Book Report: The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning by Deidre Shauna Lynch
Thesis of the Work
Because Lynch’s ideas and words entwine to create an enchanting jungle for the reader to explore deep meanings in a state of wonder, I will deploy one of Lynch’s sentences as a microcosm of this remarkable book:
My emphasis on the economy of character has, I hope, had the effect of historicizing the
very category of literary and of historicizing the disciplinary divisions and divisions of
audience and market that sustain it. … History can also demonstrate something a bit different about our own individuating identification with the characters in our fiction–a consumption practice reshaped by that romantic recasting that made knowledge of characters’ truths into personal, private knowledge: that our transactions with characters remain, that change notwithstanding, profoundly social experiences” (20).
Charting our notion of interiority through time, with the novel as both vehicle and vessel–both a driving force and recipient within the “social machine” (207)–The Economy of Character deploys eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction and history to show that our idea of “character” is historically specific, socially constructed, and evolves over time. Lynch argues against the notion that characters exist on a continuum structured by a flat/round binary, with flat characters superior to, and a natural progression from, round characters. Lynch shows how character and interiority “work” (250) as both product and process of culture and literature.
Methodological/Theoretical Approach
Published in 1998, Lynch’s Economy of Character debuted in the post-structuralist (new historicist) heyday and departs from the structuralist theory of the 1950s. Lynch deconstructs binaries such as round/flat (3), depth/legibility (12), individuals/types of individuals (48), caricatures/characters (front cover), novels/Shakespeare (139), good/bad readers (149). She negates structuralist commonplaces (14-17, 19) including Ian Watt’s structuralist, 1951 work Rise of the Novel (4, 16, 124, 126, 268, 285-86). Deconstruction shows how knowledge is produced, examining the historical and cultural conditions and underlying structures which describe an object–in this case, character–to understand the system of characters that produced it. To that end, what could be more “deconstruction” than deconstructing the word character itself (42)? Lynch of course plays, as she and Derrida say, with the multiple meanings, including that of alphabetical characters. Furthermore, like Derrida did in Of Grammatology, she critiques Levi-Strauss (173).
Contribution
Lynch won the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book for The Economy of Character the year it was published, 1998, according to the introduction of Lynch when she spoke at the University of Minnesota in 2015 regarding “What Is/Was the Book?” (Youtube). She edited the 2012 Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume D: The Romantic Period, and serves as the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University. Excerpts from reviews on the book’s rear cover illuminate critical reception of her work during that time, and its contribution to the academic discourse, including:
The Economy of Character is one of the most ambitious and important books about
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fiction to appear in years. Fundamentally
rethinking the ways in which the hitory of the novel is conceived, Lynch shows how our very notion of ‘character’ is historically specific and socially constructed. After reading her book, we will no longer be able to assume that the work of the novel is and has always been to represent interiority, and we will appreciate the enormous amount of cultural and nationalizing work that had to be done before British fiction would be genericized in this way.
Chapter Summaries
The Economy of Character’s 265 pages are organized into two sections in a general-to-particular flow, from broad strokes of history in part 1 to close reading of the romantic period, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen in part 2. Part 1, “The Economies of Characteristic Writing,” consists in chapters 1-2 which lead readers through “Fleshing Out Characters” and “Fictions of Social Circulation”; part 2, “Inside Stories,” unleashes a torrent of innovative close readings including full chapters on Burney Austen in chapters 3-5, “Romantic-Period Reading Relations,” “Agoraphobia and the Interiority in Frances Burney’s Fiction,” and “Jane Austen and the Social Machine.”
Chapter 1, “Fleshing Out Characters”
Chapter 1 fleshes out characters, coining the phrase “economy of character” (23) to describe the age known for the “rise of the novel” (23) and a commercial world “altered by new trade routes and new forms of credit and full of strange commodities that invited the gaze and emptied the pocketbook” (4). Lynch invokes eighteenth-century novelist Henry Fielding to demonstrate that this period was “marked by an accelerated luxury consumption and by the most rapid urbanization in European history” (25). The ideas of John Locke and Hogarth play a prominent role in this chapter. After discussing “the principle of market stratification that pits high art against mass culture” (27), Lynch moves on to the works of Eliza Haywood, Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Daniel Defoe’s realism, Hogarth’s crusade against caricatures in favor of his characters, finally landing on mid-eighteenth century English acting sensation David Garrick, in a section titled “Garrick’s Face.”
