlet ...................................................... 236 Todd Borlik Surviving the Economy: Madams, Houses, and Profits in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure........................................................................... 259 Laura Faulk The Limits of Popular Representation: Postwar Working Girls in Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything (1958) and Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl (1962) ....................................................................... 277 Polina Kroik The Madam, the Bootlegger, and the Mystic: The Black Market and the Cruelty of Fairness in The Street (1944) ..................................... 294 Rekha Rosha The Daddy Antidote: Domestic Masculinity Confronts Commerce in Silas Marner and Jennifer Government............................................... 324 Ingrid Ranum Contributors............................................................................................. 344

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘Merchants, Barons, Sellers, and Suits’ began as a hybrid English/Business English online class at Quinnipiac University. I would like to thank everyone at Quinnipiac University that had a hand in putting the online course together. Many warm thanks to the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) for holding a session about the changing images of the businessman in literature at the 2009 conference. Last, but not least, I would like to thank everyone at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their commitment to this project and working with me so diligently throughout the publishing process.

INTRODUCTION

The theme of the changing images of the businessman through literature began as a conversation about a hybrid course at Quinnipiac University. The purpose of this course was to take an online English course for nontraditional business majors and create a theme that would be relevant to the business world. Being given the task to create this course from the ground up was exciting and intriguing. There turned out to be a lot more material that could be used for this theme than previously thought. To gauge the temperature of the topic a panel was submitted with the theme about the businessman (or woman) and the changing image through literature. At the 2009 NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) conference in Boston the panel was held and many ideas, such as some of the ones presented in the following essays, were discussed. A secondary theme evolved out of the construction of the first. Participants discussed the environment as a catalyst in the change of "what a person actually thinks a businessman (or woman) looks like." Many of these images were formed based upon pop culture, such as the traveling salesman in the Loony Toons cartoons who sells brushes door to door and hails from Walla Walla, Washington. Others were based the images read about in books, such as Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman. The essays included in this volume, presented by doctoral candidates and scholars from across a range of geographical regions and disciplines, result in a collection that investigates the idea of the changing image of the businessman throughout literature both in America and in Europe. The arrangement of the collection is a comparative timeline allowing the changing images of business to evolve with each essay. The collection begins with Jessica Stock's essay that concentrates on the representation of Jewish businessmen in Anthony Trollope's fiction and the ways in which he plays with ethnicity to examine the construction of national belonging. Trollope's The Prime Minister and The Way We Live Now depict Jewish businessmen attempting to climb up the social ladder with the use of money (cash, stocks) without the privilege of land or title. With the figure of the Jewish businessman, Trollope dislodges race from class, and, in turn, race from national belonging. While his two main Jewish characters, Ferdinand Lopez and Augustus Melmotte, are eventually destroyed, their

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Introduction

fall is less an indictment of their business tactics than an interrogation of how money signifies national belonging in a changing English hierarchy. Trollope displaces his anxiety onto his Jewish characters and uses them as a way to interrogate a national identity dislocated from landownership. The Jewish Diaspora offers Trollope a way to tease out the limits of national identity by using the figure of the Jewish businessman as the example par excellence of industrialization’s effects. Trollope's ambivalent depiction of Jews warns of the perils of industrialization while also deconstructing English traditionalism. Trollope scholarship generally places him in an uncomplicated Victorian tradition; however, I see his novels and use of Jewish characters as anticipating modernity's challenge to the nation, the economy, and identity. Similarly, April Toadvine's paper deals with advertisers whose job it is to convince consumers to buy. Anthony Trollope’s novel, The Struggles of Brown, Smith, and Robinson, makes light of advertisers as he describes a culture in which advertisers and consumers are fighting over the newest precious commodity: the fantasy of consumption. Trollope’s satirical novel takes aim at the adversarial nature of the relationship between the store, its advertisers, and its customers. Told from the perspective of George Robinson, mastermind of an ingenious, if fruitless, marketing campaign for a newly opened store, the novel critiques the role advertisers like Robinson play in emphasizing style over substance. Trollope depicts a world in which advertisers create a fantasy of consumption that both employee and customer recognize as false. As a result, advertising creates an antagonistic relationship between employee and customer that ultimately leads to the store’s failure. The customer’s desire for the advertised, yet unobtainable, objects for sale in the store, and the retailer’s creation of the fantasy of universal consumption through advertising leave both salesperson and shopper dissatisfied and disgruntled. Luca Caddia explores, in his essay "The Soi-Distant Hero's Suicide: Chancy Speculation In Trollope's The Prime Minister," how Trollope rejects the danger of irresponsibility by describing social conjunction after the suicide of a character, Ferdinand Lopez, whose death under a train in the sixtieth chapter of The Prime Minister is responsible for the dismissal of a railway porter, considered guilty of having been unable to avoid the suicide. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate how the novelist’s conception has less to do with a censorial attitude than with the intrinsic impossibility of self-regarding actions in contemporary life, in which one person’s existence is closely tied to another’s.” Melanie Hanson's article discusses the image of the vampiric businessman in Goblin Market that parallels with the terror of bankruptcy

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that appears in English Victorian novels. Bankruptcy in real life left the tormented person in this era completely vulnerable and helpless as the character Laura is left ravaged and wanting in Goblin Market. Laura is financially, emotionally, and physically bankrupt by her associations with the businessmen in the poem. The goblin salesmen, however, also represent a kind of bankruptcy – the morally bankrupt who take advantage of the innocent, the struggling working man trying to make a buck, those who will leech off anyone so that they can avoid scandal and not end up unemployed and in the poorhouse (scandal was like Greek tragedy to the Victorians in England). Elaine Brousseau's paper discusses Shylock's connection with capitalism. Shakespeare's Jew has been seen as personifying "possessive individualism" and as embodying the acquisitiveness at the heart of modern entrepreneurial capitalism. The essay examines nineteenth-century reviews of American productions of The Merchant of Venice to reveal the extent to which Shylock was associated with American capitalism and particularly with what the culture perceived as the shortcomings of the businessman. Devon McDonald's article explores the bellmen’s transitory state in early modern England, and their negotiation of the literate transformation. Moving from images that exemplify the bellmen’s status as central to early modern communities, through to images that expose the bellmen’s displacement during the printing revolution, and ending in examples of the bellmen’s own print work and their successful adaptation to print culture, this essay maps the progressive nature of the bellmen of England and highlight the complex sociological, economical, and governmental transformations that characterize this period. Examining the bellmen’s unique position as an early hinge between oral and literate culture effectively frames the mutually dependant and reciprocally enriching components of text and voice—more specifically, it demonstrates how these overarching communicative themes have informed and influenced both commerce and commodity. In David SImmons' The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Heller to Vonnegut (2008) the changing depiction of the entrepreneurial figure in selected novels of the 1960s is examined. During the nineteenth century figures such as Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Hearst were idolized by large sectors of the population. In an America in which production occupied such a central position, individuals such as Rockefeller and Hearst became important icons within the social assemblage, as the literal embodiment of what was classified as the “success myth." During the immediate post-war period authors utilize the widely recognized ideological

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Introduction

significations of the entrepreneurial figure and the “success myth” in order expose them as falsehoods and suggest that a more democratic reformulation of society is needed. Carrie Conners explores how Edward Dorn’s long poem Gunslinger draws upon conventions of the epic quest, the Western, comic books, and other genres in order to create a hilarious, heterogeneous, allusive and unapologetically difficult text. The poem follows a gunslinger/ metaphysician/demigod and his band of brothers, which includes a talking, pot-smoking horse (sometimes known as Claude Levi-Strauss), on a meandering and haphazard quest that is eventually abandoned or forgotten, to find and duel Robart, a paragon of capitalism based on Howard Hughes. The collection of outsiders and innumerable references to drug culture would lead one to think that Dorn’s poem world is an imagined world counter to that of 1960s and 1970s America or a fantastical facsimile of the counter-culture of that time period. But, as Dorn’s poem demonstrates, even with outsider status and drug-induced hazes, the capitalist world cannot be escaped. Blaine Greteman's paper discusses how Mark Twain first mocks Americans’ slavish devotion to Benjamin Franklin’s industrious ideal; then he sees Franklin as a golden exemplar contrasted with corrupt modern businessmen; finally, in a speech at his 67th birthday in 1902, the man who coined the phrase “Gilded Age” to describe the rampant greed and corruption of late nineteenth-century business culture happily identifies the “captains of industry” with the Franklinesque ideals of hard work, morality, and social mobility. Twain’s vacillations are instructive, because they strike at the core of Americans’ ambiguous, nearly schizophrenic, conceptions of the businessman. One minute he’s a greedy sinner, the next an inspirational saint; here he’s all that is wrong with America, there he embodies the country’s greatest egalitarian ideals. That ambivalence is at least as old as Calvinism, which prompted Puritan settlers both to find signs of God’s grace in hard work and success and to fight a vigilant introspective battle against greed and luxury. Zachary Snider explores the urban American businessmen of Bret Easton Ellis’s novels who are metrosexual demons, each obsessed with designer apparel, costly cosmetology products, under the spell of popular culture phenomenon, and more often than not, financially sound for life thanks to trust funds and/or high profile jobs. These male divas have a glorious surplus of money, women, and drugs, but because they are such self-obsessed cosmopolitan-ites, Ellis fuels their interior monologues with enough neuroticisms for every Los Angelean and especially New Yorker to idolize these social climbers and kings of convenience. Ellis city men,

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these metrosexual skyscraper-dwellers, are simultaneously chauvinistic and princess-like, most notably his infamous anti-hero Patrick Bateman of American Psycho, who must detail for himself the clothing labels and costs of everyone’s apparel in his immediate surroundings. Christopher Schaberg's essay discusses how literature functions reflexively in fictional office settings. Part one considers the popular AMC television show Mad Men, which offers both topical and critical points of entry concerning this subject. Part two focuses on two contemporary office space novels: Joshua Ferris’s novel Then We Came to the End and Ed Park’s novel Personal Days. In part three, David Foster Wallace’s unfinished work The Pale King is analyzed, looking specifically at an excerpt published in The New Yorker entitled “Wiggle Room.” This analysis demonstrates how these works of literature struggle to represent the tedium of office work, and show how narrative completion and endless workaday labor are caught in a conceptual bind. Todd Borlik's essay explores how Shakespeare’s high tragedy, Hamlet, is integrated in to the world of high finance. Juxtaposing Shakespeare’s tragedy with these three cinematic renditions affords an ideal opportunity to chart the changing image of the businessman between the early modern and the modern eras. Although viewers may assume that the depiction of Claudius as a ruthless tycoon is pure artistic license on the screenwriters’ parts, a close reading of the play-text reveals that this is not exactly the case. In his opening monologue, Claudius uses the word “business” twice in ten lines. Generally, business in the play connotes the affairs of state. However, Hamlet also points to an evolving and unholy alliance between the merchant classes and the monarchy, and shares several generic features with early modern city comedy. Laura Faulk 's article explains as the eighteenth century gave rise to trade, business, and capitalism, prostitution became a lucrative option for women as more men could afford paying for sex. Several factors determined the “worth” of each prostitute, including virginity, appearance, and number of sexual partners. Madams managed their prostitutes, setting prices, taking a cut of each transaction, and determining how often they worked. Like all businessmen, madams determined their girls’ worth through their business practices. Polina Kroik's essay focuses on the decades following the Second World War when the modern corporation became recognized as the dominant social and economic form. The American middle-class breadwinner, once idealized as the enterprising “businessman,” was now typically seen as a corporate employee, a bureaucrat with little agency or power. William H. Whyte’s widely read sociological account, The

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Introduction

Organization Man (1956) and Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) represented the “organization” as a threat to conventional masculinity and family structure. Although women’s presence in the office was sometimes alluded to as a cause of the “feminization” of the work environment, these authors’ criticism of the corporation did not extend to its effects on the growing number of working women. Rekha Rosha explores how Ann Perry's The Street’s protest is expressed not within the political spaces of Harlem but within its economic margins. The novel’s counter-triad—the madam, the bootlegger, and the mystic—offer another view of markets. By its very existence, Harlem’s underground economy exposes free enterprise’s considerable failings. Yet unlike the legitimate business owners of Harlem, the black market operators leverage resources to create wealth, which they redistribute to the community. Petry’s black market businessmen and women, while frequently cruel, manage to provide material resources for their community’s most disenfranchised members. In the final essay Ingrid Ranum discusses how during the Nineteenth Century, a variety of forces (industrialization, urbanization, the development of suburbs) removed business from the home and contributed to the development of separate and distinctly gendered spheres. In the developing domestic ideology, the home was a moral haven from the corrupt world of business and work, a haven created by and centered on women. While the idea of women as agents of the home and men as workers in the public sphere of business was perhaps more powerful conceptually than in reality, nineteenth-century ideology did forge powerful associations surrounding the moral force of home and family on one hand and the potentially corrupting commercial arena on the other; associations that endure in interesting ways, even into the Twenty-First Century. Although the world of commerce–business, trade, and manufactory–has often been treated as the natural milieu of men, it can be a peculiarly alienating space, and perhaps was particularly so at the times of the writing of George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) and Max Barry’s Jennifer Government (2003).

A GENTLEMAN’S BUSINESS: JEWISH REPRESENTATION AND NATIONAL BELONGING IN ANTHONY TROLLOPE’S THE PRIME MINISTER JESSICA S. STOCK

Anthony Trollope's career spanned decades and produced over forty novels. His proficiency as a writer enabled him to provide for himself and his family by creating and selling fictional worlds.1 His art was his commodity and Trollope's writing is preoccupied with business and the maintenance of money. As readers, we get to know the interest paid on debt and how many pounds an inheritance contains. While Trollope's careful monetary record might indicate an authorial obsession, the significance of business and capital in his fiction stems from anxieties over the changing economy of the mid and late Victorian era. During the 1860s and 1870s the expansion and centralization of the banking industry freed mass amounts of capital and offered credit to those who would have previously been barred from obtaining it. Elsie B. Michie's "Buying Brains" notes that with this economic sea change Trollope's novels evoke "through the drama of individual characters' financial problems, an entire culture's response to dramatic changes in economic practice and theory."2 The transition from a landed gentry system that valued birth and class to a capitalist stock market that encouraged populist consumption and 1

Trollope is well known for daily writing sessions, which were complete with word quotas and schedules. He considered writing part of his "work," though Trollope was employed outside of the literary world as a civil servant in the post office for many years. For more on Trollope's work ethic see B.K. Stevens' "Advice from a Master: Anthony Trollope, still popular 126 years after his death, had much to say to writers about making ends meet, sticking to a schedule, and a lot more," in Writer 122.6 (Jun 2009): 24-55. 2 Elsie B. Michie, "Buying Brains: Trollope, Oliphant, and Vulgar Victorian Commerce," in Victorian Studies (August 2001) 78.

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A Gentleman’s Business

speculation was a generative conundrum for Trollope. As such, the businessman became a recurring character in Trollope's later fiction. But if the businessman was to be an index for this economic upheaval, why does Trollope particularize this seemingly national issue by making so many of his characters Jewish? The Jewish characters and their status as "men of business" or "men of the city" emphasize Trollope's fear that capital was dismantling traditional English culture. That many of Trollope's businessmen are or are coded as Jewish signifies differently than a gentile businessman. This chapter seeks to explore the complexities of such a representation and how the image of the "Jew" in general and, the "Jewish Businessman" in particular, resonates in Trollope's fiction and Victorian culture. The Prime Minister, published in 1876, connects the image of the businessman with a Jewish character named Ferdinand Lopez--an interloper and an aspiring gentleman--who disrupts the orderly social milieu of the Palliser novels.3 As a self-characterized "advanced Conservative Liberal," Trollope's ambivalence about a social mobility enabled by greater economic opportunities comes into relief with his depictions of Jews.4 Bryan Cheyette locates this ambivalence in Trollope's "trying to 'balance' opposed forces in Victorian liberalism which wanted to both extend a reformist, universalizing State, and, at the same time, maintain a parliament nation whose values were rooted in the past."5 This tension between the universal state and traditional nation is played out with the figure of the Jew particularly as they are tied to the stock market, speculation, and credit. Money enabled Jewish businessmen to compete on the economic and social market. Trollope recorded these social changes and presented a figure of Ferdinand Lopez whose ethnicity and employment as a man of business challenged traditional readings of money and national belonging.

3 The name "Ferdinand Lopez" signifies a Spanish or Portuguese background, thus making him of Sephardic ancestry. The depiction of Ferdinand Lopez is a thinly veiled critique of Benjamin Disraeli who Trollope felt was an adventurer and unfit for government. This is of particular interest because earlier in his novelistic career Benjamin Disraeli promoted the superiority of Sephardic Jewry--he considered them enlightened and aristocratic--and he emphasized his Italian Jewish ancestry. Lopez's name and ambitions link him to Disraeli who became the Prime Minister of England for the second time in 1874. 4 Frank Kermode, "Introduction" in The Prime Minister, by Anthony Trollope (New York: Penguin, 2002) xvii. 5 Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of 'the Jew' in English Literature and Society (New York: Cambridge, 1995) 25.

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Besides being a prolific writer, Trollope was also well traveled. He visited and wrote about North America, the West Indies, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia and his novels, which are mainly set in England, are influenced by these travels. Trollope's travelogues include observations about his host country; however, many of his observations relate back to his native England. Of special interest to Trollope was how the colonies would govern without an established history to guide them. Trollope believed that "Time and wealth [had] produced a race of statesmen and a race of legislators" who were best suited to govern England.6 In contrast to the colonies, England had an established national government: "time and wealth" maintained the privileged few, who in turn, tended to the rest of the population. While the colonies could experiment with democracy, Trollope believed England should maintain its traditional system of government and he feared that money would disband this "race of statesmen."7 In the introduction to The Way We Live Now, Frank Kermode argues that Trollope's last novels served "as a warning of the way things would be if aggressive, uncontrolled, freebooting attitudes to money-making were to break down the restraints supposedly extant in England--the long-maintained habits of honourable dealing, the truthfulness of gentlemen, the solidity of squirearchy and noblisse oblige of aristocracy."8 The idea that the democratization of the economy would ruin or diminish the English national character preoccupied Trollope and The Prime Minister explores the corrupting force of capital. The figure of the businessman represents this rupture between tradition and modernity and its effect on national culture. With the character of Ferdinand Lopez, who in the course of the novel marries the genteel Emily Wharton and runs for parliament, Trollope exercises his deep ambivalence about the changing English national culture, the evolving social definition of a "gentleman," and how money disrupted these ideals. In the opening scene of The Prime Minister Trollope introduces Lopez as a "gentleman." Lopez’s appearance on the first page and as the title character of the first chapter signals his prominence in the narrative, and specifically his importance to a Victorian social theory that was incorporating the new sciences of anthropology and ethnography. Not descending from English statesmen, Ferdinand Lopez challenges England's definition of a racial national belonging by seeking a seat in 6

Anthony Trollope, New Zealand (New York: Ward, Lock & Co., 1874) 112. Ibid, 112 8 Frank Kermode, Introduction to The Way We Live Now (New York: Penguin, 2002) xvi. 7

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parliament. Trollope stresses the importance of origins to maintaining an English gentry system—and a healthy English nation—by highlighting Lopez's lineal lack: It is certainly of service to a man to know who were his grandfathers and who were his grandmothers if he entertain an ambition to move in the upper circles of society, and also of service to be able to speak of them as of persons who were themselves somebody in their time […] but while the struggle is going on, with the conviction strong upon the struggler that he cannot be altogether successful unless he be esteemed a gentleman, not to be ashamed, not to conceal the old family circumstances, not at any rate to be silent, is difficult.9

Trollope introduces the main source of tension in the novel: ancestry and inheritance. In order to break into "upper circles" a past must be supplied; the lack of a past can prove difficult and damaging to aspiring social climbers. This opening sentence connects belonging, whether social or national, to a past. The sense of past and people proves extremely powerful and throughout the entire novel Lopez must account for its absence. Trollope makes clear that Lopez does not come from a notable family highlighting that the new business structure of London enables his social climb. Lopez lacks social capital and tries to obtain it with the only capital he has access to: money. Money, however much you have of it, cannot complete the social definition of a 'gentleman'. Trollope acknowledges the need for a past and particularizes it in terms of breeding: "It was admitted on all sides that Ferdinand Lopez was a 'gentleman'. Johnson says that any other derivation of this difficult word than that which causes it to signify 'a man of ancestry' is whimsical."10 Here is the tug and pull of Trollope's characterization of Lopez--he is and is not a gentleman. When read within Johnson's classical definition of ancestry a gentleman must be well bred in the most basic way: both his parents must be of good breeding themselves. However, Trollope quickly sees that this definition does not encapsulate or explain Lopez's ascent to upper society, for which the text must account. Because of his minority status, Lopez becomes astute at mimicking upper class modes of dress and speech. His mimicry is a protective measure as well as one of assimilation. Trollope cannot simply represent Lopez as an evil interloper because he recognizes the fragile predicament Lopez finds himself in and perhaps more importantly, the fragility of a class system that can so easily be mimicked. In Hommi Bhabba's 9

Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister (New York: Penguin, 1994) 9. Trollope, 10.

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definition "the menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. And it is a double vision that is a result of what [has been] described as the partial representation/recognition of the colonial object."11 Lopez's donning of Englishness affirms and subverts at the same time. His recognition of the system destabilizes the notion of the English gentleman as an organic truth. Trollope details just how Lopez has fashioned himself an English gentleman: His very tailor regarded him as being simply extravagant in the number of his coats and trousers, and his friends looked upon him as one of those fortunate beings to whose nature belongs a facility of being well dressed, or almost an impossibility of being ill dressed […] but never, at any moment […] was he dressed otherwise than with perfect care. Money and time did it, but folk thought that it grew with him, as did his hair and his nails12 Trying to connect being a 'gentleman' to familial relationships and blood lines and discrediting Lopez's claim to the title of 'gentleman,' Trollope reveals how constructed the identity of a 'gentleman' is. By employing a good tailor and paying fastidious attention to dress, Lopez becomes a gentleman. While Trollope will spend the remainder of the book trying to discredit this reading and return the term 'gentleman' back to its racial origins, the slippery space between identity and difference has already been opened. Bhabba's insights into how colonialism works in the Empire function similarly for Lopez, a Jew, trying to become English. As Anne McClintock eloquently argues in Imperial Leather: Imperialism is not something that happened elsewhere--a disagreeable fact of history external to Western identity. Rather, imperialism and the invention of race were fundamental aspects of Western, industrial modernity. The invention of race in the urban metropoles […] became central not only to the self-definition of the middle class, but also to the policing of the 'dangerous classes': the working class, the Irish, Jews, prostitutes, feminists, gays and lesbians, criminals, the militant crowd and so on.13 Because Jews, among others, were able to climb the social ladder by mid-century, race was invented to curtail this upward movement. Lopez's mimicry of the 'gentleman' destabilizes the fixity of race, revealing that it can be obfuscated if properly dressed and acted. Instead, Trollope's 11

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994) 85. Trollope, 12-13. 13 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995) 50. 12

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rendering of Lopez disconnects race from class, and the author of The Prime Minister will spend the remainder of the book trying to reconnect them. In the same paragraph that declares Lopez a "gentleman," we learn what he does for a living : "He had been on the Stock Exchange, and still in some manner, not clearly understood by his friends, did business in the City" (11). Much like Lopez's familial beginnings, how he makes his money and where it comes from remain murky throughout the novel. Race, like stocks and bonds, was becoming an unreliable marker of identity or a corresponding economic reality: "The problem of economic representation in turn leads to concerns over the representational relationship, or non-relationship, between wealth and character."14 Trollope connects Lopez's capitalist enterprise (one that moves away from a landed system of wealth) with his ability to act like, while not actually being, a gentleman. Or as one of Lopez's foes points out, "One man these days is so like another […] that it requires good eyes to see the shades of the colours."15 Lopez's ability to blend into English society makes him dangerous by destabilizing class markers. Money proves to be hazardous to national health because it erases difference, making it harder to discern gentlemen from mere men. For Trollope, money could be dangerously democratic to a traditional England. Trollope clearly links origins of self and origins of money as similar ways to interpret a man. Paul Delany's "Land, Money, and the Jews in the Later Trollope" connects ancestry to two things: blood and land. In an economic model based on kinship and land ownership, which defined England until the industrial era, identity was defined by connections of blood and land: Identity proposes that people are most real and knowable through their ancestral attachment to a tract of land, an attachment signified by possession of a name that goes with the property. The landowning classes therefore deserve to be the very soul or essence of the English nation; their opposite is the Jews, a people without land, country, or stability of name. Yet the Jews also epitomize, for Trollope, a different and specially modern kind of identity, one that springs from full-blown assertive individualism.16 In this light, how Lopez makes his money and where he comes from connect in the nexus of an English landed gentry system that rejects his wanderings and landless wealth. Lopez challenges this class system 14

Gary Levine, The Merchant of Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2003) 17. Trollope, 288. 16 Paul Delany, "Land, Money, and the Jews in the Later Trollope," Studies in English Literature1500-1900. 32.4 (Autumn 1992) 765-766. 15

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because he separates money and identity from land ownership. In this way, Lopez's murky beginnings--where he comes from and where his money comes from--present a crisis of representation for Trollope. Lopez's use of the market and capital to earn the title 'gentleman' is not good for the health of the nation: "it is a terrible thing to have one's whole position in the world hanging upon […] a probable rise in the value of manure."17 Unlike his rival Arthur Fletcher whose lineage, good looks, and landed wealth maintains Trollope's "race of statesmen," Lopez's rise is linked not to the prestige of land, but to the foulness of manure. Because he owns nothing, Lopez's connection to England is tenuous. Instead, Lopez speculates on money and the future, which is befitting for a Jewish man who can never fully belong. Arthur Fletcher, Lopez's foil throughout the book, describes this predicament: "Like others of his family, he thought ill of Lopez, believing the man to be an adventurer, one who would too probably fall into misfortune, however high he might now seem to hold his head. He was certainly a man not standing on the solid basis of land, or of Three per Cents,--those solidities to which such as the Whartons and Fletchers are wont to trust."18 Lopez does not belong to England because he does not own land or participate in the national economy with Three per Cents.19 Lopez has no "solid" connection to land, family, or nation. Trollope's characterization of Lopez as an "adventurer" would have resonated with his readers as both a jab at Benjamin Disraeli and as a warning against speculative capitalism. Lopez's adventures in business jeopardizes social order because his business risks are not tempered by a deeper connection to the English nation. In contrast to the English families in the novel, Lopez cannot collect on long standing social contracts--such as Three per Cents--but must gamble in order to profit. It is the willingness to gamble that Trollope warns against and sees as corrosive to the social order. While Lopez's money might garner him the title of 'gentleman,' however begrudgingly by the narrator, his predicament is particularly vulnerable, representative of his status as a Jewish minority in England. Hannah Arendt’s invaluable The Origins of Totalitarianism sees Jewish 17

Trollope, 215. Trollope, 282. 19 The "Three per Cents" was the interest paid on investments in the Funds. "The combination of a powerful empire and the Industrial Revolution created a stock of wealth owned by the propertied classes that transformed Britain. The consol, a long-term liability of the British government paying an average of about 3 percent, displaced land as Britain’s primary asset" John H. Makin, Should Americans Save More? AEI http://www.aei.org/outlook/22024. 18

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A Gentleman’s Business

vulnerability in their statelessness: "Nowhere and at no time after the destruction of the temple did Jews possess their own territory and their own state; they always depended for their physical existence upon the protection of non-Jewish authorities."20 Lopez must seek English society's acceptance, all the while knowing he is dependent on it for protection. In the end, Lopez has no real power, even with money, because he does not have the protection of land. His landlessness (or statelessness for all Jews) renders him weak and dependent, a position that will destroy him. Disconnected from land and from family, Lopez is isolated in his own self-creation: "He had been as though he had been created self-sufficient, independent of mother's milk or father's money."21 When all economic avenues are exhausted in England, Lopez decides to go to Guatemala where he hopes that his fortunes will turn: "Under those circumstances I must leave England, and try my fortune in Central America […] If I cannot succeed in this country I must go elsewhere."22 He cannot make it in the epicenter of Empire, London, and chooses to go to Guatemala and try his hand in the colonies. Lopez's move to leave England highlights the usefulness of the colonies to rewrite personal history. Lopez is excluded from England's wealth at home, but abroad he would have a better chance. Benedict Anderson points out that this departure from London to the far reaches of Empire "permitted sizeable numbers of bourgeois and petty bourgeois to play aristocrat off center court: i.e. anywhere in the empire except home."23 Lopez recognizes that he cannot escape his race and class while in England, but will be more likely to do so the closer he gets to the colonies. Lopez's identity is flexible, even global, transcending national boundaries. Lopez's identity proves too modern, too independent. In contrast to the "solid" basis of English wealth, Lopez's wealth evaporates. In the end, he chooses suicide as a way to escape his surreal existence: "he walked down before the flying engine--and in a moment had been knocked into bloody atoms."24 Unlike the "solid" wealth of the English nation, Lopez's life was unstable. Lopez is caught between two worlds: traditional England and Modern England. David Feldman defines modernity as "a set of economic, social and political changes in Europe which are clearly, if unevenly, detectable from the eighteenth century. These include the advances of urban growth and industrialization [and] of secularization and 20

Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1979) xiii Trollope, 19. 22 Ibid, 421. 23 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1993) 137. 24 Trollope, 520 21

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plurality within civil society…"25 In the end, these social and political changes called modernity eradicated Lopez. Modernity literally crushes Lopez as the past and the future converge upon him. He dies nameless and disconnected from the world. Trollope emphasizes the abrupt departure of Lopez; it is shocking to read: It seemed as though the man had been careful to carry with him no record of identity, the nature of which would permit it to outlive the crash of the train. No card was found, no scrap of paper with his name; and it was discovered at last that when he left the house on the fatal morning he had been careful to dress himself in shirt and socks, with handkerchief and collar that had been newly purchased for his proposed journey and which bore no mark. The fragments of his body set identity at defiance, and even his watch had been crumpled into ashes.26 Lopez's death is outside of time and place; he belongs nowhere even in death. In an instant Lopez is gone, completely obliterated from the narrative and the nation. Lopez, though obliterated into "bloody atoms," clearly represents the future struggles of Jews in England. Lopez tries to maneuver through a changing society and reap the benefits of an emerging individualism. But he does not succeed. While Trollope holds up the colonies as a way to escape from race and class inequities in England, he does not let Lopez become part of the nation at home. His progress is halted, by and large, because he is a racial and economic outsider married to a gentile lady. Only because Lopez ventured to leave his Jewish roots behind does he get punished. But this is the paradox of nineteenth-century Jewry: "The birth and growth of modern antisemitism has been accompanied by and interconnected with Jewish assimilation, the secularization and withering away of the old religious and spiritual values of Judaism."27 Jewish assimilation is, in part, enabled by wealth generated by business, not by land or racial inheritance. Trollope's Jewish businessman is not just a fictional creation, but a meditation on the changing economy and its effects on the national culture. Credit is the polished shaft of the Temple. But with what are you to polish it? The stone does not come from the quarry with its gloss on. Man’s labour is necessary to give it that beauteous exterior. Then, wherewith 25

David Feldman, "Was Modernity Good for the Jews?" in Modernity, Culture, and 'the Jew' Eds. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998) 171. 26 Trollope, 523-4 27 Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1979) 7.

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A Gentleman’s Business shall we polish credit? I answer the question at once. With the pumicestone and sand- paper of advertisement. —Anthony Trollope, The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson28

28 Anthony Trollope, The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson: By One of the Firm (New York: Penguin, 1993), 4.

CATCHING THE ELUSIVE CONSUMER: TROLLOPE’S ADVERSARIAL ADVERTISING APRIL TOADVINE

George Robinson, the narrator of Anthony Trollope’s 1861 novel about a would-be store partner/advertiser, The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson: By One of the Firm, finds it difficult to rate the importance of credit too highly. By comparing it to a polished shaft, he both describes it as a work of art with a beautiful exterior and as a weapon—the shaft of a spear. Both connotations pose equally important questions: Is credit, that mainstay of the financial system, beautiful but artificially hollow, or is it a weapon to be wielded against adversaries? Trollope’s self-described “satire on the ways of trade” shows credit in both of its highly damaging aspects and raises questions about the viability of an economic and governmental system supported by such a practice. The novel was certainly not successful on the level of Trollope’s more commercially popular Barset or Palliser novels, and the failure of this work to achieve popularity has since translated into a lack of critical interest, remaining largely unexamined as a lesser work of a popular author. Despite the lack of critical interest, Trollope’s novel deserves more study; not only are there established ways of trade, but more importantly, those ways indicate serious differences between businessmen and their allies in consumption, their customers. Among the established ways of trade that Trollope felt obliged to hold up for scrutiny, one of the most important was the institution of advertising. The moral dimensions of the existing system of credit and debt—employed to identify debtors as improvident and those who extended credit as unscrupulous—no longer seemed to apply to massproduced advertising, which was geared to entice as many people into expenditure as possible. In his novel, Trollope exaggerates problems of false representation and consumer expectation to skewer the newlyemergent advertising industry and its interest in advertising style regardless of substance. Nor does he fail to blame the consumers who, through their incessant desires for bargains, push businesses into

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Catching the Elusive Consumer: Trollope’s Adversarial Advertising

dangerously divisive practice. Advertisers, businesses, and the consumers who fuel them with their money make up a cycle of consumption that, at least in Trollope’s eyes, seemed to put Victorian society at risk of existing on empty promises of credit rather than the substance of economic progress. In this article, I plan to argue that as participating members of the capitalistic economy in Victorian England, businessmen found themselves operating in a system that encouraged the erosion of self-proclaimed English values of self-reliance, pride in craftsmanship, and trustworthiness that shop owners wanted to portray. Rather, the consumptive ideal promoted by Victorian businessmen and their reliance on public kinds of credit contributed to an antisocial element in Victorian consumer society, leading to a culture in which competitors, customers, and clerks eyed each other warily, even antagonistically. In order to show the ways in which businessmen found themselves at odds with their customers, I will use Trollope’s largely ignored satiric novel, The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson: By One of the Firm, which reflects Trollope’s concerns that the new style of business privileged image and style over than substance and value to the detriment of Victorian society. Through the figure of Mr. Robinson, the narrator, Trollope creates a businessman whose self-promotion and speculation in the name of advertising eventually leaves him without a firm or a job. The pointed satire shows that the eventual outcome of the new style of business that Robinson represents is failure- of the business, and of the society that allows the kind of speculative transactions that Robinson prefers. . Trollope’s novel describes the trials of a trio of men who start up a store called Magenta House. Mr. Brown, the eldest, provides the initial capital, Mr. Jones, married to Mr. Brown’s eldest daughter, provides customer service and day-to-day oversight of the shop clerks, and George Robinson, the youngest, is responsible for advertising. Robinson describes his attempts to attract customers with a breezy tone that allows him free reign to convince his readers that he is indeed acting correctly in adopting the latest business tactics despite the anger of his customers and the failure of his business. Business practice at Magenta House is at the heart of a larger problem in consumer society: the increasing resemblance between running a successful business enterprise and speculation has caused the alienation of consumers from the businesses that supply their desires. In fact, the more businesses advertised to create interest in their wares and found themselves relying on spectacle to attract attention, the more they found that the consequence of their advertising and spectacle was to create wary, cynical consumers who viewed them as competition in a struggle

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over commodity ownership. Trollope’s satire situates his concern about the effect of Robinson’s unbridled pursuit of credit as one of the outcomes of capitalist behavior that as he shows, ultimately proves destructive.

Credit and its discontents The financial stability that characterized the mid-Victorian period was supported by a sense of unlimited economic expansion and progress despite fears regarding the moral acceptability of investment. Gambling, still a source of uneasiness in Victorian society because of moral considerations, bore a striking resemblance to the stock market and the burgeoning financial industry. Citing a study by Ann Fabian in which she argues that in order to be taken seriously in nineteenth-century America, the financial sector succeeded in separating itself from gambling, David Itzkowitz notes a similar process happened in Britain.1 Stock brokers and others who attempted to convince skeptical society-members that the work of the financial world was indeed respectable wanted to show that they were not idly risking the money raised by the industry of others; in effect, they wanted to avoid being labeled as gamblers. As speculators, however, they were quite capable of risking other people’s money on one of the many schemes that caused financial turmoil in the nineteenth century. Itzkowitz focuses on the effectiveness of the means Victorian society used to separate gambling and speculation, particularly in the stock market; equally concerning though, was the way speculation in business affected the already strained relationship between business owner and consumer. Not only was the idea of debt considered immoral, since it indicated a lack of adherence to the work ethic that was part of respectability, but the idea of credit itself was questionable since it seemed to exist on the flip side of debt; an attempt to use money that belonged to another, it also indicated an unwillingness to work for oneself. In an article published in 1849, W.E. Aytoun warned that “speculation, carried beyond due bounds, is neither more nor less than a repetition of the old game of BEGGAR MY NEIGHBOR under another form. To fair and legitimate enterprise w owe much of our modern improvement…To unfair and illegitimate enterprise, undertaken for the sole purpose of immediate gain, we owe nothing save great periods of misery and desolation.”2 Clearly, Aytoun is of two minds 1 David Itzkowitz, “Fair Enterprise or Extravagant Speculation: Investment, Speculation, and Gambling in Victorian England”, Victorian Studies 45, no 1 (Autumn 2002): 121-147. 2 W.E. Aytoun, “The National Debt and the Stock Exchange,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Vol. 66 (Dec. 1849), 678. Capitals in the original.

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Catching the Elusive Consumer: Trollope’s Adversarial Advertising

about speculation, since even as raises concerns about increasing levels of commercialism in the country, he makes a distinction between speculation done within bounds, and that done outside of bounds. As speculation became acceptable in the form of investment, business practice shifted to allow goods to be procured on expectation of sale.3 Futures speculation, which allowed parties to buy goods in the future at contracted prices, seemed highly speculative in the sense that there was no guarantee that the goods would be sold. Both parties could end up losing money as a result. In effect, the businesses were developing a private form of credit based on speculative ventures among themselves. In addition to private credit, Patrick Brantlinger points out that credit is also public.4 In order for the financial system to operate at all, the populace must invest faith in the national government. Without such belief, the money is worthless as currency and the government cannot function. In addition, stores operate on a similar form of credit; they depend on the faith of their customers, without whom the store would fail. Not only do customers need to believe that a store can provide quality merchandise, they must also believe that the store is superior to competitors who can offer the same product; just as a government must convince its people that it has the ability to govern effectively, the store exists on its ability to develop credit with its customers, by no means an easy task. For most stores, the best way to develop that credit was through advertising.

The Way We Do Business Now In the years since the Great Exhibition, the means by which stores attracted customers underwent a shift from a system that privileged the store owner and employees, who controlled access to the merchandise, to the customer, who became the target of sophisticated strategies of marketing intended to entice shoppers into purchasing. Not only did businesses, especially smaller ones, find themselves forced to change long-held traditions about the way merchandise was displayed and sold to the customer, but even the hardiest of shopkeepers must have wondered about the new department stores that appeared with such overabundance of product on display.

3

Itzkowitz, “Fair Enterprise or Extravagant Speculation,” 126. Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996). 4

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Attempts to attract customers became increasingly visual after the Great Exhibition, when businesses began to use shop windows and often the in-store displays to create the kind of overwhelming visual experience that would entrance the viewers into purchasing. Displays, however, also had the effect of keeping the customer at a distance- allowing the shopper space for what Colin Campbell refers to as hedonism.5 The shopper’s imagined pleasurable relationship with the displayed, unobtainable object leads to a desire to purchase; the desire for the object leads to a lack of fulfillment since the actual purchased object cannot live up to its promised perfection. Shoppers are caught in a cycle of returns in which they continuously seek and fail to find the pleasure promised by the enticing displays. To keep customers coming back, store owners faced pressure to give the customers more of the visual displays they came to expect as part of the shopping experience. From the 1860’s, shopkeepers found themselves trying to keep up with their competitors in size and scope, and more importantly, trying to justify their relationship to the consumption of their customers. As stores began to adopt stronger promotional strategies, their tactics were more obvious; as Geoffrey Crossick points out in his study of nineteenth-century shopkeepers, their “self-advertisement was distressingly public. How [could] smaller retailers have felt when faced with the excitement of David Lewis’ Liverpool store, with its model of Strasbourg Cathedral Clock?”6 Businessmen struggled to produce visual displays that would awe and attract more customers than their competitors. Not all shops could afford models, or hired actors, but even without that expenditure, it was in their best interests to present an image of themselves and their clientele as posh and upwardly mobile. Display was also an influence on advertising, especially on newspapers that eschewed advertisements because of their connection to display.7 5 Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987). Campbell views modern hedonism as a process by which individuals, rather than being passive consumers of advertising information, or compulsively driven to emulate the status of others, actively engage in imagined pleasure by picturing the ownership and consumption of objects prior to purchasing them. The ownership of objects, he argues, is seldom as pleasurable as the anticipation of them, which is why people continue to shop for other pleasures to consume. 6 Geoffrey Crossick, “The Petite Bourgeoisie in Nineteenth-century Britain: the Urban and Liberal Case,” Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth Century Europe, ed. Geoffrey Crossick, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (London: Methuen, 1984), 64. 7 Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985)

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Catching the Elusive Consumer: Trollope’s Adversarial Advertising

While advertisements became more popular as newspapers needed the money advertisers could provide, they still carried a commercial taint. The taint, however, paled in comparison to the bargains being offered by stores that needed to attract middle class money. As part of their interest in attracting customers, stores faced the challenge of selling merchandise at prices that would attract them, even if that meant selling at a loss. Not only were shops competing against each other visually, but businessmen were finding it no longer enough merely to have a product that people needed. They needed to sell the product at a cheaper price than their competitors. In part, this pressure stems from the success of advertising; once consumers could be informed about the newest products, and even more importantly, their prices, comparison shopping made it difficult for stores to charge prices that differed significantly from their competitors. As stores worried about how to attract customers, the discourse about the appropriateness of consumption, credit, and debt continued to warn shoppers of the effects their behavior would have on their moral state. One of the mainstays of Victorian descriptions of shoppers and shopping is the nearly universal disdain for the seemingly unbridled consumption of the shopping experience. For the shopkeeper, however, the pressures of consumer society came as a result of their success in convincing shoppers to consume. Accused of taking advantage of vulnerable shoppers, especially women, shop owners faced critique for their part in encouraging people to spend money. Larger retailers, like Witley’s, found themselves at odds with both their competition and their customers as they started expanding. Whitley’s faced pressure from competitors when the store began offering services for customers; a ladies room in particular was a problem because it seemed to encourage ladies to consume without limit, since time was no longer a factor limiting their shopping trips.8 In response to accusations, Whitley argued that rather than trying to cause a disturbance or negatively affect his customer’s morality, he was merely responding to their needs. As stores began providing more services for customers, they were accused of doing so out for motives of greed. Owners were assumed to be greedy, since only greed could account for their desire to increase profits by preying on supposedly weaker customers. In fact, the pursuit of a profit, it was feared, would end up corrupting the shopkeeper as surely as 8

Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton UP), 31. Rappaport’s work describes the cultural influences that led shopping and merchandising to become a force allowing urban women to develop public spaces in which to operate in the world of cultural and civic improvement of their lives.

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it would end up corrupting the shopper. While credit had long been a means of allowing shoppers to purchase without money, it came to seem dangerously equivalent to debt, with all its associated moral concerns. Considered the most vulnerable to potential moral influence were the female shoppers; responsible for both the domestic and moral economies of the home, they formed a growing segment of the target audience in the discourse of greed, credit, and debt. As shoppers however, business owners could consider women neither vulnerable nor protected from consumer culture. An image of female shoppers persisted as “demon[s] allowing nothing to prevent [their] enjoyment of opportunities to consume, or by browsing, to leisurely enjoy the shopping culture created …at the expense of the shopkeeper.”9 The responsibility for providing the new space for meeting friends, walking and looking at displays, and many other things that did not involve the exchange of money fell to the shopkeepers, who found that they were paying assistants to show items to women who had no intention of buying, only of pricing an item. This left shopkeepers with an undesirable clientele who could only be distinguished from the paying customers when they didn’t purchase. In some ways, these non-paying shoppers presented the biggest dilemma of all. Since the business depended on encouraging them to purchase, the shop assistants could ill afford to refuse to help a customer, yet the demands of the shopper had the potential to breed resentment, both from clerks and store owners, who saw the non-payer as a drain on potentially strained resources. If, on the one hand, the business distrusts the paying customer because of their pressure on price levels, and on the other, distrusts the non-paying customer as potential waste of effort and resources, with little to distinguish the two, shops had little incentive to act ethically toward the individuals who chose to believe their advertisements. The contradictory attitude toward consumption meant that the relationship between owner and customer was based, at least in part, on the alienation created by consumer society itself; it creates suspicion about motives between businessmen and their clientele despite their interdependence. However, this is only one side of the problem that Trollope is satirizing in his novel.

9 Tammy Whitlock, Crime, Gender, and Consumer Culture in Nineteenth Century England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate), 5.

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Catching the Elusive Consumer: Trollope’s Adversarial Advertising

Ethical dilemmas in advertising Readers of the Jan 5, 1860 edition of The Daily News found an advertisement from E. Moses and Son, merchant tailors and general outfitters, claiming to “combine economy and excellence in all articles of clothing, in a manner, and to an extent, quite beyond the reach of any firm in London or elsewhere. The vast scale on which their business is conducted enables them to accept prices that to other traders with a less extensive list of customers would be utterly ruinous.”10 The advertisement reaches potential shoppers on a number of levels; first, it mentions one of the important watchwords of the Victorian home: economy. Promoting lower-priced goods of high quality, the ad adopts the language of the domestic economist- a language which women, assumed to do the majority of the household shopping, would be expected to recognize. At the same time, however, the ad makes a claim about the size of the store itself – a claim that seems to rival the importance of the clothing being sold, which is described only after the size of the store is established. The ad tries to create an image of a vast commercial enterprise with limitless resources which, presumably, would make the shopper feel more secure spending with this company than other, obviously inferior companies. The store’s self-representation as a large, successful commercial concern reflects an attempt to equate size, and more importantly, access to products, with success. With access to a wider selection, shops could present themselves to their customers as reliable businesses with access to capital. More importantly, they could allow their customers to share in the success by association by shopping at the store while at the same time, presenting an aura of exclusivity to appeal to patrons. What is interesting about this advertisement is that by placing it in the newspaper, the advertisers have, naturally, guaranteed a wider audience than their claim to exclusivity would seem to require. In the January 10, 1860 edition of the Birmingham Post, advertisers reflect the balance between profit and perception. One advertiser proclaims a sale of one lot of goods from the bankrupt establishment of Henry Watts and Co., drapers. Next to that ad, Holliday, Lewis and Company advertises that they have purchased a second lot of stock from bankrupt Watts and Co. and are offering that stock at “greatly reduced prices for immediate clearance.”11 Not only do the ads reflect the tenuous 10 11

Daily News, January 5, 1860, Classified Advertisement. Birmingham Daily Post, January 10, 1860.

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nature of the linen business, but they show the possibility that risky business behavior can lead to benefits in the form of sales for consumers and profits for competitors. It also equates to profit for the competitor, who can add to his inventory and his customer base. The advertisements that proclaim the bankruptcy of the Watts store makes a number of appeals to readers. First, to previous customers of the store, there is the incentive to acquire goods that they had previously been unable to afford. In addition, these previous customers are now being invited into other stores, probably competitors, with the likelihood that they will eventually become loyal customers of the new establishment. Interestingly, both advertisements include the amount that the lot of goods from Watts and Company is valued rather than relying on detailed description or an appeal to the taste of the readers. The assumption made by the advertisers is that significant monetary outlay on the part of Holliday and Lewis will somehow translate in the minds of the reader to increased stock, larger and more financially secure store operation and most importantly, discounted merchandise. Whether or not a store was actually financially secure enough to provide merchandise at discounted prices, advertising allowed them to present an image of success. One of the other reasons that advertising was considered déclassé was that advertisers were not always burdened by a strict interpretation of the facts. Advertisements made use of a number of tactics intended to convince the bargain-hunting shopper to enter the store. Businesses claiming to sell at ruinous prices, fire sales, bankruptcy, and other drastic events competed for attention in the advertisements pages of the newspapers, and while some of the events were true, the startling rapidity with which businesses came up with new emergencies indicates the likelihood that at least some of the emergencies were invented. The emergency sale was only one tactic; not only was it a time-honored tradition to display one item and sell another, as Trollope’s shoppers find out, but the often substandard items for sale gave a new meaning to the adage about things that are too good to be true. Of course, not all emergencies were faked; shopkeepers were under pressure to maintain a profit while keeping customers convinced that the prices they charged were low and reasonable. This pressure often came out in the advertising tactics used to get the attention of prospective customers. As Lori Loeb points out in Consuming Angels, advertisers were considered purveyors of puffery- promoting items at best, poorly-made and at worst, fraudulent.12 12

Lori Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York: Oxford UP, 1994), 5. Loeb makes the argument that by using images to play on fears of contaminated food for their children, advertisers hoped to encourage

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Catching the Elusive Consumer: Trollope’s Adversarial Advertising

As a result, advertisers were often considered unrefined, their ads considered unsuitable for middle-class magazines. Despite their untrustworthy nature however, advertising found its way into the middle class as more magazines found ways to increase income. The similarities between the tactics used to advertise stocks and store sales indicate that the thin moral line between investment (a morally and generally monetarily safe proposition) and speculation (related to gambling and moral risk) is, for Trollope, blurring into non-existence. Trollope’s narrator uses the tactics of advertising to drum up business, but in doing so, shows that the store is a speculative venture, gambling on its relationship with the customers (its credit) to convince people to take the risk of purchasing goods. In effect, this is the credit that Trollope is exploring on a number of levels: Robinson’s exploitation of the relationship between the store and its customers, and in another sense, the exploitation of the relationship between Robinson and his readers, who must also extend credit in order to read his story. These ethical dilemmas seem not to deter Trollope’s narrator, who believes that the new business model is credit-based. Even though his advertisements require the store to pull a bait and switch, he does not see this as an ethical problem. As he answers the charge that advertisers do not always deliver on what they promise, he claims that one should, as “the stern moralist say[s] to the wicked mother in the play, assume a virtue if you have it not”.13 As he describes it, one advertises to get credit which Robinson says is “the belief of other people in things that don’t really exist”.14 He goes on to describe what he means with an example: “When you go to your friend Smith’s house and find Mrs. S. all smiles, you give her credit for the sweetest of tempers. Your friend S. knows better; but then you see she’s had wit enough to obtain credit.”15 Robinson believes that the world runs on the ability to convince people that you have plenty of what they want to purchase, whether or not the goods are available. His advice for the businessman who wants to seem successful is the same for a wife who wants to pretend nothing is going wrong with a dinner party: “Assume your virtue. The more you haven’t got it, the more you must assume it. The bitterer your own heart is about that drunken cook and that women to purchase items as varied as soap, fashion, and home décor, among many other things. Her analysis illuminates the importance of women in Victorian commodity culture, but even more importantly, it illustrates that businessmen understood the importance of women in their customer base 13 Trollope, The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson, 5. 14 Ibid., 7. 15 Ibid.

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idle husband who will do nothing to assist you, the sweeter you must smile”16. Though he despairs of his partners, Robinson believes that the use of credit is the mark of a successful businessman who is able to acquire goods without money on hand. The more ability one has to convince one’s creditors of the solvency of the business, regardless of the actual financial situation, the more goods one can actually have on display, as Robinson intimates when he complains that Mr. Brown does not understand that his behavior is influencing their creditors into demanding their money earlier out of fear. Throughout the novel, Mr. Brown is depicted as bemused by Robinson’s new-fangled strategies to bring people to the store. Brown not only expects to order stock for the store with the money actually in hand, but also exhibits concern for the morals of the staff, clear signs that he is operating under a misapprehension as to the way business is done, according to his fellow partners. Brown’s status as senior partner, however, is not based on credit, but on the fact that of the three partners, he was the one who invested his own money into the project. This subtle depiction of Brown’s adherence to a previous style of shop keeping (and its adherence to quality and individual relationships between staff, owner, and consumers) is a reminder that behind the flashy style Robinson encourages, there is nothing that equals the previous system, which encouraged fiscal responsibility on the part of shop owners and consumers. Robinson’s behavior shows him to be a speculator, using the business to gamble with the store’s finances and the store’s credit. His fundamental difference of opinion with Mr. Brown involves payment for the store’s goods, which Robinson assumes does not need to be paid for until sold. In an 1878 pamphlet describing speculation, E.C. Madison explains, “Speculative purchases may therefore be made by persons not possessing sufficient money to pay for the stock bought, and speculative sales may be made by persons who are not possessed of stock.”17 Robinson’s complaints stem from his worry that Mr. Brown’s tactics show the store’s creditors that he does not understand how to speculate. In other words, he is unable to use credit properly. Robinson’s use of credit is evident in an incident that shows the connection between advertising, morality, and sociability that Trollope was critiquing in his book. When a supplier fails to provide goods to the store that Robinson has already advertised, Robinson creates a series of news stories detailing the adventures of the thief, Johnson of Manchester, 16

Ibid. E.C. Maddison, Speculation on the Stock Exchange: An Explanation of the Various Methods of Operating in Stocks and Shares (1878) cited in Itzkowitz, 132. 17

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Catching the Elusive Consumer: Trollope’s Adversarial Advertising

who is supposedly responsible for deceiving the supplier, and taking the goods. Robinson creates Johnson, has him on the run from the police, captured, escaped, and rumored to be off to America, all in the space of a week. Since even his store clerks don’t know for sure whether Johnson is real, they debate among themselves the possibility of his capture. Various people named Johnson write letters to the papers to make clear that they are not responsible for the actions of the criminal who shares their name. This public attention is proof that the advertising ploy is garnering results. Robinson himself sees the story as a game in which he assumes that the readers following the adventures of the non-existent Johnson will enjoy the story, come to Magenta House to purchase goods, and find out more. In effect, he relies upon the store’s yet undiminished credit to convince people to shop out of pity for their troubles. His gambit relies upon the notion that readers have a short attention span when it comes to entertainment; he allows the story to drop over a weekend without another mention, without any customer questioning the lack of follow-through. Interestingly, the only person who does become curious about Johnson of Manchester is his romantic rival, Brisket, whom Robinson has repeatedly denigrated. Brisket’s ability to see through Robinson comes, at least in part, from his lack of interest in the store’s public credit. Brisket is only interested in “seeing his way,” by which he means seeing the cash dowry he requires before marrying. Because Brisket does not extend credit to the store, he is not taken in by the grandiose claims about its ability to acquire goods. Rather, he expects cash money from Mr. Brown before proceeding with plans to marry Mr. Brown’s younger daughter. Interestingly, it is because Brisket completely refuses to accept promises about the store’s future earnings that he precipitates the crisis that leads to the store’s failure when Mr. Brown attempts to pay his daughter’s dowry. In effect, Trollope uses the character of Brisket to show that credit exists only as a result of a belief granted by the public. Without the ability to use publicity, especially advertising, to create credit, the store could not survive. At times, Trollope shows the danger in Robinson’s desire for publicity at any cost; when the men Robison has hired to portray knights on horseback almost trample a child and the store is castigated in the paper for the advertising scheme, Robinson’s wonders if the store could have gotten more publicity if the child had actually been trampled in the crowd. The cold calculation with which Robinson considers this publicity as a potential sales tactic is an indicator of his suspect morality. Additionally, though he never admits it, Robinson’s lack of concern about the financial

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effects of his advertising on the firm is at least a contributing cause to its failure. As Robinson puts it when questioned by his friend, Mr. Poppins, “A man goes into hats, and in order to force a sale, he builds a large cart in the shape of a hat, paints it blue, and has it drawn through the streets. He still finds that his sale is not rapid; and with a view of increasing it, what shall he do? Shall he make his felt hats better, or shall he make his wooden hats bigger?”.18 Obviously Robinson is not interested in creating better hats if it means a decrease in sales. His emphasis on style includes the spectacle of the large hat parading through the streets, not a guarantee of quality, but certainly an eye-catching way to advertise his company, regardless. While Robinson despairs of breaking Jones of the habit of the sales tricks used in lesser shops, Jones points out that Robinson is much like the proverbial pot talking to the proverbial kettle. Robinson’s creation of “news” as advertising illustrates the fluidity and basic untrustworthiness of the information he provides about the store. Because his tactic works, it marks a moment of triumph in Robinson’s belief that the style of the advertising, and the store, is much more important than the substance of what is sold. His friend Poppins’ ethical argument about the need for quality construction of goods essentially challenges Robinson’s standards and actually causes a moment of consideration in which Robinson begins to wonder if indeed, he has been wrong. At the same time, Robinson’s emphasis on style over substance does not seem to him to be unethical since, given enough time, he could procure the advertised merchandise for any customer. What he does not consider are the ethical implications of the actions of the sales staff who are asked to intentionally mislead the customers as a result of Robinson’s advertisements. He might despair of Jones’s tricks from lower-class shops, but he fails to recognize his own culpability in creating the situation that requires Jones to resort to tricks. After all, as he sees it, the customer is responsible for checking any advertising claims for themselves. Robinson’s lack of concern for misled customers is one of many instances that reflect the division between capitalist and consumer throughout the novel. By speculating on the store’s credit with consumers, Robinson creates a situation in which the store can make money whether or not the store is actually providing worthwhile merchandise. Not only does this encourage customers to enter the consumptive cycle by promising a product that can never fulfill all expectations, it also creates unhappy clientele if the merchandise is shoddy or too quickly manufactured. 18

Ibid., 251.

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The consumer can just as easily withdraw credit from a store that treats him poorly, or which has overpriced merchandise. Robinson’s view of credit might represent capitalism, but as a dangerous contest for control over the credit of the store. . The alienation in the front of the shop, as Trollope shows, is only one result of consumer society. The other is the alienation behind the counter. For the owners of Magenta House, the relationship between the owners of the shop is more complex than exploitation alone might explain. After all, Brown, Jones, and Robinson are involved in the everyday work of the shop, and all are dependent on the shop for their livelihood. The relationships at Magenta House are mediated by money; the partners draw a living allowance until it becomes obvious that Mr. Brown has taken more than his share because he does not understand the financial situation of the shop. At the same time, the relationships between the three are also mediated by their understanding of credit. The tensions between them rest on two perennial differences within capitalist economy: the operation of capital and credit at Magenta House. Robinson’s insistence on credit over capital puts him at odds with the senior partner, Mr. Brown, who has the unreasonable (to Robinson) desire to stock items to sell and to pay for that stock with money. In ridiculing Mr. Brown, Robinson sets himself up as fighting for progressive business practice against the forces of an older generation stuck in its cashdependent ways. In addition, Robinson sees himself as a more valuable employee than Mr. Jones, whose skill with customers, especially female customers, is ridiculed by Robinson as unimportant when compared with Robinson’s skill with advertising and ideas. Robinson’s bias causes him to forget the role Jones plays in convincing customers to return, just as neither Jones or Brown understand Robinson’s ability to get new shoppers to come to the store.

The Ambitious Advertiser To hear him tell it, George Robinson is assailed on all sides by people who fail to believe in the power of advertising and his ability to harness that power. First, there are his partners, then, the butcher, Mr. Brisket, who ultimately wins Maryanne Brown, the woman Robinson hopes to marry, and ultimately, a friend, Mr. Poppins, who thinks that Robinson should actually provide, rather than publicize, quality merchandise if he wishes his customers to continue to shop at Magenta House. All of these challenges to Robinson’s ideas have one thing in common: they represent different views about the acceptability of credit and the means of its

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acquisition. In effect, these different views stem from conflicts about what was acceptable behavior for a business in consumer economy, and whether businesses should encourage spending for consumer goods. Regardless of the actual quality of a product, the advertiser’s job was to promote its value- to convince consumers to risk their money on that product. The conflict between Brown, Jones, and Robinson results from a lack of social status for advertisers as well as a deep seated distrust of Robinson’s methods by his two seemingly outdated partners. Robinson’s repeated disputes with his partners over the way to run the business often highlights the divide between Robinson, who sees advertising on an equal footing with Mr. Jones’ customer service, and Mr. Jones, whose snide remarks illustrate his belief that Robinson does not contribute enough to the running of the firm. Indeed, Mr. Jones’ complaint is that, unlike Robinson, his job is real work involving customer contact and a certain degree of diplomacy to deal with the women who come through the door. Mr. Jones’ shock when he finds out that Robinson, the “bill-sticker” was a partner in the haberdashery shows his estimation of bill-stickers in general and Robinson in particular, as lower in the social scale than any business could wish to hire. The feeling is mutual; Robinson grudgingly admits that Jones is an acceptable manager for the shop, but disdains the “tricks of the trade” that he feels mark Jones as lower class. Both, it seems, are in contention for class position and recognition for the value of their work. While Robinson is perhaps too quick to value his own labor, he does so because he sees himself doing the important work of developing the store’s “credit. Since Robinson has already admitted that credit lies in the belief of the beholder, his concern is less with the substance of what the store sells, as with the style of it. Despite the distrust of his partners, Robinson continues to believe that just as the business develops credit with other businesses, it also develops credit with consumers in the same way- by promising to deliver at some future date. Like Mr. Brown, Robinson’s friend, Mr. Poppins, clings to the stubborn belief that a business’ job is to provide customers with the best quality product possible; once this is done, the customers will reciprocate by continuing to shop. He does not separate the retailer from the producer, so expects that a carefully produced product is sold by those who make or at least understand it. Magenta House, however does not produce anything it sells. It retails them, and as a result, Robinson is free to ignore concerns about the quality of his merchandise. Instead, he can focus on his ability to get monetary credit from his manufacturers and advertising credit from his customers.

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Just as he considers Mr. Brown lost in fogeydom for his inability to understand the new ways of business, Robinson thinks that Poppins does not understand the intricacies of trade. He believes that his job is not to provide quality, but to promote it, whether or not it exists. He does not make shirts, for example, but he can describe them in a way that convinces people to purchase- whether or not they exist. In effect, these two have essentially definitions of retail’s place in the manufacturing chain. Robinson’s view is that the retailer is a distributor, not the manufacturer of a product, and as such, has no investment in the quality of the goods for sale. His advertisements allow him to make claims about the quality and quantity of goods while remaining distant from the actual production of any commodities. It is telling that one of Robinson’s first acts as the store is being remodeled is to decide that window displays were necessary. Robinson is willing to put the new interest in visual display to his advantage. He goes a step further on opening day, when he hires men to dress in costumes in order to make a spectacle in the street. As an opening day gambit, his tactic works, even getting a mention in the newspaper. The problem is that men who dress in costume have nothing to do with the actual product being sold- and neither does Robinson, whose interest in style rather than substance becomes more problematic as he tries to create an image for the firm that is not consistent with the events that he describes. The difference between Robinson’s view and Poppins’ is more than mere style over substance, however. By placing the businessman on par with the manufacturer, Poppins’ model for retail would ensure that customers would see a connection between the store owner and the goods for sale. The businessmen would represent a link to traditional values of quality, value, and craftsmanship through the sale of well-made goods, and as such would be accorded the respect of the customer. Poppins’ model forms the basis of many advertising appeals to customers looking for just such an assurance of quality. Robinson’s appeals link quality with cost in a way that indicates the two are synonymous, and in doing so, he relies on the speculative natures of his customers to make sure that they are willing to risk the quality of their purchases for the chance at a lower cost.

Antisocial Consumption By the time Trollope wrote his novel in 1861 for Cornhill, England seemed to be enjoying the benefits of industrial revolution: economic prosperity and freedom from political strife; at the same time, cracks in the national armor were evident. As Lauren Goodlad argues, the Victorian

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liberal government was made up of a number of competing interests, among which she identifies those philanthropic groups advocating selfreliance and self-help for those in the lower ranks of society, sometimes at the cost of the dignity of those they were supposedly serving. While the national government promoted the ideals of harmonious social relationships and slow, progressive, legal change as the means for avoiding revolution on the European model, the divisions between working and middle-class groups continued to grow, each putting pressure on the government to meet their needs.19 These tensions in the social structure allowed various groups to develop a level of autonomy as they worked to provide services and structure for those the government did not; at the same time, they widened gaps between groups that competed for resources and between those who gave aid and those who received it. The different levels of tension that existed between shop owners, their competitors and customers certainly contributed to Trollope’s sense that capitalism in English society was undermining, or at the very least changing, basic social relationships. Not only do the disaffected customers who appear in his novels come expected to be cheated by the store, but they do so armed with information prepared to combat it. In a sense, Trollope depicts the store as a place of conflict and competition between businesses and consumers rather than a place unified by consumptive behavior. One of the primary cracks in the social order as Trollope describes it is consumer society itself which encourages this divisive behavior. The consumer participates in a love/hate relationship with the store as the provider of both the pleasures and pains of ownership. The wary consumers that come to Magenta House determined to find bargains represent a new form of antisocial behavior20. Armed against the store, they represent a hostile form of capitalism that is equally willing to steal as to purchase in order to own the object of desire.

Antisocial shopping Robinson is unconcerned about his effect on the store’s clientele because underlying his consumptive worldview is the assumption that the 19 Lauren Goodlad, Victorian Culture and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003). 20 Christopher Lane, Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England (New York: Columbia UP, 2004). Lane argues that misanthropic, antisocial impulses ranging from dissatisfaction, dislike, cynicism, even active hatred, were pathologized as the nineteenth century continued; interest in maintaining civil society limited the expression of these feelings, despite potential benefits.

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customer is responsible for taking care of herself. Interestingly, Robinson’s belief in credit does not extend to a belief in his customers, nor does he expect his customers to grant the credit that his advertisements require. This view of customers as savvy shoppers is at odds with the image of shoppers as passive, accepting the claims of advertisements without question. It is this inconsistent view that is at the heart of the relationship between store and shopper. Robinson’s attitude makes it clear that he sees customers as a group with antithetical goals from his own. In fact, the two groups on opposite sides of the counter have distinct interests that are, at times, in opposition, based as they are on different definitions of the consumptive fantasy of ownership of the objects being traded in the shop. As a result, the store owner becomes part of an adversarial relationship with the customers who, unable to be trusted, might steal their way out of the store. The feeling is entirely mutual; consumers see the businessman as little better than a tease, someone who encourages their interest in items that suddenly are not available. The two groups exit in a mutually symbiotic, yet entirely distrusting relationship. For Robinson, the women waiting outside the shop each morning represent a group of adversaries bent on getting prices that are not only unprofitable, but impossible for the shop to maintain. As a result, he feels very little remorse for selling cheap goods. As he considers, for example, the question of food adulteration, an ever-present concern for Victorian shoppers, he blames it on Mrs. Jones, who if she “will buy her sausages at a lower price per pound than pork fetches in the market, has she a right to complain when some curious doctor makes her understand that her viands have not been exclusively supplied from the pig?”.21 In effect, he blames the purchaser for the pressure to produce goods at cheap prices, not the producer, and certainly not the distributor. The feeling of distrust is mutual. Shoppers who see the advertisements for Magenta House soon find themselves looking in vain for the items they thought were available, regardless of Robinson’s belief that shoppers should know that advertisements only mean the ability to acquire an item, not its presence in the stock room. The two become overt adversaries in an incident that is central to understanding Robinson and Jones’ effect on the customers. When the store partners realize that the ladies are too good at spotting cheap knockoff goods in the windows of the store and refusing to pay top money for them, they put the only real item on display, and refuse to allow the customers to handle it. Customers who ask are told that they’re purchasing the same item, and that the window simply can’t be 21

Trollope, The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, 252.

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disturbed. Sales people at Magenta House are trained to ask disruptive customers, namely those demand to handle the displays, to leave. It’s this attempt to misdirect the consumer that eventually causes one of the most important moments in the novel, when Mrs. Morony, an Irishwoman, comes in with a friend and demands to buy a mantle on display. When she is not allowed to purchase, or even to handle the displayed mantle and is instead told that she might buy another, she becomes agitated, and demands to buy the mantle on display for the price for which mantles are being advertised. Both she and the sales people are very clearly aware that the mantle she wants to purchase is much better quality than the ones that are being advertised to the public, and that the advertised price applies to the cheaper quality goods. Mrs. Morony causes a public scene by engaging in a shouting match and indeed, Mr. Jones, the partner responsible for customer service, ends up having to wrestle the mantle out of her hands in front of other customers when she uses her umbrella to get hold of it. What almost becomes a public brawl is broken up by the police with other customers looking on. Even Robinson, with his love of all public notice for the store, recognizes the damage this does for the store’s image, but he rationalizes the incident by saying that Mrs. Morony planned what he considers an assault on the store with the intent of getting away with the mantle. Like all ladies who try to take advantage of tradesman for cheaper goods, he believes his customer is a robber. In fact, as Robinson recounts the encounter between Mrs. Morony, her friend, and the sales staff, he says, “it was clear to be seen that the enemy was of no mean skill and of great valour”22, clearly the way one would describe an adversary in a military campaign. Mrs. Morony’s actions indicate that she sees the staff as obstructing her acquisition of the mantle she wants, and refuses to accept their authority to sell her the product they are offering at the advertised price. Robinson’s advertising has created a desire for the commodity, but at the expense of his store’s credit with some of its customers, who see their worst fears confirmed when Robinson’s advertising tactics create the need for a bait and switch by the store. Robinson defends the need for the switch by blaming the customer, rather than his practices. He asks, somewhat caustically, “Am I to say, Sir, here is a cheap hat. It is made from brown paper, and the gum will run from it in the first shower. It will come to pieces when worn, and disgrace you among your female acquaintances by becoming dinged and bulged? Should I do him good? He would buy his cheap hat elsewhere and tell 22

Ibid., 145

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pleasant stories of the madmen he had met”.23 As an advertiser, he recognizes the consumer need for fantasy in order to facilitate consumption of the products. On the other hand, his own cynicism about the way business operates causes him to perpetuate the cycle that creates the cynical consumer who disbelieves advertising, and therefore refuses to grant credit to the store. Essentially, Robinson’s enemy is self-created. Robinson’s expectation that the customer can take care of herself has created two groups: the customer, whose business it is to disbelieve the advertisements they see, and the sales people, whose job it is to convince them to purchase regardless. These two groups come into conflict at the moment when illusory desires created by advertisers are obstructed by the very real demand for money. When the customers are expected to take care of themselves, and when they are expected to do so by distrusting the stores that provide advertised goods, they become cynical. Even more, when the customers moves from distrust of the store’s advertising to active intent to bypass the store clerks in procuring the means to enjoy the fantasy of consumption, I would argue the customers have become antisocial. Trollope puts the final stamp on his character’s advertising empire at the end of the novel; not only has Robinson been left without a job, but he is inspired by his experiences to take the ultimate step in self-promotion: running for Parliament. Trollope uses Robinson’s idea to point out that not only does business run on credit via advertising, but the entirety of British society is set up on a system of credit. If the system of credit that has existed between customers and shop owners is eroded by the emphasis on consumption, conflict arises between them. On a much larger scale, if the system of credit that exists between the government and the individual is similarly eroded, it could cause disaster. Not only does a representative in Parliament have to self-promote just as an advertiser might promote a product, but given Robinson’s propensity for marketing, he might be equally dangerous to believe. The implication that having ruined one business, Robinson intends to treat the Parliament in the same way indicates the threat Trollope saw in the kinds of consumptive business practices described in the novel. Robinson’s style destroys the very credit on which it relies. Creating a group of wary, cynical consumers does not bode well for the other firm that required public credit with which to operate: government. Not only does government function similarly to a store in 23

Ibid., 251

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that it asks constituents to accept its authority on faith, but it would be equally disastrous if that faith were shattered. Stores and individuals might fail, but without public confidence in the government, the country might go the same way. Should the public perceive that the government, like Magenta House, is lacking in substance despite all advertising to the contrary, the results could be disastrous.

Works Cited Aytoun, W.E. “The National Debt and the Stock Exchange,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Vol. 66(Dec. 1849): 655-678. http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/cgibin/ilej/image1.pl?item=page&seq=1& size=1&id=bm.1849.12.x.66.410.x.655 Birmingham Daily Post, January 10, 1860, http://find.galegroup.com/bncn/dispBasicSearch.do?prodId=BNCN&u serGroupName=prdue_main Brantlinger, Patrick. Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006. Brown, Lucy. Victorian News and Newspapers. Oxford, Clarendon, 1985. Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Crossick, Geoffrey. “The Petite Bourgeoisie in Nineteenth-Century Britain: the Urban and Liberal Case,” Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth Century Europe, edited by Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, 62-94. London: Methuen, 1984. Daily News, January 5, 1860, http://find.galegroup.com/bncn/dispBasicSearch.do?prodId=BNCN&u serGroupName=prdue_main. Itzkowitz, David. “Fair Enterprise or Extravagant Speculation: Investment, Speculation, and Gambling in Victorian England,” Victorian Studies 45, no. 1 (2002) 121-147. Goodlad, Lauren. Victorian Culture and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. Lane, Christopher. Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. Loeb, Lori, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Rappaport, Erika. Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.

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Trollope, Anthony. The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson: By One of the Firm. New York: Penguin, 1993. Whitlock, Tammy. Crime, Gender, and Consumer Culture in Nineteenth Century England. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005.

THE SOI-DISANT HERO’S SUICIDE: CHANCY SPECULATION IN TROLLOPE’S THE PRIME MINISTER LUCA CADDIA

It is a certainty of service to a man to know who were his grandfathers and who were his grandmothers if he entertain an ambition to move in the upper circles of society, and also of service to be able to speak of them as of persons who were themselves somebodies in their time. —Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister, 1876

The Prime Minister’s opening sentence is a statement of intent, whose supposed universality has been compared to Pride and Prejudice’s celebrated ouverture. In it, the other protagonist (or the protagonist Other) of the novel is introduced to the reader as a virtually doomed man. Not knowing his grandfathers, and what is worse, incapable of speaking of them as of “somebodies”, Ferdinand Lopez must learn to fashion his gentlemanly identity out of the blue, within a social network whose friendship acceptance is strictly limited to actual knowledge. As a financial speculator who shows the emotional training of Georg Simmel’s blasé type and the first symptoms of a Bret Easton Ellis yuppie, not only is Lopez far too modern for the world of ancestry into which he is thrown, he is also, arguably, the coolest businessman in mid-Victorian fiction. If this factor cannot be overlooked in a collection devoted to the image of the businessman through literature, it has been elsewhere. Too concerned with criticizing Trollope for perpetuating stereotypes of Jews and speculators, critics have often levelled Lopez on the same ground of Melmotte from The Way We Live Now (1875) as the typical stockmarket villain Victorian fiction must ultimately eject.1 Thus doing, not 1

Some of the few sympathetic accounts of Lopez include Geoffrey Harvey. The Art of Anthony Trollope. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), pp. 143-60, and Robert Tracy. Trollope’s Later Novels. (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 47-60.

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only they have failed to consider him as the specific character he is, but they have ironically ended up sharing Trollope’s own authorial denial of Lopez’s heroic status. In a letter to Mary Holmes, Trollope defined him as “the soi-disant hero”,2 a definition that for David Skilton implies that “it is not the text which confers the status of hero on the character, but the character who claims it for himself.”3 The present article, the first to date devoted to a detailed close reading of Ferdinand Lopez’s suicide chapter in The Prime Minister, aims to analyze the character of Lopez as hero manqué of the novel, in order to understand why he fails to become a sympathetic character according to Trollope’s own standards. Indeed, Lopez’s individualistic attitude towards life is set in a context where the public sphere of the Parliament and the social world of the ruling classes are constantly blurred: in this novel, the Prime Minister’s wife’s generous hospitality to the members of her husband’s coalition provides the ground where MPs are chosen, so that politicians are recruited for their sociability and not for their public spirit, i.e. their devotion to the national welfare. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister knows that by levelling public spirit and personal business a conflict of interests will follow which will damage the collective wealth of the nation. “What is any public question but a conglomeration of private interests?” angrily wondered the reformist John Bold in The Warden (1855), Trollope’s first major work. Twenty years later, the chronicler of the professional classes keeps describing the dangers inherent in such a common practice, and through the depiction of Ferdinand Lopez’s suicide at a fictitious junction in North London in the sixtieth chapter of The Prime Minister, Trollope employs the richest metaphor in his oeuvre to explain the necessity of personal responsibility within one’s community. Indeed, after Lopez’s suicide, a railway porter stands accused of being responsible for his death because he couldn’t stop Lopez from throwing himself under a train, a fact through which Trollope means to show that there is hardly an individual action that does not have public consequences.4

2

Letter to Mary Holmes, 7 May 1876, in N. John Hall (ed.), The Letters of Anthony Trollope, Stanford University Press, Stanford California, 1983, p. 687. 3 David Skilton, Introduction to The Prime Minister, Penguin Classics, London, 1994, p. xvi. Henceforth quoted as PM in the body of the text, followed by the number of the page. 4 I am indebted to Professor David Skilton for having brought the germ of this essay to my attention. Indeed, it was he who first made me think about the significance of the railway porter in The Prime Minister.

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The Body Politics of Victorian Fiction Victorian fiction challenges the current assumption of individual alienation and separation in the modern metropolis in favour of a conception of the city as a community in which each individual action has strong consequences on other people’s lives. J. Hillis Miller was one of the first critics to realize this: in The Form of Victorian Fiction, he wrote that the development of Victorian fiction is a movement from the assumption that society and the self are founded on some superhuman power outside them, to a putting in question of this assumption, to the discovery that society now appears to be self-creating and self-supporting, resting on nothing outside itself (Miller 1968, 30).

According to Raymond Williams, the city is a place where men and women appear to be pursuing individual courses but where what they do, in its known and unknown effects, creates an effective common life within which all the individual lives are eventually held and shaped.” The urban novel highlights the “connection between fragmentary and divided experiences; (…) the creation, from social chaos, of one common end, to make the world a better place (Williams 1973, 155).

One of the most direct consequences of this creation is a new conception of individual responsibility, here conceived as a concern with the defence and preservation of a community whose elements are not detachable pieces, but necessary parts of a whole. As George Levine has underlined, literary realism describes and exalts an ordinary reality made of many little parts which are not simply juxtaposed, but interrelated. The Tenway Junction chapter in The Prime Minister, which depicts the struggle between organic nature and technology, and the blurring of private and public because of the proximity of individuals within society, shows what realist writers mainly hope and at the same time fear: “the faith was that science would reveal the organic, the secularist’s last hope for meaning and the validation of morality; the fear was that it would yield only to the mechanical (Levine 1981: 19).” The image of community as a body has been used in English literature since the seventeenth century: Phineas Fletcher’s poem The Purple Island (1633), for example, employed the double allegory of a fictional Pacific island and the human body to discuss the body politic and interrogate the centralized power of the Stuarts. According to Mark Bayer, in Fletcher’s “celebration of tributaries of what is perhaps the smallest organ of the human body, is the implicit claim the political agency resides in all aspects

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of the state and not exclusively in the head of the monarch (Bayer 2002, 250).” Nevertheless, when such an organic allegory reaches the urban images of the mid-Victorian era, its premises assume a neurotic quality which is very different from Fletcher’s democratic purpose. Among the major Victorian novelists, it seems to me that Anthony Trollope is the one who expanded the connective tissues of the body politics to its most extreme consequences, as my close reading of Ferdinand Lopez’s suicide at Tenway Junction will show. To say that Trollope’s novels are concerned with the consequences of one’s actions within the community they are performed, is only half the story; one of Trollope’s specific and enduring goals as a social novelist is that of having realized that once a deed has been executed, it begins to exist in the world in new, unexpected shapes. Therefore characters often find themselves in the shameful situation of having to bear the responsibility of the gap between inward intentions and outward effects. I have used the term “shameful” because, generally speaking, the instruments Trollope usually employs to show the disproportionate enlargement of a character’s responsibility towards the world are gossip, the press, and the law. Once this is acknowledged, it is no wonder that his Palliser Novels, published between 1865 and 1880 and mainly concerned with the lives and careers of fictitious Members of Parliament, are a particularly fertile field for describing the larger-than-life consequences of a man’s action. In these novels, so aware characters are of the dangers inherent in every potential faux pas, that their agency is often represented as virtually impotent: from Phineas Finn’s murder trial, which literally “unmans” him because of the negative publicity he must submit to, to Lord Fawn’s fear of a scandal concerning his engagement with the disreputable Lady Eustace, Trollope’s public men struggle hard not to lose their reputation, their “character”. For the eponymous hero of this series of novels, Plantagenet Palliser, later Duke of Omnium and Prime Minister of the novel here analyzed, equilibrium even becomes tantamount to stillness. In chapter 6 of The Prime Minister, for instance, his wife Lady Glencora asks him (and the narrator repeats the following question three times in the same chapter): “and what are they going to make you now?” In the Palliser Novels political principles are less relevant than the set of social connections that make a man “Prime Minister”, that is why the Duke’s agency as head of the coalition is strictly limited to the will of the other members. Whereas Fletcher’s purpose was that of questioning the absolute power of the monarch in the first half of the seventeenth century, the situation Trollope describes in the mid-1870s shows a reversal of those

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conditions according to which–in a kingdom where the sovereign only exercises a symbolic power–the body of Parliament exerts a new form of social tyranny over its own head. If a literal reading of the Duke’s stubborn attitude in The Prime Minister may trick the reader into believing that he fails to be a good Prime Minister because he is not as sociable as the members of his coalition wish he were, Courtney C. Berger has reminded us that “Palliser advocates a ‘pure’ politics that is informed by partisanship and ideas, not the social and economic concerns of its participants.”5 Correspondingly, when Phineas Finn begins his parliamentary career in the eponymous novel, his elder colleague Barrington Erle recommends him to look to “men, not measures” (Phineas Finn, 59), thus inverting a famous Whig slogan, according to which MPs must work for things, and not for men.6 The tyranny exercised by the coalition towards honest men like Phineas and Palliser is spoiled by a conflict of interests according to which the social and the public sphere are not separate, but blurred. Parliamentary career is here described as a worldly activity in which the Duke’s public spirit, that is his concern for the nation’s welfare, is less relevant than the system of connections that make the ruling classes interrelated. Not by chance, the occasional cause of the Duke’s resignation will be the scandal provoked by his wife’s supposed recommendation of Ferdinand Lopez as the Prime Minister’s favourite candidate for the borough of Silverbridge. According to Trollope, it is exactly because of such conflicts of interests that a public man must both be and look uncorrupted, and it is especially on account of this gap between substance and form that Ferdinand Lopez deserves a special mention among Trollope’s villains.

