Tangled Webs: Lies, Capitalist Expansion, and the Dissolution of the Subject in The Gilded Age

ELLEN J. GOLDNER Tangled Webs: Lies, Capitalist Expansion, and the Dissolution of the Subject in The Gilded Age UCH of the humor in Mark Twain's and Charles Dudley „Warner's The Gilded Age plays in the gap between a populist expectation that the "real" cause of events resides in individual and local life and a growing recognition that some other mode of causation, embedded in global capitalism, strains against what individuals in the local milieu might know. While the novel sets much of its satire (the chapters on Washington graft, for example) in a populist idiom, it also begins to recognize and explore a mode of causation-over-distance that jars local understandings and unbalances the stance of the individual subject. When Colonel Betiah Sellers touts his great invention—his Imperial Eye Water—the satire's early ground of critique in local life suddenly gives way and unexpectedly validates a mode of wide-reaching causation at work in the economy. At the beginning, Sellets' speech is a populist satire that lampoons the Colonel's wild economic speculations precisely because they violate local assumptions about the ground of value and events: "I've been experimenting . . . on a little preparation for curing sore eyes—a kind ofdecoction nine-tenths water and the other tenth drugs that don't cost more than a dollara barrel: I'm still experimentArizona Quarterly Volume 49 Number 3, Autumn 1993 Copyright © 1993 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-161 6oEüenJ. Goldner ing: there's one ingredient wanted yet to perfect the thing, and somehow I can't just manage to hit upon the thing that's necessary. . . . But I'm progressing, and before many weeks I wager the country will ring with the fame of Beriah Sellers' Infallible Imperial Oriental Optic Liniment and Salvation for Sore Eyes— the Medical Wonder of the Age! Small bottles fifty cents, large ones a dollar. Average cost, five and seven cents for the two sizes. The first year sell, say, ten thousand bottles in Missouri, seven thousand in Iowa, three thousand in Arkansas, four thousand in Kentucky, six thousand in Illinois and say twentyfive thousand in the rest of the country. Total, fifty-five thousand bottles; profit . . . twenty thousand dollars at the very lowest calculation." (i: 97-98)' [italics mine] Sellers' project appears ridiculous because the passage grounds meaning in immediately visible facts, and places the value of objects in immediate use, rather than in the exchange rates of the market. In contrast, Sellers' absurd invention, like his big talk, lacks a basis in the immediate and the actual. The decoction—nine-tenths water and onetenth some inexpensive drugs—is missing one ingredient, which we assume is the drug, the only actual cause of any cure. As Sellers' description shifts from the liniment to the process by which he claims it will create a fortune, Twain ridicules an object without use value (a liniment without a drug) which, nonetheless, has an enormous potential exchange value on the national market (twenty thousand dollars in the first year of production). Sellers' liniment, nine-tenths water, is a comic analogue of the watered stock that financed most of the railroad construction satirized in The Gilded Age. Railroad construction was financed through watered stock because no company could raise enough money based on the current value of an unfinished railroad to complete the line. Hence, companies sold stock based on projected futute earnings of the road (Ratner et al. 327-28). These stocks, burlesqued in the eye-water, were fraught with a new temporal interdependency that created a complicated and unpredictable cause of events. The huge sums of money needed to construct a project as vast as the railroads made it impossible for any company to gather all the needed cash through usual methods of financing. In order to finance the railroad before construction, com- The Glided Age61 pañíes based the price of stock, not on its original cost or present value, but on its projected future market value (Ratner et al. 321—24). The watered stock represented by Sellers' eye-water is fraught with temporal interdependencies. Events in the immediate present no longer stand as the simple cause of future...