Finance, Fiction, and Loss

Abstract

Two new books argue that fictional depictions of loss reveal how eighteenth-century Britons conceived personhood, agency, and wealth. Technically intricate yet pristinely written, Nicole Mansfield Wright's Defending Privilege and Katherine Binhammer's Downward Mobility probe the novel's formal mechanics to examine the stories we tell about law and finance, respectively. Wright claims that by scripting private conversations and interior monologues, fiction can teach us how “foundational principles of societal obligation took hold in the eighteenth century and became entrenched.” Binhammer wagers that narrative's insistence upon “meaningful connection” can show the lie to the epistemological shell game by which “financialization comes to appear as commonsense” and growth economies remain desirable despite their social debris and ecological fallout. Both Wright and Binhammer assert the relevance of literary studies to the present by centering interpretive reading as a political practice for assembling broader coalitions against the “specter of authoritarianism” (Wright) and reimagining what “it might mean to share resources in more equitable and sustainable ways” (Binhammer).Defending Privilege examines a raft of conservative novels that perceive the British legal system as a threat to hereditary advantage. Where critics often focus on writing that flatters what they believe to be their own democratic values, Wright salvages a “neglected inheritance” that defies the supposition that literature unvaryingly seeks equality among citizens and justice for the oppressed. Her readings of Tobias Smollett, Charlotte Turner Smith, Walter Scott, and a crew of slavery apologists find authors floundering to “justify traditional social hierarchies despite progressive cultural headwinds.” These fictions preserve privilege by casting the privileged as victims of arbitrary justices, frivolous litigants, distasteful arrivistes, shameless frauds, and dishonest witnesses. Wright demonstrates how the rising novel enabled conservative authors to entice readers with “nostalgic fantasies of a continuation of rigid social hierarchy” by first promising them “an access portal into legal systems that were bewildering and opaque.” And yet, as Defending Privilege's careful readings bear out, these covert ideological projects undermined their reactionary claims through their self-reflexive, polyvocal forms. The fictions that ostensibly defended privilege often sabotaged it by inadvertently advancing the very egalitarian claims their authors sought to discredit.In chapter 1, Wright argues that Smollett's understudied novels, Ferdinand Count Fathom and Sir Launcelot Greaves, and little-known stage comedy, The Reprisal, illustrate the “juridical limbo in which travelers, noncitizens, and other outsiders become marooned on entering alien jurisdictions.” To safeguard the rights of mobile aristocrats, Smollett champions what Wright calls a “flexibility of affinity” as a condition of legal access that protects privileged interlopers from the caprices of parochial rule and hostile jurisdictions. Communities are just, Smollett implies, to the extent that they redefine themselves to accommodate worthy visitors. But as Wright shows, plots that hinge on pliable justices and ad hoc identity performances threaten to undermine privilege by casting “doubt on the belief that we can reliably differentiate between those who deserve access to the legal system,” and those who don't. We learn, in chapter 2, that Charlotte Smith adapted the sentimental romance into an instrument of conservative legal critique by writing marriage plots that compel sympathy for the plight of women struggling to restore dissipated estates. Where students of eighteenth-century poetry may associate Smith with her humanitarian embrace of persecuted foreigners in The Emigrants, her reworking of the French and German pitaval form to anthologize gentry grievance and her novel Marchmont (1796) espouse intolerance toward the “the economic elevation of class interlopers.”Wright, in chapter 3, reads Walter Scott's novel in letters, Redgauntlet (1824), as a “reflection on the continuum between advocacy and authoritarian control of those who cannot speak for themselves.” Wright argues that Scott revives the epistolary mode, which had grown unfashionable by the 1820s, to suggest that “the voices of the lowly ought to be embedded in, and contained by, the authorized expression of the educated.” Attorneys enable poor litigants to obtain justice at the cost of modulating their complaints, thereby preventing underclass resentment from destabilizing “traditional social hierarchy.” Wright claims that Redgauntlet's epistolary form alerts readers to this coercive bargain and to the inequities governing a professionalized advocacy system under which certain people speak for others. Chapter 4 covers two proslavery novels, Cynric Williams's Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827) and the anonymous Marly: Or, a Planter's Life in Jamaica (1828), which attempt to disqualify black slaves from testifying against Caribbean planters. At a time when West Indian legislators debated whether slaves could bear sworn witness against whites, these works endow their African characters with a sophisticated affective repertoire of “prevarication or evasive silence,” to imply a “conniving, duplicitous” population over whom “whites would need to keep a firm upper hand.” However, like other reactionary works, proslavery fictions tend to defeat themselves, in this case by portraying “some blacks as more rational and emotionally mature than whites, calling into question the fundamental justification for slavery.”Wright's blow-by-blow account of backfiring conservative experiments contributes to a wider disciplinary project of dismantling a mythological eighteenth century characterized by a “driving desire for equality for all,” a historical fiction ardently retold by such disparate authors and orators as Steven Pinker, David Cameron, and Ronald Reagan. By roving beyond the canon's catchment, Defending Privilege