As good as gold: Money, the market, and morality in American literature, 1857--1914

"As Good As Gold: Money, the Market, and Morality in American Literature, 1857-1914" examines the development and expression of the modern American social economy, the ways in which social and economic relationships developed into one another and became intricately identified as part of an often-indistinguishable process. Central to this social development remains the notion of reticulated culpability, the movement of moral responsibility away from individuals and onto modern representational systems, both economic and literary. Three cultural areas often presumed to exist outside of economic influences---the transcendental muse of genteel poetry, the "naturalness" of motherhood, and the autonomy of self-identity and interest---are found to be inextricably linked with market dynamics and monetary systems of representation. Chapter one, "The Currency of the Poetic," studies the career and poetry of Edmund Clarence Stedman, the "Bard of Wall Street," alongside the Panic of 1857 and the organization of the New York Clearing House to find a reconciliation of poetic idealism with bullionist materialism. Chapter two, "'Sterile Misery,'" traces the tensions between natural human reproduction and unnatural monetary reproduction (both senses of "usury") in Chopin's The Awakening and Wharton's Sanctuary. During the "race suicide" anxieties of the early twentieth century, women were seen as becoming active agents in the symbolic orders of a traditionally masculine economy at the expense of their duties as mothers. Chapter three, "The Profitable Philosophy," examines nineteenth-century doubts about disinterestedness in acts of charity alongside Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man and "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and Mary Wilkins Freeman's The Debtor. While the presumption of self-interest indicated a detached self always moving to benefit itself, economic forces increasingly identified that self through and with market interests. The dates covered are symbolic, beginning with the centralization of the New York banking structure and publication of The Confidence-Man in 1857 and closing with the organization of the Federal Reserve System and the publication of Dreiser's novels The Financier and The Titan by 1914.