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The commodification of the American dream: Capitalist subjectivity in American literature

Tyson, Lois Marie, Ph.D.

The Ohio State University, 1989

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THE COMMODIFICATION OF THE AMERICAN DREAM:
CAPITALIST SUBJECTIVITY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate
School of the Ohio State University

By
Lois Marie Tyson, B.A., M.Ed., M.A.
* * * * *

The Ohio State University

1983

Approved by

Dissertation Commitee:

Walter A. Davis James Phelan
Adviser
Department of English
Mark Conroy In passing from history to nature, myth . . . abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies C1357)

cut is no longer the myths which need to be unmasked. . . . cut is the sign itself which must be shaken; the problem is not to . . . change or purify the symbols but to challenge the symbolic itself.

Roland Barthes, Image - Music - Text (1977)
Copyright by
Lois Marie Tyson
1989 To Mac Davis
The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies.

— Kate Chopin

11

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Professors James Phelan, Mark
Conroy, and Alan Hausman for their very helpful and good- natured comments and suggestions. Very special thanks go to Professor Walter A. Davis, without whose inspiration and encouragement this dissertation would not have been written. To my parents, Marie and Charles Tyson, I wish to express my gratitude for teaching me the importance of independent thinking and for having the patience to put up with me when I exercised it. Deepest appreciation is expressed for Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Ella .'itzgerald, Ray Charles, Jean-Paul Sartre, Vincent van Gogh, and all the artists, known and unknown, whose work has made our work possible and whose spirit has given our species something to shoot for.

Ill

VITA

1972 ............................

B. A., Douglass College Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey

1982 ............................

1984............................

M. Ed., Ohio University Athens, Ohio

f1. A., Ohio University Athens, Ohio

1984-85

........................

Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Massachusetts

1985-Present ....................

Graduate Teaching Assistant, The Ohio 5tate University, Columbus, Ohio

FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field; English
Studies in:
American Literature, 20th Century Ernest Lockridge

American Literature, 19th Century Thomas Cooley

American Women Writers Daniel Barnes

Critical Theory Walter Davis

IV

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION..............................................

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ..........................................

V I T A ..................................................... ii iii iv
INTRODUCTION CHAPTER

............................................

1
PAGE
I. THE ROMANCE OF THE COMMODITY: F. SCOTT
FITZGERALD’S THEGREAT GATSBY

................

23 65
II. WOMAN AS FETISH: EDITH WHARTON’S HOUSE
OF MIRTH

....................................

III. ’’LIFE IS BUT A DREAM”: ARTHUR MILLER’S
DEATH OFA SALESMAN..............................115

IV. BEYOND BEING AND NOTHINGNESS: JOSEPH
HELLER’SSOMETHINGHAPPENED

CONCLUSION.................................................221

BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................ 237

....................

174
INTRODUCTION
Commodification- The Dreamer and the Dream

If, as Martin Heidegger suggests, humans are those creatures whose very being is at issue for them (573, then it is not surprising that one of the reasons we study literature is to learn about ourselves, both individually and collectively. A literary text is not only an art object, but also a storehouse of the norms, mores, ideologies, and emotional conflicts of the culture from which it emerges. Whether literary works endorse or criticize cultural values, they provide fertile ground from which we can harvest an understanding of a culture’s collective psyche, an apprehension of how cultural habits reveal the nature of men and women’s existence in and perceptions of the world. Homer’s Illiad reveals the conflicts of the warrior-ethic in Greek culture; Shakespeare’s King Lear explores the meanings and values attached to kingship and fatherhood in Elizabethan England; Eliot’s Middlemarch investigates the relation between individual action for change and societal inertia in Victorian England.

2

What can American literature of the twentieth century tell us about ourselves today? Among other things, it can throw into contemporary focus a very traditional American concern; the relationship between the individual and the group. From F. □. Matthiessen's portrait of American Renaissance writers as literary revolutionaries committed to exploring the possibilities of a self-expression inspired by the lack of a specifically American literary tradition, to Donald Pease’s recent reconsideration of the motives of American Renaissance writers in terms of their desire for community and continuity, critics of American literature have discussed the individual and the group as more or less discrete entities, often placing them in a polarized opposition. I start with a different assumption about the relation between the individual and the group. They are not discrete entities, and their relatedness is more than interactive: the individual and the group are mutually constitutive.
As Louis Althusser has explained, in order for any social system to survive, its conditions of production must be reproduced in the individual psyche. This task is accomplished by ideology:
CTlhe category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but . . . onlu . . . insofar . . . as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of 'constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects. (171)

