The commodification of the American dream: Capitalist subjectivity in American literature

As Louis Althusser has explained, in order for any social system to survive, its conditions of production must be reproduced in the individual psyche. This task is accomplished by ideology: "the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but ... only ... insofar ... as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of 'constituting' concrete individuals as subjects (Lenin and Philosophy 171). This perspective problematizes the relation between the individual and the group because it doesn't treat them as autonomous, discrete entities, as they have historically been treated, but instead focuses on their dialectical relationship.; To learn how the individual and the group are dialectically related in contemporary American society or, in Althusser's terms, how conditions of production in contemporary America are reproduced in the individual subject, five mainstream critical tools--psychoanalysis, marxism, feminism, existentialism, and post-structuralism--are used, in dialectical conjunction, to analyze four major works of American literature spanning this century: Edith Wharton's House of Mirth (1905), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949), and Joseph Heller's Something Happened (1974).; This analysis suggests the following conclusions. (1) Individuals are interpolated within the American socius through the complementary ideologies of commodification and the American dream. (2) These ideologies are valorized and disseminated through the semiotic monopoly of the dominant class. (3) The individual and the group cannot be sustained as separate entities in our consideration of American literature and culture because the very structures of consciousness are inscribed within the process of social signification. (4) The relationship between structures of American consciousness and structures of American sociopolitical economy is grounded in a desire validated by the American dream and that is the secret source of the dream's seductiveness: the desire to escape historical contingency. (5) This desire is inextricably linked to the commodity through displacement and mystification. (6) There is, over time, a gradual increase in the conscious deliberateness with which the individual merges with the socius and a gradual emptying of the sign, both of which conditions point to commodification as a phenomenon whose power is progressively increasing in our culture.