Chapter 2, “Fictions of Social Circulation”
Chapter 2 tours the reader through eighteenth-century social circulation commencing with Garrick’s “pumped-up ways of looking at character” (80), which “fleshes out the figure that mid-eighteenth-century characteristic writing was devising so as to conceptualize a project of comprehensive knowledge” (83); to John Locke’s meditations on “interior space” (85); to Henry Fielding (91); ending with Lynch’s dialogue with Catherine Gallagher’s ideas on “fictionality.” One of my favorite visuals in this book, “When is the mental museum’s collection complete? At what point in is sequence of collecting is the self itself?” prods the reader into the present. Not only were eighteenth-century readers collecting physical objects as part of consumer culture, they were collecting ideas; likewise, readers of this Louvre-like book, a museum of ideas, may visit and revisit, to collect Lynch’s ideas to add to their notion of “self.” The last two sections of this chapter, “Pretenders and Nobodies” and “Facelessness: The Physiognomies of Money,” “engage with what was eventually even more useful about an emphasis on an (overcharacterized) character’s private properties” (86). Lynch uses Gallagher as a launch point to “play with” the idea of “nobody” (93)–Gallagher’s “fictionality of characters and on fiction’s incitements of the social passion of sympathy” then examine currency in a close reading of Joseph Andrews, finally positing that “readers who … imagine the inner life of the complex character … are tantalized with what, as consumers who are troubled by luxury yet in thrall to the world of goods, they most fervently seek–a way to be acquisitive and antimaterialist at once.”
Chapter 3, “Romantic Period Reading Relations”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge kick starts chapter 3 listing off “good” and “bad” readers (another binary Lynch deconstructs, in this chapter), which orients the audience into the romantic period while simultaneously instructing us how to close-read–an apt reminder during this delightfully dense part 2, which relies heavily on Lynch’s (and her audience’s) close reading skills:
Readers may be divided into four classes.
1. Sponges, who absorb all they read, and return it nearly in the same state, only a little
dirtied.
2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing, and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time.
3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read.
4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable who profit by what they read and enable others to profit by it also.
–Samuel Tayler Coleridge, Lectures (1811-12) (123).
Lynch segways back (to the future), to Watt’s Rise of the Novel, then to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads to show how “‘gaudy phraseology’ lose their grip; for a liberal and romantic history, this is the era that sees the rise of the self-expressive language of man” (124). The heart of Economy of Character, where The Economy of Character and The Business of Inner Meaning within its title meet–occurs in the narrative description of novels, and market culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (126-27). Lynch begins to invoke more forcefully Burney and Austen. Because “we have seen the characters in novels take on depth and become more like real, ‘well-rounded individuals,’” and “we have seen fictional characters seem to become more like their readers,” Lynch can now orient us toward how the populations were being organized in new ways, hence why “sensitive reading that plumbs the depths of a character in a novel–the enterprise of ‘appreciating’ the inner lives of beings who cannot possibly be taken at face value–can be ranged alongside other, cognate technologies of the self that came into use in the romantic era” (such as “window-shopping” and i.e., Burney’s Branghtons and Austen’s Thropes) (126-27). Romantic readers began interpreting Shakespeare, particularly the character Hamlet, in new ways (134-147), showing that the “self” produced in/by transactions occupied a social space “defined just as much by what and whom it sought to exclude” (163)–just like the structuralist round/flat character binary (my own take).
