The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James by Elsie B. Michie (review)

The jumping off point for Elsie B. Michie’s history of the novel of manners concerns what appears to be one of the most clichéd features of the genre, a love triangle involving the hero who is torn “between a wealthy, materialistic, status-conscious woman who might enhance his social position and a poorer, more altruistic, and psychologically independent woman who is the antipode of her rich rival” (1). Michie investigates the underlying contemporary institutional and cultural influences that made this marriage plot device so prevalent, one that almost always pits the values of love against those of money. In her study, she argues that the heiress serves as a key figure for representing the tensions arising from larger historical economic forces at play during the nineteenth century when the novel of manners rose to prominence. As Michie acknowledges, studies already exist that examine the impact of capitalism on the fiction of the Industrial Age with respect to class, most notably Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction. But the author distinguishes her book from such work because of her emphasis on property and wealth exchange via marriage rather than on money as an index of class differences.

In the last chapter, “Henry James and the End(s) of the Marriage Plot,” Michie chooses three of James’s late novels (The Spoils of Poynton, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl) as exemplary works for wrapping up her book’s main argument. She asserts that representations of the figure of the vulgar heiress in the genre change as attitudes toward wealth accumulation (what the nineteenth century termed engrossment) develop over the span of the century. One of the strengths of this study is that by refusing to treat capitalism as a one-trick pony, Michie demonstrates that the Victorian version of the economic institution was supple enough to evolve and diversify over a hundred-year period. Her book begins with establishing the initially negative views about wealth and marriage exchange during the time that Austen wrote, [End Page E-19] and then each successive chapter reveals an increasingly complex attitude emerging out of capitalism’s ascendance. Michie argues that English society originally identified engrossment with the owner’s vulgarity, especially with crass behavior by the female sex. Using contemporary classic economic and anthropological works (for example Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, Georg Simmel, Claude Levi-Strauss, and John McLennan), Michie examines how the image of money found in a mix of both canonical and less well-known novels ranging from Austen to James gives voice to anxieties about the impact of wealth on both societal moral values and on individual character formation.

Michie presents a provocative thesis here, and her argument for James’s late fiction neatly fits in with the trajectory of her over-arching argument for the book. The evidence she provides is primarily textual with parallels made to contemporary social science theories: for example, in the chapter on James, Michie combines Georg Simmel’s sociology of money with ethnologist John Ferguson McLennan’s work on marriage and property. Michie argues that by the start of the twentieth century the genre’s contrast between the rich and poor woman ceases to be treated as intrinsic to the plot. That is, the dichotomy no longer structurally orders the whole narrative. Even if the opposition is still present in the novels, it is one that is imposed by an older, powerful, often wealthier female character who for her own personal benefit desires to act as though she were the author of a Victorian novel. In The Spoils of Poynton, rather than focusing on virtue as the key value possessed by and identified with the poor girl character, Mrs. Gereth represents Fleda Vetch to her son Owen as an aesthetically sophisticated rival to the moneyed Mona Bridgestock and her vulgar...