Bartleby’s Consensual Dysphoria

In this essay I seek to understand why many of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protestors embraced Bartleby, the dysfunctional scrivener of Melville’s Story of Wall Street, as a fellow traveler in their movement. I first situate Bartleby the Scrivener in the context of classical legal thought, expanding on some claims put forward in a seminal article on Bartleby by Brook Thomas in the 1980s. I then argue that Melville’s scrivener suffered from a psychic and political condition I call “consensual dysphoria.” Bartleby suffered from consensual dysphoria in extremis. The OWSers recognized this—thus their otherwise inexplicable empathic bond with him. Consensual dysphoria, as depicted by Melville and as suffered by Bartleby, I will urge, is a part of the debilitating legacy of classical legal thought that persists today, and in an even more developed and exaggerated form.

Raisin, Race, and the Real Estate Revolution of the Early Twentieth Century

Lorraine Hansberry’s hit play of 1957, A Raisin in the Sun, centered on the decision of an African American family in Chicago, the Youngers, to move to a house in a white neighborhood. The play is set in the post–World War II era, but many of its scenes and actions relate back to real estate practices that began at the turn of the century and that continued to evolve into the midcentury and to some degree beyond. During those decades, housing development and finance increased dramatically in scale, professionalization, and standardization. But in their concern for their predominantly white consumers’ preferences for segregation, real estate developers, brokers, financial institutions, and finally governmental agencies adopted standard practices that excluded African Americans from many housing opportunities and that then reinforced white preferences for housing segregation. Many seemingly minor features of the play reflect the way that African Americans had been sidelined in the earlier decades’ evolving real estate practices—not just the family’s overcrowded apartment, but also more subtle cues, such as the source of the initial funds for the new house, the methods for its finance, and the legal background of the white homeowners’ effort to discourage the purchase. This essay pinpoints these and other small clues, and describes how standardizing real estate practices dating from the turn of the century effectively crowded out African American consumers like the Youngers, with consequences that we continue to observe in modern patterns of urban segregation.

The Second New Deal and the Fourth Courtroom Wall

This essay explores Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 labor opera, The Cradle Will Rock, as an assault on legal legitimacy. Since its famous first production—a pared-down performance in which actors delivered their parts from the house, improvised when the WPA canceled the scheduled opening of the controversial project—critics have emphasized Cradle’s indebtedness to the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, to whom Blitzstein dedicated the work. Consistent with Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, Blitzstein distances the audience from Cradle’s characters, substituting rational understanding for unreflective empathy. Like Brecht, he employs this theatrical device to expose the cultural and economic underpinnings of familiar social practices, including capitalism. Imported to the US context, the Brechtian reimagining of theatrical conventions resonated with a corresponding attack on formal legal justice. At the height of the New Deal’s crisis of legal legitimacy, Cradle depicts a judicial system baldly beholden to wealth and property. The anti-union steel magnate at the show’s center bribes and manipulates journalists, professionals, and public officials to promote his concept of “liberty,” namely, freedom from organized labor. By amplifying the effects of economic interests on legal outcomes while undermining empathy with the characters who facilitate and legitimate repression, Cradle invites the audience to consider its own complicity in law’s injustice.

Money and Art in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward

Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward, was the second most popular American novel of the nineteenth century after Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Bellamy imagines Boston in the year 2000. Equality prevails, while money and law have disappeared. This essay focuses on Bellamy’s account of how literature thrives in this society and shows that it is fundamentally flawed. First, to explain how literature is produced, Bellamy is forced to introduce a form of money into his society after all. Moreover, he has no way to explain why the logic that leads to the introduction of money in order to make literature possible does not apply to producing everything else a well-lived life requires. Second, the literature that Bellamy envisions suggests that his world is no utopia at all. It is instead a dull dystopian place in which neither literature nor art is likely to flourish.

