From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

Preface

xi Preface If it is possible to care too much about a book, this one may be a case in point. While each academic project I have undertaken was in some manner a way to sort out a baffling aspect of my life, this book, for me, raises the most fundamental questions about human existence. What are we given? Life, talent, love, friendship, objects, or faith? Who gives these gifts and why? And what, if any, are the obligations that come with these gifts? In what way can gifts be blessings, curses, or simply mixed blessings? How can we trust, and how can we forgive betrayal? Can we imagine our lives’ stories without gifts? Can we tell any stories without gifts? How can we offer and accept sacrifices in an increasingly capitalist culture? And while life, with its sometimes horrible and sometimes wonderful twists and turns, made me rethink these questions over and over in the last years, literature and academic writing gave me a way of exploring them.Luckily,I found that the same questions had occupied the minds of the best thinkers and writers. The academic conversation about the gift,spanning from Marcel Mauss’s foundational essay on the gift to Jacques Derrida’s fabulous ruminations on it much later, gave me a way of seeing both the possibilities and (im)possibilities of the gift.This twentieth-century academic conversation also made me discover, for the first time, that the American nineteenth-century writers I had long studied and cherished were engaged in their own, equally brilliant and complex explorations of the gift.1 My encounter with the gift in these academic and literary works is the subject of this book. As in the lives of the writers I describe here, the gift has been an important reality in my life,and this book is the result of many gifts I happily acknowledge. Some parts of this book have been published before in different forms, and I am grateful not only for permission to reproduce but also for the collaboration of editors and readers that make one’s work worth reading in the first place. A part of chapter 3 appeared as “A Quilt for Life: Lydia Maria Child’s The American Frugal Housewife,” American Transcendental Quarterly 13, no. 2 (June 1999): 89–104. “Hunger, Panic, Refusal: The Gift of Food in Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World” deals with food as gift in Warner’s novel and appeared in Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews, 173–87 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan , 2009). A shorter version of my Frank Norris chapter was published as xii Preface “McTeague: Naturalism, Legal Stealing, and the Anti-Gift” in the collection Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism, edited by Mary E. Papke, 86–106 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003). And I am very grateful to have a short, suggestive essay on the gift and capitalism included in the January 2012 issue of PMLA entitled “Capitalism, Fiction, and the Inevitable,(Im)possible,Maddening Importance of the Gift,”which offers in quick strokes the main ideas of this book. The pleasure of scholarship for me lies in the gift economies from which much of our work results, be it in the classroom, in casual conversation, at conferences, or in writing groups. The Society for Critical Exchange created one context in which I first encountered and got excited about the idea of the gift. I am very grateful to my doctoral students at the Graduate Center, particularly the students in my seminar on “Gift and Commodity,” with whom I was able to read Mauss and Derrida and discuss many of the text I interpret here. I have been extraordinarily lucky in finding writing groups wherever I have lived and worked over the last ten years or so, and I want to acknowledge the help of as many readers as I can remember: Elizabeth Abrams, Steve Biel, Kristin Hoganson, Jill Lepore, Laura Saltz, and others at Harvard University; the New York Americanist Group; my New York writing group (Jeff Allred, Sophie Bell, Sarah Chinn, Anna-Mae Duane, Josef Entin, Jon Hartman, and Jennifer Travis); Joe Leo and Mark McDane; and,last but not least,my friends and colleagues Lisa Honacker and Deborah Gussman, whose cooking and support were as perfectly right and valuable as their comments on my writing. I thank my research assistant Jon Rachmani for helping me with some final...