Today’s class – on Bloomsbury Group aesthetics – was difficult. And in some respects that is the point of Bloomsbury Group aesthetics, including Forster’s novel. Forster likes to put the characters in his novels into impossibly complex situations which he referred to (in Howards End, as it happens) as “muddle.” The complexity of life, human relations, desires and wants, expectations and failings, are all thrown together in a puzzling and largely untenable set of predicaments. The point, many critics think, is not for readers to resolve or judge these situations one way or another (as we are invited to do with Roxana or Emma) or even to sympathize with them (as we do Maggie I think) but rather for readers to appreciate that good and bad qualities co-exist with each other and in themselves. The “human condition” is revealed to be in its essence not right or wrong but simply complex.

What does this have to do with money? You all might recall the scene early in the novel where the women in Margaret and Helen’s circle debate “What are we to do with our money.” No one can come to any satisfactory solution – and the women’s inability to decide is in part what leads to the central plot thrust of the rest of the novel. Complexity is causal (as Robert Trigo reminds us all plots are) but not in the direction of resolution (like Emma) but more in the direction of appreciation – for the “beauty” (a word that appears many times in the novel) of what is impossible. To see this muddle though is to appreciate the “form” of the novel – mixed up, messed up, confusing, complex, without it being something that “teaches” anything in particular. The novel becomes an opportunity to see the world – and even the economy as we will see with Keynes – with an eye to all of its difficulties and somehow see it all as an “experience” that we can measure and even possibly appreciate.

The novelist Zadie Smith has a wonderful essay on “muddle” in Forster’s novels. It was published in the Guardian in 2003.

Like Roxana–and decidedly unlike Emma–The Mill on the Floss ends very sadly. Why? Obviously there is a symbolic relationship between the Flood and the water imagery the “runs” all the way through the novel and which we saw working very strongly in Ruskin too. But why end the novel so tragically? What might this final image tell us about the relationship between fiction and economics? Is there, moreover, a correlation between the way Eliot ends her novel and her take on Maggie’s sexuality, education, and gender?

I’ve been reading the posts on Mill on the Floss with great interest. Let’s keep them up!

We ended last class talking about the relationship between the “love” plot and the “money” plots in the novel. Poovey sees them as quite different strands that compete with each other for the interest of the reader and, possibly, point out some of the ironies in the way readers of “financial journalism” might have encountered a novel that only seems marginally to do with finance and capital–but which actually is. Kreisel, by contrast, sees the two plots as intimately related on the evidence of economic language (she is similar to Miles here) and of parallels between the novels’ major narrative developments and ongoing debates in political economy about social progress, consumption, and economic order. I’m wondering if any of you have a preference for either of these readings? Why or why not?

By now we all should be well into – if not finished – Austen’s Emma. We have also spent quite a bit of time thinking about the state of the British monetary system and the controversies surrounding it in Austen’s time.  A number of you have commented already on the way the language of wealth, value, rank, and so on permeate Austen’s language. On Thursday I suggested that one of the ways Austen’s novel engages with the broader philosophical debate on money is through her use of Free Indirect Discourse (style). While the bullion debates tried to foreclose or resolve the “embarrassing” question of what, exactly, guaranteed the value of money, Austen’s use of FID provides a way for us to see “behind” the subjective points of view of her main character and toward some more “objective” standard of value (namely, her narrator). But can we trust in the narrator’s controlling presence, this “narrative institution”? Or, to put the question another way, can we trust the “machine” of Austen’s prose in the same way that we trust institutions like the Bank of England?

More specifically, what do you all make of the way Austen imagines Emma’s relationship with and manipulation of Harriet? If Walter Scott was right, and Harriet circulates through the novel “like a bank bill” what does this say about the way Austen herself manipulates monetary themes and issues?

What other ways might we see Austen engaging with the broader issues of the bullion debate? How, for instance, might we compare Austen’s novel with Defoe’s? How does the concern with marriage, class (or social rank), with landscape or nationhood that we find in both novels allow us to speak about the way capitalism had progressed by the turn of the 19th century?

Here we are in the middle of week 2 and well into the first novel on the course, Defoe’s Roxana. In class on Tuesday we discussed our first impressions of the novel, its style, and oddly “stream of consciousness” form. Now that you’ve had a bit more time to get further into the novel, is anything changing about this style? What is your sense of Roxana herself as a character or a speaker? She is of course clearly obsessed by money. How does this obsession make itself apparent? Why is she so obsessed?

One more question to get you thinking: why don’t the male characters have any names?

Feel free to answer using the comments function. Or write a new post with your own questions or reflections on what we’re reading right now!

No literary genre has been shaped so directly and so pervasively by market capitalism as the novel.  In this course, we will consider how novels comment on matters of economy, money, and finance and how, in turn, changes in the economy influence the novel.  Reading a selection of fiction from the eighteenth century to the present alongside essays on money and monetary economics from the same periods, we will examine ideas of representation, value, character, and power common to both fiction and economics. We will think about the way fiction supplements and challenges the exchange practices of the market and also about how alternative modes of exchange—personal, communal, sexual—are represented in monetary and fictional literature.

Note: no background in economics is necessary to take and enjoy this course. However, we will be doing quite a bit of reading in the history of monetary economics to supplement our readings of the novels.  Students should be open to interdisciplinary methods of research and modes of reading.