Money and Tragedy in the Nineteenth-Century Novel Clany Soileau Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2006 Money and tragedy in the nineteenth-century novel Clany Soileau Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Comparative Literature Commons Recommended Citation Soileau, Clany, "Money and tragedy in the nineteenth-century novel" (2006). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 1875. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/1875 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. MONEY AND TRAGEDY IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Interdepartmental Program in Comparative Literature by Clany Soileau B.A., University of New Orleans, 1971 B.A., University of New Orleans, 1972 M.A., University of New Orleans, 1978 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1998 May 2006 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would particularly like to express my gratitude to Joseph Ricapito who over the past ten years has given me an inspiring example of what a scholar should be. I was fortunate to have him as a teacher and an inspiration beginning with my very first semester of graduate study at LSU and every year since. I would also like to thank the members of my committee, Bainard Cowan, John Pizer, and Adelaide Russo, for working with me on this project. This dissertation is dedicated to my wife Norma for her help and understanding in all aspects of my life. Without her help, it would never have been written. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………ii ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………iv CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………………………………………1 2. LE PÈRE GORIOT………………………………………………………………………………………………………44 3. THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM……………………………………………………………………………77 4. MASTRO-DON GESUALDO………………………………………………………………………………………107 5. MIAU………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………137 6. BUDDENBROOKS…………………………………………………………………………………………………………165 7. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………………………………………201 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………210 VITA……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………223 iii ABSTRACT The nineteenth-century novelists studied in this dissertation used tragic form to investigate economic and social changes taking place around them. Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1834), William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham (1884-1885), Giovanni Verga’s Mastro-don Gesualdo (1888), Benito Pérez Galdós’s Miau, (1888), and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901) reflect the interest of writers in France, the United States, Italy, Spain, and Germany in questions concerning how money in an evolving capitalist society not only had a major role in shaping the behavior and personalities of specific individuals but also affected such institutions as the family. Under these changing social conditions, these writers developed a new tragic model: a middle-class individual destroyed by social and economic change involving the role of money in a capitalist society. In their novels, the businessman or bureaucrat replaced the nobility as a subject for a tragedy, which could consist of an entire novel or a tragic narrative imbedded in a novel. One aspect of the role of money which these novelists chose to investigate was how bankruptcy, either the catastrophe itself or the fear of it, could lead to tragedy. Caught up in the struggle to prosper, the individual man, and in the novels studied here it is always a man, became alienated within his iv family and society as relations based on the need to make money replaced traditional bonds based on family and social ties. The lives of the main protagonists revealed similar characteristics related to how money affected their function in society and gave the novelists the tools they needed for an investigation of the new capitalism. These novels parallel work being done by the writers’ contemporaries who were analyzing the same social phenomena and developing ideas which would become modern social science. The tragic figure in these novels could easily be seen as being caught in Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’, the result of allowing capitalism’s ethic of money-making to become too important in his life. Georg Simmel’s writing on the function of money, tragedy, exchange theory, and gratitude are also important in understanding these novels. v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION “Bankruptcy is perhaps the greatest and most humiliating calamity which can befall an innocent man. The greater part of men, therefore, are sufficiently careful to avoid it. Some, indeed, do not avoid it; as some do not avoid the gallows.” Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations “Money we know will do almost everything, and no doubt money had had much to do with this.” Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right “La vie n’est-elle pas une machine à laquelle l’argent imprime le mouvement?” Honoré de Balzac, Gobseck “It seems there is a kind of satisfaction in the work of picking up gold besides the mere gain.” Daniel Defoe, A New Voyage Around the World by a Course Never Sailed Before 1 I Tragedy and Money: A Statement of Purpose The nineteenth-century novelists studied here gave tragic form to their works to show how the struggle to acquire money shaped the personalities and behavior of those living in the evolving capitalist society which they saw around them. Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1834), William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham (1884-1885), Giovanni Verga’s Mastro-don Gesualdo (1888), Benito Pérez Galdós’s Miau (1888), and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901) all have major figures for whom the fierce struggle to make money leads only to spiritual or 1 financial bankruptcy and misery. Money as a medium of social exchange distorts traditional social and family ties and leads not only to the central figures being alienated from those around them in the greater world of business and society but also from members of their own family. This alienation from others hastens the deterioration of their personality and the lonely death that follows is the logical end to each man’s tragedy. It is important to note that these novels have been presented at times as ‘tragedies’ by critics. However, to date no one has pointed out how the form of tragedy seen in these works as a group relates to a specific Euro-American phenomenon: a novel with a middle-class character whose tragic fate is directly related to the function of money in society. The tragedy in these novels reveals individual suffering within a larger and dominant social reality. Although the individual tragedy is real, the writers’ objective approach gives the reader little hope that the suffering will lead to communal healing or a new and better social order. This study is purposely descriptive and like Aristotle’s Poetics the “method is empirical” (Ferguson 3). In that method lies its thesis, i.e., to show by clear example how a distinct form of tragedy in a select group of nineteenth-century novels can be described in terms taken from Aristotle’s Poetics. Each 2 novel has a central figure who occupies a position of at least some prominence in his society and all have plots based on reversal, recognition, and pathos. The remarks in the Poetics defining each of the classic terms apply clearly to what is seen in these novels. First, Aristotle says for the tragedy to be most effective the work should represent the fall of a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous—a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious men of such families. (Poetics 76) I think it is clear that with the evolution of culture from Aristotle’s time to nineteenth-century capitalism, the middle-class figures of these novels fulfill this requirement. A common theme in many novels, including those in this study, is that the members of the commercial and financial sectors of society were coming to form a new and respected class of people whose position and values were tied to the new economic forces that were changing society. Although George Steiner expressed a belief common to many critics that “There is nothing democratic in the vision of tragedy” (241), I believe the history of the form during the Industrial Revolution refutes his idea. A deeper understanding of history and humanity gave new status to ordinary people and 3 allowed them to take their place in literature, and in tragedy. I will discuss this at greater length later in this introduction. The other defining terms of a tragedy found in Aristotle are also clearly applicable to these novels: “Reversal of the Situation is a change by which the action veers round to its opposite” (72); “Recognition, as the name indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge” (72); and “The Scene of Suffering [translated as ‘pathos’, by others] is a destructive or painful action, such as death on the stage, bodily agony, wounds and the like” (73). Further, in each case, we see the central figure fail due to some some ‘error or frailty’, giving us clear examples of Aristotle’s term hamartia. In each novel studied here, when the main protagonists begin to see the truth, when there is recognition of how they have failed, the tragedy is inescapable and it is very clear here that for these writers the “action of perceiving, passing from ignorance to knowledge is near the heart of tragedy” (Ferguson 18). Any description of the novels mentioned above must take all these terms into consideration and I will do so in the analysis of each work.