An end to begetting: Capitalism, narrative, and the Edwardian family saga

This project attempts to account for the sudden emergence of the multi-generational family saga at the turn of the twentieth century and to identify some of the cultural forces that gave rise to this narrative form. The study examines the ideological and political implications of the genealogical novel in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga, Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love, and Virginia Woolf's The Years. Using the insights of Fredric Jameson and Rosemarie Bodenheimer, who argue that the very shape or form of narrative belies its true politics, and of Peter Brooks, who argues that every narrative represents an attempt to achieve mastery over some originary "trauma," I contend that the structure of the family chronicle novel offers a response to the economics of capitalism and its associated notions of "progress." As Edward Said has noted of modern literature generally, the family novel is characterized by a shift from modes of filiation to ones of affiliation as each invariably abandons the genealogical narrative structure and, with it, the capitalist system the family connotes. In attempting to depart from this form, moreover, each demonstrates Jameson's notion that narrative form deforms as it strains against the limits of its own ideological horizons. The family's destruction is invariably catalyzed by a counter-force embodied in a sexuality that confronts the financial asceticism represented by the family. In identifying sexuality with subjectivity and autonomy, the family novel, I argue, draws upon Henri Bergson's contemporary notion of elan vital, pitting the freed, sexual individual against the economic universe embodied by the family. The study demonstrates the way in which illicit sexuality functions as an antidote to the mythic narrative of capitalist "evolution," progress, and never-ending financial accumulation. In its movement away from the genealogical ordering of the family narrative and toward a fiction centered upon the subjective universe of the modern individual, the family saga demonstrates also the transition in aesthetic sensibilities from the Victorian realist novel to the experimental narratives of high modernism.