The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James

320 Pages·2011·2.934 MB·English

by  Michie, Elsie Browning

the vulgar question of money
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© 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2011
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Michie, Elsie B. (Elsie Browning), 1948–
The vulgar question of money : heiresses, materialism, and the novel of
manners from Jane Austen to Henry James / Elsie B. Michie.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-1-4214-0186-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 1-4214-0186-x (hardcover : alk. paper)
1 . English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Material
culture in literature. 3. Money in literature. 4. Material culture—Great
Britain—History—19th century. 5. Great Britain—Social life and
customs—19th century. I. Title.
pr878.m38m53 2011
823.8093553—dc22 2010050251
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For Emily, Sarah, and Molly,
who grew up while this book was being written
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contents
Preface: Vulgarity, Wealth, and Gender ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction Rich Woman / Poor Woman: An Anthropology
of the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot 1
1 Social Distinction in Jane Austen 26
2 Frances Trollope and the Problem of Appetite 65
3 Anthony Trollope’s “Subtle Materialism” 103
4 Margaret Oliphant and the Professional Ideal 142
5 Henry James and the End(s) of the Marriage Plot 179
Afterword From Pemberley to Manderley 216
Notes 223
Bibliography 277
Index 293
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preface
Vulgarity, Wealth, and Gender
When I began working on this book it had become the fashion to introduce aca-
demic papers by telling personal anecdotes—a custom initiated, I think, by the
epilogue to Renaissance Self-Fashioning, in which Stephen Greenblatt tells the story
of sitting next to a man on a plane who is going to visit his hospitalized son who
has lost the ability to speak and the will to live. I used to begin the papers that even-
tually formed this book by explaining that I became interested in the rich woman
in the nineteenth-century novel after my mother died and left me money she had
inherited from her mother and kept in her own name even after she was married.
Jokingly, I called that money my matrimony since I was unmarried and it was, in
eVect, my patrimony.
But telling the story of my inheritance did not work as such anecdotes were sup-
posed to do. It did not elicit sympathy or engage the audience’s attention. Instead,
as I spoke, listeners’ eyes stopped meeting mine. My audience became restless and
began to cough and shuZe. They looked down at their feet and seemed to be
overcome by what Christopher Herbert has called “a panicky dread of indelicate
references to money matters” (“Filthy” 199). It was as if they were literally feeling
what we call the embarrassment of riches. One should speak of money in the re-
fined, almost inaudible tones associated with the quiet of banks with their marble
halls or of investment oYces with their deep carpets. One should reveal it only
indirectly as in the haute couture clothes that are so understated that only the co-
gnoscenti know how much they cost. When I talked about my inheritance, I was,
like the fashions typically chosen by the nouveau riche and the heiresses I write
about here, being too loud, too explicit about the possession of wealth. The term
the Victorians would have used to describe my behavior was “vulgar,” a word that
carried such aVective force in the period that the narrator of Anthony Trollope’s
The Prime Minister (1876) can exclaim, “Vulgarity! There was no other word in the
language so hard to bear as that” (177).
For us in the late modern era vulgarity is more commonly associated with