Commerce, Law, and Revolution in the Novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë

The 1840s and 1850s witnessed the publication of three great “condition of England” novels: Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855). All three novels examine the consequences of the Industrial Revolution in England, and all are critical in their appraisal of its effects on individuals, society, and the national—and even the international—realm. All three focus on the world of commerce and manufacturing, but the realm of law is never far away. Yet there are differences: in Shirley, Brontë delves into the interior lives of two very different female protagonists, while Gaskell’s narratives are more concerned with economic and social injustice. Brontë set Shirley during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s, a period of British imperial struggle and ultimate triumph. Gaskell placed the action of Mary Barton a decade prior to its writing, but in North and South she depicted her current moment, with a consequent sharpening of her critique. This essay examines the novels’ treatment of a set of interconnected themes: commerce, law, and revolution, with reference to related questions of politics, gender, and time.

Regulating Greed

John Dos Passos’ The Big Money (1936) is hardly the only important American work to see greed as a cause of the stock market crash and then the Great Depression. It is packed with the problem of distinguishing greed from ambition, and it raises the question of the right social response to unattractive impulses. Prior to losing his idealistic fervor, or exchanging it for conservative passion, Dos Passos freely associated ambition with corruption, and acquisitiveness with antisocial self-interest. His deployment and biographical sketches of industrialists and other notable Americans suggest the difficulty of distinguishing avarice from ambition. Dos Passos’ treatment of ambition presupposes an economy where one person’s gain is at the expense of another; artistic accomplishment is, however, freed from this assumption. The novel speaks more to individual excesses than to their regulation, but it offers an opportunity to think about both.

Counterfeiting Confidence

Taking Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857) as a point of departure, this essay explores the perils of trusting too much or too little in the representations of strangers in a burgeoning capitalist society. It attends in particular to the “natural struggle between charity and prudence” that was exhibited not only by fictional passengers on the steamboat Fidèle but also by their real-life counterparts in nineteenth-century American courtrooms, where alleged con men and women were more than occasionally called to account for their questionable moneymaking ventures. While many of the era’s imaginative writers figured the law and its enforcers as marginal and ill equipped to meet the challenges posed by fraudsters, contemporary court records tell a different story, revealing the ways members of the bench and bar endeavored to police the ambiguous borderlands between capitalism and crime.

Introduction

This introductory essay broadly describes the connections between money, literature, and law that are explored in greater depth in each chapter of the volume. It explains the chronological parameters of the volume, the period framed by the Industrial Revolution and the Great Depression. Money and literature are both useful interpretive tools for understanding the law, and all three, especially when working together, allow for greater understanding of human society. The introduction gives a brief description of each chapter but also foreshadows the themes that recur throughout the volume and directs the reader’s attention to the interaction between storytelling and social science.

Irish [and English and American] Poets, Learn Your Trade

he puzzle is why poetry has so little contact with the business of ordinary life. Robert Frost is an exception, but even so ideological a poet as Auden refrains from being bleared with trade. Yeats in particular, a conservative, disdained trade, though urging poets to learn theirs. The very word “poetry,” of course, is from “thing made,” and the puzzle deepens. St. Thomas Aquinas had raised making by people to the dignity of God’s making, at least poetically. And yet. We have The Oxford Book of Love Poetry and The Oxford Book of the Sea, with battles and botanical observations (“Nothing gold can stay”), and yet the economy, even after the invention of economics by the Scots in the eighteenth century, is set aside. It has left poets and their readers in law and literature and politics proud to be thus ignorant. The sacred and the profane in fact are entangled.

The Grapes of Wrath, Economics, and Luck

Economic success and failure are always, to some degree, a matter of luck. The degree of randomness and luck involved in economic outcomes is, for most people, relevant to their support for schemes of social insurance. But a substantial amount of psychology research suggests that Westerners, especially Americans, systematically and significantly underestimate the role of luck in economic outcomes. Just world theory suggests that people are motivated to interpret good and bad outcomes in the world as more merited or deserved than they actually are. With this social science perspective, I interpret John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The novel is most obviously a story about the struggle of labor in a capitalist world, about which much has been written. But the story was provocative and subversive in another way: focused relentlessly on luck, it strongly counters the tendency to underestimate the role of luck in economic outcomes. Contrary to conventional storytelling, as well as the reactionary counter-novels it spawned, hard work and moral decency are not rewarded.