5

Courtney C. Berger. “Partying with the Opposition. Social Politics in The Prime Minister,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 45 (Fall 2003): 320. 6 See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (First MIT Press paperback edition, 1991), p. 137: “In order to save the principle of publicity even against the tyranny of an unenlightened public opinion itself, [John Stuart Mill wrote that] it was to be augmented with elements of representative publicity to such an extent that an esoteric public of representatives could emerge. In relation to the latter, the public that was only permitted to have itself represented would have to be satisfied that ‘their judgments must in general be exercised rather upon the characters and talents of the person whom they appoint to decide these questions for them, than upon the questions themselves (Mill, Bentham, 1838)’. Mill wrote this sentence only four years after an election proclamation in which the Whigs reminded their electorate that the rigorous intent behind a political public sphere: remember that you are now fighting for things, not men.”

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Ferdinand Lopez Ferdinand Lopez is the man whose behaviour best portrays the blurring of social and public described in Trollope’s oeuvre in general and in The Prime Minister in particular. Since the members of the Whig oligarchy, to which the Prime Minister belongs, cannot afford to lose their gentlemanly integrity, ordinary as it may result in most of the cases, their actions are often strictly limited to the maintenance of the system (although set in the age of Disraeli and Derby’s “leap in the dark”, Trollope’s Palliser Novels are still partial to the gradual development of Palmerston’s “age of equipoise”). On the contrary, Lopez’s status as an outsider and his virtually unknown reputation give him ample opportunity to style a fluid identity. Gifted with an imperious look, his main gift as a businessman is that of being “strangely endowed with the power of creating a belief (PM, 42).” Trollope makes a connection between this advertising ability and his inconsistent identity. At the beginning of the novel, Lopez is courting Emily Wharton, the daughter of a conservative barrister. When Mr Wharton tells him that he will not give up his daughter to a man who is not an English gentleman, the Mediterranean Lopez replies: “I hope that I may be able to present things to you in an aspect so altered as to make you change your mind (PM, 34).” As Berger has written, “Lopez’s strength lies in making others believe in his self-representations. […] This commitment to representation characterizes [his] entire attitude towards his view of commodity speculation (Berger 2003: 326).” This attitude is confirmed throughout the novel, especially when Lopez tries to convince a skeptical Lady Eustace to invest her money in a new drink called Bios: ‘How are you to get people to drink it?’ she asked after a pause. ‘By telling them that they ought to drink it. Advertise it. It has become a certainty now that if you will only advertise sufficiently you may make a fortune by selling anything…’ (PM, 467).

Lopez considers advertising as the instrument that allows a conflation of reality and representation on behalf of the latter. By employing persuasion through his hypnotic, magnetic gaze, Lopez is able to alter the look of things, just like advertisements gain credibility by means of their diffusion (“advertise sufficiently”). The narrator makes an arbitrary connection between speculation and deception, by claiming that Lopez makes others believe things that do not exist in reality, but only in their expectation:

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for to himself, to his own thinking, that which we call cheating was not dishonesty. […] That which he did, and desired to do, took the name of speculation. When he persuaded poor Sexty Parker to hazard his all, knowing well that he induced the unfortunate man to believe what was false, and to trust what was utterly untrustworthy, he did not himself think that he was going beyond the lines of fair enterprise (PM, 211).

As regards this, it is important to underline that, unlike Melmotte from The Way We Live Now or Dickens’s Mr Merdle, Lopez is an attractive man, and not one who reflects his moral ugliness through his physical appearance. Lopez’ s erotic energy, best expressed through the two female protagonists’ attraction to him, shows the subtle potentials of the advertising business within the economy of nineteenth-century England. Skilled in arrow shooting and defined as the Duchess’s new swan, Lopez is also frequently spoken to by “unfortunates of both sexes” on the night before his suicide.7 These continuous allusions at illicit sexual activities cannot be overlooked, especially when considered in relation to Lopez’s obsession with money-making. Aware that “money is the means by which men make money (PM, 380)”, Lopez shows how “the uglier aspects of capitalistic economics and sexual dominance result from social inequality. To secure a place in his society Lopez needs money; to get money he needs power, but power is also the result of already having money (Richard Barickman, Susan MacDonald, and Myra Stark 1982, 233).” The vicious circle concerned with money-making has also been related to Lopez’s Jewish origins, often hinted at but never actually revealed. This ethnic factor has provided the ground for a debate focused on the contraposition between the Englishness of the Whartons, built up on a landowning clan system, and Lopez who, as Jewish, embodies the man without land par excellence.8 In my opinion, Lopez’s ethnic origins are little more than a comic badinage that reveals less Trollope’s view on the subject than his countrymen’s prejudices. For example, if it is true that the free indirect discourse in which Mr Wharton defines Lopez as a “swarthy son of Judah (PM, 35)” is only supposed to be comic, the dialogue between Lopez and his business partner Sexty Parker about Shylock certainly is: 7

See John Sutherland. “Where is Tenway Junction?”, in Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Puzzles in 19th-Century Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 164. 8 For a discussion on Lopez as a ‘Jew’, see Bryan Cheyette. Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society. Racial Representations, 1875-1945. (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 23-42; Paul Delany. Literature, Money and the Market from Trollope to Amis. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).

46

Chancy Speculation in Trollope’s The Prime Minister “He was a Jew, wasn’t he?” “That was the general idea.” “Then you ain’t very much like him, for they’re a sort of people that always have money about ’em.” “How do you suppose he made his money to begin with? What an ass you are! (PM, 401).”

It is worth noting that this comic meta-dialogue reveals both Trollope’s awareness of his readers’ prejudices and Lopez’s consciousness of his situation within the social and economic context he is in. Not least, perhaps this is the only moment in the novel where the narrator shows genuine sympathy towards the soi-disant hero.

Selfishness as Irresponsibility: a Victorian Concern Victorian prejudices against speculators are not only grounded on the spectacular falls of the time’s magnates, copiously described in the newspapers, but also on a more philosophical cultural basis. Peter Mandler writes that most mid-Victorian writers who focused on Teutonic characteristics to describe national character placed emphasis on the concept of “self-reliance”, which gradually replaced “independence”: ‘Self-reliance’ […] suggested a well-balanced person, responsible, dignified, ‘self-possessed’, ‘self-respecting’, and, where necessary, ‘selfdenying’: capable, therefore, of recognizing his own true self-interest in obedience to the law and cooperation with others (Mandler 2006: 101).

By stretching August Comte’s distinction between “altruism” and “egoism”, the Victorians came to blur the difference between actions motivated by personal interest and deeds which are morally wrong, so that it was difficult to frame “a positive description of purely private or noncollaborative forms of self-cultivation or self-assertion (Collini 1991: 66).” This description fits Lopez’s case very well: at the beginning of The Prime Minister, Lopez and his friend Everett Wharton discuss the idea that money-seeking is debasing because it is utterly self-absorbing. Everett says: “a man ceases to care for the great interests of the world, or even to be aware of their existence, when his whole soul is in Spanish bonds (PM, 22).” This is one of Trollope’s points about speculation, which Lopez’s attitude confirms in full. Audrey Jaffe has discussed this kind of prejudice against financial speculators as a bogeyman whose function is to discourage the middle-class reader from speculation. Comparing Lopez’s attitude towards money with that of Mr Wharton, Jaffe writes that the distinction between speculation and investment turns out to be a matter of

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degree and not of quality, and she makes a point of demonstrating how “there is hardly an investment that is not speculation.”9 Although I concur with this analysis, it does seem to me that there is an additional major point concerning Lopez as a speculator, a point endorsed by the economy of the novel rather than by the economy of nineteenth-century England, that is his constant dependence on other people’s money, a factor that confirms the close interrelation of characters within their community. Unlike his friend Everett, Lopez does not have a rich father and therefore must work hard, since his ambition is “to move in the upper circles of society (PM, 9).” However he can’t help being dependent on the financial help of other people in order to succeed, which shows the contradiction inherent in regarding himself as a solitary fighter on the one hand and using other people to climb the social ladder on the other. Indeed, the impossibility of getting money from his father-in-law leads him to get into debt with his partner Sextus Parker, but all Lopez feels is the injustice of Mr Wharton towards him and not the fact the he is ruining his partner’s life. As the narrator confirms, “he was a man, whom the feeling of injustice to himself would drive him almost to frenzy, though he never measured the amount of his own injustice to others (PM, 292).” When his attempt to become an MP through the illicit support of the Prime Minister’s wife fails, he takes the fact as a personal affront and asks the Prime Minister for an indemnity, in spite of having already got the money from his father-in-law; the scandal triggered by this story ends up by causing his social exclusion. In order to avoid the catastrophe he even plans to become a manager of a mine in Guatemala, thus joining the list of Trollopian characters who try to invest their impetuous energies abroad after having failed in England. But the rumours of his unreliability alienate him from his partners’ trust. Nevertheless, even after his unmasking, he remains faithful to his self-styled character and sees himself as a romantic hero in a prosaic world, without realising that the cause of his failure is not tragic destiny, but sheer lack of responsibility.10 9

Audrey Jaffe, “Trollope in the Stock Market: Irrational Exuberance and The Prime Minister,” Victorian Studies 45 (Autumn 2002): 53. She also writes that “distinctions between investment and speculation tend to be made on the basis of personal involvement: the investor is said to be more committed to the company or commodity to which he lends his money”, and therefore relatively detached from his enterprise, whilst speculators are thought to be more involved since their activity is supposed to be riskier. 10 “He regarded his fate as does a card-player who day after day holds sixes and sevens when other men have aces and kings. Fate was against him. He saw no reason why he should not have had the aces and kings continually, especially as

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The following part of the paper will be examining in detail the chapter devoted to Lopez’s suicide. A close-reading is particularly important, because it shows an unusual philosophic scope in Trollope’s canon.

Tenway Junction The place chosen by Lopez to commit his suicide is Tenway Junction, a fictitious place not distant from North London.11 As the name implies, it is not simply a railway station with parallel lines, but a junction in which “lines diverge east, west, and north, north-east, and north-west, round the metropolis in every direction, and with direct communication with every other line in and out of London (PM, 517).” This image, which seems to represent the uncontrollable web of the financial power of the city,12 also reminds of the associative implications of the metropolis, i.e. the physical setting where characters’ lives intertwine and their social relationships ramify. “It is a marvellous place, quite unintelligible to the uninitiated, and yet daily used by thousands who only know that when they get there, they are to do what someone tells them (PM, 517).” Tenway Junction is a metaphor of the society described by Trollope, where characters’ positions are not detachable from the context in which they find themselves, and where, consequently, it is required of them to follow those orders which are necessary for the system to operate. Let me draw your attention to the term “uninitiated”. The main reason for Lopez’s failure is just that he is alien to the kind of behaviour required to succeed in a gentlemanly society: Lopez, who is not even English,13 has only disguised himself as a gentleman, but Trollope makes a point of demonstrating that belonging to

fate had given him perhaps more than his share of them at first (PM, 515).” As to the myth of the romantic hero, Lopez quotes Byron’s The Bride of Abydos (PM, 472), a poem in which a tyrannical father kills his daughter’s lover, a situation that reminds Lopez of his, considering that he thinks of himself as a victim of his father-in-law’s wickedness. 11 Jennifer Uglow, the World’s Classic editor of The Prime Minister, identifies Tenway Junction with the Grand Junction at Willesden, Middlesex. For a discussion on this subject, see John Sutherland 1996. 12 Cfr James Pope Hennessy. Anthony Trollope. Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1971, p.331. 13 Lopez claims that his father was a Portuguese gentleman and his mother an English lady. “Though this man had lived nearly all his life in England, he had not quite acquired the knowledge of the way in which things are done which is so general among men of a certain class, and so rare among those beneath them (PM, 371).”

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this category has less to do with aesthetic canons than with ethical ones, let alone pedigree.14 The description of Tenway Junction begins to stress the focus on the fact that the objects that happen to be placed there are closely interrelated: The space occupied by the convergent rails seems to be sufficient for a large farm. And these rails always run one into another with sloping points, and cross passages, and mysterious meandering sidings, till it seems to the thoughtful stranger to be impossible that the best-trained engine should know its own line. Here and there and around there is ever a wilderness of waggons, some loaded, some empty, some smoking with close-packed oxen, and others furlongs in length black with coals, which look as though they had been stranded there by chance, and were never destined to get again into the right path of traffic. (PM, 517)

In this image, dissimilar elements share a common space notwithstanding their coming from different “stations”, and prominence is given to the sense of chaos generated by the apparent coincidence of their proximity. Words like “stranded” or “wilderness” (“to be in the wilderness” also means “to be politically disgraced”), perfectly describe the situation of Lopez, who is now alone and abandoned to his bad infinity. The whole scene, which depicts urban elements like rails and wagons that seem to have no cause for being where they are, symbolizes the initial impasse people usually experience as soon as they arrive in a city.

Order and Chaos It is significant that Trollope carries on the description of Tenway Junction by referring to categories like order and chaos: we have just left a land of commercial wagons that seem to have been “stranded by chance” on the rails and are bound not to find their way again, but suddenly “men and women […] do get properly placed and unplaced, so that the spectator at last acknowledges that over all this apparent chaos there is presiding a great genius of order (PM, 517, emphasis mine).” Once again the symbolic relation that brings together the railway elements with human beings is evident. However, even though the apparent chaos in Tenway Junction is kept under control, order can only be revealed at the end of the story, which implies both the necessity of the process that leads to this 14

“In a sense he was what is called a gentleman. He knew how to speak, and how to look, how to use a knife and a fork, how to dress himself, and how to walk. But he had not the faintest notion of the feelings of a gentleman (PM, 497).”

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acknowledgement and the impossibility of setting aside the single parts that form the process itself.15 The order Trollope deals with is not achieved through a deus ex machina, but is something shaped in a fortuitous way, like a sequence of different sounds that reach the ear simultaneously. The moral concern of this novelist, who is closely concerned with individuals’ relationships within the social system, is clearly expressed in the following quote: From dusky morn to dark night, and indeed almost throughout the night, the air is loaded with a succession of shrieks. The theory goes that each separate shriek-if there can be any separation when the sound is so nearly continuous-is a separate notice to separate ears of the coming or going of a separate train. The stranger, as he speculates on this pandemoniac noises, is able to realize the idea that were they discontinued the excitement necessary for the minds of the pundits might be lowered, and that activity might be lessened, and evil results might follow. But he cannot bring himself to credit that theory of individual notices (PM, 518).

This passage focuses on the fact that the theory, which the stranger-so similar to the narrator-cannot be led to believe in, implies that every shriek is a very distinct and separate sign, that is, that every experience is absolute and detached from the others. However the description of this chain of shrieks that produce the impression of a long, continuous sound seems to give prominence to the fact that in practice characters are so united in city life that they cannot be regarded as separate, since they all belong to the same context that is shaped through the conjunction of their single experiences. This symbolic aspect becomes clearer if we consider what is about to happen, that is Ferdinand Lopez’s unexpected meeting with a railway porter (here oddly defined as pundit), a meeting that is as fortuitous as fatal because it will leave the porter with consequences which are closely determined by the irresponsible behaviour of the soi-disant hero. 15

See Victoria N. Alexander. The Ordering Tendencies of Chance, available on the web at (2002). In her study she examines five major tendencies of Determinism and calls “Deterministic Fortuity” a kind of experience which is common to many Victorian novels: “Chance plays a role in determining context; context, or whole, in turn determines the parts. In retrospect, once all the necessary information had been revealed, one would be able to decipher the end in the beginning. Unlike in the analogical deterministic narrative, however, the causal chains here would be caused by describable physical constraints. Many Victorian novels follow this scheme, in so much as they are more empirical than analogical.”

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The narrator highlights the porter’s professionalism. Indeed, the porter very soon realises how weird Lopez’s behaviour is, therefore he keeps following him and rebukes him over and over again when he sees him getting too close to the end of the platform. Waiting on the platform is forbidden, he repeats, but Now, Tenway Junction is so big a place, and so scattered, that it is impossible that all the pundits should by any combined activity maintain to the letter that order of which our special pundit had spoken. Lopez, departing from the platform which he had hitherto occupied, was soon to be seen on another, walking up and down, and again waiting. But the old pundit had had his eye upon him, and had followed him round. At that moment there came a shriek louder than all the other shrieks, and the morning express down from Euston to Inverness was seen coming down the curve at a thousand miles an hour. Lopez turned round and looked at it, and again walked towards the edge of the platform. But now it was not exactly the edge that he neared, but a descent to a pathway-an inclined plane leading down to the level of the rails, and made there for certain purposes of traffic. As he did so the pundit called to him, and then made a rush at him-for our friend’s back was turned to the coming train. But Lopez heeded not the call, and the rush was too late. With quick, but still with gentle and apparently unhurried steps, he walked down before the flying engine – and in a moment had been knocked into bloody atoms (PM, 51920).

With Lopez’s fragmentation the third volume of the novel is over. The last one opens with a public official accusing the porter of being inefficient. He says that he “was a disgrace to the service, and expressed a hope that the Company would no longer employ a man so evidently unfit for his position. But” the narrator goes on, “the man was in truth a conscientious and useful railway pundit, with a large family, and evident capabilities for his business (PM, 524).” At this point the connection between individual experiences described in the previous chapter becomes clearer. By putting an end to his life Lopez proves himself guilty, once too often, of not having realised the potential of his actions, and confirms his great talent for ruining other people’s lives. I would like to emphasise this interpretation by using a further reference to Trollope’s organic conception of the metropolis. In the second volume of the novel, Lopez is willing to buy a load of guano, a fertilizer made of sea-bird excrement. No doubt Trollope is here playing with the idea of speculation as a dirty occupation, as Dickens had similarly done in

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Little Dorrit and in Our Mutual Friend.16 In light of this one can easily conceive Tenway Junction–with its cross passages and mysterious meandering sidings–as the bowels of London, whereby the social waste that Lopez has become gets expelled and scattered on the ground. Considering that in the last volume of the book all the characters will have to pay the consequences of Lopez’s irresponsibility–his wife, his father-in-law, his partner, and above all the Prime Minister, who gets publicly exposed for having paid Lopez’s expenses–it is easily understood how the minor story of the railway porter reveals Lopez’s misconduct as a bad fertilizer for the last part of the novel. What seems to me remarkable in this chapter is that, instead of stressing the focus on the drama of a man on the verge of committing suicide, Trollope chooses to show the character’s action as an irresponsible act because of the effects on those who will have to face its consequences. The issue challenged here is, of course, the meaning of suicide as a strong assertion of the subject and the assumption of it as the ultimate action of a selfish life. This demonstrates how the novelist’s conception has less to do with a censorial attitude towards speculators than with the consciousness of how meaningless self-regarding actions are in modern metropolitan life, where one person’s existence is closely tied to that of others. In a sense, this chapter also seems to dispute John Stuart Mill’s idea, expressed in On Liberty (1859), that society has no right to intervene against someone when his/her choices are only concerned with his/herself. The new proximity experienced by citizens in a mass society complicates the tensions between individuals in such a way as to affect their actions within the world in an atrophying way, as this article has also shown in connection to the impotent agency of the members of Trollope’s Parliament . This being said, it is difficult not to include the nervous system among the several images inspired by Tenway Junction, especially in light of current physiological readings of Victorian fiction.17

16

See Tamara Wagner. “Speculator at Home in the Victorian Novel: Making Stock-Market Villains and New Paper Fiction,” Victorian Literature and Culture 36 (2008): 27, 21-40. Wagner writes that “if the guano in The Prime Minister or the memorable dust mounds of OurMutual Friend are […] explicitly linked to excrement, their reduction to mere paper fictions (untrustworthy shares and disputed wills) only makes them more suspect, not cleaner to handle.” 17 See for example Nicholas Dames. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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Conclusion At the beginning of this paper I stressed the focus on the opening sentence of The Prime Minister to emphasize an outsider’s hopelessness in a prejudiced society. Then I highlighted the difference between the social and the public sphere implying that, in spite of his difficulties, Lopez does not fail because he is an outsider, but because he wants to take advantage of the blurring between social and public as an outsider. Indeed, if it is true that Lopez does not succeed as a public man because, from a purely cynical point of view, he lacks the social connections of English gentlemen, what he really lacks to become the hero of the novel is the ethics of a gentleman, that is a well-balanced awareness of his specific station within society. And since one’s station is here described as a junction, one’s identity cannot be earnestly conceived without any concern for others.18 Now I would like to conclude my paper with a further reference to the term “speculation” and its connection to the categories of order and chance my article has dealt with. Since the meaning of the word speculation shifted from “spiritual revelation” to “economic prognostication”,19 chance has come to play a major role in the definition of the term. It is not surprising that, at the beginning of The Prime Minister, Ferdinand Lopez asks himself: “who can really calculate chances? (PM, 24).” Lopez is willing to believe that Mr Wharton will give him his permission to marry his daughter, and therefore backs himself in a way that is typical of the speculator. What he doesn’t realize is that in a world regulated by the cause-effect principle, which my close-reading of his suicide’s chapter has just demonstrated to be the case in this novel, chance may well be at the core of human experience, but it is definitely not its presiding principle. Even the most fortunate event happening to Lopez, i.e. his going to Everett’s rescue when he is attacked by the garrotters, leads Mr Wharton to give him his daughter’s hand only because Lopez proves suddenly altruistic on that single occasion and thus manages to gain the old man’s trust.20 18

On the other hand it must be also remarked that, whereas characters like Lopez fail because of their amorality, a too rigid concern with duty may represent a different reason of tension between a character and the others, as in the Duke of Omnium’s case. 19 For an extended reflection on this subject, see Tatiana M. Holway. “The Game of Speculation: Economics and Representation.” Dickens Quarterly 9:3 (1992). 20 Needless to say, what happens in St James’s Park is no more than an authorial escamotage chosen to allow Lopez’s admittance to the Wharton family. Indeed,

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Therefore, if chance is only the ground on which seeds are sown in The Prime Minister, the concept of order conveys a double significance: on the one hand, it looks like the result of an open, spontaneous process, formed by all the relations and contacts that come together by chance, and is similar, from some points of view, to the Epicurean theory of atoms, which is also mentioned in the novel.21 On the other hand, since one’s behaviour is not detachable from the context in which it is put into effect, order becomes closely tied to one’s actions; hence the call for individual responsibility endorsed by the novelist, who asks the reader to invest in responsible civic sense instead of speculating on irresponsible heroism.

Works Cited Alexander, Victoria N. Narrative Telos: The Ordering Tendencies of Chance. http://www.dactyl.org/directors/vna/documents/Narrative_Telos.pdf> 2002); Barickman, Richard, Susan MacDonald, and Myra Stark. Corrupt Relations. Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins, and the Victorian Sexual System. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982; Bayer, Mark. “The Distribution of Political Agency in Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island.” Criticism 44, (Summer 2002): -270; Berger, Courtney C. “Partying with the Opposition. Social Politics in The Minister.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 45, (Fall 2003): 315-36;

after the rescue, Lopez “applied his mind to think how he could turn the events of the evening to his own use (PM, 195).” 21 Epicurus’s theory of atoms is quoted in the novel as regards the difference between Sir Orlando Drought’s character and Palliser’s: “Samples of each sort from time to time rise high in political life, carried thither apparently by Epicurean concourse of atoms; and it often happens that the more confident samples are by no means the most capable. The concourse of atoms had carried Sir Orlando so high that he could not but think himself intended for something higher. But the Duke, who had really been wafted to the very top, had always doubted himself, believing himself capable of doing some one thing by dint of industry, but with no further confidence in his own power (PM, 327).” What happens in this novel reminds of Epicurus’s theory both in the idea that the world is composed by atoms which combine casually (physics), and in the idea that happiness can be reached only through virtue (ethics). The Prime Minister’s disenchanted attitude, compared to Sir Orlando’s providential conception, seems to ridicule the idea of a providential order.

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Cheyette Bryan. Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society. Racial Representations, 1875-1945. Cambridge University Press, 1995; Collini, Stefan. Public Moralists. Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850-1930. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991; Dames, Nicholas. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Delany, Paul. Literature, Money and the Market from Trollope to Amis. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002; Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society [1962]. Translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. First MIT Press paperback edition, 1991; Hall, N. John (ed.). The Letters of Anthony Trollope. Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1983; Harvey, Geoffrey. The Art of Anthony Trollope. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980; Hennessy, James Pope. Anthony Trollope. Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1971; Holway, Tatiana M. “The Game of Speculation: Economics and Representation.” Dickens Quarterly 9:3, (Sept 1992): 103-14; Jaffe, Audrey. “Trollope in the Stock Market: Irrational Exuberance and The Minister.” Victorian Studies 45 (Autumn 2002): 43-65; Levine, George. The Realistic Imagination. English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981; Mandler, Peter. The English National Character: the History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006; Miller, J. Hillis. The Form of Victorian Fiction. Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy. Notre Dame & London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968; Sutherland, John. “Where is Tenway Junction?” Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Puzzles in 19th-Century Fiction, Oxford and New York: Oxford’s World’s Classics, 1996, 163-67; Tracy, Robert. Trollope’s Later Novels. Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1978; Trollope, Anthony. The Prime Minister. Edited with an Introduction by David Skilton. London: Penguin Classics, 1994; Phineas Finn. Edited with an Introduction by John Sutherland. London: Penguin Books, 1985;

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Wagner, Tamara. “Speculator at Home in the Victorian Novel: Making Stock-Villains and New Paper Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture 36 (2008): 21.40; Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford University Press, 1973.

THE CONSUMED CONSUMER: BUSINESS AS USUAL FOR CHRISTINA ROSSETTI’S “GOBLIN MEN” MELANIE HANSON

“Utopia” for the businessman in any century is having consumers consumed with desire for the product or service the salesman is selling, so consumed, in fact, that the buyer will seek out and buy the product or service at absolutely any cost. The consumer should be consumed with envy of those who have already procured the product or service, and so consumed by the product or service after consumption that the buyer wants more and more, making the businessman richer and richer. In contemporary times, the current fad in children’s toys, whatever that happens to be, is a perfect example of this phenomenon; advertising entices the child to desire all of the toys in the series and the parent tries to accommodate the child’s wish. As John Ruskin, English Victorian writer, pointed out in Unto This Last, “Consumption absolute is the end, crown, and perfection of production.”1 So what was true in Victorian England concerning the ideal capitalist vision is still true today. However, Sir Thomas More in the early modern period in England coined the word “utopia” which means “nowhere.” It is the capitalist utopia that English poet Christina Rossetti scrutinizes in her parable of power relations, Goblin Market, published in 1862. The goblin men, the fruit venders in the poem, are depicted as weasellike, animalistic entities whose intent is to suck the life out of their customers, literally, bankrupting them. The image of the vampiric businessman in Goblin Market has parallels with the terror of bankruptcy that appears in English Victorian novels. Bankruptcy in real life left the tormented person in this era completely vulnerable and helpless as the character Laura is left ravaged and wanting in Goblin Market. Laura is 1 John Ruskin, Unto This Last, The Works of John Ruskin, Ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1912): 98.

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financially, emotionally, and physically bankrupt by her associations with the businessmen in the poem. The goblin salesmen, however, also represent a kind of bankruptcy – the morally bankrupt who take advantage of the innocent, the struggling working man trying to make a buck, those who will leech off anyone so that they can avoid scandal and not end up unemployed and in the poorhouse (scandal was like Greek tragedy to the Victorians in England). Elizabeth K Helsinger, Terence Holt, Richard Menke, and more recently Victor Mendoza, among others, have written Marxist criticism about desire, exchange and consumer power in Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market. However, there is no research that this author has uncovered showing how Rossetti’s “goblin men” represent a warning about the real threat of bankruptcy in the face of unscrupulous capitalism and the dangers of buying what the “sleazy” businessman is selling in Victorian England. My treatise on bankruptcy in relation to Goblin Market was influenced by Barbara Weiss’ book The Hell of the English: Bankruptcy and the Victorian Novel. Weiss indicates that the middle years of Queen Victoria’s reign, when Rossetti wrote and published Goblin Market, was a time when the process of industrialization had advanced to a point that English society was being restructured.2 The encroachment of capitalism was paralleled to the breakdown of traditional morality. Goblin Market is about Laura’s failure to resist temptation, and failure was considered by the English Victorians to be the result of inefficiency or even lack of virtue on the part of the individual.3 The great paradox of the age was that they prided themselves on mastery of the material world and then discovered that the material took revenge upon the human spirit: What Georg Simmel described as ‘objectivism,’ what Karl Marx called ‘alienation,’ and what Emile Durkheim termed ‘anomie,’ the Victorian writers portrayed metaphorically [. . .] as ‘bankruptcy’ – a great social and spiritual void or apocalypse lurking ominously beneath the seeming prosperity of the Victorian years and threatening to engulf society with it dislocations and contradictions.4 Although Weiss’ book interrogates the image of bankruptcy in famous novels from English Victorian writers, I believe her theories can be applied to the poetry of this era as well. The different types of bankruptcy discussed in Weiss’ book are of central importance in Rossetti’s Goblin 2

Barbara Weiss, The Hell of the English: Bankruptcy and the Victorian Novel (London: Associated University Presses, 1986): 13. 3 Ibid. 19. 4 Weiss 22.

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Market. Another work that influenced my discussion of Rossetti’s poem is the satiric cartoon “Gobbling Market” by E. H. Shepard that was published in Punch magazine in March 1942 (almost 100 years after Rossetti published her poem). In this cartoon, a snail is selling the shell off his back and a chicken is selling its own eggs as well as dead chickens roasting in the background. The rat salesman is dressed in a fancy waistcoat with a watch fob. The cat merchant is selling ladies’ stockings with a sign that reads “No Coupons.” Almost all of the salesmen and customers in the cartoon have claws for hands. A sign posted on a tree says “This way to the fines pool.” Shepard’s depiction of the goblin men from Rossetti’s poem shows the seamy side of the sales profession in a capitalist society, where all roads, for the merchant and the consumer, in the 19th and in the 20th centuries (and of course, in the 21st century as well), lead to the “fines pool.”5

Summary of Goblin Market The poem Goblin Market tells a tale of two sisters, Laura and Lizzie. Laura succumbs to the temptations presented by the goblin men to buy and eat their delicious fruits. She subsequently wastes away; death is imminent. Lizzie sacrifices herself to the goblin men to save Laura's life. The goblins attempt to corrupt Lizzie with the juices of their delicious fruit, but she adamantly resists their advances. Laura eats the fruit and sucks the juices from the body of Lizzie, put there by the goblins during Lizzie's temptation, and Laura's life spirit is restored. In the end, Laura and Lizzie are pictured years later as the mothers of children. Laura recites to the children the story of the haunting adventure with the goblin men, how her sister risked death itself to save her from harm. The poem's last lines contain this moral adage: "'For there is no friend like a sister'" (l. 562).6

Bankruptcy in Goblin Market According to MacKenzie Bell, William Michael Rossetti, Christina Rossetti’s younger brother, warned against a search for detailed symbolism in Goblin Market, although he did admit to a general ethical significance for the poem: 5 Richard Menke, “The Political Economy of Fruit,” Ed. Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999): 104. 6 For the full text of Goblin Market, see Appendix 1.

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It is interesting that William Rossetti’s interpretation of his sister’s poem uses words like “to succumb to temptation makes one a victim to that same continuous temptation” and “to restore one’s lost estate,”8 the very terms that would apply to a state of bankruptcy. Although Christina Rossetti demurred that her poem was “just a fairy story,” Helsinger points out that a number of fairy tales focus on buying and selling.9 The merchant men in Rossetti’s “A Peep at The Goblins” (the original title of the poem) reveal the world of the salesman in Victorian England. Rossetti’s poem gives the reader a “peak” at the world of consumerism. The “cry” of the goblin men to “Come buy” at the opening of Goblin Market sounds just like the call of vendors in any town square in Victorian England, as on Charlotte Street where Christina Rossetti’s grew up as a child, as Jan Marsh describes.10 One of the earliest books Christina Rossetti read was William Hone’s Everyday Book in which a London barrow woman is crying her wares.11 The poem in the book, that is quoted below, simulates the call of the street pedlars that sounds very much like the opening lines of Goblin Market: Round and sound, Two-pence a pound Cherries! Rare ripe cherries! [. . .] Cherries a ha-penny a stick! Come and pick! Come and pick! Who comes? Who comes!12

This call to “buy and buy” more products would underscore for any household the magnitude of credit and debt, personal and national. 7

Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti (London: Haskell House Publications, Ltd, 1971): 207. 8 Ibid. 9 Elizabeth K. Helsinger, “Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market,” Ed. Joseph Bristow, Victorian Women Poets (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1995): 189. 10 Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life (NY: Viking, 1994): 231. 11 Ibid. 12 Marsh 232.

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According to Jon Lash, the ominous specters of credit and debt in Victorian England evoked feelings of delight and doom in their “victims of vanity.”13 80% of sales in small city shops in England were offered on credit. Unpaid bills were a perpetual issue.14 The echoing “cry” from vendors would be a daily reminder of fiscal household issues, especially unnerving for those who were financially unsteady. Rossetti would certainly have known Covent Garden Market in London and heard the cries of Mayhew’s costermongers, according to Menke.15 In addition, the litany of fruits that the goblin men enumerate and try to sell in Rossetti’s poem is reminiscent of the trade cards and billheads used by the merchants in Victorian England. Billheads were used to provide “memories of shopping experiences and communicate the marketing position of the shop as well as its topographical location; [. . . business people] used trade cards to create a consumer desire for their products that went beyond the utility value of the goods on display,” as Allison Kay points out.16 Trade cards included great differences of content and style with detailed descriptions of the proprietor’s respectability and the quality and variety of the stock. Sometimes the trade card information was in poetic form, especially for goods and services sold to women: Ladies If you wish to buy Cheaper than ever, go and try, Babb’s (High Holborn) That’s the place, To suit your Purse, and Charm your Face. The Largest Stock in London’s there, The Newest Patterns, rich and rare, Bonnets. Tuscans, Dunstables, Silks and Straws. Caps. Lace, Tulle, Blond, Applique, and Gauze; Habit shirts, Collars, Canzoves, Capes Of every kind, and various shapes, In English style, all British made 13

Jon Lash, “Credit and Debt in Victorian England,” 3pp, Metacrawler, Web (1 Sept 2009): 1. 14 Ibid. 15 Menke 124. 16 Alison C. Kay, “Retailing, Respectability and the Independent Woman in Nineteenth-Century London,” Eds. Robert Beachy, Beatrice Craig, and Alastair Owens, Women, Business and Finance in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2006): 156.

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The Consumed Consumer As patronized by Queen Adelaide. An endless choice will there be found. One shilling each, and some One Pound. Then thither hasten, in a trice, For now they sell at Wholesale Price. Now ladies! Now—your attention fix. For Babb’s 296, High Holborn.17

Another example of the trade card of Mrs. Sowden of 8 Gerrard Street, Soho, discusses the wares of her shop, Opera House Masquerade: Come ye Sons of glee and Fun, See all other Shops out done; Fie for Shame why must we press ye, To come to such a Shop to dress ye The Charge is small which must entice, You’ll ne’er complain of Sowden’s Price.18

Notice the similarity of these 2 trade cards to the opening lines in Rossetti’s Goblin Market, quoted below: Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy: Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpecked cherries, Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheeked peaches, Swart-headed mulberries, Wild free-born cranberries, Crab-apples, dewberries, Pine-apples, blackberries, Apricots, strawberries;-All ripe together In summer weather, -Morns that pass by, Fair eves that fly; Come buy, come buy: Our grapes fresh from the vine, Pomegranates full and fine, 17 18

Kay 157. Ibid. 161.

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Dates and sharp bullaces, Rare pears and greengages, Damsons and bilberries, Taste them and try: Currants and gooseberries, Bright-fire-like barberries, Figs to fill your mouth, Sweet to tongue and sound to eye; Come buy, come buy.19 (ll. 3-31)

This passage is the trade card of the goblin merchants, hawking their wares in Goblin Market. Their trade card, a poetic song, tells of the topographical location where the products were harvested and attempts, quite irresistibly, to create consumer desire for the product in question as well as establish a sense of propriety about the merchants themselves. Christoph Lindner indicates that early Victorian advertisers not only recognized the commodity as an object full of signification, but also used that understanding to position themselves at the place where commerce meets culture, becoming capitalism’s minstrels.20 The purpose of the profusion of fruit listed on the trade card is to “overload the senses and [. . .] impair the observer’s ability to see beyond the physical,” as Mary Arseneau observes.21 The description of the fruit on the merchant men’s “trade card” is “one of the most lusciously rendered descriptions of fruit in Western literature,” as Matt Christensen points out.22 “The language of the goblins' litany of enchanted fruit is sensual and indulgent.”23 In juxtaposition, the threat of figurative and literal death, since bankruptcy is a kind of death and the merchant men’s fruit, eaten by Laura, nearly kills her, is the undercurrent of meaning connected to the description of the fruit. The goblin men’s call of “Come buy, come buy” (l. 4) is only heard by “maids” (l. 2). The matriarchal society that Rossetti creates, devoid of men except the merchants, reveals her gendering of the world of sellers and buyers. The 19 R.W. Crump, ed, The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979): 11-26. From now on throughout this chapter, all lines quoted from Goblin Market are from this same source. 20 Christoph Lindner, Fictions of Commodity Culture from the Victorian to the Postmodern (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003): 44. 21 Mary Arseneau, “Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina Rossetti, the Oxford Movement, and Goblin Market,” VP 31 (1993): 84. 22 Matt Christensen, “Can I Know it? – Nay: An Alternative Interpretation of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market,” 12 pp. Victorian Web. Web (1 Nov 2009): 1. 23 Ibid.

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sales world is masculine and the consumers are feminine. I do not think that Rossetti is literal here. I believe she uses masculinity to represent capitalism because she sees capitalism and industrialization as a cannibalistic, invading force and she sees consumers as innocent victims who are brutalized by the lure, the addiction of buying and buying to the point of ruin, but at the same time culpable for their addiction. Laura is tempted by the call of the fruit sellers, but her sister, Lizzie, blushes (l. 35) at the goblins’cry. Laura’s character represents the real threat of bankruptcy through intemperance, and Lizzie’ character is the shame felt by insolvent families in Victorian England. Laura “bows her head” (l. 34) as she listens; this could be interpreted as a kind of misplaced reverence and surrender to the force of capitalism. However, I believe these lines indicate Lizzie’s attempts to “veil” (l. 35) her embarrassment as families in Victorian England would do; the scandal would be excruciating if others found out about the debts a family, or one member of the family, had accrued. William Thackeray presented this common fear and humiliation among the middle-classes in his illustration called “An Elephant for Sale” for his novel Vanity Fair. He depicts a family whose belongings are suddenly taken away from them and sold at auction. The illustration enforces the essential vulgarity of the situation and the terror and humiliation that families feel who find themselves in this position: auctioneers with no knowledge of the family or the sentimental meaning of its possessions expose them to a heartless public. Dobbin, who has chivalrously come to the auction to buy back some of the Sedleys' things, appears as the helpless young gentleman threatened by the auctioneer and his two helpers, one of whom looms over Dobbin.24 Bankruptcy auctions were commonplace in novels of this era, as Jeff Nunokawa indicates.25 In the English Victorian novels, the bankrupt become “untouchables,” helpless castaways of society, even after the debtor prisons were closed in England.26 Unlike the urban characters in most English Victorian novels, however, Rossetti’s Laura and Lizzie live in a pastoral environment in the poem; they work on a farm for their produce. These characters are set in opposition to the goblin men who are traveling salesmen. As Menke illustrates, the fruits of Laura and Lizzie’s labor are contrasted with the 24

“Bankruptcy in Victorian England – Threat or Myth?” 2 pp. Metacrawler. Web (1 Sept 2009): 1. 25 Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994): 5. 26 “Bankruptcy . . .” 1.

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fruits of the goblin men that are sold for financial gain.27 Goblins in English folklore were nomadic, just like traveling salesmen. They did not sell their wares from shops in the city. Capitalism has invaded the countryside in Goblin Market, a clear statement by Rossetti of the onerous nature of consumerism, an omen of the infiltration of the social structure of England by capitalism and an undermining of the agrarian economic culture of gifting, a limiting of the “cash nexus.” When Laura tries to buy some of the goblin fruit in Christina Rossetti’s poem, she “Long'd but had no money,”28 so she barters a lock of hair and a tear for the goods. If middle class workers in Victorian England lost their livelihood, they could depend on their savings, their trade union, their credit with local shopkeepers, their neighbors and friends, and the pawnbroker or the Poor Law to bail them out of financial ruin. Therefore, depicting Rossetti’s main narrative figures, Lizzie and Laura, as pastoral figures makes sense. It hearkens back to an earlier time in England’s history of agrarian predominance in economic stability versus later industrialization; it reminds the reader of the power of the pastoral ethic in literature (revisiting a place of safety and security in fiction as in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It), and it reminds the reader of Jane Austen’s love of the country gentry life and skepticism of the trend to migrate to the cities to live and work (her villains, as in Mansfield Park, are always those who live in the city). The following lines reveal the simplicity of country life, untarnished by industrialization in Goblin Market: Early in the morning When the first cock crowed his warning Neat like bees, as sweet and busy, Laura rose with Lizzie: Fetched in honey, milked the cows, Aired and set to rights the house, Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat, Cakes for dainty mouths to eat, Next churned butter, whipped up cream, Fed their poultry, sat and sew'd. (ll. 199-208)

However, the characters in this idyll cannot escape the encroachment of the merchants who crawl across the glen to torment them in Rossetti’s poem. No one in Victorian England could escape capitalism. In addition, country life was in reality far from idyllic. Country life required hard work with a “no pain, no gain” philosophy. The sleazy businessman represented 27 28

Menke 106. Menke 106.

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a kind of underhanded commerce, not the “honest day’s work” kind of labor in an agrarian culture. Rossetti, like the other authors of this era, is commenting in Goblin Market on the death of a previous agrarian lifestyle in England and the skepticism of the world they have created in its place. And Rossetti knew of this nightmare first hand. Her uncle and her mother’s brother, Dr John Poldori, had killed himself with poison, owing to his massive debts, according to Marsh.29 William Michael Rossetti, Christina’s younger brother, writes in his memoir that their father, Gabriele Rossetti, made his living as a teacher of Italian at King’s College.30 However, this position paid no salary; the professors lived on a proportion of the students’ fees that they were allocated, and there were never many students who wanted to learn Italian, as Marsh observes.31 It was a family of “narrow means” since the elder Rossetti made less than 300 pounds a year, as Christina Rossetti’s brother discusses.32 Gabriele was also an impulsive spender although his wife tried to be careful with money.33 “The fortunes of the Rossetti family, always mediocre enough, were at a low ebb from 1842 to 1854. In 1843, the family worried about their financial situation and their economic state was acute.34 “Ill-health and partial blindness overtook our father, leading to the diminution, and ultimately, the loss, of professional employment in 1853,” as William Rossetti explains.35 The financial burden then fell on the other members of the household: Maria, Christina Rossetti’s sister, worked as a governess, and William Rossetti became a clerk at the Inland Revenue office.36 Christina Rossetti and her mother opened a day school at No. 38 Arlington Street, Mornington Crescent to support the family, as Elisabeth Cary explains.37 However, the school was not prosperous so they opened another day school in another part of town, but this school also failed. Dante, the elder brother, brought in very little due to his career in writing and painting and his expenses were considerable. 29

Marsh 15. William Rossetti, ed, The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti (London: MacMillan and Co., Limited, 1904): xlvi. 31 Marsh 21. 32 William Rossetti xlvi. 33 Marsh 21. 34 Ibid 39. 35 William Rossetti li. 36 William Rossetti li. 37 Elizabeth Luther Cary, The Rossettis: Dante Gabriel and Christina (NY: Knickerbocker Press, 1900): 230. 30

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Goblin Market was published in 1862, about a decade after this time of meager means. From 1854 to 1862, Christina Rossetti tried to publish her writing when her brother William took over the financial burden of keeping the family together. During this time period, Christina Rossetti made no more than a tiny 10 pounds a year as a writer.38 The threat of bankruptcy was something that was most probably ever-present in the family’s minds. Therefore, Christina Rossetti was an expert on running from the specter of financial ruin when she wrote her poetic masterpiece. And she was not alone. Goblin Market is not the only work of literature written in 19th-century England that discusses financial ruin. The literature written in this era reflects a fiscal fascination; these writings (and there are many more examples) depicted the idea that “sleaze” flourished in fraudulent business practices and debt was omnipresent: William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847) and The Newcomes (1855); Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848), Bleak House (1852), and Little Dorrit (1857); Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley (1849); Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), George Eliot’s The Mill and the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Daniel Deronda (1876); Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863); and Anthony Trollopes’ The Eustace Diamonds (1873) and The Way We Live Now (1875). Insolvency touched the characters in the literature and touchedthe authors who created the characters. William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and Charlotte Bronte were all writers in 19th-century England, like Rossetti, whose families had faced bankruptcy or enormous debt. Sir Walter Scott’s tragic decline was an ominous symbol of not just an author’s life of financial instability, great highs and great lows, but more importantly, of a nation in crisis, as Weiss observes.39 However, the central precept of English Victorian novels was not financial bankruptcy but things that were the same as economic ruin, bankruptcy as a metaphor. Bankruptcy as metaphor is of central importance in Goblin Market as well. Capitalism is insidious, a virulent disease that penetrates all aspects of society; no one can escape it except those like Lizzie in Goblin Market who tune out the voice of the salesman, who avoid the sales pitch and avoid bankruptcy, who refuse to consume. The goblin men sell fruit; this appears to be a conscious choice by Rossetti, because fruit is tempting (it hearkens back to the first temptation in the garden of Eden), and fruit is literally consumed by the consumer. Capitalism tempts the sales person to 38 39

William Rossetti li. Weiss 16.

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race after riches that he/she may not ever achieve and tempts the consumer to buy what he/she does not really need to survive. Although Laura appears to be protecting her sister from the strange men and their constant sales pitch, Laura is actually intrigued by their sales tactics. Laura half-heartedly tells Lizzie, all the while peaking at them: We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits: Who knows upon what soil they fed Their hungry thirsty roots? (ll. 42-45)

The thirst to consume has consumed Laura. There is also a possessiveness between Laura and the goblin men; she does not want her sister to beat her to the best buys, the good deals, so she discourages her from wanting to buy, saving the best stuff for herself. Laura discourages Lizzie by telling her that the products the merchant men are hawking must be contaminated, not the kind of produce that her “choosy” sister would want to consume. Later in the poem, Laura is unable to hear the goblin men’s song after her first purchase, but Lizzie can still hear them (l. 254). Those who have “bankrupted” themselves in the “Goblin Market” are no long potential customers. “Laura turn'd cold as stone” (l. 253) with raging jealousy that her sister could consume but refuses and Laura who desperately wants to buy more and more cannot hear the sales pitch any longer. Rossetti portrays Laura’s fixation, her “shop ’til you literally drop” philosophy, as a type of addiction that ruins all it touches. Crouching close together In the cooling weather With clasping arms and cautioning lips With tingling cheeks and finger tips. (ll. 36-39)

The cool weather indicates that it is autumn, an image of decay. Buying and buying is decadent and can lead to financial destruction. Lines 38 and 39 are juxtaposed; being tempted to consume to the point of devastation is both frightening and thrilling. An addiction is frightening and thrilling too. In 1860, Rossetti had recurrent nightmares in which goblins, ghosts, satanic and creepy animals appeared; her tormentors were always monstrous, masculine, inescapable, and incomprehensible figures where terror and desire were mixed, as Marsh indicates.40 The pairing of Laura’s desire and Lizzie’s shame and guilt, that Marsh discusses as 40

Marsh 257.

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threatening erotic feelings due to the abuse of Rossetti’s father towards his daughter,41 I believe really indicates a parallel to the shopaholic’s addictive nightmare and the threat and accompanying frustration and shame of insolvency. A number of celebrities in contemporary society have been punished for shoplifting, an addiction that is frightening and thrilling, an addiction to power and a game of chance that could end in financial disaster. Goblins are traditionally in fairy mythology full-size devils, as Marsh discusses.42 In the forties and fifties in Victorian England, Thomas Carlyle lambasted the influx of capitalism, stating that the English people had become possessed by the devil, a devil that reduced all relationships between people to a “cash nexus.” The soul in this kind of world most dreaded the failure to possess money, as Weiss indicates.43 Selling is as evil business in this poem. Christina Rossetti’s uncle wrote a Gothic tale called The Vampyre which she did not read but she possibly read Lord Byron’s poem Giaour concerning the curse of the vampire that “ghastly haunts the native place / And sucks the blood of thy race” as Marsh discusses.44 The goblin men “drain the stream of life”45 out of their victims, just as a vampire does. The goblin men hobble (l. 47) and crawl (l. 74); they do not walk with an easy gait. The actually march up the glen backwards (l. 87) indicating the upside-down, not “upright,” world of the trader. Nunowaka asserts that in the English Victorian frame of mind, “the commodity form, like a triumphal army or a thief in the night, has entranced regions of the psyche, precincts of culture and forms of labor.”46 The merchants invade the psyche of the consumer. Everything becomes commodified. Lindner explains that in Das Capital, Marx illustrates how capitalism and it modes of production will change the worker into a crippled monster.47 The goblins are crippled by the figurative as well as literal weight of their task: “One lugs a golden dish / Of many pounds weight” (ll. 58-59). The seller’s fear of debt pushes the sales person to take advantage of the unsuspecting. The sellers have the faces of animals: cats, rats, and wombats, and ratels (ll. 71, 73, 75, 76). These animals display the characteristics of sneakiness, sleaziness, and gross sensuality. Adam Smith 41

Ibid. 261. Marsh 231. 43 Weiss 14. 44 Marsh 263. 45 Ibid. 46 Nunokawa 4. 47 Lindner 58. 42

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in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations asserts that everyone is a laborer and creates a list of workers that many English Victorians would have felt was really a list of shirkers, parasites and vagabonds, as Catherine Gallagher examines,48 much like the description of the goblin men. Ratels are carnivorous and look like a badger. The goblin salesmen consume their clients’ capital leaving the customer a dying shell of her former self (l. 277-80) and verbally “badger” her using “hard sell” tactics until the customer buys their wares; “come buy” is repeated twenty-one times in the poem. The repeating call to “Come buy” turn “shrill” (l. 89). The repetitive nature of the poem, as in “Evening by evening” (l. 32) indicates the tenacious, unrelenting nature of the merchant men. Selling and buying is an unrelenting cycle that eventually bankrupts all those who participate. John Stuart Mill in On Liberty indicates that people in Victorian English society were being shaped by and for the market society.49 This shaping is true of the goblin men as well as Laura and Jeanie in Rossetti’s poem. “Cooing all together: / They sounded kind and full of loves (ll. 78-79): this is a different sales pitch used by the goblin men to “shape” and woo the client. The welcoming words (l. 111) of the goblins are honey-like “purring” (l.108-9), “sugar-baited ” speech (l. 234) targeted directly at Laura’s addiction. Lizzie is the dutiful sister whose efforts to contain Laura’s acquisitive proclivity are thwarted by the sales pitch of the goblin men. “‘Oh,’ cried Lizzie, ‘Laura, Laura, / You should not peep at goblin men.’ / Lizzie cover'd up her eyes” (ll. 48-50). Rossetti’s poetry and prose is full of examples of the morally steadfast who refuse to look at temptation. The term “bankruptcy” connoted “the threatened self,” “moral and spiritual rebirth,” and “social apocalyse” to the English Victorians, as Weiss explains.50 All of these types of metaphoric impoverishment appear in Rossetti’s poem. Lines 48 through 50 of Goblin Market are Rossetti’s statement concerning what Weiss defines as the accommodation between morally threatened self in conflict with public life.51 How does a moral person maneuver through the maze of temptation in the public world of commerce? The economic identity of an English Victorian was very 48 Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006): 73. 49 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Ed. Alburey Castell. (Northbrook: AHM, 1947): 68. 50 Weiss 22. 51 Weiss 88.

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vulnerable to devastating consequences from which the person would never completely recover. It was not just the loss of money that was at issue; bankruptcy represented a deeper terror, that all the prosperity and optimism of 19th-century was really a sham.52 Bankruptcy was a crisis that caused the individual to lose social position and therefore re-evaluate emotional and religious values and sexual roles; this personal upheaval was more unsettling than the threat of poverty.53 A person like Lizzie with her eyes covered up (ll. 50-51) is shutting out temptation (Laura entices, "Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie, / Down the glen tramp little men” ll. 54-55) and looking inward to evaluate and re-affirm the identity that the person believes is there. Lizzie is afraid that looking at the goblin men and their wares, looking at the face of consumption, will drain the life out of her, the essence of who she is and what she stands for. And she is correct in this assessment of the situation, as is witnessed by her sister’s rapid decline after consuming the goblin merchants’ wares (l. 288, 297-8). Lizzie’s instincts and memories assist her in maintaining her identity. She warns Laura about another maiden who bought into the merchant men’s sales tactics: Do you not remember Jeanie, How she met them in the moonlight, Took their gifts both choice and many, Ate their fruits and wore their flowers Plucked from bowers Where summer ripens at all hours? But ever in the noonlight She pined and pined away; Sought them by night and day, Found them no more, but dwindled and grew grey; Then fell with the first snow, While to this day no grass will grow Where she lies low: I planted daisies there a year ago That never blow. (ll. 147-61)

Jeanie’s consumerism was costly; she lost her identity and more important, her life, because of her consumer addiction. As Jon Stobart indicates, consumption transforms the consumer; consumer identity is produced and recreated by shopping practices and the act of consumption

52 53

Ibid. Ibid. 95.

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itself.54 What’s more, nothing can grow where Jeanie was buried. Her consumption and the bankruptcy it caused are so polluting that everything is destroyed. Also, in many novels of the English Victorian age, the bankrupt commit suicide, as in Dickens’ and Trollope’s novels.55 Jeanie and Laura commit suicide by continuing to want to “Come buy.” By line 54, all possessiveness and envy has vanished as Laura entices her sister to join her in a shopping spree, validating her “harmless” desire to try out the goblin wares. However, frugal Lizzie will have none of it: “Their evil gifts would harm us" (l. 66). Laura and Lizzie represent the columns in a balance ledger: Laura is the debit side and Lizzie is the credit side. Laura is loss and Lizzie is gain or what they owe versus what they own. Despite Lizzie’s warnings, Laura goes to meet the goblin men who are “leering” (l. 93) and “sly” (l. 96) in their first encounter with her, reminiscent of the English Victorian unscrupulous business practices described in James Foreman-Peck’s research as well as contemporary used-car salesmen. Laura visits them at nighttime, a time when evil transactions occur in fairy tales. Laura stretches to view the bargains (l. 81) while the goblins weave her a crude crown of thorns (l. 100). She is a martyr to her shopping frenzy, a sacrifice on the altar of insolvency. But the lure of an exclusive “steal” is too much for Laura’s “sweet-tooth” (l. 115): “Men sell not such in any town” (l. 101). The language Rossetti uses is all merchantile: “Good folk, I have no coin; To take were to purloin: I have no copper in my purse, I have no silver either, And all my gold is on the furze That shakes in windy weather Above the rusty heather.” “You have much gold upon your head,” They answer’d all together: “Buy from us with a golden curl.” She clipp’d a precious golden lock, She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl. (ll. 116-27)

Notice the words “coin,” “take,” “purloin,” “have,” “copper,” “purse,” “silver,” “buy,” “rare,” “pearl,” and the repetition of the words “gold” and 54

Jon Stobart, Andrew Hann, and Victoria Morgan, Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and Shopping in the English Town, c. 168-1830 (London: Routledge, 2007): 14. 55 Weiss 21.

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“golden” in the previous passage. Laura does not want to steal, but the salesmen have no scruples about stealing from her. “The appearance of unfettered free trade [of the merchant men] only masks the fact that they set the terms of the exchange.”56 Laura is literally “fleeced” and “clipped” by the merchants. The goblins will take money but they would prefer to take the buyer’s life and soul, creating an eternal addiction to their product. Their sinister plan includes wanting the person to buy and then they want the buyer to be so consumed by the product that the buyer will give up life itself to consume again. This is the definition of addiction in buying as well as in selling. The salesmen are consumed by consumption just like the buyers. Once the buyer has purchased, the sellers are suddenly not available for further purchase because they cannot hang around. The “fruit-merchant men” are “brisk” (l. 241); hanging around is a waste of time and money. They want buying desire to eat up the purchaser but more importantly, they want to find other victims to ensnare. Laura gobbles down the fruit over and over again, not understanding “how should it cloy with length of use?” (l. 133). Gallagher uses the term “somaeconomics” to indicate the emotional and sensual feelings that people attach to buying, not only the desire to buy but also the aftereffects of a spending spree.57 Laura experiences this before and after she eats the fruit; the character’s life and feelings are projected on the product of consumption.58 The mid to later 19th century in England was an era of retail revolution, as Margot Finn discusses.59 However, some of the salesmen in Victorian England suffered from a corrosive bankruptcy at the heart of their immoral tactics. According to Foreman-Peck, “competition was calculated to ensure the survival of the most unscrupulous supplier.”60 “Let the buyer beware” were never truer words. In English Victorian business, there were few restraints on how money could be made. Eric Hobsbawm, a political and social historian, indicates that personal insolvency was extremely serious, because there was no form of social security or government assistance in Victorian England as exists in contemporary times:

56

Menke 116. Gallagher 4. 58 Ibid. 5. 59 Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Person Debt in English Culture 17401914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 278. 60 James Foreman-Peck, “Sleaze and the Victorian Businessman,” HistoryToday 45.8 (Aug 1995): 7. 57

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The Consumed Consumer A man might have to work hard to raise himself into the middle class, but once in a moderately flourishing line of business, he could take things very easily indeed, unless he made some appalling miscalculation, or hit an abnormally bad patch in the course of an abnormally bad slump. Bankruptcy was, according to economic theory, the penalty of inefficient businessmen, and its spectre haunts the novels of Victorian England [. . .] the very horror of bankruptcy is itself a symptom of its comparative rarity.61

V Markham Lester concurs that the validity of financial disaster was a significant issue for English Victorian society; random factors often ruined a family. Although insolvency declined near the end of the century after the Great Depression between 1873 and 1896, financial failure was indeed a real threat.62 Rossetti wrote Goblin Market a decade before the Great Depression when the Bankruptcy Lists of The Gazette were an everpresent testament to the decay of life underlying the surface prosperity of the era, as Weiss discusses.63 Public attitudes became critical of immoral business practices. Nunokawa describes the privacy of property as refined and delicate trying to withstand the garish showy exhibitionism of capital64 and a similar comparison can be made between Lizzie and the merchant men. Upstanding English Victorian businesses did not get any support from the law. Local authorities tried to regulate exploitative prices on products and services of private enterprise but they were not always successful in keeping businesses free of sleazy practices.65 Insider trading ran rampant; however, by the end of the 1840s, almost all companies were conducting, or had completed, investigations into real or alleged financial irregularities by their officers.66 “In 1895, the Comptroller General for Bankruptcies reported that many liquidations still occurred solely because joint stock companies provided the opportunity to defraud creditors.”67 So, the goblin men’s unscrupulous practices in Rossetti’s poem were grounded in fact.

61 Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire:The Birth of the Industrial Revolution (NY: New Press, 1999): 161-2. 62 V. Markham Lester, Victorian Insolvency: Bankruptcy, Imprisonment for Debt, and Company Winding-Up in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995): 171. 63 Weiss 14. 64 Nunokawa 9. 65 Ibid. 4. 66 Foreman-Peck 2. 67 Foreman-Peck 3.

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Laura heads for home after a consuming frenzy, “And knew not was it night or day” (l. 139). Her buying addiction is disorienting; it puts her in a haze. When Lizzie sees her sister, she is frightened by Laura’s stupor and warns her about the bankrupt state that their friend Jeanie got herself into that ultimately killed her. She tries to warn Laura, but Laura’s immediate response is that she intends to go bargain hunting the next night again and bring back some “midnight specials” for Lizzie to try (l. 167-8). In lines 184-98, a comparison is given, in a litany of similes, between the two sisters, yet the reader is conscious that bankruptcy and solvency are twosides of the same coin, so to speak, especially in lines 210-4. A knock-off bag might look the same, but it is not Gucci. One sister has nothing and the other has everything: greed brings hollowness but stability brings abundance, not abundance of purchases or purchase power but abundance of satisfaction. Self-worth is connected to self-discipline. Nature is in sync, balanced and stable all around the sisters (mirroring the stability and endurance of Lizzie), but Laura’s frenzy for fruit, just will not leave her in peace. Laura cannot hear the call of the goblin men anymore. Their job is done. She is hooked, so they do not have to call to her anymore to entice her to buy. They are now after her sister, the hard sell. They do not care at all what happens to their past clients. Laura cannot sleep and her passion for buying eats her up inside; Laura does not want to owe in her transactions but she ends up feeling cheated as if the merchant men owe her restitution: Then sat up in a passionate yearning, And gnash’d her teeth for baulk’d desire, and wept As if her heart would break. Day after day, night after night, Laura kept watch in vain In sullen silence of exceeding pain. She never caught again the goblin cry: “Come buy, come buy;” – She never spied the goblin men Hawking their fruits along the glen: But when the non wax’d bright Her hair grew thin and grey; She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn To swift decay and burn Her fire away. (ll. 266-80)

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Karl Marx in Das Capital describes the irrational relationships between people and their material desire.68 Solvency is not something that one can hold on to easily but it is priceless if a person can maintain it, whereas all types of bankruptcy (financial, moral, spiritual) grabs hold of someone and chokes the life out of them so that everything the person touches goes bad. Laura buries the kernal stone, her one dried up memento of her buying spree, but it never comes to fruition (ll. 281-6). Laura dreams of her next buy but she is like a person dying of thirst seeing a mirage (ll. 289-90). Getting rich quick is an illusion and obsessive spending leads to only one place – the poor house. Financial ruin is a burden or “yoke” (l. 308). Laura’s depression causes her to stop doing her chores that will maintain the financial stability of the farm and instead she “sat down listless in the chimney-nook / And would not eat” (ll. 297-8). Lizzie longs to find a solution for the waning health of her sister, mentally and physically, but fears that she will have to pay too dearly (l. 311) to unscrupulous businessmen to get Laura the help she needs. Lizzie does not want to end up like Laura and like Jeanie: She thought of Jeanie in her grave, Who should have been a bride; But who for joys brides hopes to have Fell sick and died In her gay prime. (ll. 312-6)

Jeanie is morally and socially bankrupt; she gives her soul to the goblin men instead of to her fiancé in the solemn union of Christian marriage and loses her life because of her imprudent choices. Lizzie realizes that she must meet the sleazy businessmen face-to-face if she is to save her sister from ruin, so for the first time in her life, she listens to their sales pitch (ll. 327-8). Lizzie serves as the goblin men’s economic foil. She takes with her as a bargaining chip a silver coin (l. 324). Money in Victorian England was moving from a solid foundation of land or gold to a mere abstraction of paper.69 She will not give away her gold; she represents the stability in land and gold. She will not give away her golden curl as Lizzie did. Lizzie’s silver penny represents the devaluing of the gold standard in Victorian England; she tosses this silver penny at the goblins as a way of telling them what their worth is, basically devalued in her estimation of “worth.” Value for her is in the land, her house, the cows she and Laura milk, and the chickens that produce their 68 69

Lindner 53. Weiss 19.

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eggs. Bankruptcy is a loss, a lack of value. Ruskin in Unto This Last points out that “all true economy is the ‘Law of the House.’”70 New Testament parables of debt, silver coins, merchants, pearls (all elements in Goblin Market) influenced Ruskin’s ideas of political economy in his book, and Rossetti knew Ruskin through her brother, Dante.71 The goblins laugh and chuckle (l. 329, 334) because they think they have found another sucker to gobble up (l. 335), but they are in for a rude awakening. Lizzie “punks” them. Financial planning and good “sense” wins out over the “cents” of indulgence in Christina Rossetti’s tale of credit and debt. Lizzie has the credit of goodness on her side in abundance. The goblins pull out all the stops just like a salesman who wants to reel in an innocent prospect: “Mopping and mowing / Full of airs and graces” (ll. 336-7), they try to win over Lizzie. “Chattering like magpies” (l. 345), they pitch their dog-and-pony show to Lizzie. The goblins are in a frenzy because like sharks in the water, they smell blood. Feasting is something that is associated with those who sell and those who buy. According to Gallagher, capital looks like a life form, a grouping of numerous individual persons responding to pain and pleasure stimuli.72 Laura and the goblins resemble Gallagher’s description of “capital.” The merchants take great liberties with Lizzie hugging, kissing and squeezing her to get her to succumb (ll. 348-9). Lizzie tosses the silver penny at them (l. 367) and wants to grab the goods and depart, but the merchants want to get as much filthy lucre out of her as they can. They entreat her to stick around: "Nay, take a seat with us, / Honour and eat with us," / They answer'd grinning: / "Our feast is but beginning” (ll. 368-71). They want her to commune with them, to become one with them, as bankrupt as they are. When the merchant men and their victims loll around consuming fruit, they are being non-productive, adding nothing to their credit and accumulating deficit. However, Lizzie does not buy in to their scheme. This infuriates the goblin men. She tries to go home and take back her penny, their “fee” (l. 389). The goblin men call their client derogatory names to shame her into buying (ll. 394-5); they call her proud and uncivil. In lines 396 and 397, the businessmen show their true colors: they become loud and shoot evil looks in her direction. They become violent towards her, trying to force her to consume their product (ll 399-407), but she will not do it. The threat of financial ruin causes people to do crazy, immoral things. Lizzie’s resistance is so steadfast that the goblin men throw her penny back at her and vanish (ll. 437-46). They see that the silver penny is 70

Ruskin 113. Menke 120. 72 Gallagher 50. 71

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Lizzie’s way of devaluing the capitalist marketplace, of their economic community, and they are rejecting her estimation of industrialization’s importance. In addition, resistance to overspending vanquishes bankruptcy. The goblins return the silver penny because Lizzie has refused to keep up her end of the contract (to become addicted to spending by consuming the product). In transactions with the goblins, there is fine print in the contract (basically, all those who consume will be permanently ruined) and Lizzie is aware of this. Lizzie hears her penny jingling in her pocket (l. 452) and the sound is music to her ears (l. 454). The penny is the way she will trick the tricksters. Saving versus spending brings peace and happiness to her, but more importantly, Lizzie feels fearless (l. 460). Lizzie saves her money and saves her sister. Lizzie brings the figurative fruits of her labor back to her sister who consumes them (l. 468). Laura is afraid that her sister too has been ruined by the goblin men (l. 483). Laura goes through withdrawl for her addiction but eventually Laura is saved by her sister and becomes a believer in familial securities versus financial risk. Laura realizes that “She gorged on bitterness without a name: / Ah! Fool, to choose such a part / Of soul-consuming care!” (ll. 510-2). Lizzie’s “Economic Bail Out Plan” for her sister, Laura, succeeds and saves Laura’s life and soul as well as stopping the draining effects of consumption. Bankruptcy impacted individual personality, family life, social relationships, and the welfare of the community. “Bankruptcy is a symptom of social disintegration, of a world that was losing its sustaining ties of community, stability and order.”73 Marx believed that relationships in the 19th century were dominated by monetary gain, alienating the individual from the community and enslaving the individual to merciless economy.74 Rossetti’s poem discusses the issues of personal and social integration. Many years have passed at the end of Goblin Market. Laura and Lizzie are mothers (l. 546), Laura tells the story of the goblin men to the children (l. 549): “Would talk about the haunted glen, / The wicked, quaint fruitmerchant men, / Their fruits like honey to the throat / But poison in the blood” (ll. 552-5). Financial ruin can poison family bonds, so Laura passes on the message to the children about the ruin of debt and the importance of family bonds in times of crisis: “For there is no friend like a sister” (l. 562). As Menke puts it, “sisterhood manages to shut down the shop.”75 Sisterhood bankrupts the market and the merchants. Laura is Marx’s alienated individual who is saved by the community. Marx’s theory of “crises” indicated that crisis is a test of the individual’s relationship to the 73

Weiss 20. Ibid. 19. 75 Menke 128. 74

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economic system.76 Although in most of the English Victorian writings, the adage “Nothing gold can stay” is the rule, in Rossetti’s poem gold does stay. The gold of the land and of personal worth and morality wins out over commercialism. Rossetti’s poem is about what we “owe,” not financially, but specifically what we owe to family and ultimately, to self.

Works Cited Arseneau, Mary. “Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina Rossetti, the Oxford Movement, and Goblin Market.” VP 31 (1993). Print. “Bankruptcy in Victorian England – Threat or Myth?” 2 pp. Metacrawler. Web. 1 Sept 2009. Bell, Mackenzie. Christina Rossetti. London: Haskell House Publications, Ltd, 1971. Print. Cary, Elisabeth Luther. The Rossettis: Dante Gabriel and Christina. NY: Knickerbocker Press, 1900. Print. Christensen, Matt. “Can I Know it? – Nay: An Alternative Interpretation of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market.” 12 pp. Victorian Web. Web. 1 Nov 2009. Crump, RW, ed. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Finn, Margot C. The Character of Credit: Person Debt in English Culture 1740-1914. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print. Foreman-Peck, James. “Sleaze and the Victorian Businessman.” History Today 45.8 (Aug 1995). 5-8. Print. Gallagher, Catherine. The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Print. Helsinger, Elizabeth K. “Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market.” Ed. Joseph Bristow. Victorian Women Poets. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. 189222. Print. Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution. NY: New Press, 1999. Print. Holt, Terence. “‘Men Sell not Such in any Town’: Exchange in Goblin Market.” Victorian Poetry 28.1 (1990): 51-67. Print. Kay, Alison C. “Retailing, Respectability and the Independent Woman in Nineteenth-Century London.” Eds. Robert Beachy, Beatrice Craig, and

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Alastair Owens. Women, Business and Finance in Nineteenth Century Europe. Oxford: Berg, 2006. 152-66. Print. Lash, Jon. “Credit and Debt in Victorian England.” 3 pp. Metacrawler. Web. 1 Sept 2009. Lester, V Markham. Victorian Insolvency: Bankruptcy, Imprisonment for Debt, and Company Winding-Up in Nineteenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print. Lindner, Christoph. Fictions of Commodity Culture from the Victorian to the Postmodern. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003. Print. Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. NY: Viking, 1994. Print. Mendoza, Victor Roman. “‘Come Buy’: The Crossing of Sexual and Consumer in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market.” ELH 73 (2006): 913-47. Print. Menke, Richard. “The Political Economy of Fruit.” Ed. Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999. 104-36. Print. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Ed. Alburey Castell. Northbrook: AHM, 1947. Print. Nunokawa, Jeff. The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Print. Rossetti, Christina. Goblin Market and Other Poems. NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1994. Print. Rossetti, William Michael, ed. The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti. London: MacMillan and Co., Limited, 1904. Print. Ruskin, John. Unto This Last. The Works of John Ruskin. Ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 1912. Print. Stobart, Jon, Andrew Hann, and Victoria Morgan. Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and Shopping in the English Town, c. 168-1830. London: Routledge, 2007. Print. Weiss, Barbara. The Hell of the English: Bankruptcy and the Victorian Novel. London: Associated University Presses, 1986. Print.

Melanie Hanson

APPENDIX 1 GOBLIN MARKET

Morning and evening Maids heard the goblins cry: "Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy: Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpecked cherries, Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheeked peaches, Swart-headed mulberries, Wild free-born cranberries, Crab-apples, dewberries, Pine-apples, blackberries, Apricots, strawberries;-All ripe together In summer weather,-Morns that pass by, Fair eves that fly; Come buy, come buy: Our grapes fresh from the vine, Pomegranates full and fine, Dates and sharp bullaces, Rare pears and greengages, Damsons and bilberries, Taste them and try: Currants and gooseberries, Bright-fire-like barberries, Figs to fill your mouth, Citrons from the South, Sweet to tongue and sound to eye; Come buy, come buy." Evening by evening Among the brookside rushes, Laura bowed her head to hear,

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The Consumed Consumer Lizzie veiled her blushes: Crouching close together In the cooling weather, With clasping arms and cautioning lips, With tingling cheeks and finger tips "Lie close," Laura said, Pricking up her golden head: "We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits: Who knows upon what soil they fed Their hungry thirsty roots?" "Come buy," call the goblins Hobbling down the glen. "Oh," cried Lizzie, "Laura, Laura, You should not peep at goblin men." Lizzie covered up her eyes, Covered close lest they should look; Laura reared her glossy head, And whispered like the restless brook: "Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie, Down the glen tramp little men. One hauls a basket, One bears a plate, One lugs a golden dish Of many pounds weight. How fair the vine must grow Whose grapes are so luscious; How warm the wind must blow Thro' those fruit bushes." "No," said Lizzie: "No, no, no; Their offers should not charm us, Their evil gifts would harm us." She thrust a dimpled finger In each ear, shut eyes and ran: Curious Laura chose to linger Wondering at each merchant man. One had a cat's face, One whisked a tail, One tramped at a rat's pace, One crawled like a snail, One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry, One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry. She heard a voice like voice of doves Cooing all together: They sounded kind and full of loves

Melanie Hanson In the pleasant weather. Laura stretched her gleaming neck Like a rush-imbedded swan, Like a lily from the beck, Like a moonlit poplar branch, Like a vessel at the launch When its last restraint is gone. Backwards up the mossy glen Turned and trooped the goblin men, With their shrill repeated cry, "Come buy, come buy." When they reached where Laura was They stood stock still upon the moss, Leering at each other, Brother with queer brother; Signalling each other, Brother with sly brother. One set his basket down, One reared his plate; One began to weave a crown Of tendrils, leaves and rough nuts brown (Men sell not such in any town); One heaved the golden weight Of dish and fruit to offer her: "Come buy, come buy," was still their cry. Laura stared but did not stir, Longed but had no money: The whisk-tailed merchant bade her taste In tones as smooth as honey, The cat-faced purr'd, The rat-paced spoke a word Of welcome, and the snail-paced even was heard; One parrot-voiced and jolly Cried "Pretty Goblin" still for "Pretty Polly;"-One whistled like a bird. But sweet-tooth Laura spoke in haste: "Good folk, I have no coin; To take were to purloin: I have no copper in my purse, I have no silver either, And all my gold is on the furze That shakes in windy weather Above the rusty heather."

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The Consumed Consumer "You have much gold upon you head," They answered all together: "Buy from us with a golden curl." She clipped a precious golden lock, She dropped a tear more rare than pearl, Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red: Sweeter than honey from the rock. Stronger than man-rejoicing wine, Clearer than water flowed that juice; She never tasted such before, How should it cloy with length of use? She sucked and sucked and sucked the more Fruits which that unknown orchard bore; She sucked until her lips were sore; Then flung the emptied rinds away But gathered up one kernel-stone, And knew not was it night or day As she turned home alone. Lizzie met her at the gate Full of wise upbraidings: "Dear, you should not stay so late, Twilight is not good for maidens; Should not loiter in the glen In the haunts of goblin men. Do you not remember Jeanie, How she met them in the moonlight, Took their gifts both choice and many, Ate their fruits and wore their flowers Plucked from bowers Where summer ripens at all hours? But ever in the noonlight She pined and pined away; Sought them by night and day, Found them no more, but dwindled and grew grey; Then fell with the first snow, While to this day no grass will grow Where she lies low: I planted daisies there a year ago That never blow. You should not loiter so." "Nay, hush," said Laura: "Nay, hush, my sister: I ate and ate my fill, Yet my mouth waters still; To-morrow night I will Buy more;" and kissed her:

Melanie Hanson "Have done with sorrow; I'll bring you plums to-morrow Fresh on their mother twigs, Cherries worth getting; You cannot think what figs My teeth have met in, What melons icy-cold Piled on a dish of gold Too huge for me to hold, What peaches with a velvet nap, Pellucid grapes without one seed: Odorous indeed must be the mead Whereon they grow, and pure the wave they drink With lilies at the brink, And sugar-sweet their sap." Golden head by golden head, Like two pigeons in one nest Folded in each other's wings, They lay down in their curtained bed: Like two blossoms on one stem, Like two flakes of new-fall'n snow, Like two wands of ivory Tipped with gold for awful kings. Moon and stars gazed in at them, Wind sang to them lullaby, Lumbering owls forbore to fly, Not a bat flapped to and fro Round their rest: Cheek to cheek and breast to breast Locked together in one nest. Early in the morning When the first cock crowed his warning Neat like bees, as sweet and busy, Laura rose with Lizzie: Fetched in honey, milked the cows, Aired and set to rights the house, Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat, Cakes for dainty mouths to eat, Next churned butter, whipped up cream, Fed their poultry, sat and sewed; Talked as modest maidens should: Lizzie with an open heart, Laura in an absent dream, One content, one sick in part;

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The Consumed Consumer One warbling for the mere bright day's delight, One longing for the night. At length slow evening came: They went with pitchers to the reedy brook; Lizzie most placid in her look, Laura most like a leaping flame. They drew the gurgling water from its deep; Lizzie plucked purple and rich golden flags, Then turning homewards said: "The sunset flushes Those furthest loftiest crags; Come, Laura, not another maiden lags, No wilful squirrel wags, The beasts and birds are fast asleep." But Laura loitered still among the rushes And said the bank was steep. And said the hour was early still, The dew not fall'n, the wind not chill: Listening ever, but not catching The customary cry, "Come buy, come buy," With its iterated jingle Of sugar-baited words: Not for all her watching Once discerning even one goblin Racing, whisking, tumbling, hobbling; Let alone the herds That used to tramp along the glen, In groups or single, Of brisk fruit-merchant men. Till Lizzie urged, "O Laura, come; I hear the fruit-call, but I dare not look: You should not loiter longer at this brook: Come with me home. The stars rise, the moon bends her arc, Each glowworm winks her spark, Let us get home before the night grows dark: For clouds may gather Though this is summer weather, Put out the lights and drench us through; Then if we lost our way what should we do?" Laura turned cold as stone To find her sister heard that cry alone,

Melanie Hanson That goblin cry, "Come buy our fruits, come buy." Must she then buy no more such dainty fruit? Must she no more such succous pasture find, Gone deaf and blind? Her tree of life drooped from the root: She said not one word in her heart's sore ache; But peering thro' the dimness, nought discerning, Trudged home, her picher dripping all the way; So crept to bed, and lay Silent till Lizzie slept; Then sat up in a passionate yearning, And gnashed her teeth for baulked desire, and wept As if her heart would break. Day after day, night after night, Laura kept watch in vain In sullen silence of exceeding pain. She never caught again the goblin cry: "Come buy, come buy;"-She never spied the goblin men Hawking their fruits along the glen: But when the noon waxed bright Her hair grew thin and grey; She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn To swift decay and burn Her fire away. One day remembering her kernel-stone She set it by a wall that faced the south; Dewed it with tears, hoped for a root. Watched for a waxing shoot, But there came none; It never saw the sun, It never felt the trickling moisture run: While with sunk eyes and faded mouth She dreamed of melons, as a traveler sees False waves in desert drouth With shade of leaf-crowned trees, And burns the thirstier in the sandful breeze. She no more swept the house, Tended the fowls or cows, Fetched honey, kneaded cakes of wheat, Brought water from the brook: But sat down listless in the chimney-nook

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The Consumed Consumer And would not eat. Tender Lizzie could not bear To watch her sister's cankerous care Yet not to share. She night and morning Caught the goblins' cry: "Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy:"-Beside the brook, along the glen, She heard the tramp of goblin men, The voice and stir Poor Laura could not hear; Longed to buy fruit to comfort her, But feared to pay too dear. She thought of Jeanie in her grave, Who should have been a bride; But who for joys brides hope to have Fell sick and died In her gay prime, In earliest Winter time, With the first glazing rime, With the first snow-fall of crisp Winter time. Till Laura dwindling Seemed knocking at Death's door: Then Lizzie weighed no more Better and worse; But put a silver penny in her purse, Kissed Laura, crossed the heath with clumps of furze At twilight, halted by the brook: And for the first time in her life Began to listen and look. Laughed every goblin When they spied her peeping: Came towards her hobbling, Flying, running, leaping, Puffing and blowing, Chuckling, clapping, crowing, Clucking and gobbling, Mopping and mowing, Full of airs and graces, Pulling wry faces, Demure grimaces, Cat-like and rat-like,

Melanie Hanson Ratel- and wombat-like, Snail-paced in a hurry, Parrot-voiced and whistler, Helter skelter, hurry skurry, Chattering like magpies, Fluttering like pigeons, Gliding like fishes,-Hugged her and kissed her: Squeezed and caressed her: Stretched up their dishes, Panniers, and plates: "Look at our apples Russet and dun, Bob at our cherries, Bite at our peaches, Citrons and dates, Grapes for the asking, Pears red with basking Out in the sun, Plums on their twigs; Pluck them and suck them, Pomegranates, figs."-"Good folk," said Lizzie, Mindful of Jeanie: "Give me much and many:"-Held out her apron, Tossed them her penny. "Nay, take a seat with us, Honour and eat with us." They answered grinning: "Our feast is but beginning, Night yet is early, Warm and dew-pearly, Wakeful and starry: Such fruits as these No man can carry; Half their bloom would fly, Half their dew would dry, Half their flavour would pass by. Sit down and feast with us, Be welcome guest with us, Cheer you and rest with us."-"Thank you," said Lizzie: "But one waits At home alone for me: So without further parleying,

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The Consumed Consumer If you will not sell me any Of your fruits though much and many, Give me back my silver penny I tossed you for a fee."-They began to scratch their pates, No longer wagging, purring, But visibly demurring, Grunting and snarling. One called her proud, Cross-grained, uncivil; Their tones waxed loud, Their looks were evil. Lashing their tails They trod and hustled her, Elbowed and jostled her, Clawed with their nails, Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking, Tore her gown and soiled her stocking, Twitched her hair out by the roots, Stamped upon her tender feet, Held her hands and squeezed their fruits Against her mouth to make her eat. White and golden Lizzie stood, Like a lily in a flood,-Like a rock of blue-veined stone Lashed by tides obstreperously,— Like a beacon left alone In a hoary roaring sea, Sending up a golden fire,— Like a fruit-crowned orange-tree White with blossoms honey-sweet Sore beset by wasp and bee,— Like a royal virgin town Topped with gilded dome and spire Close beleaguered by a fleet Mad to tug her standard down. One may lead a horse to water, Twenty cannot make him drink. Though the goblins cuffed and caught her, Coaxed and fought her, Bullied and besought her, Scratched her, pinched her black as ink, Kicked and knocked her, Mauled and mocked her,

Melanie Hanson Lizzie uttered not a word; Would not open lip from lip Lest they should cram a mouthful in: But laughed in heart to feel the drip Of juice that syrupped all her face, And lodged in dimples of her chin, And streaked her neck which quaked like curd. At last the evil people, Worn out by her resistance, Flung back her penny, kicked their fruit Along whichever road they took, Not leaving root or stone or shoot; Some writhed into the ground, Some dived into the brook With ring and ripple, Some scudded on the gale without a sound, Some vanished in the distance. In a smart, ache, tingle, Lizzie went her way; Knew not was it night or day; Sprang up the bank, tore thro' the furze, Threaded copse and dingle, And heard her penny jingle Bouncing in her purse,— Its bounce was music to her ear. She ran and ran As if she feared some goblin man Dogged her with gibe or curse Or something worse: But not one goblin skurried after, Nor was she pricked by fear; The kind heart made her windy-paced That urged her home quite out of breath with haste And inward laughter. She cried "Laura," up the garden, "Did you miss me? Come and kiss me. Never mind my bruises, Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices Squeezed from goblin fruits for you, Goblin pulp and goblin dew. Eat me, drink me, love me; Laura, make much of me; For your sake I have braved the glen

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The Consumed Consumer And had to do with goblin merchant men." Laura started from her chair, Flung her arms up in the air, Clutched her hair: "Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted For my sake the fruit forbidden? Must your light like mine be hidden, Your young life like mine be wasted, Undone in mine undoing, And ruined in my ruin, Thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden?"— She clung about her sister, Kissed and kissed and kissed her: Tears once again Refreshed her shrunken eyes, Dropping like rain After long sultry drouth; Shaking with aguish fear, and pain, She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth. Her lips began to scorch, That juice was wormwood to her tongue, She loathed the feast: Writhing as one possessed she leaped and sung, Rent all her robe, and wrung Her hands in lamentable haste, And beat her breast. Her locks streamed like the torch Borne by a racer at full speed, Or like the mane of horses in their flight, Or like an eagle when she stems the light Straight toward the sun, Or like a caged thing freed, Or like a flying flag when armies run. Swift fire spread through her veins, knocked at her heart, Met the fire smouldering there And overbore its lesser flame; She gorged on bitterness without a name: Ah! fool, to choose such part Of soul-consuming care! Sense failed in the mortal strife: Like the watch-tower of a town Which an earthquake shatters down,

Melanie Hanson Like a lightning-stricken mast, Like a wind-uprooted tree Spun about, Like a foam-topped waterspout Cast down headlong in the sea She fell at last; Pleasure past and anguish past, Is it death or is it life? Life out of death, That night long Lizzie watched by her, Counted her pulse's flagging stir, Felt for her breath, Held water to her lips, and cooled her face With tears and fanning leaves: But when the first birds chirped about their eaves, And early reapers plodded to the place Of golden sheaves, And dew-wet grass Bowed in the morning winds so brisk to pass, And new buds with new day Opened of cup-like lilies on the stream, Laura awoke as from a dream, Laughed in the innocent old way, Hugged Lizzie but not twice or thrice; Her gleaming locks showed not one thread of grey Her breath was sweet as May And light danced in her eyes. Days, weeks, months, years Afterwards, when both were wives With children of their own; Their mother-hearts beset with fears, Their lives bound up in tender lives; Laura would call the little ones And tell them of her early prime, Those pleasant days long gone Of not-returning time: Would talk about the haunted glen, The wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men, Their fruits like honey to the throat But poison in the blood; (Men sell not such in any town): Would tell them how her sister stood In deadly peril to do her good, And win the fiery antidote:

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The Consumed Consumer Then joining hands to little hands Would bid them cling together, "For there is no friend like a sister In calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen whilst one stands."77

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SHYLOCK AS THE AMERICAN CAPITALIST ELAINE BROUSSEAU

In 1989, Dustin Hoffman took on the role of Shylock in Peter Hall's production of The Merchant of Venice at New York's 46th Street Theatre. In an interview, Hoffman said of The Merchant of Venice that the play was "about a man stopped from doing what he wants to do, which is to be a businessman."1 Hoffman's remark connecting Shylock with the businessman resonates with reviews of American productions of the play from more than a century earlier that identify Shylock's business activity as peculiarly American. The reviews reveal that Shylock, a Jewish money lender, became for mid-nineteenth and early twentieth-century audiences the man of trade, the Chatham Street peddler, the Wall Street financier. The Merchant of Venice, one of the most frequently staged of Shakespeare’s plays in the American nineteenth century, was the first to be performed in America by a regular company—in Williamsburg, Virginia, on December 5, 1752—making Shylock the first representation of a Jew in a legitimate drama on the American stage.2 The play was enormously popular even in the colonial period and was among the plays carried into the Midwest on showboats during the antebellum period .3 By 1840, The Merchant of Venice was being played in almost every town in the country, and nearly every major actor in America played Shylock. Even later in the century—after 1870—Merchant retained its popularity; only Hamlet was performed more frequently among New York productions of Shakespeare 1 Merchant of Venice—Actors and actresses—Hoffman, Dustin. Shakespeare Clippings File. Harvard Theatre Collection. 2 Jacob Rader Marcus, Memoirs of American Jews, 460. There is some critical disagreement about the date of this performance. According to Toby Lelyveld, the December 5 date is the one given by Dunlap in A History of the American Theatre, New York, 1832; however, Charles H. Shattuck gives the date as September 15 as does Arthur Hobson Quinn in A History of the American Drama, From the Beginning to the Civil War. The introduction to Edwin Booth’s promptbook of the play says that Dunlap gives the date as September 5, 1752 . 3 Alfred Van Rennselaer Westfall, American Shakespearian Criticism, 59.

