The ‘Invisible Hand’ and British Fiction, 1818–1860: Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism by Eleanor Courtemanche (review)

In The ‘Invisible Hand’ and British Fiction, 1818–1860, Eleanor Courtemanche argues that Adam Smith’s concept of the invisible hand, in underscoring a tension between the actions of individuals and a larger force that organizes those actions, provides a useful model for thinking about the structure of the nineteenth-century British novel. Smith’s “three epistemological positions of freely acting individual, restrained sovereign, and knowing theorist correspond roughly to the distinction between characters and narrator” (76). This statement identifies both the strengths and limitations of Courtemanche’s approach. On the one hand, it enables sweeping new readings of novels that take into account the oscillation between a worm’s eye and bird’s eye view. On the other hand, it proves difficult to define the exact relation between Smith’s work and that of the novelists in question.

Like Smith’s theory, Courtemanche’s approach acknowledges multiple points of view, while pointing toward a larger aggregate. All her chapters include a range of thinkers. The introduction situates her argument in relation to Marxism, New Economic Criticism, and recent writing on liberalism. In laying out the theory of the invisible hand, chapter 1 discusses the three Smith texts in which it appears—The History of Astronomy (1795), The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and The Wealth of Nations (1776)—as well as the physiocrat economists who preceded Smith, the early nineteenth-century economists who followed him, and the modern theorists who have discussed that sequence of thinkers. Chapter 2 reads Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53) in light of Smith and various narrative theorists, including D. A. Miller and J. Hillis Miller. Chapter 3 reads Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34) and Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) in conjunction with Raymond Williams, Elaine Freedgood, Catherine Gallagher, Audrey Jaffe, and others. Chapter 4 reads William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–48) in relation to a series of modern economists, Carl von Clausewitz, and the debate between John Stuart Mill and William Whewell. Chapter 5 reads Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss1 (1860) through analyses of sympathy that include the work of F. R. Leavis, Rae Greiner, and Harry Shaw.

Through these multiple references, Courtemanche shows the ways in which “narratives can model emergent behavior, but at the cost of a certain incoherence” (156). The strength of her approach lies in its inclination to explore incoherence rather than attempt to resolve it. In reading the generic tensions of Northanger Abbey, she shows the ways in which the gothic is nestled within a realistic narrative in such a way that gothic incidents, like abduction, appear in muted form, as when John Thorpe takes off with Catherine Morland. Rather than critiquing the narrator’s excessive investment in Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, Courtemanche charts the narrator’s oscillation between intimate and distanced readings of her character, arguing that such shifts force readers to critique their own distance from the text. Toggling between individual points of view and an overarching perspective, Courtemanche invites us to see the novel in spatial terms. As she explains initially, “the invisible hand suggests an ironic mode of social action in which the results of individual actions are displaced to some definite spatial and temporal distance, creating by implication an unimaginably complex and detailed web of moral causality” (1). Such spatial readings provide glimpses of social complexities that novels can point toward but never fully represent. But they risk becoming overly descriptive, a risk that falls along gendered lines.

Courtemanche’s work reflects the division she finds in Smith, where “the gap between economics and virtue, between action at a distance and personal behavior, was often solved by making use of the category...