Aesthetics and Economics in A Florentine Tragedy

Aesthetics and Economics in A Florentine Tragedy REGENIA GAGNIER I concluded my Idylls of the Marketplace with an appendix on A Florentine Tragedy called "Commodity Fetishism as Poetry." The interpretation I offered there may be summarized by its final paragraph: The play transforms beauty into a commodity and love into an object in the most exhilarating fashion. Simone's poetry is the poetry of objectification and glorious materialism : beyond the lovers' mere economic metaphors, Simone can only love what he sees and what he sees is made visible, not by its value, but by its price: the logical conclusion of the play is that the husband and wife see each other for the first time, value each other for the first time, because the strength of one has been activated, and the beauty of the other has been objectified, by a competitor. Simone's is the poetry of spectacle. The revolutionary desire of the play - the annihilation of the aristocrat, the repossession of beloved and made objects by the bourgeoisie, class and national solidarity in the face of evil empires - situates the merchant in a commercial world, a world with promise of production and, with considerable extension of the imagination, reproduction . It is a world inhabited, as Alfred Douglas would say, without apology, but tragically .I At the time, that interpretation of the play was intuitive. Here I would like to take a closer look at how Wilde's play - a celebration, however tongue-incheek , of market society - converged with contemporary economic and aesthetic theory, for both disciplines, economics and aesthetics, were undergoing transfonnations in the fin de siecle that would have momentous effects in the twentieth century. The most memorable intellectual message from A Florentine Tragedy (to be distinguished from the play's sensuous pleasures of sound and sight) is that competition raises economic agents' aspirations as well as the quality ofproducts and that nothing has value until it is given a price on the market , two postulates of late Victorian economics. The key complicating factor in Modern Drama, 37 (1994) 71 72 REGENIA GAGNIER the play, that what is on the market is a bourgeois woman, who was traditionally excluded - or protected - from market relations under political economy, is what raises Wilde's play above the economic discourse informing it. Wilde's letters suggest that A Florentine Tragedy was always a commodity in Wilde's mind, a fetishized object through which he fantasized an end to his economic troubles. In offering the unfinished play to George Alexander in February 1895, a few days before Queensberry left the notorious card at his club and Wilde began the proceedings that would alter the course of his life and fame, he said he was pressed for cash and lamented that his "life was so marred and maimed by extravagance.,,2 In prison, he could not recapture the play's worldly mood (410, 427,492), but after release, in June 1897, he wrote to Robert Ross that he was "determined to finish the Florentine Tragedy, and to get £500 for it - from somewhere. America perhaps" (591). In the last letter in which he mentions it, he still intends to begin it "tomorrow" (638). The play thematized his extravagant life in London, underwrote it, and philosophically redeemed it. Wilde was equally sure of the play's aesthetic, typically contrasting it with his more prosaic life with Douglas or in prison (427), as in the famous "feasting with panthers" passage of De Profundis: "Instead of making . beautiful coloured, musical things such as Salome and the Florentine Tragedy ... I found myself forced to send long lawyer's letters to your father" (492). Thus A Florentine Tragedy has a particular significance in Wilde's life and times, as the site where need and disinterested pleasure become interdependent and inseparable. This, of course, is the convergence of economics, the science that intended to provide for the maintenance of daily life, and aesthetics , the science of the disinterested pursuit of beauty. Political economy and aesthetics arose simultaneously in eighteenth-century Europe. Elsewhere I have shown in detail the historical transformation of both disciplines from Victorian social sciences committed to providing for and expressing the needs and desires of...