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

1. Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and the Inevitable, (Im)possible, Maddening Importance of the Gift

one Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and the Inevitable, (Im)possible, Maddening Importance of the Gift Surprisingly, this is the first book to think in detail about the gift in nineteenth-century American fiction.Initially,I was poised to argue for the usefulness of an economic approach to nineteenth-century American literature that considered not just capitalism but also gift exchange. But in the process of writing this book, a far more compelling story emerged. To all of the writers considered here—and to many more who did not make it into the book—the gift was both a central reality and a puzzle: it shaped their everyday lives and ensured, in many cases, their mere survival; it lay at the center of their complex roles as gifted artists in an increasingly capitalist culture; it was significant for their wider thinking about capitalism in a century that saw its full development and its many pitfalls; it was entangled in their struggle with faith; it shaped their view of social relations and forms of otherness; and, most importantly for this book,it defined and drove the structures,shapes,and nature of their narratives. The gift, then, also connected the writers in From Gift to Commodity,made their fictions speak to each other in ways that would otherwise remain almost invisible. In the end, I found myself not so much exemplifying a critical approach than finally getting at the central mysteries,even aporias,of texts that I had read many times before without grasping some of their most fundamental structures and struggles.Thinking about the gift made me listen to the texts in new ways. Most narratives, I found, were propelled, even structured ,by gifts—at times,the greatest gift a human can give another human,the gift of life—and they struggled with the gift, its complicated way of creating bonds and obligations. Other narratives that tried to imagine a world without gifts were fragmented and even broke down as a result. They suggested what on second sight became obvious: we cannot have narratives without gifts and the bonds they create and define in time. Gifts, as Jacques Derrida wrote in response to Marcel Mauss, happen, if they happen, in narratives; narratives, in turn cannot exist or cohere without gifts. 1 2 From Gift to Commodity Derrida’s writings on the gift show that paradoxically the gift, in another sense, remained unspeakable to most narratives or that, as Derrida posits, it remained outside of reason and language or logos. Some narratives, such as Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World, gestured toward the unspeakable terror of the gift, particularly the ultimate and most unfathomable gift of death. Other texts—for example, Hannah Webster Foster’s Coquette, Herman Melville’s Confidence-Man, or William Dean Howells’s Rise of Silas Lapham—run up against or gestured toward the mind-boggling, unknowable, secretive, in Derridean terms (im)possible,quality of the gift.In that sense,while narratives exist and cohere through the gift and the human bonds and obligations it creates in time,they are also brought to the brink of their existence,the brink of logos,by the gift. It turns out that the gift, while engendering the plots and themes of narratives, also leads us to their silences and impossibilities, the ways in which they must but cannot speak the gift. While bringing narratives into being, the gift also ultimately defines their central aporias. Beyond those fundamental considerations of the gift in relation to narrative, the centrality of the gift as a theme for the novel should not come as a surprise since, as John Frow writes in Time and Commodity Culture, “one of the most powerful and most illuminating ways of thinking about the pattern of relations between persons has been through the opposition of the gift to the commodity” (1997,102).The novel as a form is deeply concerned with “the patterns of relations between persons,”so it can also be thought about through that “opposition of the gift to the commodity.”Frow further points out that this opposition is far from clear cut; it turns out over and over again to be “a form of mythical thinking.” “On closer examination,”he notes,“the concepts of gift and commodity seem to partake of each other”(102).With their interest in depicting social relations, novels—more than other forms of literature—register these tensions. From Gift to Commodity explores the problematic relationship between gift and commodity economies in the nineteenth-century American...