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plays.4 As John Gross points out, “It would have been hard to be a playgoer in nineteenth-century America without seeing a performance of The Merchant of Venice sooner or later”.5 Even articles from the early twentieth century attest to the continued popularity of the play. In a review of E.H. Sothern as Shylock entitled "Sothern Shows A New Shylock to Hub Critics," the reviewer notes that "the young lady in the seat at our left last evening remarked that she 'knew every line of the play by heart.' And without doubt everyone in the theatre last evening was more or less familiar with the lines." 6 The popularity of The Merchant of Venice in the nineteenth century says something about what entertained and concerned American theatergoers. In his book about Shakespeare and the Jews, James Shapiro observes that the Elizabethans’ “cultural preoccupation” with the Jews has more to say about the Elizabethans than it does about the Jews in Renaissance England.7 Shapiro points out that the “social anxieties” that circulate through The Merchant of Venice have continued to be in play whenever and wherever the play is performed “in large measure because the play continues to give voice to recurrent cultural problems of nation, race, and gender."8 If The Merchant of Venice offers a locus, then, for investigating nineteenth-century America’s curiosity about or unease with Jewish ethnicity, it does so precisely because Shapiro’s claim about the Elizabethans most likely holds true for nineteenth-century Americans as well: their interest in the figure of the Jew and especially the Jew in the character of Shylock says more about what Americans were preoccupied with at the time than it does about the situation of Jews in America. Shapiro’s contention that The Merchant of Venice continued through the centuries to “interven[e] in...cultural and national crises” finds resonance in the entry of Shylock and Merchant into nineteenth-century discourse.9 4

Harley Erdman, Staging the Jew, 21. In Erdman’s survey of New York Shakespeare productions between 1870 and 1919, only As You Like It, Macbeth, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet were staged as frequently as Merchant. 5 John Gross, Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy, 138. 6 Merchant of Venice—Actors and actresses—Sothern and Marlowe. Shakespeare Clippings File. Harvard Theatre Collection. 7 James S. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 89. Shapiro elaborates: “Ultimately, it is not the raw number of Jews in early modern England that is of interest as much as the kind of cultural preoccupation they became, the way that Jews complicated a great range of social, economic, legal, political, and religious discourses, and turned other questions into Jewish questions as well” (77). 8 Ibid., 89. 9 Ibid., 89.

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Shylock in the mid-nineteenth century American productions of The Merchant of Venice was regularly represented as grasping, miserly, vengeful and evil, although this characterization was softened to make him more sympathetic to audiences as the century progressed. This portrayal is not surprising given the general anti-Jewish climate in the United States and elsewhere at the time. What is more surprising and interesting, however, is that two different but related associations seem to have made their way into popular discourse: Shylock’s association with racial blackness and with capitalism. The nineteenth-century’s persistence in thinking of Jews as a separate race rather than a religious or ethnic group made easier the move to align Jews with blacks. Simultaneously, the stereotypical association of the Jew with money and greed allowed Shakespeare’s play to provide a site of exploration for audiences struggling with Jewish difference, revealing what seems to have been a collective uneasiness with and ambivalence toward American capitalism and toward Jews, who were identified with American capitalism. Shylock, then, emerges as a complicated character in the American nineteenth century: He is at once a black and a businessman, the Ethiop and the capitalist, the stereotypical black man who cannot be counted on to be honest and the quintessential American man of trade. Allusions to Shylock reverberate throughout nineteenth-century discourse: Shylock has, to borrow Harley Erdman’s nice expression, “jumped the walls of the theater..., serving as a ready reference point for gentiles (particularly, it seems, those who have had little or no personal contact with Jews).”10

Jews in Nineteenth-Century America The audience that gathered in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1752 to see William Hallam’s first production of the Merchant of Venice had probably never seen a Jew.11 Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the Jews arrived in the United States in very small numbers, and they tended to settle in larger population centers.12 Although there were only fifteen thousand Jews in a total population of fifteen million by 1830 and about 150,000 on the eve of the Civil War, the influx of German Jewish immigrants between 1820 and 1870 meant that, by 1877, the Jewish population had risen to 250,000. While they were moving westward across 10

Erdman, Staging the Jew, 18-19. Marcus, Memoirs of American Jews, 32. 12 Louise Mayo, The Ambivalent Image, 13; Marcus, Memoirs of American Jews, 32. 11

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the country after a time in the port of entry, many Jews remained in New York; 40,000 were in the city by the time of the Civil War.13 Jews could be found in a variety of occupations in nineteenth-century America. Those whose stories are collected in Jacob Rader Marcus’ twovolume Memoirs of American Jews, 1775-1865 were peddlers, clerks and merchants as well as bankers, soldiers, rabbis and lawyers. Some of these Jews recall incidents of discrimination and Judaeophobia, although whether this discrimination was a consequence of anti-Semitism is not always easy to determine; some job discrimination seemed to stem more from the jockeying for position among different immigrant groups.14 Still, Shylock’s story would have had contemporary significance for antebellum and post-Civil War theatergoers, who would probably have been familiar with the more public, governmental instances of discrimination. For example, in November 1862, General Ulysses Grant ordered railroad conductors to block passage of Jewish travelers going south. Another directive, Order no. 11 issued the following month, expelled Jews from Grant’s area of command, because they were suspected of illegal cotton speculation; this order was revoked a few weeks later after much protest in the press.15 Once Grant became president, he offered the post of Secretary of the Treasury to Joseph Seligman, a Jew whose banking firm had helped finance the Civil War by obtaining European capital for President Lincoln. In 1877, Seligman was barred on religious grounds from entering the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, an incident that caused a considerable stir. The Grand Union affair also evoked condemnation, including strong reaction from ministers like Henry Ward Beecher.16 Discrimination against Jews existed, but so did protests against it.

The Merchant of Venice in the Nineteenth Century While The Merchant of Venice was performed frequently in the nineteenth century, what was the play Americans actually saw? The Merchant of Venice was tampered with fairly extensively in this period, and the cuts made to the play put more emphasis on Shylock. The acting editions used and published in the nineteenth century indicate what changes to the play were thought desirable. Earlier in the century the 13

Mayo, The Ambivalent Image, 13-14; Ellen Schiff, "Shylock's Mishpocheh: Anti-Semitism on the American Stage," 82. 14 See David A. Gerber's Anti-Semitism in American History for more on this complex topic. 15 See Mayo, The Ambivalent Image, 127, for the public reaction to Order No.11. 16 Toby Lelyveld, Shylock on the Stage, 75-76.

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Inchbald and Oxberry editions were used, but Lacy’s Acting Editions (later to be bought by New York’s Samuel French), first published in 1849, became the most widely used nineteenth-century dramatic texts. According to David Grimsted, “these were essentially the versions given in America,” and “a leading American manager claimed he followed exactly the omissions made by the English licenser of plays for his Philadelphia presentations."17 The most significant change to the play was the cutting of the casket scenes (except for the one with Bassanio) and, thus, the removal of any mention of the suitors. With the Belmont scenes so much reduced, the focus of the play falls squarely and disproportionately on Shylock, and any connection that Shakespeare might have been drawing between currency and exchange at Belmont and the trading practices of worldly Venetian merchants is certainly lost. In addition, the play was routinely performed without its fifth act, which put more of the focus on Shylock, ending the play with the trial scene. Early nineteenth-century director William Wood lamented the practice, while acknowledging that “the late fashion of mangling the ‘Merchant of Venice,’ by concluding the piece at the close of Shylock’s character, has become almost universal.” Wood attributes the practice to “the selfishness of some Shylocks,” and notes that “some small Shylocks have favored the public with the trial scene alone.” Wood applauds the reaction of Fanny Kemble, a famous Portia, to this practice: She “treated this insult to Shakespeare with just severity and contempt. Her last act of this play was always considered one of her most favorable exhibitions of comic power.”18 Edwin Booth also did the play in “an abbreviated fouract version,” although he discontinued the practice around 1878.19 The introduction to Booth’s promptbook for the 1867 Winter Garden production of Merchant explains that modern audiences have no patience with scenes that, “though developing delicate delineations of character, do not help on very notably the plot of the piece;” because “the plot is consummated in its chief features with the fourth act,” the audience “immediately jumps to its feet” without waiting to hear how the other strains of the plot conclude.20 Ellen Terry restored Act V in Henry Irving’s production of the play in the 1870s, but it is apparent that the play was still being performed, at least occasionally, in a radically cut version as late as 17

David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 115. William Wood, Personal Recollections of the Stage, 203. 19 Lelyveld, Shylock on the Stage, 71. 20 It is not entirely clear how the writer of this introduction knows that the audience leaves before Act 5 if the fifth act was not, in fact, performed in this period. 18

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1885 from a review of Lawrence Barrett as Shylock that mentions that the play was cut “at both ends, and...so much of the intermediate matter [was eliminated] that the whole fabric was well-nigh threadbare.”21 The upshot of omitting Act V was that the merchant Antonio and the resolution at Belmont disappeared from the play, leaving Shylock’s humiliation to stay with the audience at the play’s new ending.22

Shylock as the American Businessman Critical opinion has long acknowledged Shylock’s connection with capitalism.23 Edward Andrew sees Shylock as personifying “possessive individualism” and, as usurer, as “embody[ing] the ‘heartless greed’ and ‘limitless acquisitiveness’ at the root of modern entrepreneurial capitalism."24 John Gross draws upon Marx’s references to Shylock in “On the Jewish Question” to observe how “thoroughly Judaized” Western society had become and how “Shylock is everywhere—running banks, factories, landed estates; making money wherever there is money to be made.”25 What mid- to late-nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century reviews of productions of The Merchant of Venice reveal, though, is the extent to which Shylock was associated with American capitalism and particularly with what the culture seemed to perceive as the shortcomings of the American businessman. Reviews of productions of The Merchant of Venice are marked by the language of American business. A review of a Chicago performance of Merchant with Edwin Booth as Shylock noted that “Mr. Booth’s Shylock....is not the lean, haggard, money-changing miser, but rather a robust, well-conditioned man of business—independent and but triflingly subservient to his Christian fellow-merchant.” Ten years earlier, Booth's Shylock “resembled a Chatham Street Jew, invoking

21

Merchant of Venice—Actors and actresses A-Be--Shakespeare Clippings File. Harvard Theatre Collection. 22 While the removal of so much of the Belmont material is the most obvious excision made to the text, a random perusal of several promptbooks reveals a number of minor cuts, many of which were removed to satisfy the prudish. For example, all references to Jessica as a boy in Act II.vi (which is II.v in Mark Allen’s promptbook) were removed, as was the exchange between Portia and Nerissa in Act III.iv about how they will look when dressed like men. 23 The word “capitalist” first entered the language about 1795 and was used to refer to “moneyed men.” 24 Quoted in Martin Yaffe, Shylock and the Jewish Question, 11. 25 Gross, Shylock, 297.

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justice against a shoplifter escaping with an unpaid pair of breeches,”26 a remark that situates Shylock in the Lower East Side Jewish pushcart immigrant culture that predated the Jewish rise in American business. In a 1908 review of the play, the connection made between Shylock’s business practices and those of Americans uncovers the particular soulless, hardhearted quality of the American man of trade. Reviewer Charles Darnton notes that Henry Ludlowe as Shylock is “strictly American” and that “he was as hard as a business man and just about as interesting. His soul seemed to have shut up shop.”27 Another review identifying the businessman with soullessness remarks on Shylock's "puny soul" and refers to him as "the money-getter with his soul shrunk to the size of a ducat."28 Reviews connecting Shylock to the modern commercial spirit continue into the early twentieth century. The Boston Herald reviewer in December 1910 expects Shylock to be "the not undignified financier whose class enjoyed a certain respect in the trading republic."29 In a long article in September 1912 in N.Y. Theatre entitled "Shadings of Shylock," Paul R. Martin looks at how Richard Mansfield's interpretation of the role had made Shylock into "a careful man of business."30 A Boston Herald review of the play on December 31, 1914 refers to Robert Mantell's Shylock as a "shrewd financier, meditating a hard bargain,"31 while actor Ben Greet in 1914 saw the Jews and Christians in the play "as citizens of a great universe, struggling, as we do now, in commerce for the mastery of the market."32 Sarah Bernhardt's singular portrayal of Shylock identified the Jewish money-lender with American patriotism—in fact, Bernhardt's costume made her look like "the Uncle Sam of American caricature." According to a reviewer for the Boston Transcript, her Shylock "wore a 26

"Shylock.” Feb. 2, 1878. Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare Clippings File. Harvard Theatre Collection. 27 Merchant of Venice Scrapbook, Vol. 2. Folger Shakespeare Library. 28 "'The Merchant' Again." Boston Transcript, Feb. 9, 1915. Shakespearean Scrapbook—Merchant of Venice, Vol. 1. Harvard Theatre Collection. 29 "Shubert Theatre, Sothern and Marlow in 'The Merchant of Venice.'" Boston Herald, Dec. 1, 1910. Shakespearean Scrapbook—Merchant of Venice. Vol. 1. Harvard Theatre Collection. 30 Shakespearean Scrapbook—Merchant of Venice. Vol. 1. Harvard Theatre Collection. 31 "Shylock A Cynic with Dignity." Boston Herald, Dec. 31, 1914. Shakespearean Scrapbook—Merchant of Venice. Vol. 1. Harvard Theatre Collection. 32 Merchant of Venice—Actors and actresses—Ben Greet. Shakespeare Clippings File. Harvard Theatre Collection.

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chine [sic] whisker; his thin gray hair fell in lank locks around his long, gaunt face; his sleeves were of blue sewn with stars; his mantle ran in long stripes of red and white."33 Shylock’s “puritan austerity,”34 a kind of denial of the pleasure principle, also serves to connect the Jewish usurer to the nineteenthcentury American businessman. This characterization resonates with deTocqueville’s earlier observations about the solitariness of American businessmen and their comparative avoidance of pleasurable pursuits when compared to their European counterparts.35 Although he doesn’t make the connection explicit, a reviewer in the Kansas City Times is clearly thinking of the American businessman in writing about The Merchant of Venice. Calling Shylock “the greatest of gold hoarders,” he submits that “if he [Shylock] goes farther than his money-grasping brother of a later time it is because he was of another age and race.”36 Some nineteenth-century observers directly link Shylock’s business practices with his Jewishness. For example, the following nineteenthcentury writer gives what he sees as a historical reason for equating the Jew, whom he calls “the great capitalist,” with an insatiable desire for wealth: How it chanced that Shakspeare should have selected a Jew [itals. in orig.] in whose person to exhibit these odious vices, is not unworthy of notice…. From the great wealth of some of their number in every country, they had acquired a universal reputation for extortion and rapacity: and by the greediness of arbitrary power, to which it frequently became convenient to confiscate their property, this popular notion was favoured and propagated.37

The practice of stereotyping Jews, of assigning rapacity and the unremitting pursuit of wealth as racial qualities, continued unabated through the nineteenth century in the popular press and in reviews—and in the actual culture. Historian David Gerber, in his study of the Jews in Buffalo in the 1850s, points out that in the mid-nineteenth century, antiSemitism “found expression in the notion that, in the name of profit and advancement, Jews will grasp every unfair advantage and break legal and 33 "News of the Theatres." November 17, 1916. Shakespeare Scrapbook— Merchant of Venice. Vol. 1. Harvard Theatre Collection. 34 Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare, 131. 35 Alexis deTocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2, 136-39. 36 Coates, “On and About the Stage.” Kansas City Times, Feb. 14, 1899. Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare Clippings File. Harvard Theatre Collection. 37 “Observations on Some of the Male Characters of Shakspeare. Shylock” 562-5.

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moral codes.”38 Jews were seen not just as opportunistic businessmen but also as secretive and as having their own morality, which sanctioned the One writer, reviewing Edwin Booth’s cheating of Christians.39 performance as Shylock, referred to “that unquenchable lust of lucre which markes the race."40 This identification of materialistic ambition as a racial trait continues into the twentieth century—for example, a review by Edward H. Crosby of David Warfield's Shylock notes that "the Jew is shown with his racial love of money"41 and a review of Johnston Forbes Robertson as Shylock at the Schubert Theater refers to him as a "wailing, mercenary Jew."42 Although nineteenth-century commentators on Shakespeare generally applaud his creation of original characters, Shylock was looked upon as representative of his “race.” Says Mrs. M.J. Whipple, “Shylock is the most wonderful representative character in dramatic literature. His whole being savors of Judaism. His avaricious scheming propensity only represents the Jewish nation, which has dealt in money ever since the time of Christ” (297).43 A reviewer for the Home Journal observed that actors should emphasize Shylock’s Jewishness, and he chided the actor Richard Mansfield for not making his Shylock Jewish enough. He acknowledged Shylock’s originality and individuality, but insisted that “we perceive a light touch of Judaism in everything he says and does” and imagined that “we can hear a slight whisper of the Jewish accent even in the written words.”44 Dissenting voices—and performances—were few. An occasional reviewer, this one writing about a performance of The Merchant of Venice in New Orleans, offers a view less characteristic of post-Civil War America: “The Jew that Shakspere [sic] drew is not the Jew of to-day; not like the modern Jew as seen in this country or in England, a man among men, as good as any and as well treated, according to his qualifications of culture, refinement and deserts as a gentleman.”45 While not a drama 38

Gerber, 202-03. Ibid., 217-18. 40 Quoted in Lelyveld, 75. 41 Edward H. Crosby, "Warfield's Shylock is Different." Merchant of Venice— Actors and actresses—David Warfield. Shakespeare Clippings File. Harvard Theatre Collection. 42 Merchant of Venice—Actors and actresses—Forbes-Robertson. Shakespeare Clippings File. Harvard Theatre Collection. 43 Mrs. M.J. Whipple, "Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice," 297. 44 Home Journal, Dec. 23, 1893. Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare Clippings File. Harvard Theatre Collection. 45 New Orleans Picayune, October 11, 1888. Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare Clippings File. Harvard Theatre Collection. 39

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critic, the antebellum Jewish writer Isaac Harby objected to Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock, finding nothing redeeming in it and stating that Shakespeare made Shylock a Jew simply to satisfy Elizabethan prejudices; he pointed out that, in the original story, the Jew was the victim of the Christian’s villainy.46 Meanwhile, on stage, Junius Brutus Booth’s Shylock was unusual for its time. For one thing, Booth seemed to understand and be sympathetic to Jews. He had actually studied the Talmud and “had more than a passing acquaintance with Jewish ways”; reportedly, he attended a synagogue somewhat regularly, and it was thought that he could actually participate in the service in Hebrew.47

Shylock in Minstrelsy The Merchant of Venice was not spared treatment by the minstrels, and the texts of the minstrel pieces make the connection between Shylock and his representation as a nineteenth-century businessman clear. In addition, because Shylock would, of course, have been played in blackface, the connection between Shylock—and, by extension, the Jew—and blackness is given a visual reality in the minstrel productions of The Merchant of Venice. In Shylock, which Griffin and Christy’s Minstrels performed in 1867,48 Shylock is “a dealer in old clothes” on Chatham Street in New York’s Lower East Side, and Antonio (“Tony”), whose occupation is unclear, seems to be short of money from spending too much at Chatham Street concert saloons. Gary Engle contends that “few afterpieces achieved the comic intensity that can be seen in Griffin’s version of the...standard minstrel burlesque." Culminating in what Engle calls “a blanket-toss revel at the end," the piece is full of lively dances and song parodies, which are marked by frantic, over-the-top punning (a characteristic of minstrel pieces) and references to contemporary political and social issues.49 The women’s rights issue finds its way into a song to the popular tune “Campdown Races,” and Shylock’s occupation reflects the growing number of Jewish immigrants, many of them ekeing out a 46

Marcus, 350. Lelyveld, 63. 48 Gary D. Engle in This Grotesque Essence: Plays from the American Minstrel Stage points out that a date can be ascribed to the piece with some assurance because of political references in the text. 49 Engle, "Introduction." This Grotesque Essence, 91. An example of the outrageous punning in Shylock is Antonio's line "I'm left alone, but still without a loan," and later "There are two doors to this room I conjecture,/'Tis in the Tu-dor style of architecture." 47

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living as peddlers on the streets of the Lower East Side. There is a confusion and carelessness in assigning ethnicity to the characters. Shylock’s heavily accented speech—for example, he sells “vun pair pants, and lettle veskit” and greets his “frients” with “how’s pishness dis cold day?”50—actually seems to disappear as the piece goes on. Topical references include Shylock’s comments on the business of making money (“Oh, Wall-street is a tick’lish place,/There’s ruin in the golden race”)51 that situate him at the very center of American capitalism. His appeal in the trial scene to The Dook for justice—"What! revile my claim,/Oh, mighty Khan, oh, sweet a merry Khan,/Don't bubble over in your righteous wrath,/A Khan, you know, should hold some else than froth"52— uses outrageous punning both to demand American justice and to demand that the American justice meted out to him have some substance to it, be “else than froth.” What effect might a blackface Shylock—in other words, a white man made up in blackface playing a Jew—have had on the audience? There are several areas of ambiguity and confusion here. Eric Lott points out that the activity of gazing on "black" figures, whatever other effects it may have had, “secure[d] the position of white spectators as superior, controlling figures."53 To the extent, then, that watching a minstrel show reassured white audiences of their superiority, Shylock in blackface must have further underlined the sense of the Jew as an outsider, while making a visual link between Jew and black reinforced by their shared positions outside of mainstream culture. Shylock’s heavily accented speech in this minstrel piece is a further alienating strategy. But there is no question that audiences found this figure funny—from his opening laments to his comic punishment of being tossed in a blanket at the end. This minstrel rendering of Shylock as a figure of fun harks back to what is known about his earliest representation, ironically not in Shakespeare’s play itself but in the early eighteenth-century adaptation of Merchant by George Granville entitled The Jew of Venice.54 Indeed, it was not popular to play Shylock as 50

Shylock, 93. Ibid., 149. 52 Ibid., 153. 53 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, 140-141. Lott says that "black" figures were "screens on which audience fantasy would rest." 54 Gross, 108. Almost nothing is known about the performances of The Merchant of Venice in Shakespeare’s time and in the early years after his death and before the closing of the theaters, including which member of his company played Shylock. After the theaters were reopened in 1660, Merchant was not one of the 51

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a “straight” character and even less as a sympathetic one until 1879 “when Henry Irving successfully demonstrated that Shylock could be played, not as a sinner, but as a man sinned against.”55 Although not a minstrel piece, the popular English burlesque Shylock: or the Merchant of Venice Preserved by Francis Talfourd also met with success in America and may have influenced the minstrel development of Shylock. Performances took place at Burton’s Theatre in October 1853, and later at the same theatre in September 1867.56 This burlesque was revived several times in both England and America and, “as late as 1868, when Booth’s tragic treatment of Shylock was most highly acclaimed, it continued to be hailed as a novelty."57 Interestingly, Jessica (who is never in disguise in this piece) asks Shylock’s pardon at the end and returns what she had taken from him. Although Shylock is directed to “shave your face and look more like a Christian,” he is not told directly that he must convert; the normally “puritan” Shylock also gets drunk in this piece.58 John Brougham’s burlesque Much Ado About A Merchant of Venice (1868), which the author describes as “from the original text—a long way,” was printed in 1868 but had been performed in New York since 1839.59 Brougham himself took on the role of the Jewish money lender, playing him as a “rather Hibernian Shylock."60 Again, the connection to American business is emphasized. In this burlesque, Antonio, who works on Wall Street, borrows money for himself, not for Bassanio, but it’s Bassanio, not Shylock, who suggests the pound of flesh as security. Shylock is represented as careless of his adherence to Jewish dietary laws when he agrees to eat raw oysters with Bassanio, a move that costs him his fortune when Jessica makes off with Lorenzo in her father’s absence. More than in other burlesques, the puns in Much Ado draw for their humor upon the conflation of lines from other Shakespeare plays, as when Antonio says “My solid flesh will never, entre nous,/Thaw and resolve itself into a Jew." In the more or less happy ending, Shylock forgives Jessica and everyone else assembled in the court, asking them also to “Pardon my faults and I’ll forget them all."61 plays revived. In fact, John Gross calls the late seventeenth-century stage history of the play “a complete blank.” 55 Lelyveld, 36. 56 Stanley Wells, ed. Nineteenth-Century Shakespeare Burlesques, xiii. 57 Lelyveld, 117. 58 Talfourd, Shylock: or the Merchant of Venice Preserved, 148. 59 Wells, x. 60 Quoted in Lelyveld, 118. 61 John Brougham, Much Ado About A Merchant of Venice, 101, 116.

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The Jew as Black This association between Jewishness and blackness is not peculiar to the American nineteenth century. There is a long history of Jewish association with blackness, and Shapiro points out that the stereotype of “Jewish racial otherness” only began to be challenged at the end of the seventeenth century after a century of travel and trade: “By the end of the seventeenth century works like the English translation of Francois Maximilien Misson’s A New Voyage to Italy make clear that it is ‘a vulgar error that the Jews are all black.’” Earlier in the century (1635), William Brereton saw Jews in the synagogue in Amsterdam and wrote that the Jewish “men [are] most black...and insatiably given unto licentiousness,” while the Scottish minister Robert Kirk noted in 1690 that the Jews he saw “were all very black men.”62 In the American nineteenth century, this association of Jews with blackness persisted—indeed, the identification of Shylock with the country's black population is suggested in, and occasionally made explicit in, social discourse. The writer in The Atlantic Monthly Magazine in 1839 who said, when speaking of Shylock, that “the skin of the Ethiopian is not easily changed” conflated the American image of the Jew with multiple resonances of blackness.63 In addition to suggesting a racial identification, this writer draws on the stereotype of blacks as untrustworthy in observing that Shylock too should have been suspected of dishonesty in setting the bond. While he all but equates Shylock with the American black in this essay, other references are less direct. In “The Black Race in North America,” which appeared in Debow’s Review in 1856, the association is more comparative but also underlines the status of both Jews and blacks as outsiders: “That successive generations of his race [American blacks] have here been born and reared no more makes it [United States] their country than was Egypt that of the sons of Israel for the same reason."64 Perhaps most startling is the observation by Adam Gurowski, a Polish noble and visitor to America, who reflected in his memoirs in 1857 that “numbers of Jews have the greatest resemblance to the American mulattoes. Sallow carnation complexion, thick lips, crisped black hair. Of all the Jewish population scattered over the globe one-fourth lives in 62

Quoted in Shapiro, 170-71. Shapiro also quotes Paul Isaiah, who, in 1655, said, "I know you to be a Jew, for you Jews have a peculiar colour of face different from the form and figure of other men….you are black and uncomely, and not white as other men." 63 "Observations on Some of the Male Characters of Shakspeare. Shylock," 565. 64 "The Black Race in America," 206a.

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Poland. I am, therefore, well acquainted with their features. On my arrival in this country (the United States) I took every light-colored mulatto for a Jew."65 In this observation, the Jew literarily becomes black—or perhaps, more precisely, the black becomes a Jew.66 * * * In general, mid-nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers and reviewers betrayed their uneasiness with American capitalism and the single-minded striving after wealth associated with it, and they used the Jew as a scapegoat for this uneasiness, much as Shapiro said the Elizabethans used their fascination with Jews to confront and complicate a variety of political, economic and social issues. Indeed, Stephen Fraser, in his book Wall Street: America's Dream Palace, points out that Henry Ford's anti-Semitic tirade, The International Jew (1920-21), which blamed a Jewish conspiracy for everything from the Bolshevik Revolution to pornography, originated in Ford's lack of trust in Jewish financiers, who had come to occupy the "inner sanctums" of capitalism. (Jews were, in fact, among the initial establishers of the New York Stock Exchange.) And, as Fraser puts in, in Ford's version of anti-Semitism, "capitalism had been Judaized."67 The popular image of the Jew was not, however, unrelentingly unfavorable. Louise Mayo points out that Jews often were commended “as exemplars of the competitive values of American capitalism,” because their success was the result of “the very diligence, hard work, and thrift that were central values in the business-oriented society,” values that sound very much like the traits of industry and frugality that Benjamin Franklin champions in his Autobiography and that have become a kind of prescription for achieving the American Dream. Indeed, “famous Jews were more often regarded as examples of success gained in the face of overwhelming obstacles than as Shylocks."68 Gerber cites an 1854 Courier editorial praising Buffalo Jews as useful, hardworking citizens who helped relieve the distresses of the Jewish unemployed: “They set an example worthy of all imitation. They are among the best, most orderly, well-disposed citizens.”69 65

Quoted in Gilman, 31. Karen Brodkin’s How the Jews Became White Folks examines the history of this peculiar racial subordination and the later movement toward racial inclusion with whites. 67 Stephen Fraser, Wall Street: America's Dream Palace, 140. 68 Mayo, The Ambivalent Image, 181. 69 Quoted in Gerber, 210. 66

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Americans seem to have been ambivalent, then, about both Jews and capitalism, critiquing the materialism of American society and its practitioners while at the same time embracing many of the business world’s central values. Shylock in the mid- to late nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, then, becomes a focal point around which anxieties about blackness, otherness and money-making converge. Shylock's association both with the American black and with capitalism become linked at the point where the black stereotypes of secretiveness and untrustworthiness attach to the Jewish businessman. The confused response to the figure of the Jew may have spoken to the way Americans were simultaneously attracted to some of the values of capitalism and repulsed by their “black” undercurrents.

Works Cited Adams, John Quincy. “The Character of Desdemona.” The American Monthly Magazine. (March 1836): 209-217. "The Black Race in America, No. II." Debow's Review. (February 1856): 190a-214a. Brodkin, Karen. How the Jews Became White Folks. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Brougham, John. Much Ado About A Merchant of Venice. 1868. In Nineteenth-Century Shakespeare Burlesques. Vol. 5: American Shakespeare Travesties (1852-1888), edited by S. Wells. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1978. Engle, Gary D. "Introduction." In This Grotesque Essence: Plays from the American Minstrel Stage. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Erdman, Harley. Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860-1920. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Fiedler, Leslie A. The Stranger in Shakespeare. New York: Stein and Day, 1972. Fraser, Stephen. Wall Street: America's Dream Palace. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Gerber, David A. Anti-Semitism in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Gilman, Sander L. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Grimsted, David. Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800-1850. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

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Gross, John. Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Lelyveld, Toby. Shylock on the Stage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Marcus, Jacob Rader. Memoirs of American Jews, 1775-1865. Vol. 1. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1995. Mayo, Louise. The Ambivalent Image: Nineteenth-Century America's Perception of the Jew. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1988. Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare Clippings File. Harvard Theatre Collection. Merchant of Venice Scrapbook. Vol. 1 and 2. Folger Shakespeare Library. "Observations on Some of the Male Characters of Shakespeare. Shylock." The American Monthly Magazine June 1836: 561-568. Schiff, Ellen. "Shylock's Mishpocheh: Anti-Semitism on the American Stage." In Anti-Semitism in American History, edited by D. Gerber. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Shapiro, James S. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Shakespearean Scrapbook—Merchant of Venice. Vol. 1. Harvard Theatre Collection. Shakespeare, William. Merchant of Venice. "Introduction." Promptbook of Edwin Booth. 1867. Harvard Theatre Collection Promptbook. —. Merchant of Venice. Promptbook of John Howe. 1850. Harvard Theatre Collection Promptbook 215. —. Merchant of Venice. Promptbook of Mark Allen. 1830's. Harvard Theatre Collection 211. —. Merchant of Venice. Promptbook of May Vanderhoff. 1855. Harvard Theatre Collection 216. Shylock. In This Grotesque Essence: Plays from the American Minstrel Stage, edited by G. Engle. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Talfourd, Francis. Shylock: or the Merchant of Venice Preserved. 1853, 1860. Nineteenth-Century Shakespeare Burlesques. Vol. 3. Selected and introduced by S. Wells. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1978. deTocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Vol. 2. 1840. Edited by P. Bradley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

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Wells, Stanley, ed. Nineteenth-Century Shakespeare Burlesques. Vol. 15. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1978. Westfall, Alfred Van Rensselaer. American Shakespearian Criticism, 1607-1865. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1939, 1968. Whipple, Mrs. M.J. "Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice." The Ladies' Repository. (October 1875): 297-? Wood, William B. Personal Recollections of the Stage. Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1955. Y1affe, Martin D. Shylock and the Jewish Question. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 997.

REVISING REPUTATIONS: THE BELLMEN OF ENGLAND AND ORAL CULTURE IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD DEVON MCDONALD

Many discussions of the history of communication technology take as a central tenant the revolutionary force of Gutenberg’s printing press; indeed, it is commonplace to claim that the early modern period endured a cataclysmic revolution during which print culture devastated and antiquated the English oral tradition. Many scholars assume a polarized view of this shift from a spoken/oral culture to a printed/visual culture— pitting one mode of communication against the other, implying that their relationship is naturally oppositional. Since most contemporary scholars identify with a twenty-first century, text-reliant culture, it is not surprising that the “war” between literacy and orality has so often been expressed in what Mark C. Amodio calls “the positivistic, evolutionist terms of what has come to be known as the Great Divide model.”1 However, this view, in which antiquated oral traditions were essentially conquered by the superiority of literacy, fails to acknowledge the multifaceted transformations of this period and the mutually dependant and reciprocally enriching elements of both textual and oral traditions. Reducing the communication revolution that so defines the early modern period to nothing more than a crude binary not only robs this period of its nuanced intricacies, it effectively silences the voices of individuals and collectives whose histories complicate, mediate, and even conciliate these supposedly incongruent communicative traditions. By amplifying such voices, by magnifying and examining historical characters that defy strict categorization, we can effectively force the Great Divide model into question. A group of marginal, seemingly obscure historical figures— known as the Bellmen of England—offer an unparalleled opportunity to accomplish this task. 1

Amodio, Mark C., Writing the Oral Tradition, 2.

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However, the Bellmen of England have not been a central topic of historical inquiry and, consequently, the details of this vocation, and of its relation to print and to the spoken word, remain largely scattered and undeveloped. Thus, I will begin this essay with an effort to unify what is known about the Bellmen, to explicate their traditional responsibilities and their traditional placement in the social hierarchy. Following this introduction, I will undertake a brief examination of the printing revolution and, more specifically, the social and cultural effects on the Bellmen and their reputations as a result of the spread of literacy and print. I will then turn to the Bellmen’s response to the pressures of print by examining the overtly hybrid, orally influenced texts they produced during the seventeenth century. This case study of the Bellmen of England, then, will effectively recover an important point-of-view, one that the presumed dominance, exclusivity, and superiority of print otherwise occludes, while mapping one example of the adaptive rerouting of oral culture within the bounds of early modern England. The history of the Bellman of England will thus reveal an intricate and integrated (rather than divided and hierarchical) model for the transformation of communication.

The Bellmen of England A cursory glance at the limited references and allusions to the Bellman figure in modern scholarship reveals that the Bellman’s vocational function, social status, cultural significance, and value as a subject of historical study, have all been disputed by historians and academics. On the one hand, some scholars have cast the Bellmen as social outcasts, granting them cursory attention if only to define them as decrepit and largely useless during their time or to dismiss them as lowly civil servants of little interest.2 On the other hand, some scholars elevate the Bellmen to 2

Such arguments begin early in the historical scholarship; for example, in Chales Hindley’s 1884 text A History of the Cries of London he incorrectly conflates the Watchman and Bellman posts into a single vocation, before describing these workers as selected from “the poor and feeble...in order to keep them out of the poor house” (56). Hindley’s generalization misconstrues the Bellman’s reputation as, although their duties at times overlapped, the Bellman and the Watchman were two distinct vocations, in which the former enjoyed more diverse duties and greater responsibility and the latter was often the target of derision. See Diana R. MacKarill’s “A History of Bellman’s Verses” for brief remarks on the distinction between a Bellman and a Watchman. See also G. E. Mingay’s Georgian London for a discussion of the Watchman tradition as a subject of widespread ridicule. For a contemporary dismissal of the Bellman see David Cressy’s Society and Culture

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a higher order than ordinary street hawkers and street criers, associating them with civic authority, sagacity, and even religious influence; for example, Sean Shesgreen goes so far as to count the Bellmen among “the noblest and most venerable of all street characters” briefly describing them as guardians who “protected the city from the catastrophes it feared most” while standing as cultural archetypes of “quasi-religious” protective potency.3 Although such directly evaluative statements regarding the Bellmen of England are rare, these divergent opinions do suggest that further insight is needed in order to stabilize the Bellmen’s historical position. However, let us first turn to what is known and what can be agreed upon regarding the history of the Bellman of England. Historically, the Bellmen performed an essential municipal role as literate and vocal instruments for the reigning political system. Bellmen were responsible for reading aloud minor, local legislative issues—those matters that would affect the common people but that did not warrant more formal circumstances. Thus, in early modern England “notices of importance were ‘cried’ at the meeting house, where presumably those in attendance could read, and then were ‘cried’ through the streets, where literacy was less firmly established.”4 As professional orators, Bellmen also served the daily domestic requirements of the people “by proclaiming things lost, to be sold, runaway servants and announcements of all kinds” as well as

in Early Modern England in which he briefly argues that the Bellmen of London did not enjoy respect or social standing; oddly, he calls on a single example, a 1666 document from colonial New England, in order to substantiate this claim. 3 Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast, 33. The work of Sean Shesgreen perfectly illustrates the shaky historical ground on which the Bellman figure rests. In an earlier book, The Criers and Hawkers of London, Shesgreen calls on a single source from 1772 to suggest that although Bellmen supposedly guarded the peace of the night they were actually defenceless, drunken outcasts subject to routine beating by “young rakes.” However, as quoted in the main text, twelve years later Shesgreen cast the Bellmen in a much more favourable light, acknowledging the efficacy of their civil role while arguing for their status as potent cultural symbols. Shesgreen’s eventual change of mind speaks to the ambiguity that continues to plague the Bellmen as both ancient civil servant and historic icon. Interestingly, the supporting sources Shesgreen offers to substantiate his revised and more positive argument are over a century older than those used to back his earlier claims; this gap, between his arguments and between the dates of his source material, points to the need to qualify generalized claims about the early modern period according to the specific date, and historical milieu, from which “evidence” has been secured. 4 Cressy, Society and Culture, 311.

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“sales by public auction or private contract, weddings, christenings, and funerals.”5 The Bellman also declared the time and the weather, both at infrequent intervals. References to the Bellman’s historical role as a vocal timepiece and short-sighted meteorologist dominate literary allusions to the Bellman throughout the early modern period. The diary of Samuel Pepys offers a firsthand account of this tradition; on Monday, January 16th, 1660, after a lively evening of music and wine, Pepys found himself awake far later than usual and, to accentuate the late hour, he wrote: “I staid up till the bell-man came by with his bell just under my window as I was writing of this very line, and cried, ‘Past one of the clock, and a cold, frosty, windy morning.’”6 The Bellman’s’ duties, then, were explicitly local and revolved around the apparent needs of those occupying his city, town, or parish. However, although it is rarely recognized, Bellmen were much more than merely voices for hire; their historical responsibilities surpass simple parroting and proclamation to encompass a variety of central, even sacred duties. For example, the Bellmen served a crucial protective function— one which they shared with the nightly Watchmen. The Bellmen were commissioned to pace the streets at night to ensure the safety of the public and to maintain civility and order. They were responsible for guarding their townships against the night activities of vagabonds, hooligans, and thieves, as well as for ensuring that each householder hung out their evening lantern to assist in lighting the city streets. Bellmen also watched over the proper handling of these lanterns, a significant responsibility considering that fire represented the single greatest threat to early modern communities. The Bellmen’s dedication to these varying tasks seems to have been respected and even admired by contemporaries—for example, in Thomas Fuller’s 1662 text The History of the Worthies of England, an exposé of political figures and praiseworthy vocations, “the usefull custome of the night Bellman” is commended for its role in “preventing many Fiers and more Felonies.”7 Thus, the town Bellman not only delivered proclamations concerning civil trivialities and domestic news, he looked out for riot, debauchery, danger, and suspicious behaviour and was directly responsible for the safety of persons and property.8 5

Elliott, A History of English Advertising, 2; Sampson, A History of Advertising, 59. 6 Pepys, Passages, 4. 7 Fuller, The History of the Worthies, 292. 8 For an often quoted poetic rendition of many of the Bellman duties just discussed see Vincent Bourne’s elegiac Latin poem “As Davidem Cook, Westmonasterii

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The Bellmen of England were also involved in a number of other duties that have often been overlooked in the historical discourse. For example, during their nightly rounds, Bellmen were responsible for protecting the people from various harmful forces through superstitious and spiritual means; as they walked the streets at night the Bellmen made use of two “spiritual weapons”—the ringing of their bell and the chanting of various prayers.9 The ringing bell was believed to purify the air, to drive away evil spirits, goblins, and witches and to prevent thunder and lightning.10 The blessing or prayer, chanted in rhyme, fulfilled a similar function as a defence against mythic and spiritual creatures. The poet Robert Herrick provides a late example of a Bellman’s blessing chant in his short verse “The Bellman”: From noise of scare-fires rest ye free, From murders benedicite, From all mischances, that may fright Your pleasing slumbers in the night; Mercy secure ye all, and keep The goblin from ye, while ye sleep. Past one o'clock, and almost two, My Masters all, Good day to you.11

While many Bellmen’s verses were designed to ward off the unknown and the unholy, others stressed the importance of the holy and the revered. Thus, pious Bellmen often called on the grace of God to forgive the sins of the public and to protect both themselves and the townsfolk from danger. Custodem Nocturnum et Vigilantissimum, Anno 1716,” written in honour of David Cook, the Bellman of the parish of St Margaret's, Westminster (Miscellaneous Poems, 156-158). On the topic of this poem, F.W.T. offers a query in the 1851 edition of Notes and Queries entitled "The Bellman, and His History" in which he recaps the main themes of the poem and asks some intriguing questions regarding the tools and traditions of the Bellman trade. More recently Haan Estelle has taken up discussion of this poem in his essay “Metropolitan Identities: Perspectives on London.” However, Estelle incorrectly identifies the central character in the ode as a Watchman (rather than a Bellman) and is thus puzzled by its warm tone. Estelle notes that despite the Watchmen’s historical reputation for drunken and cowardly behaviour, the individual spotlighted in Bourne’s poem is curiously portrayed as genial, friendly, and respectable; this supposedly “odd” choice of poetic muse would certainly make more sense to Estelle if he were aware that Bourne was describing a Bellman of England. 9 Morris, Legends ‘O the Bells, 40. 10 Ibid. 11 Herrick, Hesperides, 95.

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The poet Samuel Rowlands offers an example of just such a religious prayer in an appendix to Heavens Glory, Seeke It entitled “The Common Cals, Cryes and Sounds of the Bell-man”; he includes this evening chant: All you which in your beds doe lye, Unto the Lord ye ought to cry, That he would pardon all your sinnes; And thus the Belmans prayer begins; Lord give us grace our sinful life to mend, And at the last to send a joyfull end: Having put out your fire and your light, For to conclude, I bid you all good night.12

Ranging in topic from goblins to God’s grace, the Bellmen’s chants demonstrate that, once the sun had set, Bellmen held themselves responsible for the physical and the spiritual safety of the larger community. This responsibility was, at times, extended beyond the sleeping parishioners to include those condemned to death. Bellmen often cried upcoming executions throughout the streets and, in some parishes, delivered a scripted verse to the condemned criminal on the evening before their execution. For example, in Hell upon Earth: Or the Most Pleasant and Delectable History of Whittington’s Colledge, otherwise (vulgarly) called Newgate, written in 1703 under the alias Tuus Inimicus (Latin for “your enemy”), the author reveals that “A Bell-Man, at dead of Night rings his Bell under Newgate, and then with a dismal Voice calls the condemn’d Persons to hear the following Speech”: All you that in the condemn’d Holds do lie, Prepare you, for to Morrow you shall die; Watch all and pray, the Hour’s drawing near, That you before th’ Almighty must appear: Examine well your selves, in time repent, That you may not t’eternal Flames be sent: And when St ‘Pulchre’s Bell to morrow, tolls The Lord above have Mercy on your Souls.13

12

This strange poetic appendix is attached to the main text without pagination or a clear pattern of symbols. The poems are simply arranged under nine separate headings; the aforementioned chant can be found under the final heading entitled “For Sunday.” 13 Inimicus, Hell upon Earth, 11. For an intriguing poetic response from a condemned prisoner, addressed to the Bellman himself, see the anonymously penned poem “His Verses in Answer to the Bell-man’s, the Night be-fore the

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Such verses not only informed the public of the upcoming spectacle of execution but also overtly encouraged prisoners to repent before God, and before the people, while they still had time. With the above examples in mind, it seems clear that the combined duties of the Bellmen of England imbued them with authority and responsibility and suggest that Bellmen would generally have been viewed with respect as figures of influence in political, religious, and local matters. This position of centrality and influence is reflected and reinforced in much early modern literature as the Bellman image and persona were regularly appropriated to bolster authoritative content, typically in texts that focus on warnings to the public. Bellmen were often figured forewarning the English people in ceremonial and religious documents and were particularly relied upon in tracts and broadsides produced for distribution to the masses. As Tessa Watt observes in Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640, “the bell-man became a stock character of godly print, portrayed in woodcuts with his lantern and bell, and his dog.”14 The Bellman figures centrally in the memento mori ballad tradition, a genre of ballads that promoted dwelling on death and mortality as a means to preserving a virtuous lifestyle and to preparing for the coming apocalypse. These ballads capitalize on the accessibility of the Execution” in The Tyburn Chronicle: Or, Villainy Display’d in all its Branches (56-57). This tradition is also highlighted in John Webster’s 1623 drama The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy in which the imprisoned Duchess is approached by the spy Bosola (disguised as Bellman) who states: “I am the common Bell-man/ That usually is sent to condemn’d persons/ The night before they suffer” (4.2). Bosola then recites a Bellman’s verse of reprimand and warning: Of what is't, fooles make such vaine keeping? Sin their conception, their birth, weeping: Their life, a generall mist of error, Their death, a hideous storme of terror, Strew your haire, with powders sweete: D'on cleane linnen, bath your feete, And (the foule feend more to checke) A crucifixe let blesse your necke, 'Tis now full tide, 'tweene night, and day, End your groane, and come away. Although the quality of this passage has likely been influenced by Webster’s talent, his reliance on the Bellman costume as a believable disguise for Bosola, a disguise that would grant him unsuspected entrance to the prison chamber, demonstrates the commonality of this practice. 14 Watt, Cheap Print 114.

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Bellman vocation in order to create an allegory for warning and death. For example, a seventeenth century broadside entitled England’s New Bellman: Ringing into all Peoples Ears Gods Dreadful Judgements against this Land and Kingdom juxtaposes an image of Christ, exposing the wounds of the crucifix and engulfed in a divine cloud, with an image of a Bellman complete with his iconic features (fig. 1).15 The text employs the Bellman figure as a trustworthy emblem of both authority and alarm, metaphorically awakening the apathetic London populace from their sinful slumber while proclaiming the imminence of Judgement Day. The similarity between the church bells that chimed to announce a death and the Bellman’s ringing announcement before and after executions and fatalities likely ensured the symbolic efficacy of the Bellman image. In this way Bellmen, conceived of as both voices of prudent warning and as harbingers of death, could symbolize both the possibility of death and Death itself.

15

The woodcuts featured in this one page religious pamphlet are the central focus of the document, dominating nearly half of the total page space. The author, place of publication, and publication date for this piece remain unknown, though the English Short Title Catalogue posits a suggested date of 1695.

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Figure 1. England’s New Bell-man. Reproduced by kind permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Shelf mark: EBB65H v.1.

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Yet the use of the Bellman character as an authoritative allegory was not limited to religious ballads and ephemera; many writers assumed a fictionalized Bellman persona, or adapted their writing to traditional Bellman oratory, in order to connote immediacy and alarm. For example, an anonymous seventeenth century author penned a political pamphlet entitled The British Bellman. Printed in the Year of the Saints Fear.16 This Royalist pamphlet takes on the oratorical language of the Bellmen, including the iconic introductory phrase “O yes, O yes” often uttered by Bellmen before calling out lost or found items. The author of this document assumes the “crying” of a Bellman in order to expose the vices that define any who might oppose the monarchy. Both the title and the rhetorical style of this pamphlet call on the symbolic weight of the Bellmen to connote trustworthiness as well as the authority to detect danger and to warn others of its destructive potential. In assuming the identity and expression of a Bellman the author assumes a language of immediacy and urgency that is intended to transform an otherwise effusive and overwrought sermon into both a scathing attack and a forceful, persuasive warning. The symbolic Bellman character was also used in parody, satire, and other documents of ridicule. For example, a seventeenth century author named “J.C.” produced an eight-page pamphlet entitled The Merry Bellman's Out-Cryes, or, The City's O Yes. Being a mad merry Ditty, both Pleasant and witty, to be cry'd in Prick-song Prose through Country and City which, as the title page informs, was “Printed in the Year of Bartledum Fair, 1655. When few honest men can Thrive.”17 The pamphlet echoes the Bellman’s pattern of crying things lost and found in order to generate flippant and ironic social commentaries; for example, among the many colourful things that are “missing” in England, this “Bellman” asks if anyone has seen a “Priest that is not Covetous,” “a Tailor that is no Thief,” “a cunning Bawde, that is not Diseased,” “a sly Hypocrite that would not be taken for the best Christian,” or “a Puritane that will not lie.”18 If readers come across such a person, they are advised to “bring speedy word to the Cryer” as such people are “hardly found/Within the 16

Beneath the title the words “Anno Domini, 1648” are printed in a script type suggesting an approximate date for the piece; however, the author and place of publication remain unknown. Multiple copies have survived and are available for viewing; see, for example, the Bodleian Library (Shelf mark: G. Pamph. 642). 17 Further publication details for this document remain unknown. The sole surviving copy, which has suffered some damage, is available for viewing at the Houghton Library, Harvard University (Shelf mark: 14475.15.75*) 18 J.C., The Merry Bell-man's Out-Cryes, 4.

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Circuit of Old Englands ground.”19 In this pamphlet the Bellman character is still being used to “warn” the public of danger and to expose “villainy”—the tradition has simply been subjected to the ironic and critical wit of an adept social observer. As the above examples make clear, the authority, duty, and insight associated with the figure of the Bellman were often called upon in early modern literature, engraining and propagating the iconic and symbolic merit of the Bellmen of England. The roles and responsibilities of these Bellmen, along with the numerous references to, and appropriations of, the character in early modern literature, suggest that they were trusted civil servants of moderately elevated status responsible for a diverse and esteemed spectrum of duties spanning the political, religious, ceremonial, and domestic spheres of early modern England. Their rich and varied history garnered them iconic status as worthy symbols for all things authoritative, declaratory, and watchful—an iconography that writers looking to gain added credence for their words were happy to adopt. That they were occasionally mocked does not mean that they were unimportant; to the contrary, the Bellmen’s impact on the social life of early modern Londoners was what made them subject to gentle ridicule. However, it was during the early modern period that information first leapt from the mouths of Bellmen to land squarely in the jaws of Gutenburg’s press. Consequently, as the use of print and the literacy of the common people increased the centrality and the social status of the Bellmen of England decreased. Thus, the relationship between the Bellmen and the printed word is a tense and complex one, and is deserving of further attention.

The Bellmen and the Printed Word That the communication revolution of the early modern period gradually endangered the “usefull custome” of the Bellmen tradition is hardly surprising; the Bellmen belonged to the world of orality, of shared experience, and of bodily immediacy where communication, hindered by illiteracy, often demanded physical proximity. However, as the previously illiterate public emerged as a reading public, and as the channels of communication underwent gradual revision, the experience of “community” was permanently transformed.20 As Elizabeth L. Eisenstein 19

Ibid. That the mounting pressure of the printed word gradually eroded experiences of familiarity, presence, and propinquity in social interaction has led some to suggest that this transformation resulted in regrettable losses to the human communal 20

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writes, although “bookshops, coffeehouses, and reading rooms provided new kinds of communal gathering places,” the traditional model of community was permanently outmoded by the advent of the printed message; print gradually severed and redistributed the bonds of community as “new forms of group identity began to compete with an older, more localized nexus of loyalties”—gradually, “communal solidarity was diminished.”21 Thus, during the early modern period the communal and external model of communication so familiar to the Bellman was gradually displaced by the private and internal model emphasized by print culture. Further, as the concept of community changed so too did the notion of the public; print allowed for private citizens to articulate competing public opinions and to engage, en mass, in a public discourse. Jürgen Habermas has famously argued that the late seventeenth century was a hinge moment in European history, that the social, technological, commercial, and institutional environment of the early modern period resulted in the birth of the “public sphere” forever altering the linear model of communication, beginning with governmental authority and ending with the common people, and favouring instead the creation of nebulous, seemingly independent public networks.22 Habermas suggests that such changes were complexly interwoven with the major economic and commercial shifts witnessed during this period arguing that the emergence of the “public sphere” relied on two newly amplified economic forces—namely, “the traffic of news” and “the traffic of commodities.”23 According to Habermas, these two features of the “public sphere” were inseparable; during this communication revolution “the press… developed a unique explosive power” and the “traffic in news developed not only in connection with the needs of commerce; the news itself became a experience. See, for example, Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy for a close discussion of the losses resulting from the rise of print. 21 Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution, 106-107. 22 It is important to note that the applicability of Habermas’ concepts to the English 17th century and the timing of and nature of the emergence of the “public sphere” itself are hotly debated issues. For example, in their introduction to the edited collection The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England Peter Lake and Steven Pincus note that since its inception into the theoretical canon of European studies the “public sphere” has been moving backwards in time. They go on to state that the term “public sphere” now appears frequently in discussions of the Restoration, the Interregnum, the Civil War, and the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. This collection brings together current arguments about Habermas and the early modern period and is highly recommended reading for those wishing to acquaint themselves with this ongoing debate. 23 Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 16.

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commodity.”24 The social and economic rearrangements and adjustments brought about by such a transformation were substantial and negatively affected many who were entrenched in or reliant on older modes of communication. As Habermas makes clear, the rise of the “new domain of the public sphere whose decisive mark was the published word” essentially overshadowed and undermined “the traditional domain of communication.”25 As professional oral communicators without a coveted commodity, and as servants of the community model, the Bellmen of England were especially vulnerable to these changes. Since immediate contact with their audience defined the work of the Bellmen, the environment bred by print culture, one less reliant on personal relationships and human presence, threatened to permanently outperform and outmode them. For example, in many major cities, the sixteenth century saw a transition in the announcement of governmental proclamations and statutes. As Adam Fox notes, “in cities such as York and Exeter… proclamations and statutes were already less likely to be announced in the streets by the ‘Bellman’ during the course of the sixteenth century and were posted up instead.” 26 Although the Bellmen’s role was not eliminated, these changes steadily eroded the prestige and centrality they once enjoyed. To elucidate the Bellmen’s devolution, I will turn to two early modern images, two “snapshots” of crucial phases in the Bellmen’s vocational trajectory. Both images focus on English street hawkers and street criers; however, the first image records the cultural climate during the late sixteenth century, while the second offers a similar record of the late seventeenth century. When juxtaposed, these images bookend roughly one-hundred years of dramatic revolution, demonstrating graphically both the incredible pressure placed on the oral tradition during the early modern period and the social and cultural restructuring that occurred due to the demands of print culture. Of course, in contrasting ways, both images offer a direct visual commentary on the centrality and status of the Bellman of England before and after the turbulent seventeenth century.

The Bellman Figure in the Early Cries of London The images discussed in this section are early representatives of the genre known as the Cries of London, a genre that focuses on the representation of English street hawkers and criers. The Cries series, 24

Ibid., 20, 21. Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 16. 26 Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 45. 25

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originating in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century and spanning four hundred years, stands as one the oldest traditions in British art.27 These images first appeared as broadsides, designed for ephemeral decoration, and thus few extant copies remain. Due to their simplicity, early versions of the Cries are often described in disparaging terms, as wanting rather than as charming or quaint. F.P. Wilson has gone so far as to suggest that the “scanty remains” of the early Cries prints hold little more than disappointment in store for historians due to their “crudity,” especially when compared to the work of “such notable craftsmen as Paul Sandby, Francis Wheatley and Thomas Rowlandson.”28 Those scholars that do focus on the early Cries often do so only to set the stage for a discussion of later prints; for example, Celina Fox quickly dismisses them, bluntly declaring that “[n]one of the early series was artistically outstanding and none possessed anything more than a generalized typology.”29 Sean Shesgreen, has conducted thorough analyses of many early Cries prints and offers much rich commentary in his work; however, Shesgreen echoes Fox’s sentiments as, for him, these images are “cold to human values;” they are methodical and taxonomic, displaying the street venders “not naturalistically and expressively...but scientifically, following the methods of natural history.”30 He argues that these images serve to separate and isolate the hawkers—idealizing and generalizing them while forcing them into a specific hierarchy and order. According to Shesgreen these images “code, classify, rationalize, and quantify the metropolitan scene” and are “early analogues to statistics.”31 Yet, although these prints do present a heavily filtered and superficially divided version of early modern street hawkers, they simultaneously connote unification and solidarity in that they make visible a marginal, and often overlooked, collective. The Bellman of London (fig. 2) stands as the original, prototypical Cries of London broadside; it is the great ancestor to the extensive, multigenerational progeny of Cries that populate four hundred years of

27

Shesgreen, The Criers and Hawkers of London, 12. Wilson, “Illustrations of Social Life,” 108. 29 Fox, Londoners, 157. 30 Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast, 27. 31 Ibid., 28. Although I disagree with some of Shesgreen’s suggestions regarding the prints analyzed in this section, I am heavily indebted to his keen eye and scholarly rigor. For his detailed description and interpretation of many of the early Cries prints see The Criers and Hawkers of London (especially pages 12-22) and Images of the Outcast (especially pages 19-36). 28

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British popular print production.32 Celina Fox dates this print at “about 1600” and correctly argues that it “would seem to be the earliest extant London series of cries.”33 Karen Beall, in her authoritative bibliography of London Cries, also locates this piece in the early seventeenth century.34 More specifically, C.P. Maurenbrecher has posited a suggested date of 1630 as the latest possible origin and Sean Shesgreen, admitting that “dating such cuts and attributing them to an artist or school are vexing, speculative ventures,” has suggested a tentative printing date as early as 1590— noting “stylistic ties to the workshop of Remegius and Franz Hogenberg.”35 The sheet is divided into thirty-six alcoves housing various sellers of items and services while a double panel in the center privileges the official Bellman of the city. The print is a curious combination of realistic and metaphoric styles, an odd combination given that early prints of vendors were usually completed “in either symbolic or naturalistic idioms.”36 The hawkers are depicted in authentic, simple dress, conveying their low social status; visual emphasis falls on their functional roles as the providers of goods and services, made explicit via the dramatic presentation of tools and trades and the inscription of a cry or slogan beneath each niche. These characters stand in exaggerated, dramatic poses, like statues or works of art, while the graceful arches and curved pillars, reinforce a classical artistic theme. Although these vendors are just that, men and women dependent on hawking their wares in order to survive, their poses suggest a dignity, autonomy, and charming individuality that seems to transcend their social limitations. However, the theatrical gestures of these hawkers and venders are not entirely metaphorical, as such showmanship was often literally employed to attract attention and to tempt passersby. Sean Shesgreen notes that such poses, used on the streets to increase sales, “were a new strategy in the late 1500s…designed to overshoot the intellect and strike the gaze…but also to assert opposition to authoritarian cultures of the printed word, the text and the contract.”37 Thus, the dramatic poses recorded in this print, like the actual street hawker’s postures that possibly

32

As this print is both anonymous and untitled, I have followed Shesgreen in naming the piece after the central character. 33 Fox, Londoners, 156. 34 Beall, Cries and Itinerant Trades, E4. 35 Maurenbrecher, Europaische Kaufrufe, 152; Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast, 20. 36 Shesgreen, The Criers and Hawkers of London, 15. 37 Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast, 28.

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Figure 2. The Bellman of London. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum Shelf mark: Hind III.367.81.

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inspired them, may also reveal the pressure felt by oral communicators to distance and distinguish themselves from the commerce of print culture. The Bellman, framed in a double panel of classical pillars, is imbued with a heightened sense of dramatic importance. The inverted spire directly above his head ensures that his centrality in both image and theme is noted. The characteristic halberd, lantern, and bell are posed and dramatized to highlight their symbolic connotations of guardianship, illumination, and proclamation. Even the Bellman’s loyal dog, a constant companion in most representations of the Bellman, bows to his confidence and authority. The Bellman himself is walking in a slight depression or valley, is depicted as somewhat larger than the other figures, and seems to step forward, as if on a course beyond the limitations of his space—all of which mark him as distinctive and of greater importance. He is the figure of authority; he is the voice of the print. Indeed, it is his words that grace the other double panel of the image, floating in a space void of the limitations of ground and sky. It reads: Mayds in Your Smocks. Looke Wel to your lock. Your fire And your light And god Give you good night. At One a clock.

Although they exist in an idealized space, isolated from one another by columns and arches, certain characters (such as the “water bearer” and the “Bear bayter”) intentionally violate their confines and suggest a continuity and connection between all of the traders represented. Although a cagelike grid has been superimposed on the figures, they exist on a single and unified plane, marked by the Bellman leader. While Shesgreen is right to suggest that “the first broadsheets of street criers… defined, surveyed, offered stereotypes of, and even idealized England’s footloose to make them intelligible and palatable,” from the start these images also present a strong sense of community.38 The Bellman of London (fig. 2), through purposeful placement, communicates the prominence and importance of a unified oral tradition.

38

Shesgreen, The Criers and Hawkers of London, 12.

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Figure 3. The Common Cryes of London. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum Shelf mark: Hind III.367.82.II.

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However, the challenges presented to this tradition due to the pressures of print culture, and the consequent destabilizing of the authority and purpose of the oral traditions primary figure, the Bellman of England, are well represented—through the very absence of the Bellman character—in another London Cries image entitled The Common Cryes of London (fig. 3). The exact date of production for this engraving, like the previous image discussed, is uncertain. Sean Shesgreen has suggested that “because it carries the name of John Overton (1640-1713) and the address of his print shop...this impression of the The Common Cryes appeared after 1667, the year that he moved to that address.”39 However, F.P. Wilson has suggested that the words “The Weekly Intelligence” inscribed above the bookseller figure may refer to “the London newspaper of that name first published in 1679” and suggests this date as the earliest possible origin (110). Despite these uncertain origins, it is clear that this print, representing a culture nearly a century changed since the production of the previous image, presents an entirely different city scene, one in which the hawkers’ characteristics have changed dramatically. Rather than posing majestically, these street vendors seem ignorant of the surrounding architectural space and are consumed by their objectives. The unified directionality of their focused gazes, as well as their generic, profiled positioning, connotes an assembly line of workers rather than a series of distinct and important members of a specific community. The purposeful and hurried men are reduced to single-file lines, burdened by their work and crushed under the weight of obligation, and the women move with such hast that their clothes flutter after them. The portrayal of commodities has also transformed dramatically. In The Bellman of London the processes of sale and consumption are represented through a primary focus on the figure, the person; the commodity being “hawked” is posed within a unique human showcase and is presented in relation to a diverse community of other individuals. The Common Cryes of London, however, focuses much more readily on the commodities themselves; these characters are isolated, stripped of character, and removed from any communal or social context. The men are now separated from the women and the goods and services offered are now disproportionate to the individuals who wield them. For example, the seller of “glaffes” would easily fit inside her basket, the seller of “brumes” carries a stack of merchandise larger than his body, and the seller of “turneps” offers gargantuan globes larger than her head.

39

Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast, 21.

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The sheer volume of material and products carried by individual hawkers has also been radically altered in the later image. For example, the seller of “fyne brushes” in The Bellman of London saunters along carrying only three items for sale, with one brush in each hand and one tucked neatly under his left arm; the seller of “brumes” in The Common Cryes, on the other hand, is burdened by two brooms in his right hand, a large cluster of materials in his left, at least six brooms strapped over his stooping back, as well as a large sack of supplies hanging from his left shoulder. Even the transcribed cries associated with each hawker have been altered; the quaint and charming cries of “Buy any Shrimps?” or “New Cod New!” have been replaced by simplistic labels without human inflection such as “Herrings” or “Mackrill.” These crude identifying marks suggest that the voice of the figure has been silence, gagged by a curt label that ignores his or her presence and channels attention directly toward the commodity. There are no breaches in the segmentation of the characters, no playfulness in their portrayals—enjoyment, humour, and celebratory unity are entirely absent in this image. Indeed, the mechanical efficiency of The Common Cryes suggests a prophetic portrayal of the industrial revolution. The joyless, isolated depiction of the hawkers and vendors, as well as the hyper-focalized, impractical nature of the depicted products, betrays the presence of a much-amplified capitalist spirit in which commodity rules over identity and profit rules over community.40 Thus, the change in collective identity and the loss of a sense of localized loyalty evident in this image, especially when compared to The Bellman of London, is the result of over a century of radical social change. These workers now belong to a different collective, one that is defined by the forces of capitalism and commodity. In light of these developments, it is no surprise that The Common Cryes of London centralizes the bookseller, the embodiment of the new order of print, standing in direct opposition to the hawkers and vendors while attempting to persuade passersby to “buy a new booke.” This bookseller is the symbolic usurper of the Bellman’s position; his influence over his society is connoted by the landscape added solely to his double panel. In addition to the bookseller figure’s personal marketing broadcast, the subtitled caption also contains a promotional message as it informs that the image is “printed and sold” by John Overton at his print shop at the 40

Interestingly, as Celina Fox has noted, later prints in The Cries of London genre return to the artistic, charming, and individualized illustrative style exemplified by The Bellman of London (fig. 1); Fox suggests that a return to this classic style may have been driven by a growing nostalgia for pre-industrial London.

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“sign of the White Horse.” Thus, the image is at once a pictorial decoration fit for consumption and an advertisement meant to promote further spending; this capitalist duality is presented centrally.41 The difference in the representation of the street vendors and hawkers in this late seventeenth century piece is thus indicative of a complex mutually-dependant relationship between textual production and commodity culture and points to the emerging period of the “public sphere.” Yet the most striking differences between the two images, the oppression of the street hawkers and the complete omission of the Bellman figure, point to a further caveat in Habermas’s analysis of this period; he warns that the era of the “public sphere” was ushered in and supported by a new and powerful collective identity, the “new stratum of ‘bourgeois’ people… which occupied a central position within the ‘public’” and that the rise of this new class had a profoundly negative effect on “the old occupational orders” who gradually suffered “downward social mobility”; these negatively affected “occupational orders” were largely made up of those vocations that were historically central to the newly threatened oral tradition.42 The Common Cryes of London thus exemplifies the widespread economic and social change of late seventeenth century England, characterized by both the advancement of capitalist intent and the reorganization of the social hierarchy. In this later image, all information, the prized commodity of the “public sphere,” is forcefully connected to the printed word: both the print itself, and all kinds of other useful information in the form of new “bookes,” can only be obtained from “John Overton” at his print shop. When one considers that the dissemination of information was the central responsibility of the historical Bellmen, his absence from the image makes sense—by the late 17th century, it was primarily print that communicated publicly what was once the domain of the Bellmen. Thus, the birth of the “public sphere,” characterized by the free exchange of printed information and ideas in public space, appears to have seriously endangered one of the oldest and most respected communicative traditions. 41

In Images of the Outcast, Shesgreen suggests that this print should be recognized as “one of the earliest examples of printed advertising in England,” noting that although this sheet is “primitive and unfocused beside today’s target marketing” it nonetheless contains “a genuine nugget of publicity” (32). Shesgreen is thus pointing to this broadsheet as an early player in the fields of commoditization and consumerism. It should be noted that much of the later seventeenth century printed productions in England, including those produced by the Bellmen, attempt to incorporate similar, simplistic selling strategies. 42 Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 23.

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Although juxtaposing The Bellman of London (fig. 2) with The Common Cryes of London (fig.3) may initially appear to validate a dichotomous model of oral and literate culture, a final development in the history of the Bellmen will serve to complicate such a model. Fascinatingly, despite the advent of the printing press and the spread of literacy across early modern England, the Bellmen quickly adapted their verbal abilities in the face of impending obsolescence and determinedly injected their oral lineage into the realm of the printed and the visual. Capitalizing on their iconic status as hubs of authoritative information and as venerable civil servants, the Bellmen produced their own unique materials for print, sale, and consumption.

The Bellmen’s Ballads Street ballads were the fodder of the lower-classes; they were practical, straightforward documents, often serving as the earliest of introductions to the printed word, and were disconnected from the esoteric realm of high literacy. They were simple in both form and content and were ever careful to “involve no psychological block in relation to printed texts, no claims on the intellect, and no contact with the unfamiliar.”43 The ballad form thus offered the Bellmen of England an accessible means of communication, a direct line to their target audience, and a convenient method for bolstering their recently threatened visibility in an increasingly segregated environment. Thus, beginning in the latter half of the seventeenth century, during specific holidays, usually Christmas or New Years, Bellmen across England began collaborating directly with print shops in order to broadcast their own ballads to the local townsfolk.44 These ballads were presented to nearby residents as tokens of appreciation and respect; however, they also served to remind the people of the Bellman’s efforts, and of his delight in serving the community, while encouraging a reciprocal gesture of recognition in the form of monies or a small “Christmas box.” The Bellmen’s seasonal timing likely aided the success of this latter motivation and, based on the multiple extant copies of these ballads, copies that span centuries, it seems that the Bellmen’s efforts were usually rewarded.45 Yet, the Bellmen’s ballads contain much more than mere solicitation. 43

Wurzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 17. Mackarill, “A History of Bellman’s Verses,” 16-17. Also, Hindley, A History of the Cries of London, 51. 45 Diana R. Mackarill suggests that the earliest extant Bellmen’s ballad was produced in 1666. She is likely referring to the ballad by Thomas Law, Bellman of “St Giles Cripplegate, within the freedom” available for viewing at the British 44

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The design and content of the Bellmen’s ballads ventures on formulaic as most of these ballads share four distinct features: rhetorically similar titles introducing the name of the Bellman and his specific parish, a large, crude woodcut image of the Bellman in his vocational attire, three columns of poetry covering a narrow topical range, and a poetic prologue and epilogue section featuring first person commentary from the Bellman himself. Although this consistency might be read as reflecting the limited scope of the Bellman vocation, such uniformity may actually reveal deliberate orchestration, and carefully calculated motivation, on the part of the Bellmen. Given that the Bellmen of this period were facing the mounting pressures of print culture, and the gradual erosion of their duties and purpose, it seems safe to assume that these ballads were knowingly and cautiously crafted. Further, it is likely that these ballads not only allude to the vocational anxiety experienced by Bellmen during this period but address, and even attempt to compensate for, this anxiety. As the standing and necessity of the traditional Bellman began to fade, such ballads may have offered Bellmen the chance to execute a subtle cultural counterattack, a means to focus attention on both their iconic history and their relevance in early modern English society. A closer examination of the iconic attributes of the Bellmen’s ballads will aid in untangling the complex motivations behind these deceptively simple texts. The four aforementioned features of a typical Bellmen’s ballad—the introductory title, the woodcut image, the poetry, and the epilogue and prologue sections—are well illustrated in “A Copy of Verses Presented...By Andrew Maxsey Belman” (fig. 4), a representative example printed in the year 1680 for the Bellman of the “parish of Lambeth.” This ballad will stand as a useful model through which to examine the characteristics and consequent implications of the Bellmen’s ballad tradition. The introductory title of this piece follows the mechanics of most, beginning with “A Copy of Verses” followed by the first and last name of the Bellman and his respective parish. These titles serve to identify the parties involved, but also forge a link between the Bellman and the township he serves that foregrounds sociability and rapport. By offering his personal name, rather than just his formal title (such as “Bellman of Lambeth”), the Bellman humanizes himself and encourages his audience to see an individual, rather than a uniform. At the same time, in centralizing the name of the parish, the Bellman hails a specific audience, Library (Shelf mark: Lutt.II.110). This genre went on to flourish well into the nineteenth century. See Mackarill’s article for a discussion of Bellmen’s ballads in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; see also Figure 6.

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Figure 4. A Copy of Verses Presented...By Andrew Maxsey Belman. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Shelf mark: Ashm. 1094. (46).

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encouraging each individual to identify as a member of a larger community, and as a participant in, or “worthy master or mistress” of, his or her community. By reminding each householder of their communal civic arrangement, the Bellmen ballads effectively emphasize membership in, and even loyalty to, the larger community and the necessary existence of the public servants who humbly safeguard the members of that community. This focus on the care and protection of the township is furthered by the stock image that grounds the introductory title, featuring a poised Bellman standing tall in the evening streets. The crude woodcut of the Bellman, complete with his vocational tools and his canine companion, is a standard feature of the ballads from the latter half of the seventeenth century onward. As Diana R. Mackarill notes, the constancy of the woodcut images across several centuries of ballad production suggests an attempt, on the part of the Bellmen, to “retain a traditional figure.”46 This “traditional” or iconic image of the Bellman, as many of the previously discussed prints demonstrate, predates the Bellman ballads, having flourished across a variety of early modern print genres in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Thus, the constancy of the Bellman woodcut can be read as an attempt to synchronize the actual Bellmen with a traditional, figural, and culturally entrenched identity, a convenient and potent iconography.47 However, the symbolic potential of the Bellman woodcut extends beyond an appeal to history, literature, and tradition. In addition to the Bellman figure himself, the woodcuts always depict the same supplemental elements in roughly the same fashion: these include a lantern, a halberd, a large bell, and a smirking dog. Depicting these tools is, in itself, not unusual, as a lantern would have been necessary for the nocturnal nature of some of the Bellman’s duties, a halberd would have 46

MacKarill, “A History of Bellman’s Verses,” 26. Of course the continual reuse of these images is also a matter of practicality as the woodblocks used in cheap print were rarely designed for a specific document; indeed, the images used to supplement ballad text often bear no relation to the content or theme of the ballad itself. However, as I hope I’ve made clear, the history of the Bellmen’s ballads is more complex than a utilitarian understanding of woodcuts can account for. Firstly, the full spectrum of iconic attributes are present in the majority of woodblocks that depict Bellmen across a spectrum of literary genres—this speaks to the existence of a specific iconography. Secondly, the particular elements in the illustrations remain constant across centuries, seriously undermining any claim that the images used in Bellmen’s ballads were the result of necessity or limitation rather than careful planning and selection.

47

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been essential for providing both stability and protection, a bell, as the loudest alarm known to man at the time, would have been an ideal supplement to a lusty voice, and a dog no doubt offered appreciated companionship, and an added set of keen eyes, to help the long nights pass safely. 48 Yet, because these specific features were represented so religiously, and across such impressive spans of time, their deliberate appeal to symbolism is as obvious as their ancient functions. The lantern was likely meant to imply more than a literal source of light— metaphorically, it is analogous to an idealized version of the Bellman himself, for he is a light in darkness, he is guidance, direction, and comfort when faced with the terrors of the night. Likewise, the illustrated Bellman does not merely carry a bell, but embodies its function as a declarer, a proclaimer, a voice to be heard, while the halberd or staff conjures his authority, his prowess, and his right to wield the weight of civil discipline. As the one attribute not essential to the Bellmen vocation, it is the recurrence of the dog image that most strongly suggests an interest in symbolic osmosis. The canine companion is often positioned in perfect pictorial balance to the central figure, functioning as a graphic counterweight to the Bellman himself and forcing a parallel between the two characters. The rhetorical benefits of this association are obvious even to a modern audience as, at least from the medieval period onward, the canine image has been used to evoke a specific and affable set of qualities, including vigilance, bravery, usefulness and faithfulness.49 These connotations correspond well with the Bellman’s potential interest in developing or maintaining a similar reputation while anxiously reassuring a forgetful audience of his diverse abilities. The poetry featured in the ballads, presented in compact type arranged in three spaced columns, skillfully inscribes the traditional duties and services of the Bellmen while subtly reminding readers of their natural affability. Andrew Maxsey’s ballad offers a number of poetic quips on the usual subjects, ranging in topic from politics, the weather, and coming holidays to the safety of travellers and the salvation of souls. Although such topics may appear trite, they serve an important rhetorical role in effectively echoing the responsibilities of the traditional Bellman. Indeed, 48 As Bruce R. Smith notes in The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, the sound of a bell ringing ranks among the three loudest sounds that a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century listener might encounter, the others being “thunder” and “cannon-fire”(49). 49 Werness, Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism, 139. For an amusing alternative reading of canine symbolism in Medieval and Renaissance art see Cohen’s Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art, especially pages 79-81.