returns a more complicated picture of Enlightenment jurisprudence, one characterized by contradiction, confusion, and surprising overlaps between humanitarian and conservative expression. This picture, Wright persuasively demonstrates, equips us to debunk the spurious pretexts under which an idealized eighteenth century is invoked to legitimate demagoguery today.Eighteenth-century ideological inheritance is just as urgently at stake in Binhammer's Downward Mobility, a nuanced and painstakingly researched study of economic diminution that could capably serve as a long history of the 2008 financial crisis. Binhammer argues that money obtains narrative form when it graduates from metal coin into paper currency and speculative capital, a transformation that followed the founding of the Bank of England, the creation of insurance, and the maturation of stock markets. Undertaking a structural analysis of “money's novelization,” Binhammer shows how sentimental fiction's discrete conventions “manage the temporal and structural contradictions behind capital's logic of infinite and compounding growth.” Her readings advance Frances Burney, Oliver Goldsmith, Sarah Scott, and Frances Brooke not merely as witnesses to a commercial economy reconstituting itself to wring profit from exchange, but also as plotters of capital whose feats of narrative invention render sentimental stories worthy objects of financial criticism.In chapter 1, Binhammer describes debt as an endlessly reassignable “cost of doing business” rather than a moral problem or index of suffering. She coins the phrase “unfriended debt” to describe the process by which “wealth accumulates by estranging the costs of meeting our social obligations to one another.” She also describes the severing of fiscal responsibility from social duty by studying two responses to the failure of bankruptcy laws to relieve the insolvent poor. The liberal Society for the Discharge and Relief of Persons Imprisoned for Small Debts forgave the debts of those who lacked the large liabilities necessary to qualify as bankrupts and could attest their moral worthiness via petition. The radical James Stephen, meanwhile, decried altogether the custom by which “poor debtors are carrying the entire risk of economic growth,” thus becoming the first “debt resistor.”The differentiation of forgivable debtors from swindlers and profligates entailed characterization, the novelistic device that anchors chapter 2’s examination of debt's alchemical transformation into equity. Binhammer's comparative reading of two fictive debtors, the charitable patriot, Harry Fenton of Henry Brooke's Fool of Quality, who discharges the burdens of others, and the reckless Primrose of Vicar of Wakefield, whose arrears land him in jail, suggests that the readerly pleasure of character accrues from the “risks a text takes with misinterpretation, . . . risks that call for more-complex interpretive strategies.” Characters become leverageable assets in novels that engross readers by holding out the possibility that someone “might not be who they say they are.”In chapter 3, Binhammer surveys fictions that nest stories within themselves—a sustained analysis of narrative framing that bears structural affinity to Wright's study of lawyerly mediation. Embedded narratives, Binhammer claims, reproduce “capitalism's internal contradictions,” particularly the tension between use-value and exchange-value. In the book's most formally granular chapter, Binhammer sorts embedded tales by their level (the number of removes between an implanted story and the main plot), voice (who delivers a given story and how), voice level (whether the teller of an embedded story is present in the diegesis), and function (whether an embedded story changes the main plot, accentuates its themes, or merely digresses from it). Binhammer uses this taxonomy to size up a variety of texts, including Man of Feeling, David Simple, Emily Montague, and Millenium Hall, concluding that just as capitalism defines itself through infinite circulation “sentimental fiction is grounded in an infinite accumulation of stories.”The final two chapters concentrate on novels by Frances Burney. In chapter 4, we discover that capital's plot becomes legible in sentimental fiction as an intersection of different temporalities. Binhammer argues that Cecilia's plot abides not by the linear progression of boundless gain that Adam Smith serenely charts in Wealth of Nations, but through the stochastic collision of “multiple temporal worlds that circulate, coexist, conflict, and coalesce.” This convergence of time becomes palpable in scenes that cast Burney's protagonist as cornered, coerced, thwarted, stuck in traffic. Cecilia escapes only by pursuing the risk mitigation strategy of marriage, a “safe bet” that Binhammer likens to savings bonds. In chapter 5, where the focus is on Camilla, Binhammer asks whether the endings of novels can teach us anything about the end of capitalism. Observing that sentimental plots often overrun the marriage scenes we might expect to conclude them, Binhammer attributes this surplus to the delay between the buying and selling of capital, a deferral that has led critics to censure Camilla for its seemingly herky-jerky plot. In a world that genders “consumption as feminine,” Camilla's inability to “meet everyone's economic and social needs simultaneously” implies a capitalist economy that requires its participants to produce and consume surplus value in perpetuity.Downward Mobility contains a complex argument, which may challenge readers for whom phrases like “collateralized debt obligations” summon less than crystal clear referents. Binhammer undauntedly acknowledges the difficulty of her subject matter and makes surmounting the impenetrable mysticisms of finance an explicit pedagogical goal. She navigates through an abstruse conceptual realm to attune readers to the forms and conventions that actually govern it. By taking seriously sentimental fiction's account of how wealth happens and recedes, Binhammer employs the tools of criticism to get to the bottom of what economics really is.