~. ,";"i ;. ~ . ' New Orleans Review Volume 24, Number 2 Summer 1998 I. LOYOLA UNIVERSITY NEW ORLEANS - Editor Ralph Adamo Front Cover: Canal Street Series, #6. Back Cover: Canal Street Series, #3. Both by Jesse Morgan. Associate Editor Book Review Editor New Orleans Review is published quarterly by Loyola University, New Mary A. McCay Orleans, Louisiana 70118, United States. Copyright© 1998 by Loyola Sophia Stone University. Copy Editor New Orleans Review accepts submissions of poetry, short fiction, essays, T. R. Mooney interviews and black and white art work or photography. Translations are also welcome but must be accompanied by the work in its original language. All submissions must be accompanied by a self-addressed stamped Typographer Business Manager envelope. Although reasonable care is taken, NOR assumes no responsi­ Bill Lavender Michelle Mechta bility for the loss of unsolicited material. Send submissions and individual Lisa A. Rose subscriptions to: New Orleans Review, Box 195, Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118. Intern E-mail address: [email protected] Skelly McCay http:llwww.magamall.comlmagazinei880111New_Orleans_Review.htm http: I I www.world widemagazines.com IIi terary-resources-review .html Advisory/Contributing Editors Institutional subscribers contact Faxon (800-289-7740), EBSCO (205-991-6600), John Biguenet or your subscription service. Douglas Brinkley Barbara Ewell Subscription rates: Individuals: $18.00 Michelle Fredette Institutions: $21.00 Bruce Henricksen Foreign: $32.00 Bill Lavender Back Issues: $ 9.00 each Peggy McCormack Marcus Smith Contents listed in the PMLA Bibliography and the Index of American Periodical Verse. Founding Editor Miller Williams New Orleans Review is distributed to booksellers by: Ingram Periodicals-1226 Heil Quaker Blvd., LaVergne, TN 37086-7000 1-800-627-6247 Advisory Committee DeBoer- 113 East Centre St., Nutley, NJ 07110 Lorynne Cahn Barbara Lemann 1-800-667-9300 Philip Carter Carol Mcintosh Loyola University New Orleans is a charter member of the Association of Yorke Corbin Julian Mutter Jesuit University Presses (AJUP). Randy Fertel Michael Sartisky Henry Folse Sophia Stone US lSSN 0028-6400 Roger Kamenetz CONTENTS Rita Signorelli-Pappas The Rookery 98 Nick Barrett Louis Gallo My Mother's Cooking 99 The City Care Forgot, or, Duke Alexis Alexandrovitch Romanoff Meets Buffalo Bill, after which He Travels M. Rukmini Callimachi to New Orleans for Mardi Gras 6 Undressing 101 Sheila Mulligan Webb Pacifier 102 NINETEENTH-CENTURY MONEY AND CULTURE SELECTED PROCEEDINGS OF THE THIRTEENTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF INCS INTERDISCIPLJNARY NINETEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES Books Richard E. Johnson, Janice Carlisle, Michele Levy James R. Watson on Breaking Crystal 122 Introduction 10 Mary McCay on Massa Ablishinist! Save Me! 124 Gordon Bigelow Contributors 130 Technologies of Debt: Bank Finance and the Subject of Economic Thought 14 Fritz Breithaupt Money as a Medium of Communication and Money as Individuation 23 Laura George Figures of Commerce in the "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" 31 Thomas A. Vogler The Economy of Writing and Melville's Gold Doubloon 45 Tom Dent Sharon Leah Kayfetz Counterfeit Coins and Traffic Jams: Rewriting Masculinity Playwright Poet in Adam Bede 62 and Anne R. Trubek 1932- 1998 Forgers of the Real: Trompe L'Oeil Paintings of Money 73 Timothy f. Wager Regulating the Market: The Society of Authors and the Professionalization of Literary Production 84 4 New Orleans Review New Orleans Review 5 Louis Gallo What's next? THE CITY CARE FORGOT, Topeka, Jefferson City, Louisville, Memphis, New Orleans (1877) OR, DCKE ALEXIS ALEXANDROVITCH ROMANOFF He fell in love with MEETS BUFFALO BILL, AFTER WHICH HE the divine Lydia Thompson TRAVELS TO NEW ORLEANS FOR MARDI GRAS who sang Ifever I cease to love in "Bluebeard" He moped in Russia's expansive gloom, tossed weary pebbles in the Dnieper The Creoles adored her enough and dreamed of buffalo in America. to name a baseball team after her. Vodka was not his drink. He preferred the filigreed bouquet of French Chablis. The city was so excited about his Royal Highness it annulled the government to form And Slavic women, The Krewe of Rex. how coarse. In America All night Alexis danced the quadrille they were like canaries with Lydia aboard the james Howard he'd heard sailors say. docked at Gravier Street Wharf. So he booked passage for St. Louis The next night he attended II Trovatore and introduced himself to Buffalo Bill at the French Opera House and disappeared discreetly after the show. who took him to Omaha where they joined Custer, Sheridan and a team On Mardi Gras Day they erected a throne of cowboys and founded "Camp Alexis." across from City Hall on St. Charles St. He fell in love with Louis Saloman, merchant, first King of Rex, Spotted Tail's daughter draped in purple velvet and rhinestones, !fever I cease to love ... reared his horse to salute the Duke and persuaded her and Alexis bowed regally to join him in Denver Ifever I cease to love, Bill taught him how to shoot. sang the first band, The enraged beast nearly