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the discussion of politics, weather, holidays, and spiritual salvation bear striking categorical resemblance to the Bellman’s historical job description (proclaiming minor legislation, declaring the time and the weather, and chanting evening prayers, for example). Because the quality of the Bellmen’s poetry ranges from childlike rhyme and vocabulary to only moderately complex form and language, it has often been overlooked, even insulted, by historians. The Bellmen’s verses have been described as “miserable doggerel,” as slovenly poetry of “execrable character,” and as drivel that expresses “little more than obsequiousness and sentimentality.”50 Indeed, to suggest that another’s work is written in “the style of a bellman” has been considered a proverbial insult for centuries.51 Yet such criticism neglects the Bellmen’s history and the cultural context in which these cantos were presented; the simple, easily memorized verses are descendants of the Bellmen’s traditional religious and ceremonial street broadcasts—they are occupationally specific and oral in nature. Indeed, the distinctly oral underpinnings of Bellman rhyme likely smoothed the Bellmen’s turn to the ballad form since ballad publication and the oral tradition were well recognized bedfellows during the early modern period. Tessa Watt describes the creation of most ballads as a “repackaging of ‘traditional’ culture” totally reliant on the writers’ skill in “gathering songs and stories from oral sources, converting them into suitable print form, and sending them off across the countryside to a new and wider public.”52 Clearly the Bellman, as a traditional figure of orality, and as the rightful voice behind an artistically limited but charming collection of poetic blessings, warnings, and civil proclamations, makes for an ideal participant in this “repackaging” process.53 Yet, unlike many of the Bellmen’s oral proclamations, which involved nearly simultaneous composition and presentation, the ballad form also offered Bellmen the 50

Christmas with the Poets, 71; Hindley, 51; Rickards, “Bellman’s verses,” 46. Pancoast, Standard English Prose, 382. Also, Hindley, A History of the Cries, 51-52. 52 Watt, “Publisher, Pedlar, Pot-poet,” 73. 53 It is worth nothing that the print-bound rhymes of England’s oral tradition were reluctant prisoners; as Robert S. Thomson’s work successfully argues, the contents of these ballads—printed, read, and recited from generation to generation— survive today as the common “folksongs” of England. Thus, although oral culture was certainly funnelled through the printing press, the contents of many printed works found renewed vigour, and an enduring audience, in the gossip, rumours, and rhyme of oral culture. See Thomson, Robert S. “The Development of the Broadside Ballad” for further discussion. 51

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opportunity to dwell on their creations, to purposefully shape and arrange their content in order to hone a specific message.54 Given the aforementioned social and cultural upheaval facing the early modern Bellman, it is not surprising that the ballads are predominantly focused, both textually and graphically, on advertising the iconic role of the Bellman himself, carefully projecting a traditional figure of humility and loyalty. However, as the prologue and epilogue sections of these ballads often make clear, the Bellmen were also focused on promoting their role within the community as one of importance and, above all, necessity. These small bookend sections, superficially featuring first person accounts of the Bellman’s experiences and good wishes, accomplish the task of selfpromotion by calling on rhetoric of courage, bravery, and protective heroism.55 In “A Copy of Verses Presented...By Andrew Maxsey Belman” (fig. 4), Maxsey presents his vocation as central to maintaining the safety of the parish; in the opening lines of the prologue he casts himself as a heroic, nearly superhuman civil servant declaring, “What dangers of the night do then pursue/Behold here comes your Servant Andrew!” Maxsey here suggests that he is all that stands between the treacherous forces of the night, and the helpless, slumbering parishioners. This theme of heroism is mirrored by one of pious guardianship, expressed most clearly in the final poem of the ballad entitled “The Belman’s Care”:

54

The ballad form also had another distinct advantage over the Bellmen’s usual mode of communication—namely, contemporary and historical fixity. The ballads could be returned to again and again by their readers, effectively searing the Bellman personage into the memories of the reading public. This same notion of tangibility and fixity ensured that the Bellman was also engrained into the larger, collective, communal memory as their ballads now had the potential to survive time and to live on as static monuments. 55 These first person accounts, usually focused on bravery and knowledge of the criminal underworld soon developed into more broad claims to sagacity. For example, in 1681 Thomas Priest, Bellman for the parish of “Cripplegate without, and within the freedom” secured Maxsey’s printer, H. Brugis, to print his own ballad. However, in addition to the usual celebratory poetry, he included two unique sections—“The Bellman’s Good Counsel” and “The Belmans Advice.” These two new segments, indicative of a need to assert both importance and wisdom, introduced a strong didactic element to the Bellmen’s ballad form, a trend that would gain momentum as the genre’s popularity spread. The aforementioned ballad is available for viewing at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Shelf mark: Firth b.20 (f.91))

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Revising Reputations Kind sirs my duty I am free to do And it is in hopes thereby to please you Walking about and ringing of this my Bell And finding that all things are safe and well Then turn again to rest and soundly sleep And God I hope will you in safety keep.

Maxsey then concludes his ballad with an epilogue of warning to the underworld of Lambeth: “For all grand Rogues and Thieves I do defie/And rather than ile see you wrong’d ile dye.” It is no coincidence that Maxsey’s prose centralizes the most dramatic and most frightening aspect of his civil duties; his insistence that he is the enemy of all “grand Rogues and Thieves” reveals a deliberate and transparent persuasive strategy, an effort to project a laudable, respectable, irreplaceable image. By shifting focus away from his vocational foundation as a public orator and toward his role as a nocturnal protector and guardian, Maxsey, like other Bellmen of the period, builds a case for his own necessity. Mirroring the synchronization of the stock Bellman woodcut with the “traditional” or iconic Bellman image, Maxsey’s idealized self-depiction can be read as an attempt to align the actual Bellman with a larger cultural narrative. Maxsey’s insistence that he stands as a valiant and indispensable public servant echoes the theatrical gestures of “rogue-books,” a genre of early modern literature focused on crime fighting and the criminal underworld. In fact, one of the first early modern texts to centralize the Bellman figure was just such a book, Thomas Dekker’s The Belman of London: Bringing to Light the most Notorious Villanies that are now Practised in the Kingdome (fig. 5). First printed in1608 this book proved remarkably popular and was twice reprinted in its first year of publication. Indeed, before the first print year had ended Dekker had produced and published a sequel entitled Lanthorn and Candlelight, or the Bellman’s second Night’s-walk. In which He Brings to light a Brood of more strange Villanies than ever were till this year discovered. Various later editions of both texts were printed up to 1648. The earlier book, a 38 page exposition on street knowledge, identifies 1608 as the apex of a dark age of criminality and presents the Bellman as a figure of morality, exposing and documenting the criminal underworld of London. An odd combination of romantic narrative and pseudo-sociology, the first half of the text follows the narrator as he investigates and observes a secret gathering of villains and rogues while the second half houses the Bellman’s explanations and definitions of a variety of evildoers. The sequel to this text, Lanthorn and Candlelight, features a more religious plot as it pits the congenial and ethical Bellman against the Devil and his messenger (who are presented

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Figure 5. Frontispiece for Thomas Dekker’s The Belman of London. Reproduced by kind permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Shelf mark: STC 6480.5.

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together as the clandestine leaders of all rogues and villains).56 Both of these so-called “rogue-books” include lists of a number of “villain” prototypes common in the streets of London, such as the “Prigger of Prancers” (a horse thief) and the “Wilde Rogue” (a violent thrill seeker), with the goal of educating London’s citizens on the nature of the villains living in the city as well as how to recognize and evade them.as how to recognize and evade them. Though in these works Dekker uses the Bellman as a fabricated persona through which to safely criticize his contemporaries and his culture, his choice of screen character is telling; Dekker’s Bellman cunningly infiltrates the underworld, demonstrating bravery and loyalty to his people, while simultaneously decrying the Devil and safeguarding religious faith. It is evident that Dekker was aware of the engrained symbolic heritage of the Bellmen of England, relying on their iconic status as connected and aware watchdogs in order to garner a sense of validity and authority for his discussion of the criminal underworld. Dekker calls on the symbolic potential of the Bellman figure from the fore; for example, The Belman of London begins with this transparently symbolic, theatrical introduction: In the night therefore hath hee stolen foorth, and with the help of his Lanthorne and Candle (by which is figured circumspection) hath he brought to light, that broode of mischiefe, which is ingendered in the wombe of darkenesse [...] I devote my life to the safety of my Countrie, in defending her from these Serpents: I will waste out mine eies with my candles, and watch from midnight till the rysing up of the morning: my Bell shall ever be ringing, and that faithfull servant of mine (the Dog that follows me) be ever biting of these wilde beastes.57

Dekker’s use of Bellman symbolism moves beyond the well-known connotations of warning, knowledge, insight, and trustworthiness; he articulates clearly a vision of the Bellman as hero. The similarities between Dekker’s introduction and Maxsey’s prologue and epilogue are clear—both present a hero who rushes through the night fearlessly defending the people from “grand Rogues and Thieves,” snaky, mischievous criminals, and all such creatures “ingendered in the wombe of darkenesse.” Dekker’s work certainly offers a useful template for what an idealized Bellman looks and acts like, and it is this template, set out in the rogue adventures of a fictional Bellman, that real Bellmen later revived in 56

For a detailed discussion of Dekker’s Bellman-themed publications see Hunt’s Thomas Dekker: A Study, especially pages 135-139. 57 Dekker, The Belman of London, A2.

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their anxious self-marketing campaigns. Like Dekker, the mid-seventeenth century Bellmen likely realized that the newly-literate masses were drawn to familiar heroes, and that it was through the power of print that such heroes came into being. The work of Thomas Dekker, like the numerous other literary appropriations of the Bellman image and persona examined above, demonstrates that the relationship between the Bellmen of England and their numerous print doppelgangers was mutually enriching. Although, in the Bellman figure, writers found a convenient and accessible character, the Bellmen too had much to gain from the propagation, circulation, and even exaggeration of their traditional roles and responsibilities and of their cultural value. Thus, the Bellmen’s ballads reveal not only the Bellmen’s ability to adapt their vocational abilities to a changing society, but also their skill in capitalizing upon an iconography and identity created for them through the intermingling of their occupational history with their function as literary figures. In effect, the Bellmen created a product that, on the surface, seems geared toward simple solicitation but that, on closer inspection, contains a full range of skillfully incorporated rhetorical strategies. From the title and woodcut image through to the simplistic poetry, the prologue, and the epilogue, these ballads artfully create an idealized space in which the Bellman figure is honoured as a traditional figure of trust, sanctity, and civic authority and revered as a modern hero of unparalleled, selfless bravery. In both ways these ballads present Bellmen who are active and essential. Although the Bellmen’s ballads were presented under the superficial guise of gaining a small fiscal reward, it is evident that the true motivations for their production and distribution were more complex. Noting the satirical and critical asides directed toward the street cries of Bellmen throughout early modern literature (especially regarding the annoyance of their nocturnal proclamations), Diana MacKarill has suggested that Bellmen produced these ballads in an effort to counter such complaints and “redress the balance in their favour.”58 Though MacKarill is certainly correct in suggesting that the Bellmen’s ballads were motivated by both economic and cultural pressures, she underestimates the scope of the latter motivation. Clearly, the downward social mobility experienced by Bellmen in the era of print moved these men to not only explore new avenues of income, but to fabricate a rhetorically impressive, culturally infused product that increased their public visibility, circulated a favourable public image, and defended their claims to authority and cultural capital. 58

MacKarill, “A History of Bellman’s Verses,” 17, 18.

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Figure 6. A Copy of Verses...Presented by Edward Heddington, Reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum. Shelf mark AN433337001.

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As the multiple extant copies of the ballads suggest, the Bellmen’s efforts were rewarded. The success of the Bellmen’s efforts is highlighted in “A Copy of Verses...Presented by Edward Heddington” (fig. 6), a ballad from “the Parish of Christ-Church, in the County of Surrey” dated 1792. This ballad, demonstrating the culmination of over a century’s worth of revision and decorative infusion, carefully preserves the ancient design formula including a depiction of the symbolic Bellman complete with his bell, lantern, halberd, and canine companion. It is fair to conclude then, that what the Bellmen lost in prestige and centrality they gained in a new, lucrative, and long-lasting method for engaging and sustaining their communities.

Revising Reputations This examination of the Bellmen of early modern England has covered three main points of inquiry: an explication and rectification of the Bellmen’s roles, responsibilities, and cultural influences, a graphic analysis of the devolution of the Bellmen during the printing revolution, and a discussion of the Bellmen’s response to this revolution in the form of the Bellmen’s ballads. The first of these initiatives makes clear that the Bellmen were initially prominent characters in the early modern period, that they functioned as a kind of civil, communal bridge, mediating the divide between individual people and the community: they were leaders of the masses, captains of the street hawkers and vendors, and protectors of the laypeople. Their duties ranged from the domestic to the governmental, from the ceremonial to the religious, the spiritual, and the sacred. However, with the advent of print, the scope of these responsibilities was gradually diminished as the community model of English living underwent a revolutionary and permanent transformation. As the two contrasting London Cries broadsides graphically demonstrate, by the midseventeenth century the oral tradition and the Bellmen’s centrality had both been heavily eroded. Yet, as the other ephemera and literature discussed above illustrate, while the importance of the actual Bellman declined over the early modern period, the image of the Bellman persisted, and indeed became an icon of orality in the age of print. It was this iconography, situated firmly in the idealized, traditional Bellman image, which the anxious early modern Bellmen recognized and mobilized in their self-preservation efforts. Reacting not only to their impending obsolescence but also to the mounting influence of commoditization and print advertising, the socially attuned Bellmen of England fervently produced a unique genre of entertaining, instructional, and persuasive

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ballads. The Bellmen’s ballads demonstrate the ingenuity and insight of the early modern Bellmen, artfully intertwining the Bellmen’s responses to daunting social, cultural, and economic threats; these ballads attempt to address and reconnect a dispersed audience, to establish positive rapport between the Bellmen and their people, to increase the Bellman’s social visibility, to further entrench the traditional value of the Bellman vocation, and to cast the Bellman as a modern hero, all while securing financial aid. Although the Bellmen of England are central characters in what Habermas calls “the traditional domain of communication,” a domain supposedly supplanted by print culture and the “public sphere,” their struggle to counter such revolutions, and their success in adapting to social change by repurposing their oral heritage and their iconic history, complicates this simplistic model of cultural transformation. The case of the Bellmen demonstrates graphically the rerouting of culturally significant and historically resilient elements of the oral tradition and the literature of the Bellmen, the Bellmen ballads, marks an early compromise and mutual enrichment between the oral and the literary. Thus, as acclimatized relics of the oral tradition, alive and well throughout the early modern period, the Bellmen of England immediately explode a binary model in which orality is supplanted by literacy. Consequently, instead of decrying the oral tradition as an ancient and archaic inferiority we can begin to perceive more clearly its complex coexistence with literature and the printed word in early modern England; instead of a Great Divide between oral and literate culture it is clear that the two often overlapped, interacted, and, at times, even merged. Thus, any historian of orality or literacy must recognize that a more representative and accurate understanding of the early modern period can be constructed by examining how print culture, and the advent of the “public sphere,” can be said to have marginalized, modified, or integrated (rather than appropriated or eliminated) the oral tradition.

Bibliography Amodio, Mark C. Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Beall, Karen. Cries and Itinerant Trades. Hamburg: Dr. Ernst Hauswedell & Co, 1975. Bourne, Vincent. Miscellaneous Poems: Consisting of Originals and Translations. London: W. Ginger, 1772.

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Christmas with the Poets, ed. Henry Vizetelly and Miles Birket Foster. London: David Bogue, 1851. Cohen, Simona. Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Cressy, David. Society and Culture in Early Modern England. Cornwall: Ashgate, 2003. Dekker, Thomas. The Belman of London: Bringing to Light the most Notorious Villanies that are now Practised in the Kingdome. London: [E. Allde?], 1608. Elliott, Blanche B. A History of English Advertising. London: BP Limited, 1962. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Estelle, Haan. “Metropolitan Identities : Perspectives on London.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 97 (2007): 77-112. Fox, Adam. Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Fox, Celina. Londoners. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987. Fuller, Thomas. The History of the Worthies of England who for Parts and Learning have been Eminent in the Several Counties. London: J.G.W.L. and W.G., 1662. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. Thomas Burger. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1989. Herrick, Robert. Hesperides or Works both Human and Divine of Robert Herrick. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1887. Hindley, Charles. A History of the Cries of London, 2nd ed. London: Charles Hindley, 1884. Hunt, Mary Leland. Thomas Dekker: A Study. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964. Inimicus, Tuus [pseud.]. Hell upon Earth: Or the Most Pleasant and Delectable History of Whittington’s Colledge, otherwise (vulgarly) called Newgate. London: 1703. Lake, Peter and Steven Pincus. The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. MacKarill, Diana R., “A History of Bellman’s Verses,” Journal of the Printing Historical Society 26 (1997). Maurenbrecher, C.P. Europaische Kaufrufe. Dortmund: Harenberg Kommunikation, 1980. Morris, Ernest. Legends ‘O the Bell. London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1935. Mingay, G. E. Georgian London. London: B. T. Batsford, 1975.

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Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. London: Methuen, 1982. Pancoast, Henry Spackman. Standard English Prose. New York: T. Holt and Company, 1902. Pepys, Samuel. Passages from the Diary of Samuel Pepys. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921. Presbrey, Frank. The History and Development of Advertising. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968. Rickards, Maurice. The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Curator and Historian. New York: Routledge, 2000. Rowlands, Samuel. “The Common Cals, Cryes and Sounds of the Bellman.” Heavens Glory, Seeke It. London: Michaell Sparke, 1628. Sampson, Henry. A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times. London: Chatto and Windus, 1874. Shesgreen, Sean. Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002. —. The Criers and Hawkers of London. California: Stanford University Press, 1990. Thomas, Keith. “The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England.” The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. Ed. Gerd Baumann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Thomson, Robert S. “The Development of the Broadside Ballad Trade and Its Influence Upon The Transmission of English Folksongs.” Ph.D. diss. Queens’ College: Cambridge, 1974. T., F.W. "The Bellman, and His History." Notes and Queries, vol. 3. 78 (1851): 324-325. The Tyburn Chronicle: Or, Villainy Display’d in all its Branches. London: J. Cooke, 1768. Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. —. “Publisher, pedlar, pot-poet: The changing character of the broadside trade, 1550-1640.” Spreading the Word: The Distribution Networks of Print 1550-1850. Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 1998. Webster, John. The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy As it was Presented Privatly, at the Black-Friers; and Publiquely at the Globe, by the Kings Majesties Servants. The Perfect and Exact Coppy, with Diverse things Printed, that the Length of the Play would not Beare in the Presentment. London: Nicholas Okes, 1623. Werness, Hope B. The Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in Art. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004.

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Wilson, F.P. “Illustrations of Social Life III: Street Cries.” Shakespeare Survey 13 (1960): 108-117. Wurzbach, Natascha. The Rise of the English Street Ballad 1550-1650. Trans. Gayna Walls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

FROM OPTIMISM TO ENNUI: THE CHANGING DEPICTION OF THE BUSINESSMAN IN AMERICAN FICTION OF THE 1960’S AND 1970’S DAVID SIMMONS

In The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Heller to Vonnegut (2008) I examine the changing depiction of the entrepreneurial figure in selected novels of the 1960s. During the nineteenth century figures such as Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Hearst were idolized by large sectors of the population, as Harold Lubin suggests in Heroes and Anti-Heroes (1968): “Countless inspirational portraits of the ‘captains of industry’ . . . appeared in magazines and newspapers. Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford, among others, fired the imagination of countless young people.”(306) In an America in which production occupied such a central position, individuals such as Rockefeller and Hearst became important icons within the social assemblage, as the literal embodiment of what was classified as the “success myth.”This modern day mythology quickly entered popular discourse, taking on a moral element when it appeared in fiction, as Richard Weiss notes: “when the notion of the self-made man began to gain broad currency . . . writers explicitly linked virtue with success and sin with failure.”(5) I argue that during the immediate postwar period authors utilise the widely recognised ideological significations of the entrepreneurial figure and the “success myth” in order expose them as falsehoods and suggest that a more democratic reformulation of society is needed: “The realization of the entrepreneurial figure as a fiction means that where once it functioned as a model of aspiration for all, it now became a scapegoat for increasing disillusionment concerning the stratification of American society.” (56) In the monograph I note that this realization is, in part, engendered by a wider re-evaluation of the inherent contradictions within American individualist ideology in the period following the Second World War reflected in a series of major sociological works that include C. Wright

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Mills’ The Power Elite (1956), J.K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958), Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers (1959) and Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964). These texts invoke an intense questioning of capitalist society and the effects it has on personal liberty, as Galbraith notes, “Biological progress is no longer threatened by measures which lessen the perils of economic life for the individual. But liberty still is.”(60) Running throughout all these works is the suggestion that capitalism has subverted an “original” American individualism into something negative. This negative and “false” capitalist individualism has damaged the well-being of society, and in the process created an America in which “the American Dream is losing some of its lustre for a good many citizens who would like to believe in it.”(Packard, 17) This concept of a negative capitalist individualism infuses many of the novels produced during the 1960s as novelists start to deconstruct the ideology behind the entrepreneur as a model for individualism, revealing the figure’s implicit leaning toward hierarchal systems which militate against the truly egalitarian elements of the “American Dream”, as Vance Packard notes in The Status Seekers (1959): “In modern big business, it is becoming more and more difficult to start at the bottom and reach the top. Any leaping aspiration a noncollege person has after beginning his career in big business in a modest capacity is becoming less and less realistic.” (60) While the individualist morality of the “success myth” had permeated American society during the nineteenth century with relatively little resistance, by the middle of the twentieth century a growing sense of inequality began to supplant respect for this element of capitalist ideology. In the post-war era, the entrepreneur as the embodiment of such rhetoric started to lose some of its potency as many began to realize that the individualist tradition of the capitalist hegemony was not necessarily conducive to the well-being of society, as the sociologist Paul Goodman suggests in People or Personnel (1963): Oddly, the rhetoric of independence and civil liberties is now spoken only by Big Business, at least by the branches of Big Business that are not immediate partners of government and operating on cost-plus. But the tone of Business rhetoric is no longer the social-Darwinism of rugged individualism, but rather defensive complaint against the encroachment of the other entrepreneur. (30)

While the focal point of my previous work lay on those post-war deconstructions of individuals who had already reached the top of the capitalist system; characters aping the Rockefellers and Guggenheims of the business world, in this chapter I intend to shift my focus to depictions

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of the more “ordinary” blue or white collar workers found in fiction created during the 1960s and 1970s. Characters such as Harry Angstrom in John Updike’s Rabbit Run (1960)and Bob Slocum in Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974)do not occupy the top echelons of hierarchal structures, and therefore in terms of the discourses of 1960s anti-capitalist rebellion inhabit a decidedly more complex ideological and political position. The consensus opinion that, as Theodore Roszak states, “For ... whom is the life-depriving fiction of money more pathetically reified than by the successful capitalist” (96) is brought into question by the hardships, both financial and spiritual that the “businessmen” characters in the novels under discussion in this chapter experience. At this point it is important to note that the use of the term “businessman” is an imprecise one. Though historian Arthur Marwick suggests, in his comprehensive record of the decade, The Sixties (1998), that “most of the movements, subcultures, and new institutions which are at the heart of the sixties change were thoroughly imbued with the entrepreneurial . . . ethic.”(13) The notion of the businessman as it is commonly known today was yet to solidify. Furthermore, the counterculture’s professed aversion to the capitalist system means that very few of the more popular texts of the decade contain protagonists who actually engage in anything as mundane as going out to work for a living. Perhaps only John Updike’s Harry Angstrom and Joseph Heller’s Bob Slocum can be seen as straightforward portrayals of individuals who are employed in the contemporary workplace. Other novels of the period take a decidedly more oblique approach to depicting the blue or white collar worker. In Max Evans’ The Rounders (1960) the businessman becomes a cowboy. The novel tells the story of two horse breakers, an anonymous narrator and a character named Wrangler. The text follows these two down and out characters as they try to earn enough money to survive while working for the corrupt, cattle rancher Jim Ed Love: “without a doubt the lowest-life son of a bitch in the world.”(75) Evans’ novel is one of the first of a spate of 1960s texts, which represent the cowboy as an everyman. Both the narrator and Wrangler are noticeably devoid of the figure’s more conventional, heroic trappings, as one character says, “I never knew of a couple of dumber cowboys than us.”(20) The two protagonists of the novel also stand in opposition to an encroaching and oppressive capitalism: “The country is goin’ to hell in a hurry. If these ranchers keep buying these pickup trucks, there ain’t goin’ to be no use for horse breakers like us.”(29) In spite of their awareness of the immense changes that capitalism is bringing to the horsebreaking

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profession, the cowboys are unable to do anything about their situation and, as such, become increasingly absurd figures: I felt kind of embarrassed walking into camp with one boot off. The boys all laughed and wanted to know if I’d felt sorry about my horse carrying such a big load. They acted like I had just got down and walked on purpose. It would have been easy to have killed the whole bunch, including Old Fooler, right on the spot. I was just too tired to do it. (19)

Through the ostensibly Western narrative, Evans draws parallels between the situation of the protagonists and that of so many of the postwar generation who were faced with entering a society that was increasingly diminishing job satisfaction. Indeed, the ennui experienced by the two cowboy characters, as they struggle to subsist on a meagre income, can be read as a reflection of the boredom experienced by many 1960s blue-collar workers, who, as Vance Packard notes, “are bored with their work and feel no pride or initiative or creativity.”(16) The Novel ends in a highly symbolic fashion with the narrator and Wrangler betting their savings on a horserace in an attempt to escape working for Ed Love only to lose and be thrown in jail. However, on the verge of sentencing the two protagonists are saved by the influence and connections of their boss: He has paid your fines here, too, and said he was glad to see you boys had a good Fourth of July, but to get on back to the ranch now just as soon as you could, he has a new string of Broncs ready for you to top out. I still didn’t say a thing. I couldn’t (119)

It would seem that there is no escape from the nullifying effects of the workplace for the two horse wranglers as they melancholically resolve that Jim Ed Love “ain’t such a bad feller after all” but rather “All he wants is results” (120), which it appears they will now be obliged to provide him with. There can be little doubt that through its sympathetic portrayal of the two horse wranglers Evans intends to elicit a great deal of empathy for the plight of the common working man. Indeed, in terms of post-war fiction the trend seems to be towards presenting the businessman as the victim of larger capitalist processes over which he has little, to no, control, transforming him ideologically into what David Galloway calls “the Absurd Hero.” Common in post-war American fiction, “the Absurd Hero” is an individual who suffers in an apparently meaningless and Godless universe yet finds solace in both the realisation of this absurdity and in the move towards the reaffirmation of human dignity and ethical values. In the novels under discussion in this chapter the “Absurd Hero” is transfigured

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as the common working man who, while initially enraptured by “The viciously seductive rhythm of contemporary life” soon comes to realise the spiritually nullifying effects of the “exhausting, monotonous, and apparently unending tasks” (10) he is required to partake of. One example of such a figure is to be found In John Updike’s seminal Rabbit Run. The protagonist of the novel, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is initially a disillusioned salesman, hawking “a kitchen gadget called the MagiPeel peeler in five-and-dime stores” (51) in his home town of Brewer: “a treeless waste of industry, shoes factories and bottling plants and company parking lots and knitting mills converted to electronics parts.” (39) Indeed, much of Updike’s early work is concerned with the hollow profundity of the modern world, such as his 1954 poem “Superman,” which explores ideas of mass production and personal identity: I drive my car to supermarket, The way I take is superhigh, A superlot is where I park it, And Super Suds are what I buy. Supersalesmen sell me tonicSuper-Tone-O, for relief. The planes I ride are supersonic. In trains I like the Super Chief. Supercilious men and women Call me superficial –me. Who so superbly learned to swim in Supercolossality. Superphosphate-fed foods feed me; Superservice keeps me new. Who would dare to supersede me, Super-super-superwho? (1958, CH, 6)

Harry finds such a world emotionally and spiritually constrictive and attempts to run away from it, first from his job as a salesman and then later in the novel from his job working on his wife’s father’s car lot. Harry rejects these jobs based upon their immorality, refusing to be a part of a system which relies on emotional disconnection from your fellow man, as he says of the car salesman position: “The job at the lot is easy enough, if it isn’t any work for you to lie” (235) Throughout the novel commercial work is posited as a necessary evil, as Harry notes “In the twentieth century, in the United States of America.

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Yes. There exists a sense in which all Christians must have conservations with the Devil, must learn his ways, must hear his voice.” (237) For Harry work is a means of homogenising the individual into a component part of a dishonest capitalist system. Haunted by a desire not to “be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door” but to “Be yourself” (9) Harry worries that “from shore to shore all America was the same” (33) and that by going to work in the conventional manner he will lose his own unique identity. Indeed, it is only when he is liberated from the world of work, when he is living with Ruth Leonard and temporarily financially independent, that Harry feels a sense of happiness at his condition: He feels on even keel. For two days he and Ruth have lived on his money and he still has fourteen dollars left. Furthermore he has discovered, poking through her bureau this morning while she was out shopping, that she has an enormous checking account, with over five hundred dollars in it (115).

Harry goes on to find employment as an unofficial gardener for the elderly Mrs Smith. In many ways this job embodies the countercultural dream of living closer to the land, Harry is able to get more in touch with his caring side, nurturing the plants in the Eden-like space of Smith’s Rhododendron gardens; as Ruth points out to Harry “you have it pretty good.”(143) However, in spite of his disillusionment with the contemporary workplace and home, Rabbit is continually pulled back to the necessity for more conventional work in order to feed and support both himself and those he loves, as one of the presenters on an early morning children’s television show his wife is watching proclaims “He gives each of us special talents to become these things, provided we work to develop them. We must work, boys and girls.” (10) Yet Harry can never fully come to terms with the 9-5, and the “feeling of being closed in” (271) and so runs away once more, this time however he leaves behind his alcoholic wife who accidentally drowns his newly born daughter. Upon returning to sort things out Harry is rebuked by Janice for his inability to conform to the capitalist system of work “How would you support me? How many wives can you support? Your jobs are a joke. You aren’t worth hiring.” (305) Harry’s desire for the liberation of the individual from the dehumanization of the contemporary workplace is traceable in the 1960s penchant for decentralization. Indeed, such enthusiasm demonstrates the possibility that those within the counterculture saw in the individual a vehicle for collectivist ideology. The rejection of a “centralising style [which] makes for both petty conforming and admiration for bigness,”

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(Goodman, 19) and the adoption of an unofficial “political maxim: to decentralize where, how, and how much is expedient” (Goodman, 27) exemplify a 1960s re-evaluation of the relationship between the individual and the larger community. Many members of the counterculture believed that by “decentralizing” power back into the hands of American citizens; inevitably, conditions would be improved for all. Ultimately, Harry is refused any real chance for self-actualisation when he is a part of the system; instead he feels that his only option is to try to abandon the system wholesale, as he exclaims at one point “the thing is how I feel. And I feel like getting out.” (249) Whether this approach is fruitful is debatable but nevertheless at the end of the novel Harry is left with a desirous feeling for escape that positions the capitalist system as a conformist trap and the businessman as its victim. That is not to say that the majority of businessmen in post-war fiction are portrayed in a positive manner, far from it. In Joseph Heller’s Catch22(1961), we are confronted with "perhaps the best known of all fictional profiteers," (Brandes, 273) the character of Milo Minderbender. Milo is, as the BBC News website suggests “A pure capitalist” who represents the principles of that ideology taken to their most inhumane extremes; he starts a business in black market eggs that escalates into a worldwide syndicate in which Milo suggests that “everyone has a share” (288). In reality, the reverse is true, and Milo’s “international cartel” (named M & M Enterprises) only serves to make him rich by dehumanizing others. This includes members of his own squadron when he makes a business deal with the Germans to attack them: “I’m just trying to put it on a businesslike basis. Is anything wrong with that? You know, a thousand dollars ain’t such a bad price for a medium bomber and a crew. If I can persuade the Germans to pay me a thousand dollars for every plane they shoot down, why shouldn’t I take it?” (294) In spite of Milo’s amorality, the character is revealed to have attained great influence and power on a global scale through his manipulation of the capitalist system; becoming the Mayor of Palermo, and Cairo, the Assistant Governor-General of Malta, the Shah of Oran, the Caliph of Baghdad, and worshipped as a pagan god in certain parts of Africa. In Catch-22, as in so many novels of the 1960s and 1970s, society takes on an increasingly bureaucratic and frightening element in which it is suggested that the individual’s autonomy is replaced by the technical autonomy of the organization. As Chief Bromden famously notes of the post-war world outside the mental asylum in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962):

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All up the coast I could see the signs of what the Combine had accomplished ... a train stopping at a station and laying a string of fullgrown men in mirrored suits and machined hats, laying them like a hatch of identical insects, half-life things coming pht-pht-pht out of the last car (186 – 7).

In this supposedly more efficient and organized system, compassion for the individual is reduced. Human satisfaction is repositioned as something entirely technical in nature, which can be fulfilled through the formal analysis of certain technical specialists with the ability to synthesize these needs into material products and services for the public. This rationalization denies the possibility of reflection and evaluation, for these activities would contravene the individual’s allotted role within the system. The Marcusian fear that increasingly “Men do not live their own lives but perform pre-established functions” (Eros, 45) is explored further in Joseph Heller’s second novel Something Happened; a kind of Über-text for mid-century capitalist ennui. In some ways the book can be seen as a contemporary updating of earlier texts such as Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), which deal with issues of conformity and the search for purpose in the rapidly expanding world of American business. However, whereas Sloan’s text finally suggests that all that is needed for personal and spiritual fulfilment is a good work/home life balance, Heller offers no such easy solution for the modern condition, as Kurt Vonnegut notes in his review of the book for The New York Times “[Something Happened is] one of the unhappiest books ever written” Something Happened, which Heller explained could be seen as the story of Slocum’s interior mental struggle as opposed to the exterior physical struggle of Yossarian in Catch-22, proposes no real answer to the central character’s divided self. Slocum is at once a consummate part of the corporate machine, yet also in mourning for a sense of youthful innocence, which he feels he has lost: “hiding inside of me somewhere ... is a timid little boy just like my son who ... wishes he could come outside and play.” (231) Slocum longs for a return to the way things were when he was younger; as he suggests of his wife’s younger self: “I miss her greatly and love us both very deeply when I remember how we used to be then” (121) Slocum’s loss of innocence in the novel is reflected in the greater forces at work in the country at large: “the decline of American civilization.” (67) The novel suggests that one of the foremost contenders behind this sense of loss is Slocum’s workplace, a model of the post-war corporation, which rules by intimidation and bullying until its workforce are left

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emotionally deadened: “drained ... of energy and ambition” (13). Slocum introduces us to his workplace by describing the ever present use of fear as a controlling force over those who work there: In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by at least one person. (13)

This use of fear extends to Slocum himself who admits that in his department “are six people who are afraid of me.” (17) However, this control does not make Slocum happy rather he sees it as part of the necessary processes of the larger machine that is the company he works for. At the start of the novel what Slocum truly fears is divergence, of any kind, from the mundane conformity of his daily workplace routine; expressed in his fear of opening doors: “I was afraid to open doors in that company too.” (14) Instead Slocum prefers to “do good work steadily and try to make no enemies” (15). Indeed, Slocum’s descriptions of the company are redolent with mechanistic imagery, transfiguring the organisation into a machine in which employees “are encouraged to revolve around each other ... like self-lubricating ball-bearings” (41) Throughout the novel Slocum appears torn between the superficially pleasant but banal nature of his workplace-“The company is benevolent. The people for the nice part are nice, and the atmosphere, for the most part, is convivial.” (18) – and the fact that working there is slowly causing him to go insane. While Slocum feels that he should appreciate the lifestyle that working at the company affords him he nevertheless experiences an ongoing epiphany of self-realisation that means he is “not always able anymore to deceive myself” (29) While this enlightened state leads Slocum to wonder at one point: “Is this really the most I can get from the few years left in this one life of mine?” (30) He nevertheless stops short of a full-blown rejection of the processes of corporate America, always retaining a desire for its “rewards” despite recognising their negative stultifying effects: I care. I want the money. I want the prestige. I want the acclaim, the congratulations ... But will it matter, will it make a difference? No. Do I want it? Yes. (Should I want it? Nah. But I do, I do, dammit. I do). (136)

In The Making of A Counter Culture (1968), Theodore Roszak suggests that changes in the work place environment during the post-war

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period caused a sense of alienation to grow amongst those in business structures. Roszak notes that “capitalism tends to alienate the worker from the means and fruits of production” (58) but also that during the post-war period, alienation has arisen in the form of “the deadening of man’s sensitivity to man.” (58) Such a statement rings true of Slocum who seems to exist in a state of perpetual monotony, interspersed with occasional decisions related to the parceling out of monotony to others: “it’s a real problem to decide whether it’s more boring to do something boring than to pass along everything boring ... and then have nothing to do at all” (33) While Vance Packard suggests that the post-war worker “must find their satisfactions outside their work” (16) it would seem that no such option is available to Slocum, who feels that “there is no place left for me to go.” (34) Slocum’s family provides him with little respite. His wife is an alcoholic, he fears his disabled son Derek, while he is constantly arguing with his daughter. The only hint of happiness in Slocum’s life lies with his son whose innocence has a way of “evoking and recalling to us the great need and capacity for affection each of us has hidden away very deep inside” (165) On several occasions Slocum looks to the innocence of his son in order to reassure himself that the world is not entirely bad, as the character suggests: “He is more important to me than the President of the United States.” (305) What Slocum is perhaps attracted to is his son’s complete freedom from capitalist ideology (during one episode the child repeatedly gives away any money that his parents hand him), however, as time goes on this division begins to collapse. At one point in the novel, Slocum is required to go into his son’s school to talk with the physical education teacher, Mr Forgione, concerning his son’s reluctance to partake in sports. Upon discussing the matter Forgione exclaims that Slocum’s son “has to learn now that he has to be better than the next fellow. That’s one of the lessons we try to teach him today to prepare him for tomorrow.” Though, for the reader, Forgione’s explanation resonates with the competitive ideology behind corporate America; an ideology which Slocum seems ill at ease with, preferring his son’s individualism, “I like my little boy pretty much the way he is.” (244) At the same time as lauding his son’s non-conformity, Slocum expresses his dislike for his child’s lack of competitiveness, noting that “there are times, I must admit to myself, when I wish he were more so.” (244) In the end, after being temporarily excused from games, Slocum’s son decides he wants to rejoin the rest of the class in a move that is suggestive of the pervasive hold capitalist ideology holds over the American individual: “It is not so much that he wishes to look good but that he wants to avoid looking bad.” (254)

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In refusing to resolve Slocum’s numerous dichotomies Heller refuses the optimism of earlier American texts to suggest the tragic absurdity of many post-war individuals; as Vonnegut notes: "Something Happened," ... could become the dominant myth about the middle-class veterans who came home from that war ... commonly took jobs which were vaguely dishonorable or at least stultifying ... [and] lost their dignity and their will to live in the process.

The only solution Slocum can seem to come up with for his condition is an impossible regression to a pre-capitalist state located in early childhood: “I know at last what I want to be when I grow up. When I grow up I want to be a little boy.” (340) The fact that this is not possible only serves to make Slocum’s situation all the more tragic. Indeed, even when faced with the possibility that he has contributed to the death of his beloved son (by asphyxiation) at the end of the novel all Slocum can do is carry on working for the company, ascending the corporate ladder because it is all he knows how to do anymore: Nobody knows what I’ve done. Everybody is impressed with how bravely I’ve been able to move into Kagle’s position and carry on with the work of organizing the convention. No one understands that carrying on bravely was the easiest thing to do. (565)

In conclusion then it is perhaps an oversimplification to try and suggest that the depiction of the businessman in American fiction of the 1960s and the 1970s can be discussed in any unitary fashion. While there are a number of texts from this time period that by adjusting their focus to the needs of the individual often reach conclusions that suggest a necessity for societal change along more communal and humanist lines, embodying the countercultural suggestion that, “The social expression of the liberated work instinct is cooperation,”(Liberation, 91) novels such as Heller’s Something Happened offer a decidedly bleaker view of the effects of business on the individual and their capacity to fight the system. Whereas, in many 1960s’ novels, loneliness, engendered by material success, tends to lead characters along a constructive path towards spiritual and emotional self-fulfillment. Slocum is seemingly unable or unwilling to begin finding and reconstructing a more valid purpose for himself. In spite of this, the novels under discussion in this chapter do suggest at least a need to move beyond the repressive tendencies of the capitalist hegemony in order to attain alternative methods of truly achieving personal satisfaction. Rabbit Run and Something Happened both, to

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varying degrees, suggest the need for a replaced emphasis on the relationships between individuals in order to combat the stultifying effects of the capitalist workplace, offering solutions that would “no longer demand the exploitative repression of the “Pleasure Principle” (Liberation, 91) but instead encourage its reassertion as a means of facilitating selfdetermination and actualization.

Works Cited Anon., BBC News, What Is Catch-22? And Why Does the Book Matter? (2002) [online]. Available:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1868619.stm [2004, October 12]. Boorstin, Daniel, The Image or What Happened to the American Dream (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961) Brandes, Stuart Dean, Warhogs: A History of War Profits in America. (University Press of Kentucky, 1997). 273 Evans, Max, The Rounders (New York: Bantam, 1965) Farrell, James J., The Spirit of the Sixties (London: Routledge, 1997) Gair, Christopher, The American Counterculture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) Galbraith, J.K., The Affluent Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963) Galloway, David, The Absurd Hero in American Fiction (Austin: University of Texas, 1970) Goodman, Paul, People or Personnel and Like a Conquered Province (New York: Random House, 1968) Heller, Joseph, Catch-22 (London: Vintage, 1994) —. Something Happened (London: Random House, 1995) Kesey, Ken, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (London: Picador, 1973) Lubin, Harold, ed., Heroes and Anti-Heroes (San Francisco: Chandler, 1968) Marcuse, Herbert, Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) —. An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1971) Marwick, Arthur, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, 1958 – 1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Mumford, Lewis, The Myth of the Machine (New York: Brace & World, 1967) Packard, Vance, The Status Seekers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961) Roszak, Theodore, The Making of a Counter Culture (London: Faber, 1969)

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Searles, George J., ed., A Casebook on Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992) Simmons, David, The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Heller to Vonnegut (London and New York: Palgrave, 2008) Smith, Stan, A Sadly Contracted Hero—The Comic Self in Post-War American Fiction (London: British Association for American Studies, 1981) Updike, John, The Carpeted Hen and Other Tame Creatures (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958) —. Rabbit Run (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995) Vonnegut, Kurt. The New York Times. The New York Times Book Review (October 6th 1974) [online] Available: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/15/home/heller-something.html ?_r=2 [5 September, 2009]. Weiss, Richard, The American Myth of Success ( New York: Basic Books, 1969).

‘BUT HE AINT NEVER BIN SEEN!’: THE PROTEAN HOWARD HUGHES AND OVERLAPPING CAPITALIST NARRATIVES IN ED DORN’S GUNSLINGER CARRIE CONNERS

Edward Dorn’s long poem Gunslinger1 draws upon conventions of the epic quest, the Western, comic books, and other genres in order to create a hilarious, heterogeneous, allusive and unapologetically difficult text. The poem follows a gunslinger/metaphysician/demigod and his band of brothers, which includes a talking, pot-smoking horse (sometimes known as Claude Levi-Strauss), on a meandering and haphazard quest that is eventually abandoned or forgotten, to find and duel Robart, a paragon of capitalism based on Howard Hughes. As Marjorie Perloff observes, “[e]ach of the four books is devoted to a specific drug: the first to marijuana, the second to LSD, the third and fourth to cocaine.”2 The collection of outsiders and innumerable references to drug culture would lead one to think that Dorn’s poem world is an imagined world counter to that of 1960s and 1970s America or a fantastical facsimile of the counterculture of that time period. But, as Dorn’s poem demonstrates, even with outsider status and drug-induced hazes, the capitalist world cannot be escaped. Indeed, Dorn’s poem recognizes its involvement in the system of capitalism. Critics such as Robert von Hallberg3 have noted that Dorn’s “poetry is more intelligently political and more sensitive to wide complicity

1

Edward Dorn, Gunslinger (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989). Marjorie Perloff, introduction to Gunslinger, by Edward Dorn (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989), xiii. 3 See also Thomas Foster, “Kick[ing] the Perpendiculars Outa Right Anglos: Edward Dorn’s Multiculturalism,” Contemporary Literature 38 (1997): 78-105. 2

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than that of almost any of his contemporaries”4 This complicity can be seen in major structural components of the poem, such as the abandonment of the quest to find and presumably duel Robart (i.e. to kill capitalism). The characters do not fail necessarily; they merely get distracted, losing sight of their goal. However, the poem moves beyond an apathetic representation of the corrupt establishment and the counter-culture’s failure to effectively change it. The poem’s larger-than-life comedy defamiliarizes the familiar, revealing parts of the world that were blindly accepted to be the artificial constructs that they are. “The Cycle,” a lengthy section at the end of Book II that parodies traditional formalist poetry5 as it is written in numbered four line stanzas instead of the free verse of the rest of the poem, tells the story of Robart, an alias for Howard Hughes. As several critics have noted, on a fundamental level “The Cycle” describes an actual trip that Howard Hughes took from Boston to Las Vegas.6 In it, one line is repeated, which is noteworthy since this type of repetition does not occur elsewhere in “The Cycle.” The line, “And human hands first mimicked and then mocked”7 can be read as a description of the exploitation and subjugation of people under the system of capitalism. The powers that be first tried to copy the “hands” or people, more specifically workers, or act like them in order to seduce them into the system, but then mocked in the sense of “to deceive or impose upon; to delude, befool; to tantalize, disappoint” those people who worked to sustain the system, but gained little from it.8 It seems that Dorn, through the repetition of this line, is trying to emphasize how the capitalist system manipulates people to serve it, reducing them to reified “hands” for financial gain. However, I argue that this line also encapsulates Dorn’s strategy for the poem’s political critique. Dorn both mimics and mocks the system of capitalism in order to expose its flaws, but, more importantly, to show how 4 Robert Von Hallberg, “This Marvellous Accidentalism,” in Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn, ed. Donald Wesling (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 81. 5 Peter Michelson indicates that Dorn uses skaldic verse as a formal model. Peter Michelson “Edward Dorn, Inside the Outskirts,” Sagatrieb 15, no. 3 (1996): 198. 6 See Michael Davidson “To Eliminate the Draw: Narrative and Language in Slinger” in Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn, ed. Donald Wesling (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 134; James K. Elmborg ‘A Pageant of its Time”’: Edward Dorn’s Slinger and the Sixties, Studies in Modern Poetry, vol. 6 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1998), 72. 7 Dorn, Gunslinger, 90-91. 8 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “mock.”

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it generates myths and appropriates cultural narratives to sustain itself. Narratives, such as Christianity, have been used to support and spread capitalism, deliberatly blurring the line between capitalist tenets and Christian values to encourage Christians to see a critique of capitalism as a critique of their faith. Dorn mimics capitalism not only “to imitate or copy (a person, action, etc.), esp. for the purposes of ridicule or satire, or to entertain” as the first definition from the Oxford English Dictionary states, but also, and more importanly, “to emulate or masquerade as another; to resemble closely, esp. in structure or functionality.”9 In the mimetic sense, Dorn’s poem mimics or represents the structure and functionality of capitalism in many ways so that the reader who may not have noticed these structures around him or her in daily life may become aware of them and be in a better position to analyze them. The poem’s incorporation of many genres and lexicons mimics capitalism’s use of diverse narratives to sustain itself. Dorn’s representation or mimcry is necessary for him to effectively mock it. Since one cannot escape the system in which one exists, simply ridiculing it is an ineffective means of political critique. By creating a poem that represents the logic (and illogic) and structures of capitalism, Dorn can effectively jeer at the system by highlighting specific flaws and manipulations that people often cannot recognize. One example of Dorn’s mimicry and mockery of capitalist structures of power is his representation of Robart, a protean character based on Howard Hughes, a paragon of capitalism. The Howard Hughes figure’s numerous disguises and several aliases spoof Howard Hughes’s real-life attempts to disguise himself. More importantly, though, these disguises mimic and mock the overlapping, and sometimes conflicting, narratives that capitalism produces and appropriates in order to assert and sustain its dominance in the West. The ridiculousness of the sheer number and the odd juxtapositions of Hughes’s many costumes, which correspond to capitalist narratives, reveals the illogical, conflicting beliefs that members of capitalist society often blindly accept, thus upholding the system. A particularly hilarious example of these odd juxtapositions occurs in the line “For He was decoyed as the cheeze in a burger.”10 The capitalized and italicized (just in case we didn’t get the joke) “He” is a gesture of deification that suggests the Howard Hughes figure is a Christ figure to boot, since Christ is often assigned the capitalized pronoun. This mimics capitalism’s appropriation of the narrative of Christianity to “convert” people. Although the appropriation of Christianity to expand capitalism 9

Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “mimic.” Dorn, Gunslinger, 90.

10

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that can be seen in such concepts as manifest destiny is not necessarily funny, the blending of a paragon of capitalism with a fast food topping and Christianty’s son of god is simultaneously hilarious and bizarre. One reason the concept of manifest destiny does not leave people rolling in the aisles is that it tries to blend capitalism and Christianity in such a way that people will not notice the incongruity of those ideologies. Dorn, on the other hand, tries to emphasize the incongruity of Christianity and capitalism using humor. This humor is described by Elliott Oring’s concept of “appropriate incongruity” which he defines as “the perception of an appropriate relationship between categories that would ordinarily be regarded as incongruous.”11 Oring’s theory more effectively describes Dorn’s humor than the better-known incongruity resolution theory. An important difference between Oring’s theory and incongruity-resolution theory is that: appropriate incongruity does not suggest that an incongruity is resolved. The incongruity remains, even though points of connection between the incongruous categories are discovered. A measure of appropriateness is recognized between the juxtaposed domains, but incongruity and appropriateness characterize a psychologically valid rather than a logically valid relation.12

Oring expands his theory in order to differentiate jokes from similar structures, such as metaphors, which are not usually regarded as funny: in jokes the engagement of incongruity and the search for its appropriateness is spurious rather than genuine. That is to say that jokes emerge when some aspect of either the incongruity or its appropriateness (more often the latter) is recognized as illegitimate. It violates logic, the sense of what we know to be true, or the sense of what traditional behaviors or expressions are supposed to do or mean.13

The appropriate incongruity encourages readers to compare the seemingly disparate things. This comparative process, even though it fails in making sense initially, does provide opportunities for making connections between the incongruous terms, but the terms are not reconciled. In the case of Howard Hughes, the cheeze in a burger, and Jesus Christ, one can make the connection that the terms metonymically 11

Elliott Oring, Engaging Humor (Urbana and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1. 12 Ibid., 2. 13 Ibid., 5-6.

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represent American capitalism, the fast food industry and Christianity respectively. Both the fast food industry and Christianity are institutions and/or narratives used to sustain capitalism, although in thinking of Christianity as a faith many people overlook its institutional role. Fast food, a culinary version of Henry Ford’s infamous assembly line, fosters the desire for immediate gratification, which both encourages and is encouraged by capitalism. Additionally, the disguise of cheeze in a burger puns on Hughes’s status as a paragon of capitalism or a “Big Cheese,” and the word “burgher,” which refers to a member of the bourgeoisie. Christianity, through manifest destiny and the ethic of hard work that it promotes, has long been used to support and expand capitalism. By combining Christianity and the fast food industry in the line, Dorn, in a sense, equates both terms or puts them on the same level by simultaneously showing the deflated status of Christianity and the elevated status of fast food in the U.S. through the comparison. This social leveling hints that capitalism is the great equalizer and treats everything like a product to be sold. This reading implies that fast food, a stand-in for the mass produced consumer product in general, has become godlike, that people worship and revere it with a devotion usually associated with religious faith. Through the cartoonish image of people worshipping a piece of cheese in a burger Dorn mocks the illogical conflation of Christianity and capitalism and reveals that capitalism itself has become America’s religion. Appropriate incongruity can be seen through Dorn’s repeated comparison of Howard Hughes to Christ, which emphasizes the mystery surrounding both figures. Dorn describes Hughes as an “unseen symbolic Body Of the shrouding”14 and the crowd, when refering to Hughes, later declares “But He aint never bin seen!”15. Connections between Hughes and Christ have some grounding in that Hughes was notorious for being a recluse while the Bible reports that Christ’s body disappeared from his tomb as he ascended to heaven. But, attempts to equate a reclusive millonaire to the purported savior of human kind are far from appropriate, and therefore humorous. However, serious consequences of this kind of mystery can be discovered. Faith in the unseen is a critical aspect of Christianity, but Dorn emphasizes the danger of such blind faith when applied to capitalism. Dorn suggests that such faith in the powers that be sets people up to be taken advantage of. Indeed, the lines following the exclamation “But he aint never bin seen!” refer to the famous con of the 14 15

Dorn, Gunslinger, 90. Ibid., 91.

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shell game, “You maybe oughta look for a bean / Under at least three shells”16. This image further illustrates the danger of blind faith in capitalism since “bean” is slang for money and if people must resort to looking for money under shells, the system is conning them. Perhaps the most dangerous, and humorous, of Robart’s disguises is the janitor/Janus figure. Upon first glance, though, this costume seems anything but threatening. Playing upon some of Howard Hughes’s germ phobias, Dorn describes this guise: While he shuffled along with his feet encased In Kleenex boxes He wobbled astride an industrial broom The perfect disguise of the casual janitor Who came through Janus from the far side17

The image of Hughes “wobbl[ing]” with boxes of tissues on his feet to protect him from germs is silly, especially when coupled with the eyerolling irony of Hughes, a person seriously afraid of germs, as a janitor, an occupation that requires one to be in contact with germs. However, once the connection between Janus and janitor is made, the ominous quality of the get-up becomes apparent. The term janitor derives from the Latin janus meaning arch or gate.18 In Roman mythology, Janus was the god of gates, doors, passageways, and beginnings.19 Janitors are caretakers of doors and halls, and in fact, one definition of janitor is “doorkeeper.”20 Although Janus was depicted with two heads looking in opposite directions21, the image can also be interpreted as a two-faced figure, which Dorn depicts Hughes to be. As a janitor, an occupation of low economic reward and low status in capitalist society, Hughes is mimicking the crowd, the workers. This insider position enables him to dupe (mock) the workers once he puts away his broom. Another hazard revealed by this costume, later described as “the dangerous disguise of Nobody,”22 is that it portrays the myth of hard work guaranteeing success or the myth of the self-made man. Dorn’s disguising of Hughes as a worker, or a “Nobody,” alludes to the capitalist myth that 16

Ibid., 91. Ibid., 90. 18 Merriam Webster Online, s.v. “janus.” 19 Michael Grant and John Hazel, Who’s Who in Classical Mythology (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 193. 20 Merriam Webster Online, s.v. “janitor.” 21 Grant and Hazel, Classical Mythology, 193. 22 Dorn, Gunslinger, 92. 17

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hard work can make any man successful (i.e. rich). Far from starting at the bottom, at nineteen years of age Hughes inherited a fortune from his late father, who founded the successful Hughes Tool Company.23 Dorn debunks the myth that anybody can become a paragon of capitalism is they work hard enough by showing that the only way Hughes can look unexceptional is by hiding behind a mask, or, in his case, a broom. Without it Hughes will be exposed as the “wild eyed charioteer,”24 as Dorn describes him at the beginning of “The Cycle,” that he is. His dangerous disguise as “Nobody” also recalls the Odysseus in the The Odyssey tricking the Cyclops Polyphemous.25 He tells Polyphemous that his name is “Nobody” so that after he blinds him by gouging his one eye with a spear, Polyphemous can only call out to the other Cyclops, “‘Nobody’s killing me now by fraud and not by force!’”26 Just as Odysseus did to Polyphemous, Robart and the system of capitalism are killing the masses by deceiving and blinding them from the reality of their station in American capitalist society. As we have seen through Dorn’s depiction of Howard Hughes and his many guises, Dorn uses humor to reveal the illogic of capitalist myths and narratives appropriated by capitalism. However, on a larger scale, the heterogeneous style of Dorn’s poem often mimics the difficulty of making sense of such overlapping myths27. While the poem incorporates other texts, such as cowboy songs,28 it invokes and plays upon the conventions of several genres: the Western in that the plot hinges on the Gunslinger’s duel with Robart; epic poetry as Dorn plays with Homeric epithets, alternately referring to the horse as “the Bombed Horse,” “the Turned On Horse,” “the Oblique Horse,” “the Plugged In Horse,” “the Stoned Horse,”

23

Don L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004). 24 Dorn, Gunslinger, 90. 25 Peter Michelson reads Dorn’s use of “Nobody” as a reference to “Blake’s figuration of God as Nobodaddy” (198). Michelson, “Edward Dorn, Inside the Outskirts,” 198. 26 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagels (New York: Penguin, 1999) , 223-24. 27 Several critics have discussed Gunslinger’s heterogeneity, including Brian McHale when comparing Gunslinger to Menippean satire. See Brian McHale, The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Lon Poems (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004). 28 For an argument about the importance of song in Gunslinger, see William J. Lockwood, “Art Rising to Clarity: Edward Dorn’s Compleat Slinger” in Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn, ed. Donald Wesling (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985).

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“the Odd toed ungulgate,” to name a few29; and formalist poetry, most notably in “The Cycle” when Robart’s car is described as “leasèd” and in the cheekily-rhymed stanza: 13

This cantankerous crowd was led To discover how it bled By the apparition of a Cheeze, in bed And do you know what they said?30

In addition, the poem alludes to many texts including the Bible, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Shakespeare’s Sonnets, “The Raven,” songs by the Beatles, and draws upon numerous lexicons, such as language from drug culture, physics, philosophy, mathematics, economics, as well as slang. The reader has to adapt to the heterogeneity of the text in order to navigate the world of the poem. Creating this difficult text, which mimics the difficulty of deciphering the world of capitalism, aids in Dorn’s attempt, in his own words, to do what he thinks writers try to do: There are some people who have power and a certain kind of means at their disposal who are trying to get the society to think in a certain way, to do a certain set of things, and so forth. I think any responsible writer is never that. No writer is ever trying to get anybody to do something; what they’re trying to create is a cognizance in the society of itself, to furnish the means—through clarity of language—for a self-appraisal and selfevaluation.31

In this case, the obscurity, not clarity, of language can lead to a better understanding of culture. The stylistic double movement of Dorn’s mimicking and mocking is similar to Linda Hutcheon’s description of postmodern parody. She claims:

29

Grant Jenkins also reads the horse’s numerous names as “epic epithet[s].” Grant Jenkins, “Gunslinger’s Ethics of Excess: Subjectivity, Community, and the Politics of the Could Be,” Sagatrieb 15, no. 3 (1996): 213. 30 Dorn, Gunslinger, 91. 31 Donald Allen, ed., Interviews (Bolinas, CA: Four Seasons Foundation, 1980), 109. William J. Lockwood also cites this quote in “Art Rising to Clarity” in Internal Resistances. He describes the poem’s jargon as self-mirroring for the audience, which can lead to self-refection (170, 182-83). Additionally, Peter Michelson in “Edward Dorn: Inside the Outskirts” uses the quote to identify “consciousness” as Dorn’s “first principle” (191).

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Parody—often called ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or intertextuality—is usually considered central to postmodernism, both by its detractors and its defenders. For artists, the postmodern is said to involve a rummaging through the image reserves of the past in such a way as to show the history of the representations their parody calls to our attention[. . .]But this parodic reprise of the past of art is not nostalgic; it is always critical. It is also not ahistorical or de-historicizing; it does not wrest past art from its original historical context and reassemble it into some sort of presentist spectacle. Instead, through a double process of installing and ironizing, parody signals how present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference.32

“Installing and ironizing” is analogous to Dorn’s mimicking and mocking. Dorn shows his characters to be complicit with capitalism and represents it (mimicking) in order to critique it (mocking). Hutcheon’s description of postmodern parody also provides insight into Dorn’s critique of capitalism: parody is doubly coded in political terms: it both legitimizes and subverts that which it parodies. This kind of authorized transgression is what makes it a ready vehicle for the political contradictions of postmodernism at large. Parody can be used as a self-reflexive technique that points to art as art, but also to art as inescapably bound to its aesthetic and even social past. Its ironic reprise also offers an internalized sign of a certain selfconsciousness about our culture’s means of ideological legitimation.33

Although this legitimization may seem counterproductive in a text that critiques dominant cultural ideologies, it is actually a critical part in Dorn’s critique. The process of legitimization is mimetic. By representing capitalism, Dorn in effect holds a mirror up for his readers to see the workings of the system, the structure of their world, fostering a self-consciousness about their place in it. This vantage point is necessary for specific, and potentially more effective, critique. Hutcheon’s theory of postmodern parody also fits Dorn’s poem well because it, like the poem, recognizes the effect of history on the present and the presence of history in the present and, most importantly, the political efficacy of humor, which some critics have questioned.

32

Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 93. 33 Ibid., 97.

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Some critics34 have read Gunslinger as a Jamesonian pastiche, which Jameson describes “is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter.”35 Although Dorn wears seemingly innumerable “linguistic mask[s]” in Gunslinger, slipping in and out of the language of Westerns, comic books, phenomenology, astrophysics, etc., Dorn’s mimicry and mockery has political bite and is hilarious. Others have seen Larry McCaffery’s avant-pop as an apt description of Gunslinger.36 In After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant Pop Anthology McCaffery writes: "Avant-Pop combines Pop Art's focus on consumer goods and mass media with avant-garde's spirit of subversion and emphasis on radical formal innovation. Avant-Pop shares with Pop Art the crucial recognition that popular culture, rather than traditional sources of high culture—the Bible; myth; the revered classics of art, painting, music and literature—is now what supplies the citizens of postindustrial nations with key images, character and narrative archetypes, metaphors, and points of reference and allusion that help us establish our sense of who we are, what we want and fear, and how we see ourselves and the world."37 Although Dorn’s poem is certainly formally innovative, it does not privilege popular culture over high culture. Rather, it unapologetically references both, often juxtaposing or combining allusions from both categories, challenging the reader to make sense of it all. In her critical introduction to the poem Marjorie Perloff writes: Much has been made of the poem’s political critique, its indirect but searching attack on the Vietnam War as the very emblem of the “Shortage Industry” created by industrial capitalism. But despite Dorn’s glancing references to the Four Corners Power Plant, to the military takeover in Chile or in the business deals effected in Saudi Arabia, Slinger invokes rather than analyzes the debacle of postmodern Capitalism. Indeed, it could be argued that Dorn’s pop narrative and campy characterization give rise to what is correspondingly a Pop critique of “the Great Cycle of the Enchanted Wallet” (89), a critique that may strike readers of the late 34

See McHale, The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole, 57; Foster, “Kick[ing] the Perpendiculars Outa Right Anglos: Edward Dorn’s Multiculturalism.” 35 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 1991), 17. 36 See McHale’s The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole (10-11). 37 Larry McCaffery, After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology (New York: Penguin, 1997), xvii-xviii.

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eighties as slightly “sicksties” (139) in its assumption that rebellion against “them” can effect change and that the drug culture is an appropriate (and perhaps necessary) component of that rebellion.38

Although the indirect engagement with political issues and persistent drug references could lead readers to dismiss the political critique as shallow or naïve, I think that such readings do a disservice to the subtlety and complexity of Dorn’s sociopolitical project. Rather than “invok[ing] [. . .]the debacle of postmodern Capitalism,” Dorn confronts readers with an unsettling vision of their world, emphasizes their participation in the creation of its catastrophic state. Returning to the Hughes figure, Dorn’s depiction of Robart’s many guises and their corresponding cultural narratives represents his analysis of one method postmodern capitalism utilizes to sustain itself. Beyond Dorn’s own analysis, the humorous presentation of the protean Hughes coupled with the complex text of “The Cycle” encourages readers to analyze the system themselves. This strategy of challenging the reader is one important way in which Gunslinger does not fit Hutcheon’s definition of postmodern parody. She asks: Is there a problem of accessibility here, however? What if we do not recognize the represented figures or the parodied composition? [. . .] there exists a very real threat of elitism or lack of access in the use of parody in any art. This question of accessibility is undeniably part of the politics of postmodern representation. But it is the complicity of postmodern parody—its inscribing as well as undermining of that which it parodies— that is central to its ability to be understood.39

She also states, “[p]ostmodernism aims to be accessible through its overt and self-conscious parodic, historical, and reflexive forms and thus to be an effective force in our culture.”40 Dorn’s poem is deliberately elitist and difficult at times. A common reader could not be expected to know the numerous allusions to physics, classical literature, mythology, phenomenology, etc. It can be argued that there are times when ignorance of these topics does not mar one’s experience of reading the poem, but at other times, in order to follow the poem, such knowledge is required. This difficulty mimics the difficulty of “reading” and existing in capitalist society. 38

Perloff, Introduction, xii-xiii. Hutcheon, Politics, 101. 40 Ibid., 13. 39

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The level of readerly engagement required by the text is high. Indeed, there have been attempts to make extensive notes to the poem to help readers understand the allusions, such as Stephen Fredman and Grant Jenkins’s “First Annotations to Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger”41 which runs well over one hundred pages. Peter Michelson, after discussing Charles Olson’s concern with cultural consciousness, explains: Dorn has the same commitment to cultural consciousness but is more like a village recorder, one with an incisive if irritable anthropologist’s eye, tracking the habits of the locals. He’s an anthropologist with an attitude, but then it’s his village. He’s not imposing alien standards, though sedition might be another matter. Neither does he intervene. It’s a free country, as they say. But there’s a difference between freedom and “freedum.”42

Dorn is trying to teach readers to read the world or see it in a new way by showing them, often in unflattering terms, what they really look like. Although not gentle, Dorn is critical in the hopes that readers will not be easily duped by capitalist paragons dressed up as fast food. Dorn, when speaking of Abhorrences, one of his later works, stated “the only poetry that anybody might want to pay attention to is the poetry that exhibits a certain kind of aggression towards the readers”43 Gunslinger is just this type of poetry, and even after more than thirty years after its publication, we should still be paying attention. Dorn’s instruction won’t solve the problems of capitalism, but changing people’s perceptions through the poem’s humor can lead to a more informed public.

Works Cited Allen, Donald, ed. Interviews. Bolinas, CA: Four Seasons Foundation, 1980. Barlett, Don, L. and James B. Steele. Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004. Davidson, Michael. “To Eliminate the Draw: Narrative and Language in Slinger.” In Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn, ed. Donald Wesling, 113-149. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985. 41

Stephen Fredman and Grant Jenkins, “First Annotations to Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger,” Sagatrieb 15, no. 3 (1996): 57-176. 42 Michelson, “Inside the Outskirts,” 186. 43 Joseph Richley, ed., Ed Dorn Live: Lectures, Interviews, and Outtakes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 71.

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Dorn, Edward. Gunslinger. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989. Elmborg, James K. ‘A Pageant of its Time’: Edward Dorn’s Slinger and the Sixties. Studies in Modern Poetry, vol. 6. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1998. Foster, Thomas. “Kick[ing] the Perpendiculars Outa Right Anglos: Edward Dorn’s Multiculturalism.” Contemporary Literature 38 (1997): 78-105. Fredman, Stephen and Grant Jenkins. “First Annotations to Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger.” Sagatrieb 15, no. 3 (1996): 57-176. Grant, Michael and John Hazel. Who’s Who in Classical Mythology. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagels. New York: Penguin, 1999. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 1991. Jenkins, Grant. “Gunslinger’s Ethics of Excess: Subjectivity, Community, and the Politics of the Could Be.” Sagatrieb 15, no. 3 (1996): 207-242. Lockwood, William, J. “Art Rising to Clarity: Edward Dorn’s Compleat Slinger.” In Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn, ed. Donald Wesling, 150-207. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985. McCaffery, Larry. After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology. New York: Penguin, 1997. McHale, Brian. The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Michelson, Peter. “Edward Dorn, Inside the Outskirts.” Sagatrieb 15, no. 3 (1996): 177-206. Oring, Elliott. Engaging Humor. Urbana and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Perloff, Marjorie. Introduction to Gunslinger, by Edward Dorn, v-xviii. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989. Richley, Joseph, ed. Ed Dorn Live: Lectures, Interviews, and Outtakes. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Von Hallberg, Robert. “This Marvellous Accidentalism.” In Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn, ed. Donald Wesling, 45-86. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985.

STOCK CHARACTERS: THE LITERARY LIVES OF AMERICAN BUSINESSMEN BLAINE GRETEMAN

I merely desired to do away with somewhat of the prevalent calamitous idea...that Franklin acquired his great genius by working for nothing, studying by moonlight, and getting up in the night instead of waiting ‘til morning like a Christian, and that this program, rigidly inflicted, will make a Franklin of every father’s fool. —Mark Twain, 18701 Q. What works were chiefly prized in the training of the young in former days? A. Poor Richard’s Almanac, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and The Declaration of Independence. Q. What are the best prized Sunday-school books in this more enlightened age? A. St. Hall’s Garbled Reports, St. Fish’s Ingenious Robberies, St. Camochan’s Guide to Corruption, St. Gould on the Watering of Stock. —Mark Twain, 18712 I see around me captains of all the illustrious industries, most distinguished men.... Our institutions give men the positions that of right belong to them through merit; all you men have won your places...only by the natural gifts God gave you at your birth, made effective by your own energies. —Mark Twain, 19103

The image of the businessman in American culture is complicated: the most thoughtful writers, like Mark Twain, seem to contradict themselves on the subject as often as they speak of it. In the quotes above, Twain first mocks Americans’ slavish devotion to Benjamin Franklin’s industrious 1

Mark Twain, “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” 139-40. Mark Twain, “The Revised Catechism,” 6. 3 Mark Twain, “Sixty-Seventh Birthday,” 364-65. 2

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ideal; then he sees Franklin as a golden exemplar contrasted with corrupt modern businessmen; finally, in a speech at his 67th birthday in 1902, the man who coined the phrase “Gilded Age” to describe the rampant greed and corruption of late nineteenth-century business culture happily identifies the “captains of industry” with the Franklinesque ideals of hard work, morality, and social mobility. Twain’s vacillations are instructive, because they strike at the core of Americans’ ambiguous, nearly schizophrenic, conceptions of the businessman. One minute he’s a greedy sinner, the next an inspirational saint; here he’s all that is wrong with America, there he embodies the country’s greatest egalitarian ideals. That ambivalence is at least as old as Calvinism, which prompted Puritan settlers both to find signs of God’s grace in hard work and success and to fight a vigilant introspective battle against greed and luxury.4 As much as the thriving merchant’s business might show God’s pleasure, there was always the lingering problem of camels and needles. Through his autobiography and the Poor Richard’s Almanac, Benjamin Franklin perhaps did more than anyone else in U.S. history to resolve that ambivalence—intertwining the ideals of the fledgling democracy with the traits of frugality and industry, depicting wealth not just as a result, but as a cause of moral development. As Poor Richard’s “Way to Wealth” preached in 1758, “Be industrious and free; be frugal and free.”5 For a time, that gospel caught fire, half convincing even skeptical literary figures like Henry James to search for a businessman hero. But Franklin’s platitudes soon gave way to the often-harsh realities of nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrialization and consolidation, and the literary depictions of businessmen solidified into types that were less pious Poor Richard than miserly misanthrope—an even older archetype. If they can be called heroic at all, the businessmen in American literature usually hew close to the Romantic reading of Milton’s Satan— bold, daring, but damned by their infernal lust for power and place. Their souls dead, their sensitivities blunted, from the novels of William Dean Howells and Henry James to the films of Billy Wilder and Tim Robbins, businessmen cut a pathetic figure—finding redemption only by leaving business and discovering the world of art, courage, and love. These literary creations, then, can only really explain one side of the Jekyll and Hyde conception of the businessman in American culture. But 4

For a detailed treatment of this complicated relationship see R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 83-113. Tawney notes that the Reformation by no means spawned capitalism--Reformation preachers often attacked it--but the Protestant ethic did ultimately provide a fertile ground for capitalism to thrive. 5 Benjamin Franklin, Works of Benjamin Franklin, 103. Franklin’s emphasis.

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although several excellent studies have examined negative depictions in literature, few have examined the equally powerful areas where American culture resists those depictions.6 Where can we look to trace the survival of the other, more positive side, the Franklinesque ideal which emerges even in the speeches of a literary cynic like Twain? To find it, this essay argues, we need only look as far as the literary efforts of the businessmen themselves and the historians who memorialized them. In 1938 the historian Miriam Beard mused that “If it is a little strange that writers have not yet provided a history for the businessman, it is still more curious that he himself remains so unconcerned in the matter. For history is a potent weapon, and a man who lacks one nowadays may be said to go unarmed.”7 In fact, by the time Beard wrote those words, businessmen were already getting handy with their most potent weapon, cloaking themselves in the language of Ben Franklin. Soon, many historians were just as armed and dangerous—trawling through memoirs and letters to construct biographies indebted as much to Ben Franklin and the typology of literary heroism as to the documentary record. Indeed, as they consciously tried to rewrite and counteract the depictions of businessmen in novels and films—emphasizing the businessman’s creativity, his morality, his soul—both these biographers and their subjects may owed more to their literary doppelgangers than they would care to admit. After briefly examining the dominant literary and cinematic identities of businessmen, this essay will turn to the businessmen and their histories to see how they engage in their own acts of literary selffashioning. Although my analysis will include various prominent businessmen, it will especially focus on those who were often most vilified in their own time and who have been the subjects of striking revisions since: industrialists like Henry Ford and so called “robber barons” like Sam Insull, John D. Rockefeller, and Jay Gould. Ultimately, the larger goal is not merely to show that some historians have created false, fictional identities for these characters—on the contrary, their rehabilitations have done much to balance popular, but totally spurious, vilifications. Instead, the goal is merely to show that when coming to

6

Several works thoroughly document the negative depictions of businessmen in literature, and I refer to them throughout this essay: Lorne Michael Fienberg, Changing Perspectives on the Businessman in the American Novel: 1865-1914; Emily Watts, The Businessman in American Literature; Henry Nash Smith, “The Search for a Capitalist Hero,” 77-112; Arthur Pollard, ed. The Representation of Business in English Literature. 7 Miriam Beard, A History of the Businessman, 1.

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terms with the place of businessmen in American cultural history, fictions of all kinds have been very powerful weapons.

