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  • The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph
  • Lorri Nandrea (bio)
The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph, by Audrey Jaffe; pp. ix + 138. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010, $59.95, $24.95 paper, $9.95 CD-ROM.

Audrey Jaffe's timely, provocative book maps cultural and psychological transactions between individual feeling, or identity, and representations taken to be reflections of collective feeling: statistical averages and stock market graphs, but also, more complexly, novels. Jaffe argues that representations of "the average man" or the stock market as characters whose behavior narratives help to explain rely on the Victorian novel's use of character "as an explanatory device." Arguing that such representations shape what they purport to reflect, Jaffe extends a rich vein of criticism inspired by Michel Foucault, building on the work of Nancy Armstrong, Catherine Gallagher, and Mary Poovey, together with scholarship on the intersections between feeling, representation, and technology or commerce in the eighteenth century by Terry Castle, Deidre Lynch, and Adela Pinch. Jaffe is interested in the ways in which concepts rooted in statistics inflected Victorian identities, and the continuing power of those dynamics. She finds "in contemporary discourse a Victorianism we didn't know was there" (114). Indeed, the tropes and oppositions Jaffe identifies in Anthony Trollope's The Prime Minister (1876) are equally capable of illuminating the Bernard Madoff scandal, precisely because the latter has been "cast within the narrative and characterological terms of Victorian fiction" (118).

Her first chapter focuses on the tension between the particular individual and the mathematical average—which no one embodies—in Victorian statistical discourse and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72). Jaffe argues that the idea of the average constructs both "a new image of society as a whole" and "the conception of a new kind of individual: one who is imagined as containing society within him or her self" (29). The differences that mark an individual as uncommon (Dorothea), the likenesses that mark an individual as common (Mary Garth), and the internal oscillation between the two (Lydgate) all depend on comparisons enabled by the average: "character emerges as a closeness to or distance from an average" (40). Both types of identities— the average and the exceptional—are "function[s] of group identity" (35); they depend on bell curve calculations and comparisons to others whom one is (or tries to be) more or less like. The "average man" of Jaffe's title thus references not one who occupies the apex of the bell curve, but one whose identity and "affective life" depend on "representations of a social whole in which, in what is finally a mise-en-abyme of identity-making, he sees himself reflected" (22). Or, as Jaffe later writes in her discussion of happiness, "If what one has within one's head is a comparison concept, consisting of possible similarities to or shades of difference between oneself and others, then any notion of a single or stable interiority has been replaced by an image of relationship: the self as an effect of a comparison with others" (85).

Jaffe calls this process "distant reading" (103), redefining Franco Moretti's phrase to mean "the shaping of identity as an attachment to a series of consolidating abstractions" (104). This process serves as a through-line connecting representations of the average, of the stock market, and of happiness. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the stock market. Jaffe asserts that "the mutually-reinforcing discourses of the novel and the stock exchange . . . tie specific kinds of financial activities to distinctions in emotion and character" (46). In particular, the opposition between the investor and the speculator [End Page 779] represents not only alternative financial styles but also personalities, moralities, and ultimately "terms of a psychic drama" occurring within characters (58). In an illuminating reading of The Prime Minister, Jaffe shows that this opposition may be transferred onto the realm of love relations: "Emily Wharton's feeling for Lopez resembles a speculator's projections for his shares" (74).

Here and in chapter 4, the literary arguments are well developed and illustrate the value of Jaffe...

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