Pub Date : 2019-06-27DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190873455.003.0011
D. Baird
Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward, was the second most popular American novel of the nineteenth century after Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Bellamy imagines Boston in the year 2000. Equality prevails, while money and law have disappeared. This essay focuses on Bellamy’s account of how literature thrives in this society and shows that it is fundamentally flawed. First, to explain how literature is produced, Bellamy is forced to introduce a form of money into his society after all. Moreover, he has no way to explain why the logic that leads to the introduction of money in order to make literature possible does not apply to producing everything else a well-lived life requires. Second, the literature that Bellamy envisions suggests that his world is no utopia at all. It is instead a dull dystopian place in which neither literature nor art is likely to flourish.
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Pub Date : 2019-06-27DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190873455.003.0008
Alison L. LaCroix
The 1840s and 1850s witnessed the publication of three great “condition of England” novels: Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855). All three novels examine the consequences of the Industrial Revolution in England, and all are critical in their appraisal of its effects on individuals, society, and the national—and even the international—realm. All three focus on the world of commerce and manufacturing, but the realm of law is never far away. Yet there are differences: in Shirley, Brontë delves into the interior lives of two very different female protagonists, while Gaskell’s narratives are more concerned with economic and social injustice. Brontë set Shirley during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s, a period of British imperial struggle and ultimate triumph. Gaskell placed the action of Mary Barton a decade prior to its writing, but in North and South she depicted her current moment, with a consequent sharpening of her critique. This essay examines the novels’ treatment of a set of interconnected themes: commerce, law, and revolution, with reference to related questions of politics, gender, and time.
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Pub Date : 2019-06-27DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190873455.003.0010
M. Nussbaum
A surprising connection was recently discovered between the proper Victorian philosopher Henry Sidgwick, great Utilitarian theorist, and Walt Whitman. I explore the deep affinity between Utilitarianism, often mischaracterized as cold, obtuse, and economistic, and Whitman’s radical poetic humanism. The Utilitarian vision of the founders also sought a radical equality, aiming to increase the average utility of each individual, regardless of social status. Like Whitman’s poetry, its vision of human desire resisted the hypocritical hierarchies of conventional morality. Jeremy Bentham, Utilitarianism’s founder, criticized conventional morality by arguing that pleasures differed only in quantity rather than quality. He rejected the distinction between “higher” and “lower” pleasures as a screen behind which to condemn the behavior of others while validating one’s own desires. Yet where Utilitarian critique may seem obtuse or fail to provide a positive vision for human endeavor, it benefits from Whitman’s poetic vision of cosmic unity and democratic equality. Whitman’s poetry could recognize qualitative differences in political values without a return to hierarchy. Considering the affinity between these figures and their ideas may lead us to an economics informed by both utilitarian critical reason and a passionate, qualitative assessment of political values.
{"title":"Love from the Point of View of the Universe","authors":"M. Nussbaum","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190873455.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190873455.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"A surprising connection was recently discovered between the proper Victorian philosopher Henry Sidgwick, great Utilitarian theorist, and Walt Whitman. I explore the deep affinity between Utilitarianism, often mischaracterized as cold, obtuse, and economistic, and Whitman’s radical poetic humanism. The Utilitarian vision of the founders also sought a radical equality, aiming to increase the average utility of each individual, regardless of social status. Like Whitman’s poetry, its vision of human desire resisted the hypocritical hierarchies of conventional morality. Jeremy Bentham, Utilitarianism’s founder, criticized conventional morality by arguing that pleasures differed only in quantity rather than quality. He rejected the distinction between “higher” and “lower” pleasures as a screen behind which to condemn the behavior of others while validating one’s own desires. Yet where Utilitarian critique may seem obtuse or fail to provide a positive vision for human endeavor, it benefits from Whitman’s poetic vision of cosmic unity and democratic equality. Whitman’s poetry could recognize qualitative differences in political values without a return to hierarchy. Considering the affinity between these figures and their ideas may lead us to an economics informed by both utilitarian critical reason and a passionate, qualitative assessment of political values.","PeriodicalId":387376,"journal":{"name":"Power, Prose, and Purse","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131989341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-27DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190873455.003.0012
L. Weinrib
This essay explores Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 labor opera, The Cradle Will Rock, as an assault on legal legitimacy. Since its famous first production—a pared-down performance in which actors delivered their parts from the house, improvised when the WPA canceled the scheduled opening of the controversial project—critics have emphasized Cradle’s indebtedness to the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, to whom Blitzstein dedicated the work. Consistent with Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, Blitzstein distances the audience from Cradle’s characters, substituting rational understanding for unreflective empathy. Like Brecht, he employs this theatrical device to expose the cultural and economic underpinnings of familiar social practices, including capitalism. Imported to the US context, the Brechtian reimagining of theatrical conventions resonated with a corresponding attack on formal legal justice. At the height of the New Deal’s crisis of legal legitimacy, Cradle depicts a judicial system baldly beholden to wealth and property. The anti-union steel magnate at the show’s center bribes and manipulates journalists, professionals, and public officials to promote his concept of “liberty,” namely, freedom from organized labor. By amplifying the effects of economic interests on legal outcomes while undermining empathy with the characters who facilitate and legitimate repression, Cradle invites the audience to consider its own complicity in law’s injustice.