I. Self-Making and Spiritual Bankruptcy As John Cawelti has aptly demonstrated, the persona and values shaped and perpetuated by Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Poor Richard’s Almanack played a key role in creating an American cult of “the self-made man.”8 Franklin wrote plenty of cautionary advice about the moral dangers of riches: “content and riches seldom meet together, Riches take thou, contentment had I rather.”9 But he also pushed the values that entrepreneurs, in later decades and centuries, would look to for their moral compass: industry, frugality, morality, inventiveness: “God gives all things to industry”; “Get what you can, and what you get hold; / ‘Tis the stone that will turn all your lead into gold.”10 Moreover, Franklin sometimes associated wealth and virtue and tried to inculcate “Industry and Frugality, as the Means of procuring Wealth and thereby securing Virtue,” as he put it in his memoirs.11 His followers—especially the businessmen and their historians that we will be examining—highlighted these elements rather than Franklin’s warnings about riches and seized on the prominence of self-made businessmen as central to the concept of American democracy, proving its mobility and opportunity. As the minister and Whig politician Calvin Coltin expressed it in 1844, “Ours is a country, where men start from an humble origin...and where they can attain to the most elevated positions or acquire a large amount of wealth.... This is a country of selfmade men, than which nothing better could be said of any state of society.”12 Despite frequent qualms, even writers like Emerson and Whitman often endorsed this view—but always with the qualification that American business success was just the first step in a progression toward greater, more democratic and egalitarian cultural riches. With the onset of industrialization and the emergence of mega-fortunes like those of the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller and the financier and speculator Jay Gould, this hope looked increasingly misplaced, and American writers became more hostile to businessmen’s appropriation of 8

John Cawelti, Apostles of the self-made man, 9-36. Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, 108. See also this entry from 1750: “If your riches are yours, why don’t you take them with you to t’other world?” (200). 10 Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, 200, 263. 11 Franklin, Memoirs, 242. 12 Calvin Colton, Junius Tracts, 15. 9

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Franklin. Sometimes they argued that businessmen were corrupting Franklin’s vision—as in Twain’s comparison of Franklin to Gould quoted above. Sometimes, as in the case of British writer D.H. Lawrence’s 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature, writers simply bought into the association of Franklin with businessmen and rejected the ideas of the “snuff-colored little man” altogether: Now if Mr. Andrew Carnegie, or any other millionaire, had wished to invent a God to suit his ends, he could not have done better. Benjamin did it for him in the eighteenth century. God is the supreme servant of men who want to get on, to produce.... And this is all the God of the grandsons of the Pilgrim Fathers had left. Aloft on a pillar of dollars.13

Ironically, it is Lawrence, not Franklin, who is the conservative force here—the literary treatment of businessmen had been almost relentlessly negative since long before the U.S. was founded, and as the literati mobilized against businessmen they reanimated old critiques more often than creating entirely new ones. From Piers Ploughman to The Pilgrim’s Progress, writers in the Christian tradition have predominantly seen wealth as an obstacle on the path to heaven, and—like the fourtheenthcentury religious hermit Richard Rolle—they’ve associated “erthly bysines” with an unhealthy materialism which must be “despised” for the soul to prosper.14 Through Catholic and protestant regimes, writers of religious and secular works have frequently condemned businessmen for the deadly sin of greed; even the much vaunted connection between the Puritans and the rise of American capitalism does not imply that Puritan settlers looked kindly on material gain that wasn’t explicitly used for God’s glory. Forty-three years after the wealthy Boston merchant, Robert Keayne, was fined for making unjust profits—but ultimately spared excommunication—Puritan divine Michael Wigglesworth still sent businessmen to Hell in his wildly popular 1662 poem “The Day of Doom.” The “honest” businessmen protest that they’ve made all their money above-board: Our way was fair, our dealing square, we were no wasteful spenders, No lewd toss-pots, no drunken sots, no scandalous offenders. 15

13

D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 15. Richard Rolle, The Form of Living, 93. 15 Michael Wigglesworth, Day of Doom, 729-44. 14

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But God—who, in fairness to the businessmen, also seems to relish sending unbaptized children to hell—is having none of it: Your Gold is brass, your silver dross, your righteousness is sin: And think you by such honesty eternal life to win? You much mistake, if for its sake you dream of acceptation; Whereas the same deservest shame and meriteth Damnation.16

Despite the idea that earthly success was a possible sign of salvation, these civil, true-dealing men made the mistake of too directly connecting material gain with spiritual worth; they relied too much on works. That remains the basic definition of materialism today. And even when later writers dropped Wigglesworth’s fundamentalist religious views, they often retained the idea that businessmen are apt to neglect their deeper, spiritual side in pursuit of earthly gain. This spiritual corruption of the businessman is most often expressed in literature by figures who are misers or crass materialists—Ebenezer Scrooge being an obvious example that this is not a purely American phenomenon. Henry Ingledee, the main character in T.S. Denison’s novel An Iron Crown (1891) exemplifies the type: Mr. Ingledee, the many fold millionaire, who almost swayed the finances of a continent, and who played with the railway systems, as the angler plays with a struggling fish before landing him, had, with all his force of character, an exceedingly small soul animated by unworthy and ungenerous motives.17

But the archetype that is perhaps most prominent in American literature is Silas Lapham in William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885).18 Lapham is a grasping, spiritually stunted, materialist, whom the novel sneeringly describes as “a fine type of the successful American.”19 Uncultured and undereducated, Lapham climbs to the top by pushing his partner out of his fair share, although he was raised on “the 16

Wigglesworth, Day of Doom, 841-48. T.S. Denison, An Iron Crown: A Tale of the Great Republic, 22. I must credit John Cawelti for citing this extremely rare book, which was previously unknown to me. 18 See Watts, The Businessman, 1. 19 William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham, 2. 17

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simple virtues of the Old Testament and Poor Richard’s Almanac.”20 His kin in American literature are many: Robert Danforth, the successful and industrious but morally and aesthetically corrupt blacksmith in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s first short story, “The Artist of the Beautiful”; the shapeshifting, eponymous hero of Melville’s The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857); the self-made and self-corrupted Bartley Hubbard in Howells’ A Modern Instance (1882); the Jewish Rosedale in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905); the townspeople who have “drummed nothing but money and knavery into their [children’s] ears from the time they wore knickerbockers” in Willa Cather’s “The Sculptor’s Funeral.”21 In many of these works, the moral culpability of fortune-making is so great that business is simply the public face of theft, as in Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You Mr. Rosewater (1965): Noah Rosewater and a few men like him demonstrated the folly of the Founding Fathers in one respect: those sadly recent ancestors had not made it the law of the Utopia that the wealth of each citizen should be limited. This oversight was engendered by a weak-kneed sympathy for those who loved expensive things, and by the feeling that the continent was so vast and valuable, and the population so thin and enterprising, that no thief, no matter how fast he stole, could more than mildly inconvenience anyone. Noah and a few like him perceived that the continent was in fact finite, and that venal office holders, legislators in particular, could be persuaded to toss up great hunks of it for grabs.22

These devious businessmen have stalked the large and small screen as much as the page: a 1981 study by the Media Institute found that only 3% of businessmen portrayed engaged in socially productive behavior, while over half of corporate chiefs portrayed committed illegal acts and 45% of all business activities were portrayed as illegal.23 That may be a little surprising considering that one of America’s most influential writers, Henry James, felt the potential, on the cusp of the twentieth-century, for finding an “epic hero” among these businessmen.24 But as they’ve appeared in American literature, businessmen have usually been “heroes” in the sense that the Romantics associated Milton’s Satan with the term: bold, daring individuals who are brought to ruin by their own demonic energy. Theodore Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood (The 20

Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham, 4. Willa Cather, “The Sculptor’s Funeral” 335. 22 Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, 20-21. 23 Crooks, Conmen and Clowns, vi. 24 Henry James, “The Question of Opportunities,” 16. 21

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Financier, 1912; The Titan, 1914) is a prime example. Created to echo the careers of tycoons like Rockefeller and Gould, Cowperwood is defined by his amorality. He goes to jail for embezzling city money; an inveterate womanizer, he shows indifference to his wife and children.25 In his own time, Dreiser was attacked for the immorality of his stories—but although Cowperwood’s drive and energy may be captivating, Dreiser’s depiction of him ultimately looks more like a condemnation than an endorsement: Rushing like a great comet to the zenith, his path a blazing trail, Cowperwood did for the hour illuminate the terrors and wonders of individuality. But for him also the eternal equation—the pathos of the discovery that even giants are but pygmies, and that an ultimate balance must be struck. Of the strange, tortured, terrified reflection of those who, caught in his wake, were swept from the normal and the commonplace, what shall we say?26

Cowperwood deals in destruction; there is nothing creative or constructive about his career. Unlike the merchants or entrepreneurs championed by the original followers of Franklin, Cowperwood’s success has performed no positive services, built up no infrastructure, bettered no one’s morality. Indeed, with a trail of tortured and shattered victims in his wake, Dreiser’s businessman is ultimately left without even an inkling of personal accomplishment or satisfaction: And this giant himself, rushing on to new struggles and new difficulties in an older land, forever suffering the goad of a restless heart—for him was no ultimate peace, no real understanding, but only hunger and thirst and wonder. Wealth, wealth, wealth!27

The most striking thing about Cowperwood and other businessmen in American film and literature—whether they are fools like Sinclair Lewis’ Babbit, epic failures like Cowperwood and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, or malcontents like Bob Slocum in Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974)—is that they seem to lack something. Cowperwood has “no real understanding”; Gatsby tries to buy culture and create a history, but when he dies the whole facade crumbles. Perhaps the best depiction of the businessman as “lacking” something vital is in Nathaniel West’s satirical A Cool Million (1934), in which the 25

See David Brion Davis’ essay on Cowperwood and other titanic literary figures, “Fictional Analysis of Stress Seekers,” 104-131. 26 Theodore Dreiser, The Titan, 509. 27 Dreiser, Titan 510

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protagonist loses limb after limb as he makes his way among rapacious capitalists. Sometimes, there is clearly an aristocratic, snobbish resentment at work in these depictions—artistic elites scorning the base tastes of the new rich. But at its most biting and lasting, this criticism has gone even deeper, suggesting that the businessman’s occupation somehow chokes out the beautiful and the good—whether that “good” is located in art, God, or the family. The socialist newspaper editor Abraham Cahan captured and helped shape this pattern in his novel The Rise Of David Levinsky (1917): I was born and reared in the lowest depths of poverty and I arrived in America in 1885 with four cents in my pocket. I am now worth more than two million dollars and recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the cloak-and-suit trade in the United States. And yet when I take a look at my inner identity it impresses me as being precisely the same as it was thirty or forty years ago. My present station, power, the amount of happiness at my command, and the rest of it, seem to be devoid of significance.28

If we recollect the earliest criticisms of businessmen, we might feasibly identify this lack of significance as a lack of soul—the soul that, in a more secular society, is often signified as much by aesthetic appreciation or philosophical depth as by religious fervor. Hence, in the 1999 film, Cradle Will Rock, when Nelson Rockefeller orders the destruction of Diego Rivera’s Rockefeller Mural—which includes a portrait of Lenin—the clash between business and art signifies more than a battle between leftand right-wing politics. It is a clash between the creative arts and the destructive power of business; between materialism and soul.29 There is redemption from soulnessness for some of these types. But as Henry James showed with Christopher Newman, the title character in The American (1877), this redemption comes only after the businessman leaves business.30 Newman retires and goes to Europe to discover culture, mulling over his past life: Many of the qualities that made a great deed were there [in his business achievements]: the decision, the resolution, the courage, the celerity, the clear eye, and the strong hand. Of certain other achievements it would be going too far to say that he was ashamed of them, for Newman had never had a stomach for dirty work.... But none the less some of his memories 28

Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky, 1. Cradle Will Rock, dir. Tim Robbins, 1999. 30 This was pattern was first noted by Henry Nash Smith, in “The Search for a Capitalist Hero,” 99. 29

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seemed to wear at present a rather graceless and sordid mien, and it struck him that if he had never done anything very ugly, he had never, on the other hand, done anything particularly beautiful. He had spent his years in the unremitting effort to add thousands to thousands, and, now that he stood well outside of it, the business of money getting appeared tolerably dry and sterile.... It had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all the summer [in Europe] was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made by sharp railroad men and stockbrokers.31

The same sort of realization dawns on Tom Rath, the main character in Sloane Wilson’s 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (also a film starring Gregory Peck) while he is still in the business world. Already alienated by his experiences in WWII, Tom Rath leaves his low paying job at an arts charity to climb the corporate ladder. The soulless corporate world, however, begins to tear him and his family apart, and he must ultimately leave it to preserve himself and them: only then can he say, with any serious, “God is in his heaven...all’s right with the world.”32 The trope of leaving business to save the soul is a popular one in American film, where it sometimes gets a rather extreme manifestation. This happens in North By Northwest (1959), for example, and in The Desperate Hours (1955), both films where fate throws a businessman into the path of criminals or hit men who are out to destroy them. The businessmen ultimately redeem themselves, finding new depths of soul and passion, only by surviving these trials. Although Emily Watt’s points to James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970) as one of few postwar American novels to “suggest a shift in perspective” toward a more sympathetic treatment of businessmen, it actually recapitulates this same basic story in a more extreme form. Ed Gentry, an owner and partner in a small advertising agency, is sick of his boring, numbing, button-down life: “the feeling of inconsequence of whatever I would do, of anything I would pick up or think about or turn to see was at that moment being set in the very bone marrow.”33 So he and a group of friends—a sales supervisor, a mutual fund salesman, a fitness buff—head into the woods. Oddly, the film version leaves out this pre-history, but it has made the rest of the story well known: the men are attacked by hillbillies, kill one, and endure a harrowing, sometimes fatal, journey home. Upon returning, the newly purged Ed Gentry has been “delivered” from his malaise—he becomes a kinder boss, a better husband. He carries 31

Henry James, The American, 72. Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, 274. 33 James Dickey, Deliverance, 18. 32

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the wilds within him, and they give him humanity: “The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to me, a personal, private possession.”34 Gentry finds his humanity, his soul, despite his business life, not because of it. The fact that he must go through such extreme trials to become a sympathetic businessman really shows, despite Watts’ argument, just how deeply Dickey still sees the relationship between business and soul as a divide. In this way, Deliverance is not unlike works that frequently redeem businessmen by providing an injection of love or romance. For example, Cash McCall, a novel by Cameron Hawley better known as a 1959 film, presents a cold hearted corporate raider who falls for the daughter of a company president that he is about to oust. The romance softens him, changing his focus from business to family and human relationships. These ideas—that businessmen can be redeemed only by leaving business, enduring against trials and suffering, or finding love—become very important as we look at the selffashioning undertaken by businessmen and their biographers. Of course, the picture is not monolithic. Although they have largely been ignored in studies of the businessman in literature and film, some “types” of businessmen—particularly small businessmen or inventors, who partake in of the Franklinesque ideal of creative industry—routinely get positive treatment on film.35 Horatio Alger’s novels provide another famous example, although they don’t actually tell quite the rags-to-riches story that critics often associate with them.36 Rather, as John Cawelti notes, Alger’s stories are more about rags to respectability and a good deal of luck combines with the heroes’ industry and honesty to help them on their journey to the middle class—the subtitle of Struggling Upward, after

34

Dickey, Deliverance, 275. Emily Watts examines both the film and novel in her book, 158-160. 35 The absence of inventors, as a class, in Emily Watts’ book is particularly striking, since she sets out to expose “anti-business bias” and find viable capitalist heroes in literature (5). But she is not alone in failing to see that the creativity of inventors earns them a special place in literature: Henry Nash Smith also forgets them in “The Search for a Capitalist Hero,” as does John Chamberlain, who inveighs against “modern anti-business novelists” in “The Businessman in Fiction,” 134. For some positive inventor/entrepreneurs in film see The Hudsucker Proxy, directed by Joel and Ethan Cohen, 1994, and Tucker: The Man and His Dream, directed by Francis Ford Copalla,1988. The later self-consciously writes Tucker into the tradition of Franklin, as the eponymous character exclaims, for example: “If Benjamin Franklin were alive today, he’d be arrested for flying a kite without a license!” 36 See Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man, 110-111.

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all, is Luke Larkin’s Luck.37 Nevertheless, they were received and reinterpreted as reifications of an American rags-to-riches dream, especially by businessmen and historians who often used them to explicate their own tales of great wealth.38 If there is such a thing as an archetype in either the Christian or classical literary tradition, however, it is of the fall from grace rather than the ascent toward perfection—even Milton’s Paradise Lost is unquestionably more powerful than his Paradise Regained. With only a few rare exceptions, writers and artists give us a fallen world, and the forces that dominate that world—sin, industrialization, big business, whatever—are more likely to be demonized than glorified.

II. Historical Personae and Literary Reconstruction This is not necessarily the same world that historians see as they count up the cultural and material cards that have built the house in which we live. Perhaps because of this, and because they allow businessmen themselves to speak, the reunion of Romance and business, of heroism and Franklinesque industry, has happened most often and most vigorously in histories and the biographies of actual businessmen. Take for example the autobiography of Thomas Mellon. His career was more about banking and financing than thrift and invention. Intelligent and ambitious, Mellon rose from respectability to riches, not from rags to respectability; his father owned several properties and offered his son a farm, then supported him through boarding school and prep school when he turned down the chance to “spend my lifetime making an honest, frugal living by hard labor, but little more.”39 But in his 1885 autobiography, Mellon seizes on the moment he discovered Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography as the epiphany which gave his life its true shape: It delighted me with a wider view of life and inspired me with new ambition.... For so poor and friendless a boy to be able to become a merchant or a professional man had before seemed an impossibility; but here was Franklin, poorer than myself, who by industry, thrift and frugality had become learned and wise, and elevated to wealth and fame.... I regard the reading of Franklin’s Autobiography as the turning point of my life.40

37

Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man, 108-111. For a recent example, see Alex Pitofsky, “Dreiser’s The Financier and the Horatio Alger Myth,” Twentieth Century Literature, 44.3 (1998): 276-290. 39 Thomas Mellon, Thomas Mellon: His Life and Times, 64. 40 Mellon, Thomas Mellon: His Life and Times, 33. 38

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This is not meant to argue that Mellon’s account is false or disingenuous. It is simply to note that as he wrote his autobiography in the late 19th century, while novelists from Howells to Twain were crying out against the corrupt means by which the new fortunes had been made, Mellon claimed his descent from Franklin—with the implication that his career was as much about freedom, morality, and the public good as it was about money. The move resonates throughout the biographical literature on businessmen. The novelist Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, saw Ford’s factory system as the embodiment of soulless industrialization, symbolized by a world where men sang hymns that thanked “Our Ford” and the Christian cross was hacked into a “T.”41 Historian Allan Nevins, on the other hand, approached Ford from a radically different perspective, recuperating the magnate’s reputation in part by writing it into a Franklinesque trajectory. He compared Ford’s factory system not with some pre-industrial Arcadia, but with its contemporaries in early-20th century America; he paid scant attention to the intangible spiritual needs of Ford’s workers, but found ample material evidence that the advance to a $5 day did much to feed their families and educate their children.42 Unsurprisingly, then, Nevins diverges from writers contemporary with Ford, who looked at “the Ford factory, the workmen with their dull eyes, their rapid dull hands, obeying their mechanical drill masters,” and inveighed against Ford’s “cruelty, insensitivity, his intolerance, his hatred of everything related to beauty, freedom, human dignity.”43 Instead, Nevins sees Ford as someone who “wanted almost desperately to aid broken individuals and promote the good of all individuals,” and he claims that Henry Ford embodied “Franklin type of thrift” and instilled it in his workers.44 Even Peter Collier and David Horowitz, who are more awake to the brutal and tragicomic aspects of Ford’s folksy persona, can’t help but succumb to nationalistic mythologizing when they put him in historical context: Although it may not have seemed so at the time, his death was a recessional for that time of industrial conquest in the nation’s life. In the years ahead this American hold on the identity of the automobile which he more than anyone else had established would weaken and finally slip. Even though it had been fraught with eccentricity and destructiveness, his time

41

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 196. See Allan Nevins, Ford, 3 vols (New York: Scribner, 1954-63). 43 Jonathan Norton Leonard, The Tragedy of Henry Ford, 1. 44 Nevins, Ford, 3:332. 42

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would come more and more to seem a golden age by comparison with what came after.45

If this passage shows the historians’ capacity for the long, materialist view, their invocation of the golden age—with its roots in Greek and Roman literature—is equally significant. Because as much as historical accounts might differ in their final conclusions from literary ones, the narratives they present are in some sense just as constructed, just as dependent on literary models. Collier and Horowitz see American industrialization as “epic nation building.”46 So it is unsurprising that as they examine key figures in this process they turn to literature to convey how these members of the Ford coterie work as epic characters, comparing them not only to Franklin, Sam Smiles and Horatio Alger, but also to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King.47 In Nevins’ cold-war era biography of Rockefeller—which Peter Collier and David Horowitz cite as the work that ushered in “the new school of business history sympathetic to the American economic system”—the historian had an even greater challenge. Unlike Ford, Rockefeller was no tinkerer, no builder. And Standard Oil’s history of crushing competitors and manipulating markets would seem to mitigate against both Franklin’s ideal of the virtuous businessman and the historical view of the businessman as key to “epic nation building.” Nevertheless, Nevins writes warmly about Rockefeller’s mother instilling “piety, neatness, industry, modesty of deportment,” and claims that “as an old man, Rockefeller could still hear her voice echoing [Poor Richard’s Almanack]: “Willful waste makes woeful want.”48 Throughout the biography, Nevins is at great pains to cast Rockefeller’s career as one that built up the country rather than just crushed competitors. To do this, he holds tight to the theme of Rockefeller’s extreme thrift, his Franklinesque work ethic, his great religious belief. In fact, Nevins is often ready to do extreme violence to Rockefeller’s own troublesome words to make them fit the proposed image, as in Rockefeller’s claim that “God gave me my money.” While critics seized on this statement as an example of Rockefeller’s arrogance, Nevins blithely counters that it was “actually uttered in a state of complete

45

Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Fords: An American Epic, 228. Collier and Horowitz, The Fords 435. 47 Edsel—the doomed prince—is compared to Hamlet; Henry Ford II garners the Bellow comparison, Collier and Horowitz, The Fords, 229, 439. 48 Allan Nevins, John D. Rockefeller, 3. 46

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humility.”49 After all, even as he crushed his competitors, Rockefeller routinely downplayed the pursuit of money for money’s sake. What gives Nevins his insight into Rockefeller’s true mental state? Apparently nothing more than his belief that the oil-magnate embodied Franklin’s ideal. This is no accident, of course: Nevins was carefully selected by the Rockefellers to solidify an image that publicist Ivy Lee and a host of other public relations people had already worked to perpetuate. And Rockefeller’s personal documents, which were used by Nevins as source material, relentlessly perpetuate the self-image of a thrifty Franklin hero. As his properties became palaces, as he bought up winter homes where he could find the best golfing and his luxuries would seem to have exploded the myth of his austerity, the aging Rockefeller wrote “I am convinced that we want to study more and more not to enslave ourselves to things and get down more nearly to the Benjamin Franklin idea of living, and take our bowl of porridge on a table without any table cloth.”50 The disjunction between the material realities of Rockefeller’s life and the literary image that he has embraced and made himself a spokesperson for is truly remarkable. Even more striking is the way Ron Chernow—who proposes to use his biography to correct both the positive and negative myths around Rockefeller—simultaneously claims his subject in the cause of Franklin and virtue: Benjamin Franklin once observed, ‘I believe long habits of virtue have a sensible effect on the countenance,’ and Rockefeller’s nature became engraved in his aging face. The finely wrinkled, papery flesh told of frugality, the steady gaze of resolute purpose, the masklike face of cunning and craft.51

Quite literally “reading” Rockefeller’s physiognomy as a literary work that extolled the old man’s virtues, Chernow shows that the historian’s more balanced view is not necessarily any more bound to hard fact. What it seems to be bound to, instead, is a singular typology that elevates the smallest Franklinesque childhood anecdotes to the greatest significance in terms of the businessman’s later career. Hence, the young Pierre du Pont’s “entrepreneurial” decision to sell a wagonload of paper that he found is seen by both du Pont and his biographer Alfred Chandler as a crucial token of the thrift and industry which would later help him

49

Nevins, John D. Rockefeller, 360. Quoted in Raymond Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., 196. 51 Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, 612. 50

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remake the DuPont corporation.52 Even Jay Gould, the speculator and railroad financier who was known as the “Mephistopheles of Wall Street,” gets recruited for the Franklin ideal in a revisionist biography by Maury Klein. “Both parents,” Klein opines, “implanted in the boy a simplicity of taste, an aversion to vice or pomp, and a shrewd disposition to the practical.”53 Indeed, for Klein, Gould’s weak physical frame becomes the symbol of his Franklinesque spunk. Gould’s weakness, combined with an uprising by farmers who rented his parents’ land Were enough to crush most boys so ill-equipped to face life’s pressures. Yet they did not crush Jay. On the contrary, they seem to have been the fiery furnace in which his character was forged and from which his genius emerged. His was an intellect honed on adversity and disadvantage.54

Klein seizes on this theme of disadvantage, and his favorite metaphor to elucidate it is the Horatio Alger hero. Klein actually names one of his subchapters on Gould after a Horatio Alger novel, Struggling Upward. Here, Gould becomes the scrappy Alger hero: “No Horatio Alger hero ever faced a tougher climb to success than Jay Gould, and none managed it with more efficiency or self-effacement.”55 The comparisons continue throughout the book: “between 1860 and 1867 Jay acted out the role later enshrined by Horatio Alger...”; “like any good Alger hero, Jay was rewarded for his perseverance.”56 Some recuperation of Gould’s life and reputation was no doubt in order, but it is noteworthy that the revision takes place largely within a fictive framework, through the careful redeployment of the same types and antitypes once used to cast Gould as villain. Interestingly though, the Jay Gould that Klein depicts is less like an actual Alger hero than an idealized amalgamation of Alger and Franklin. A hero like Gould doesn’t succeed by luck, but by “driving himself to the limits of endurance, he worked hard...probed everywhere for new opportunities. Ever diligent, always hustling, he willingly paid whatever price was necessary to push himself along.”57 Of course, Gould isn’t the only one to warrant the comparison. Rockefeller’s biographies are replete with assertion’s like Chernow’s that “He could have been the hero of any 52

Alfred Chandler and Stephen Salsbury, Pierre S. du Pont, 13. Maury Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould, 17. 54 Klein, Life and Legend, 19 55 Klein, Life and Legend, 21. 56 Klein, Life and Legend, 66, 492. 57 Klein, Life and Legend, 66. 53

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of the 119 inspirational tracts soon to be penned by Horatio Alger, Jr.”58 George Perkins—who got his start in the insurance business through pure nepotism before becoming financier and partner to J.P. Morgan, earns this praise in his biography: “the story of his rise from obscure beginnings to wealth and power would have strained the credulity of Horatio Alger’s most devoted readers.”59 If the businessman was born in Britain, he just as often earns a comparison to that nation’s Alger, Sam Smiles. So Sam Insull, who became a billionaire utilities tycoon in the U.S. before being indicted for fraud, is described in a biography by Forrest McDonald as someone who “applied the formula” of Smiles’ “pluck, diligence, and determination...honesty, thrift, and prudence.”60 Again, this is not to argue that the comparisons are wholly without merit. Rather, it is simply meant to note that the way we are asked to understand these prominent businessmen, and the way they understood themselves, is essentially by way of literary devices. The authors admit that the facts presented in these biographies about business deals and practices are purposefully arranged to mitigate against popular, literary misconceptions of grasping, miserly businessmen. But facts never “speak” for themselves; here, they are made to speak in a particular accent by associating them with the strongest traditions in the businessman’s cultural arsenal. Ford, Insull, Gould, in their own biographies and autobiographies become “personae” in the original sense of the term, putting on masks that have been preconfigured by a literary tradition and that shape the life accordingly. It is unsurprising, then, that businessmen and their biographers also seem to be countering the literary image that they lack soul, humanity and romance. Sometimes, the effort is blatant enough, as in department-store owner Henry Gordon Selfridge’s The Romance of Commerce, which argues that trade is not only an exciting adventure, but also a key to securing social ideals like peace.61 Further, as if to confound the literati who saw business as art’s soulless opposite, Selfridge argued that it was the life-blood of the arts and the nation: “It is as necessary to the existence of any nation as blood to the physical man.... Commerce is the mother of arts, the science, the professions, and in this twentieth century has itself become an art.”62 Carnegie, who never tired of telling his own rags-toriches story, took up the same themes in a speech of 1903, describing 58

Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, 48. John Garraty, Right-Hand Man, 3. 60 Forrest McDonald, Insull, 10. 61 H. Gordon Selfridge, The Romance of Commerce, 4. 62 Selfridge 4-5. 59

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businessmen as the ultimate peacemakers, as uniting the world into a wholly benevolent corporate community: If the parliaments of these countries would only remit to the Iron and Steel Institute the whole subject of international relations, including armies and navies, you could readily appoint a committee of distinguished citizens of each of these countries, members of this institute, who would have little difficulty in laying the foundation of international peace and good will...guiltless of hostile intent.63

Rockefeller too joined the love-fest, commending the “quick-witted businessman whose spirit and energy are so splendid.”64 The wit, the energy, the national mission of the businessman cast his exploits as Franklinesque romance, if not quite epic. Sinclair Lewis would skewer these attitudes in Babbit, where he wrote that “To them, the Romantic Hero was no longer the knight, the wandering poet, the cowpuncher, the aviator, nor the brave young district attorney, but the great sales manager.”65 But this only seemed to increase the determination of businessmen and their biographers to make the soulful image stick. Nevins, for example, hears the clash of swords in the oil business: Business activities—the development of the resources of the half-explored country, the raising of the standard of life, the establishment of the material basis on which any ideal superstructure must rest—were already America’s principal challenge to her young men.... As energetic young Frenchmen in Froissart’s time turned to war, as energetic young Englishmen in Elizabethan days turned to exploration, as energetic young Americans of 1800 turned to pioneering, so now energy and ambition turned to business. It was much more than the road to wealth; it was the field to which the majority of Americans looked for...self expression.66

Nevins may have a valid point here. But his zeal to burnish Rockefeller’s image has surely carried him past the objectivity that he declares at the book’s beginning and into the realm of bold but seemingly unconscious mythopoesis. Whatever the truth of Nevins’ statement—and 19th century artists, writers, preachers, actors and musicians may have contested Nevins argument that business was the preeminent form of self-expression—it is 63

Andrew Carnegie, “The Secret of Business is the Management of Men,” 137677. 64 John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events, 72. 65 Sinclair Lewis, Babbit,142. 66 Nevins, Rockefeller 9-10.

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fascinating how directly it answers literary charges against businessmen by meeting them on their own terms. Nevins’ style of rhapsodic editorializing here is hardly an isolated incident. He also says Ford had “the artist’s desire to remake some part of the world after his own pattern,” and compares him to Walt Whitman, saying both men “were artists in the energy of their vision and the bigness of their style.”67 Likewise, Insull is constantly described by his biographer, Forrest McDonald, as a revolutionary, a visionary. When Insull introduced a depreciation reserve system to the bonds offered by Chicago Edison, and sold $1,200,000 of them in London, his biographer elevated him to worldheroic status: “The perceptive among them [Insull’s peers] must soon have sensed that they stood to him roughly as the second and third consuls stood to Napoleon.”68 Although Insull “looked more like a mustachioed, mortgage-holding villain than a hero, he had one commanding physical attribute...his eyes could persuade, command, demand, or hypnotize; they could disarm with gentleness or overwhelm with blazing passion.”69 Maury Klein indulges the same impulse continuously throughout his biography on Gould—often in attempts to confound the image of Gould as a ghoul. Consider Klein’s description of how Gould weathered 1884—a year in which he kept the Wabash from default by “creative” manipulation of the law, kept himself from ruin by manipulating the markets, and failed to install his favored candidate, James Blaine, in the White House: This creative impulse, which had driven Gould throughout his career, did not perish in the fiery ordeals of 1884. On the contrary, he emerged wanting more than ever to leave his children the larger inheritance of an ongoing business empire. Ultimately, this obsession became the tragic flaw that consumed him.70

Klein’s wording is heavy with significance, highlighting Gould’s creativity, his desire to build businesses instead of just stripping their assets. Most importantly, it concedes that Gould has a tragic flaw, but totally reorients the nature of that flaw. Unlike Howells’ Cowperwood, Gould’s flaw isn’t his overwhelming ambition, amorality, or lack of soul, but his dedication to his family; the image of Gould as a model parent is reiterated throughout the book. In short, the important thing here is not Gould’s business acumen, but his humanity. Although Klein’s book, The 67

Nevins, Ford, 2:619. McDonald, Insull, 73. 69 McDonald, Insull, 78. 70 Klein, Life and Legend, 340. 68

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Life and Legend of Jay Gould promises to get at the life behind the legend maliciously constructed by newspapermen, literati, and other propagandists, it can’t avoid constructing a legend of its own, with all the connotations of “fiction” and “saints life” that the term legend implies. Or rather, it can’t get behind one legend without carefully leveraging another. Indeed, the biographies and autobiographies of these prominent businessmen are united by subtle verbal strategies that reconfigure weaknesses as great human strengths. Hence, in Nevins’ biography, Rockefeller’s “materialism” is transformed into a positive: “his passionate interest in business success struck many as purely materialistic. But he would never have made the success he did had he been less singleminded.”71 Just as Rockefeller is single minded, not materialistic, thus fulfilling both Franklinesque and Christian ideals, so Nevins notes that “monopoly was and is a hateful thing,” but insists that Rockefeller’s monopolistic Standard Oil was “not primarily an expression of Lawless Mammonism. It was primarily...a response to the uncertainties, wastes, and cruelties of unbridled competition.”72 This was an interpretation Rockefeller promoted when he insisted he wasn’t crushing businesses, but saving them: “The Standard was an angel of mercy, reaching down from the sky, and saying ‘Get in the ark.’”73 So much for the conflict between religion and business. Likewise, although they dutifully report Henry Ford’s searing anti-Semitic comments, Collier and Horowitz sometimes spin events to perpetuate the idea that he was an untutored idealist who was simply embittered and corrupted by critics who didn’t understand him. Hence, when Ford’s shocking ignorance of history was demonstrated at a libel trial (he had sued the Tribune for calling him ignorant), his biographers don’t see this as exposing his hypocrisy, or undermining the idea that it takes a great intellect to build a great company—they see it as an assassination which “murdered” the idealistic Henry Ford: “He would never again be the sunny optimist who had captivated America a few years earlier.”74 Of course this murderous cloud has a silver lining, because it allows their story’s Hamlet—the fated Edsel—to enter the stage as the new idealistic hero. In the same vein, Klein spins vocabulary 180 degrees, answering charges that Gould was “a loner who shunned the company of his fellows” by arguing that he actually “marched to the beat of his own drummer.”75 Rugged individualism displaces miserly misanthropy, one 71

Nevins, Rockefeller 8. Nevins, Rockefeller 356. 73 Quoted in Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, 153. 74 Collier and Horowitz, The Fords, 90. 75 Klein, Life and Legend, 20. 72

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familiar masque displacing another. Klein claims contemporary accounts by Gould’s schoolmates that Gould was a pariah have “no evidence to support” them; but he accepts as “compelling testimony” the refutation of that charge by Jay’s favorite teacher.76 Gould wasn’t cold or “insensitive or indifferent to human suffering”; his response, instead, was that of the noble “stoic: to accept misfortunes for what they were, a part of the game.”77 He wasn’t a criminal, but “like a good general, he mastered the rules not to follow them blindly but to know when and how to violate them if it suited his needs.”78 Courage, individualism, creativity, sensitivity and stoic resolve meet in Klein’s Gould. It is an image perfectly suited to confound the muckrakers and novelists who make businessmen their pariahs, because it is cut from the same cloth.

III. Conclusion Without the fictional attacks on businessmen, or a long Christian tradition suspicious of their success, perhaps businessmen and their biographers wouldn’t feel so compelled to shape their lives into tales of thrift, courage, adversity and romance. Nevins was commissioned to write Rockefeller’s biography, for example, directly as a result of the illtreatment he’d received from muckrakers and literati; it was simply the most enduring of a wave of other commissioned biographies of businessmen.79 Of course these historical depictions of businessmen weren’t solely reactions against their tarnished image in literature and film: in life, they no doubt manifested many of the positive qualities highlighted by their biographers, in part because they felt the need to fashion a life of business according to the rules of fiction. Some genuine, some exaggerated, fictions are indispensable to anyone who wants to turn a life—with all its vagaries, accidents, and contradictions—into some kind of coherent narrative. And we needn’t resort to any high postmodern theory to see that resolving a life into a coherent narrative is, after all, a creative and interpretive act. Forrest McDonald, when relating Insull’s key conversations, admits in a quiet footnote that he has pieced coherent dialogue together from quotes in articles, interviews, and documents— even “correcting” vocabulary found in newspaper and magazine articles 76

Klein, Life and Legend, 20. Klein, Life and Legend, 21. 78 Klein, Life and Legend, 54. 79 For the search to find Rockefeller’s ideal biographer, see Collier and Horowitz, The Rockefellers, 627-37. For other biographies that coincided with the “self help” movement, see Cawelti 176. 77

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“to make it conform to Insull’s characteristic speech.”80 On a larger scale this is what all biographies do. In a knowing and penetrating chapter called “Ford: Symbol, Legend, Reality,” Nevins notes that the automobile magnate’s identity had long belonged to the realm of symbol, fiction and interpretation: “the symbolic Ford was a complicated concept, meaning many things to different men.... He was an economic giant, a political child, a philanthropist, a tyrant, a messiah, a devil—but as a symbol he was tremendous.”81 Oddly, the “Reality” Nevins finally describes in that same chapter is quite clearly just another interpretation, and a rather flattering one, that makes Ford a complicated hero of the great American adventure. He was “passionate,” he had “an insight which associates recognized as wholly superior to their own,” he was a man “on a pioneering quest for new...ideas.”82 Likewise Ron Chernow, in the foreword to his work, describes Rockefeller’s life as lingering “in our national psyche as a series of disconnected images,” and admits that “it is often hard to piece together the varied images into a coherent picture.”83 But it is the biographer’s job to join them, to create a narrative out of the scattered remnants of a life. If the biographer accepts the narrative of American economic progress as a given, or even if he rejects progressive history but sees the story of business as one which illuminates the American zeitgeist, is it any surprise that his depiction of businessmen runs counter to the literary one, emphasizing creativity, frugality and romance instead of debasement and cruelty? But why this divide? If novelist, filmmaker, and biographer are all engaged in similarly creative acts, why are their perceptions of businessmen so utterly contrary? After all, the comments (if not the actual novels) of Henry James about the possibilities for a businessman hero show that the literati could envision a creative element in business, as do the odd works, by writers like Ayn Rand, which truly see the world of business as the world of heroic action. And as Peter Gay notes in Pleasure Wars, the same “bourgeois” movement that made innovation a byword in 19th century industry helped make it a term of acclaim in art and literature.84 Yet somewhere along the line most art and literature very clearly turned against this bourgeois industrialism, even as many historians and businessmen continued to see it as a realm of constructive innovation.

80

McDonald, Insul, 1n. Nevins, Ford, 2:606-07. 82 Nevins, Ford, 2:614, 615. 83 Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, xiii. 84 Peter Gay, Pleasure Wars, 8-9. 81

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Gay sees this divide as the beginning of a war that has now raged for nearly two centuries between artistès and the bourgeois. Perhaps Daniel Bell has best explained what provoked and sustained this war by positing a rift between the principles governing the economic realm—”efficiency and functional rationality”—and those governing the cultural realm—”the enhancement and fulfillment of the self and the ‘whole’ person.”85 In the 19th century, Bell argues, the cultural and economic systems were still unified under the auspices of the Protestant work ethic, as both artist and entrepreneur sought to find the new, to rework nature, and to refashion consciousness: When the protestant ethic was sundered from bourgeois society, only the hedonism remained, and the capitalist system lost its transcendental ethic. There remains the argument that capitalism serves as the basis for freedom, and for a rising standard of living and the defeat of poverty. Yet even if these arguments were true...the lack of a transcendental tie, the sense that a society fails to provide some set of ‘ultimate meanings’ in its character structure, work, and culture, becomes unsettling to a system.86

In this view, ultimately, the historians we’ve been discussing are simply making the wrong arguments—mistaking material for spiritual progress, anointing businessmen as false saints—and the literati are essentially correct in their view that immersion in commerce leaves us with “something missing.” To some extent, this properly characterizes the positive historical approach to businessmen. Looking out at a nation where industrialization has brought better health, higher wages, and better technology to millions of people, biographers have granted businessmen a kind of heroism that literary writers have been less willing to bestow as they view the same scene in terms of commoditization and homogenization. But Bell’s view seems too easy and needs some modification for several reasons. First, as shown earlier in this paper, Puritan diatribes against business demonstrate that the economic and cultural realms were never totally harmonious. Second, if biographers and businessmen are simply blinded to spiritual and humanitarian deficiencies by the gleam of material progress, then why do they spend so much time emphasizing non-material qualities like kindness, innovation, perseverance, courage, soul? Why not simply argue their case on its merits? The answer must lie in something else that Bell identifies, when he argues that “the modalities of culture are few, and they derive from the 85 86

Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 37, 14. Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 21.

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existential situations which confront all human beings, through all times, in the nature of consciousness: how one meets death, the nature of tragedy and the character of heroism, the definition of loyalty and obligation, the redemption of the soul, the meaning of love and of sacrifice.”87 In other words, our culture remains concerned with the “deep” existential truths, and it has a relatively small vocabulary in which to express them. The real difference in the conclusions reached about businessmen by historians and artists will, then, lie not so much in the truths with which they are concerned as the places they look for answers—after all, as humans they will share the same existential questions. Art and literature, I would argue, often seek those existential answers in perfection, or at least they imply some imaginary ideal, by pointing out the flaws in our normal existence. In religious art and literature that perfection was God—the unmoved mover who was the ultimate answer to questions like “what is love” and “what is courage?” But even in religious eras, literature answered those questions by way of contrast—contrast with the ordinary fleshly sin that governed our workaday lives. In the secular world, literature has looked for answers to those same existential questions in more varied realms— nature, the pre-industrial world, Romance—but each one remains defined by its difference from the dominant systems that govern our workaday lives. For a brief moment in the 19th century, as increasingly secular artists began to see Religion, not sin, as a force keeping man from existential truth, the material progress offered by business shone a little brighter. But as business became our dominant social system, and as businessmen became our representative figures, perhaps it was inevitable that they became targets for authors who were looking for intangible existential truths. This is where some historians—and businessmen—differ, not because they are seeking different existential truths, but because of where they look for them, and the questions they ask along the way. Insofar as they confine themselves to material facts, to a real world that is and always has been flawed, historians must look for answers to the existential questions—of heroism, of creativity, of purpose—by examining the forces, movements, and material changes that brought their world into being. For historians like Nevins, or Collier and Horowitz, the force that created the modern world was commerce. And the rationalization of that commerce, its technological advancement, its increased efficiency, are all viewed as progress—a key arena where humans demonstrate heroism, creativity and purpose by seizing the forces that shape the world. 87

Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 12.

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Even for a historian like Alfred Chandler, who says in his Pulitzer Prize-winning study that he wants to study the material formation of economic institutions rather than whether industrialists are “bad fellows or good fellows,” there is an underlying assumption of progress, the idea that the concentration and growth and businesses is key to creating an economic meritocracy.88 Chandler’s focus on the material causes of economic concentration, like technological advancements, makes the formation of major enterprises seem almost inevitable: “the almost simultaneous availability of an abundant new form of energy and revolutionary new means of transportation and communication led to the rise of modern business enterprise.”89 But there is still a sense in his work that those who understood these changes first, and nurtured them rather than hindered them, were men of destiny. They “rise” along with their industries, brilliant strategists in arcs of upward movement. If historians sometimes use literary allusions, language, and tropes to create the narratives for those men, this is because they are, as Bell might say, working within the same “cultural modalities” as novelists. This doesn’t necessarily make their depictions of businessmen “fictitious.” But it may help explain how these utterly opposed literary and historical views of businessmen can coexist as products of the same American consciousness: a consciousness where business and technology are seen as dominant forces in daily life and historical change, but where the existential implications of those forces—now as in the time of the Puritans—are still open to interpretation.

Works Cited Alger, Horatio Alger. Struggling Upward, or Luke Larkin’s Luck. Virginia Electronic Texts Center: 2001. Beard, Miriam. A History of the Businessman. New York: Macmillan, 1938. Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 1976. Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky. New York: Harper, 1960.

88

Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand, 5. See also Chandler’s sequel which looks at the development of multinational firms in Germany, the U.S., and Britain, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. 89 Chandler, The Visible Hand, 78.

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Carnegie, Andrew Carnegie. “The Secret of Business is the Management of Men.” The World of Business. Vol. iii. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962. 1376-77. Cather, Willa. “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” McClure’s Magazine. January, 1905. 329- 36. Cawelti, John. Apostles of the self-made man. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965. Chamberlain, John. “The Businessman in Fiction. Fortune. November, 1948. 134-48. Chandler, Alfred and Stephen Salsbury. Pierre S. du Pont and the of the Modern Corporation. New York: Harper, 1971. Chandler, Alfred. Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1990. —. The Visible Hand. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1977. Chernow, Ron. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller. New York: Random House, 1998. Collier, Peter and David Horowitz. The Fords: An American Epic. New York: Summit, 1987. —. The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty. New York: Holt, 1976. Colton, Calvin. Junius Tracts. vii. New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1844. Cradle Will Rock. Directed by Tim Robbins. Touchtone Pictures, 1999. Crooks, Conmen and Clowns: Businessmen in TV Entertainment. Washington, DC: The Media Institute, 1981. Davis, David Brion. “Fictional Analysis of Stress Seekers.” Why Man Takes Chances: Studies in Stress Seeking. Ed. Samuel Klausner. New York: Anchor, 1968. 104-31. Denison, T.S. Denison. An Iron Crown: A Tale of the Great Republic. Philadelphia: Potter, 1891. Dickey, James. Deliverance. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. Dreiser, Theodore. The Titan. New York: New American Library, 1965. Fienberg, L.M. Changing Perspectives on the Businessman in Literature: 1865-1914, Dissertation: Berkeley, 1977. Franklin, Benjamin. Memoirs. Ed. Max Farrand. Berkeley: U of California P, 1949. —. Poor Richard’s Almanack. Ed. Andrew Trees. New York: Barns and Noble, 2004. —. The Works of Benjamin Franklin. Ed. Jared Sparks. Vol. 2. Boston, 1836. Fosdick, Raymond. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. New York: Harper, 1956. Garraty, John. Right-Hand Man. New York: Harper, 1957. Gay, Peter. Pleasure Wars. New York: Norton, 1998.

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Howells, William Dean. The Rise of Silas Lapham. Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1912. The Hudsucker Proxy. Directed by Joel and Ethan Cohen. Warner Brothers, 1994. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Collins, 2004. James, Henry. The American. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962. —. “The Question of Opportunities.” American Social Fiction. Ed Michael Millgate. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1964. Klein, Maury. The Life and Legend of Jay Gould. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1930. Leonard, Jonathan Norton. The Tragedy of Henry Ford. New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1932. Lewis, Sinclair. Babbit. New York: Harcourt, 1950. MacDonald, Forrest. Insull: The Rise and Fall of a Billionaire Utility Tycoon. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962. Mellon, Thomas. Thomas Mellon: His Life and Times. U of Pittsburg P, 1994. Nevins, Allan. Ford. 3 Vols. New York: Scribner, 1954-63. —. John D. Rockefeller: A Study in Power. New York: Scribner, 1959. Pitofsky, Alex. “Dreiser’s The Financier and the Horatio Alger Myth.” Twentieth Century Literature 44.3 (1998): 276-290. Pollard, Arthur, ed. The Representation of Business in English Literature. Institute of Economic Affairs, London: 2000. Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957. Rockefeller, John D. Random Reminiscences of Men and Events. New York: Doubleday, 1909. Rolle, Richard. The Form of Living. English Writings of Richard Rolle. Oxford: Clarendon, 1931. Selfridge, H. Gordon. The Romance of Commerce. New York: John Lane, 1918. Smith, Henry Nash. “The Search for a Capitalist Hero.” The Business Establishment. Ed. Earl F. Cheit. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964. 77-112. Tawney, R.H. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. New York, 1952. Twain, Mark. 1870. “The Late Benjamin Franklin.” The Galaxy. 10: 13840. —. 1910. “Sixty-Seventh Birthday: At the Metropolitan Club, New York, November 28, 1902.” Mark Twain’s Speeches. New York: Harper and Brother, 1923. 363-74.

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—. 1871. “The Revised Catechism. New York Tribune. 27 September. 6. Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Paramount, 1988. Vonnegut, Kurt. God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. New York: Delacourt, 1965. Watts, Emily. The Businessman in American Literature. U of Georgia P, Athens 1982. Wigglesworth, Michael. Day of Doom. New York: Spiral, 1929. Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002.

THE WALL STREET BUSINESSMAN GOES METROSEXUAL ZACHARY SNIDER

The urban American businessmen of Bret Easton Ellis’s novels are metrosexual demons, each obsessed with designer apparel, costly cosmetology products, under the spell of popular culture phenomenon, and more often than not, financially sound for life thanks to trust funds and/or high profile jobs. These male divas have a glorious surplus of money, women, and drugs, but because they are such self-obsessed cosmopolitanites, Ellis fuels their interior monologues with enough neuroticisms for every Los Angelean and especially New Yorker to idolize these social climbers and kings of convenience. Ellis city men, these metrosexual skyscraper-dwellers, are simultaneously chauvinistic and princess-like, most notably his infamous anti-hero Patrick Bateman of American Psycho, who must detail for himself the clothing labels and costs of everyone’s apparel in his immediate surroundings.1 During this text’s respective era of 1980s Reaganomics, readers’ narrative experience with Ellis’s novels of this millennial businessman archetype (and eventually the film adaptations of them) morphed into only an image of pretense and pastiche, emotionally and, seemingly, psychologically void of any humanistic depth. Norman Mailer once critiqued harshly of Psycho: “I cannot recall a piece of fiction by an American writer which depicts so odious a ruling class…The writer may have enough talent to be taken seriously…How one wishes he were without talent! One does not want to be caught defending ‘American Psycho’.”2 Yet, in terms of the introduction and evolution of the early-90s mod-man metrosexual, the literary marketplace can only defend, appreciate and rely on American Psycho. Synonymously, fans of Ellis’s most controversial work of social fiction, many of whom were–and still are–the Wall Street clones that Ellis wrote about, also must attribute his 1 2

Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1991. Anderson, Susan Heller. “CHRONICLE.” New York Times. 2 February 1991.

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monstrous creation of Patrick Bateman to the influential way they dress, make reservations at hip restaurants, and the chauvinistic methods in which treat their girlfriends. Both in the 1990 print version and the 2000 film adaptation of American Psycho, Patrick Bateman’s often ladylike cosmetic monologues and his soulless, verbalized product descriptions commented on consumer-obsessed 1980s male diva culture more than any other novel of its time. Wall Streeters still continue this ‘feminized’ version of masculinity in the 21st century, but it was literary characters like Bateman who made it okay for them to do so. Notoriously outspoken New York Times journalist Roger Rosenblatt stated jokingly yet disapprovingly in his original review of Psycho upon the book’s original publication date: The context of these high jinks is young, wealthy, hair-slicked-back, narcissistic, decadent New York, of which, one only assumes, Mr. Ellis disapproves. It's a bit hard to tell what Mr. Ellis intends exactly, because he languishes so comfortably in the swamp he purports to condemn. Perhaps this is the tormenting ambivalence of his "twenty something" generation, which he defined in The Times's Arts and Leisure section of Dec. 2. He wrote: "We are clueless yet wizened." Yes, that must be it. What "American Psycho" has is the most comprehensive lists of baffling luxury items to be found outside airplane gift catalogues. I do not exaggerate when I say that in his way Mr. Ellis may be the most knowledgeable author in all of American literature. Whatever Melville knew about whaling, whatever Mark Twain knew about rivers are mere amateur stammerings compared with what Mr. Ellis knows about shampoo alone.3

On the surface level these characters are selfish, materialistic jerks who would kill their own mothers for a one-of-a-kind Paul Smith suit. On a deeper level, though…they are selfish materialistic jerks who would kill their own mothers for a one-of-a-kind Paul Smith suit…but do not know why they are the horrid way that they are. Costumed with expensive threads and labels, these materialistic Ellisian Wall Streeters are each in a crisis with his Other, as was Ellis himself when he created The Rules of Attraction’s Paul Denton, Glamorama’s Victor Ward, the fictionalized character of Bret Easton Ellis in Lunar Park, and especially, Wall Street’s first publicly known metrosexual, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. Denton and Rules’s other college-age males are financial analyst businessmen in training, while Glamorama’s Ward and his fashion drones are an alternative representation of the urban businessman for the 21st 3 Rosenblatt, Roger. “Snuff This Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” New York Times.16 December, 1990.

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century: the jet-setting, globe-trotting celebrity ‘businessman,’ whom Wall Streeters now attempt to emulate in appearance and lifestyle. Most of all, these man-boys fight vehemently to not have to grow up, no matter with how much materialism, consumerism, violence, misogyny, and homophobia they decorate their fashion catwalk battle armor. Daniel Cojocaru analyzes Psycho’s Wall Street clones by stating that they’re in an alternative hyperreality, according to Jean Baudrillard’s heightened concept of mediadictated reality: “Bateman becomes an expert in dressing in style, securing reservations at new and expensive restaurants, and staying in great physical shape–in short, he becomes an expert in adapting to the Baudrillardian hyperreality world of pure signification.”4 This ‘hyperrealism’ in which Bateman and his clones live is the very egotistic bubble of pretense and segregated self-importance that many real-life investment bankers strive to inhabit. Above Wall Street but below 14th St., these ubermale superhero Cassanovas still immaturely want to be king of the playground, albeit with really expensive facial moisturizer, fash-mag boxer briefs, and pricey cologne. Journalist Mark Simpson created the term “metrosexual” in the early90s when he wrote his article “Here Come the Mirror Men” for The Independent. In 2002 Simpson updated and expanded his article for Salon.com to include the likes of David Beckham, Robbie Williams, George Clooney and Brad Pitt as definitive ‘Mirror Men,’ and retitled it “Meet The Metrosexuals.” Gracing the cover of urban businessmanoriented publications like Esquire, Details and GQ, these aforementioned celebrities who don three-piece suits and are photographed at desks with paperwork and briefcases, are now the Oceans Eleven-like epitome for real-life urban businessmen. They are the fashion and lifestyle icons for actual men who work on Wall Street to idolize and idealize, by mimicking not only celebrity culture, but the dapper metrosexual characters these entertainers portray in film. In 2002 Simpson wrote: The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis -- because that's where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference. Particular professions, such as modeling, waiting tables, media, pop music and,

4

Cojucaru, Daniel. “Confessions of an American Psycho: James Hogg’s and Bret Easton Ellis’s Anti-Heroes’ Journey from Vulnerability to Violence.” Contagion: Vol 15/16. p. 185. 2008/2009.

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nowadays, sport, seem to attract them but, truth be told, like male vanity products and herpes, they're pretty much everywhere. 5

Simpson and other journalists who have scribed about metrosexual characters or culture often attribute Ellis’s creation of Patrick Bateman as the first publicly ‘out and proud’ metrosexual of literature. Starting in 1990, upon American Psycho’s release from Vintage Books, many NYCbased yuppie businessmen collectively thought Ellis was writing about them, not only their day-to-day lives, but about their fantasy lives as well. Perhaps the most troubling problem with Ellis’s gang of model wanna-bes is that while their creator knows better than to take his characters seriously, many fans of Ellis’s fictions do not realize that his characters are symbols of social phenomenon more than they are representations of trueto-life humans. They’re satirized cultural culminations of the dozens of reasons why male twentysomethings fool themselves with ballooned selfimportance and ultimate capitalism, particularly that of appearance. They’re stereotypes, no matter how truthful they may seem or come across – and Ellis intentionally created them to be humorous stereotypes. Similar to most social theories of conformity, Ellis had and still has no way of preventing his young army of shallow nihilists from having a collective conscious desire to overtake cities like Manhattan with their overzealous self-aggrandization. The birth of Patrick Bateman, the world’s first proud, if not obsessive, metrosexual, quickly spawned a Manhattan clan of dedicated followers of fashion, which quickly grew into an international group of male divas. Protest groups’ fears of Ellis promoting misogyny and homophobia were, eventually and for the most part, soon silenced by Psycho’s contextual megaphone of consumerism. Cojocaru states in his analysis of the attempted realism of Psycho’s characters and their interaction: American Psycho on the other hand is concerned with the consequences of the crass materialism of the U.S. yuppie generation, culminating at the end of the 1980s, as experienced by the serial-killing first-person narrator Patrick Bateman…Timothy Price, one of Bateman's colleagues on Wall Street, expresses this in the following words: “In essence what I'm saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I'm an asset.”6

This very thought by Price wrongfully justifies that each of Bateman’s clones, like Bateman himself, does not realize that he is an unoriginal 5

Simpson, Mark. “Meet the Metrosexual.” Salon.com Arts & Entertainment. July 22, 2002. [http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2002/07/22/metrosexual/] 6 Cojucaru.

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sheep in a herd of metrosexual businessmen, herded together by their insecurities and collective egoism. Similar to other attractive cities that boast exclusive international banking firms such as London, Tokyo, and Frankfurt, the young male investment banker population of Manhattan is not mainly composed of native New Yorkers. Nor is the rest of the island. In New York City, it is impossible to work anywhere or eat at any exclusive restaurant or order dirty martinis in any shi-shi-foo-foo bar where you will not be surrounded by pretty, designer-labeled twentysomethings who have relocated to big bad Manhattan to pretend to be the movie star versions of themselves. Below 34th St., Gramercy Park, Battery Park City, Tribecca, Soho, and even the East and West Villages are filled with model-wannabes–males and females alike–who faithfully make shopping lists of every designer label and cosmetic line formerly featured on weekly episodes of Queer Eye For the Straight Guy. These exact readers and viewers of NYC-based literature and film are the precise followers of Ellis’s fictions, and now, even during middle-age, he still knows how to cater to his yuppie businessman audience. The first time Patrick Bateman communicates with his audience via a mellow voiceover in Mary Harron’s film version of American Psycho, he details his morning beauty ritual, a cosmetic obstacle course that some models probably don’t even endure before elaborate photo shoots. Bateman tells us: I live in the American Gardens Building on West 87th St. on the 11th floor. My name is Patrick Bateman. I’m 27 years old. I believe in taking care of myself and a balanced diet and rigorous exercise routine. In the morning if my face is a little puffy I’ll put on an ice pack while doing stomach crunches. I can do 1000 now. After I remove the ice pack I use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower I use a water activated gel cleanser, then a honey almond body scrub, and on the face an exfoliating gel scrub. Then I apply an herbal mint facial mask which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an after shave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out or makes you look older. Then moisturizer, or an anti-ageing eye balm followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion.7

While reading the text of American Psycho through the lens of a stereotyping literary critic, you could easily argue Bateman’s psychosis and sexual orientation. Because of his obsession with beauty products and expensive clothing, which is typically associated with female characters, 7 American Psycho. Dr. Mary Harron. Perf. Christian Bale, Reese Witherspoon, Jared Leto. Lions Gate Films, 2000.

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as well as his rampant over-the-top homophobia, a queer theorist might argue that Bateman is a closeted homosexual. Likewise, a feminist critic might attempt to convince readers that Patrick Bateman is a misogynistic monster. But both of these critical readings–which have been performed many times in recycled theoretical dissertations since the early 90s– completely undermine Ellis’s unique take on masculinity. Guinevere Turner, who wrote the screenplay adaptation for Harron’s film version of Psycho, stated in an interview, “If you examine the story, it's actually a really feminine piece about how retarded men are – the way in which men are actually so self-obsessed in the way that we associate with gay men…We saw the humor in it…”8 Harron, in support of Turner’s screenplay argument, stated similarly of Bateman’s intentionally comedic, or satirical, Wall Street character: The story of Patrick Bateman, a status-obsessed Wall Street executive who commits frenzied murders in his spare time, was not a slasher novel. It was a surreal satire, and although many scenes were excruciatingly violent, it was clearly intended as a critique of male misogyny, not an endorsement of it. When eight years later I was asked to do just that, it seemed to me that enough time had passed for the story to be seen as a commentary on the late 80's, and I hoped that by excising those graphic torture scenes, I would allow the novel's true meaning to appear.9

This true meaning, as Harron defines it, is indeed satirizing the ‘feminine’ qualities of these characters’ masculinity, although they hypocritically often attempt to overstate their masculinity while trying to impress their male colleagues. These characters’ lack of awareness of how vain and princess-like they act, is precisely from where the comedic essence of Ellis’s narrative emerges. Ellis himself stated of the feminist uproar in regards to his character’s killing of women: I saw Gloria Steinem on Larry King, and she was saying, ``I hope Mr. Ellis realizes that when this book comes out and women are killed and tortured in the same fashion as is described in American Psycho, I hope he understands that he must take responsibility for this.'' If for some reason a deranged mind gets hold of this book and reads it and does commit a terrible act of violence against a woman -- or a man . . . how does that affect my role as a writer? Do we not express ourselves the way we want because a very small, tiny, minuscule percentage of people might get the 8

Snow, Nicholas. “HOLLYWOOD Velvet.” Lesbian News: Vol 28. p. 41. May 2003. 9 Harron, Mary. “The Risky Territory of ‘American Psycho’.” New York Times: Late Edition. April 2000.

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Bateman possesses overdramatic masculine, narcissistic qualities in the way he dominates women and compares himself to his coworker-friends. His male ego wars with said coworker-friends throughout the entire narrative. It remains undecided however, if Ellis is purposely trying to ‘feminize’ him with his obsession of designer cosmetic products and immense appreciation with, if not obsession for, high-end fashion. Ellis has given Bateman a princess complex via his image and constant psychological escapism, waiting for a comforting companion or a dosage of humane pathos to save him. With this genderless idea (or, the combination of noticeable male and female characteristics) in Psycho, rather, it’s the capitalistic obsession of Bateman’s wounded ego that guides his murders and other crimes, rather than his desire to destroy women. In one scene, Bateman kills a business associate for having a better apartment and business card than Bateman himself does. Only, in order to commit the murder, Bateman must put on a raincoat so his expensive suit doesn’t get dirty, all the while meticulously using an ax to hack up his colleague on the Style section of the New York Times that he has spread all over the floor, so as not to make a mess. In his character analysis of Bateman, theorist Kilbourn stated similarly of the ‘designer’ character of Ellis’s anti-hero: In neither novel nor film is Bateman monstrous merely because he is a serial killer who graduates to mass murder by the end. In the film, far more directly than in the book, he is monstrous for reasons parallel to those criteria of monstrousness identified for mass media images of women. As a character he is an amalgam of various commodified attributes: muscular body, blandly handsome face, designer clothes, expensive haircut, Wall Street job, uptown apartment, and so forth. Bateman's attempts to assert any kind of authentic gendered identity fail to the same extent that they succeed: he is more fake and more depthless than all the other men around him, whom he resembles outwardly to the point of interchangeability – a joke underscored to great effect in the film in its presentation of Bateman as one of several nearly identically handsome young men in designer suits, tortoise-shell framed glasses, and slicked-back hair.11 10

Snow. Kilbourn, Russell J.A. “American Frankenstein: Modernity’s Monstrous Prodigy.” Mosiac: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature: Vol. 38. Iss. 3. p. 167-184. Winnipeg: September 2005. 11

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While, outwardly, this investment banker character type is both socially acceptable on both the page and in real life, the interior monologues of Bateman’s monster-businessman caused critics of all isolated academic and social theories to be convinced that there is something far more purposely hateful within Bateman, as intentionally created and intended by Ellis himself. In the text of the novel, Bateman mostly preys upon minorities: women (predominantly prostitutes, because he can control them more easily by paying them, and without verbal challenge on their part); a black homeless man and a Korean dry-cleaner; and a gay colleague. Ultimately, Bateman finds that he cannot kill his gay colleague of Piece & Pierce because in order to strangle him to death in the bathroom, Bateman would actually have to touch him, a hideously grotesque act that homophobic Bateman cannot even fathom. Upon American Psycho’s release, gay activist groups and queer theorists protested Patrick Bateman’s malicious hatred of homosexuals, which Ellis wrote in passages such as: When I stopped on the corner of 16th St. and made a closer inspection it turned out to be something called a “Gay Pride Parade,” which made my stomach turn. Homosexuals proudly marched down Fifth Avenue, pink triangles emblazoned on pastel-colored windbreakers, some even holding hands, most singing “Somewhere” out of key and in unison. I stood in front of Paul Smith and watched with a certain traumatized fascination, my mind reeling with the concept that a human being, a man, could feel pride over sodomizing another man, but when I began to receive fey catcalls from aging, overmuscled beachboys with walruslike moustaches…I sprinted…back to my apartment…to put on a new suit …and gave myself a pedicure.12

The fact that Patrick Bateman runs away from the ‘disgusting’ homosexuals in order to give himself a pedicure and perform an elaborate costume change should have been reason enough for gay activists to realize Bret Easton Ellis was antagonizing these metrosexual productobsessed men. Ellis himself stated of his own personal Frankenstein: With American Psycho it was very clear to me when I started writing that this was going to be a character who was so obsessed with appearances that he was going to tell the reader in minute, numbing detail about everything he owns, everything he wears, everything he eats. And that sense of detail spilled over into the murders. It seemed to me dishonest not to present those sequences in the same fashion that the narrator, Patrick 12

Ellis, American Psycho.

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The Wall Street Businessman Goes Metrosexual Bateman, would describe a plate of food at a restaurant, the interior of his apartment or the clothes everyone in a room is wearing. It seemed a logical extension of his voice.13

Ergo, Bateman is the formulated symbolic collection of the very type of capitalistic and consumerist businessman that Ellis satirizes. Having rendered his anti-hero as indirectly comedic, many readers and critics did not realize the irony that composes Patrick Bateman’s scattered, obsessive identity. In his recent article on metrosexual culture, American journalist Don Rottenbucher claimed that Ellis actually defends homosexual culture: “For all those who don’t know, a “metrosexual” is nothing new. It is just a spin on the great ’80’s term, toxic bachelor… Bret Easton Ellis wrote ‘American Psycho’ in retaliation to the homophobic mod-men of the inane ’80’s.”14 Similarly, Mark Simpson, who is a self-proclaimed anti-queer theorist, suggests that Ellis’ consumerist images and representations of masculinity fare far worse than the female representations: In "American Psycho," the antihero serial killer's problem is presented as his failure to recognize the woman that could civilize him: "Have you ever wanted to make someone happy?" (Patrick’s secretary Jean) asks innocently. (Patrick) doesn't hear her: He's too busy getting out his giant nail gun. Making someone else happy is of course an even more impossible quest than making yourself happy -- our parents taught us that. But in this case it is rather less likely to stain your white silk sofa.15

No matter under what critical lens theorists study the text of American Psycho, what readers of Ellis’s book and viewers of Herron’s film encounter is Narcissus getting off with himself, just in extravagantly priced trendy suits. In his 2005 article entitled “The Rise of the Metrosexual,” men’s studies columnist Dan McCarthy wrote: Go watch American Psycho five or six times. To his "friends," who can look at a guy and immediately identify the price and designer of every article of clothing he is wearing, Patrick Bateman is someone to be emulated. He can do 1000 sit-ups. He uses deep pore cleanser lotion and an herb-mint facial mask. He is rich, good-looking, young, and funny. Of course, he's a raging homicidal psychopath in his spare time. But why would that matter? He's fabulous! The point of the movie is that the 13

Love, Robert. “Psycho Analysis.” Rolling Stone: 601. p. 45. 4 April 1991. Rottenbucher, Don. “The Spin Zone.” Central Michigan Life. September 10, 2003. [http://www.cm-life.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/09/10/3f5eb98f345c8] 15 Simpson. 14

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glorification of the superficial is ultimately meaningless, because even Bateman's friends don't care to know him well enough to see what's underneath.16

The toiletry monologue in the film version of Psycho in which Bateman introduces himself is only a fraction of the length for which this monologue rambles on in the novel. Likewise, as Psycho’s narrator – in both the novel and screenplay – Bateman cannot sit still in a restaurant, at a dinner party, or in a business meeting without detailing for himself the designer wardrobes of everyone in the room. Example: “Price is wearing Ermenegildo Zegna, a cotton shirt with French cuffs by Ike Behar, a Ralph Lauren silk tie and leather wing tips by Fratelli Rossetti.”17 This consumerist obsession eventually starts to define Batman’s actual sexuality, if not his entire identity. Even more so than a specific gender or another person, Bateman and his clones are ravenously attracted to brand names and expensive products available for only privileged persons. While Patrick Bateman is said to be the first metrosexual to appear in Ellis’s work, and mainstream fiction as a whole, really, the characters of Sean Bateman and especially Paul Denton and Richard “Dick” Jared certainly showed metrosexual-businessman promise when The Rules of Attraction was published in 1987, just two years after Ellis’s debut novel Less Than Zero. In Rules’s text, the gay character of Paul Denton narrates in the same consumer product obsessed language for which Patrick Bateman became infamous.18 In the film version of Rules, Paul Denton is presented as a bisexual university student, presumably so his character is more acceptable and less threatening to mainstream American audiences.19 Thus, for accepting audiences, Paul Denton is not a taboo faggot, but instead an acceptable metrosexual. The scene when Paul Denton rekindles his boyhood sexual fling with Richard Jared features one of the most blatant spoilt male diva duos ever filmed. Roger Avery directs the prima donna underage male characters to sip cocktails with their pretentious absent-minded mothers, and then has them perform for each other a lipsync duet to George Michael’s “Faith.” They engage in a co-strip karaoke, each of them progressively tossing off another layer of clothing 16 McCarthy, Dan. “The Rise of the Metrosexual.” Barstool Sports. July 27, 2005. [http://www.barstoolsports.com/article/The_Rise_of_the_Metrosexual/315/] 17 Ellis, American Psycho. 18 Ellis, Bret Easton. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Penguin Publishing, 1987. 19 The Rules of Attraction. Dr. Roger Avery. Perf. James Van Der Beek, Kip Pardue, Ian Somerhalder. Lions Gate Films, 2002.

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the sillier they act, suggesting that when the layers of designer apparel are gone in the fictional text, so is the pretense heterosexualized façade of their characters, and perhaps of Bret Easton Ellis himself. Personally, in ‘real life,’ Ellis does not classify himself as either homo- or heterosexual.20 In 2005, although Ellis often wrote about his fictional self (in Lunar Park) or hi Others as having a wife or girlfriend, he publicly stated that his lover of many years, Michael Wade Kaplan, had died the year prior.21 While he never stated so publicly, perhaps his characters are, sexually speaking, alpha-masculinized versions of himself. For example, in Rules of Attraction in the scene when Paul mistakes a drugged-up Sean Bateman for seducing him, he tells us: I’d be wearing my long Loden wool coat I got at the Salvation Army in town and he’d be wearing his leather jacket weighed down with cigarettes, bottles of wine, Haagen Dazs ice cream, shampoo, and he would stop, just to be daring, to buy one piece of Bazooka gum… Sean wanted it so badly that I couldn’t say no, since he stood there, defiant, sexy in tight jeans, his jaw set, his hair shiny but matted with sweat due to our lovemaking and casually tousled. How could I say no?22

Ellis waited 10 years after the release of American Psycho to publish his next novel, Glamorama, which followed a small group of characters whose obsessive and shallow personalities rival those of the pretentious Psycho gang, particularly Ellis’s protagonist Victor Ward. Virtually nothing happens in the first 250 pages of Glamorama other than Victor Ward name-dropping and, even more often, obsessing about his and his girlfriend’s appearance at media parties and press events, a behavior most associated with insecure female characters or cloying teenage girl archetypes.23 During yet another PR extravaganza, Ward tells us: Most people were mellow and healthy, tan and buff and drifting around. Others were so hysterical – sometimes covered with lumps and bruises – that I couldn’t understand what they were saying to me, so I tried to stay close to Chloe to totally make sure she didn’t fall back into any destructive habits and she wore Capri pants and Kamali makeup, canceled 20 Shulman, Randy. “The Attractions of Bret Easton Ellis.” Metro Weekly: Washington DC’s GLBT Newsmagazine. 10 October 2002. DC: Metro Weekly. 23 Nov 2009. [http://www.metroweekly.com/feature/?ak=126] 21 Wyatt, Edward. “Bret Easton Ellis: The Man in the Mirror.” New York Times. 7 August 2005. [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/arts/07wyat.html?_r=1] 22 Ellis, The Rules of Attraction, 90. 23 Ellis, Bret Easton. Glamorama. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1999.

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aromatherapy appointments that I was unaware she had made, her diet dominated by grape- and lemongrass- and root-beer-flavored granitas.24

While The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho satirized the consumer-obsessed values and Reaganomics of the 1980s’ Gen X’ers, Glamorama issued in the new Ellisian metrosexuals for today’s mediaand celebrity-obsessed Millennial generation. Similar to every reality television “character” of the new millennium, Victor Ward and his gang of soulless drones all constantly need to feel special and feel like a celebrity, no matter how high the price tags or how fatal the consequences of their obsessions. Once the plot of Glamorama sludges through the meticulously irritating details of guest lists and decorations, the metrosexual characters leave New York for Paris and London, suggesting that now, ten years after the birth of Patrick Bateman, metrosexuality is such a globalized phenomenon that it has become the norm. This suggests that beefy American Frat boys-cum-Wall Streeters and ‘limp-wristed’ sensitive European businessmen are now equal, an idea that would mortify both of these opposing groups who think they define masculinity. Victor Ward and his male model and PR pals meet and get into trouble with British and other European metrosexuals–a picture-perfect textual event that Derek Zoolander and his international caricature idiot model mates can thank for their successes. Ultimately, perhaps what Ellis is desperately trying to tell his readers is that unlike Patrick and Sean Bateman, unlike Richard Jared, Paul Denton and Victor Ward, and unlike many of his fashionista faithful readers, Bret Easton Ellis the man, at 45 years old, has grown up. Ellis wants his readers and critics to know that he has confronted his fictional Others, the characters that have made him infamous. He wants us to know that he has battled these immature, self-obsessed fictional metrosexuals, and that he has won. During an interview Ellis did for the Danish television talk show Deadline, in which he discussed his 2005 novel Lunar Park, he stated: A lot of Patrick Bateman was based on my father. After I hung out with a group of Wall Street guys in 1986 and 87, and while I was outlining American Psycho, I began to realize that these guys were like my dad. I mean, they were obsessed with status and the right table in a restaurant and wearing the most expensive suits and dating the hottest babe and having

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The Wall Street Businessman Goes Metrosexual the nicest car and having the flashiest haircut and, you know, they were very vain, very narcissistic guys, and so was my dad.25

In response to his characterization of Bateman, Ellis freely defends the fact that he did not want Bateman to have an epiphanic awakening or admittance of his character’s psychological background: I don't think you can explain someone like Patrick Bateman -- at least not within the context of a novel where the character is talking to you, narrating to you—without cheating. I didn't want to—and I didn't want Bateman to literally verbalize: ``I was mistreated by my parents when I was younger, and that is why. . . . I was rejected by women when I was in my teens, and this is why I do this.'' Maybe an unspoken explanation is maybe what Mailer was looking for. Again what you have here are two writers disagreeing on their takes on a novel. To me there is no reasoning. To me this creature just exists.26

During Ellis’s interviews during the first 20 years of his career, he usually claimed that he was vastly dissimilar to the selfish consumerist characters that he scribed–that he wrote fiction and fiction only. He claimed that is fictive Others were complex representations of young finance world businessmen he had met and despised. Perhaps the reason for Ellis’s former defensive statements is because – like both his characters and his fans – Ellis despised himself. Bret Easton Ellis wants us to know that like Patrick Bateman and Victor Ward, he too was a metropolized, Paul Smith-obsessed monster. Ellis stated: But I must admit, I mean, now, after all these years, I can finally say it, that look – I based Patrick Bateman on myself, as well. And I was too afraid to admit that for many, many years because the reaction to the book was so violent that I felt I had to defend it on a literary level and defend it on a conceptual level rather than, “Hey, look. This is what I was feeling during this decade. This is what I was feeling when I was 23, 24 and 25 and writing the book. This was the lifestyle that I was also living, and Patrick Bateman – he’s me too.27

Had the capitalist and anarchist trends of the 1980s crept into the 90s and then into the new millennium, perhaps Bret Easton Ellis’s moneyhungry, shallow metrosexual characters would have survived. But since 25

2 gang Bret. November 6, 2005. Deadline. February 8, 2006. [http://www.dr.dk/DR2/deadline2230/2005/11/03/150721.htm] 26 Snow. 27 2 gang Bret.

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the consumerist everyman of the late 20th century has been replaced by the commercialist everyman of the reality-television-premiering, celebrityand media-obsessed 21st century, Ellis has had to reinvent and revise both his characters and his public profile. While he is still able to hide behind his Other, he has had to morph his own image into a much more empathetic urban everyman, his most recent fictive Other being the semifictional character of ‘Bret Easton Ellis’ in Lunar Park, a man approaching midlife crisis who is having trouble letting go of his 5th Avenue male divaness, now that he has moved out to the suburbs. Only now, without the extortionately-priced designer apparel, Ellis has introduced a newer, softer metrosexual businessman for the millennium, in the guise of what has always been his favorite but formerly costumed character: himself.

Works Cited American Psycho. Dr. Mary Harron. Perf. Christian Bale, Reese Witherspoon, Jared Leto. Lions Gate Films, 2000. Anderson, Susan Heller. “CHRONICLE.” New York Times, p. 10. 2 February 1991. Baxter, Tara co-conspiring with Nikki Craft. “There Are Better Ways of Taking Care of Bret Easton Ellis Than Just Censoring Him…” Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography. Diana E.H. Russell, ed. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993. Cojucaru, Daniel. “Confessions of an American Psycho: James Hogg’s and Bret Easton Ellis’s Anti-Heroes’ Journey from Vulnerability to Violence.” Contagion: Vol 15/16. p. 185. 2008/2009. 2 gang Bret. November 6, 2005. Deadline. February 8, 2006. [http://www.dr.dk/DR2/deadline2230/2005/11/03/150721.htm] Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1991. Glamorama. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1999. Lunar Park. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Penguin Publishing, 1987. Glamorama. Dr. Roger Avery. Perf. Kip Pardue, Robert Sean Leonard, Estella Warren. Lions Gate Films, 2007. Harron, Mary. “The Risky Territory of ‘American Psycho’.” New York Times: Late Edition. p. 2.13. April 2000. Kilbourn, Russell J.A. “American Frankenstein: Modernity’s Monstrous Prodigy.” Mosiac: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature: Vol. 38. Iss. 3. p. 167-184. Winnipeg: September 2005. Love, Robert. “Psycho Analysis.” Rolling Stone: 601. p. 45. 4 April 1991.

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McCarthy, Dan. “The Rise of the Metrosexual.” Barstool Sports. July 27, 2005. [http://www.barstoolsports.com/article/The_Rise_of_the_Metrosexual/ 315/] Rosenblatt, Roger. “Snuff This Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” New York Times. 16 December, 1990. Rottenbucher, Don. “The Spin Zone.” Central Michigan Life. September 10, 2003. [http://www.cm-life.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/09/10/ 3f5eb98f345c8] The Rules of Attraction. Dr. Roger Avery. Perf. James Van Der Beek, Kip Pardue, Ian Somerhalder. Lions Gate Films, 2002. Shulman, Randy. “The Attractions of Bret Easton Ellis.” Metro Weekly: Washington DC’s GLBT Newsmagazine. 10 October 2002. DC: Metro Weekly. 23 Nov 2009. [http://www.metroweekly.com/feature/?ak=126] Simpson, Mark. “Meet the Metrosexual.” Salon.com Arts & Entertainment. July 22, 2002. [http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2002/07/22/metrosexual/] Snow, Nicholas. “HOLLYWOOD Velvet.” Lesbian News: Vol 28. p. 41. May 2003. Wyatt, Edward. “Bret Easton Ellis: The Man in the Mirror.” New York Times. 7 August 2005. [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/arts/07wyat.html?_r=1]

THE WORK OF LITERATURE IN THE AGE OF THE OFFICE CHRISTOPHER SCHABERG

In this essay I discuss how literature functions reflexively in fictional office settings. In part one I consider the popular AMC television show Mad Men, which offers both topical and critical points of entry concerning this subject. Part two focused on two contemporary office space novels: Joshua Ferris’s novel Then We Came to the End and Ed Park’s novel Personal Days. In part three, I analyze David Foster Wallace’s unfinished work The Pale King, looking specifically at an excerpt published in The New Yorker entitled “Wiggle Room.” I demonstrate how these works of literature struggle to represent the tedium of office work, and I show how narrative completion and endless workaday labor are caught in a conceptual bind.

Part 1: The Literary Reflexes and Imperatives of Mad Men If we are to believe Mad Men, advertising agencies in the late 1950s and early 1960s expose people at their worst. These workspaces reveal a rarified soul of the mid-century (mostly male) American who is self-made, cutthroat, libertarian to the core, and often fleeing a nasty or otherwise murky past. Mad Men explicitly refutes Raymond Williams’s 1970s theory of “real advertising” as an ordinary form of public notice—as if there could be a form of marketing existing in a pure relationship to honest, everyday life. Rather, what one sees in Mad Men is an advertising office environment that seeps into and subsumes the quotidian: there is no life outside of advertising work. The work makes life worth living. However, I would like to suggest that the context of Mad Men were not the late 1950s and early 1960s at all, but in fact is the turn of the 21stcentury office space where actual lives play out in fantastically undramatic and banal scenarios every day. Mad Men is called a “period drama”—but the show more accurately reflects contemporary conditions.

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In this way of understanding the show, Mad Men would be a subtle form of “job spill,”1 that sociological phenomenon wherein instruments of labor leak into so-called “personal technologies”—cell phones, PDAs, email, Bluetooth devices, laptops—such that one is able to continue working at any point in the “off hours” while under the impression that one is not “at work.” Increasingly, job spill runs both ways: leisure time becomes seamlessly enmeshed in work-time (through instant messaging, chatting, email, YouTube, eBay, and the other new media forms), and work-time becomes the perverse object of enjoyment for leisure time: one can repose at the end of a long day at the office and watch Mad Men. In other words, watching a TV show about work can counter-intuitively make one better at work in the office—indeed, one becomes ready to work in the office at any moment. What I am proposing here is an inversion of Joshua Clover’s shrewd argument that the futuristic sci-fi film The Matrix can in fact be read as an allegory of the 1990s U.S. tech-boom and all the drab office work predicated thereon. According to Clover, The Matrix was not about a speculative future; rather, it was about the contemporaneous moment that was just as pervasive as (if more boring than) a land of hovercrafts, superhero leaps, and robots. In Clover’s words, the office spaces of the 90s tech boom functioned as “a mass of systems, agreements, leverages and interlocked interests of a complexity no individual can encompass, codified by documents no one sees. It’s not a place, really, just a set of codes….”2 A similar sense of endless work is very much the looming sense of Mad Men: through a stream of stories centered around the advertising office, a set of seemingly universal “codes” sinks in about the constancy of work. If The Matrix’s future is really about workers in the contemporaneous late-90s, I am suggesting that Mad Men’s past is actually about what it is like to work at the end of first decade of the 21stcentury. By reinforcing the endlessness of work, the show cumulatively replaces what Jacques Lacan called the “spatial identification” of the “mirror stage” with a glimmering TV screen that reflects more clearly, and is far more alluring: these shows about the “leverages and interlocked interests” of the ad office assure audiences of a narrative meaningfulness in work (even in its most vicious möbius arrangement: work and leisure, never quite separable). If watching TV is the antidote for a long day at the office, then watching a show about office work soothes doubly, for it diminishes the difference between labor and leisure that much more: 1 2

“Job spill,” http://www.wordspy.com/words/jobspill.asp Joshua Clover, The Matrix (London: British Film Institute, 2004), 82.

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working reminds one of what one can see on TV. Likewise, TV reminds one of what happens “at work,” as Lev Manovich describes labor in the information age: “All kinds of work are reduced to manipulating data on one’s computer screen, that is, to the processing of information.”3 Sitting in front of a TV processing a series is not all that unlike sitting in front of a computer screen entering data. (Thus older deep TV sets and computer monitors evolve into flat-screens that can toggle alternately between entertainment and work displays, with the mere tap of a button.) In this practical/ideal scenario, then, job spill so thoroughly infiltrates leisure time to the point where even seemingly relaxing in front of the TV trains one to be a better worker, at the most basic level by reinforcing the body/screen arrangement synonymous with so much contemporary office work. Within the series, Mad Men contains another feature of narrative reflexivity: the persistent imperative for the characters to become literary. The main characters of Mad Men are in one sense “writers”—they write copy and author marketing campaigns. However, there is a persistent undercurrent wherein certain characters desire to be literary writers. In an early episode in the series, the account executive Ken Cosgrove (played by Aaron Staton) has a short story published in The Atlantic, and the copywriters in the office are either proud of him or extremely jealous; in reference to this event, the boss Roger Sterling (John Slattery) quips that in every ad man there is an aspiring novelist. Another account executive, Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), is very envious of Cosgrove, and therefore has his wife pull strings with an ex-boyfriend who is an editor in order to get his story published; but instead of being published in The New Yorker, Campbell’s story ends up in Boys’ Life, and he is furious. At another point in the show, the copywriter Paul Kinsey (Michael Gladis) steals a typewriter from the office so he can work on his plays at home. Consistently and throughout, the senior boss Bert Cooper (Robert Morse) makes references in a worshipful tone to the writings of Ayn Rand. To mention only one more instance, in the first episode of the second season, the main character of the show, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), notices a youngish hipster in a bar reading Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency. The episode ends with Draper reading O’Hara’s poems to himself, ruminating on literature—we hear Draper reading in a voiceover, his furrowed brow the sign of profound literary contemplation.4 3 Lev Manovich, “Introduction to Info-Aesthetics,” The Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, Ed. Smith, Enwezor, Condee (Durham: Duke U. Press, 2008), 334. 4 Like the fringes in Julius Caesar that according to Roland Barthes are “quite simply the label of Roman-ness” (“The Romans in Films” in Mythologies).

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This literary landscape within Mad Men is not just fictive terrain: after the Mad Men allusion to O’Hara’s collection of poems, the book became a “Hot Trend” on Google and was promptly out of stock at Amazon.5 Mad Men not only trains us how to work, but also how to consume—both, of course, looping around into one another, like sitting before a TV show and one’s work in front of a computer screen. If indeed Mad Men reflects the seamlessness of office work in contemporary life, the literary dimension becomes a latent urge, an unconscious desire for legitimization. If there seems to be a dynamic of complicity between literature and office work in Mad Men, this dynamic is further evinced in three recent literary works: Joshua Ferris’s 2007 novel Then We Came to the End, Ed Park’s 2008 novel Personal Days, and David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King (due to be published in unfinished form in 2010). These three examples are interesting not only as literary representations of office spaces; these novels also exhibit critical tensions within and around the literariness of office work in general.

Part 2: Endless work, and the Work that can be Finished If Mad Men is really about the contemporary moment and collusions of obligatory office work and personal screens, the contemporary office novel is really about a certain need for literature within what Clover calls “the blunt quotidian of work; a nightmare as discomfiting for its ennui as its ensnarements.”6 In Then We Came to the End and in Personal Days, what we read are two versions of the same story: each novel takes up the contemporary office space as a setting that spurs extra narrative material. However, this is not a simple matter of clever postmodern meta-fiction, but seems to have more to do with the purely productive ambiance of the office work at hand. In other words, even when these novels tell stories of boredom, banter, and wasted time—not working per se—the novels as novels maintain the necessity of (and a staunch belief in) both the finished literary Work and also the endless office work depicted therein. The literary Work and office work function as a double-jointed articulation, but one that reverses roles constantly, as I shall show below. In The Work & the Gift, Scott Shershow argues convincingly for this irreducible bind between work and the Work: 5

“‘Mad Men’ using Frank O’Hara’s ‘Meditations in an Emergency’ boosts sales” in the Los Angeles Times online, http://articles.latimes.com/2008/aug/10/entertainment/ca-amazon10 6 Ibid, 80.