Chapter 4, “Agoraphobia and the Interiority in Frances Burney’s Fiction”
From “Fashion Victims,” to “Burney’s Showrooms, “Camilla’s Shopping,” “Sketches of Charcaters…Put in Action,” “Burney’s Machines,” and “Remote Control and Exchanges: The Wanderer,” one can trace from the agoraphobia (fear of crowds–a tension between the individual and the masses/society) and interiority in Burney’s fiction into the broader social context offered by the final chapter 5, “Jane Austen and the Social Machine.” We have moved from the abstract concepts of chapter 1 into the physical realm of motion: whether actions are governed from within, through the power of interiority and choice, or from without–the social machine. Lynch expertly draws attention to this tension on chapter 4’s first page, by quoting Evelina’s Captain Mirvan who comments on women in general, based on his daughter and Evelina in particular: “‘Ay, to be sure,’ said the Captain, … ‘Whatever’s the fashion, they must like of course.” On the next page is Evelina’s report that the polite young gentlemen “pass and repass, look[ing] as if they thought we were quite at their disposal … they [saunter] about, in a careless indolent manner, as if with a view to keep us in suspense” (28). These statements together show the roles–the characters–society expected women (complicent recipients/objects of male attention) and men (shoppers in the marriage market) to play; though the heroine and hero of the novel, Evelina and Lord Orville, as individuals, departed from these roles, showing their “character” (Evelina laughed at the fop Lovell when he asked her to dance, and Lord Orville displayed excellent manners throughout). Though chapter 5 predominantly focuses on Camilla, Lynch’s close-reading tactics and theories are sound and flexible enough to apply to Evelina (and other works). For, as Lynch puts it: “‘Character’ can be a device for pursuing the lines of analysis that extend from one self on to others” (206).
Chapter 5, “Jane Austen and the Social Machine”
Like the previous chapter on Burney, Lynch’s chapter on Austen touches on one of the books we are studying this semester–Northanger Abbey–yet predominantly focuses on another–Persuasion; however, the methods/ideas applied to Persuasion shed insight on Northanger Abbey, as well. Chapter 5 launches a discussion of Josiah Wedgewood’s knicknacks to show how the romantic reader “finds the means to sound the depths of her own special self and manifest her distinctive sensibility” (209). In much the same way that Lord Orville exalts Evelina as an individual whose value takes time to show itself, Captain Wentworth’s perception of Ann Elliot shifts from her appearing “flat” to “round,” from shallow judgments on her lack of “character” to appreciation of her “roundness” and “depth.” In this way, Lynch closes her general argument with particular examples from literature, having moved from the eighteenth to nineteenth century to show it is our perception which has changed, and not the characters.
Connections/Applications/Extensions
The chapter summaries above, specifically the Burney and Austen (301-2, 305) sections including Free Indirect Discourse, the discussion on market culture (in chapters 2-3 especially), Clarissa, Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, Samuel Richardson’s interpretation of Hamlet (139), and the above summary of Lynch’s dialogue with Watt and Gallagher, only begin to show the far-reaching implications that this text has on our study of the “Long Eighteenth Century.”
Strengths and Weaknesses
The strengths of this work far outweigh its weaknesses. Innovative, influential, and exciting, Economy of Character’s post-structuralist treatment of the previous narrative on literary history shines in its groundbreaking interpretations, bursting with historical and textual evidence and refreshing, lively close readings. The masterful ease with which Lynch zooms in and out of the 18th and 19th Centuries to specific works, characters, passages, and sentences within those works/Centuries, orients the reader to the locality of “character” and “interiority” within the human experience.
In the interest of painting a balanced portrait, I will mention that the five-chapter Economy of Character devotes two-fifths of its chapters to Burney and Austen. This works as a visual argument against Lynch’s deconstruction of the structuralist way of thinking about flat and round characters, that Burney and later Austen’s characters realized the full potential of “character” by rounding theirs out. Burney and Austen are the only authors that appear to be “worth” a full-chapter, as opposed to authors of “flat” characters such as Fielding, Richardson, etc.
Questions
This text, like a round character/individual, invites so many questions that I am not aware of all of them–yet. The Economy of Character, like Evelina, Persuasion, Hamlet, Jane Eyre, and the characters within those universes, is a rich work of art that invites reading and rereading.
Our academic subculture, after all, can boast both good and bad ways of rereading” (i.e.,
automotons). “When I have a hard day, and decide to reread Jane Eyre and make myself cry, my motive in returning to Jane is not to continue my pursuit of the hidden meanings lodged in the character or my pursuit of the unconscious structure of the text. Under such conditions, I don’t take pleasure in repetition with a difference; I take pleasure in repetition without it (149-50).
In other words, my interest affords The Economy of Character another read—or so–attending to “repetition with a difference” for me to fully value its character.
Works Cited
IAS UMN. “What Is/Was a Book? Thursdays @ Four with Deidre Lynch.” Youtube, 15 Dec.
2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulnDjrCjNQw.
Lynch, Deidre Shauna. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of
Inner Meaning. Chicago, 1998.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Romantic Period. Vol. D. M.H. Abrams et al. New
York: Norton, 2012. Print.