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Pub Date : 2019-06-27DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190873455.003.0005
M. Nussbaum
Freud said that Americans are immature because they channel their libido into moneymaking. In Babbitt (1922), Sinclair Lewis seems to agree. It is generally thought that his 1927 novel, Elmer Gantry, continues the critique, exposing American religiosity as itself fundamentally commercial. I argue that Lewis’s project is deeper and more complicated than the standard reading admits and that it derives ultimately from Dante’s idea of the aspirations and errors of love. (Dante is a favorite author of Lewis’s and figures in Babbitt as the one notable from the past who is conjured up in the Babbitts’ séance.) Novels that shock are often read crudely at first, and Lewis’s novels are no exception. I argue that Lewis ultimately agrees with Elmer’s sermon: love is indeed “the morning and the evening star.” As in Dante, so in Lewis: love can aspire, but it can also be deflected and stunted in many ways. Moneymaking is one form of stunting; excessive interest in sex is another (and a better one in Dante’s view, because it is closer to what really matters). And perhaps worst of all, it can be blinded by intellectual pride, a vice from which the agnostic novelist and former ministerial student was in no way free. The novel does criticize George Babbitt the avaricious, it does criticize Elmer Gantry the libidinous, but it reserves its deepest and saddest condemnation for the Lewis surrogate, Frank Shallard, who cannot find anything worthy of his love.
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Pub Date : 2019-06-27DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190873455.003.0015
D. Mccloskey
he puzzle is why poetry has so little contact with the business of ordinary life. Robert Frost is an exception, but even so ideological a poet as Auden refrains from being bleared with trade. Yeats in particular, a conservative, disdained trade, though urging poets to learn theirs. The very word “poetry,” of course, is from “thing made,” and the puzzle deepens. St. Thomas Aquinas had raised making by people to the dignity of God’s making, at least poetically. And yet. We have The Oxford Book of Love Poetry and The Oxford Book of the Sea, with battles and botanical observations (“Nothing gold can stay”), and yet the economy, even after the invention of economics by the Scots in the eighteenth century, is set aside. It has left poets and their readers in law and literature and politics proud to be thus ignorant. The sacred and the profane in fact are entangled.
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Pub Date : 2019-06-27DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190873455.003.0007
S. Datta‐Barua, J. Masur
Numerous characters in Austen’s novels have commissions in the army or militia, and several central characters enlist in the navy. There was an important distinction between these two services. Officers in the army and militia were paid wages. Sailors, on the other hand, were entitled not just to wages but also to a share in the value of any “prizes” that they captured at sea. We theorize that this prize system existed because naval officers and crew needed to be given equity shares in their endeavors in order to create incentives for aggressive action. This distinction between how soldiers and sailors were paid has a profound effect on the development of Austen’s characters. The army is a force for the status quo. The navy, on the other hand, is an avenue for true social advancement. Austen also uses the choice between services to show the character of the individuals who enlist.
{"title":"Wealth and Warfare in the Novels of Jane Austen","authors":"S. Datta‐Barua, J. Masur","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190873455.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190873455.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Numerous characters in Austen’s novels have commissions in the army or militia, and several central characters enlist in the navy. There was an important distinction between these two services. Officers in the army and militia were paid wages. Sailors, on the other hand, were entitled not just to wages but also to a share in the value of any “prizes” that they captured at sea. We theorize that this prize system existed because naval officers and crew needed to be given equity shares in their endeavors in order to create incentives for aggressive action. This distinction between how soldiers and sailors were paid has a profound effect on the development of Austen’s characters. The army is a force for the status quo. The navy, on the other hand, is an avenue for true social advancement. Austen also uses the choice between services to show the character of the individuals who enlist.","PeriodicalId":387376,"journal":{"name":"Power, Prose, and Purse","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114627039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-06-27DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190873455.003.0014
Richard Mcadams
Economic success and failure are always, to some degree, a matter of luck. The degree of randomness and luck involved in economic outcomes is, for most people, relevant to their support for schemes of social insurance. But a substantial amount of psychology research suggests that Westerners, especially Americans, systematically and significantly underestimate the role of luck in economic outcomes. Just world theory suggests that people are motivated to interpret good and bad outcomes in the world as more merited or deserved than they actually are. With this social science perspective, I interpret John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The novel is most obviously a story about the struggle of labor in a capitalist world, about which much has been written. But the story was provocative and subversive in another way: focused relentlessly on luck, it strongly counters the tendency to underestimate the role of luck in economic outcomes. Contrary to conventional storytelling, as well as the reactionary counter-novels it spawned, hard work and moral decency are not rewarded.
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Pub Date : 2019-06-27DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190873455.003.0006
J. Driver
This chapter juxtaposes the tales of two ambitious men, both born in the American West, who moved east to New York in an effort to make names for themselves during the 1920s. The ambitions of Jay Gatsby—as recounted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—and William O. Douglas—as recounted in his autobiography, Go East, Young Man—led the two men in very different directions. Where Gatsby turned to lawlessness, Douglas instead turned to law. The distinct journeys and distinct fates that Gatsby and Douglas experience yield insight into the significance of class within the United States, and also offer significant complications of the American Dream.
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Pub Date : 2019-06-27DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190873455.003.0002
S. Blumenthal
Taking Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857) as a point of departure, this essay explores the perils of trusting too much or too little in the representations of strangers in a burgeoning capitalist society. It attends in particular to the “natural struggle between charity and prudence” that was exhibited not only by fictional passengers on the steamboat Fidèle but also by their real-life counterparts in nineteenth-century American courtrooms, where alleged con men and women were more than occasionally called to account for their questionable moneymaking ventures. While many of the era’s imaginative writers figured the law and its enforcers as marginal and ill equipped to meet the challenges posed by fraudsters, contemporary court records tell a different story, revealing the ways members of the bench and bar endeavored to police the ambiguous borderlands between capitalism and crime.
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