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On the one side, the daily exertions that are always done and never done, the labors by which one lives or, as it is said, makes a living. On the other side, the project or the poem, the opus, the oeuvre, of the Book: those achieved or imagined totalities… There will never be an absolute distinction between the two sides of the opposition, for to consider work in any sense is to of course also rebegin the Work of theorizing work: the unfinished labor of thinking its value, its necessity, its purpose, or its end(s).7

Shershow’s schema provides a useful frame in which to consider contemporary Works about office work. Literature about office work takes “making a living” as a subject, and then rewraps this quotidian labor in the very aura of the Work (i.e., the novel). Writing about office labor becomes a reflexive project, also about how a subject becomes book-worthy: work becomes a topic for the Work. Thus the novels do not only sample the seeming endless stream of office work; they also rely on a totality at hand, the Work of the novel. Each novel is complicated at (and by) this junction of endless work and the Work that is (or at least in theory can be) finished. Ferris’s Then We Came to the End chronicles the downsizing of an ad agency at the turn of the 21st-century. A middle portion of the novel (pages 196–230) is devoted to the fragment of a novel-within-the-novel; it turns out that a peripheral character in the novel has been writing his own (internal, fragmentary, fictional) novel about the characters in the (actual) novel. This narrative layering underscores a problematical literary inability to capture the endlessness of work in the office: this work can never be completed—it never comes to an end (this is part of what makes it a comic or an absurd topic), and thus it is necessarily impossible encompass by the Work. A novel about office work must therefore be about more than simply working in the office—for that is a boundless subject, a neverending tunnel of tedium. (Thus, Mad Men wanders out into the domestic exterior of the “Sterling Cooper” ad agency: the office, in its endless work, is paradoxically insufficient for a TV drama—the Work of the show needs more than its endlessly working subject.) In Ferris’s novel, office work is not enough: there needs to be a character inside who has already deemed the office novelistic. The internal novel of is about a sort of transcendent literariness that exceeds office work, but also allows the office to be taken on as a subject. The fictive office worker, like the reader, must already know what is in one’s hands: the contents of a novel. The effect of this internal novel that takes up a middle portion of the book is that it elides the subject of workspace for the subject of novel-writing—there is a strange 7

Scott Shershow, The Work & the Gift (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2005), 1.

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layer between the businessmen and the reader, and it is called a book. Can the endless work of office laborers be seen in literature, or is what we see always already mediated by the Work that appears idyllic, finished? The setting of Ferris’s novel—the office space—is insufficient as a subject in and of itself: endless office work is replaced by the Work of the novel. In Then We Came to the End, the minor character Hank Neary is discovered toward the (apt) end of the novel to have written what can only retrospectively be understood as the inter-novel. The fictional office, therefore, contains a character who is already writing an inter-novel about the fictional workspace. The inter-novel forces a guise of coherence and completion—and posits narrative meaningfulness—to what for 380 pages has seemed to be little more than the dramatized minutiae of endless workaday office life. By placing a novel-within-the-novel, Ferris tethers endless work to the Work that is finished—and throughout, these oppositional forces are continually repelling one another. For example, as if caught in the centrifugal force of narrative tangents, the second half of the book indulges in additional storylines. One of these storylines concerns the character Tom Mota, who is introduced as a borderline sociopath, or at the very least an oddball. Early in the novel, Tom begins wearing increasingly multiple company-pride polo shirts at once, layered ridiculously, and when he is confronted about this strange clothing choice, he states with unsubtle irony: “You don’t know what’s in my heart,” said Tom, pounding his fist against the corporate logo three times. “Company Pride.”8 Tom becomes unhinged in the office, and is rapidly fired (this happens within the first 25 pages of the novel). In the second half of the novel, though, Tom Mota returns with a vengeance, in a clown suit and toting a gun. The office space here is lampooned as a place for over-determined dramatic action. On the one hand, we might be tempted to call this narrative move an act of bad faith on the part of the novelist, as if Ferris is admitting that office work does not make an interesting enough story on its own—you need a man in a clown suit with a gun. On the other hand, we might understand this over-determined dramatic action as interesting in its own right as narrative excess: as a sort of reverse “job spill” wherein outlying stories obscure the setting (and the work) at hand. We might even go as far as to suspect that the Tom Mota subplot functions as a narrative tangent, a distracting vector that moves away from the endless work of the office in favor of a story with a tidy ending. Thus the laid off and disgruntled worker who returned to the office 8 Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (New York: Back Bay Books, 2007), 11.

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and went on a shooting spree is provided an absurdly poetically-just conclusion: we learn in the last pages of the novel that Tom Mota, after recovering from his rampage, joined the Army—and was “killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan.”9 This poetic justice might have been hinted at in Tom Mota’s near palindrome name, a signal for symmetry that, once again, obscures the office work that, because it is endless, can never be reflected in a finished Work which must venture outward, beyond the businessman, in order to end. I do not mean to isolate the Tom Mota subplot of Then We Came to the End as an inherently poignant aspect of the novel. What the Tom Mota subplot demonstrates, rather, is a reflexive necessity for the office narrative to escape the gravitational force of its more immediate atmosphere: the workspace. The novel ends in this way, notably beyond the office: what Ferris provides is a phenomenally unspectacular (if also mildly utopian) conclusion of the cast of office characters attending a literary reading on the University of Chicago campus, where the peripheral character Hank Neary is giving a reading of the story-within-the-story. Again, I want to insist that this is not (or not merely) postmodern metafiction; instead, this is an embedded Work of literature that takes the reader (and the author) away from the alleged subject of work. It is curious that when the main characters of the story—who are represented by a first person plural narrator (“We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise….”10)—find out that Hank Neary has “published a book,” they remember him as “a failed novelist.”11 This is an aporia that the novel cannot reconcile: the actual literary character of the novel is twice disavowed, once in words (Hank as a simultaneously “published” and “failed novelist”) and again in the rejected setting (the novel ends not in the office, but at a University bookstore). Then We Came to the End represents a paradox: literature is seen to be that thing with and end made possible by endless work—literature becomes the Work apart, utterly incongruous with the day-to-day grind of the office. Ed Park’s Personal Days is in many ways remarkably like Then We Came to the End. Park’s novel tells the familiar story of an office space under siege by abstract economic shifts and corporate buyouts, and the narrative employs a similar first person plural narrator in the first section of the novel: “Our company was once its own thing, founded long ago by men with mustaches.”12 By turns, Personal Days achieves a different 9

Ibid, 381. Ibid, 3. 11 Ibid, 370. 12 Ed Park, Personal Days (New York: Random House, 2008), 17. 10

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formal approach than Then We Came to the End, but the novel becomes caught up in a similar paradoxical situation in relation to its own novelistic conceit. While moving at a faster clip than Ferris’s novel, Park’s narrative sags under an excess of sign systems that are ubiquitous in office environments: e-mail riffs, Microsoft Word jargon, HTML code—even an actual picture of a Post-It note dropped somewhat arbitrarily into the prose. The figure of the Post-It note is particularly curious, arbitrary not for what it says, but rather in its isolation as a secondary media form. We might rightly ask why Park does not carry this tactic to the extreme and include pictures of all the other office detritus common to this space: screen savers, stapler logos, dot-matrix printer page perforations, office chair tracks in carpet—the list of items is in principle endless, and arguably aesthetically interesting. Yet, if the office space is a sort of readymade art object, what makes the novel a necessary or useful form of representation? Indeed, one vexing question about Personal Days is why it needs to take the form of a novel at all; its format as evinced by the contents reveals that it is perhaps most interested in the computer programs that shape everyday life in the office: I. II. III.

Can’t Undo Replace All Revert to Saved

1 85 191

One cannot help but wonder if a more immersive aesthetic production could have been achieved in an installation involving the computer commands, not unlike David Byrne’s “Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information,” stylized PowerPoint presentations that utilize all of the preprogrammed styles and formatting to show how medium and message are inescapably intertwined in the ubiquitous software.13 As it is, the three parts of Personal Days each take a quite different form. Part one involves short sections under pithy, workspace allusive headings such as “The cc game” and “Multiple-desk syndrome.”14 Part two unravels in the style of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, an elaborated (if at times enigmatic) outline that accumulates to continue the story of the office. Part three is comprised of one very long email with no paragraph breaks and constant reflections on the email itself as a communicative medium. Within each of these narrative forms, sub-forms appear. One of the more curious sub-forms is aggressively yet ambiguously literary.

13 14

http://www.davidbyrne.com/art/eeei/ Ibid, 11, 21.

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As in Ferris’s novel, Personal Days contains a text-within-the-text. In this case, in the middle section—“II(E)”—of Personal Days, one of the office workers discovers a cryptic notebook in a recently fired employee’s desk. The laid off co-worker was named Jill; the notebook left behind therefore carries the intertextual title “The Jilliad.”15 The notebook contains pages and pages of corporate aphorisms and maxims for the office worker, for example: Don’t be the one who says, I told you so. Tell them so to begin with. Tell them often. —Office Politics 101, by Randall Slurry Think of the office as an ocean liner. Are you the captain? A passenger? Or the person who plays xylophone for the lido deck band? —Climbing the Seven-Rung Ladder: The Business of Business, by Chad Ravioli and Khâder Adipose Confusion is inevitable. Ride the Wave. —The Manager’s Bible: The New Memory System for Daily Insights, by Wayne V. Hammer with Juliette Earp16

“The Jilliad” functions as an internal manuscript that does not so much comment on the forces or relations of production in the office as it justifies an ostensibly pure literariness of the work at hand (as well as the Work in hand). The fictional object of literature—an epic/pastiche of “ghostwritten CEO memoirs, Machiavellian road maps, and PowerPoint-friendly wealth manuals”17—exists as a sort of internal referent, proof, as it were, that office work is literary, and that what the reader is holding is also literary. The office workers in Personal Days come to understand The Jilliad as “a sort of modern cautionary tale, or myth, or something”18—meanwhile, the novel itself has somewhat lost focus. The characters are not at work; rather, they are fixated on a Work, on a fictitious act of literature that necessarily exceeds the narrative at hand. Real labor relations and forces of production are obfuscated in exchange for a quasi-mystery plot surrounding a text whose “author was a ghost” and whose “manuscript was unstable.”19 The office is an endless setting for Personal Days; the office only gains its novelistic adequacy through external (and structurally 15

Ibid, 127. Ibid, 122–123. 17 Ibid, 122. 18 Ibid, 127. 19 Ibid, 128. 16

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unavailable) textual material. The Work lies outside of actual office work—yet the Work must be discovered or located inside the workplace, in order to make the subject literary. We arrive again at the bind between work as an endless subject, and the Work as an object, discrete and able to be finished. When the office novel becomes extra literary, the specter of the finished Work distracts from the real endlessness of work.

Part 3: The Author is Dead; Office Work Remains David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel about office work selfconsciously bores. This was put as a question in the online magazine New York, in an article entitled “Will David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King Be the Most Boring Book Ever?”20 To get at the complexity of this unfinished work, let us consider an excerpt that was published in the New Yorker magazine shortly after Foster Wallace’s suicide; the excerpt is called “Wiggle Room.” This is perhaps the strongest (if strangest) office space story, because it tunnels unflinchingly into the boredom, tedium, and inner-subjective torment of one Lane Dean Jr., I.R.S. tax return office worker. The subject explains why certain readers might have been afraid of or excited by the prospect of a very potent Foster Wallace dose of boring prose. Unlike Personal Days and Then We Came to the End, Foster Wallace’s writing does not make wry comedy out of the day-to-day dramas, debacles, and tangential tales of office workers. Rather, “Wiggle Room” presents the reader with an understated mind/set of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts that bore in a double sense. This is Lane Dean Jr.: He did another return; again, the math squared and there were no itemizations on 32 and the printout’s numbers for W-2 and 1099 and Forms 2440 and 2441 appeared to square, and he filled out his codes for the middle tray’s 402 and signed his name and I.D. number that some part of him still refused to quite get memorized so he had to unclip his badge and check it each time and then stapled the 402 to the return and put the file in the top tier’s rightmost tray for 402s Out and refused to let himself count the number in the trays yet, and then unbidden came the thought that “boring” also meant something that drilled in and made a hole.21

20

Lane Brown, “Will David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King Be the Most Boring Book Ever?” New York magazine online, March 3, 2009, http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2009/03/will_david_foster_wallace.html 21 David Foster Wallace, “Wiggle Room,” The New Yorker, March 9, 2009, 63.

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This sentence is representative of the entire excerpt, which moves between contemplation and hallucination, all under a clock on the wall whose second hand’s “job was to go around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow, unvarying machinelike rate, going no place it hadn’t already been a million times before….”22 Foster Wallace does not animate the workspace so much as he uses the bored (and possibly boring) subject to dissolve distinctions between the world of work and the life of the mind. “Wiggle Room” includes a drawn-out meditation on the etymology of the word boredom that is self-referential in many regards: for the reader afraid of being bored by the text, the text puts that boredom under an analytical lens; for Lane Dean Jr., his story of boredom is also a story about boredom; for David Foster Wallace, the novel story reflects not only a fictitious character’s struggle with boredom, but also the author’s own long struggle with a subject that finally consumed him in a final end—i.e., the subject of subjectivity. The lonely, quiet office cubicle becomes a literary figure for phenomenological introspection, a type of work that can “bore” endlessly, as in tunnel down, but also as in evacuate—this is the kind of work that no Work can finally (or ever) fully encompass. “Wiggle Room” did not appear on its own when it was originally published posthumously in the New Yorker. A long article preceded this excerpt, in which D.T. Max reviews Foster Wallace’s life and his struggle to write The Pale King. Max writes about the unfinished novel: It is about being in the moment and paying attention to the things that matter, and centers on a group of several dozen I.R.S. agents working in the Midwest. Their job is tedious, but dullness, “The Pale King” suggests, ultimately sets them free. …The problem was how to dramatize the idea… Wallace’s solution was to overwhelm his seemingly inert subject with the full movement of his thought. His characters might be low-level bureaucrats, but the robust sincerity of his writing—his willingness to die for the reader—would keep you from condescending to them.23

These final words are heavy, given Foster Wallace’s suicide—and yet these words familiar, too. One cannot help but hearing echoes of Roland Barthes, who famously pronounced “The Death of the Author” in his eponymous essay from 1968. Given Max’s assessment of Foster Wallace’s writing of The Pale King, Barthes’s words take on fresh significance: “we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: 22 23

Ibid, 65. D.T. Max, “The Unfinished,” The New Yorker, March 9, 2009, 57.

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the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”24 Of course Barthes did not mean this in a literal sense, but in the case of Foster Wallace and The Pale King, this theoretical position has been carried out in “real time,” as it were: the author is dead; office work remains. This might be an unofficial slogan for editors after David Foster Wallace’s death, faced as they were with hundreds of pages of dense, ruminative, unfinished prose—about a subject (office work) that has no end. As D.T. Max’s article “The Unfinished” seems to make clear, the text requires commentary in place of the author. The author is dead; but office work remains. First, there is D.T. Max’s article, written presumably on a computer screen (that minimal case of office space par excellence), and fortified by ample research, interviews, and editing along the way to publication. Then, the editors will have to figure out (in their offices) what to include, what to omit, and how to format an unfinished Work about work. As a later article in the Guardian reported, The Pale King “is set for publication in the UK next year following an intensely contested auction between six British publishers.”25 The article quotes Simon Prosser, publishing director of Penguin imprint Hamish Hamilton, as saying: “His [Foster Wallace’s] challenge was to write about something so big you could hardly comprehend it—a world of mind-numbingly boring work.”26 The article goes on to explain: [Prosser] was adamant that although the work is unfinished, nothing would be added to it. “You’ll get literally 50 pages of a perfect section, then a note to himself saying ‘insert X here’. In a lot of cases, the X exists, but there will be some parts that don’t. The challenge will be to remain as true as possible to what is there,” he said. “Personally I think that if ‘notes to self’ are included, it’ll be fine. We’ll obviously present it as an unfinished novel—he himself thought he hadn’t finished it. What’s so tragic is that he didn’t realise how close he was.”27

Prosser’s adamant claim that “nothing” will be added to Foster Wallace’s text encounters friction with the potential allowance of the “notes to self.” This begs the question of whether the literary fragment is sufficient on its 24 Roland Barthes, Image – Music – Text, Trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 148. 25 Alison Flood, “Unfinished Foster Wallace novel finds UK publisher,” Guardian, May 7, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/07/david-foster-wallaceuk-publisher 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid.

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own, or whether it would benefit from the author’s “notes to self”—yet if so, where would one draw the line? It is precisely this line of questioning that spurs Michel Foucault’s queries in “What is an Author?”: Assuming that we are dealing with an author, is everything he wrote and said, everything he left behind, to be included in his work? This problem is both theoretical and practical. If we wish to publish the complete works of Nietzsche, for example, where do we draw the line? Certainly, everything must be published, but can we agree on what “everything” means? We will, of course, include everything that Nietzsche himself published, along with the drafts of his works, his plans for aphorisms, his marginal notations and corrections. But what if, in a notebook filled with aphorisms, we find a reference, a reminder of an appointment, an address, or a laundry bill, should this be included in his works? Why not? These practical considerations are endless once we consider how a work can be extracted from the millions of traces left by an individual after his death.28

This looming imperative for “everything” to be published is exactly what Foster Wallace was writing about in The Pale King: how to catalog without dressing up the endlessly boring contents of the human mind put to rote work. At the same time, it is the inability to delimit “everything” that makes the editorial work difficult, if not outright impossible: everything written in Foster Wallace’s last years could never be finally recovered for the sake of the book, because writing (as Jacques Derrida would put it in another context), disseminates. In “What is an Author?” Foucault goes on to argue that, “Plainly, we lack a theory to encompass the questions generated by a work and the empirical activity of those who naively undertake the publication of the complete works of an author often suffers from the absence of this framework.”29 Here again, one cannot help but be drawn back into Foster Wallace’s in principle endless subject of tax form filing, of which “W-2 and 1099 and Forms 2440 and 2441” is a truly infinitesimal sampling. One could never be certain just how exhaustively boring Foster Wallace was planning to be, because the complete Work could never encompass the endless work. And once we accept this fundamental uncertainty, how could one ever arrive at a conclusion as to The Pale King’s proximity to completion, as Prosser (the publishing director of Penguin) seems to intuit? On the one hand, Prosser admits that Foster Wallace himself 28

Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977), 118–119. 29 Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977), 119.

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“thought he hadn’t finished it”; but on the other hand, Prosser, from the vantage point of the publishing office, is apparently able to see the real tragedy: just how close the novel was to being finished. This little snippet of reportage around Foster Wallace’s unfinished Work reveals a tangle of theoretical complexities. To rephrase Foucault, we especially lack a theory to encompass the questions generated by the unfinished Work about unfinishable office work.

Conclusion: Office Work, In The End, Never Complete The Pale King was what Foster Wallace himself came to call the “Long Thing.” It was to be a Work about work, and ends up being an unfinished Work that requires more work—that is, more office work from other people (e.g. journalists, editors, academics) for a Work that can never, by definition, be complete. The Guardian article quotes a Penguin statement about how Foster Wallace was aiming “to be emotionally engaging and to write about boredom while being entertaining and to show the world what it was to be a human being.”30 The desire to “show the world what it was to be a human being” suggests a tall order for any book. But seen from another angle, this is also an effect of any act of literature: writing always necessarily is a trace of human effort, or work. This either unique or obvious sense of Foster Wallace’s intention for The Pale King is reminiscent of what was arguably the first great office space narrative: Herman Melville’s 1853 story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” While The Pale King adds to the complex (genre) of contemporary office space novels including Personal Days and Then We Came to the End, Foster Wallace also conjures Melville’s much earlier tale that provides—in an anticipatory way—a critical backdrop for the contemporary tales of office work. I will conclude with a few remarks on “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” In Melville’s story, the narrator employs Bartleby to work in his “good old office” as a law-copyist: At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he 30

Alison Flood, “Unfinished Foster Wallace novel finds UK publisher,” Guardian, May 7, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/07/david-foster-wallaceuk-publisher

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wrote on silently, palely, mechanically.31

The figurative gustatory language of “famishing,” “gorge himself on,” and “digestion” ironically anticipates the dramatic turn of the story, whereby Bartleby abruptly stops writing, and gradually starves himself to death. Bartleby’s shift in attitude is marked by his resorting to the infamous line “I would prefer not to”—repeated again and again in increasingly absurd contexts. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek explains Bartleby’s maddening refusal as “not so much the refusal of a determinate content as, rather, the formal gesture of refusal as such.”32 In other words, it is not that Bartleby simply stops writing in the law office, but that he stops (working) in general. To put this in the context of work and the Work as I have discussed it in relation to contemporary office space novels, Bartleby represents a critical stopgap for work (writing in the law office), and the Work (the story) takes place. The office is again poised as the uncertain space that loses focus, dissolves in repetitive, endless tasks; meanwhile, the Work of literature emerges in the foreground. In his reading of “Bartleby,” Zizek goes on to claim that “there is a clear holophrastic quality to ‘I would prefer not to’: it is a signifier-turned-object, a signifier reduced to an inert stain that stands for the collapse of the symbolic order.”33 In other words, “I would prefer not to” is not simply a “No!”, but rather states a preference for something in the negative. Bartleby’s seemingly simple refusal is in fact an embodied “structural minimum”34 that, when given, causes the entire positivistic system of production to tremble, by invoking an opening to negation. Critical for Zizek is the supposition that this trembling of the system remains after the system is gone—all systems must tremble in order to change, and therefore the trembling (which is a negative structural quality) should be a constant. Within the incomplete novel The Pale King, Foster Wallace’s I.R.S. office is left trembling in its incomplete state. In this light we might think of The Pale King as a sort of Bartleby always asymptotically approaching death, both before and without death, because an incomplete novel can never end. Thus Foster Wallace’s own death might be seen to literally let his Work live incomplete, a curious testament to endless work. To return to the first three case studies, Mad Men, Then We Came to 31

Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street,” Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11231/11231.txt 32 Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 384. 33 Ibid, 385. 34 Ibid, 382.

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the End, and Personal Days: we might conclude that what keeps these texts from being truly critical (of) office work(s) is that they, in a word, prefer to narrativize (often to excess) the office. The structural logic of office work is without end, and thus it endlessly affirms the relations and forces of production that determine the work. This keeps what Henri Lefebvre would call “the social text” legible—yet still unread. Yet the Work contains work, offering the idea(l) of a meaning “in the end,” as the banal/apocalyptic saying goes. This is the work of literature in the age of the office: literature converts endless work into a finished product, and provides meaningfulness where perhaps this meaning-making itself might rightly be called into question in a way that the Work cannot quite manage. Foster Wallace’s The Pale King and Melville’s “Bartleby” complicate the work of literature in the office, suggesting in their own ways that scriveners and authors alike will continue to die, but the work always remains—and (just) writing cannot break free of this dire matrix. Literature never simply reflects office work, but stands as a fundamental conceptual knot where work and the Work are inextricably tangled. For literature to be able “to show the world what it is to be a human being,” the Work would have to tunnel equally and endlessly into the work…accepting the full risk of never (re)emerging complete. In the end, Foster Wallace’s unfinished Work will never have an adequate conclusion, and this most truthfully—if also troublingly—reflects the basic condition of office work which is, in principle, never complete.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Image – Music – Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Brown, Lane. “Will David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King Be the Most Boring Book Ever?” New York magazine online, March 3, 2009. http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2009/03/will_david_foster_wall ace.html. Clover, Joshua. The Matrix. London: British Film Institute, 2004. Ferris, Joshua. Then We Came to the End. New York: Back Bay Books, 2007. Flood, Alison. “Unfinished Foster Wallace novel finds UK publisher.” Guardian, May 7, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/07/david-foster-wallaceuk-publisher. Foster Wallace, David. “Wiggle Room.” The New Yorker. March 9, 2009.

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Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. Manovich, Lev. “Introduction to Info-Aesthetics,” The Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Ed. Smith, Enwezor, Condee. Durham: Duke U. Press, 2008. Max, D.T. “The Unfinished.” The New Yorker. March 9, 2009. Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street.” Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11231/11231.txt. Park, Ed. Personal Days. New York: Random House, 2008. Shershow, Scott. The Work & the Gift. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2005. Zizek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

DENMARK INC.: ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT AND ANTICORPORATE SATIRE IN THREE FILM ADAPTATIONS OF HAMLET TODD BORLIK

In March of 2006, a group of 50 CEOs gathered at Babson College in Massachusetts for an unusual two-day seminar. Organized under the auspices of CEO Roundtable, a social-networking/support group for Boston-area business leaders, the retreat had a rather surprising agenda: “using Hamlet as a touchstone for insight and discovery.” The event was spearheaded by Tina Packer, the creative director of a Shakespearean theatre troupe based in the Berkshires and the co-author of Power Plays: Shakespeare’s Lessons in Leadership and Management. According to a blurb published on the company’s website, Packer explained that Hamlet is a play about rhetoric, a discipline and method that⎯by empowering individuals to question and argue⎯forged a way of thinking and problem-solving that opened the way for international trade, commerce, democracy and even corporations.1

Of all the zany incarnations in which Shakespeare has appeared in modern culture, one of the most fascinating and under-recognized among literary scholars is that of the Bard as business consultant. The last two decades have seen a deluge of publications peddling Shakespearean drama

1 Tina Packer, CEO Roundtable, http://ceo-roundtable.com/seminar_spring2006b .asp? pageid=10. A report that aired on NPR’s “Marketplace” noted a good portion of the debate revolved on assessing Claudius’s abilities as a crisis manager: “CEO and Chairman of the Bard,“ NPR, http://marketplace.publicradio.org/ display/web/2007/09/04/ceo_and_chairman_of_the_bard/.

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as a repository of eternal verities about leadership, public speaking, and power-brokering.2 It would be tempting to bash this genre as a desperate bid to camouflage books on boosting profitability as odysseys of personal enrichment. Douglas Hedrick, for instance, has remarked on the authors’ efforts to beautify their writing in the borrowed plumes of the Bard’s cultural authority, typically “asserted at the level of the quotation.” 3 “Put money in thy purse” may be good financial advice, but surely it would be foolhardy to ransack the plays in search of such sound-bytes. For Douglas Lanier, the success of Shakespeare’s make-over into a marketing guru confirms that, outside the academy, the Bard “remains by and large an emblem of cultural legitimation for the existing social and economic order, an order dominated at this moment in history not by nation-states, but by a global hegemony of corporate multinationals.”4 Noting that the boom of Shakespearean corporate management books coincided with the playwright’s conquest of the cineplex in the 90s, Lanier goes on to warn that film itself underwrites Shakespeare’s appropriation by a Culture Industry allied with global capitalism, adapting four hundred year-old plays in conformity with “the codes, practices, and ideologies of contemporary mass media,” and, in effect, repackaging Shakespeare for a “post-theatrical, post-literary age.” Curiously, the commercial impetus that Lanier attributes to film Packer assigns to Shakespearean rhetoric. While the suggestion that Hamlet paved the way for modern multinational corporations because it features rhetorical language seems a dubious syllogism, Packer’s remarks, nevertheless, dovetail with some emergent trends in what has come to be called the “New Economic Criticism.“ In one of the foundational texts in this field, Deirdre McCloskey illustrated that metaphor and various rhetorical means of persuasion saturate economic discourse. A number of subsequent studies have documented the ways in which financial writing .

2

In addition to Packer’s Power Plays, the self-improving entrepreneur may choose from titles such as Jay Shafritz’s Shakespeare on Management: Wise Business Counsel from the Bard, Kenneth Adelman and Normand Augustine’s Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard’s Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage, Jim Davies, The Bard and Co.: Shakespeare’s Role in Modern Business, and Paul Corrigan’s Shakespeare on Management: Leadership Lessons for Today’s Managers. 3 Donald K. Hedrick, “Bardguides of the New Universe: Niche Marketing and the Cultural Logic of Late Shakespeareanism,” Shakespeare After Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 35-57. 4 Douglas M. Lanier, “Shakescorp Noir” Shakespeare Quarterly 53:2 (2002), 161.

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sponges from literary narrative, seizing upon Robinson Crusoe, for instance, as an archetype of homo economicus.5 Conversely, literary critics have become increasingly aware of the extent to which Shakespearean drama registers the commercial dynamism of early modern England. Most work in this field to date has focused on plays with a blatant interest in commerce and trade, such as The Comedy of Errors, Troilus and Cressida, and The Merchant of Venice.6 As a revenge tragedy set in the court of medieval Denmark, Hamlet would seem to have little truck with the gritty economic realities of Elizabethan Eastcheap. A close reading, however, reveals that commercial tropes punctuate the text. Claudius uses the word “business” five times altogether, twice in his opening monologue in reference to negotiations about the diplomatic crisis with Norway. When the two ambassadors return Claudius promises to “answer and think upon this business” (2.2.81), to which Polonius replies, “this business is well ended” (2.2.85).7 While “business” in the play thus generally denotes affairs of state—the earliest recorded use of the word to refer specifically to commercial transactions occurs in Defoe’s English Tradesman (1727)— Shakespeare’s England had witnessed an evolving alliance between the merchants and the monarchy. Fittingly, in the first scene we learn that Claudius has been engaging in “foreign mart for implements of war” (1.1.73). For some audience members, Claudius’s placing a pearl in the poisoned wine would have recalled a similar feat by the famed Elizabethan merchant, Thomas

5

Deirde McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), McCloskey, “Sophisters, Economists, and Calculators,” in Rhetoric and Pluralism, ed. Frederick Antczak (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995), 187-210. M. Neil Browne and J. Kevin Quinn, “Dominant Economic Metaphors and the Postmodern Subversion of the Subject,” in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (New York: Routledge, 1999), 131-149, 134-5 6 For a representative anthology, see Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism, ed. Linda Woodbridge (New York: Palgrave, 2003). Douglas Bruster’s essay contains a handy catalogue of the scholarship in this field, to which a few more entries may be added: Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), and Peter Grav, Shakespeare and the Economic Imperative: What’s aught but as ‘tis valued? (New York: Routledge, 2008), 7 Unless otherwise indicated, all citations from Hamlet are from the Arden edition of Q2, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson, 2006).

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Gresham, the founder of the Royal Exchange.8 The play establishes an even more conspicuous affinity between the mercantile classes and Polonius, whose famous valedictory lecture to Laertes has gained an iconic status as one of the famous distillations of bourgeois commonsense in all of world literature. Bestriding Polonius’s corpse, Hamlet barks out a final insult: “Thou find’st to be too busy is some danger” (3.4.31). The anachronistic understanding of the word “business,” and the slippage between government and management has enabled financial writers like Packer, Norman Augustine and Kenneth Adelman to shift the play’s focus from Hamlet to his uncle Claudius, re-framing it as a drama about crisis management.9 In a much more historically-grounded reading, Walter Cohen has illuminated the tragedy’s “appropriation of maritime enterprise,” dredging up the history of Anglo-Danish trade negotiations over shipping and fishing to uncover how Hamlet “plumbs the depths of England’s traditional northwest European mercantile orientation.”10 The image of CEOs on a weekend powwow reenacting snippets of Hamlet seems still less anomalous when one recalls the first recorded performance of the play. On September 5, 1607, the crew of the Red Dragon, a merchant vessel sponsored by the East India Company, staged a production of Hamlet as they anchored off the coast of what is now Sierra Leone. The play was apparently a success, as the captain’s journal reports that it was reprised three weeks later. 11 Given that the East India Company would ultimately emerge in the eighteenth century as ”the world’s most powerful company, the first truly global multinational corporation,”12 one can imagine a savvy post-colonialist construing this performance aboard the Red Dragon as somehow implicating Hamlet in the economic imperialism of the nascent British Empire. Is Packer correct, then, after all? Is she unwittingly vindicating the arguments of literary theorists when 8

Gresham’s feat was depicted in Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody II. See Jean Howard, Theatre of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598-1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 50-60. 9 Norman Augustine and Kenneth Adelman, Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard’s Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage, (New York: Talk Miramax Books, 1999), 167-207. 10 Walter Cohen, “The undiscovered country: Shakespeare and mercantile geography,” in Marxist Shakespeares, eds. Jean Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (New York: Routledge, 2001), 131, 137-38, 148. 11 See Gary Taylor’s delightful recreation of this performance in “Red Dragon,” in Travel Knowledge, eds. Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Signh (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 223-48. 12 Taylor, “Red Dragon,” 225.

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she claims that Hamlet is a play that indirectly “opened the way for international trade, commerce, democracy, and even corporations”? To anyone with a cursory knowledge of Shakespearean cinema, the claim that Hamlet radiates a capitalist ethos is problematic to say the least. Indeed, the choice of this particular tragedy as the focal point for the CEO Roundtable retreat seems potentially ill-starred considering the multiple adaptations of the work that have re-imagined it as an indictment of corporate greed and corruption. Despite Lanier’s concern that Shakespeare on screen is always already facilitating the interests of media-fueled capitalism, three different films have sought to mould Hamlet into a repository of values under siege in a society dominated by the cash nexus. Although Michael Almereyda’s version remains the best known in the English-speaking world, his choice to use the contemporary business world as the mis-en-scène is, as he acknowledges in the preface to his screenplay, by no means original; two other celebrated adaptations—Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well [Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru] (1960) and Aki Kaurismäki’s Hamlet Goes Business [Hamlet Liikemaailmasssa] (1987)—have also transferred Shakespeare’s high tragedy to the world of high finance. Why should all three directors, from three countries as different as America, Japan, and Finland find this narrative spin so apropos? What is it about Shakespeare’s text that lends itself to appropriation for both a CEO’s practicum and an anti-capitalist diatribe? Juxtaposing Shakespeare’s tragedy with these three cinematic renditions affords an ideal opportunity to chart the changing image of the businessman between the early modern and the modern eras. Along the way, this essay will reveal how the brooding Prince has come to be conscripted as an anti-type for the modern bureaucrat. Surprisingly, however, all three films, while presenting trenchant exposés on the cutthroat nature of business world, remain critical of the romantic bourgeois subjectivity that Hamlet allegedly inaugurates.

The Film’s the Thing: Corporate Conscience in Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well While Ran and Spider-Web Castle (erroneously translated as Throne of Blood in a bid to market it as a samurai film) have garnered a good deal of commentary, The Bad Sleep Well remains the most under-rated of Kurosawa’s Shakespeare adaptations.13 Its neglect stems in part from that 13 Robert Hapgood, “Kurosawa’s Shakespeare Films: Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well, and Ran,” in Shakespeare and the Moving Image, ed. Anthony Davies

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fact that the parallels with the Shakespearean source are comparatively oblique; indeed, the film’s debt to Hamlet does not become apparent until roughly the 68th minute. Western audiences’ esteem for the film has also been hampered by a lack of knowledge regarding the economic conditions in post-War Japan. The Bad Sleep Well can be taken as a commentary on the re-emergence of the Zaibatsu, or family-run financial cliques and business conglomerates. Combining Japan’s traditional feudal values with Western business practices, the Zaibatsu spearheaded the industrialization of Japan in the late nineteenth century. While the Militarists had charged them with placing profit over nation, Leftists, and the American occupational administration, also denounced them as a bunch of grasping robber barons, whose appetite for plunder had propelled Japan into the war. General MacArthur himself decried the monopolistic and nepotistic system that “permitted ten family groups comprising only fifty-six families to control directly or indirectly every phase of slavery of the remainder of the Japanese people.”14 Under MacArthur’s leadership, SCAP (Supreme Command for the Allied Powers) launched an ambitious program to dismantle the Zaibatsu. McCarthyism trumped MacArthurism, however, as the plan for economic deconcentration of Japan’s major corporations was soon hobbled amid fears that such policies would leave Japan vulnerable to Communism. Of the 1,200 firms initially slated for deconcentration, 325 were actually targeted, of which only 28 were finally dissolved. One of the largest firms to be disbanded, Mistubishi was revitalized in 1954, and five years later, its rival Mitsui was granted a similar reprieve. These corporations were never again to be exclusively family-run enterprises as before the war, yet their bushido-infused culture of intense employee loyalty remained more or less intact.15 Meanwhile, a

and Stanley Wells (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 234-249; John Collick, Shakespeare Cinema, and Society (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1989), 150-87; Stephen J. Philips, “Rotten States: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well,” in Hamlet on Screen, ed. Holger Klein and Dimiter Daphinoff (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 153-162; Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare in Japan (London: Continuum, 2005), 136-42; Ann and John Thompson, “Pertinent Likeness: Kurosawa’s Bad Sleep Well as a Version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” Shakespeare Studies 44 (2006): 1727. 14 Qtd. in Marius Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2000), 686. 15 Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, 686-88, Yutaka Kosai, “The Postwar Japanese Economy,” in The Cambridge History of Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 6:496-98, Hidemasa Morikawa, Zaibatsu: The Rise and

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confederacy of political figures with close ties to the business community gained control over the government. Between 1957 and 1960 (the year Kurosawa’s film was made), Japan’s Premier was Nobusuke Kishi, a former bureaucrat from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (and a member of the Tojo cabinet at one point listed as a Class A War Criminal), who shared power with Tanzan Ishibashi, a conservative economic journalist. In brief, when Kurosawa began shooting The Bad Sleep Well, the image of the businessman in Japan was at something of a nadir. The disturbing merger of politics and business is particularly apparent in the film because the corrupt executives oversee a governmental agency, the Public Corporation for the Development of Unused Land. In the glorious opening sequence, the story unfolds amid a wedding between the daughter of the Vice-President, Iwabuchi, and his personal secretary, Nishi. As we soon learn that the groom was only promoted to secretary after he began dating the daughter, the wedding itself highlights the nepotism of the Zaibatsu. Meanwhile, scenting a scandal, a gang of newsreporters invades the wedding. Their nose for copy proves true, as a police detective arrives and arrests the Assistant Chief of Contracts, a man by the name of Wada. It soon emerges that Public Corporation awarded inflated bids on government building contracts to Dairyu (Big Dragon) Construction Company in exchange for massive and illicit kickbacks. When the President of Dairyu rises to give the couple his wedding toast, he, to the amusement of the press corps, awkwardly seizes the occasion to disavow his ties to the company under investigation. The wedding sequence provides, as Donald Richie notes, “the delicious sensation of a ceremony gone wrong,” a reading that corresponds to “maimed rites” that haunt Shakespeare’s text, in which the wedding of Gertrude and Claudius follows too “hard upon” Hamlet Sr.’s funeral. The parallels continue as Kurosawa combines the wedding with a plot twist that turns out, in retrospect, to have been the equivalent of Hamlet’s Mousetrap: as the bride and groom prepare to slice the wedding cake, a waiter carts in a second enormous gateau in the shape of the Public Corporation’s office building, with a single red rose jutting from a seventh-story window. A reporter shouts that a man had leapt out of that very window five years previously, as the film cuts to a series of close-ups on three squirming executives: Iwabuchi, Moriyama, and Shirai. In addition to being a tour de force of narrative exposition, the opening sequence frames the businessmen as pack of flabby, sweaty, late middle-aged, and unscrupulous plutocrats. Fall of Family Enterprise Groups in Japan (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1992), 238-39.

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Eventually we discover that it was Nishi, the groom, who ordered the cake. He is actually the illegitimate son of the man who jumped from the window to cover-up the fraud. Under an assumed identity, Nishi has infiltrated the company and married the Vice President’s daughter in order to gather evidence of his bosses’ complicity in his father’s death and to wreak his revenge. Although Kurosawa and his co-writers take substantial liberties with their adaptation, the changes they make tend to reflect Japan’s cultural and sociological differences with the West at a time of intense Westernization in the aftermath of the Occupation. Among the most flagrant and intriguing departures is the film’s treatment of suicide. In Hamlet, the Prince’s meditations on “self-slaughter” convey his intense inwardness, inquisitive intellect, and psycho-spiritual torment. In Shakespeare’s England, suicide is a profoundly individual act, the ultimately sincere statement of social and existential alienation. As a Shinto/Buddhist culture, however, Japan has no ethical or religious prohibitions against suicide, and thus less pressing fears of “what dreams may come.” On the contrary, suicide in The Bad Sleep Well represents a selfless act of clan loyalty. The corrupt executives of Public Corporation exploit this vestige of feudal devotion as a form of damage control to prevent any scandal loosening their grip on the reins of power. Like the Norwegian soldiers who “go to their graves like beds” for Fortinbras’s cause, the underlings in The Bad Sleep Well are asked to make the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of the company. As he is about to be re-arrested, one dutiful executive hurls himself in front of an oncoming truck to avoid incriminating his superiors. Wada, the Assistant Chief of Contracts, likewise prepares to leap into a smoking volcano before being reluctantly rescued at the last moment by Nishi. Given the residual feudalism of Japanese corporate culture, it makes perfect sense that the Japanese were the first to re-conceive Hamlet as a critique of business ethics. After kidnapping Wada, Nishi forces him to be a spectator at his own funeral. When he first sees the lavish ceremony for which the company has footed the bill, Wada screams, in an outburst of corporate fealty: “I have to die now!” Nishi, however, plays a tape he secretly recorded of Iwabuchi and Moriyama plotting Wada’s death. As we, along with Wada, watch the two executives bow before the grieving widow, we overhear them callously order their colleague’s execution and plan to spend the night in the arms of some young girl. The scene confirms Hamlet’s view of mourning as an action “that a man might play,” and epitomizes the film’s depiction of businessmen as duplicitous, venal hypocrites.

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But the businessmen in the film are, unlike the film itself, not entirely black and white. Indeed, the same actor who plays the sinister Moriyama, Takeshii Mori, had starred eight years earlier as the saintly salary-man who combats bureaucratic inertia to build a playground over a swamp in a bombed-out, blue-collar district of Tokyo in Kurosawa’s Ikiru. This film’s title, incidentally, means “to be,” and is sometimes used in Japanese translations of Hamlet’s famed soliloquy. Meanwhile, in a memorable scene in The Bad Sleep Well, Iwabuchi appears in an apron and chef’s hat, cooking dinner for his son and daughter, a jovial and likeable paterfamilias. At this moment, as his son observes, “it is hard to believe that he is really bad.” Borrowing a shopworn phrase from Hannah Arendt, one might say the film seeks to capture the “banality of evil.” But if the film looks awry at the Japanese organization men who readily slay themselves for the company, it also remains wary of the disaffected rebel embodied by Nishi. In order to avenge his father’s death, Nishi must infiltrate the company and become the duplicitous businessman he despises. After abducting another corrupt executive, Shirai, Nishi hauls him to the office window from which his father fell, and issues a grim ultimatum: jump out the window or drink a glass of poisoned (another sly allusion to Hamlet) whiskey. The terrified man downs the whiskey, which was not really poisoned, but is driven mad by the ordeal. Nishi later confesses that it is hard to hate evil, and that to fight it he must become evil himself. He is especially guilt-stricken for having taken advantage of his bosses’ daughter, Yoshiko, in order to expose her father’s crime. As a first-hand witness of Iwabuchi’s domestic, paternal side, Nishi finds himself unable to reconcile his desire for vengeance with his knowledge that by fulfilling it he would in fact orphan his own wife as he had been orphaned. Compounding the ethical conundrum, Kurosawa implies that Nishi’s own father had been involved in the firm’s corruption, and that the son finances his vendetta with the tainted money his father bequeathed to him. Although the film eschews or drastically abridges Shakespeare’s pensive soliloquies, Nishi shares Hamlet’s queasy conscience, and remains acutely aware of the moral consequences of his vendetta. This connection brings us to the most compelling reason why Kurosawa selects Hamlet as the source-text for a film about white-collar crime: The Bad Sleep Well draws upon the Prince’s reputation as the poster-child of introspection par excellence in order to blacken the businessman as unthinking and remorseless. Tellingly, the screenplay denies the corrupt executives of Public Corporation the penitent monologue that Claudius delivers in Act 3, scene 3. Only Shirai, the youngest of the trio, displays symptoms of a bad

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conscience after he spies Wada and mistakes him for his supposedly dead colleague’s ghost. The minute his icy façade begins to soften, the other two executives decide to have him murdered as well. As the film’s title implies (which might be more accurately rendered as The Worse You Are, The Better You Sleep), the businessmen are immoral precisely because they are unreflective. In contrast, we can assume that bad dreams vex the sleep of Nishi, as they do his Shakespearean prototype. But unlike Hamlet, Nishi’s quest for vengeance ultimately fails. Critics of the film have sometimes complained that the screenplay’s reliance on Hamlet sidetracks Kurosawa from his emphasis on collective action required for significant social reform to occur: “by transforming the problem of economic democracy into a very different concern with the crimes of three men, the film denies its initial political focus.”16 Instead, I think it might be more appropriate to view the film as leveling the same critique at Hamlet, or rather at the heroic subjectivity with which it has become synonymous. Revealingly, Nishi’s part was cast much against type as Toshiro Mifune. It is Mifune, Kurosawa’s Burbage, who invariably assumes the role of the brash, charismatic outsider in the director’s films. He embodies a strident individualism that Kurosawa finds both captivating and dangerous, and often linked throughout his work with American ideals. It cannot be by chance that the name of the Hamlet figure, Nishi, means “West” in Japanese. To some extent, Nishi attains heroic status insofar as his vendetta will not only satisfy his own honor but also “benefit everyone in Japan who suffers from the greed engendered by huge and unregulated concentrations of economic power.”17 In one of his tormented monologues, he exclaims: “it wasn’t just to avenge my father. I wanted to punish them all, all those of prey on the people who are unable to fight back.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in contrast, does not possess this highly developed social conscience.18 But Nishi’s quest is ultimately doomed, because the corruption resides not in certain individuals but within the system itself. This point is made clear in the brief coda to the film when Iwabuchi receives a phone-call from an anonymous superior, who tells him to take a prolonged vacation until the scandal subsides. As Stephen J. Philips has observed, this faceless figure (who may have been modeled on Premier Kishi) could be perceived as the real Claudius.19 In the 16

Stephen Prince, The Warrior’s Camera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 180-81. 17 Ibid., 180. 18 For more on the discrepancies between Hamlet and Nishi, see Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare in Japan, 139-41. 19 Philips, “Rotten States,” 159.

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unforgettable final shot, Iwabuchi bows to the phone after placing it back on the receiver, a gesture indicating that the traditional corporate culture of Japan has emerged unscathed. It would, I think, be reductive to interpret the film as an allegory about the rise of Premier Kishi or the failure of the occupational administration to dismantle the Zaibatsu. Yet in an era marked by pell-mell Westernization, Kurosawa’s film manages to reject both the collectivist ethos of Japan’s tainted Confucian and samurai heritage as well as the robust individualism embodied by the likes of General MacArthur and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In an interview, Kurosawa once explained the genesis of the film as follows: This was the first film of Kurosawa Productions, my own unit which I ran and financed myself. …Consequently, when I began, I wondered what kind of film to make. A film made only to make money did not appeal to me—one should not take advantage of an audience. Instead, I wanted to make a film of some social significance. At last I decided to do something about corruption, because it has always seemed to me that graft, bribery, etc. at the public level, is one of the worst crimes there is. These people hide behind the façade of some great company or corporation and consequently no one knows how dreadful they really are.20

As this quotation suggests, an antipathy between art and business is not an exclusively Western phenomenon. Although Kurosawa had grappled with social themes before, it can hardly be coincidental that he takes on a morally bankrupt commercial enterprise in the first film made independently of the studio system. The film, he announces, is not a business venture; indeed, one might say that a film becomes an artistic endeavor insofar as it is undertaken for motives other than “to make money.” Despite the fact the early modern theatre industry in London was profit-driven, through the film’s subtle allusions to Hamlet Kurosawa draws upon and reinforces the perception of Shakespeare as an author who transcends market values. In the process, it further bolsters Kurosawa’s own claims to auteur status. Although Nishi often whistles a jazz tune, which in turn is echoed by the score, this Hamlet-figure himself does not seem to possess any artistic aspirations or recognizably bohemian qualities. By distancing the audience from Nishi (we do not even witness his death, which happens off-screen), the film itself, rather than the character, absorbs Hamlet’s supposed artistic sensibility, a sensibility it carves out through its opposition to the ethos of business. The film itself is 20

Donald Riche, The Films of Akira Kurosawa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 140.

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a feature-length Mousetrap, but a Mousetrap that fails, since corporations lack the conscience that goads Shakespeare’s Claudius.

Scandinavian Noir: Karuismäki’s Hamlet Goes Business The next film to modernize the play is the wonderfully irreverent Hamlet Goes Business by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. Perhaps due to its limited distribution, the film has made only the faintest ripple in Shakespearean cinema studies.21 In the opening scene, Klaus (a.k.a. Claudius) poisons his boss to seize control of the company referred to in the film simply as “The Group.” He has been conducting secret negotiations to sell the company’s diverse holdings to a Norwegian magnate named Wallenberg. This Fortinbras figure intends to burn down the sawmill for insurance money and shut down the shipyard to give his Norwegian company a monopoly on the construction of Caribbean cruiseships. In return, Klaus will receive exclusive rights to manufacture and sell yellow rubber ducks. Hamlet, however, retains 51% of the shares from his father, and vetoes the deal. Shot in black and white, the film exudes a mock-noir ambiance in which the initial crime, Hamlet Sr.’s murder, becomes symptomatic of a more deep-seated social problem.22 In the case of Hamlet Goes Business, this problem centers on what one film-scholar terms the “cold reality of economic life in Finland.”23 To explain the forces behind this chill, and place Kaurismäki’s depiction of the businessman in perspective, it is necessary to say something about the nation’s political and economic climate in 1987, the year the film was made. Since World War II, Finland prided itself on pursuing a middle-way between Europe and the Soviet Union. In the era of Glasnost, with the collapse of communism immanent, Finland began to veer decisively toward the West, liberalizing much of its economy. Much of Kaurismäki’s work seeks in response to “probe beneath the surface illusion of Finland’s affluent society, exploring the lives of those disadvantaged by Finland’s transition from traditional heavy 21

Melissa M. Croteau, “Aki Kaurismäki’s Hamlet Goes Business: A Socialist Shakespearean Film Noir Comedy,” Shakespeare’s World / World Shakespeares, ed. Richard Fotheringham, Christa Jansoh, and R.S. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 193-206. 22 Linda Charnes conducts a psychoanalytic study of Hamlet as an uncanny precursor of film noir in Hamlet’s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium (New York: Routledge, 2006), 29. 23 Peter Von Bagh, Aki Kaurismäki, trans. Anne Colin du Terrail (Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, 2006), 77. The translations from the French are mine own.

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industry to a high-tech consumer and information economy.”24 In this regard, it is illuminating to compare Kaurismäki’s adaptation with Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 version. At the end of Branagh’s Hamlet, the Norwegian army storms the palace and topples the statue of the old King, a scene that took a visual cue from the destruction of the statues of Lenin and Marx during the fall of the Iron Curtain.25 Kaurismäki, however, with his pronounced socialist sympathies, seems more ambivalent about the impending triumph of neo-liberalism, In retrospect, Kaurismäki has referred to Hamlet Goes Business as “prophetic,” dubbing the garish, synthetic ducks as harbingers of the mobile telephone industry that would soon come dominate the Finnish economy.26 More generally, though, the rubber duck also functions as an emblem of the capricious nature of modern business in which the product is simply a means toward a profit. The bathos the duck elicits is palpable, particularly when an accidental squeak punctures the solemnity of a scene. During the board meeting, the businessmen fondle it as if it were some inestimably precious gem. Overall, the film caricatures the business leaders as vulgar, unfeeling, egomaniacal materialists. The interior shots of their offices and board-meetings are soul-numbingly drab, reinforcing the impression of the business world as bleak and homogenous, financially wealthy yet aesthetically impoverished. Kaurismäki’s cavalier paraphrasing of Shakespeare’s text manages to unmoor the play from the domain of haut-culture, while at the same time sharpening its critique of corruption and abuse of power. Unsurprisingly, the screenplay retains a good deal of Polonius’s valedictory lecture to Laertes. But whereas Kurosawa jettisons Shakespeare’s language and preserves only the barebones of the plot, Kaurismäki renders it into modern colloquial diction: “The clothes make the man. … Don’t pay back a loan too soon. The lender may die and you save a lot.” Robbed of Shakespeare’s deft rhetorical touch, the speech sounds even more calculating and crass, particularly since Kaurismäki omits the famous line “too thine own self be true.” The departures are equally telling; in contrast to his Shakespearean progenitor, this Polonius coaches Ophelia to encourage Hamlet’s advances. Rather than ordering her to break off contact with him, he slips her a wad of cash and tells her to buy a revealing outfit. A marriage with the new boss’s stepson is too tantalizing 24 Shohini Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema: Europe, The Middle East, East Asia and South Asia (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 43. 25 Mark Thornton Burnett, “‘The Very Cunning of the Scene’: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet,” Literature/Film Quarterly 25:2 (1997): 78-82. 26 Peter Von Bagh, Aki Kaurismaki, 79.

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an opportunity to shun. “His family has too much money to be left to some typist,” he muses, adding, “good thing we’re Catholic. Divorce would be expensive for him.” The blocking makes Polonius even more repulsive. During the entire conversation with Ophelia he never once makes eye contact with his daughter, but stares straight ahead puffing on a cigar. In every single scene in which he appears, Polonius is never once without a stogie, puffing away even inside a limousine with the windows rolled up. The habit eventually proves to be fatal when Hamlet notices the smoke seeping out from Gertrude’s armoire and fires at it, literally taking aim at this clichéd prop of plutocratic excess. Hamlet, in contrast, prefers the more bohemian cigarette. Meanwhile, Polonius's son, Lauri is portrayed as feeble, whiny, and vain. He runs off to complain to Klaus after Hamlet slaps him, whipping an electric razor out of his suit coat pocket to shave before his meeting with the boss. The renowned Finnish actor, Esko Salminen plays Klaus as a smug, macho and brutish schemer. During the board meeting, he declares that it is no time to “pause for breath” while darting a withering look intended to humiliate a board member across the table who presumably offered this advice. In the new global economy, he exclaims, “nobody deals with losers.” When Polonius worries that the shipyard workers may protest the planned closure, the unflappable Klaus replies: “hunger and cold will drive them home.” During the Mousetrap sequence, Klaus, not Polonius, boasts of his prior acting experience. But Kaurismäki alters the line “so capital a calf” to “so capital a pig,” a likely bit of wordplay on the idiom “capitalist pig.” Klaus’s conscience is not wrung by the re-enactment of his murder; he flees his seat only because the stagehand shines the spotlight in his eyes. The contrast between ruthless businessman and the young bohemian becomes crudely obvious from the caption preceding the scene in which Klaus escorts Hamlet around the factory floor: “Satan and Jesus at the Mountain.” Hamlet, at least at first, seems to have a marked antipathy to business. During the board meeting, he hunches over a desk in a corner, scribbling with crayons as Klaus outlines his pitch to sell the company’s holdings to the Norwegians. Instead of equipping Hamlet with a refined artistic sensibility, the director conveys his rebellious, anti-corporate spirit primarily through the soundtrack. Whereas excerpts from Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich accompany the more somber scenes, Hamlet has a jukebox in his room, which shuffles through a selection of American blues and rock n’ roll throughout the film. In the farcical denouement, he actually kills Laertes by slamming a giant radio over his head, then switching on a raucous rockabilly tune. After his quarrel with Ophelia,

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Hamlet attends a concert by the Finnish rock trio Melrose. Their rousing three-minute rendition of a song (sung in English) entitled “Rich Little Bitch” functions like the equivalent of the Player’s speech recounting Priam’s slaughter. Not only does it convey Hamlet’s sexual frustration, but it also provokes in the viewer feelings of working-class angst. Yet, despite the sympathy a revenge plot arouses for the avenger, this Hamlet remains a defiantly unlikable character. This is in part a result of Pirka-Pekka Petelius’s deadpan performance, as Kaurismäki favors a decidedly Brechtian approach to acting. When his father’s spirit recounts that he was murdered, Hamlet remains unmoved. “Get on with it,” he snaps, “it’s cold out and I’m hungry.” In the opening sequence, he sneaks into the kitchen to snatch a slice of ham—a visual pun in keeping with Kaurismäki’s irreverent treatment of his source—and continues to snack on food throughout the duration of the film. Whereas Shakespeare’s Hamlet has “foregone all custom of exercise,” Petelius delivers this speech while lifting weights (in a dress shirt), and frets about his figure. His tenderness toward Ophelia is a flagrant ploy to get her into bed. When she refuses to have sex with him, he insults her. He even forces a drunken kiss on his chauffeur’s girlfriend. In addition to being a “horny, gluttonous layabout,”27 Petelius’s Hamlet has no genuine passion for the theatre. When he delivers his advice-to-the-players speech he looks only at the piles of cash, tossed with an arrogant nonchalance, with which he bribes the actors. If Shakespeare’s Hamlet is “loved of the distracted multitude” (4.3.4), Petelius appears something of a snob, incapable of forming a genuine attachment to the working people around him.28 He is portrayed as puerile, spoiled and self-absorbed, but without the redeeming poetic introspection of Shakespeare’s soliloquies. In one of the remarkable moments in the screenplay, Klaus comments, “Hamlet has never loved anybody but himself—in that he is like me.” Polonius chimes in: “And me.” Whatever shred of sympathy the audience might possess for Hamlet disintegrates completely in the final scene. After murdering Klaus, Hamlet moves into his father’s office, cradling a computer. The prop is an unmistakable omen of Hamlet’s’ embrace of the new high-tech economy. In a delightfully perverse twist, he confesses to Simo, his chauffeur and the Horatio stand-in, that he was the one who poisoned his father by secretly upping the dosage of the diluted poison Klaus had been pouring in 27

Daniel Rosenthal, 100 Shakespeare Films (London: British Film Institute, 2007), 38-40. 28 Curtis Breight, “Smirnoff’s Shakespeare” Aki Kaurismaki’s Hamlet Goes Business and Other Socialist Comedies of the Suomi State,” Selected Papers from the West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association 24 (2001): 58.

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his drink. Craving to take charge of the company himself all along, Hamlet now announces he will go ahead with stepfather’s plan to sell the group and shut down the shipyard. But he is soon hoist with his own petard, as Simo, a Union spy, promptly poisons Hamlet, and the shipyard is saved. Even more explicitly than in Kurosawa’s adaptation of the tragedy, the director distances himself from the Prince to express his misgivings about the character’s heroic individualism, which is here unmasked as bourgeois self-absorption. As a result, the artistic sensibility of Shakespeare’s humanist Prince (manifested in his love of philosophy, theatre, and GrecoRoman literature) is instead deflected onto the auteur.

Almereyda’s Hamlet: The Prince as Post-Modern Flâneur In his film of Hamlet set fin de millennium Manhattan, Michael Almereyda foregrounds the importance of the business milieu by framing the opening exposition through the moon-roof of Claudius’s limousine. Portraying Hamlet as an experimental video artist and his uncle as the sleek, sinister CEO of Denmark Corporation, Almereyda re-imagines the play as a parable about the alienation of the artist in modern technocapitalist society. The director bolsters this reading by casting Hamlet as Ethan Hawke, known for his role in Reality Bites as a Gen-X slacker disillusioned with the humdrum work-a-day world. The photo featured on the publicity posters and on the DVD cover dramatizes the conflict with remarkable precision: a close-up of Hamlet’s face, the tormented artistintellectual, pitted against a nocturnal vista of the Manhattan skyline, with its eerie shimmering monoliths of corporate power. A miniature replica of this shot appears later in the film, when Hawke’s face appears against the skyscrapers reflected on the tinted window of Claudius’s limousine, just before cutting to the first soliloquy. By recording several of the soliloquies on a grainy pixilated hand-held camera, Hawke’s Hamlet seems to be a disciple of the Dogme 95 movement.29 Launched, fittingly enough, by Danish filmmakers Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Dogme 95 rebels against the highly stylized conventions of Hollywood films with their overblown budgets and extravagant special effects. A kind of cinematic Reformation, the Dogme 95—with its number duplicating Martin Luther’s 95 theses—shares Hamlet’s Protestant suspicion of outward “show” and spectacle. During Claudius’s press conference Hawke points his camera at the cameramen in 29 Samuel Crowl, Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 191.

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one of the adaptation’s many meta-cinematic moments. Almereyda’s homage to Dogme techniques registers an animus against the Mammon of Hollywood, further enhancing Hamlet’s antipathy toward big business. Despite (or perhaps because of) its box-office success, Almereyda’s Hamlet has elicited mixed esteem from Shakespeareans. For Lanier, the film ultimately stands as an object lesson in the impossibility of creating “a specifically filmic mode of resistance” to the Culture Industry.30 Deborah Cartmell, meanwhile, has complained that its concessions to the “teenpic” genre dumb down the source-text into a kind of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s Excellent Adventure.31 Yet Cartmell’s suggestion that Almereyda’s film can be aligned with the genre of city comedy deserves more sustained attention than her essay affords it. Early modern city comedy often expresses a “proleptic critique of the saturation of everyday life by market values.”32 In his preface to the screenplay, Almereyda describes this critique as one of the explicit aims of his adaptation. Responding to reviewers who accused him of product placement, Almereyda makes this startling confession: The undignified, all but unbelievable truth is that we paid for the privilege of parading certain logos and insignias across the screen. There was, after all, an intended point. ‘Denmark is a prison,’ Hamlet declares early on, and if you consider this in terms of contemporary consumer culture, the bars of the cage are defined by advertising, by all the hectic distractions, brand names, announcements and ads that crowd our waking hours.33

One of the most jarring moments of ad-busting occurs when the Ghost vanishes inside a luminous Pepsi machine, thereby associating the soft drink giant with his torturous “prison-house.” Like early modern city comedy, Almereyda’s film stages a combat of youth against age, emphasizing the youthfulness of Hamlet and Ophelia in his casting, as well as the economic forces that sabotage their relationship. Finally, the 30

Lanier, “Shakescorp Noir,” 177. Deborah Cartmell, “Hamlet in 2000: Michael Almeredya’s City Comedy,” in Plotting Early Modern London, ed. Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock and Anne-Julia Zwierlein (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 209-15. 32 Howard, Theatre of a City, 213. 33 Michael Almereyda and William Shakespeare, Hamlet (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), xi. Compare Almereyda’s comment with a similar complaint by Kaurismäki: “It is difficult to film the city today because you always see advertisements for Nestle, Shell, Kemira, Fortum, Nordea, Nokia planted everywhere with all the clumsiness of which a huge corporation is capable.” Von Bagh, Aki Kaurismaki, 80 (translation mine). 31

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film updates city comedy’s rivalry between the aristocracy and the citizenry by spinning the conflict between Hamlet and Claudius into a classic case of bohemian versus bourgeois. As Cèsar Graña delineated in his study of the same name, the artist-intellectual in 19th Century France sought to subvert the hegemony of bourgeois values by cultivating an aristocracy of spirit.34 Charles Baudelaire’s profile of the dandy, cited by Graña, epitomizes Hawke’s Hamlet perfectly: “repelled, jobless, taskless but rich in native power, [he] comes to conceive the foundations of a new sort of aristocracy, one which will be especially difficult to destroy because it is founded upon the most precious and most indestructible of endowments [i.e. sensibility, creativity] … which neither labor nor money can confer.”35 As Hamlet slinks through the commodified landscape of lower Manhattan, he emerges as a post-modern flâneur. The shots of garish neon signage and stock-market quotes impinging on his awareness transform reality into the kind of montage Hamlet later assembles into his Mousetrap. In a wonderful meta-narrative moment, he stands before a sign advertising the Lion King on Broadway, a reminder that Disney has already re-packaged the play for a mass audience. Yet if Almereyda’s film romanticizes Hamlet, it also depicts the indie artist as victimized by the very forces of technological capitalism against which he rebels. His addiction to his computer and video journal, and his compulsive viewing of films, conspire to distance him from Ophelia, Gertrude, and from society at large. In one of the most striking montage sequences, Almereyda inserts a clip of the revered Buddhist Thict Nhat Hahn, lecturing on the need to “inter-be” with others. An Eastern spin on John Donne’s famous mantra, “No man is an island,” and a deliberate counter-point to Hamlet’s famed soliloquy, the speech cleverly conveys that modern anxiety springs not so much from dread of damnation in the next life, but from existential isolation in this one. Ironically, Hamlet, busy fiddling with his editing software, fails to hear the message. For Alessandro Abbate, this episode highlights Hamlet’s complicity in his own alienation. 36 Despite this character flaw, Hawke’s Hamlet remains a more sympathetic figure than his counterparts in Kurosawa and Kaurismäki The reasons for this are manifold, but two notable ones leap to mind: First, the 34

Cèsar Graña, Bohemian Versus Bourgeois: French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1964). 35 Ibid., 151 For more on Baudelaire’s Hamlet-complex, see Helen Phelps Bailey, Hamlet in France: From Voltaire to Laforgue (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1964), 138. 36 Alessandro Abbate, “To Be or Inter-Be: Almereyda’s end-of-millenium Hamlet,” Literature/Film Quarterly 32:3 (2004): 82-91.

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Japanese and Finnish directors remain more dubious of the heroic individualism of Anglo-American culture, which can easily be appropriated by the very forces they critique, as the Shakespearean financial advice books make all too clear. Secondly, whereas The Bad Sleep Well and Hamlet Goes Business decline to translate Shakespeare’s text into a literary Japanese or Finnish idiom, Almereyda preserves the original language. Like blank verse compared to prose, the lyrical brilliance and philosophical penetration of Hamlet’s speech emphasizes the aesthetic sensibility of the character. The end result of this linguistic anachronism is to heighten the impression of Hamlet as out of sync with the pragmatic commercial values of his age. Depictions of Hamlet as the nemesis of the businessman are by no means limited to the three films I have examined in this essay. Stacy Title’s 2000 film, Let the Devil Wear Black, portrays Hamlet as a dyspeptic graduate student, and Claudius as a sleazy parvenu who owns a string of bars and strip joints in modern Los Angeles. Branagh’s In the Bleak Midwinter (1996) follows a struggling actor who rejects the lucre of Hollywood and the advice of his agent to stage a low frills production of Hamlet in a provincial church. The hit Canadian mini-series Slings and Arrows (2003) pits the endearingly eccentric artistic director Geoffrey Tenet, renowned for his performance of Hamlet, against the bland and blandly named accountant, Richard Smith-Jones.37 If Robinson Crusoe has served as the poster-child of homo economicus, Hamlet has come to act as his foil, the supreme portrait of an aesthetic consciousness in world literature. Donald Hedrick endorses such a reading when he holds the play up as “our last best hope within a corporate culture with no apparent exit.”38 Just as critics have patched together a few scattered clues to cast Claudius as a CEO, the textual warrant for Hamlet’s resentment of business is likewise minimal. But it does exist. After all, the play dates from the same period as Troilus and Cressida, which features scathing critiques of the commodification of human relations. In his opening monologue, Hamlet pronounces himself exhausted by all the “unprofitable ... uses of this world” (1.2.134). He expresses impatience with “the million” who failed to appreciate the play about Priam’s slaughter, and is irked by the volatility of market forces that creates the vogue for child acting companies. He speaks with mordant disapproval of Claudius’ s 37

Earlier modernizations such as the B-noir Strange Illusion (1946) and the anguished post-war German adaptation, The Rest is Silence (1960), also take passing swipes at the business world. 38 Hedrick, “Bardguides to the New Universe,” 54.

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“thrift” in re-serving the funeral meats at the wedding, ridicules the foppish Osric as “spacious in the possession of dirt” (5.275), and openly breaks with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by branding them mercenaries: “have you any further trade with us?” (3.2.325). When his companions inquire about the ghost’s tidings he brushes them off by telling them to pursue their “business and desire … For every man hath business and desire” (1.5.128-9). Again, the word business here carries a generic meaning that has nothing to do with financial transactions. But it does insinuate something unworldly about Hamlet’s character picked up on by critics and film-makers. If, like Polonius, we seek the cause of Hamlet’s transformation, we would also have to rattle off a long declension, beginning perhaps with Goethe and Coleridge’s canonization of him as the patron saint of the alienated intellectual. Although often overlooked, Hamlet’s nobility must also be considered a contributing factor. Recently, Linda Charnes has diagnosed the Prince’s popularity as symptomatic of the American consumer’s sense of being “virtual royalty,” reflecting the feeling of entitlement to wealth without labor created by the 90s stockmarket boom.39 In the case of Hawke’s performance, however, the opposite is arguably true: Hamlet’s disenchantment with market values underscores the virtual nobility of the bohemian. As Graña observes, one of the key strategies of the literary rebellion against the middle class has been to mimic “the spirit of the mandarinate— the discretion and loftiness of the self-created intellectual aristocrat before the money-and-toolssecurity of the businessman.”40 Rather than condone idleness, antibusiness adaptations of Hamlet convert introspection and autobiographical art-for-self’s-sake into a kind of uncompensated labor. Today, an ability to understand Shakespeare has itself become, for better or worse, a prerequisite of any claims to cultural refinement. The financial management guides disturb literary critics because their accessibility and economic pragmatism threatens the status of Shakespeare as a purveyor of values that transcend the market. To borrow Hamlet’s phrase, the toe of the businessman continues to gall the kibe of the literary intellectual. Films, of course, can pose the same threat. In a telling coincidence, Augustine and Adelman’s Shakespeare in Charge was published by Hyperion, a subsidiary of Miramax books, the same media conglomerate that released Almereyda’s Hamlet. If Lanier is correct that Almereyda’s corporate-funded corporate satire ultimately fails to break the skin of the hand that feeds it, the films by Kurosawa and Kaurismäki bite 39 40

Charnes, Hamlet’s Heirs, 71. Grana, Bohemian Versus Bourgeois, 206.

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with greater tenacity. Like cinematic ghosts sprung from the vault, they offer a timely warning about Hamlet’s appropriation by the forces of Western economic individualism.

Works Cited Abbate, Alessandro. “To Be or Inter-Be: Almereyda’s end-of-millenium Hamlet.” Literature/Film Quarterly 32:3 (2004): 82-91. Almereyda, Michael and William Shakespeare, Hamlet. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Augustine, Norman and Kenneth Adelman, Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard’s Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage. New York: Talk Miramax Books, 1999. 167-207. Bailey, Helen Phelps. Hamlet in France: From Voltaire to Laforgue. Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1964. Breight, Curtis. “Smirnoff’s Shakespeare” Aki Kaurismaki’s Hamlet Goes Business and Other Socialist Comedies of the Suomi State,” Selected Papers from the West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association 24 (2001): 56-63. Browne, M. Neil and J. Kevin Quinn, “Dominant Economic Metaphors and the Postmodern Subversion of the Subject.” In The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen. New York: Routledge, 1999. 131-149 Burnett, Mark Thornton. “‘The Very Cunning of the Scene’: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet.” Literature/Film Quarterly 25:2 (1997): 78-82. Cartmell, Deborah. “Hamlet in 2000: Michael Almeredya’s City Comedy.” In Plotting Early Modern London, ed. Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock and Anne-Julia Zwierlein. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 209-15. Charnes, Linda. Hamlet’s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium. York: Routledge, 2006. Chaudhuri, Shohini. Contemporary World Cinema: Europe, The Middle East, East Asia and South Asia. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Cohen, Walter. “The undiscovered country: Shakespeare and mercantile geography.” In Marxist Shakespeares, eds. Jean Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow. New York: Routledge, 2001. 128-58. Collick, John. Shakespeare Cinema, and Society. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1989. 150-87; Croteau, Melissa M. “Aki Kaurismäki’s Hamlet Goes Business: A Socialist Shakespearean Film Noir Comedy.” In Shakespeare’s World /

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World Shakespeares, ed. Richard Fotheringham, Christa Jansoh, and R.S. White. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008. 193-206. Crowl, Samuel. Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. Graña, César. Bohemian Versus Bourgeois: French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Basic Books, 1964. Grav, Peter. Shakespeare and the Economic Imperative: What’s aught but as ‘tis valued? New York: Routledge, 2008. Hapgood, Robert. “Kurosawa’s Shakespeare Films: Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well, and Ran.” In Shakespeare and the Moving Image, ed. Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells. Cambridge University Press, 1994. 234-249. Harris, Jonathan Gil. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Hedrick, Donald. “Bardguides of the New Universe: Niche Marketing and the Cultural Logic of Late Shakespeareanism.” In Shakespeare After Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 35-57. Howard, Jean. Theatre of a City: The Places of London Comedy 15981642. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Jansen, Marius. The Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2000. Kishi, Tetsuo and Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare in Japan. London: Continuum, 2005. Kosai, Yutaka. “The Postwar Japanese Economy.” In The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Lanier, Douglas. “Shakescorp Noir” Shakespeare Quarterly 53:2 (2002), 157-80. McCloskey, Deidre. The Rhetoric of Economics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. —. “Sophisters, Economists, and Calculators.” In Rhetoric and Pluralism, ed. Frederick Antczak. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995. 187-210. Morikawa, Hidemasa. Zaibatsu: The Rise and Fall of Family Enterprise Groups in Japan. Tokyo:University of Tokyo Press, 1992. Philips, Stephen J. “Rotten States: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well.” In Hamlet on Screen, ed. Holger Klein and Dimiter Daphinoff. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. 153162.

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Prince, Stephen. The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Riche, Donald. The Films of Akira Kurosawa. Berkeley: University of California Press,1996. Rosenthal, Daniel. 100 Shakespeare Films. London: British Film Institute, 2007. Taylor, Gary. “Red Dragon.” In Travel Knowledge, eds. Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Signh. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 223-48 Thompson, Ann and John Thompason. “Pertinent Likeness: Kurosawa’s Bad Sleep Well as a Version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” Shakespeare Studies 44 (2006): 17-27. Von Bagh, Peter. Aki Kaurismäki, trans. Anne Colin du Terrail. Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, 2006. Woodbridge, Linda, ed. Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism, ed. Linda Woodbridge. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

SURVIVING THE ECONOMY: MADAMS, HOUSES, AND PROFITS IN MEMOIRS OF A WOMAN OF PLEASURE LAURA FAULK

The eighteenth century gave rise to trade and capitalism, allowing prostitution to become a lucrative option for women as more men could afford paying for sex. Several factors determined the “worth” of each prostitute, including virginity, appearance, and number of sexual partners. Madams managed their prostitutes, setting prices, taking a cut of each transaction, and determining how often they worked. Like all businessmen, madams determined their products’ values—their girls’ worth—through their business practices. In his novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, John Cleland explores contradictory depictions of prostitution, juxtaposing two houses of business, both run by women, as the heroine Fanny starts her career at one before moving to the next. While both madams are in the business of selling sex, they conduct their enterprises differently, both attempting to live well in the libidinal economy. They each encourage one of two forms of prostitutes: common, street whores and women of pleasure. As England’s growing capitalism changed class boundaries and promoted the importance of the commodity, Mrs. Cole adapts to the alteration, changing her business to fit the needs of her higher-class customers while Mrs. Brown does not. In the enterprise of sex, women dominate while men are limited as customers or favorites instead of owners or managers. In spite of their differences, both business models make money, and perhaps the most striking similarity between the two is the lack of men within the management of each house. While Cleland’s brothels monetarily benefit a few men, they primarily support women. As such, women personally invest themselves in the rapidly growing business of trade without need of husbands or fathers to sustain their livelihood. Indeed, though the women

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sell their bodies to male customers, they do not need men in managing their enterprises.1 Fanny begins her journey from the country to the metropolis thinking “Luck [is] all” she needs to find a wealthy husband and thereby solidify her own fortune.2 However, wealthy husbands are scarce while pretty women are readily in demand, causing Fanny to create her own fortune by selling her body for others’ pleasure. Prostitution allowed women an income outside the home, an opportunity usually reserved for men. As England’s economy turned to capitalism, Fanny, and prostitutes in general, become a valuable commodity in the libidinal economy. Through advances in industry and agriculture, England became the foremost “commercial nation” in the eighteenth century,3 one willing to trade in the most personal of objects, the body. The libidinal economy, channeled to “exploit desires and feelings,”4 included the objectification of woman as enviable purchases “dreamt about by the general population,” though largely unaffordable.5 As the English nation expanded, the economy grew, and capitalism took over the country with the goal of “commodification.”6 The whorehouse was a microcosm of England’s increasingly market-based economy, exercising the practices of capitalism and supported by this “new money.”7 This change to capitalism both helped and harmed prostitutes. Existing in the outskirts of the law, brothels ranged from organizations of luxury and wealth to unkempt and disorderly buildings. Bawds were often heavy drinkers, abusive, and vulgar, readily mistreating their girls by physical 1

Male bawds were not unheard of, but whorehouses were usually run by women, according to Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730-1830 (New York: Longman, 1999), 28. 2 John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985), 3. 3 James Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700-1789. 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1993), 103. 4 Jane Kenway, Elizabeth Bullen, Johannah Fahey, and Simon Robb, Haunting the Knowledge Economy. (London: Routledge, 2006), 85. 5 M. Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1992), 114. 6 Ibid., 85. 7 John C. Beynon, “‘Traffic in More Precious Commodities’: Sapphic Erotics and Economics in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” in Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and its Influence. ed. Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson (New York: AMS Press, 2003), 4. Fergus Linnane, Madams, Bawds and BrothelKeepers of London. (Thrupp: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2005), 51.

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beatings or withholding payment.8 If they did not victimize innocent girls into joining their establishments, it was common practice to force girls to stay by denying them money or clothes, or simply threatening to have them jailed for stealing.9 Yet the eighteenth century often idealized prostitution; the successful prostitutes often retired at a young age with decent fortunes or married one of their wealthy benefactors. They exercised a broad sexual freedom while becoming important consumers, setting new trends in fashion, supporting merchants, and attracting rich clients to London.10 When Fanny enters this economy as a prostitute, she is turned into a coveted and consumable object, and as such, she is influenced, like other commodities, by supply and demand. In order to survive as a prostitute, she must be in demand by meeting the desires of consumers. But consumers and their needs change, weakening the original use or value of goods and providing them with new ones, associating them with new meanings and desires.11 With Cole’s help, Fanny adapts to the needs of her clientele, changing her role from traditional prostitute to woman of pleasure, an item for the wealthier classes who can afford her compliance. Prostitution was a common enterprise in eighteenth century England. One midcentury estimate placed three thousand prostitutes in the city of London but notes the city’s growing size probably meant a continual increase in prostitutes.12 In 1789, German traveler W. De Archenholtz estimated that fifty thousand prostitutes lived in London alone.13 He divided these women by their value. The “lowest sort” lived with and under the direction of bawds, while other, higher class, prostitutes lived in their own houses or rented apartments.14 Archenholtz seemed surprised that the higher class ones “possess[ed] those virtues we admire in the sex, youth, beauty, and the graces, gentleness, education, principles, and even . . . . delightful modesty.”15 These “higher sort” were characterized by 8

Linnane, 40. Henderson, 29. 10 Laura J. Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 2006), 11. 11 Featherstone, 114. 12 Felicity A. Nussbaum, “One Part of Womankind: Prostitution and Sexual Geography in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (1995): 20. 13 Robert A. Erickson, Mother Midnight: Birth, Sex, and Fate in EighteenthCentury Fiction (Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne) (New York: AMS Press Inc., 1986), 30. 14 Ibid., 30. 15 Ibid., 30-31. 9

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their “delightful modesty,” which hints of sexual restraint, and their beauty, fulfilling the more refined tastes of the wealthier class. These prostitutes were the more desired and therefore more expensive, excepting those newly initiated to the trade, virgins. Virgins were known to be free of venereal disease, and many believed that their purity cured diseases.16 Men also pursued virgins, believing taking virginity proved virility and masculinity, turning sex into a competitive performance of manhood, and raising the price of virgins.17 By sleeping with a woman, the man became a conqueror who was perceived to have stock in her body, and the value of his property decreased if she had sex with other men.18 Because of this, the less experienced prostitute, though not as expensive as a virgin, was a more valuable item. The sex trade boomed, and the prevalence of prostitution raised concerns. Not only could “fallen” women spread disease, but they could also destroy the innocence of others.19 As the eighteenth century progressed, the fear of bawds corrupting young, innocent women grew.20 Mrs. Brown fulfills this idea of the bawd as predator seeking to victimize girls. In her naiveté, the virgin Fanny is unprepared for the city and is quickly taken in by the madam, who “look’d as if she would devour [Fanny] with her eyes.”21 Brown looks for young, tempting women, virgins, who she can profit from by selling their bodies as pleasurable objects, and she sees Fanny as a consumable item. Fanny’s blushes convince Brown of her purity, assuring her that the girl is “fit for her purpose,” capable of bringing in a large sum for her virginity.22 She takes the girl’s money to prevent her from leaving her house, introduces her to the man intended to take her virginity, and assigns her a female bedfellow, Phoebe, who ascertains Fanny’s maidenhood and encourages her sexual appetite. In 16

Julie Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Palgrave Mamillan, 2003), 52. 17 Julie Peakman, “Initiation, Defloration, and Flagellation: Sexual Propensities in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” in Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and its Influence, ed. Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson (New York: AMS Press, 2003), 165. 18 Peakman, Mighty Lewd, 52. 19 Perhaps the most notable example of prostitutes corrupting young women is portrayed in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady. Published in 1748, the same year as Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, this novel relates the story of a virtuous woman who is drugged and raped while imprisoned in a brothel. 20 Henderson, 28. 21 Cleland, 7. 22 Ibid., 7.

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essence, Brown dupes Fanny; the girl’s first experience in a brothel is not immediately recognized as such. Not only has Brown gained a soon-to-be prostitute who can bring in money for years, but Fanny’s first sexual encounter will bring in an immediate, never to be repeated, high sum. Within Fanny’s first night at her house, Brown establishes greedy ownership of her, enacting and justifying the horror story of the ruthless bawd. Cleland sets Brown as the feared corruptor of innocence. Yet Brown does not push women into the business without some preparation. In her house, virgin modesty is easily overcome with Phoebe, whose sole job is to awaken the sexual appetites of newcomers.23 This process reverses traditional sexual order; while Cole’s girls first experience sex with men, Brown’s girls are prematurely advanced by Phoebe’s wandering fingers, which Cleland uses to further portray the potentially disturbing effects of prostitution. Although enticed by Phoebe’s touches, Fanny is also disgusted by her, particularly with her gusto in performing her role. The description of Phoebe is unflattering: the experienced prostitute is older than she admits by at least ten years and “sunk” from a “long course of hackney-ship, and hot-waters,” suggesting that Phoebe visits bath houses to find relief and cure for venereal diseases.24 Phoebe is obviously not the ideal prostitute; she is not seen as attractive, limiting her income from paid, heterosexual sex, and looks as though she might transmit harmful diseases. Her intimacy exposes Fanny, any of her personal customers, and possibly Fanny’s customers, to her diseases. Her prostitution after disease may be seen as irresponsible but, more pressing to the prostitute and her bawd, lowers her value and threatens the success of Brown’s business; if customers learn the girls are diseased, the brothel’s reputation is ruined.25 Though she may not be lucrative in terms of luring men and her lust and appearance may prevent her from running her own brothel, her years in the market and faithfulness to Brown’s household prepare her for new duties, more managerial, such 23

It should be noted that Cleland almost makes fun of the image of the bawd as corruptor. Fanny’s innocence is exaggerated to humor as she does not realize Brown’s obviously immoral purpose. Furthermore, her prostitutes enjoy their work; all are represented as happy and openly, if a little too eagerly, sexual. Though constantly exposed to disease, financial problems, and competition within the house, they experience sexual freedom that other female characters are denied. 24 Cleland, 10. Lena Olsson, “Idealized and Realistic Portrayals of Prostitution in John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” in Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and its Influence, ed. Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson (New York: AMS Press, 2003), 89. 25 Linnane, 14.

