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P R E FA C E Vulgarity, Wealth, and Gender When I began working on this book it had become the fashion to introduce academic 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 eventually 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 supposed 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 refined , 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 cognoscenti 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 x Preface sexuality and the body than with wealth. But, for the Victorians, it was wedded to what the Reverend Edward Irving called,with some distaste,the“visible element of money”that helps“our sordid minds in the estimation of it”(277).We are tempted, I think, to assume that vulgarity in this sense has lost its power. It is the Victorian era with its heavy furniture and obsession with material objects that was the acme of vulgarity. As Gilbert Osmond tells Caspar Goodwood toward the end of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881),“I don’t find vulgarity, at all, before the present century.You see a faint menace of it here and there in the last, but today the air has grown so dense that delicate things are literally not recognized”(444). Coming from the mouth of a peculiarly unpleasant aesthete, this comment shows how easy it is to condemn the Victorians not just for their vulgarity but also for their excessive sensibility over what constitutes vulgar as opposed to refined behavior. The reaction of my audience when I described my inheritance suggests, however , that we may not be so diVerent from our Victorian predecessors as we might like to think. The distaste for explicit references to money persists even into the twenty-first century; we continue to feel revulsion for what Max Weber calls in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism “that activity directed to acquisition for its own sake [which] was at bottom a pudendum which was to be tolerated only because of the unalterable necessities of life in this world” (35). The point, I take it, of Weber’s comment is that, while the act of making money can be represented as an expression of the Protestant work ethic, the actual possession and accrual of wealth has something repulsive about it. Giovanni Arrighi has noted that the fear of accumulation haunts the rhetoric of those writing about nineteenth-century capitalism, providing as two examples Karl Marx’s “facetious dictum ‘Accumulate, accumulate!’” and Weber’s “serious contention that the essence of the capitalist spirit is‘the earning of more and more...

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