3

That is, subjects are "aiways-already interpellated by ideology” C17G). This perspective problematizes the relation between the individual and the group because it doesn’t let us treat them as autonomous, discrete entities but, instead, focuses our attention on their dialectical relationship, on the ways in which they inhabit and define each other.
How do the individual and the group inhabit and define each other in contemporary American society? Or, in Althusser’s terms, how are the conditions of production in contemporary American society reproduced in the individual subject? To answer this question, we must reflect upon the nature and importance of the commodity; for, in a free- enterprise, consumer society such as ours, conditions of production rest largely upon relations among commodities.
A commodity, by definition, has value not in terms of what it can do (use value), but in terms of the money or other commodities it can be traded for (exchange value) or in terms of the prestige and social status its ownership confers (sign-exchange value).1 For example. Jay Gatsby owns a well-stocked, expensive library. Its use value consists of the vast amount of information contained in its volumes, the learning it can impart to readers. Its

1 Karl Marx’s analysis of the commodity is, of course, responsible for the distinction between use value and exchange value. French political economist Jean Baudrillard has extended Marx’s discussion to include sign-exchange value, a non-material but important form of exchange value.

4

exchange value consists of the money Gatsby could gat if he sold it. Its sign-exchange value consists of the prestige it confers on its owner. Gatsby has no intention of reading the books in his library: the pa^es aij all uncut. He also has no intention of selling them: the market he deals with does not trade in books. Gatsby bought his library for the image of upper-class education and refinement it imparts to its owner. In acquiring the books for their sign-exchange value only, Gatsby has commodified culture.
As we can see from this example, an object becomes a commodity only when it has exchange value or sign-exchange value, and neither form of value is inherent in any object. Both are forms of social value: they are values assigned to objects by human beings in a given social context. Commodification, then, is the act or condition of seeing something in terms of its exchange value or sign-exchange value— in terms of what it can be traded for or the prestige it confers— instead of in terms of its physical, moral, intellectual, or aesthetic qualities.
Anything can be commodified. Art can be commodified when a work is purchased solely for the price it will bring a few years hence or for the prestige of owning it. A woman’s youth and beauty can be commodified, just like the Jewels she is wearing. And human relationships can be commodified as well, as we can see in the following dialogue from Woody Allen’s Play It Again. 5am. in which Dick and

5

Linda Christie are talking with Allan Felix about the recent break-up of his marriage.
Linda: Oh, he really loved her. I Feel like crying.

Dick: Why do you Feel like crying? A man makes an investment; it doesn’t pay oFF. . . . Allan, you’ve invested your emotions in a losing stock. It was wiped out. It dropped oFF the board. Now, what do you do, Allan? You reinvest— maybe in a more stable stock— something with long-term growth possibilities.

Allan: Who you gonna Fix me up with. General
Motors?

OF course, one obvious Function oF Dick’s discourse in this excerpt is to clariFy and underscore what is really at stake For the speaker: proFit and loss— in this case, proFit and loss in terms oF time, emotional energy, and social status. However, another, more powerFul eFFect oF such language, and the real pay-oFF For the speaker, is that it distances him From the objects oF his discourse. Dick’s real project in convincing Allan to ’’reinvest” is to distance himselF emotionally From Allan’s Feelings, and to get Allan to do the same. Dick wants to increase the sign- exchange value, or social status, oF his Friend without ’’investing” any oF his own emotional energy.
For most oF us, Dick’s behavior is Familiar because commodiFication has become a common way oF being in the world and relating to others, a psychological stance one adopts whenever one relates to persons or things as one commodity to another, that is, in terms oF relative ’’worth”

G

on a ’’market," such as the Job "market” or the marriage "market.” People "commodify” themselves and others when, for example— like Bob Slocum’s boss in Joseph Heller’s Something Happened— they try to be seen at parties talking with someone whose social status is higher than theirs in order to increase their own sign-exchange value. Part of the pay-off of this kind of commodification is the same kind of avoidance of feeling Dick Christie achieves: one doesn’t have to deal with the needs and feelings of others or with needs and feelings of one’s own that conflict with the desire for social status.
Clearly, my claim that American culture today is based upon relations among commodities has significant psychological implications for human beings both collectively and individually. While it is the socius, the human collective in its various social manifestations, that determines exchange value and sign-exchange value, it is the individual subject who, constituting and constituted by the socius, experiences the dimensions of this interplay internally, as the (repressed or activated) conflicts, desires, fears, and guilt that define his or her inferiority.
What is the dominant ideological vehicle by which individual American subjects are interpellated in a socius dominated by the commodity? The answer is, I think, "the American dream.” While there are a number of ideological