gorged him to death. dropping their instruments, Ifever I cease to love And that was that. He'd killed it. May the Grand Duke 6 New Orleans Review Louis Gallo 7 Ride a buffalo In a Texan rodeo There followed a procession of the Ku Klux Klan, carriages full of smiling Chinese NINETEENTH-CENTURY MONEY clothiers, Dan Rice's Famous Troupe of Trained Animals, caricatures of Lincoln AND CULTURE and Grant, marching formations ofTurks, SELECTED PROCEEDINGS Indians and Arabs, vans advertising Of THE Warner's Bitters, the Singer Sewing Machine, THIRTEENTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE Of Mme. Tigau's Elixir for Ladies and INCS Dr. Tichenor's Antiseptic INTERDISCIPLINARY NINETEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES But Alexis had taken offense at the parody of Lydia's song and grew gloomy and dull, could not be persuaded to dance and refused "most of the invitations extended to him, failing to keep at least one appointment with Lydia Thompson and presenting his new little friend [an actress] with a bracelet of diamonds and pearls when at last he departed New Orleans forever." We can only presume that the cold, windswept form wrapped in bearskins, trudging across endless steppes, gleaned in the Krewe a future without him, crazed anarchists, festering cells of saboteurs, wild democracy, insolent, wicked canaries, death. Janice Carlisle Richard E. Johnson Michele Levy Guest Editors 8 New Orleans Review New Orleans Review 9 INTRODUCTION Economic Thought" traces the emergence of the now powerful explanatory model of economics-the study of the production, distribution, and consump­ Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) is an international tion of products and services-from its origin in eighteenth-century concep­ scholar!~ associ~rion devoted to the exploration from a variety of disciplinary tions of political economy, the study of the sources of a nation's wea~th. perspectives of tmponant and controversial cultural issues. For the past thirteen Surveying the major shifts in economic thought during the century m which tt years, the association has sponsored an annual meeting, inviTing papers relevant took its present form, Bigelow demonstrates that these developments reflect to the announced conference theme. Meeting in New Orleans for the second changes in philosophical theories of language, issuing ultimately in a Romantic time in recent years-1992 was the earlier occasion-the members of INCS in conception of the modern market as the expression of a consumer's desires. As 1998 addressed the subject of "Nineteenth-Century Money and Culture." Bigelow argues, "It is only by reading political economy in its broadest cultural Loyola University served as the host institution, and the program, like that of contexts that we can begin to study the cultural and ideological work taken on 1_992, was. develo~ed by a lo~al inter-university committee, chaired again this by the discipline of economics today," and he makes his contribution toward ~tme b! R1char~ E. Johnson (Department of English, Loyola University) and such an understanding by encompassing such diverse subjects as philosophy, mcludmg on this occasion Janice Carlisle (English, Tulane University), Michele rheology, banking, gender, and colonialism. ~evy and Sheri Hoem (English, Xavier University of Louisiana), and Joyce Like Bigelow, Fritz Breithaupt casts a wide net in his essay, "Money as a Zonana (English, University of New Orleans). Medium of Communication and Money as Individuation," asking, as Bigelow . The meeting, held this year on April 17 and 18, began on Friday morning does, why economic thinking should have become during the nineteenth With a plen~ry fo:um of four distinguished scholars: Patrick Brantlinger, century "a major paradigm to explain the world." Breithaupt's answer lies in Professor of Eng!tsh and Cultural Studies at Indiana University; Ann what he sees as the complex and elusive ways in which money functions: as an Cvetkovich, Associate Professor of English at the Universiry of Texas at Austin· absuact and supposedly neutral concept, for instance, money functions as a Philip E. Mirowski, Carl E. Koch Professor of Economics at the Universirv of' medium of communication, drawing together people of different interests; yet, N?tre Dame; and Richard F. Teichgraeber III, Professor of History and . in its concrete manifestation (what Marx identified as the "sensual-unsensual Director, Murphy Institute for Political Economy at Tulane University. The fetish of money"), money promotes individuation. Indeed, the abstract aspect of keynote address, "The Anxiety of Affluence: Speculariry in Political Economy money can screen the fighr for inidividualiry that money promotes, obscuring and Hard Times," was delivered the next day by Mary Poovey, Professor of as well forms of social violence that attend the struggle. Like Bigelow, English at New York Universiry. Adding to and amplifying on the diverse Breithaupt expands the purview of his analysis to explain the extraordinary perspectives offered by these speakers, over one hundred participants in the power that economics has had in defining what we understand as modernity.