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as encouraging the new boarder’s sexuality. Her physicality and excitement disgust her pupil slightly, but the role is profitable. After a few nights sharing Phoebe’s bed, Fanny is determined to experiment with a male partner quickly, which somewhat dismantles her attractive modesty but also makes Brown’s employment of the girl easier. Yet Phoebe is not easily forgotten; Fanny’s disapproval is evident several years later as she recounts the story. The appalling woman appears to be the result of Brown’s ill-run brothel: diseased, perverse, and greatly concerned with virginity, and hence, money. Fanny, desperate to participate in a “real” sexual encounter of her own, instead of another night with Phoebe, does not let her eagerness overcome her distaste of her inevitable future in Brown’s house. Cole does not ruin girls as Brown does. Instead, she purposefully seeks experienced girls, those who do not need a Phoebe but gladly recount the stories of their first sexual experiences. Their accounts demonstrate the difference in what Cleland portrays as a more natural, self-instigated introduction to sexuality and capitalism than the less traditional first experiences of Brown’s girls who are taken advantage of, literally raped, by those with more money. Cole runs a very reputable house of ill repute; although she promotes lewdness, she does not promote corruption of innocence. Her criterion for girls is limited to “youth and personal charms,” and she chooses them “as much for their temper as their beauty.”26 Virginity is not the preferred qualification for her business; the second house employs already sexually active women who, unlike Phoebe, are appealing to men, particularly to the aesthetic tastes of upper-class men. Of her four girls, Fanny, Emily, Harriet, and Louisa, none is a virgin when they begin working for Cole. However, she encourages Fanny to sell herself as a virgin, suggesting the other girls did as well. Cole presents her to the world as such; Fanny plays the part, and a blood-soaked sponge convinces the new “champion,” a sickly older man.27 By selling Fanny as a virgin, Cole rakes in a much higher price for the two of them to share and establishes Fanny’s new conqueror, Mr. Norbert, as a steady customer. This scheme generates much money for the brothel, especially if it is used by all of the employees. Cole, her prostitutes, and four of the regular customers know Fanny is not a virgin and have seen her having sex, but the ruse succeeds because the new customers are carefully picked and are easily acquired by the girls’ attractions. Cole also provides her ladies with a lucrative design they can use again. While Brown wastes time looking 26 27

Cleland, 88, 93. Ibid., 134.

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for virgins who only bring in one lump sum before greatly decreasing in value, Cole enterprisingly re-makes them.28 At the same time, she places her customers in a hierarchical order. The four healthy, dependable, and wealthier clients know Fanny is not a virgin, and Cole does not want to trick them but assures them of her devotion to such valued consumers. Norbert is not one of these customers; he does not frequent the house before he meets Fanny, and he is less wealthy than the steadier clientele. This less-valued customer receives lower quality treatment. Cole’s profitable trick may seem to disrupt gendered traditions, but, in Cleland’s ideal world of happy prostitutes and their wealthy benefactors, the “victim” actually benefits from the experience. Norbert’s conviction that he is Fanny’s sole penetrator causes him to delight in sleeping with her in such a manner that his failing physical and fiscal health is restored. His money does not go into the new untried investment as he intends, but is more successfully if unknowingly placed in an experienced businesswoman. “[N]othing could equal his joy and exultation” in having sex with Fanny, and his sickly appearance suggests that his “exultation” arises from his performance of masculinity in taking a woman’s virginity, one of the reasons why virgins were so desired.29 To him, Fanny is more valuable than other prostitutes because she has “never” been touched by another man, which reflects positively on his own merit and ability. However, taking virginities is a detrimental hobby for him; before he met Fanny, he was “a gentleman originally of great fortune” who had spent much of his money on “maiden-hunting,” an expensive and never-ending pursuit that displays Norbert’s lack of moderation and extreme lust.30 His unrestrained sexuality and preoccupation with opposing his sickly appearance by constantly proving his masculinity becomes a source of disease and decay. Sexual desire should be fulfilled but also controlled. Cleland presents intercourse as more enjoyable when it is healthy and natural as opposed to a performance or competition to establish gender. Through her obliging nature and natural modesty (instead of the affected blushes and overdressing of Brown’s girls), Fanny keeps his interest, teaching him sexual restraint, in spite of her lost “virginity.” Cole instills this feminine temperament to encourage regularity among customers, and Norbert becomes a dedicated patron. Fanny explains:

28

Furthermore, as Laura J. Rosenthal argues, Fanny enjoys the theatricality of her performance, providing a new dimension of pleasure in her work: creativity (124). 29 Cleland, 136. 30 Ibid., 139.

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Surviving the Economy I passively humour’d every caprice of pleasure, and which had won upon him so greatly, that finding, as he said, all that variety in me alone, which he had sought for in a number of women, I had made him lose his taste for incontinency, and new faces.31

His virginal pursuits illustrate the “dangers of failing to moderate sexual and financial resources that ought to be devoted to the pursuit of pleasure.”32 Previously “pale, thin-made” from his “repeated overdraughts of pleasure,” he becomes healthier by his monogamy and ceases pursuing those “excesses…he was so addicted to, and which had shatter’d his constitution, and destroy’d his powers of life” as well as depleted his wealth.33 By subterfuge and teaching Fanny compliance, Cole restores the health and wealth of an Englishman through sexual restraint. Fanny ensures that he satisfies all of his desires with her body, with one business and not several expensive prostitutes. Ironically, her whorehouse helps higher, aristocratic classes, upholding class distinction among men while placing her workers above the class associated with their profession by increasing their value and pay. The brothel also protects men from succumbing to the level of Brown’s prostitutes, from losing everything in their desires. Brown’s incapability to teach self-restraint, and therefore health, to her customers or employees stems from her own habits; she has little selfcontrol. Her business suffers from her lack of restraint, from the uncontrolled lust for sex and alcohol that she spreads to her employees. Her red face signifies her addiction to alcohol; her “drunkenness is evident during her intercourse with the horse-grenadier, when her face ‘blush’d with nothing but brandy.’”34 Similarly, her customers overindulge in alcohol at her house. Fanny’s first lover, Charles, wakes up at Brown’s after a night without sexual intercourse because he drinks himself to 31

Ibid., 142. Jody Greene, “Arbitrary Tastes and Commonsense Pleasures: Accounting for Taste in Cleland, Hume, and Burke” in Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and its Influence. Ed. Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson (New York: AMS Press, 2003), 244. Bradford K. Mudge convincingly argues that Norbert’s desire for virgins has “less to do with the women than with his own need to be the conquering hero” in The Whore’s Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684-1830 (Oxford: Oxford U P, 2000), 207. This idea further minimizes Cole’s deception as Norbert is actually paying her for the change to perform his masculinity, which Fanny not only allows him to do, but also emphasizes in her expression of imaginary pain and surprise. 33 Cleland, 127, 133, 142. 34 Olson, 86. 32

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unconsciousness. This intruding problem harms the steadiness of clientele and attraction of wealthy men, as Charles also demonstrates in choosing to take the virginal Fanny from Brown’s house and set her up as his exclusive mistress instead of visiting the brothel again and tempting her to learn bad habits from Brown’s women. Brown’s lust is more problematic for her business. While she desires men, her appearance does not attract them. She has a “fat clumsy figure,” breasts that sag “navel low at least,” and a “greasy landskip [sic]” framed by a “grizzly bush,” causing Fanny to wonder at the “great stomach” men must develop to have sex with her.35 Her body epitomizes the grotesque in its satirically exaggerated qualities; it is neither natural nor regenerative in its extreme excess and decay.36 Her appearance also intimates that many of her followers in her house are similarly unattractive, or heading towards the same fate, and are therefore not as valuable as a commodity. Their bodies suggest that the brothel as a whole is unnatural, with the girls’ unnatural appetites leading to bodily destruction. Brown’s declining appearance and position as bawd does not disrupt her sexual desire though this desire undermines her capitalist enterprise. She favors one man in particular, a horse-grenadier who visits the house often. The man is “tall, brawny, young,” and “moulded in the Herculesstile [sic]” and an obvious paramour of many of the prostitutes in the brothel as “every girl in the house fell to him in course.”37 Her attraction to the man conflicts with her role as female entrepreneur. His influence over Brown harms her business. For one, he rarely indulges Brown with his sexual services as, by her ruling, all the girls are open to him and his desires. Brown cannot promote his restraint to benefit her own lust; she “only now and then got her turn,” which is not as often as she would wish.38 Secondly, Brown pays him for sex instead of following traditional roles, taking money away from her business by both her actual payment as well as by encouraging him to sleep with her instead of making him pay to sleep with the other girls. Most importantly, Brown cannot refuse him any of her ladies, even the valuable virgins, which is why she keeps Fanny from his sight; she is “under too much subjection to him to dare dispute with him,” which hints that the man may not pay to sleep with any of the girls in the house and eagerly ruins virginity and the high price it can

35

Cleland, 24. Mikhail Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World. Trans. HélЯne Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1984), 303. 37 Cleland, 24, 26. 38 Ibid., 26. 36

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fetch.39 Her business is hurt by her lust as it does not turn her girls into expensive commodities to please influential, or even paying, customers; as one critic notes, “Any madam who can stoop to such behavior lacks the requisite distance from her work to promote respectable accumulation.”40 Brown also sets a bad example for the prostitutes. If she, their employer, gives sex without pay, then her girls, who have smaller claim in the business, might very easily do the same, preventing capital from coming in the house as well as lowering their own personal values by increasing their number of sexual partners. Lena Olsson explains that this example goes farther, predicting a disturbing vision for the future of the girls: Brown is both physically and psychologically the opposite of the young girls who are just beginning their careers, and her ugliness, vulgarity, and alcoholism constitute a discouraging terminus for a harlot’s progress.41

The women in Brown’s house follow her model, eventually becoming like her, turning into the dregs of the nation, but Fanny is saved from this appalling fate by Cole’s guidance. Fanny’s experiences with Will and the sailor exhibit the influence Brown has over her girls. Like Brown and the horse-grenadier, Fanny indulges her own sexual desires with a low-class man and pays him for his services. After she seduces Will, she attempts to justify enjoying him and the pleasure he provides: “And why should I here suppress the delight I receiv’d from this amiable creature?”42 Her logic lowers her own position in society; she is not exercising the restraint necessary to maintain her value and foregoes her money-making potential as a commodity to become a consumer. The dangers of such connections are quickly realized as her keeper, Mr. H., dismisses her for her behavior; this fall from grace awakens her to the continual jeopardy of her position, the potential danger of not restraining her own desires. Luckily, Will is a virgin and does not give her the diseases that would prevent her from being one of Cole’s girls, a woman of pleasure. Fiscal success is set against sexual conquest— Fanny, Brown, and even Norbert can have secure businesses but must moderate their sexual desire to maintain their wealth. If they do not limit their number of partners then they place their financial welfare in jeopardy. 39

Ibid., 26. Andrew Elfenbein, “The Management of Desire in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” in Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and its Influence. Ed. Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson (New York: AMS Press, 2003), 36. 41 Ibid., 89. 42 Cleland, 80. 40

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Ironically, the one time she is irresponsibly promiscuous is while she works for Cole. Frustrated by the weak Norbert’s feeble attempts at sex, she picks up a sailor solely for self-gratification. However, Cole’s influence is evident as Fanny quickly “began to apprehend the danger of contracting an acquaintance” and escapes the situation.43 Fanny worriedly tells Cole of her venture, and Cole “strongly” relates the “dangerous consequences of [Fanny’s] folly, the risques [sic] to health, in being so oppenlegg’d…[that Fanny] took resolutions never to venture so rashly again.”44 The sexual encounter is dangerous partially because random sex lowers her value but particularly because nearly one in five sailors had venereal diseases.45 However, the event does cause Fanny to tell Cole of her frustration. And to prevent Fanny from similar temptation, Cole provides for her desires with other “amusements,” meaning entertaining company outside of Norbert.46 While this move increases Fanny’s number of partners and continues to exclude her personal choice of partners, it also prevents her from turning to less appropriate men, such as slovenly, lowclass sailors, and therefore from placing herself in dangerous, jobthreatening positions. This move does not urn Fanny into a consumer but into a more accessible commodity. Cole protects her prostitutes and her high class customers from spreading disease and from succumbing to uncontrollable desires by her advice and her arrangements. She prevents her girls from sleeping with lower-class men, preserving their bodies for those higher in the social order of England. Cole never has sex in the novel’s timeline and never tempts one of her prostitute’s men, setting a good example for her girls, while Brown’s girls’ attitudes towards men and each other further debase them and limit the brothel’s success. Brown’s girls are rambunctious and openly sexual. For example, when the “beauteous youth” that is Charles enters the house, they “flock’d round” him with “forwardness,” revealing their sexual appetites.47 This obvious lust, in its distaste for modesty and unconcern for limiting their number of sexual partners, does not appeal to wealthy men, as shown by Charles’s preference to drink himself to sleep instead of 43

Ibid., 141. Ibid., 141-142. 45 Olsson, 98. Furthermore, Philippa Levine notes that the English were particularly afraid of “tropical” versions of venereal diseases, which were thought more destructive and disgusting than the typical English versions of the same diseases in Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003), 4. 46 Cleland, 142. 47 Ibid., 42, 48. 44

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engaging with one of them. The brothel’s girls do not work together to promote business but are fiercely competitive with each other. In pursuing their dissipation, they eagerly endanger their personal health and worth as prostitutes and thereby the business they work for. Fanny differentiates herself from these girls by staying mostly faithful to the men she is currently pleasing, whether Charles, Mr. H, or Norbert. This loyalty, though occasionally overthrown, limits her daily enjoyment yet secures her income and future earnings. Unlike the unaffiliated prostitutes and Brown’s rowdy girls, Cole’s workers sit quietly, dress simply, and show “sweetness, modesty, and yielding coyness.”48 She teaches her girls to be obliging to each other as well as to their customers; her brothel advances health and happiness more than individual lustful pursuits. For example, Fanny refuses to have sex with Louisa’s, Harriet’s, and Emily’s partners to prevent arousing jealousy. Cole has good reason for keeping peace, as John C. Beynon explains: “posing as a virgin . . . illustrates [that] such markets of value are . . . arbitrary, imaginary, and prone to manipulation by clever women.”49 But the market cannot be influenced by one woman alone; a “community of other like-minded women” is needed.50 “Through a cooperative and non-possessive approach to wealth,” the girls help each other find and keep desirable, rich customers, not only developing a good relationship amongst themselves, but also improving each other’s riches and keeping their customers happy.51 By working together, they increase their profits. Their unified effort has a normalizing effect on the women—together, they control their own desires to fulfill those of their customers. Ironically, greed and competition work against the brothel’s success. To prosper, the business must work as a unit, limiting the harmful aspects of capitalism. While Cole has a strong, friendly relationship with her girls, Brown’s greed overcomes trust. Brown does not restrain her avarice, which shrinks her profitability; her business, in continually driving away its employees, must constantly recruit, and through Phoebe’s help, train new women. Fanny flees her house because Brown exposes her to a violent man, to rape, for profit. Fanny, ignorant of the brothel’s purpose, sees the incident as Brown allowing Mr. Crofts to assault her without reason. Brown’s actions are further reprehensible because of her choice of Crofts: his foul breath and prominent teeth suggest he is undergoing mercury treatment for

48

Ibid., 114. Beynon, 14. 50 Ibid., 14. 51 Ibid., 16. 49

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syphilis.52 The quick profit of selling virginity will, in the long run, diminish Fanny and Brown’s incomes, both in terms of attracting paying customers and in paying for treatment if Fanny catches syphilis. Cole refuses to rob money from the women whose bodies enrich her or to sell those bodies to potentially harmful men, but solidifies loyal workers as well as a steady income, investing in her products more wisely. A less rapacious businesswoman than Brown, Cole even invites the women of her house to become co-entrepreneurs: Cole’s ‘daughters . . . by means and through tuition and instructions, succeeded very well in the world.’53

Fanny’s first night working for Cole, her handsome man gives her a purse full of guineas, and, though happily surprised at his “liberality,” she does not hesitate to share the goods with Cole.54 Cole adamantly responds that she will not take the money: she would on no terms, no entreaties, no shape . . . receive any part of [the money]. Her denial, she observ’d, was not affectation or grimace, and [she then] proceeded to read [Fanny] such admirable lessons on the œconomy [sic] of [her] person and [her] purse.55

In doing this, Cole assures her trust and affection, encouraging Fanny to follow her advice in customers and training her to practice capitalism effectively; in the end, her business runs more smoothly, encountering few problems with its workers. Cole not only helps her girls’ business by promoting collaboration, but she also raises Fanny’s value by her appearance. Prostitutes, known as women of clothes, would often dress to pass as ladies though their behavior was noticeably not that of a conventional lady.56 Brown’s girls embody this image. As if to overcome their lower-class status, her girls dress in “aukward, untoward, taudry finery” [sic], which, Fanny explains, appeals less than a simpler outfit.57 Fanny describes the clothes Brown gives her: “a white lute-string, flower’d with silver, scoured indeed, but past on me for spick-and-span new, a Brussel-lace cap, braided shoes, and

52

Olsson, 85. Beynon, 13. 54 Cleland, 125. 55 Ibid., 125. 56 Erikson, 29, 31. 57 Cleland, 14. 53

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the rest in proportion.”58 Though wealthy ladies may wear this type of clothes, Brown’s girls can only afford to wear them second-hand, defeating the attempt to look like a lady, and making the girls look more common. Just as they cannot fake virginity, they cannot fake wealth, and the old clothes advertise the women as cheap, of a lower quality than Cole’s workers. When she wears a tasteful “white gown” and “a certain natural and easy air of modesty” sponsored by Cole, not the “feathers, nor fumet of a tawdry town-miss,” Fanny inevitably entices higher-class men like Norbert, men who are too rich to be attracted to ill-fitting, secondhand clothes.59 By changing Fanny’s clothes and attitude, Cole separates her from other prostitutes; in doing so, she raises Fanny above the common, poor prostitute to a woman of pleasure for high class men. As Fanny’s value rises when she moves to Cole’s, her customers’ social statuses do too. Cole’s group, three young woman and Fanny, are encouraged to sell themselves only to “customers of distinction.”60 This system enriches both the girls and Cole, and as Cole chooses these men based on their wealth, protects poorer men from spending all their money on prostitutes. Prostitution was partially considered a national disgrace by social reformers because it incited debt.61 Harlots were “accused of drawing tradesmen and apprentices away from business and into debt to support their sexual habit.”62 By only allowing distinguished men into her household, Cole ensures her paycheck and prevents less wealthy men from becoming involved with prostitution. She protects the growing mercantile class from losing its money in the libidinal economy, and she encourages her girls to satisfy their customers so completely that they do not need multiple women or costly virgins; ultimately, her brothel protects the finances of less wealthy men by exclusion as well as the finances and health of wealthy men by inclusion. Her business promotes healthiness and financial stability in her brothel’s wealthy customers. Cole prepares her girls to fulfill the desires of the upper classes completely, regardless of how unusual they may seem. While Brown’s house introduces Fanny to sex, Cole’s introduces her to appropriate customers as well as “arbitrary tastes of pleasure,” or fetishes.63 Instead of restricting Fanny to intercourse, Cole creates a more fluid spectrum of pleasure, changing Fanny from the typical commodity of prostitute to one 58

Ibid., 13. Ibid., 127. 60 Ibid., 88. 61 Nussbaum, 20. 62 Ibid., 20. 63 Cleland, 96. 59

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that adapts to consumers’ various needs. Satisfying atypical male tastes pays well, attracts new customers, and, in Fanny’s experiences, requires little work, often none of the intercourse that lowers her price, enabling her to earn extra money while continuing with her normal well-paid sexual activities. Fanny attracts one older man “whose peculiar humour was a delight in combing fine tresses of hair” and touching her with kid gloves.64 She describes their encounters: he us’d to come constantly at my toilette hours, when I let down my hair…to do what he pleas’d with it; and accordingly he would keep me an hour, or more, in play with it, drawing the comb through it, winding round his fingers…and all this led to no other use of my person, or any other liberties whatever….[He would] present me at once with a dozen pair of the whitest kid gloves at a time: these he would divert himself with drawing on me.65

Fanny thinks his behavior “fooleries of a sickly appetite,” yet does not mind them as he “paid more liberally for [them], than most others did for more essential favors.”66 Cole’s theory of compliance allows Fanny to take advantage of atypical male desires, to satisfy these wealthy men without offending their sensibility by blatantly wanting sex like Brown’s girls, and for the brothel to become an outlet for such desires. In suppressing her own sexual desires, Fanny is able to make more money and please more men while preserving her low number of sexual partners and low risk of obtaining disease. Mr. Barvile requests something more dangerous: mutual flagellation. Cole warns Fanny of the unusual request and pain in fulfilling it, but Fanny agrees to the experiment once she learns that Cole’s objections arise from “a motive of tenderness” she feels for Fanny.67 This decision pleases Cole, who claims she would have done the same when she was a woman of pleasure, demonstrating once again her influence on her workers as well as her concern reigning above greed. Fanny’s coupling with the sailor teaches her the dangers of lack of restraint; her episode with Barvile displays the self-restraint she has acquired. Payment exceeds the pain of whipping as Barville gives her “a present that greatly passed [her] utmost expectation: besides his gratification to Cole.”68 After pleasing him once, Fanny decides flagellation is not an activity she wishes to continue as it 64

Ibid., 153. Ibid., 153. 66 Ibid., 153. 67 Ibid., 144. 68 Ibid., 152. 65

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encourages her to abandon her practice of compliance; she needs “all [her] patience not to cry out, or complain in the least.”69 She chooses to not interact with Barvile again because she is afraid she could not submissively endure another encounter. When choosing between money and following Cole’s ideals of womanly submission, the ideals win. Her devotion is to promote her customers’ enjoyment instead of her own personal greed; she is in little danger of ever becoming like Brown, of lowering herself and, in conjunction, her wealthy patrons. Joining Cole’s house, Fanny becomes an ideal prostitute, willing to sacrifice herself for a customer’s pleasure, her sexuality for a customer’s sexuality. Cole’s teachings allow Fanny to look and behave like a respectable woman while attracting and pleasing patrons. Fanny does not play the role of the stereotypical harlot or demand sex like Brown’s girls; in leaving Brown’s house, Fanny avoids the stigma of the sexually depraved. Brown’s girls are not women of pleasure but overtly sexual, almost savage, women, and the brothel is not a very profitable example. As a result, Brown is forced to seek virgins to ruin in exchange for high prices, and ensures the virgins will be ruined with the help of Phoebe. She encourages her girls to make money by sleeping with as many men as possible, removing sexual restraint, ruining their bodies, and exposing many Englishmen to various venereal diseases. Her personal appearance only reflects what she represents: and what her workers will eventually become. She is a woman who does not know taste or restraint but uses her sexuality for herself, not for the satisfaction of customers. Cole and Fanny promote health and England’s class division by mostly confining prostitution to the wealthier classes, exercising restraint, and eventually removing themselves from the market of prostitution with marriage, excluding a fate like Brown’s, as a corruptor of innocence. In exalting Cole’s business model, Cleland allows women to successfully enter the business world though he still limits them to the body as opposed to a more intellectual employment. In spite of this physical confinement, the bawd must deny her desires in exchange for profit. The successful prostitute must place her customer’s wishes above her own; she remains bound to her body but unable to live for her bodily satisfaction. What separates the women of pleasure from the other prostitutes is their determination to please others over themselves.

69

Ibid., 149.

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Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by HélЯne Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1984. Beynon, John C. “‘Traffic in More Precious Commodities’: Sapphic Erotics and Economics in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.” In Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and its Influence, edited by Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson, 3-26. New York: AMS Press, 2003. Cleland, John. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Elfenbein, Andrew. “The Management of Desire in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.” In Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and its Influence, edited by Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson, 27-49. New York: AMS Press, 2003. Erickson, Robert A. Mother Midnight: Birth, Sex, and Fate in EighteenthCentury Fiction (Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne). New York: AMS Press Inc., 1986. Featherstone, M. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage, 1992. Greene, Jody. “Arbitrary Tastes and Commonsense Pleasures: Accounting for Taste in Cleland, Hume, and Burke.” In Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and its Influence, edited by Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson, 221-266. New York: AMS Press, 2003. Henderson, Tony. Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730-1830. New York: Longman, 1999. Kenway, Jane, Elizabeth Bullen, Johannah Fahey, and Simon Robb. Haunting the Knowledge Economy. London: Routledge, 2006. Levine, Philippa. Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire. New York: Routledge, 2003. Linnane, Fergus. Madams, Bawds and Brothel-Keepers of London. Thrupp: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2005. Mudge, Bradford K. The Whore’s Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684-1830. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2000. Nussbaum, Felicity A. “One Part of Womankind: Prostitution and Sexual Geography in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (1995): 16-40. Olsson, Lena. “Idealized and Realistic Portrayals of Prostitution in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.” In Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and its Influence, edited by Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson, 81-102. New York: AMS Press, 2003.

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Peakman, Julie. Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Palgrave Mamillan, 2003. —. “Initiation, Defloration, and Flagellation: Sexual Propensities in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.” In Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and its Influence, edited by Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson, 153-172. New York: AMS Press, 2003. Rosenthal, Laura J. Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in EighteenthCentury British Literature and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 2006. Sambrook, James. The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700-1789. 2nd edition. New York: Longman, 1993.

THE LIMITS OF POPULAR REPRESENTATION: POSTWAR WORKING GIRLS IN RONA JAFFE’S THE BEST OF EVERYTHING (1958) AND HELEN GURLEY BROWN’S SEX AND THE SINGLE GIRL (1962) POLINA KROIK

In the decades following the Second World War the modern corporation became recognized as the dominant social and economic form. The American middle-class breadwinner, once idealized as the enterprising “businessman,” was now typically seen as a corporate employee, a bureaucrat with little agency or power. William H. Whyte’s widely read sociological account, The Organization Man (1956) and Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) represented the “organization” as a threat to conventional masculinity and family structure.1 Although women’s presence in the office was sometimes alluded to as a cause of the “feminization” of the work environment, these authors’ criticism of the corporation did not extend to its effects on the growing number of working women. Despite this period’s conservative ideology, which relegated women to the home, more women were present in the workforce than at the start of the war. Women now held over 50% of all clerical positions and many competed with men for other professional work.2 Whereas male-centered critiques uniformly lament the loss of individuality in the modern office, texts that center on women’s experiences often celebrate it as a place of empowerment and identity-making. In Rona Jaffe’s bestselling novel, The 1

See Graham Thompson, Male Sexuality under Surveillance: The Office in American Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003), chapters 4-5. 2 See Margaret L. Hedstrom, “Beyond Feminisation: Clerical Workers in the United States from the 1920s through the 1960’s” in Gregory Anderson, ed., The White Blouse Revolution: Female Office Workers Since 1870 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1988), 161-164.

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Best of Everything (1958), the protagonist, Caroline Bender, begins working as a secretary at Fabian Publishing and quickly rises to the position of an editor. For the other characters in the novel, the office, with its social dangers and temptations is a crucible in which their mature identities are forged. Helen Gurley Brown’s equally popular advice book, Sex and the Single Girl (1962), similarly portrays the office as a sphere of personal and professional mobility. Brown defied convention by writing openly about extramarital sexuality in the white-collar office and by suggesting that women consciously use their own sexuality to get ahead.3 Whereas recent scholarship about these texts evaluates them in the context of the conservative 1950’s, I will situate Brown’s and Jaffe’s working-girl narratives within the longer history of women’s office work and its cultural representations.4 While the two authors helped lift the taboos on single women’s sexuality, their texts draw on existing conventions of the working-girl romance, a genre in which workplace inequality often appears as the status quo. A comparison with Faith Baldwin’s popular novels, written three decades earlier, will show that by focusing on women’s private lives, working-girl novels reinforce the very ideology that perpetuated gender-inequality in the workplace. This ideology did not represent the single women as asexual, but drew on a modern understanding of female sexuality in which the fulfillment of sexual desire (within the confines of marriage) is central to women’s identity.5 The ostensibly progressive aspects of Brown’s and Jaffe’s texts also reflect the changes that were taking place in the white-collar workplace and in cultural production in the postwar period. When read against contemporary representations of the office by male authors, Jaffe’s and Brown’s depictions of the office as a site of liberation seems odd. Arguably, however, both attitudes can be explained by the developments in the organization of the business office that occurred after the war. The expansion of the white-collar and service sectors and the spread of “human relations” management increased the value of traditionally “feminine” interpersonal skills and removed white-collar work further away from

3

See Julie Berebitsky, “The Joy of Work: Helen Gurley Brown, Gender, and Sexuality in the White-Collar Office,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15 no. 1, (January 2006), 91. 4 Recent scholarship on Brown includes Jennifer Scanlon’s Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and Berebitsky. Both authors mention Jaffe’s novel in passing. 5 See Steven Seidman, Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830-1980 (New York: Routledge, 1991).

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production.6 Although corporations retained their hierarchy, power was often exercised indirectly so that even men in managerial positions felt a lack agency and authority. On the other hand, a greater number of jobs opened to women and they likely benefited from more lenient management policies. The title of Jaffe’s novel is taken from a classified ad, promising candidates “THE BEST OF EVERYTHING”: “The best job, the best surroundings, the best pay, the best contacts.”7 The women in Fabian’s secretarial pool begin each day with a leisurely morning coffee, which Jaffe compares to a “ladies’ tea” (3). Brown advises readers to change jobs if they are unable to advance or meet eligible men, suggesting a market where secretarial work was readily available.8 In the publishing industry, the emergence of the paperback as a diverse and lucrative medium is the immediate context for the publication of Jaffe’s and Brown’s texts.9 Before the 1950’s, paperback publishers focused on a handful of genres, such as mystery, suspense and the Western, most of which were directed toward a male audience.10 By the middle of the decade, when the industry was suffering losses, the publishers shifted their investments to the “heavily promotable superseller,” often advertised in conjunction with a Hollywood film.11 The publication of Grace Metalius’s melodrama Peyton Place (1956 hardcover; 1957 paperback reprint) was a watershed moment for the new strategy and marked a change in the gender of the paperback audience. Like The Best of Everything and Sex and the Single Girl after it, Metallius’s bestseller included frank accounts of women’s sexuality. Leona Nevler, the young freelance editor who picked Peyton Place out of the “slush” pile, later joined the editorial board of Fawcett’s Gold Medal Books, which Jaffe fictionalizes as Fabian Publishing.12 Jaffe’s and Brown’s texts suggest that the publishers’ increased interest in women’s bestsellers also boosted 6 On the rise of the “human relations” school see Richard Gillepsie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chapters 7-8; on the service economy see, Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973), chapter 2. 7 Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), epigraph; hereafter cited in the text. 8 Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1962), 37, 97; cited in the text hereafter. 9 Scanlon, 82-83. 10 Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 176. 11 Ibid, 253-254. 12 Ibid, 262.

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women’s participation in the editorial process. Jaffe’s protagonist, like Jaffe herself, rises quickly from a secretarial position to that of an editor. Brown recommends advertising and publishing as “wonderful fields for women because you are paid handsomely not to think like a man” (99). However, since sales figures were theses publishers’ main concern, the growing ranks of women authors and editors did not necessarily translate into a more egalitarian industry. In Jaffe’s novel, the female “readers” (in effect, junior editors) fare little better than secretaries. Fabian’s higher ranks are occupied by male executives (with the exception of one woman who has little sympathy for her female subordinates). Although the novel reflects critically on women’s roles in the workplace, an ad for the hardcover edition characterizes its protagonists as “girls who play at careers while searching for love and marriage.”13 In her 2005 introduction, Jaffe recalls that she intended to write a revealing true-to-life story, unlike Christopher Morley’s Kitty Foyle (1939). Yet the promotional materials for Jaffe’s novel and the Hollywood film released in the following year consistently represent them as conventional working-girl romances. The gendered hierarchy typical of the institutions of popular culture informs the production of Jaffe’s novel as well as Brown’s book. The Hollywood producer Jerry Wald commissioned the novel as the basis for a feature film, a fact that was often mentioned in its publicity. Brown’s husband, David, also a film producer, encouraged her to write and helped “produce” the book, providing the title and finding a publisher. While Jennifer Scanlon argues that Brown’s text exemplifies a form of feminism “compatible with capitalism and popular culture,”14 I will suggest that the gender inequality inherent in the postwar economic and cultural institutions made it difficult to effect change by means of popular publications while leaving the prevailing institutional practices intact. Helen Gurley Brown dedicates many pages in Sex and the Single Girl to a critique of the negative representations of single women in popular studies and magazines. Yet Brown’s rhetoric consistently relies on the conventions and images of popular culture. The book’s opening passage, describing Brown’s marriage to the “brainy, charming and sexy” (3) Hollywood producer, resembles the conclusion of a romantic film: He was sought after by many a Hollywood starlet as well as some less flamboyant but more deadly types. And I got him! We have two MercedesBenzes, one hundred acres of virgin forest near San Francisco, a 13 14

Advertisement, The New York Times, September 2, 1958, 23. Scanlon, xi.

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Mediterranean house overlooking the Pacific, a full-time maid and a good life. (3)

Brown proceeds to enumerate the personal flaws and shortcomings that would have precluded that match under ordinary circumstances: “I am not beautiful, or even pretty. I once had the world’s worst case of acne. I am not bosomy or brilliant…I didn’t go to college…I’m an introvert and I am sometimes mean and cranky” (3). Rather than suggesting that these flaws do not matter, Brown writes that she has “worked hard to become the kind of woman who might interest him” (4). Although much of the text consists of instructions on overcoming such flaws and therefore becoming “interest[ing]” to a potential husband, Brown does attempt to create a positive representation of a single woman. This “newest glamour girl” (5), however, like the housewife with whom she is contrasted, can only be seen through the lens of mass culture. While men “picture” the wife “greeting her husband at the door…fixing little children’s lunches or scrubbing them down because they’ve fallen into a mudhole [sic],” the single woman they imagine is “alone in her apartment, smooth legs sheathed in pink silk Capri pants, lying tantalizingly among dozens of satin cushions, trying to read but not very successfully, for he is in that room—filling her thoughts, her dreams, her life” (6). Although the latter image is framed as a male fantasy, Brown’s advice on make-up, diet, interior decoration and the like seems to aim at recreating such a scene. Indeed, the book often follows a common advertising strategy of convincing the reader that they suffer from a deficiency for which the advertised product (Brown’s text) offers the only true remedy.15 With few exceptions, Brown’s single “girls” are young clerical workers living in an urban area. Popular representations of women clerks (usually typists or secretaries) became prevalent in the early decades of the 20th century, as soon as women began entering the white-collar office in large numbers. Although images of this figure varied, most frequently she was represented in a sexualized manner and appeared in romantic narratives. The secretary-employer love plot quickly became a standard feature of magazine fiction and early films.16 In the 1910’s, novels began to appear 15 See Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 46-48, and Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 19201940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 18. Brown was working as a copywriter while she was writing the book. 16 See Margery W. Davies, Woman’s Place is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers 1870-1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Lisa M.

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that examined office sexuality in a more serious way.17 One such novel, Faith Baldwin’s The Office Wife (1930) anticipates the psychological and economic concerns that Brown addresses.18 A cautionary tale directed at a mass audience, Baldwin’s novel nonetheless contains a sober account of the pleasures and economic advantages of the office romance. Like Brown, Baldwin draws on modern theories of female sexuality to explain the feelings a secretary develops for her boss. Although Baldwin models her understanding of the relationship on the ideal of companionate marriage, likening the secretary to a wife, while Brown’s ideals anticipate the sexual revolution, the two authors use similar narratives and rhetorical devices in their representations of the working girl. In Brown’s text, the office is primarily a place where single women can meet men: “[Eligible] men are reporting daily to places we girls can report to too!” Brown exclaims, adding parenthetically that “Garages, missile launching and live-bait barges hire girl clerks” (34). The use of the word “report” for both men and women masks the economic aspects of work as well as the gender inequalities of the 1950’s workplace. While women can find employment in a variety of businesses and industries, they can only be hired as “girl clerks.” In a section entitled “Case Histories,” Brown gives accounts of a few workplace relationships (not all of them sexual). Whereas men are identified by their professional positions, women are given (presumably fictional) first names or no names at all. Women and men may be “reporting” to the same place, but it is clear that men are the ones who most often occupy positions of power. Brown frequently implies that the only means of advancing in the workplace is through the favors of a male boss, and that pleasure in the workplace can be more readily derived from relationships with men than from the work itself.

Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 18701930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Lawrence Rainey, “Office Politics: Skyscraper (1931) and Skyscraper Souls (1932),” Critical Quarterly 49, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 71-88; and Rainey, “From the Fallen Woman to the Fallen Typist, 1908–1922,” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 52, no. 3 (2009): 273297. 17 Two of the earliest fictional studies of women’s roles in the modern office are Sinclair Lewis’s The Job (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1917) and Winston Churchill’s The Dwelling-Place of Light (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917). 18 Faith Baldwin, The Office Wife (New York: Grosset & Dunalp, 1930); hereafter cited in the text.

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There are a few instances in the book where Brown tells her readers that a job can be satisfying and valuable in and of itself, a source of daily excitement and a sense of identity (37, 89). However, these advantages are qualified by a comparison with the situation of married women. Single women should take the opportunity to experience the “thrills” of a job, Brown writes, because when they are married they would be too busy with household chores (37). While married women already have a sense of identity as so-and-so’s wife, a “a job gives a single woman something to be” (89). Such framing, which recurs throughout the book, undermines Brown’s endeavor to represent single women’s lives as normative. Despite the legitimization of premarital sexuality, Brown’s text ultimately portrays single women’s existence as precarious and temporary. Brown does not criticize workplace inequality and characterizes financial independence as yet another attribute that makes women appear attractive. Her key advice for single women, to “work” on themselves “at home” (9), advocates a form of invisible and uncompensated female labor, similar to housework. Three decades earlier, Faith Baldwin also depicts a world where women’s professional activity is limited to secretarial work, and where marriage and childrearing is viewed as women’s psychological destiny. The first chapter of the novel narrates the nervous breakdown of a middleaged secretary, Miss Andrews, whose attachment to the company’s “Chief,” Mr. Fellowes, became her life’s central relationship. After Fellowes dismisses the neurotic secretary, the young and pretty Anne Murdock takes her place. At the beginning of the novel, Anne is determined to excel at her work and plans to pursue a career rather than marry. She enjoys her work and sees marriage as an unnecessary risk (21, 74). Yet as Anne and Fellowes develop a mutual attraction, Anne begins to doubt her motives for remaining at her job. As the novel progresses, the view that women can become invested in their work only when they, like Anne and Miss Andrews, have feelings for their employers emerges as dominant. As Anne’s frustrated young suitor puts it: “no woman… sacrifices herself for a job”; only “for a man” (154). In the novel’s unlikely conclusion Fellowes’s wife divorces him without a scandal and he marries Anne, who had by then given up work. Although The Office Wife refers to women who work in other professions, its central argument rests on the assumption that most working women are clerks or secretaries. The novel’s opening scene, like Brown’s “Case Studies” depicts a nameless “girl” at a reception desk, assisting businessmen identified by their professions (1). Both Brown and Baldwin focus on women’s sexuality as the main problem of office life. While Brown offers her readers more alternatives, both authors, having

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briefly touched on the economic, find their solutions in the personal realm. In Baldwin’s novel, Anne recognizes that one of the reasons for her attraction may be that Fellowes is “the symbol of the earned income”— that is, the economic and professional power that he possesses (46); she realizes that Fellowes was “englamoured [sic] in her eyes by the situation …. the respective positions of employer and employed” and that she “wanted… the business protection” that “a love affair with him would afford her” (110). Brown dedicates an entire section of her book to money matters, recommending ways of managing working women’s small salaries. Brown also acknowledges the material benefits that could result from being someone’s “Girl” (13-14), and represents the boss-secretary relationship as inherently unequal. Yet in a way consistent with the working-girl genre, the authors do not pursue these insight, returning instead to the realm of romance. Aside from the literary formula thought to appeal to a broad female audience, there are other probable reasons for the similarities between the Brown’s and Baldwin’s texts. First, both authors are responding to a gender-segregated work environment. While initially typing-stenography was not strongly gendered, by 1930 this and other clerical occupations became identified with inherently feminine traits.19 As these texts suggest, the gendered division of labor in the office became as much of a social fact as the division of labor within the home. In the 1950s, as in the 1920’s and 1930’s, women’s office work was seen as a temporary placeholder between college and marriage, socially and economically distinguished from men’s careers.20 Rona Jaffe’s description of women on their way to work is evocative of this ideology: “They go to their typing pool or their calculating machines as to a waiting place, a limbo for single girls who are waiting for love and marriage” (277). Since this ideology was substantiated by institutional and social practices, many women experienced it as an unalterable reality. Brown and Baldwin also share a roughly Freudian understanding of female sexuality, which underlies their assumptions about women’s roles. Brown tells her readers that “Being sexy means that you accept yourself as a woman…with all the functions of a woman. You like to make love, have babies, nurse them and mother them (or think you would)” (65). Anne’s young suitor, Ted, voices a similar view when he attempts to persuade Anne to give up her career. Citing Miss. Andrews’ recent demise as a warning, Ted exclaims: “Anne—you were made for love—for marriage— 19 20

Fine, 168. Ibid, 140.

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for your own man—a home—for babies” (39). Though in this scene readers may identify with Anne’s ambition, the conclusion affirms Ted’s view. Baldwin justifies Anne’s marriage to the much older Fellowes by alluding to the ideal of companionate marriage and suggesting that the latter is a better match than Ted. Brown’s arguments anticipate the aftermath of the sexual revolution, where sexual expression would supercede matrimony as essential to individual identity. Compared with The Office Wife, Sex and the Single Girl reflects not only changing sexual mores but a changed work environment. Writing that it is better to be feminine and seductive rather than “hard” in the office, Brown argues that the “‘battle-axes’ of another era” earned her generation that privilege: “They had to be hard as nails and drive themselves in like nails too to compete with men” (98). However, historical accounts suggest that feminine qualities became valued in secretarial and similar positions almost as soon as women entered the field.21 The shift that seems to have taken place after the Second World War was in that public and ostentatious displays of femininity became more acceptable in the “pink collar” professions.22 In the opening pages of Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything, Caroline Bender observes the morning routine of the women arriving to the Fabian office: It was nine o’clock and the room was filling up with girls, none of whom noticed her presence at all. The teletype operator was combing her hair out of its pin curls, one of the typists was going from desk to desk collecting empty jars and taking coffee orders. Covers were being pulled off typewriters, coats hung up, newspapers spread out on desks to read, and as each new arrival came in she was greeted with delighted cries. 23 (2)

The scene makes Caroline feel as “an outsider to a private club,” and, as a male employee arrives, Jaffe compares him to a man “intruding on a ladies’ tea” (3). Although the notion that women brought domesticity into the office was prevalent at least since the 1910’s, women were expected to use their domestic talents in the service of the company and its male employees.24 Here women’s domesticity seems to hinder rather than

21

Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 149. 22 See Louise Knapp Howe, Pink Collar Workers: Inside the World of Women's Work (New York: Putnam, 1977). 23 The 1967 Hollywood comedy How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying features a musical number where women begin the business day in a similar way. 24 See Margery Davies and Kessler-Harris, 149.

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facilitate production; the clerks engage in activities that are usually done in private and seem heedless of their duties. However, this freedom to “be” women and to use company time for social interaction is consistent with the “human relations” ideology which strongly influenced managerial practices in the postwar period. This approach emerged from the Hawthorne experiments, a series of studies conducted on a small group of women workers in the Western Electric plant between 1924 and 1933.25 While attempting to assess the effect of lighting on productivity, the researchers discovered that their interviews with the workers had greater influence on the rate of production than the illumination of the workroom. Their initial insight—that social interaction between workers and supervisors and among the workers themselves affects productivity—was developed into a managerial philosophy that gave rise to personnel offices, personality tests and other sociologically inspired practices.26 William H. Whyte and Sloan Wilson criticize the bureaucratization and “feminization” brought about by this shift. Tom Rath, the protagonist of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, is asked to write an “autobiography” as part of his job interview for the United Broadcasting Corporation.27 A war veteran, Tom is uncomfortable with this personality test. Wilson emphasizes Tom’s sense of feminization by placing him in a cramped room with a typewriter and a chair that is too small for him because it “had been designed for a stenographer.”28 Of course, a personality test would not have been intended to make a potential male employee more effeminate. On the contrary, corporations wanted their employees to conform to normative masculinity.29 Conversely, displays of femininity and female bonding were not discouraged in occupations in which women predominated and to which they were thought to be inherently suited. At Fabian, women are favored in editorial as well as secretarial positions because they can select material that would 25

Gillepsie, vii. Ibid, chapters 7, 8. The “human relations” ideology has much in common with Fordism, which was used by large corporations since the 1910s. However, “human relations” systematized and codified social control within the workplace as Fordism had not. On Fordism, See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990), chapter 8. 27 Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York, London: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002), 11. 28 Ibid. 29 William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 199200; see Graham Thompson, Male Sexuality under Surveillance, chapters 4-5. 26

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appeal to the publisher’s largely female audience. The young women’s contribution as editors and “readers” (a lower-ranking position) is described in similar terms to those of a secretary. In The Office Wife, Fellowes cites the “ethusiasm” Anne brings to the office as one of the qualities that makes her the perfect secretary (124). In Jaffe’s novel, although Caroline is a Radcliffe graduate and a hard worker, the senior editor Shalimar’s speech on the occasion of her promotion focuses on “enthusiasm”: The most valuable commodity in business today, if people would only recognize it, is enthusiasm. I’m not interested in deadheads…I want editors who think that every book that we put out is an important book. I don’t care if it’s the worst piece of crap in the world; if the authors who wrote it believe in it, and the editors…believe in it, then the people who buy it will care about it. (45)

While this ideology helps women attain editorial positions, their work is undervalued because it is attributed to such elusive, feminine traits as “enthusiasm” and “instinct” (49). Before she is hired for this position, Caroline must read a manuscript every night and submit a report (45); when she gets the job, she is paid only $60 a week, five dollars less than a private secretary (125). Mike Rice, another senior editor, jokes that if “old man Fabian” was aware of these young women’s enthusiasm “he wouldn’t have bothered to pay [them] at all” (45). The novel’s representation of the books and magazines Fabian publishes also raises questions about the extent to which women editors could influence the end product. While Shalimar and Rice agree with Caroline’s rejection of the first manuscript she reads, Fabian’s output seems to be guided by sales figures not the judgment of individual editors. Rice edits a religious magazine called The Cross, but does not believe the articles he writes (4). On the first day, Caroline wants to tell the editors that a story in My Secret Life is “the worst piece of trash she ever read” (13). The novel’s naïve country girl, April, gets a job at Fabian after she fails to find work as a performer, a career she imagined as glamorous. Jaffe writes that April is “thrilled to be working at the very source of a magazine which had helped build up much of her present misinformation” (19). April’s near-seduction by Mr. Shalimar and her seduction by the wealthy and unscrupulous Dexter Key highlight the problematic nature of Fabian’s publications. Because of the company’s capitalist foundation and gendered hierarchy, women editors are as likely as men to contribute to texts that mislead and misrepresent women.

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Another speech given by Shalimar, extolling the democratic value of paperback books, is placed in a context that points to gender inequality as a problem that undermines mass culture’s egalitarian potential. When asked to work after hours with Mr. Shalimar, April is excited to be singled out by a senior editor. To the reader, Shalimar’s designs are quickly made clear, but April is confused by the overlapping of the personal and the professional in Shalimar’s office. Her perceptions are mediated by popular representations that do not lead to the correct interpretation of the scene. Although April does not believe she is “socializing” with Shalimar, she thinks that the room “[doesn’t] look like an office” but “like the den of a luxurious home, the kind you see in the movies” (27). April again imagines that the office is part of a home just before Shalimar kisses her (32). After the unwelcome kiss, April exclaims “Mr. Shalimar” and begins to cry because “it sounded so stupid…so much a line from one of Fabian’s own worst magazines” (33). The representations available to April suggest that there is a clear distinction between the domestic sphere and the sphere of work. The only genre in which these boundaries are crossed is melodrama, where the boss-secretary affair is a degraded cliché. Measured against experience, April’s knowledge, derived from films and popular magazines, proves inadequate. As it is part of the same scene, Shalimar’s speech about the value of paperback books can only be read ironically. Citing the publisher’s high sales, Shalimar grandiosely claims that Derby Books is “responsible for the changing literary taste of America” (28). Since their books are sold in drugstores, they can reach a wider audience and “train” it to read: People have to learn to crawl before they can walk. First they won’t read anything but the most obvious kind of lurid adventure stories. Then we sneak in a good book or two. We train them. Eventually all our books will be as good or better than the best so-called literary hard-cover books. (28)

While the democratic aspect of this argument is appealing, April’s experiences and the publisher’s capitalist foundation cast doubts on this scheme for literary education. As an aspiring actress, April read all the canonical playwrights, yet Fabian’s popular magazines and films were more significant in shaping her understanding of the world (18-19). The fact that Fabian’s sensationalist periodicals and fiction are more successful than their existing “highbrow” competitors also undermines the assumption that, given the chance, people would choose the more refined alternative. Since The Best of Everything was written over a short period of time, the framing of this statement may have been unconscious. Fawcett’s Gold

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Medal Books, on which Derby was based, did publish influential literary works along with its sensationalist fiction. However, the placement of this celebratory passage is consistent with Jaffe’s conflicted attitude toward mass culture, an attitude evident throughout the novel. The author’s 2005 introduction suggests that she thought of the novel as an intervention within popular culture—somewhat akin to Shalimar’s “good” paperbacks. Jaffe states that the producer Jerry Wald asked her to write “a modern-day Kitty Foyle”; although Jaffe thought that Christopher Morley’s 1939 novel was “dumb,” she was willing to write a more authentic “working-girl book,” based on her own experiences (vii). In many ways Jaffe’s novel succeeds in avoiding the clichés that pervade Morley’s sexist and frequently racist text. Yet her novel is also limited by the conventions of the working-girl genre. Like Kitty Foyle, and Faith Baldwin’s The Office Wife and Skyscraper (1931),30 The Best of Everything focuses on the private lives of its female characters. Romantic love and sexual experience are central to the narrative and seem to determine each character’s relation to the workplace. In Skyscraper, the more promiscuous girl, Jennie, becomes a kept woman and leaves town, while Lynn’s virtue allows her to keep the job even after her marriage. Similarly, in Jaffe’s novel, women who are too promiscuous meet a bad end, while most, as in The Office Wife, leave the workplace for marriage. Caroline, the only one of the “girls” who remains in the workplace, is not easily seduced and has more control than others over her sexual experiences. On the other hand, Caroline feels that her promotion to the position of an editor poses a threat to her femininity. Amanda Farrow, the editor Caroline replaces, is represented as hard if not monstrous (296). Thus the popular novelist’s work, like that of the editors at Fabian, is necessarily limited by the demands of the marketplace. Even though Jaffe wanted to write a true-to-life novel, her choice of characters and narrative structure was guided by the conventions of the working-girl romance. These conventions reflect a gendered ideology in which women’s identities are determined by their sexuality, while professional work is essential to the formation of male identity. Jaffe’s conclusion, however, bears little resemblance to the typical resolution of a working-girl romance. In the last chapters of the novel Caroline is reunited with her former fiancé Eddie Harris, who had broken the engagement and married the daughter of a Texas oil tycoon. Caroline is still in love with Eddie and the two have a brief affair, which ends when Caroline realizes that he would not leave his wife. A few days later, Caroline discovers that her 30

Faith Baldwin, Skyscraper (New York: Feminist Press, 2003).

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roommate Gregg, who had been obsessed with a former lover, a great Broadway director, had fallen to her death in his apartment building. On the same night, a day before Christmas, Caroline receives a phone-call form John Cassaro, a comedic film star she had met as a Fabian editor. Cassaro, who is a notorious Don Juan, asks Caroline to come with him to Las Vegas for Christmas. Caroline knows that it is a bad idea, but agrees to go anyway. The concluding chapter, told from Eddie Harris’s point of view, highlights the precarious position women occupied as producers and subjects of mass culture. On a plane heading back to Texas, Eddie notices Caroline’s face in a newspaper item about John Cassaro, reporting that Cassaro tried to punch a journalist when the latter asked whether Caroline was gathering material for Fabian’s tabloid, Unveiled. Although Cassaro describes Caroline as “an old friend” and the reporter states that she occupies a room next door to Cassaro’s, Eddie concludes that the two are sleeping together (435). The article makes Eddie forget his disappointment at losing Caroline as a lover and he remembers, with satisfaction, that he bought a mink jacket for his wife—a mark of professional and personal success. Throughout the novel, Caroline’s main strength is her ability to see through the rhetoric of mass representation. In an earlier scene, Caroline reads an Unveiled article about one of Cassaro’s love affairs and realizes that its “leering, sneering” prose masks the reporter’s lack of information (335-336). Yet in the conclusion, an equally allusive article reduces Caroline to another one of Cassaro’s conquests. Eddie’s uncritical acceptance of the article’s insinuations undermines Shalimar’s claim about Fabian’s “good books” and questions the premise of Jaffe’s own endeavor. The scene suggests that such ideological constructs are tenacious not simply because they are ubiquitous but because they are supported by deeply ingrained social practices. Although Eddie is one of the novel’s “cads,” as a white married man he belongs to the group favored by the social and economic system. The ideology that reduces women to their sexual experience—regardless of their professional achievements— affirms male power. The working girl novel, focusing on its protagonists’ sexuality, risks participating in this discourse, even when it incorporates critical elements. The novel’s final chapter can also be read as a critique of the fetishization of a female author as a celebrity. Jaffe’s description of her sudden fame after the novel’s publication is reminiscent of the novel’s conclusion and raises similar questions about the position of the popular woman author:

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There was so much publicity and it all happened so fast that the situation felt completely unreal. Interviews and photos of me were in the newspapers constantly…Standing in front of a bookstore, I would look into the window at all the copies of my first novel, with my picture on the front cover, and think what I would think of this suddenly celebrated person if I weren’t her. (ix)

Although the passage ends with the affirmation that “[she] was now a professional author” and would have “a career” (ix), the emphasis on her photographs in the newspapers and on book covers suggests that Jaffe’s professional work, like Caroline’s, was in danger of being overshadowed by her feminized image. As Faye Hammill observes, the 20th century literary celebrity was modeled on the figure of the movie star.31 Whereas the male Hollywood celebrity was sometimes seen as a professional, the female star was more often viewed as an icon and a Galatea figure.32 The story of success Jaffe represents in the introduction resembles the latter model of celebrity: having been discovered by Jerry Wald and Robert Gottlieb of Simon and Schuster (xvii), she becomes an infinitely reproducible image. The photograph on the original book jacket shows Jaffe in the attitude of a dreamy ingénue against the city background— more like the naïve April than her autobiographical character, Caroline. Helen Gurley Brown also became a celebrity after the publication of Sex and the Single Girl. But while Brown attributes some of her success to the help of influential men (most notably her husband), she expresses little or no criticism of the system within which her success was achieved. Recent reevaluations of Brown’s work suggest that her advice allowed women to reclaim their sexuality as a form of agency.33 Although Brown did contribute to the lifting of postwar taboos on women’s premarital sexuality, her model of individual mobility, focusing on sexuality, seems to reinforce the ideological and social practices that have marginalized women for nearly a century. As I have tried to show, there was a continuity between the ways in which gender inequality functioned in the workplace and in cultural production. With the spread of the “human relations” philosophy in management, women in gender-segregated professions were given greater freedom in displaying their “feminine” traits. In popular culture, women were allowed or even encouraged to 31 Faye Hammill, Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 17. 32 Virginia W. Wexman, Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 134-135. 33 Scanlon, x.

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write frankly about their experiences, but this writing had to conform to gender-specific genres and was publicized within the framework of female celebrity. Women’s participation in the editorial process did not substantially alter these terms. Given the systemic nature of gender inequality in the 20th century, individual mobility can only be seen a first step in the struggle for structural change.

Works Cited Baldwin, Faith. The Office Wife. New York: Grosset & Dunalp, 1930. —. Skyscraper. New York: Feminist Press, 2003. Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Berebitsky, Julie. “The Joy of Work: Helen Gurley Brown, Gender, and Sexuality in the White-Collar Office.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15, no. 1, (January 2006): 89-127. Brown, Helen Gurley. Sex and the Single Girl. New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1962. Churchill, Winston. The Dwelling-Place of Light. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917. Davies, Margery W. Woman’s Place Is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers 1870-1930. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Davis, Kenneth C. Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Fine, Lisa M. The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870-1930. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Gillepsie, Richard. Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Hammill, Faye. Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990. Hedstrom, Margaret L. “Beyond Feminisation: Clerical Workers in the United States from the 1920s through the 1960’s” in The White Blouse Revolution: Female Office Workers Since 1870, edited by Gregory Anderson. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1988.

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Howe, Louise Knapp. Pink Collar Workers: Inside the World of Women's Work. New York: Putnam, 1977. Jaffe, Rona. The Best of Everything. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. Oxford, New York : Oxford University Press, 2003. Lewis, Sinclair. The Job. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1917. Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Rainey, Lawrence. “From the Fallen Woman to the Fallen Typist, 1908– 1922.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 52, no. 3 (2009): 273-297. —. “Office Politics: Skyscraper (1931) and Skyscraper Souls (1932).” Critical Quarterly 49, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 71-88. Scanlon, Jennifer. Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Seidman, Steven. Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830-1980. New York: Routledge, 1991. Thompson, Graham. Male Sexuality under Surveillance: The Office in American Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003. Wexman, Virginia W. Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Whyte, William H. The Organization Man. New York: Doubleday, 1957. Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. New York, London: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002.

THE MADAM, THE BOOTLEGGER, AND THE MYSTIC: THE BLACK MARKET AND THE CRUELTY OF FAIRNESS IN THE STREET (1944) REKHA ROSHA

Mid-way through Ann Petry’s searching novel about life in Harlem during the Jim Crow era, the protagonist Lutie Williams witnesses the slaying of a half-starved young man by the local baker, who stabs him with his bread knife (198). But the incident is not an isolated one: “Someone had [said] that the butchers in Harlem used embalming fluid on the beef they sold in order to give it a nice fresh color. Lutie didn’t believe it, but like a lot of things she didn’t believe, it cropped up suddenly out of nowhere to leave her wondering and staring at the brilliant scarlet color of the meat” (Petry 1946, 61). The dramatic images of violence (“scarlet color”) and death (“embalming fluid”) draw a direct line from the butchering of meat to the butchering of men. For Lutie and the other residents of Harlem, a trip to the corner market can be a confrontation with their own mortality. But the greatest threat facing Lutie is Junto, the owner of Harlem’s most popular bar who single-handedly dismantles her hopes for a better future. Together, the butcher, baker, and brewer repeatedly cheat, exploit, and slaughter the residents of Harlem who patronize them. Petry’s mercantile characters offer an acid comment on Adam Smith’s apology for capitalist self-interestedness: “[i]t is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner” (Smith 1776, 13). The Street’s protest, perhaps not surprisingly, is expressed not within the political spaces of Harlem but within its economic margins. The novel’s counter-triad—the madam, the bootlegger, and the mystic—offer another view of markets. By its very existence, Harlem’s underground economy exposes free enterprise’s considerable failings. Yet unlike the legitimate business owners of Harlem, the black market operators leverage resources to create wealth, which they re-distribute to the community. Petry’s black

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market businessmen and women, while frequently cruel, manage to provide material resources for their community’s most disenfranchised members. All of Petry’s characters except for Lutie operate within the black market. Beyond characterization, the novel’s plot hinges on decisions made in the street’s most illicit spaces. Yet, surprisingly, Petry seems less interested in what the madam, bootlegger, and the mystic sell than how they sell it. Lutie’s steadfast refusal to transact with any of the unsavory members of her neighborhood and family, results in her categorical refusal to transact with anyone. Petry draws a sharp contrast between Lutie, isolated in her rage and confusion, and the customers and black market operators who conduct face-to-face exchange and enter into contracts from which both parties benefit. Not only do individuals leverage resources necessary to their survival but the means by which they do so also enables their collective survival. What seems to animate Petry’s novel is an attempt to understand at the deepest and most precise level how people agree to give and get what they need in an environment that otherwise blocks all forms of human contact. Drawing on theories of markets and rights by John Rawls and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theories of capital and space, I argue that despite the moral questions that hang over Petry’s outlaw characters, the black market forms the only institution able to transfer resources and offer the most opportunities for human interaction. The black market enables exchanges that make possible individual choice, contract, exchange, and reciprocity; by so doing, the madam, bootlegger, and the mystic redefine their relations to each other. Rawls’s definition of “justice as fairness” gets at the heart of what Petry’s novel is all about: “In justice as fairness men agree to share one another’s fate” (Rawls 1972, 102). Deleuze and Guattari describe in conceptual terms what prohibits a commitment to share our fates. They point to the principle of “limitative distribution” characteristic of capitalism which limits the flows and potential flows of social meaning through “restrictive analogy” whereby all new meanings branch out from the same trunk (Masumi 1980, xi). In Petry’s novel, black markets unblock the flow of resources by rerouting material and social capital through alternate channels. The black market is a disruptive and erratic institution that re-encodes the street and its residents. Whereas black men and women are dominated by white merchants in every instance of exchange, the black merchants accept their customers’ humanity, granting them a better sense of their own self worth. As such the black market redefines the street as a wavering zone in which alternative social meanings can be formed. Rather than think of the black

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market as a new branch of capitalism, Petry depicts it as a newly transplanted species of justice. Both A Theory of Justice (1971) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) make central to their formulations the reality that we live among others. In their references to distribution of resources and re-mappings within the field of signs, Rawls as well as Deleuze and Guttari specifically make place central to their visions of a more just and freer society.1 Rawls and Deleuze and Guattari examine the coordinates of human action—not only human action, its motives and consequences but also the context of action; that is, the social field in which individual actions acquire significance. For Deleuze and Guattari the prevailing field is conceptual—for instance, they argue that our concepts about what a person is determine in advance being as a normative stable subject—whereas Rawls privileges social institutions. While these concepts and terms are too dense to unpack fully here, I want to focus on the principle of place that unites these texts. Their principles of human context, investigating how society looks from the marginal position of “rhizomatic” events or the anonymous place “behind the veil,” offer a sort of low-angle perspective of society. The Street takes a similarly “bottom up” social perspective: the counter-institutions produced by Harlem’s black markets are central to creating the civilization below “civilization” that Petry carefully documents. In the aggregate, black market exchanges are an index of the broader political society these transactions aim at: fairness and ultimately justice. One explanation for Petry’s interest in economic exchange is that markets are intimately connected with the lives of people who live within their context (Rawls 1971, 228-51; Sen 2009, 75-87). Market exchange is a means not just of contract but of human contact; at the simplest level, exchange is the mechanism by which individuals give and get what they need, from each other. While Petry’s novel explores the contradiction of people and capital, she also finds serious moral value in the market economy. Her portraits of the black market and the individuals who operate and benefit directly from it underline what might be worth saving in the free market. For most scholars, however, capitalism is usually either the central problem of the novel (Willis 1984, 263; Clark 1992, 495) or a possible, albeit flawed, solution to inequalities of opportunity (Gayle 1975, 193). In a similar sense, capitalism is read as a distraction that, on the one hand, allows us to see exactly what Petry is protesting yet, on the 1

Rawls’s claims of social justice have formed common cause with geographical inquiry (James D. Proctor and David Marshall. Geography and Ethics: Journeys in a Moral Terrain Routledge, 1999), 138.

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other, prevents readers and scholars from seeing what Petry is actually arguing for (Elby 2008, 34). In one of numerous scenes that take place in Junto’s Bar & Grill, a central setting of Petry’s novel, we catch a glimpse of what why Petry finds something valuable in free market enterprise. Early in the novel, Lutie stops in at Junto’s for a beer, even though she can’t afford it, because “the beer was incidental and unimportant. It was the other things that the Junto offered that she sought: the sound of laughter, the hum of talk, the sight of people, and brilliant lights, the sparkle of the big mirror, the rhythmic music from the juke-box” (145). Commodity exchange is here the occasion for more meaningful human exchange. In the novel’s central gathering place, the spell of commodity fetish is broken by the chatter and clinking of glasses. But nowhere is demystification more apparent than in the novel’s depictions of the black market. Amidst the crushing exploitation by Harlem’s white merchants who have cornered the market on every resource in Harlem, the black market carves out a space wherein the neighborhood residents can transact with one other to achieve needs and wants. While the economy of the novel has been the subject of numerous articles (Barret 1999, 101; Pryse 1985, 122; Hicks 2002, 91; and Yarborough 1981, 42-46) such views tend to converge on the thesis that, as Keith Clark puts it, the novel represents “capitalism gone awry” (498). In accepting that premise up front, however, I think we see Petry undertaking a much more complex investigation of both markets and agents. To put it another way: if white capitalism is the problem that black markets attempt to resolve, as many scholars suggest, then how the black market operates matters to the success of the corrections they attempt. Examining Petry’s careful depictions of the uses and limits of the black market might allow us to see the larger questions and ideas that frame the novel. The novel’s interest in social and physical geography2 is announced in 2

Such claims about space and power invoke theoretical concepts of geography and the built environment. Typical analyses of social geography examine the dynamic relation of capitalism and space (Harvey; Giddens; Jameson; Berger; Mandel; and Lefebvre). Edward W. Soja, one of the first scholars to examine, critically, social geography, explores the material objectivity of space as a structuring force in the organization of social relations. Soja argues that the production, consumption, and exchange that urban spaces enable also enable state surveillance of that consumption and production for the purposes of regulation. From New York City to Los Angeles, urban planning carefully arranges a city around a central location, a downtown, complete with a City Hall, courthouse, jail, etc. that function as a

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its title. But 116th Street, the street of the novel’s title, forms only one axis through Harlem—branching off the main artery that crosscut prevailing social cleavages of race, class and gender, the novel’s black marketers plot alternate routes through Harlem’s landscape. The black market is a social infrastructure of networks of face-to-face relationships er that promotes social cohesion within the community. As characters seek information from each other about available resources and contract for goods and services they cannot otherwise acquire, the underground economy emerges as a series of private interactions which involve self-organized groups autonomous from the state, market, and family and who operate or are linked across state and market borders. On the whole, the black market exists in the interstices between the law, white supremacism, racism, government regulation, and acquisitive capitalism. But its marginality is imagined in a provocative way in Petry’s novel; it is essential to the distribution of resources that Harlemites cannot acquire anywhere else. Yet the significance of this fact is hard to get at without a discussion of institutions that both Rawls and Deleuze and Guattari offer. The rhizomatic quality of the black market (to borrow a key term from Deleuze and Guattari) subverts the regulatory controls of instrumentalized space, as residences are converted into brothels, speakeasies, and boticarios (herbal apothecaries). Within these underground spaces, exchange requires negotiation to reach a consensus about the terms of contract and thereby individuals make and meet their obligations to each other (Rawls’s main contention). The black market thus operates as a politically significant space because it expands communal spaces for recognition, wherein the madam, the bootlegger, and the mystic and their customers perform the rituals of civilization. While the failings of the black market are significant, its limitations do not mean that markets are unimportant but rather that any social good that depends on the market, especially illegitimate ones, is complex. Harlem’s underground economy signals the contradictions of fairness, since the sources of generosity, particularly for the madam and bootlegger, are also kind of Foucaultian panopticon—a centralized location of oversight. Thus, planning becomes instrumentalization (Soja Postmodern Geographies 241). One consequence is that levels of income radiate outward, with the least well off at the margins, recapitulating the divisions of labor within a capitalist economy. But such mechanisms are not deterministic since they are available to uncertainty of accident and/or inefficiencies; resistance is always possible. (Soja 130; 235). Instead of looking at the general links between space and power, I have been discussing the particular significance of space to acts of mutual sympathy, which Rawls takes as the basis of a good society.

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a source of cruelty. Of course the novel’s deterritorialized spaces are only temporary, suggesting the limits of both the black market and the justice it generates. For instance, Pop’s homemade liquor brings in enough money that he is able to help out his daughter, even though it is the source of his addiction. Generosity and its unintended cruelties suggest how life and commerce can be mutually, if brutally, reinforcing.

Legitimate Markets Early in the novel, Lutie imagines herself to be a twentieth-century Benjamin Franklin, starting out on the road to wealth from Harlem: “She shifted the packages into a more comfortable position and feeling the hard roundness of the rolls through the paper bag, she thought immediately of Ben Franklin and his loaf of bread. And grinned thinking, You and Ben Franklin. You ought to take one out and start eating it as you walk along 116th Street. Only you ought to remember while you eat that you’re in Harlem and he was in Philadelphia a pretty long number of years ago. Yet she couldn’t get rid of the feeling of self-confidence and she went on thinking that if Ben Franklin could live on a little bit of money and could prosper, then so could she.” (63-4)

The scene recalls the iconic image of Franklin strolling into Philadelphia with nothing more than “three rolls in his pockets” (Franklin 1793, 47) that signals the wide-eyed enthusiasm of both the young man and the young nation (to be).3 Working as a maid for a well-to-do white couple, the Chandlers, Lutie overhears their repeated conversations about prosperity, self-reliance, and the virtues of American capitalism: “Richest damn country in the world— ‘Always be new markets. If not here in South American, Africa, India – Everywhere and anywhere—.’” (43)

The Chandlers’ ritualized observations draw out the connection between self-invention and free markets implied in the reference to Franklin. Petry’s use of em-dashes signal the absence of dialogue and indicate the significance of the ritual even though the content of their conversation is not fully apparent. Petry’s punctuation also signifies that we are still 3

On Petry’s references to Franklin, see Gayle Wurst’s essay, “Ben Franklin in Harlem: The Drama of Deferral in Ann Petry’s The Street,” in Deferring a Dream: Literary Sub-versions of the American Columbiad, ed. Gert Buelens and Ernst Rudin, 1-23 (Basel: Birhauser, 1994).

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seeing the Chandlers from Lutie’s point-of-view, which is limited since for Lutie the Chandlers’ was “a world of strange values” (43). More importantly, the fragmented conversation underscores the fact that Lutie overhears these conversations as she brings in coffee or cleans up after dinner and therefore is frequently moving in and out of hearing range. These details further suggest Lutie’s distance from the “world of strange values” even as she circulates through that world. Yet, despite her limited understanding, Lutie is inspired by both Franklin’s story and the Chandlers’ idealization of it. While she acknowledges the vast differences between herself and Franklin, she literally devours the myth: “She put two of the hard crusty rolls on a plate and smiled, remembering how she had compared herself to Ben Franklin” (72). As the allusions to Franklin multiply throughout the novel, however, Petry develops her pointed critique of the values to which Lutie aspires. Franklin personifies the neo-liberalist link between free markets and democracy. Lutie’s association with Franklin is as much with his representative virtues of thrift and prudence as with the underlying liberties guaranteed by the free market. Voluntary contracts lie at the heart of civil society and its institutions, as described by Hobbes, Locke, and Smith. For Lutie, Franklin signifies the freedoms necessary to the selfinterested maximizer—free from aristocratic custom and command, free from the coercive labor of slavery, and free from the domination of tyrannical political authority. (Significantly, Franklin makes his way to Philadelphia having escaped from Boston where his father had entered him into bonded servitude to his older brother.) Franklin’s arrival in Philadelphia, thus, signals the arrival of a new paradigm of association, namely, the free market society. In Harlem, individual choice is obstructed within the very spaces where it has been promised. Like the other merchants in Harlem, the butcher sells only the cheapest cuts of meat: “There wasn’t, she saw, very much choice—ham hocks, lamb culls, bright-red beef” (61). Similarly, the grocers that Lutie patronizes sell only “the leavings, the sweepings, the dregs [of] withered oranges and sweet potatoes, wilting kale and okra. [. . .] All the bruised rotten fruit and vegetables were here (153). All of Harlem is under-nourished. If metaphors of mass deprivation indict the Harlem businesses that are its cause, Petry’s broader critique of the free market paradigm remains implied until the later-half of the novel. Returning home from work, Lutie comes upon a crime scene, and as she nears closer an onlooker turns to her and explains what has happened: “White man in the baker shop killed [a young man] with a bread knife” (198). The “puffy rolls” Lutie earlier associated with Franklin now are

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drawn into a new association with the murderous baker. Consequently, the symbolic relationship between Lutie and Franklin breaks apart. The rolls which had fed Lutie’s appetite for a belief in virtue’s guarantee of success now become a symbol of Lutie’s ideological malnourishment. Moreover, the patriotic fable of success that had propelled Lutie now seems paradoxically bruised and rotten yet sharp as a blade. Not only are Lutie’s choices limited but any negotiation over the terms of exchange is denied to her in advance: “A yellow cat sitting high on a shelf in back of [the butcher] blinked down at the customers. One of his paws almost touched the edge of a sign that said ‘No Credit’” (61). The naturalism of the scene recalls Hobbes’s descriptions of life without government as omnia bellum, a total state of war. The cat hovers over the transactions taking place below, signifying the proximity of the customers to the state of nature that cannot be transformed by voluntary contract. Lounging on a shelf above the customers, the cat is another personification of an indifferent and combative universe that opens the novel. The wind pushes Lutie backward as she struggles to make her way home signals the abstract forces that dominate Lutie but which she cannot confront. Commenting further on the violence of exchange in Harlem, Lutie speculates about the cat’s uncertain future, imagining that the butcher may grind him up and sell him as hamburger (61). Petry’s lurid naturalism reminds us that Hobbes had it partially right: fear is the basis of the social contract and not virtue (Franklin), benign self-interest (Smith), general will (Rousseau), or reason (Locke). If we must not, as Smith cautions, expect our dinner from the butcher out of his benevolence but from his self-interest alone, Petry seems to suggest that for the residents of Harlem this is still no guarantee that anyone will get dinner. At the heart of Petry’s novel is how institutions unfairly concentrate power. Drawing on her experience as a journalist, Petry’s novel reveals the inner-workings of commerce as well as other state institutions, such as health care (201-04); education (327-36); the foster care system (179); news media (198-99); and law enforcement (166; 178; and 386-87). Petry gives us an extended anatomy lesson, showing us the social body from the inside out. One of the most powerful examples is Bub’s elementary teacher, Mrs. Rinner: “She regarded teaching them anything as a hopeless task, so she devoted most of the day to maintaining order and devising ingenious ways of keeping them occupied. She sent them on errands. They [. . .] trotted back and forth with notes to the nurse, to the principal, to other teachers. The building was old and vast, and a trip to another section of it used up a good

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Significantly, Mrs. Rinner deprives her students of an equal opportunity by methods of dispossession as much as by distraction; sending her students on pointless errands through the school’s vast and empty hallways, they are forced into labyrinthine exile from one of the few, if not the only place, in which they might take hold of a better future. Petry captures the denial of social mobility in a hauntingly absurdist image; as young children meander through the sprawling institution toting meaningless scraps of paper from one room to another, their circuitous motions figure in time and space their empty lot in life. The public school is no less lethal than the butcher’s knife. But while the Kafkaesque metaphor of institutional power reminds us of its essential unfairness, the metaphor of the empty hallways returns us to the novel’s central metaphor of the market. Legitimate markets do the greatest harm because they most powerfully construct the context within which Bub, Lutie, and the other residents of Harlem live their lives. Junto’s Bar & Grill is the only space in which the residents of Harlem are able to defeat, temporarily, the social oblivion that looms over them. Throughout The Street, legitimate markets—represented by the baker, butcher, and the brewer—do the most harm because they use the Franklinian ideology of self-interest as a cover for distributions not of resources or even of rights but of power. In Junto’s Bar & Grill, Lutie describes a large mirror that hangs over the bar reflecting the long row of pints of beer lined along the bar, each one “magnified in size” and blazing like “molten gold” (145). For a fleeting moment the lives of patrons seem more expansive and their future prospects magnified: “The big mirror in front of her made the Junto an enormous room. It pushed the walls back and back into space. It reflected the lights from the ceiling and the concealed lighting that glowed in the corners of the room. It added a rosy radiance to the men and women standing at the bar; it pushed the world of other people’s kitchen sinks back where it belonged and destroyed the existence of dirty streets and small shadowed rooms” (146). The mirror gives the illusion of entry to another world; one in which the parameters of the patrons’ lives are unloosed—no longer circumscribed by the small, tight, darkened rooms. Self-confidence blooms in the brilliantly light “gracious spaciousness” (144) of Junto’s bar. In Junto’s, the reality of Harlem is exchanged for the illusion of a better life. But for all their renewed optimism, Junto’s patrons have “the appearance of moths fluttering about a gigantic candle flame” (257). The popular night spot is where both the patrons’ defeat and their redemption

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occur. As Petry’s metaphor of the mirror suggests, Junto’s is a world reversed and to step through the looking glass-world of the bar is a risky venture, at best. The image of the mirror also serves as a plot device since in this same scene Junto, who is intent on making Lutie his mistress, lies to her about a job as a singer in one of his clubs. Encouraged both by Junto’s regard for her talent and by the possibility of a well-paying job, Lutie’s hopes soar. Junto’s deception, however, leads to the novel’s final tragic reversal of Lutie’s fortunes. In the end, Junto’s power lies in his ability to manipulate reality. By contrast, it is only within the alternative spaces of the black market that characters can conduct face-to-face transactions with each other. Through acts of exchange, David, the Prophet, Mrs. Hedges, and Pop meet their obligations to themselves and to others. To put it another way, illegitimate markets allow the novel’s most marginalized characters to accept the intertwining of their fates. In her transaction with David, the Prophet, Min, the girlfriend of Jones, the superintendant of Lutie’s apartment building, gets more in return for her ten dollars than she had anticipated (138). But, even though Min gets a better deal than she bargained for, the payment she makes to David matters since it signifies her own contribution to taking care of herself. It is her investment in her own well-being that results in the “energy and firmness” in her footstep, as she leaves David’s office. The significance of Min’s visit is that the promise of human communication, negotiation, and mutual regard that characterizes the social contract is finally actualized in her contract with the “root doctor.” The emptiness of the school figures the emptiness of prevailing social institutions, like Junto’s; the real cruelty of Junto’s Bar and Grill is that in the very same moment it makes possible mutual recognition, it turns that possibility into an optical illusion. The black market, signified by the prophet rather than by profits, figures a partial correction wherein individuals are able to retain some dignity.

Illegitimate Markets Whereas the white-ruled mercantile system treats exchange as a crude form of hand-to-hand combat, Mrs. Hedges’s brothel signifies the personal nature of transaction. Sexual commerce is hyper-personal exchange, in which furtive intimacy is commodified. To Lutie, the brothel is repellant; another cheapening of human dignity (250). Yet, the commodification of sex emerges as a direct response to the wide-scale of oppression in Harlem, “where people were so damn poor they didn’t have time to do anything but work, and their bodies were the only source of relief from the

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pressure under which they lived” (206). While Mrs. Hedges exploits young girls and supplies black men with access to black women’s bodies (Mrs. Hedges steadfastly refuses to service white men), there are more complex needs that her brothel helps to meet. To understand how the black market converts vice into virtue, albeit in a more productive manner than the “invisible hand” of markets that Smith theorized, I want to turn briefly to Rawls’s views on distributive justice, which is central to understanding the social benefits Petry locates squarely within Harlem’s underground economy. In general, Rawls argues that we should be governed by equal liberty, fair opportunity for everyone, and we should arrange our economic institutions so that the least off are as well off as possible (Woolf 2006, 168). Rawls argues that the overall goal of public policy4 is to choose the option that gives the best deal in the worst case. Distribution among two people, for example, aims to make “either person better off without making the other worse off” (1971, 59). Justice is reciprocity. Or, to put it another way, justice is “a relation between citizens [. . .] in which all who are engaged in cooperation and do their part as the rules and procedures require” are to benefit, comparatively, to equal degrees (Rawls 2001, 49). Distributive justice is not just a theory but an argument for what we ought to do. For Rawls, fairness requires an equal distribution of income and wealth and where inequalities are to everyone’s benefit (a competitive economy, e.g.) then such inequalities are justified if and only if they make the worst off as well off as possible (what he calls the “difference principle”). What keeps people from agreeing on how to distribute public resources and wealth are differences in what will deliver best on their own individual self-interest. The question Rawls poses is a difficult one: What principles would create a fair society given that we have competing selfinterests? Rawls’s response to this question was to strip away, in the imagination, conditions that might prejudice individuals in their own favor. What principles of justice would people in this hypothetical situation agree to? 4

Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness relies on two principles: the first principle, which is absolute, is that everyone has the same claim to equal basic liberties, wherein individual liberties are compatible with liberties for all. The second principle has two parts: 1) offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity—the same prospects of culture and achievement available in all parts of society; and 2) the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle). Inequalities (of wage, e.g.) require that they be to everyone’s advantage, and specifically to the greatest advantage of those advantaged least.

