Financial Frictions: Money and Materiality in American Literary Naturalism, 1890-1925
Abstract
My dissertation argues that American literary naturalists employ money—particularly the tension between its materiality and immateriality—as a metaphor for hidden ontological instability in the following nineteenth-century cultural cornerstones: financial speculation, criminal justice, race law, and social-Darwinian individualism. My first chapter investigates the tension between material accounting and Gothic ethereality in Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier (1912). This chapter argues that, since the Gothic genre involves a compulsive need to account for the incredible and incorporeal, The Financier’s irresolvable tensions between gambling and speculation, home and market, are Gothically inflected. I conclude that, just as speculation haunts the ontological coherence of the home, so does it haunt the supposedly settled account of the judicial verdict in the novel. The second chapter, on Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), surveys the essentialist nineteenth-century rhetoric that elided African American citizenship with intangible fiat money. Locating resonances in the novel between passing and the history of specie Resumption, counterfeit detection, and Confederate currency, the chapter posits that Chesnutt mobilizes immaterial fiscal confidence to undercut the validity of legal metrics for detecting racial essentialism. The third chapter recruits the more abstract financial concept of insurance to argue that determinism stems from a density of chance that disrupts neat narratives of causation in Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” (1897) and “The Blue Hotel” (1898). I suggest that, like insurance, naturalism employs a deterministic inevitability of chance to loosen social Darwinism’s mooring of responsibility to the individual in order to disperse it more equitably. The final chapter, on Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf (1904), suggests that the monetary metaphors in the novel appear to bolster deterministic materialism by aligning the materiality of hard money with a Malthusianism of finite resources and Darwin’s struggle for existence. However, I argue that London embeds reminders of money’s immaterial sociality in these metaphors in order to reassert morality and to undercut social Darwinian individualism. My dissertation demonstrates that, far from being bound to a “pessimistic materialistic determinism,” American literary naturalism marshaled the immaterial belief that makes money function in order to question the perceived inevitabilities that governed turn-of-the-century ideology.