The Economics of the Arts ed. by Mark Blaug (review)

Books 159 opinion that women, married or divorced, are the victims of authoritarian agents in France. In the paper by her compatriot Yves Dezalay, a similar conclusion is reached, but only after an analysis of the 12divorce cases that occurred between 1970and 1974in the French city of Laval. Sally Maclntyre, in her paper entitled Who Wants Babies?,concludes that women are victims of professionals, such as medical doctors, nurses and social workers. She found from a study of 28 case histories that these professionals assume that it is abnormal for a married woman not to want a child and abnormal for an umarried woman to want one. This is not a very startling finding, but her methodology is good. In the paper entitled Men, Women and Communes, P. Abrams and A. McCulloch report on their results of visiting and interviewing,according to socialsciencemethods, members of 67 communes to determine to what extent these communes avoid the unsatisfactory male-femalerelations of conventional society in Britain. They obtained ‘an impression of virtual irrelevanceof communes as a solution’ for the problem of sexual inequality. Vanessa Maher carried out a study in Morocco, where she acted as a participant-observer of the interaction of men and women in family life. In this way she was able to avoid stereotyped generalizations about the role of women in similar societies. In the paper entitled Free Choice Marriage in China, Delia Davin emphasizes the teachings of Mao but questions the changesthat can be imposedby a smallideological eliteonsuch a large society with strong traditions. I wonder what role for women will be chosen by the successorsof Mao under a plan for the rapid industrialization of the country. I have mentioned only those papers in this book that seemedof some value to the social sciences and a few contrasting papers based on opinion without factual support. The Introduction by the Editors and the papers by Dezalay, by Abrams and McCulloch and by Maher would give most readers of Leonardo a sufficientidea of the present statusof studies of the problems of women in several different societies. Fact in Fiction: The U s e of Literaturein the Systematic Study of Society. Joan Rockwell. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1974. 211 pp. E3.95. Reviewed by Blake Morrison* Joan Rockwell has taught both literature and sociology. In her book she attempts to unite her interests in these seemingly distinct areas by proposing that fiction, if properly handled by sociologists, can attain the status of fact. However, this basic premise-that ‘the patterned connection between society and fiction is sodiscernibleand so reliable that literature ought to be added to the regular tools of social investigation’-is a highly contentious one, and Rockwell does not develop an argument sufficiently forceful, nor accumulate evidence sufficiently convincing, to persuade literary critics and sociologiststhat their disciplinesareinextricablylinked. Her book, though refreshingly free from sociologicaljargon, remains a series of ‘bright ideas’ and fascinating digressions, lacking the subtlety, the cohesion and above all the accuracy (she suggests in the Preface, for instance, that Vico’s The New Science, 1744, anticipated the economic determinism of Marx and Engels by ‘two hundred years’) of a serious contribution to knowledge. In the opening chapter Rockwell develops the implications of her text’ssubtitleThe Use of Literature in the SystematicStudy of Society-by arguing that fiction is not only a product of societybut a ‘producer’, ‘not only a source of information but a normative force in society’. The word fiction is forced to bear a heavy burden here, referring not only to literary texts, but to any construct-law, politics, religion, the mass media-that shapes human understanding and behaviour. This feasible but (in view of the subtitle) surprisingly broad use of the word fiction is evident again in Chapter Two, The Transmission of Norms in Fiction, where Rockwell’s best examples of ‘normative’ fiction comenot from literature but television:shedemonstrates how an establishment ‘ideology’ (in favour of the maintenance of the ‘status quo’) is at work in various popular television series in Britain. *34 Mycenae Rd., Blackheath, London SE3, England. Significantly, when R,ockwell does turn her attention to literature in Chapter Three, she is at her weakest, unable to provide any new insights: in view...