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Would you agree to racial discrimination or gender discrimination if you did not know what race or gender you were? The question Rawls ingeniously frames is this: If we did not know what our role in society would how might we organize society out of our own self-interest? Without knowing where in society we stand, we choose from “behind the veil of ignorance”—so positioned, Rawls insists, we would consider the magnitude of the distribution of benefits not merely the degree. If we assume that we might “actually” be at the bottom of the social ladder, then it makes no sense to organize social relations such that we might lose out altogether. Thus, the principle of organization that we would choose from the original position—behind the veil of ignorance—would be maximizing the outcomes for the least advantaged.5 The principle of distributive justice 5 Rawls’s emphasis on the consequence of actions bears a resemblance to utilitarianism. But the resemblance is illusory, since under utilitarian models, the greatest good for the greatest number do not take justice as a necessary condition. For instance, the loss of liberty for some may be, under utilitarianism, justified by a gain of liberty for the many. From this view, Rawls observes a clear contradiction: if justice can be denied to some in the name of granting justice for others, then justice, objectively, has not been achieved (1972, 25). Thus, from the original position, we should not expect the principles of social choice to be utilitarian” (1972, 25) since it does not matter to utilitarian principles what desires are for only that the greatest balance of satisfactions is achieved (1972, 27). If discrimination against some is correlated with enhancing self-respect in others, then the satisfaction of these desires is weighed against their potential outcome for total well-being. If such desires are repressed, it is not because the desires are unjust in and of themselves, but that they impede the greatest good for the greatest number and there is a better way to achieve social welfare. Rawls avoids the problems of utilitarianism’s indifference to justice since within his theory each and every interaction is concerned with the equality that transaction achieves. How this works according to Rawls is fairly straight forward. For example, the distribution of either resources or opportunity for resources among two people “makes either person better off without making the other worse off” (1972, 59). Reciprocity is “a relation between citizens [. . .] in which all who are engaged in cooperation do their part as the rules and procedures require” and each benefits, comparatively, to equal degrees (2001, 49). Moving outward from the interaction of two people Rawls explains how the principle of fairness as justice organizes a wide variety of social relations. Justice as fairness describes a just arrangement of the major political and social institutions of a liberal society: the political constitution, the legal system, the economy, the family, etc. The basic structure these arrangements constitute is the locus of justice because these institutions are responsible for distributing the main benefits and burdens of social life. The basic structure comprises social institutions within which individuals may develop moral imagination and judgment becoming “fully cooperating members of

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depends upon the hypothetical contract or the “original position” (Warburton 2001, 239), which suggests further that the qualities of individuals matters less than their location within an impersonal social infrastructure. In making the “original position” an irreducible condition of justice, however, the normative claim is transhistorical. As such the original position is independent of the facts of any individual, community, or society, as Raymond Geuss claims (2005, 29). If Rawls’s theory manages to avoid certain problems of gender, race, and oppression that, owing to the “veil of ignorance” do not even arise in the first place (Mills 2007, 113), it therefore also implies a theory of human behavior that is nevertheless not explained. Geuss suggests as much in pointing out that beyond the improbability of the original position is the improbability that every person standing behind the veil will arrive at the same conclusion: “No matter how long they discussed matters, there might remain at the end different groups with different views” (12). Rawls assumes that in the original position, we are aware of “primary goods” – liberty, equal opportunity, the basis of social respect, and money. But, a monk for example who does not value money is not going to give equal distribution of wealth high value and might therefore choose a society in which low taxes might favor the well off. In other words, stripping away issues of class, race, and gender does not inevitably result in a fair society in which common goods are readily achieved. Michael Sandel points out that Rawls’s theory is based on an individualist ethos one which presupposes that we can even in the imagination conceive of ourselves as radically independent of others. The fact is to the contrary; we are always already attached to others. We are born into a species, a nation, a family— consequently, Sandel argues, we cannot make decisions under the restrictive requirements that Rawls imposes. Ignorance may be a way to model impartiality but of what should we and can we be ignorant? Sandel believes that because we unconsciously apply our varied personal connections to the process of making decisions it may be more rational to consider a less restrictive original position, one in which we make decisions acknowledging the world of connections that we actually occupy (Sandel 1996, 14). Overall, it may simply be that hypothetical idealizations such as Rawls’s are, like the Greek notion of utǀpos (utopia), both the best place and no place. Petry’s novel, with its careful attention to the humanizing a society of free and equal citizens” (2001, 57). In other words, it may be that people have equal amounts of moral and ethical reason but individual judgments are shaped by the social order that institutions form.

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effects of material distributions at the bottom of the social ladder, introduces to ideas about personal identity, “positionality,” and justice a compelling question: How does an unjust society become a just society? Given the existing non-ideal state of gross inequalities in which we actually live, and furthermore given that we do in fact live with specific historical identities of class, race, and gender, what are the best ways to make the least off better off? As a realist writer, Petry makes a significant contribution to understanding the socio-political inequalities of the mid-twentieth century that also prompted Rawls to formulate his theory of justice.6 Petry’s response to the dilemma of achieving the ideals of social justice is that we have to begin with the non-idealized spaces of society. On the one hand, brothels objectify women, bootleggers feed addictions, and mystics profit from irrational superstitions. On the other, each black market operator shares a sense of equality between with his/her customer; in every transaction, both parties explicitly or implicitly recognize the other’s equally limited morality that makes the transaction possible. In other words, the basis of contract within the black market is that both parties agree to the terms of inclusivity. The best example of Petry’s view of the black market as an institution for distributing fairness appears in the least likely place: “The street would provide plenty of customers. For there were so many men just like him who knew vaguely that they hadn’t got anything out of life and knew clearly that they never would get it, even though they didn’t know what it was they wanted [. . .] men who had to find escape from their hopes and fears, even if it was for just a little while. She would provide them with a means of escape in exchange for a few dollar bills.” (250)

Yet Mrs. Hedges’s rationale is not easy to accept. From her perspective, the men who visit her brothel achieve a measure of dignity. While such empathy might seem to justify Mary’s degradation, which directly profits the madam, this is not entirely the case: “So Mary came to live with her and she gradually lost her dejected look. She laughed and talked and cleaned the apartment and cooked. Mrs. Hedges began to take a kind of pride in the way Mary blossomed out” (248). Mary “blossoms” after Mrs. Hedges takes her in, and the two women form a friendship. Even a friendship of necessity is still a friendship. While Mary is not made wholly 6

Rawls served as an infantryman in the Pacific theatre and was a witness to the devastating aftermath of Hiroshima that prompted him to write A Theory of Justice, in the same year that The Street was published (Pogge 2007, 13).

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better off by Mrs. Hedges, they are both minimally improved by the contract. Even more surprising than Mrs. Hedges’s friendship with Mary is that the madam risks her own safety to protect Lutie. When Mrs. Hedges stops the Super’s attempts to assault Lutie, she tosses him aside with “aweinspiring” force (237). In the aftermath, Mrs. Hedges makes Lutie a cup of tea, and while Lutie remains suspicious of the madam’s motives, Mrs. Hedges is in fact helping Lutie out of allegiance to her friend Junto, Mrs. Hedges delivers the novel’s central truth: “‘Some can stand things that others can’t. There’s never no way of knowin’ how much they can stand’” (240). The comment is meant to explain why Jones has attempted to rape Lutie: years of loneliness has made him “cellar crazy,” as Mrs. Hedges puts it. More importantly, the comment demonstrates that Mrs. Hedges extends empathy not just to Mary or to Lutie but also to the Super and to the men who visit the brothel. While Lutie has as much opportunity as Mrs. Hedges to offer expressions of empathy, she rarely takes the opportunity. It is as if she allows herself to contract emotionally with the fewest people; by contrast, it is because black market contracts are personal and intimate that Mrs. Hedges is able to extend sympathy within the contract as well as beyond it. Bootlegging allows Lutie’s father Grant Johnson, more frequently referred to as Pop, to fulfill his contracts with others. After the death of her mother, Lutie lives with her paternal grandmother and her father. Frequently out of work, Pop makes a little extra money selling “buck juice” out of his apartment in order to contribute to household expenses (80). Despite his intentions, his mother disapproves of his choices. Early in the novel, Lutie recalls that from the age of seven to seventeen, when she marries Jim, every Saturday night was the same: “[T]here would be a furtive knock at the door. Pop would pad up the hall and hold a whispered conversation at the door. Then he would go back down the hall and a few minutes later return to the door. There would be the clink of silver and the door would close quietly. Granny would snort so loud you could hear her all through the apartment because she knew Pop had sold another bottle and she didn’t approve of it, even though each knock meant they were that much closer to having the rent money ready” (80).

Despite her disapprobation, mother and son arrive at a truce; the sliver Lutie’s father earns may be ill-gotten but it goes to a good cause. In addition, Pop’s habitual side-stepping of the law means that he can continue to meet his obligations to his daughter: “Somehow he always

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managed to have a little money and he would take two or three limp dollar bills from his pocket and shove them into her reluctant hands. When she protested, his invariable answer was, ‘Oh, call it room rent if you gotta be formal about it’” (174). In a small way, Pop’s illicit activities enable him to do the best he can for his daughter Lutie. Rather than circumventing the law as Mrs. Hedges and Pop do, the mystic circumvents traditional religious prohibitions to provide much needed resources to members of his community. When Lutie moves into the apartment building supervised by Jones, the Super, he becomes more combative with Min, his live-in girlfriend. Worried that Jones will put her out on the street, she goes to see David, a Vodou priest or “root doctor” (120). At first, Min feels guilty for visiting the Prophet: “The preacher at the church she went to would certainly disapprove, because in his eyes her dealing with a root doctor was as good as saying that the powers of darkness were stronger than the powers of the church” (122). Despite her anxiety, Min quickly finds common ground with the Prophet: “[H]is eyes were deep-set and they didn’t contain the derisive look she was accustomed to seeing in people’s eyes. He sat looking at her and his manner was so calm and so patient that without further thinking about it she started talking. It was suddenly quite easy to tell him about how she’d never really had anything before” (133). Unlike the doctors and the Christian preacher, David is the only one who does not turn away from Min, instead, he gives her his complete and undivided attention. The effect is at once both sexual and spiritual. David’s demeanor is not physically erotic but clearly his attention to Min, his deep regard for her, sparks a sense of intimacy, as if spiritual connectedness shares the same coordinates within the flesh as sexual intimacy. The waiting room outside of David’s door is full of women like Min. One reason for his largely female clientele is that David carefully dispenses attention to each customer, which gives the women who visit him the chance to re-envision alternate relations among men and women. But the experience is also clearly spiritual, since the intimacy of the conversation is so empowering for Min that “when she came out from behind the white curtains the satisfaction from his attentive listening, the triumph of actually possessing the means of controlling Jones, made her face glow” (137). The unhurried patience with which David regards Min as well as the totems he sells to her are forms of cultural capital. When Min hangs the cross on the wall above their bed, Jones recoils, since “to him a cross was an alarming and unpleasant object, for it was a symbol of power. It was mixed up in his mind with the evil spirits and the powers of darkness it could invoke against those who outraged the laws of the church” (140).

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Using the folk medicine she’s purchased from the Prophet, Min is able to protect herself from the increasingly violent and irrational Jones. Yet cultural capital, can only go so far on the Street; despite its benefits, social capital has to be translated into “real” capital. While the reader is initially led to be skeptical of David’s motives, Mrs. Hedges comments that “he’s jes as hungry as anyone else” (120), the totems and powders he sells to Min actually work, giving her enough time to save up for a down payment on another apartment and finally leave Jones. What David sells is time, and time, for Min, is money. In their dealings with the madam, the bootlegger, and the mystic, characters typically get what they contract for, which, as the reader is repeatedly reminded, is not always the case in their dealings with the novel’s legitimate businessmen. It is not enough to say that the white market fails to uphold its end of the bargain. Contract society offers the vision of a society of free men negotiating the terms of their relations with others; no longer bound by inheritance or patronage, individuals contract on their own initiative. But contract not only promises equality of opportunity, it also “involves the sanctity of promising itself” (Thomas 1997, 3). Promising implies notions of justice; signing your name to a contract obligates you to keep your word. Failing to do so is not only a legal failure but a moral one. Black markets allow individuals to give and keep their word; the civilization beneath civilization is based not on status but on duties and obligations that individuals impose on themselves. Among the black market operators and their customers, individual exchange enables mutual recognition: the brothel offers some dignity to her male customers and a small measure of integrity for women, however slender the degree of integrity that may be; the bootlegger does the best for the least off; and the mystic summons resources of culture to enable the flourishing of life. In the black market, reciprocity means justice.

The Architecture of Fairness Place is both the subject of Petry’s novel and its central plot; The Street follows Lutie’s efforts to escape the poverty and despair of the ghetto. Every exit, however, is another trap, and as Lutie struggles to come to some understanding of how limited her options actually are she realizes only too late that her future has already been written by the street. Petry’s spatial metaphors draw our attention to and keep our attention squarely focused on where people live. When Lutie speculates that had her father “lived in a different part of town” he might have been a different person (81), Petry’s point is not that

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nurture trumps nature but that what happens to her characters is a consequence of where they live their lives as much as how they live them. In a similar way, Rawls’s original position, behind the veil of ignorance, signals the ethical significance of location. Contra utilitarianism’s emphasis on volume (greatest good for the greatest number), Rawls emphasizes the scale of distribution (his fundamental principles seek the broadest coverage of rights and resources). We might imagine the difference between Rawls and act consequentialism in the following way: Where utilitarians make no distinction about where people are in the social order, distributive justice starts with consideration for the location of persons within the social order. But Rawls’s original position is theoretical; a hypothetical space (much like Deleuze’s) that has no coordinates in the real world. Unlike Rawls’s theory, however, Petry gives us a sharper understanding of where people live their lives, the community in which they live, and how these facts inform any move towards social justice. The apartment buildings along 116th Street that serve alternately as Pop’s speakeasy and Mrs. Hedges’s brothel offer characters a way to translate “imported” codes to become more identifiably members of a community. Petry’s use of spatial metaphors comments on the novel’s central conflict between major and minor encoding practices. Although the brothel in her apartment building offends Lutie’s modest sensibilities, when she is nearly raped by her building’s superintendant the madam intervenes. After the attack, the building’s geopolitical meaning shifts; Lutie’s apartment on the fourth floor is no longer a refuge from the Super, who grinds out a meager existence in the building’s basement. The civilized and sub-civilized spaces signified by Lutie’s attic apartment and Jones’s cellar are directly mediated by the monetized space of the brothel on the first floor. Characters are linked not only at the micro-level of individual actions but at the macro-level of social infrastructures. Petry’s multiple descriptions of public and private spaces examine how we might achieve justice given where we are now. Petry’s novel explores spatial dimension of justice in a robust way to propose the need for fairer redistributions of power. One way to understand the significance of Petry’s commentary on the links between our shared fates (as Rawls puts it) and the places where we live our lives is to return to Deleuze and Guattari’s views on deterritorialization. Because deterritorialization forms news pathways in and through social codes that shape our lives, its processes are not limited to any one mode. Deleuze and Guattari argue that literature puts into play “unexpected” and “tiny cracks” that operate “by

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different agencies even in the unconscious” (194).7 As a signifying regime, literature effectuates an idea, thought or feeling (77). Literature is a genre that asks: What happened, or what could have happened? (192). In its pursuit of these questions literature can imagine for us and thereby bear us towards the operation of deterritorialization, that is, a disruption of conventional structures and codes of meaning.8 Within the novel, Petry’s metaphors of space operate as disruptions of the market’s conventional codes of violence and oppression to address the broader social inequities that plague Harlem. The cellar, Jones’s domain, is the basement of civilization; there is no potential for transactions with others. When Jones invites the lonely Bub into the basement, he does so in order to deceive the young boy into tampering with the neighbors’ mail. In destroying the letters, the lines of communication that have been cast are severed; it as if Jones is attempting to recreate for others his own situation of broken and impossible human contact. Yet Jones’s isolation proves to be a strangely unifying feature, as Jones and Lutie are linked by their shared separateness. Lutie’s apartment on the fourth floor, with “three floors below and one floor above” (390), is the staging ground of her thwarted ambitions, self-denial, and stifled desires. Lutie’s prudence and prudishness owe to her idealization of market society. But despite her best efforts to uphold social ideals, the costs are considerable. Notably, Lutie’s apartment is devoid of human intimacy. When Lutie finds out that Bub has been shining shoes for a little extra change, she slaps him across the face (66): “[I]f you’re shining shoes at eight, you’ll probably be doing the same thing when you’re eighty. And I’m not going to have it’” (71). Lutie is less angry with her son than she is with the futility of trying to instill in Bub all “those things she had learned 7

The confluence of reader and book is also a repositioning of subjectivity that is “immediately experienced in the body as such” (1980, 273). For instance, the relation between reader and author is expressed as a relation among strata--bookassemblage (4) meets eye-assemblage and nerve-assemblage whereby the reader is rendered “becoming-machine,” i.e., rhizomatic, multiple, and de-centered (21-25). 8 In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature Deleuze and Guattari define minor literature as a disruption within “traditional structures of expression,” whereas major literature reinforces traditional structures. To the extent that writing presupposes hegemony, minor literature can unseat that presupposition. For example, when Kafka blurs animal noises and non-singing, he is deterritorializing mimetic representation (“What Is a Minor Literature” 20). In stopping mimesis in its tracks, Kafka stalls the function of language to reliably relate the world to us, and thereby confer stability upon that world. Kafka’s innovation extends beyond the page by extending the capacity of language to be unstable, inventive, surprising. It is resisting a reliable account of what language is what it does.

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from the Chandlers “about making and saving money (70) in the midst of overwhelming poverty. Although the two are close, there is a rift growing between them. Bub is a latch-key kid who is frequently and by necessity left to confront the yawning emptiness of the apartment by himself: “There was nothing around him that was familiar or that he had ever seen before. His face tightened. He was here alone, lost in the dark, lost in a strange place filled with terrifying things” (218-19). There is little Lutie can do to change their situation; every decision she makes yields the same amount of dissatisfaction and disempowerment. Despite her distance from the brothel on the first floor and from Jones’s basement, the apartment offers Lutie little protection. Symbolically close to the top floor of the building, Lutie is just one flight shy of literally making it to the top. But despite the advantage of vertical height, and the fortifying effects of her faith in a market-society, Lutie’s apartment leaves her nearly indefensible (209). Even after Mrs. Hedges threatens Jones to stay away from Lutie, he sneaks into her apartment and rummages through her things: “He opened the closet door. It seemed to him that the clothes bent toward him as he looked inside—[. . .] there was the thin, white [blouse] He took it out and looked at it [and] he crushed it violently between his hands squeezing the soft thin material tighter and tighter until it was a small ball in his hands” (108). Jones’s invasion suggests the vulnerable position in which Lutie’s ideals have placed her. Even though the black market presumes a shared sense of isolation since it sells some form or another of intimacy, each illicit venue makes human contact possible, even if only momentarily. By contrast, Lutie’s empty, spartan, and carefully fortified apartment is the space of ideology rather than of fantasy (cellar), desire (brothel), dream (Pop’s speakeasy), or magic (botacario) that requires not only self-denial, i.e., cutting herself off from her impulses and desires, but cutting herself off from all human contact.

The Brothel as the Deterritorialization of the Family It is between the polar spheres of the cellar and the attic that the black market operators take up residence.9 Located on the landing between the 9 Deleuze and Guattari describe the significance of the middle-ground or plateau this way: “The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle” (1980, 25).

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symbolic domestic sphere (signified by Lutie’s apartment) and the subterranean space of brutalized humanity (Jones’s basement), the brothel is a frontier; the brothel is a liminal space that stands between idealized contract society and the absence of contract that rules Jones’s netherworld. Initially, the brothel is a liminal terrain that Lutie reviles, in part because it represents a difficult truth for her: that the boundary between her fears and her aspirations is all too porous. Despite Lutie’s dread, the brothel is one of the few humanizing spaces in the novel. Characters are atomized as they become more identifiably members of a community. For instance, we get another point of view of the complexity of needs and wants from Mary Jackson, Mrs. Hedges’s “girl.” When Lutie first sees Mary and a sailor in the darkened hallway of the first floor, she sees them as just another prostitute and her john. But we find out that the sailor, Tige, is in fact Mary’s boyfriend (254). And while Lutie disapproves of Mary’s decision to sell her body, we see the benefits of Mary’s decision. On the one hand, Mary finds genuine friendship with Mrs. Hedges and in return Mrs. Hedges is fairly generous with Mary (253). For the most part, their relationship as madam and prostitute is stable, non-violent, and at times genial. For Mary, the brothel creates opportunities for spontaneous moral freedom. As she turns tricks, Mary turns away from conventional morality to decide for herself what her life is for and to whom she will give it. The morality of Mary’s sexual freedom is also expressed by the fact that where Lutie sees only transactional intimacy, we see real intimacy, since she finds a real human connection with Tige (254-55). Mary makes the most of the minimum regard she is granted. Even Mrs. Hedges acknowledges Mary’s relationship with Tige as a sincere, emotional attachment. Such acknowledgement suggests that the institution of the brothel redistributes empathy, even if only temporarily. All members, the owner, Mrs. Hedges, the worker, Mary, and the customer, Tige, receive equal amounts of regard. Here, as elsewhere in the black market, the social death of the ghetto is partially denied by those within the marginal spaces of the economy. Ultimately, the black market in sex is “deterritorializing” since it disrupts the conventional meanings of commodified sex (represented by Lutie) and forms an alternate space within which the humanity of impoverished and oppressed black women is re-constituted and, momentarily, protected. At a political level deterritorialization refers to the complex flow of signs and meanings within interlocked cultures where marginalized subjects are not passive recipients of images and consumer goods. Rather they mediate and subvert hegemonic codes thereby

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recreating meanings and producing hybrid cultural artifacts and subjects in the process. We see such “territorial motifs” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 317) throughout the novel. Petry frequently uses location to signify how fugitive capital re-encodes domestic space. Mrs. Hedges’s insights into what she does for a living are complex. As she sees it, her customers are men “who knew vaguely that they hadn’t got anything out of life and knew clearly that they never would get it, even though they didn’t know what it was they wanted” (250). They are “men who hated white folks sometimes without even knowing why; men who had to find escape from their hopes and fears, even if it was just for a little while” and although they visit their anger and despair on the bodies of Mary, their reasons as Mrs. Hedges suggests cannot be neatly explained by misogyny. Together, the madam, Mary, and their customers re-encode the brothel, reclassifying it. The significance of the brothel as a response to social injustice is as complicated as the causes of the injustice. But, as we see throughout the novel, legitimate institutions are incapable of distributing benefits and burdens, justly. Take for example the institution of the family: burdened by an unequal distribution of opportunities, Jim and Lutie cannot sustain their marriage. By contrast, the brothel houses a new social unit based on immediate gratification. Desire and sex recreate the social institution of the family (based on law and taboo). Mary and Mrs. Hedges resourcefully convert nothing into something; the novel’s black market operators leverage resources and create wealth, which is re-distributed to the community. Such redistributions are not evidence, as Lutie insists, that the street has “sucked the humanity out of people” (229). Rather, it is widescale social injustice that makes all achievements of justice inherently limited. Petry signals the difficulties of achieving any measure of equality in the dual operations of detteritorialization and reterritorialization that the brothel performs. We might consider the brothel a rhizomatic zone, flying below the radar of social norms yet also reaching above to social ideals signified by Lutie’s Franklinian ethos and her maternality. At the same moment the madam defends Lutie’s integrity, she defends, too, the sphere of ideal womanhood with which Lutie is associated. If the domestic sphere is a failed political space, the brothel opens up a communal space where Mrs. Hedges and Lutie both undertake a civic project of selfcomprehension and recognition. Yet the brothel moves in opposing directions simultaneously both subverting and defending the institution of the family. Since Mrs. Hedges protects Lutie and thereby preserves her integrity both as a woman and as a mother. The domestic sphere is a

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defended territory that Mrs. Hedges manages to preserve, humanely, from invasion.

Bootlegging: Addiction as the Detteritorialization of the Self Grant “Pop” Williams’s apartment is part flop house and part speakeasy. Whereas Mrs. Hedges’s brothel retains a faint resemblance to the holy family, with Mrs. Hedges casting herself as a mother figure, Mary as her child, and Tige as the inessential paternal figure, Pop and his friends have no such illusions. They turn society into a floating cloud that hovers at the edge of consciousness. Pop and his girlfriend Lil and their numerous boarders form a society along a new social axis; not of property or ownership (or possessive individualism) but with dispossession of self as its aim. We might read the scenes with Pop and Lil as another instance wherein the black market economy refuses the ethos of normative market society. Lutie describes her father’s roomers as “boisterous [. . .] riff raff” (56) steeped in “raw whisky” and suspended in permanent twilight. Lil and Pop and their unnamed roomers spend their nights “drinking gin” and their days “lounging on the wide bed” (10). They are not unlike the rest of Harlem’s “sleepwalkers” (205) resignedly shuffling toward extinction. But Pop and Lil are perhaps the lotus eaters of Harlem, as they embrace the sweetness of their alcohol-fueled languor. Even after Lutie and Bub move out of the Seventh Avenue apartment to 116th Street, Pop and Lil keep on carrying on, and while Lutie more or less accepts her father’s “sly” ways, she is determined to put him and the riff raff far behind her. But for all Lutie’s hostility, the den of gin drinkers, like the other black market spaces we see in the novel, present the reader with an interesting alternative to Lutie’s rigid vision of moral improvement and financial stability. As Pop, Lil, and their various roomers sink deeper into their cups, they slip further and further out of reach of the law, duty, or obligation. When a neighbor calls the cops to complain about the noise coming from Pop’s apartment, the police arrive demanding an explanation that no one is sober enough to offer. Undaunted, however, Pop attempts a slurred defense of his rights as a citizen, while Lil, seated on the couch behind him, babbles “Um’s my daddy. Um’s my daddy” (178). Despite his obvious inebriation, Pop tells the cops that they “[a]in’t got no right to talk like that to an American citizen’” (178). But “the dignity of his reproachful remarks to the cop” are “ruined” by his incessant wobbling, as he “sways” to-and-fro. Heightening the comic effect of Pop’s drunken

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self-defense, Lil repeatedly clutches at his arm and misses (178). The scene undermines the seriousness with which the rest of the novel treats issues of human rights, family, and self-possession. As an “interval” between a given referent and its correspondent in the real world, Jean-Luc Nancy argues that sleep is often symbolized by the lullaby, or, the “swaying world” (2009, 31). In Petry’s novel, the swaying world of the drunken revelers is a direct commentary on their detachment from social norms and obligation. Eventually, Pop, Lil, and their hard-drinking friends drive out Jim, Lutie, and their son Bub. But lounging together on the wide bed, they do not form an alternate version of the family, nor are they disenfranchised citizens, as Pop’s comments to the police confirm. Indeed, all claims to social ties are “ruined” by their addiction. Yet there seems to be something more important that results from Pop’s illicit bootlegging. The revelers’ incoherence and stupefaction is perhaps a kind of resistance. However odd it may seem, Pop’s sway and drift is an expression of his freedom. His drunken demands for respect from the police officer even as he is breaking the law imply his indifference to juridical regard. Similarly, Lil’s attempts at coyness (“Um’s my daddy”) fall flat and become a discomfiting reference to incest. Such a description of Lil as a threat to the nuclear family is actually made earlier in the novel, when Lutie cites Lil’s inappropriate attentions to Bub as one of her motivations to move into the 116th Street apartment (10). Lil’s drunken reference to Pop as her “daddy” points to her considerable distance from, if not her antagonism toward, the hetero-normative family structure. It may be that in giving over to their addictions, they are no longer claimed by the institutions of the family, law, or community—in a paradoxical sense, they have broken free of the corrupt institutions that Petry critiques throughout her novel. Pop and Lil’s dismissal of any serious attempt to secure their rights is actually a consequence of not needing what they already have: “It is because we no longer have anything to hide that we can no longer be apprehended” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 197). Lost together in the liquid night of their stupor, there is, despite occasional moments of woozy bonhomie, an even more radical separateness that conditions the addicts’ temporary zone of refuge from the brokenness that Harlem signifies. Jean-Luc Nancy argues that to sleep is to experience identity as pure being: “The man or woman whose mouth thus mumbles a confused attestation of existence is no longer ‘I’ and is not truly ‘self’: but beyond the two, or simply set apart, indifferent to any kind of ipseity; he or she is in self in the sense of the thing in itself that Kant made famous [. . .] The thing in itself

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Meaning that within the world of the sleeper there no longer is any distinction between signifier and signified; the reality to which signifiers refer is now coincident with the dreamer. Pop and his cohorts resemble Nancy’s world of sleepers, as they are wholly withdrawn into themselves. For example, when Lutie walks into the apartment after an evening in Harlem, she is struck by the “noise and confusion and empty whisky bottles” (178) that greet her. The pervasive noise and chaos, like the empty liquor bottles, point the effects of the party goers rather than to the agents producing the effects. These signifiers of absence symbolize the revelers more general displacement as selfactualizing agents. Perhaps their debauchery serves as an existential response to their re-description as non-subjects under institutional oppression, as the earlier scene of Bub’s wandering through the school suggests. Yet, Pop’s weaving and Lil’s babbling also suggest both the infantilization that addiction has wrought and the regressive (or evasive) state of their addicted existence. As I read it, the detachment between agent and act that Petry implies through her use of “empty” signifiers is a dual sign of her characters’ detachment from the world and from the self. As Lutie strives to become a successful American subject, she fixates on acquiring a paradigmatic nationalist identity. By withdrawing into himself, Pop defers a coherent and knowable identity and thereby rejects the very basis of bourgeoisie subjectivity that at the same time also suggests the limitations of Lutie’s choices.

The Root Doctor: Maximizing for (the) Min(imum) Min is perhaps the most obvious example of how transactions in the black market leave the least better off. Taking Mrs. Hedges’s advice, Min pays a visit to David, the Prophet. The mystic operates a store-front church on Eighth Avenue, off of 140th Street (120). Here we see an almost literal instance of maximizing for the minimum. While his store is no gin-soaked demi-monde like Pop’s apartment, David is equally concerned with the world beyond. David offers spiritual counsel; he listens to Min’s problems and offers real solutions that work. Min asks the “root doctor” for help to keep her boyfriend, Jones, from kicking her out of their apartment. Her decision to visit the Vodou priest is a small rebellion against traditional religious customs. While Min is initially reluctant to visit David’s office (122), she changes her mind after considering the fact that “the few times

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she had a chance to talk to the preacher at the church, he interrupted her with, ‘We all got our troubles, Sister. We all got our troubles.’ And he, too, turned away” (137). After her brief consultation with David, Min reflects that “talking to him had been the most satisfying experience she had ever known. [. . .] The satisfaction she felt was from the quiet way he had listened to her, giving her all of his attention. No one had ever done that before” (136). Unlike the white doctors Min has seen in the past, who look at her but without seeing her, or the African-American doctors who made her feel “humble, apologetic” (136), David “had listened and been interested” (137). The difference in Min’s experience cannot be explained by David’s race, since the African-American doctors Min visits repeatedly ignore her, “the minute she started answering, they turned away” (136). David represents another cultural tradition and one explicitly at odds with conventional norms: “there were some things the church couldn’t handle, had no resources for handling” (123). On the one hand, David represents cultural traditions whose origins can be traced to West African religious practices that link Min to an ancestral community that sustains her. But Petry makes it clear that the spiritual tradition plays only a limited role in Min’s improved sense of self-esteem. Like David, Mrs. Hedges materializes the benefits of the social contract within the boundaries of her illicit enterprise. Reluctantly, the madam agrees to take payment at a later date from Tige, Mary’s sailor and customer (255). Unlike the butcher whose “No Credit” policy tips the contract in his favor (61), Mrs. Hedges allows Tige and Mary to contract with their own futures; they can negotiate terms with Mrs. Hedges by choosing to leverage future resources.

Min’s visit to the root doctor not only gives her a sense of confidence, but it encourages her to develop a deeper moral imagination. As David calmly listens to her, she begins to open up to him, emotionally, as if “a warm, friendly hand beckon[ed] to her to come in out of the cold” (123). The consultation with the prophet, while brief, has a remarkably transformative effect, and she feels both a deep sense of “satisfaction” and “the triumph” of having the means necessary to keep Jones from putting her out onto the street (137). She sees herself differently and imagines a better outcome for herself. She also makes better judgments about what does and does not serve her best interests. When Min decides to leave Jones, she hires a moving man to haul her few belongings away from Jones’s apartment and 116th Street. Packing up her few belongings, she considers another change in her life:

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Min comments earlier that “[s]he had stayed with the others because a woman by herself didn’t stand much chance” (133). Notably, when she leaves Jones for good, she focuses her thoughts on the equity of working with another person as a team. Furthermore, she has figured out a way to keep some in reserve so that she can exit the partnership at will. Although such observations exemplify a subtle shift in her thinking, they are further commentary on what she has gained in her transactions with the Prophet; she has a different set of expectations of herself and her partner. When she finally leaves Jones she appears to be on her way to becoming less fearful, more fully-realized person. The black market creates zones of identification within Harlem—zones that are explicitly promised yet denied by the novel’s neo-liberal capitalism’s representatives. For instance, Junto’s Bar and Grill reveals the myth of self-invention as little more than a cheap saloon promise of a free and easy society (to borrow Franklin’s description of his civic reform project, the Junto). The optimism of the national ideal not only provides a convenient cover for the merchants’ violent self-interestedness, but it also obscures the rituals of communality that self-actualization requires. In opposition to the legitimate markets, the black market operators and their customers stand for the hard reality of self-invention—the hard labor, the resourcefulness, as well as the risks that self-creation actually demands.

The Cruelties of Black Market Fairness As Rawls insists, our fates are linked together. Maximizing for the minimum means moving resources from the bottom up to ensure the flourishing of all fates; Rawls’s principle of distributive justice allows for the allocation of resources that in the strictest sense is not equal so long as the inequality has the effect that the least advantaged are materially better off than they would be under strict equality. The motivation for such imbalanced distribution is equal respect for persons. This premise is of course a difficult one to navigate. Within the novel, the concept of mutual respect is problematized in productive ways. Since the basis for respect is conditioned by the context of inequality and oppression, regard is often predicated on those negative affinities both parties hold in common. For

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Pop, the basis for exclusion from the legitimate market is the very same basis for inclusion in the illegitimate market. Personal transactions are based on affinities that everyone agrees to—loneliness, addiction, or powerlessness—and the community that the bootlegger’s transactions help to form holds some positive value, even if individually these personality traits are ultimately self-destructive. Equal respect cannot resolve all the injustice that plagues Petry’s characters. Throughout the novel Lutie sees the madam, her father, and nearly everyone else as moral failures. In her determination to be the exception to the rule she is unable to find common cause with another person. By the end of the novel, Lutie criticizes the assumption that self-discipline and self-command can guarantee success; but the myth is no longer the obstacle she confronts. There are alternative paths to survival, such as the folk wisdom of the African-American community (symbolized by David and Min)—alternatives which Lutie rejects. The kinds of intimate exchange demonstrated by Min, Mrs. Hedges, Mary, and Tige define “exchange as a form of integration” (Polyani 1985, 47); each character bargains with another to leverage market institutions to form community. In refusing to contract with anyone, Lutie slowly backs herself into a corner more deadly than Jones’s cellar, and eventually she gives in to her grief and rage. But to point to Lutie’s failures is not to ignore the problems of deriving fairness from exploitative economic practices. Mrs. Hedges makes only limited help available to Mary and Lutie. In fact, her interactions with Lutie are all calculated to help her friend Junto manipulate Lutie into being his mistress. Pop’s bootlegging is not a significant source of financial support for Lutie, and he is unable to help her in the greatest moment of crisis. While Rawls’s ideal of justice as improvement for the least off is more clearly seen in Min, such improvement is indeed minimal. While she is the only character to leave 116th Street under her own will, she gets only a few blocks north. Of course, the black market is dependent upon the legitimate markets for its existence; it cannot break away. If the disruption of the white market by the black market is the source of its fairness, it may be that the deferral of the black market to the white market is the ultimate source of its cruelties.

Works Cited Barrett, Lindon. Blackness and Value: Seeing Double. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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Clark, Keith. “A Distaff Dream Deferred? Ann Petry and the Art of Subversion.” African American Review 26.3 (Autumn 1992): 495-505. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. and Foreword, Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2003. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Trans. of Kafka: pour une littérature mineure. Paris : Les éditions de Minuit, 1975. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Elby, Clare Virginia. “Beyond Protest: The Street as Humanitarian Narrative. MELUS 33.1 (Spring 2008): 33-53 http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029740. Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Second Edition. Edited by Louis P. Masur. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. Gayle, Addison. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City: Doubleday, 1975. Geuss, Raymond. “Neither History nor Praxis.” In Outside Ethics, 29-40. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. http://books.google.com Habegger, Alfred. “Howells and American Masculinity.” In Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature, 199-250. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Hicks, Heather. “Rethinking Realism in Ann Petry’s The Street.” MELUS 27.4 (Winter 2002): 89-105. http://www.jstsor.org/stable/3250621. Masumi, Brian, trans. Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 3-25. New York and London: Continuum, 2003. May, Todd. Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Mills, Charles W(ade). “Contract of Breach: Repairing the Racial Contract.” In Contract and Domination, 106-34. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Fall of Sleep, trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. Trans. of Tombe de sommeil. Paris: Éditions Galilee, 2007. Petry, Ann. The Street. 1944. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1946.

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Polanyi, Karl. “The Economy as Instituted Process.” In The Sociology of Economic Life, edited by Mark S. Granovetter and Richard Swedberg, 31-51. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001. http://books.google.com Pogge, Thomas. John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice. Trans. Michelle Kosch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pryce, Marjorie. “‘Pattern against the Sky”: Deism and Motherhood in Ann Petry’s The Street.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, 151-176. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. 1972. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. —. Justice as Fairness, A Restatement, edited by Erin Kelly. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. Sandel, Michael. Democracy’s Discontents: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996. Sen, Amartya. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. http:// books.google.com. Smith, Adam. “Principle of the Division of Labor.” In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, ed. Edwin Cannan, 9-15. London: Methuen & Co., 1904. Originally published in The Wealth of Nations, vol 1 (London: 1776). http:// books.google.com —. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, vol. 2. Basel: J. J. Tourneisen, 1793. Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. New York and London: Verso, 1989. Thomas, Brook. “Introduction.” In American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract, 1-25. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Warburton, Nigel. “John Rawls: A Theory of Justice.” In Philosophy: The Classics, 2nd ed., 239-47. London: Routledge, 2001. http://www.books.google.com Willis, Susan. “Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison.” In Black Literature and Literary Theory, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 26383. New York: Methuen, 1984. Wolff, Jonathan. An Introduction to Political Philosophy, 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Yarborough, Richard. “The Quest for the American Dream in Three AfroAmerican Novels: If He Hollers Let Him Go, The Street, and Invisible Man.” MELUS 8.4 (Winter 1981): 33-59. http://jstor/org/stable/467388.

THE DADDY ANTIDOTE: DOMESTIC MASCULINITY CONFRONTS COMMERCE IN SILAS MARNER AND JENNIFER GOVERNMENT INGRID RANUM

In the old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.1

During the Nineteenth Century, a variety of forces (industrialization, urbanization, the development of suburbs) removed business from the home and contributed to the development of separate and distinctly gendered spheres. In the developing domestic ideology, the home was a moral haven from the corrupt world of business and work, a haven created by and centered on women. While the idea of women as agents of the home and men as workers in the public sphere of business was perhaps more powerful conceptually than in reality, nineteenth-century ideology did forge powerful associations surrounding the moral force of home and family on one hand and the potentially corrupting commercial arena on the other; associations that endure in interesting ways, even into the TwentyFirst Century. Although the world of commerce–business, trade, and manufactory– has often been treated as the natural milieu of men, it can be a peculiarly alienating space, and perhaps was particularly so at the times of the writing of George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) and Max Barry’s Jennifer Government (2003). Although separated by almost a century and a half, these two novels both were written in historical situations of commercial dislocation. Mid-Victorian England was coping with the rise of the factory and an expanding Empire, while Barry’s twenty-first-century Australia

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was–is–confronting the rise of the transnational mega-corporations and the effects of globalization. Both texts are set outside of realistic representations of their times. Silas is a home-based weaver from the early years of the century, before textile work was taken over by the great (and terrible) industrial mills of Eliot’s own day. Barry’s characters inhabit the world of what may be his time,1 but it is a world with exaggerated features: workers take the last name not of their families, nor of their occupations (Weaver, Cooper, Smith), but of their employers (Nike, Bechtel, NRA). Everything and everyone is a commodity, including the rebellious heroine who has gone to work as a government regulator, but still bears a tattoo under her left eye from her corporate days: the UPC code of a product she used to represent. While Eliot dislocates her text to gain a more congenial setting, Barry amplifies the most alienating features of modern life to intensify the need for a haven from a business world that is unrelentingly vicious. Both novels include male characters who are identified through their public function. Silas Marner is, as the novel’s subtitle reminds us, “The Weaver of Raveloe.” Jennifer Government’s Buy Mitsui, a stock broker, not only bears the surname of his corporation, he has also changed his first name from Jean-Paul so that his entire identity has been subsumed into his corporate function. Each character finds himself, for various reasons, isolated in his pursuit of business, cut off from happiness, fulfillment, and moral judgment. Interestingly, however, these two texts, so different in situation, arrive at a similar solution for the redemption of these businessmen. Each encounters a young, female child in need of parenting, and each throws himself into a new role: surrogate father. While much of the rich scholarship on domesticity explores most directly the implications of the ideology on the lives of women (including the project of recovering “The History of the Housewife,” as Catherine Hall puts it1), recent scholars—notably Hall, Leonore Davidoff, and John Tosh—have shown how important the concept of home was to men, who were as implicated, challenged, and shaped by domesticity as were women. It is a mistake to consider men in this ideology as purely creatures of the public sphere. In fact, Tosh argues that “The place of the home in bourgeois culture could be summed up by the proposition that only at home could a man be truly and authentically himself.”1 That sense of the centrality of home and family to masculine identity informs both Silas Marner and Jennifer Government, very different novels that nevertheless offer a common prescription for overcoming modern alienation: the intervention of children, of little girls who need men to be fathers almost as much as the men themselves need to become fathers. While it may be unsurprising that a Victorian woman writer would access domestic

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ideology to accomplish this recuperation, Barry’s return to this strategy is striking in a text that is named for a female character who is undeniably a part of the public (in this case government) sphere. Barry finds a kind of resistance to international corporate domination and consumerism in his recovery and updating of a type of Victorian domesticity, which allows his character Buy, like Silas Marner, to recover his humanity and reconceive his relationships with a broader community. Silas Marner opens with a description of England’s past—the present of the story—that is almost incantatory, invoking the hum of the spinningwheels of a bygone age and dwelling upon the mystery and superstition that surrounded the craftsmen-weavers who plied their trades in the villages of rural England. While this introduction certainly contributes to the oft-noted fairytale quality of the narrative, it also significantly situates the action of the novel in gendered and commercial systems. Readers are immediately invited to recognize the isolation of the weavers. They are described as “alien-looking,” “wandering men,” physically different creatures who might be “the remnants of a disinherited race” (7). They are distinct from the browned and “brawny” locals, lacking the masculine markers of muscle and tan that come with outdoor labor (7). By 1861, local weavers would also indeed have been remnants and memories, since industrialized textile production had made local weavers all but obsolete, and the rail system displaced cottage industries with easy transportation of mass-produced goods. As Richard Altick points out, the five thousand miles of track that were laid in England between 1830 and 1848 transformed local and regional economies into a national economy in the space of a single generation.1 Eliot’s weaver is a historical curiosity, a craft- and business-man of another age. Significantly, in an age of urbanization, Silas moves against the forces of history. While the population of Eliot’s own day moved to England’s teeming cities, her weaver leaves the town where he had lived in his youth to move to the rural isolation (and eventually the community) of Raveloe (18). By displacing her craftsman in time and space, Eliot softens the conditions of his alienation, making them functions of his character and the culture of his neighborhood rather than symptoms of economic modernity. Eliot’s initial description of Raveloe also situates Silas in a system of gender identity and cultural practice. The first sentence refers to distaff business: the spinning that occupied all women, regardless of class (7). If readers make the small mental leap from spinning to weaving, linking them in textile production that has been feminized by the text, we are not alone, as one of Silas’s neighbors later make the link explicit. In thinking

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of the possibility of Silas caring for Eppie, one voice allows that he might be quite capable: Why there isn’t many lone men ’ud ha’ been wishing to take up with a little un like that: but I reckon the weaving makes you handier than men as do out-door work—you’re partly as handy as a woman, for weaving comes next to spinning. (149)

In the popular conception of local economy, there is women’s work, and there is men’s work. Because Silas’s occupation is related to labors that all local women take part in, his neighbors can imagine that he has feminine facilities, that he’s “partly as handy as a woman.” But it is worth noting that even this anonymous assessment links the ability to care for a child to the desire to do so: the handiness that Silas possesses must, in this view authorize his “wishing to take up with” a child. While Silas does eventually demonstrate both a willingness and the ability to raise a little girl on his own, the genesis of his wish comes more from his isolation and sense that he has a right to her than from any conviction that he is suited to do so. Silas’s alienation in Raveloe is a welling spring with many sources. He comes to Raveloe embittered by the betrayal of his best friend, who framed him for theft and then wooed away his betrothed (16-18). Because of this traumatic event, Silas found himself exiled from his community, from his most intimate friend, and from the beginnings of his adult family life. Having lost all of this, he arrives in his new home prepared to work, but ill equipped to forge new interpersonal ties. As the narrator reports, “there was nothing that called out his love and fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst” (21). In addition, he is an outsider in a close-knit community, the inhabitants of which wondered, “how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother?” (7-8). He is set apart also by his new community’s reading of disability: his peering but short-sighted aspect is taken for the evil eye (9), and his cataleptic fits—seen as a blessing by his former community—are interpreted as occult instances of his soul leaving his body to spy on his unaware but suspicious neighbors (11). All of these circumstances complicate Silas’s integration into the Raveloe social structure, but it is his work and its recompense that create the most impassible obstacles. Although his indoor work sets him apart from the local working men, Silas’s skill as a weaver is needed in the community, and his usefulness earns him tolerance, if not acceptance (11). His actual practice of his profession, though, reinforces his separation from the people who

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surround him, and even from his own humanity. After his betrayal and dislocation into a new environment, Silas falls back on his weaving as a familiar, soothing task, but the narrator makes clear that his unthinking dedication is dehumanizing rather than therapeutic: His first movement after the shock had been to work in his loom; and he went on with this unremittingly, never asking himself why . . . He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life. . . . [A]nd Silas, in his solitude, had to provide his own breakfast, dinner, and supper, to fetch his own water from the well, and put his own kettle on the fire; and all these immediate promptings helped, along with the weaving, to reduce his life to the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect. (21)

While making a way over “the loveless chasms of [one’s] life” may seem like a worthwhile pursuit, the narrator makes apparent the flaws in this method. To be unthinking, unquestioning, unreflective is to be inhuman, no better than an insect (or arachnid). Even Silas’s domestic activities, undertaken in isolation, contribute to the narrowing of his existence. Because he lacks human relationships, Silas begins to develop an unhealthy relationship with the product of his work: not the cloth that he creates, but the gold and silver he earns through his labors. The part of his life that is not taken up by weaving or taking care of his barest bodily needs he devotes to contemplating, caring for, arranging and caressing his coins. The text suggests that Silas becomes a miser not because he wants money or the things that it can buy (goods, property, leisure, influence), but because he craves the relationships that he no longer has. The narrator describes his affection for the coins as particular, not the desire of a man for aggregated money, but a relationship with his own coins, which could not be exchanged for others of the same nominal value. Only after his work was done for the night, we learn, does he allow himself to take out the coins and enjoy their “companionship” (24). The money that he will earn for yet-unfinished projects seems to him like “unborn children” he will soon welcome into his family (24). And the coins that he has already, he “loves”; they are “his own earnings, begotten by his labour” (24). He abandons the concerns of his old life for these. That Silas so persistently personifies his gold clearly shows that the love he feels for it might be redirected if he weren’t so completely removed from human objects for his emotions. Jeff Nunokawa reads Silas’s obsession with gold as fetishistic—the nighttime, secret fondling that becomes a “revelry” (24)—and therefore,

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since the coins also represent his progeny, as unhealthily endogamous desire. Nunokawa explains, The pleasure that Eliot’s miser takes in this illicit atmosphere . . . resembles a condensed catalogue of sexual deviance—incest, of course . . . but also the range of perversions that surround the ‘secret sin’ of masturbation.1

Nunokawa is no doubt right that Silas’s obsession with the coins represents both a strong and physical desire and an unhealthy focus. But he simplifies the range of human needs by reading a desire for human contact and intimacy as necessarily sexual. Silas has thrown himself into work, and that work is generative, but it does not create human relationships. His desire is not for sexual gratification, but rather for productive relationships. In his isolation, however, all he can produce by his own labor is gold, and so he sees in his coins the faces of his “unborn children.” His desire is not in conflict with domestic ideals—in fact it seems directly informed by them. The danger in his obsession is to himself, that in focusing on the money hidden under his floor, Silas further cuts himself off from the possibility of forging real human relationships. He displaces his social needs into work and miserly obsession, further alienating himself from the real people of Raveloe. After fifteen years of building this life in his new home, Silas’s isolation is permeated by the incursion of both community and family. In a remarkably unsubtle transposition, Eliot subjects Silas to two lifechanging events in rapid succession: the theft of his gold (unsolved until the end of the novel) and the arrival in his life of a little girl. Although (or partly because) it makes him once again a miserable wreck of a man, the theft opens cracks of sympathy in the barriers between Silas and his neighbors. The neighbors have call to involve themselves in his life now that it includes a local mystery, and his misfortune makes him a more sympathetic figure than he had been before. The narrator notes that Silas, too, must have begun to feel closer to the people who listened and tried to help, whether or not we can see changes in him at this early point. After all, s/he points out, “there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud” (67). The loss of the gold may not have created the need for human contact in Silas—that he certainly already had, whether he recognized it or not—but it did provide the occasion to forge new connections. The sap that has begun circulating in Silas only really spurs new growth, however, with the arrival of a girl-child who toddles into his house while he stands at the door, frozen in a cataleptic fit while looking

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fruitlessly out into the night for some sign of his lost gold. He misses the entrance of the child into his house as he stares sightlessly into the night “as if he thought that his money might somehow be coming back to him” (126). He endows the money with agency and abilities that it cannot have, even as a human with exactly those traits approaches. His disabilities become particularly symbolic at this point in the story, as his poor vision and fits of unawareness cause him to fail to perceive immediately the good fortune that has come in, as his monetary fortune has not. Eliot nearly bludgeons her readers with the substitution, just as she bludgeons Silas, who can’t help but connect his great loss with his great gain. He initially mistakes the child’s golden hair for his gold, seeing it glowing on the hearth (127). Later, he reports, “My money’s gone, I don’t know where,” he reports, “and this is come from I don’t know where” (136). This is a sentiment he repeats in various constructions (139, 141, 186), and his initial sense of this exchange of gold for girl informs his early decision to keep the child and raise it himself. Because this motivation is repeated in several different instances, it is easy to forget the first and perhaps most important reason Silas gives for adopting the child: “it’s a lone thing—and I’m a lone thing,” he says claiming a kinship through common isolation (136). While a part of Silas’s brain is trying to work out the symbolism of the event, another part has already arrived at the literal truth of the situation. He and the child he will call Eppie need each other, and that—not some imaginary connection to the past or repayment of a loss, but that mutual need—is the basis for their becoming a family. Becoming a father to little Eppie is the main factor contributing to Silas’s integration into the Raveloe community. At first, this new domestic business causes Silas to draw upon the expertise of his neighbor, Dolly Winthrop, and at her advice he also brings Eppie to church to be baptized (140-145). For the good of the child, Silas both seeks and accepts congress with his neighbors. As he works to bring her up, she brings him out in ways he never could have predicted. The narrator makes plain that she enriches his life, while his hoard had only ever really impoverished him: [T]he child created fresh and fresh links between his life and the lives from which he had hitherto shrunk continually into narrower isolation. Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and which must be worshipped in closelocked solitude . . . Eppie was a creature of endless claims and evergrowing desires, seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and living moments; . . . The gold had kept his thoughts in an ever-repeating circle, leading to nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object compacted of changes and hopes that forced his thoughts onward . . . . (144)

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Taking upon himself the care and feeding of this life-loving “creature” forces Silas to venture continually out into the life that surrounds him, including both the natural world and society. Silas does not give up his loom and turn himself over only to his domestic chores, social connections, and outdoor rambles. Given his recent loss of all of his savings, he certainly cannot afford to do so. Rather he devises ways to accomplish both his fathering and his work, using a leash of sorts to keep Eppie close while he is occupied (146). But he metamorphoses from an unthinking spider at its web into the Weaver of Raveloe, a man anchored in a village of which he is a contributing member. Silas’s efficacy as a parent is evident both in his care of his child and in the results of his labors. By all accounts, she grows to be a happy, loyal, principled young woman. When she is offered the chance to move up in class by taking her rightful genetic place as Godfrey Cass’s daughter, she chooses to stay with Silas (193-94). She also lives out her vision of married life, articulated at the time of her betrothal, in which, rather than leaving Silas to make a new home with her husband, Aaron, she brings Aaron to live with her and Silas, again bringing more life and possibility into his cottage when he could have been left alone (168). When he is finally assured that he will not return to his solitary half-life, he rests in every expectation of continued contentment, and the novel closes with his assertion of faith in a future based in familial love: “Since the time the child was sent to me and I’ve come to love her as myself, I’ve had light enough to trusten by,” he says, “and now she says she’ll never leave me, I think I shall trusten till I die” (201). These last lines of the novel convey the depth of Silas’s recuperation. Far from seeking unreflective solitude, he has love for another and for himself, and finds peace in knowing that he will not be alone in the future, but rather will continue to enjoy the fruits of fatherhood. Given nineteenth-century domesticity’s conception of separate and gendered spheres, Silas’s insistence on and efficacy in bringing up Eppie has brought significant critical attention to the novel’s construction of gender. Henry Alley, who reads the separation of the spheres as a stringent division of traits and concerns, insists that Silas’s story is one of recovering the feminine. He argues, Silas Marner is not simply the story of a withered man whose wounded sensibility is restored through love of a child but the story of an incomplete man . . . whose female self is reawakened through the raising of a daughter.1

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In this essentializing reading of Silas’s gender, Alley posits that any contact with or comfort in the domestic sphere is feminizing (or, indeed, “female”), including Silas’s memories of his mother and sister (67-68) and the dispensing of “sustenance and care” (65). Although Alley reads Silas as a character who can balance male and female impulses and functions in terms of parenting, he apparently gets credit for masculine involvement largely through his role as breadwinner. Alley specifically notes that Silas “lacks the will of the conventional male to discipline” his child (69). This attribution may seem “conventional,” but it has little to do with the actual experience of life in Eliot’s Raveloe. We see precious little discipline dispensed by the notable fathers in the novel, Squire Cass and Mister Lammeter. It is, in fact, Dolly Winthrop who dispenses the advice that “punishment was good for Eppie, and that, as for rearing a child without making it tingle a little in soft and safe places now and then, it was not to be done” (145). If we take the male characters as uniformly lacking in an impulse that is espoused by a female character, it becomes problematic to then assume that that impulse is, contrary to evidence, a coded-male trait in the logic of the novel. More importantly, perhaps, historians suggest that the image of the nineteenth-century father as a looming authoritarian presence is a misunderstanding of family experience. Tosh identifies the “unsmiling domestic tyrant” as the “most hackneyed” of retrospective representations of Victorian fatherhood.1 In their fascinating and broad study of primary documents exposing everyday life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall assert: There is scattered evidence that some men exercised their power in a direct and domineering manner. But the local sources more often point to an intense involvement of men with their families, and a loving interest in their children’s lives.1

Davidoff and Hall do allow that “Paternal duties also included the enforcing of discipline . . .” but in this they mean expecting children to adopt productive habits. 1 There is little mention in their study of the correction that would enforce such habits, except “preying on a sense of guilt” (a practice that is described specifically in relation to mothers, not fathers) and “the threat of being denied parental—and God’s—love.”1 Davidoff and Hall note “little resort to physical punishment” in specific families that they studied,1 and certainly they do not mention any peculiarly masculine desire to punish children. It is likely that the warning, “wait until your father gets home” has a long history in the family structure conceived in a system of separate spheres, but neither the novel

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nor these recent historical studies evince a belief in the widespread understanding of masculine parenting that is rooted in correction rather than nurturance. It seems misguided to say that by dint of his care for Eppie, Silas shows himself to lack something of essential to the male. Alley’s larger point, though, is not merely that Silas has eschewed a masculine component of parenting, but that through parenting, he has accessed a part of himself or a cultural space that is specifically feminine. This view is implicitly shared by Larry T. Shillock, who argues that in insisting on raising Eppie himself and in doing so competently, Silas has fought for status that (according to Shillock) domestic ideology affords only to mothers. While Shillock sees the text as contesting the rights of the few (biological mothers) to parent (thereby empowering both men and adoptive parents), his assumption remains that such primary care of a child is specifically gendered work. He identifies the novel finally as “a sly comedy about how domestic ideology tries, and fails, to hoard mothering.”1 By rhetorically ceding the ground of parenting to women, he sets the stage for the gendered confrontation he imagines to take place in the text. Significantly, the only real challenge to Silas’s position as Eppie’s parent comes not from a mother, but from her biological father when Godfrey Cass asks the nearly-grown Eppie to leave Silas and become part of his family in practice as well as in blood (186). The conflict is between biological and practical parenting, not between mothering and fathering.1 We might note the voice of Silas’s neighbor who worries over his wish to care for a young child, but resolves the concern by noting that a weaver would be “partly as handy as a woman” (149). However, to accept that equivalence of child care with women’s work and to let it shape our sense of the gender politics of Raveloe is to cede our understanding to a single comment made by an anonymous speaker. If we trust a voice in Raveloe to assess Silas’s fitness to care for small Eppie, it should by Dolly’s, which rather says “I’ve seen men as are wonderful handy wi’ children” (140). She accepts Silas’s plea that he wants to “do things for it” himself, lest someone displace him in the child’s affection (or “get fond o’ somebody else, and not fond o’ me”), and his assertion that given his domestic abilities forged in caring for himself, he can certainly learn to care for a child. Instead of showing him how to handle and dress the child, she gives him advice as he does it, saying, “Go then: take her, Master Marner, and you can put the things on, and then you can say as you’ve done for her from the first of her coming to you” (140-141). Dolly accepts the effectiveness of fathering generally, as well as Silas’s ability (as a bachelor) to learn the skills to be a “handy” man with children rather than a usurper of territory incontrovertibly held by women.

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The message of Silas Marner is not, then, that a man can access the female inside himself, as Alley claims, or that he can take over roles reserved for women, as Shillock argues. The grace that comes to Silas comes through his adoption of a domestic masculinity that was neither an uncontested hegemonic model nor a transgressive, countercultural statement. As Tosh argues, especially among the culturally influential Victorian bourgeoisie, men “acknowledged the claims of both home” and public, homosocial life: [W]e are imposing an artificial contradiction if we suppose that [this ‘double call”] transgressed an accepted principle of “separate spheres.” The point is rather that men operated at will in both spheres; that was their privilege.1

Silas can function in the domestic sphere, and given the beneficent effect fatherhood has upon his life, it is good that he eventually does so. While it may be said that the solitary Silas had partially abdicated his public position in that he avoided participating in the social experience of Raveloe, his total immersion in business—in his work and its recompense—might seem to satisfy the demands of masculine identity. But as the novel ultimately shows, satisfying engagement in the intimate domestic business of raising a child can rescue a man who has lost himself, becoming merely an embodiment of his job. In the first decades of the Twenty-First Century, many of the social conditions that supported Victorian domesticity have been drained of their potency. The idea that women should have access to education and fulfilling work is certainly no longer a radical position, even if it is not accepted as a universal truth. The neo-liberalism that provides ideological support for globalization and market-governed economies is not structured overtly to reward maleness in the market. Sociologist R. W. Connell explains, “Neo-liberalism is rhetorically gender-neutral. The individual has no gender, and the market delivers advantage to the smartest entrepreneur, not to men or women as such.”1 Within this dominant ideology, then, there is no sense that the public sphere is reserved for men, nor that the home is particularly associated with (though not reserved for) women. As Mary Poovey points out: “Only as long as [women’s] domestic labor was rhetorically distinguished from paid labor could the illusion persist that there were separate spheres, that there was an antidote to the alienation of the marketplace, . . . .”1 Freedom from the constraints of domestic ideology is not merely appealing but essential for any society that values women as individuals rather than as relational creatures who take their satisfaction from self-sacrifice for the benefit of their domestic

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partners and children. But Poovey introduces a disturbing by-product of the demolition of separate gendered spheres: in a time when the alienation of the marketplace is a brutal reality for both men and women, is there really now no antidote to be had? Barry’s novel Jennifer Government seems to posit a domestic recuperation that, like Silas Marner’s, need not be centered on the Angel of the Hearth but that can call upon the child to lead a man (or woman) “away from threatening destruction” (Eliot, 150). Far from introducing a bucolic setting like Silas Marner’s nostalgically presented pre-industrial recent past, Jennifer Government ratchets up the dislocation and hostility of modern market economies from its very first pages. In an attempt to orient his readers to the world of his text, Barry includes a map keyed to show the prevailing global economic alliances: the United States Federated Economic Blocs, the Non-United States Federated Blocs (including the European Union: “Here Be Tariffs”), and the Fragmented Markets. Barry’s riff on the age of exploration highlights the sense of both free-wheeling market domination (by the United States) and domination of everything else by the market. The first of several divergent plot threads introduces Hack Nike, a low-level corporate hack, for lack of a better term, who, despite the fact that he has done nothing to distinguish himself in his current position, is offered the chance of a lifetime to move into a coveted position in marketing. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t read the fine print on his new contract, which calls for him to create demand for a new wave of Nike sneakers by making them seem more popular and desirable than they are. As his new supervisor (John Nike, Guerilla Marketing) explains it, the plan is this: “We take out ten customers, make it look like ghetto kids, and we’ve got street cred coming out our asses. I bet we shift our inventory within twenty-four hours.” Hack’s mission, he learns, is to “execute” this plan (5-6). As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that John Nike has reason to be blasé about consequences in an Economic Bloc where corporations have more power, more influence, and infinitely more funding than the government that barely attempts to reign in their grossest excesses. The weakness of government regulation and intervention surely plays a role in developing and supporting capitalizm,1 in the novel, but the leading contributors are the incredibly strong consumption drive and sense of personal investment in products. With no taxes, students go to schools sponsored by corporations and learn to be true not to their school, but to a product line (247). Kids see $2500 sneakers as “investments” (18-19). They scoff at a teacher’s references to “critical thinking” and “social justice” (7, 17). In this case, the child is definitely father to the man or woman. Most of the novel’s adults are just as invested in the system as the

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children are learning to be. In fact, D. Harlan Wilson identifies this willing, even ecstatic, buy-in to the system as key to the world that Barry has created. According to Wilson, in Jennifer Government “there is a fervent, conscious desire to be constructed by capitalist technologies on a social and moral level.”1 In acquiring her product-code tattoo, the title character branded herself, literally and figuratively, identifying herself with a product she once marketed, the Malibu Barbie (314). Although Jennifer has moved on from marketing into government, her rather permanent demonstration of brand loyalty means that she still has to cope with old friends and co-workers calling her “Barbie Doll” (269, 314). Whether she likes it or not in retrospect, Jennifer actively constructed a self that was a celebration of market domination and plastic irrelevancy. The problem for Jennifer and the other characters in Jennifer Government is, of course, how to exist in the United States Federated Bloc without ceding one’s identity to the technologies of capitalizm. The novel offers one alternative in a radical protest group that Hack eventually joins, a group that stages small-scale attacks, disruptive but not dangerous, on corporations. For a time, Hack seems to be flourishing in his new anticorporate role (183). But as Purnima Bose argues, the novel never really endorses this kind of activism as a productive response to the degradations of life in a neo-liberal, late-capitalist system.1 Certainly, it doesn’t seem to make Hack a happier in the long run, and, as his girlfriend notes, it doesn’t seem to improve his character, either. In an uncomfortable (and unsuccessful) confrontation, she urges him to give up a planned attack on Nike Town, saying, “Hack, I don’t think this is making you a good person. . . . You used to be . . . nicer. More generous” (256-57). According to Claire, at least, there is a possibility for individual improvement, to become (or be remade) into a “good person,” but that is not happening for Hack through his guerilla protests. Jennifer, though, despite the physical reminder of her corporate successes, seems to have found her niche as a government agent, trying to keep the worst corporate offenders in check and to help regular citizens when she can (meaning when they, or she, can arrange to finance government interventions in this taxless system). We aren’t told a lot about her transformation, about the years between her Mattel heyday and the action of the story. We know that she “went to war” with John Nike, later the architect of the shooting-consumers marketing campaign, and that she quit her marketing job (148). But Jennifer herself gives us a simple, straightforward account of what must have been a monumental change: “As soon as I discovered I was pregnant, I knew that I wasn’t giving up my baby. It sounds stupid, but it changes your life. It makes you realize

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who you are” (148). Importantly, Jennifer does not refer in this passage to her new job, her work against not just John and the bounty of corporate creeps who buy into his vision of humanity: “We’re all cogs in wealthcreation machines,” John opines. “That’s all” (222). She just refuses to accept that she is a cog or a Barbie doll. She is Jennifer Government. And she credits impending motherhood with helping her learn her identity. If pregnancy is the prerequisite for self-actualization, though, a significant portion of the population will be necessarily excluded. And with John as an example of biological fatherhood, the text makes clear that impregnating someone does not necessarily have a humanizing effect. The same man who proudly proclaimed himself a “cog” vehemently rejects redefinition based on his genetic transfer: “I never wanted a kid. You wanted it, and I couldn’t stop you. . . . So, fine, you had a kid. But don’t think you can turn me into a father” (286). “Father” is an identity that seems incompatible with the one that John has developed for himself, which, to use Wilson’s terms, is grounded in “capitalist technologies on a social and moral level.” Moreover, John’s rejection of this identity renders him the sine qua non of a new neo-liberalist masculinity, as identified by Connell: [T]he rise of new groups of managers and owners to unprecedented global power is associated with new patterns of business masculinity and, by implication, new patterns of hegemony in gender relations. For instance, this type of entrepreneurialism, increasingly detached from local gender orders, does not valorize the family or the husband/father position for men.1

To admit the title of “Father” would be to undo the capitalist power-based identity of John Nike. Or of Buy Mitsui. Buy’s history suggests that even if he is not the sociopath that John is, he has also consciously sought self-definition through the technologies of capitalism. He has become Buy Mitsui—an imperative and an identity— leaving quasi-socialist France for Australia, a part of the United States Federated Economic Bloc, where he can sell Mitsui free of government regulations (such as insider-trading prohibitions) and taxes (14-15). His own note on his cubicle wall reminds him that “SUCCESS = 500 CALLS PER DAY” (14). It is worth noting that the definition of success that he provides for himself is rooted not in happiness or even in production, but rather in labor measured by volume. However, he has been rewarded for this work with an excellent salary (15). Unlike Hack, Buy seems to be one of the talented or lucky individuals for whom this system is working. He is not the entrepreneur that Connell referred to, the one that the system is

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built to reward, but rather a white-collar worker within a corporate structure. He has been rewarded by the corporation, however, for the entrepreneurial flair he brings to his job. But when we are first introduced to Buy, he is having a panic attack brought on by anxiety over sales quotas and deadlines. Precisely because he repeats self-affirming messages into his mirror—“I am a great person. Today is a great day.”—readers are immediately aware that he does not have faith that he is a great person, nor that today will be a great day (13). Truths like those, if sincerely felt, do not need to be taped to the mirror as reminders. Buy functions as a reminder, in a way, of how easily even the successful businessman can find himself at sea in the neo-liberal world of transnational corporate life. Lauren Langman describes the ways in which globalization and what she calls the automation of “techno-capital” have resulted in a redistribution of wealth that has disadvantaged the majority, and which has resulted in the disenfranchisement of particularly younger and less-skilled workers. However, she also argues that “many people, even in more secure white-collar jobs, often feel anger and resentment, trapped by the rules, regulations, and demands of corporate life.”1 Buy’s position may not be secure, but it is a skilled, white-collar job with exceptional remuneration. Still, even when he miraculously makes his quota, ensuring that he won’t be let go this quarter, his relief is fleeting. The catalyst of his burnout, ironically, is not failure, but success, or its results. When Buy makes his quota, he is exhausted and wants to go home, but what he wants does not govern his actions. The mall “call[s] out to him,” and he decides to reward himself in the only way he can imagine: through acquisition of goods. He arrives at the mall, thinking “He deserved something to celebrate after today, didn’t he? He deserved something really expensive” (26). He needs nothing and wants only sleep, but stands in the mall trying to decide which product he “deserves” based on his success. In the mall, though, an initially casual encounter with a young girl, Hayley McDonalds, signals a change in his orientation. Hayley is desperate for a pair of the new Nike Mercury sneakers (two if she can get them, since she’s convinced they will be a brilliant investment) that are about to become available at the mall’s Nike Town (18-19, 26). Lacking any enthusiasm for a purchase of his own, Buy celebrates his success by giving Haley $5000 to buy the shoes. As Hayley accepts his gift, Buy feels “elated, better than he had in months” (27). Better than he will for a long time after Hayley takes his money to Nike Town to buy her Mercury sneakers and is shot in the guerilla marketing scheme, surviving only long enough for Buy to reach her side and try desperately to save her life (34).

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After his brief and tragic connection with young Hayley, Buy loses his motivation to work, which creates a profound disruption in his sense of self. Despite the fact that success for Buy is measured in phone calls, he finds that he does not want to answer its ring, much less place calls (7980). He diagnoses his own burnout, and the implications of it for someone with his value system, thinking “It was a terrifying idea, that you could lose the motivation to keep going. That everything that used to define and sustain you could collapse into meaninglessness” (79). He quickly spirals down into a botched suicide attempt, unsuccessful because he doesn’t know how to use a gun, and perhaps because he may really not want to kill himself but has no immediate idea of how to rebuild himself, either. In an attempt either to learn how to use a gun or find a reason not to use one, Buy reaches out to the one person he knows who both handles firearms and defines herself outside of the corporate values that have failed to sustain him: Jennifer Government (136). This move, the connection that Buy begins to create with Jennifer, leads Bose to dismiss Buy’s regeneration as a tired exploitation of the heteronormative love-plot that fails to offer any new resistance to the domination of neo-liberal ideology.1 I disagree. It’s true that Buy and Jennifer make love when she comes to prevent his suicide (170), and that the novel’s happy ending includes Buy and Jennifer in a hug (315). But in between—in the gap between survival and new life—the two have very little contact. On the night of what would have been their first date, Jennifer is forced to leave the continent to pursue John Nike, leaving her young daughter, Kate, with Buy in her absence. It is Kate who spends the second half of the novel with Buy, helping him to discover who he can be if he isn’t Buy Mitsui, stockbroker, anymore. And that hug at the end of the novel includes three people: Buy, Jennifer, and Kate. Contrary to Bose’s reading, this is not a conventional love-plot. Rather, it is a domestic recuperation. The displacement of lover for child happens abruptly and early in Buy’s recovery, but it seems one that he is immediately prepared for. When Jennifer leaves him at her apartment to pick up Kate for school, his impulses are domestic—broody, almost. By the time Jennifer and Kate return, Buy has drawn on his French (romantic, domestic, anti-capitalist) roots to raid their kitchen and concoct dinner. Jennifer had told him “to amuse himself,” and now he has “three pots bubbling on the stove top and a dish in the oven” (178). Jennifer breaks the news that she must leave post haste, never even tasting the casserole. What had begun, perhaps, as a romantic gesture, has turned out to be an element of child care. Buy and Kate eat the meal that he has prepared, and while they do, he teaches her

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about the food and language of France. When Kate becomes teary because her mom has left, he is initially stumped as to what to do. “What did he know about kids?” he thinks. “Nothing. . . . [He] didn’t know what to do. Then she reached out for him, and he hugged her. Her tiny arms felt strange around his neck. Strange and nice. He stroked her hair” (181). Importantly, when he is awkward and unable to find the right words, Kate takes charge by reaching for him, inarticulately leading him to herself, but also to human contact and to the part of himself that enjoys this domestic exchange. Over the course Jennifer’s absence, Buy learns the role of father and begins to reinvent himself. He takes Kate to school, accepting her chiding when he makes an obscene gesture at another driver in heavy traffic. When she tells him that his action was “rude,” he responds, “I know . . . I’m sorry,” and the narrator describes him as “shamed” by the experience. A moment later, after Kate accepts parental advise on when she should eat and (shyly) a goodbye kiss on the cheek, Buy is confronts the same stimulus—a tooting horn—that had earlier provoked him. This time, not only does he refrain from responding aggressively, the narrator reports that “He didn’t feel irritated at all” (225). Kate’s instruction, but also her existence in his life and the new sense of himself it provides, begins to change not only Buy’s actions, but also his temperament. Buy takes on multiple new parental tasks: feeding Kate, transporting her, talking with her about the toys that she likes (248) and what she learns in school (247, 262). But the most remarkable changes that occur in Buy’s life are transformational changes within himself. Buy’s emotional, affective, and even public, business lives are all recalibrated by his interactions with Kate. An interaction with his superior at work, one that once would have caused a panic attack or full-blown breakdown, now leads him to a personal discovery: “Everyone else is breaking their backs for this company, Buy. Maybe you don’t care about that. But we won’t carry you forever. Unless you start producing, we will replace you. So if you need something to care about, care about that.” “I have something to care about,” Buy said. “Really.” He glanced at his watch. Kate was out of school in a couple of hours. He had promised to pick her up. (227)

Performing fatherly duties occupies Buy, claiming his attention even when he is in the business world. His burnout meant that he wasn’t productive at work, and it is not clear that his new domestic ties can be compatible with the kind of CALLS=SUCCESS ethic that he had previously held, either.

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Connell’s assessment of late capitalist business would suggest that the two are in conflict. She argues, “Increasingly the test of membership in the hegemonic group is the willingness to discard other ties and generate a particular kind of performance—the life-denying labour of entrepreneurial management.”1 Certainly the novel’s anti-father, John Nike, understands this to be the case, that capitalizm is all-demanding and all-consuming. “I’m a businessman,” he declares. “That’s all. I just want to do business” (222). Buy may not be able to reconcile corporate work with his new domestic masculinity. (He moves from stockbroker into a new position at Mitsui after his burnout, but at the end of the novel it remains unclear whether this new position will be satisfying or whether he will succeed in it.) But Kate has invited him to take on a new identity that doesn’t depend on 500 calls a day, one that she formalizes by inviting him to Parent Day at her school (262). Whether he is a broker or a liaison, or even out of work and merely Buy (as opposed to Buy Mitsui), he is now, at least in some surrogate, effective way, a father. Unlike Silas Marner, which is largely concerned with character, Jennifer Government is most concerned with action, and so the plotlines crash together in the end in shootouts and arrests. With Jennifer half a world away, Buy is pulled into heroic duty. When Kate is kidnapped, he is forced to go rescue her at the place he fears most in the world: Nike Town. Having once held a dying girl in exactly that store, the prospect of pursuing kidnappers there makes him nauseous (304). But despite being shot in the arm by one of the kidnappers, he perseveres into his final conflict with—another John Nike. As if to emphasize that capitalizm will continue to produce sociopaths in the same mold, Kate’s kidnapper shares the same name as the man who planned the first Nike Town attack, who now is halfway across the globe trying to defeat the government. Buy confronts John Nike almost unobtrusively, saying “Excuse me,” (which Kate definitely could not categorize as rude). When John demands, “What the hell do you want?” Buy responds, “Forgiveness,” and throws his arms around the startled abductor (310). Buy saves Kate, but saves her with a kind of a hug that nevertheless ends with the corporate guerilla impaled on the Nike swoosh logo-shaped door handle. While Jennifer fights to save the world from one John Nike, Buy is at the mall, saving her family—and now apparently his family and so himself—from another. Silas Marner and Jennifer Government are very different novels from heterogenous cultural moments, but they may finally have very similar purposes: to remind us that being defined by one’s contributions to the economy is life-denying, and that an antidote to the self-abnegation offered or demanded by business can be found in domestic life. Referring

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to Davidoff and Hall’s work, but also illuminating the plots of both of these novels, Tosh offers this assessment: “We are reminded that pleasure in children has always been a reason for having them, and that love in action (as well as in words) is no respecter of the sexes.”1 Especially in difficult, dislocating, alienating economic systems, work and business can function to isolate men even from their communities and even from their best, most human selves. And yet they can be led away from that danger, and, as Eliot notes, it may be a child that leads them (150). The gift of fatherhood is not only the child, but the “love in action,” the love and the action that can renew the spirits of business-men.

Works Cited Alley, Henry. “Silas Marner and the Balance of Male and Female.” Victorians Institute Journal 16 (1988): 65-73. Altick, Richard D. Victorian People and Ideas. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. Barry, Max. Jennifer Government. New York: Random House/Vintage, 2003. Bose, Purnima. “Max Barry’s Jennifer Government and NationStates: Neoliberalism and the Cultural Public Sphere.” Acta Scientarum: Language and Culture 30 (Jan-June 2008): 11-18. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850. Rev. ed. London: Routledge, 2002. Eliot, George. Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe. 1861. Reprint, New York: Random House/The Modern Library, 2001. Hall, Catherine. White, Male, and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Langman, Lauren. “Globalization, Alienation, and Identity: A Critical Approach.” The Evolution of Alienation: Trauma, Promise, and the Millennium, edited by Lauren Langman and Devorah KalekinFishman, 179-2000. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. 179-200. Novy, Marianne. “Adoption in Silas Marner and Daniel Deronda.” In Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture, edited by Marianne Novy, 35-56. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Nunokawa, Jeff. “The Miser’s Two Bodies: Silas Marner and the Sexual Possibilities of the Commodity.” In New Casebooks: The Mill on the

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Floss and Silas Marner, edited by Nahem Yousaf and Andrew Maunder, 163-87. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Shillock, Larry T. “Hoarding Motherhood in Silas Marner.” Philological Papers 52 (2005): 33-44. Tosh, John. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. —. Manliness and Masculinites in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire. Harlow, United Kingdom: Pearson/Longman, 2005. Wilson, D. Harlan. Technologized Desire: Selfhood and the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction. Hyattsville, Maryland: Guide Dog Books, 2009.

CONTRIBUTORS

Todd A. Borlik is an assistant Professor at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, where he teaches Shakespeare. His works has appeared in publications such as The Shakespeare Bulletin, The Shakespeare Newsletter, Early Theatre, Literature and Film Quarterly, and Borrowers and Lenders. Currently, he is preparing a book on early modern ecocriticism, which will be published by Routledge in 2010. Elaine Brousseau is a Special Lecturer of English at Providence College. She has given conference presentations on American women writers, on women's suffrage drama, and on performances of Othello and Richard III. She has published on political theater and modern drama and is working on a book on U.S. productions of Shakespeare in the mid-nineteenth century. Luca Caddia is an independent scholar from Rome, Italy. He received his doctorate in 2008 from the University of Rome "La Sapienza". His dissertation deals with the relationship between character and career in Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels. In the Academic Year 2009-10 he obtained a residential fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art and a Paul Mellon Grant for research on practices of collecting in Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's painting. Carrie Conners is an Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College of the City University of New York. In 2010 she earned her PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she wrote a dissertation focusing on politics, humor, and poetic genre in recent American poetry. Her poetry has appeared in DMQ Review, Tar Wolf Review, and California Quarterly. Laura Faulk is currently a PhD student at Louisiana State University. She is interested in nineteenth-century British depictions of female illness, pregnancy, and nursing.

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Blaine Greteman is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He has published scholarly articles in English Literary History, College Literature, and Renaissance Quarterly and regularly writes on business and the environment for popular magazines including TIME and Ode. He is currently working on a book-length history of childhood in literature. Melanie Ann Hanson, a graduate of SDSU in California (BA) and UNLV in Nevada (MA, PhD), is celebrating her 34th year of teaching in secondary and post-secondary settings. Melanie Hanson’s most recent publication is the chapter “Spirit Voices – The Fantastical Journey of Omakayas in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence” in The Intersection of Fantasy and Native America: From H.P. Lovecraft to Leslie Marmon Silko, edited by Amy H. Sturgis and David D. Oberhelman and published by Mythopoeic Press. At present, Melanie Hanson is working on her second book, an application of the domestic panopticon to adolescent novels published in Victorian England. The works of Jennie Chappell, Emma E. Hornibrook, and Bessie Marchant will be the focus of the project. Polina Kroik is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation is entitled Producing Modern Girls: Gender and Work in American Literature and Film, 1900-1960. She has presented her work at the ALA, PAMLA, and the NeMLA. Devon McDonald is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. He has taught courses in composition, British literature, and gender studies and is currently completing a dissertation on propaganda and the history of masculinity in 20th century British literature. Ingrid Ranum is an Associate Professor in the departments of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Gonzaga University. Most of her scholarship focuses on constructions of gender in Victorian literature. She has recently published articles on Matthew Arnold and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

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Rekha Rosha is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Wake Forest University where she teaches courses in American literature. Her research focuses on American literature and economic history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Her recent essay on Benjamin Franklin and racial accounting will appear next year in Representations of Capital (Palgrave/Macmillan). Her current book-length project "Literary Accounting and the Emotional Life of Capital, from the Revolutionary War to the Great Crash of 1929" traces interrelated notions of fiscal and moral accounting in six canonical works through the trope of regulative affect—emotions of guilt, blame, and shame—to argue that the accountability plot binds a community to circumscribe its affective limits. Christopher Schaberg is an assistant professor of English at Loyola University in New Orleans, where he specializes in contemporary literature and critical theory. Schaberg's research focuses on narratives of air travel and on the aesthetics of airports. David Simmons is currently employed as a lecturer in American Literature, Film and Television Studies at the University of Northampton. He has published extensively in the areas of American Literature and Media, including a monograph entitled The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Heller to Vonnegut (Palgrave, 2008) and an edited collection: New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut (Palgrave, 2009). David is currently co-editing (with Nicola Allen) a collection of essays that are concerned with re-evaluating the contemporary novel entitled Reassessing the Contemporary Canon: From Joseph Conrad to Zadie Smith for publication in 2010. Zachary Snider, PhD. has career multiple personality disorder after working simultaneously as a university professor and an entertainment journalist. The content of his disparate publications and the subjects he teaches include: postmodern fiction; film, television and media theory; psychoanalytic theory; creative writing; pedagogical and composition theory; among others. Zachary is an assistant professor at Manhattan College and also teaches writing courses at New York University. He is in the process of completing his first novel. Jessica S. Stock is a Ph.D. candidate from Stony Brook University where she wrote her dissertation on Jewish masculinity and nationalism. Her interests include the Victorian and Modernist novel, Postcolonial theory, and Jewish studies.

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April Toadvine received her PhD from Purdue in 2007 and is currently an Assistant Professor at St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Indiana. Her research interests include Victorian advertising, newspapers, and the novel. Her next project involves educational advertising through classified advertisements.