The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James by Elsie B Michie (review)

Abstract

MICHIE, ELSIE B. Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. 303 pp. $70.00. Taking title from Frances Trollope's novel Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman, Elsie B. Michie's book examines a phenomenon that Trollope's novel crystallizes--the repugnance felt by Victorian (and contemporary) writers, readers, and critics towards open pursuit, accumulation, and display of wealth as an end in itself. It was precisely such behavior, according to Michie, that Victorians designated as in order to distance crass materialism from disinterested models of virtue, aesthetics, and taste. In examining how Victorians separated economic from noneconomic values, Michie's book contributes to an ongoing critical dialogue on how nineteenth century constituted aesthetic and moral value by disentangling it from economic. But while critics such as Mary Poovey and John Guillory have explored separation of aesthetic/moral value from economic value by providing intellectual histories of literary and economic discourses, Michie examines latter problem through a series of fine-grained analyses of novel of manners as it stretches from Jane Austen to Henry James. In these rigorously argued readings, Michie offers a circumscribed history of marriage plot in which she places the vulgar question of at forefront in order to demonstrate how notions of vulgarity structured nineteenth-century marriage plot and established within it a polarizing set of values (97). Michie's central contention in book is that novel's representations of vulgarity responded to broader cultural anxieties regarding impact of money on moral sentiments by gendering prurient forms of materialism in figure of heiress. Using Austen's Pride and Prejudice as paradigmatic example, Michie argues that female heiresses in Austen's novel, such as Miss Bingley and Lady Catherine, embody cloying materialism that novel then contrasts to poor, virtuous heroines like Elizabeth Bennett. traditional marriage-plot ending in which wealthy male suitor chooses poor, virtuous woman over wealthy counterpart quite literally marries virtue with wealth and thus cleanses wealth of negative connotations associated with rich woman. rich woman thus functions symbolically in marriage plot as a scapegoat for very economic motives that were becoming engine of a growing capitalist economy. In bringing attention to this unexamined figure within nineteenth-century novel, Michiejoins recent critics such as Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Mary Jean Corbett, and Sharon Marcus who have challenged traditional model of heterosexual exchange, elaborated most famously in Gayle Rubin's The Traffic in Women, which has dominated criticism on marriage-plot narrative. Instead of focusing on triangulation of a woman who is exchanged between two men, Michie proposes a rectangular structure that includes rich and poor woman as two possible choices (209). Drawing on nineteenth-century anthropologists such as John Ferguson McLennan, particularly latter's theory of endogamy and exogamy, Michie shows how heiress complicates model of heterosexual exchange since she cannot enter into an exogamous marriage in which wealth exits group/family but must remain within an endogamous union. Hence, whether in relation to materialistic values she represents or model of marriage she interrupts, heiress represents what L6vi-Strauss calls scandal in system of marital exchanges. She must be included in order for novel to establish values that exclude her (16). Each of five chapters in book explores book's central claims by examining three successive novels by each author, beginning first with Austen and then moving on to Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Margaret Oliphant, and concluding with James. …