Manners of Contradiction: Economy and Gender in Early Twentieth-Century American Narrative

My dissertation examines what I would describe as the economic imaginary of American novels of manners, written in the early twentieth century, a transitional period from the age of accumulation to the era of the spectacle. My contention consists of three mutually dependent claims: that my four representative American novelists of manners (Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and F. Scott Fitzgerald) are subject to "contradiction," experienced as an organizing principle in their fictions; that to varying degrees, their fictions respond to the contradictory quality inherent in money and commodities; that they foreground a certain tension between the commodity form and forms of money. The tension between money and commodities relates primarily to matters of circulation: while commodities necessarily become "use" once they are purchased and withdrawn into Victorian interiors, accumulated money persistently retains its impulse for circulation. I demonstrate how my chosen novels ( The Ambassadors, The Age of Innocence, The Professor's House, and Tender Is the Night) dramatize such a tension through their focus on male perceptions of women, where women are understood as the locus of economic transfer.;The culture of the spectacle, rather than resolving the urgency of acquisition, sharpens it: a contradiction between possession and contemplation—represented respectively by the Victorian drawing-room and the shop window—finds its most expressive articulation in the figuring of women who are affiliated with both spaces. Even as feminine consumption reinscribes women as economic subjects, a patriarchal intent to retain women, via marriage, as a form of property persists. Yet the accelerated circulation of women in and around the shop window demands an alternative strategy whereby women who are destined to circulate may also be securely possessed. The bourgeois male protagonist in the American novel of manners learns to possess women by the very act of seeing them in circulation; his mode of sight becomes a means to possession. The fullness of the contradiction, inherent in such an attempt, I propose, becomes available when women are figured specifically as money, itself a form dense with contradictions. I argue that the male conception of women as money (rather than as commodities) necessitates a modification of the genre's treatment of its favorite topics: marriage and adultery.