Life Choices

On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, the BBC broadcast a story from Ground Zero in which a grieving man and his daughter, among loved ones of the 2,749 people who died, eulogized his wife with, 'a human life is too precious a commodity to die like this'. Gallagher's book goes far toward showing why, amidst the most profound loss of life, the bereaved would refer to the lost as, technically, that which can be bought and sold. We are so embedded in market society that its sine qua non, the commodity, is now simply our word for 'thing' or 'object', dead thing, dead wife and mother. Gallagher shows how, since Malthus, economic and humanistic discourses have interpenetrated through two figures that she calls bioeconomics and somaeconomics. Bioeconomics refers to political economy's domain of production and reproduction, the domain of human labour and exchange in providing for our needs and desires. Somaeconomics refers to the springs of action in pleasure and pain, following Bentham's hedonic calculus. With these two engines Gallagher reads four novels by Dickens and George Eliot, showing how close to political economy they were, despite themselves, and how political economy itself developed in dialogue with psychology and anthropology. 'Reading political economy through these novels while also reading the novels through political economy will', Gallagher hopes, 'defamiliarize not only those two modes of writing, but also the very notions of life and feeling on which they relied' (6).

Exploring 'two modes of writing', then, the book is a discourse analysis of 'physiological, ecological, psychological, and anthropological sciences' (4) in relation to the Victorian novel as practiced by Dickens and Eliot. As a discourse analysis by one of the founders of New Historicism, it is a prime example of the genre. It provides very close readings of Malthus and other political economists and very detailed readings of the novels. In treating the novelists, it also develops a characteristic New Historical perspective on authorship, in this case Dickens as a weary labourer in the marketplace (bioeconomics) and George Eliot as agonizing over the marginal utility of additional increments of her fiction (somaeconomics). These readings are always subtle and often counter-intuitive. Malthus is shown to be more sympathetic to human pleasure and pain than Godwin and his other adversaries; the circus in Hard Times is as cruel as the factory; Hard Times itself demonstrates Dickens's fatigue with the hell of amusing his market. Gallagher claims that 'the sanitarians' [such as Edwin Chadwick] determination to plow the remains of consumption back into the process of production seems to have inspired Our Mutual Friend' (104), and shows that rather than Ruskin's definition of wealth as 'life', as healthy human babies, Dickens inexorably showed that wealth was 'illth', inextricably 'drawn from the disposal of human remains' (108).

In the case of Daniel Deronda, Gallagher links the impaired motivation – the somaeconomics or psychological springs of action – of Deronda, Grandcourt, and Gwendolyn Harleth to developments in psychophysiology after Alexander Bain and to Eliot's anxieties about the overproduction of novels that might satiate her public, corresponding to William Stanley Jevons's theories of marginal utility. In discussing the difference between Our Mutual Friend and Daniel Deronda, Gallagher stresses the shift from classical to neoclassical economics (via psychology) that was central to my 2000 book The Insatiability of Human Wants:

Our Mutual Friend's bioeconomics conformed to the productivist orthodoxies of classical political economy; labor remained the primary source of value, placed in commodities through the expenditure of life, and even though value as abstraction must float free of embodiment, realizing the potential value of a commodity is often figured as reanimation. In contrast, the drama of exchange in Daniel Deronda resembles marginal utility theory's radical departures from the classical school, departures that denied the labor theory of value and emphasized instead the choices of individuals in the market, the determinations of demand, and the way value varies according to the decrease of desire as the commodity is consumed.

(132)

As I was asked by the editors of JVC to comment on our differences, I would say that they are more...