Salon | Cents and sensibility, page 3

T A B L E+T A L K
What books have changed your life? Post your thoughts in the Book area of Table Talk.

A complete list of Salon's Money Week coverage

R E C E N T L Y
The role model syndrome
By Jake Lamar
(10/21/97)
From fisting to Flaubert
By Daniel Reitz
(10/15/97)
Satan goes to Harvard
By Mary Gaitskill
(10/13/97)
Why did they ever ban a book this bad?
By Garrison Keillor
(10/13/97)
Declaration of independence
By Joyce Carol Oates
(09/29/97)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Browse the
BOOKS ARCHIVE

spacer
A LITERARY HISTORY OF MONEY | PAGE 3 OF 4
For all the brilliance and vehemence of its rhetoric, a work like "Timon" appears almost sentimental when compared to a work like Daniel Defoe's "Moll Flanders" (1722). A naturalist before his time, Defoe simply presents his all-too-human heroine, reserving judgment and even seeming to approve as she goes about her mercantile business of being a whore, thief and wife. Moll concerns herself with the minutiae of her finances in a way almost unprecedented in serious literature: She worries about whether to put her money in a bank, wishes she had a financial advisor, haggles over the prices of her stolen goods and is constantly counting up her worth. "Moll Flanders" is one of the first works to reveal the pathos and fatality of numbers: The guineas in Moll's purse play the role formerly taken by God, or Fate. And Defoe relates it all with an amoral gusto that is disturbingly modern.
But money need not appear onstage to call the shots -- as witness Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" (1813). Austen's masterpiece is one of the most money-driven novels ever written. The fact that the subject is treated with such discretion only increases our happy awareness that large bags of loot are stashed under the floorboards. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Austen's bantering opening introduces the economic element from the outset. Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters are respectable, but not rich, and Darcy is loaded: "10,000 pounds a year" is a mantra repeated through the novel. And there is no other way for Elizabeth to maintain even her modest place in the world, except by marrying "wisely."
Economic fatality and emotional need dance an intricate minuet: Should Elizabeth marry the repulsive Mr. Collins, thus ensuring herself a middle-class existence, or follow the dictates of her heart and hold out? She holds out and, of course, wins the proud Darcy, who takes his place as one of the first in the grand tradition of wish-fulfilling heroes in women's novels -- dark, dangerous and, by the way, rich men who turn out to be paragons of every excellence. The reader, and Elizabeth, get to have their self-righteous cake and eat their 10,000 pounds too. Elizabeth is a model of integrity, but she gets the rich man anyway and his yummy estate, Pemberley. (Austen, however, is too honest a writer to remain completely silent on the allure of wealth. It is a mark of her emancipated modernity that she allows Elizabeth, after she has viewed the rolling lawns of Pemberley, to muse, "At that moment she felt, that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!") "Pride and Prejudice" balances love and money as perfectly as any novel has ever done. It is the romantic middle-class utopia of cash, love paid in advance, no monthly payments.
But there is another side of the coin, and its ugly face peers out in the marriage of Elizabeth's best friend, Charlotte, to Mr. Collins. When writers as discreetly well-bred as Jane Austen don't say something, the silence is instructive -- and she is completely silent about the future prospects of the "happy" pair. "Charlotte herself was tolerably composed," Austen observes, placing herself in Charlotte's mind after their engagement is announced. "She had gained her point, and had time to consider of it. Her reflections were in general satisfactory. Mr. Collins to be sure was neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary. Still he would be her husband." And this attitude, which cannot be said to be exactly euphoric, represents Charlotte's romantic high point. Her later reflections seem less "satisfactory." Such is the fate of a plain woman of small fortune in 1800 who has chosen "the pleasantest preservation from want," marriage to an imbecile. The wolf of poverty can be seen baring his fangs before genteelly retreating beneath the tea-cozy.
For all her psychological modernity, however, in her decorum Austen seems to belong more to the 18th century than the 19th. She represents a last, pleasant escape from the new reality: Money has entered the building, but it is still possible to keep knitting. After her, however, comes the deluge. The modern view of money -- ironic, obsessive, eroticized, moving from the most austere rejection to the most cackling covetousness -- takes center stage in the great novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the works of Balzac, Dickens, Stendhal, James, Doestoevski, Wharton and the rest.
Money had far more power, more meaning, in the 19th century than it ever had before -- or would after. The novel is the middle-class art form par excellence, and the 19th century is the golden age of the novel because the middle class is in its most dynamic, dangerous and mobile phase -- its adolescence. Money is as unknown and talismanic in the novels of Balzac -- whose lust for power of all kinds is deliriously palpable -- as it ever was, or would be. In Balzac's world, money still possesses an aura of magic; you can use it to change your deepest identity, without -- as would now be the case -- revealing that identity to be a void. Dostoevski's novels, more schizoid than Balzac's or anyone else's, are torn between opposite urges: The gambler's wild, half-crazy passion for money is thrown up against an equally intense, equally doomed spirituality. In "The Idiot," the self-hating courtesan Nastasya Filipovna throws a bundle of 100,000 rubles into the fire and urges her money-grubbing suitor Ganya to pull it out with his fingers, as the tortured, asexual saint Prince Myshkin looks on -- and Dostoevski is all of them.
It is not surprising that the 19th century also inaugurates the great literature of crime. Crime is the ultimate short-circuiting of a system that is already out of control. Fascinated and repelled by wealth, writers like Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevski and Poe were equally fascinated by criminals, by those individuals who had truly made wealth their God and their Devil. Dostoevski's account of Raskolnikoff's hideously philosophical murder in "Crime and Punishment" -- is the life of the vile old pawnbroker worth the money he will get from her? -- remains the most intense confrontation of Christian and existential values ever written.
With the advent of naturalism, that science-obsessed, ashcan-digging school of bitter truths, and the simultaneous death throes of class, money lost its strangeness, its aura. It would be gilded one last time in perhaps the greatest novel ever written about money, Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," but its mystery was gone. Naturalism stripped money of its fetishized allure, revealing it to be an agent not just of hope but of defeat and destruction.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
N E X T+P A G E+| Money hits bottom