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When people speak about love and money, they usually are referring
to a conflict: love distorted by the desire for money. Such
statements imply that love has a distinct form before economics
interferes, but this book aims to show that such a view simplifies
what is going on, because people have always been deeply shaped by
everything in the social order, including economics. So when people
say that money is distorting love, what they are really saying is
that the current relationship of love and economics is different
from an earlier relationship. This book seeks then to demonstrate
the intertwining of the discourses of love and money over a long
history by focusing on moments when parallel conceptions appear in
economic theories and love stories. The two discourses intersect
because both seek to define qualities and behaviors of human beings
which are most valuable and hence most desirable. Similar
descriptions of valuable behaviors appear at roughly the same time
in economic theories of how to acquire wealth and literary stories
of how to find ideal lovers. By tracking mutual expressions of
desire, value, and acquisition in economics and love stories, this
book argues for the ubiquity of the intertwining of these
discourses, while exploring shifts in conceptions of value. It
focuses on four eras when economic and romantic conceptions of what
is most desirable were actively changing in English discourses: the
early modern 17th century, the Victorian 19th, the modernist 20th,
and the postmodern present.
When people speak about love and money, they usually are referring
to a conflict: love distorted by the desire for money. Such
statements imply that love has a distinct form before economics
interferes, but this book aims to show that such a view simplifies
what is going on, because people have always been deeply shaped by
everything in the social order, including economics. So when people
say that money is distorting love, what they are really saying is
that the current relationship of love and economics is different
from an earlier relationship. This book seeks then to demonstrate
the intertwining of the discourses of love and money over a long
history by focusing on moments when parallel conceptions appear in
economic theories and love stories. The two discourses intersect
because both seek to define qualities and behaviors of human beings
which are most valuable and hence most desirable. Similar
descriptions of valuable behaviors appear at roughly the same time
in economic theories of how to acquire wealth and literary stories
of how to find ideal lovers. By tracking mutual expressions of
desire, value, and acquisition in economics and love stories, this
book argues for the ubiquity of the intertwining of these
discourses, while exploring shifts in conceptions of value. It
focuses on four eras when economic and romantic conceptions of what
is most desirable were actively changing in English discourses: the
early modern 17th century, the Victorian 19th, the modernist 20th,
and the postmodern present.
The movies and the masses erupted on the world stage together. In a
few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, millions of
persons who rarely could afford a night at the theater and had
never voted in an election became regular paying customers at movie
palaces and proud members of new political parties. The question of
how to represent these new masses fascinated and plagued
politicians and filmmakers alike. Movies seemed to speak directly
to the masses, via a form of crowd psychology that bypassed
individual personality. Many political commentators believed that
movies were inherently aligned with the new forms of collectivist
mass politics-indeed, government control of the movie industry
became a cornerstone of Communist and Fascist regimes, new
political movements that embraced the crowd as the basis of social
order. Michael Tratner examines the representations of masses-the
crowd scenes-in Hollywood films from The Birth of a Nation through
such popular love stories as Gone with the Wind, The Sound of
Music, and Dr. Zhivago. He then contrasts these with similar scenes
in early Soviet and Nazi films. What emerges is a political debate
being carried out in filmic style. In both sets of films, the crowd
is represented as a seething cauldron of emotions. In Hollywood
films, this is depicted as molding private loves, while
collectivist movies present it as turning into organized mass
movements. Crowd scenes do more than provide backgrounds for
stories, that is: they also function as models for the crowd in the
theater. The book concludes with an examination of the films of
Fritz Lang, who first in pre-Nazi Germany, then in Hollywood,
created movies that can be seen as meditations on both these ways
of using the crowd.
The movies and the masses erupted on the world stage together. In a
few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, millions of
persons who rarely could afford a night at the theater and had
never voted in an election became regular paying customers at movie
palaces and proud members of new political parties. The question of
how to represent these new masses fascinated and plagued
politicians and filmmakers alike. Movies seemed to speak directly
to the masses, via a form of crowd psychology that bypassed
individual personality. Many political commentators believed that
movies were inherently aligned with the new forms of collectivist
mass politics-indeed, government control of the movie industry
became a cornerstone of Communist and Fascist regimes, new
political movements that embraced the crowd as the basis of social
order. Michael Tratner examines the representations of masses-the
crowd scenes-in Hollywood films from The Birth of a Nation through
such popular love stories as Gone with the Wind, The Sound of
Music, and Dr. Zhivago. He then contrasts these with similar scenes
in early Soviet and Nazi films. What emerges is a political debate
being carried out in filmic style. In both sets of films, the crowd
is represented as a seething cauldron of emotions. In Hollywood
films, this is depicted as molding private loves, while
collectivist movies present it as turning into organized mass
movements. Crowd scenes do more than provide backgrounds for
stories, that is: they also function as models for the crowd in the
theater. The book concludes with an examination of the films of
Fritz Lang, who first in pre-Nazi Germany, then in Hollywood,
created movies that can be seen as meditations on both these ways
of using the crowd.
This book examines the effects on literary works of a little-noted
economic development in the early twentieth century: individuals
and governments alike began to regard going into debt as a normal
and even valuable part of life. The author also shows,
surprisingly, that the economic changes normalizing debt paralleled
and intersected with changes in sexual discourse.
In Victorian novels, sex and debt are considered dangerous
activities that the young should avoid in order to save and invest
toward eventual marriage and a home. In twentieth-century texts,
however, it often seems acceptable to go into debt and engage in
sex before marriage. These literary representations followed social
transformations as both economic and sexual discourse moved from
the logic of saving and production to the logic of circulation. In
Keynesian economics and consumerism, governments and individuals
were actually encouraged to borrow and to spend more in order to
increase demand and keep money circulating. In twentieth-century
sexual treatises, people were similarly encouraged to indulge their
desires, as pent-up states were considered as deleterious to the
physical body as they were to the economic.
In this book, the author traces these social transformations by
examining twentieth-century literary works and films that are
structured around contrasts between repressive and expansive forms
of economics and sexuality. He studies a range of authors,
including James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Ezra
Pound, Zora Neale Hurston, and Frank Capra. The book ends with the
1960s, because after that decade deficits no longer seemed the cure
for anything, and the advocacy of sexual indulgence dwindled. For
half a century, however, the intersections of sexual and economic
discourses created a sense that society was on the verge of a vast
transformation. The artists studied in this book were fascinated by
such a prospect, but remained ambivalent, as it seemed that their
dreams of escaping dull bourgeois life and ending repression were
becoming true because of the influence of the crassest economic
policies.
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