The Vacuity and Simultaneous Control of Wealth in John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath"

From the start of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, I was immediately struck by the nearly tangible presence of poverty in the novel.  In fact, Steinbeck is bluntly allegorical in his use of tractors as an image to represent the cold, metallic, and ignorant impersonality of banks, the rich, and industrialization over the poor farmer families of the dust bowl region of the American midwest.  In doing so, he creates a tangible tension between the bucolic, salt-of-the-earth farmers like the Joads who live in a poverty that is powerful yet not without solidarity and the unfeeling and inhuman elite, bankers who strip farmers like the Joads of their land, and in that, so much more.

However, one passage in the novel has stood out to me as a true indicator statement on the role of wealth.  In chapter 18, a fellow westbound traveler tells Pa Joad about a "newspaper fella near the coast" who has a million acres of land (206). Instead of being enviously amazed by this "newspaper fella" (who is a real life reference to William Randolph Hearst), Pa and Casy agree that such displays of excess, such unnecessary wealth, are merely signifiers of a personal disappointment, a fear of dying, and a lonely emptiness. Casy says poignantly:

If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an' maybe he's disappointed that nothin' he can do'll make him feel rich-- not rich like Mis' Wilson was when she give her tent when Grampa died.  I ain't tryin; to preach no sermon, but I never seen nobody that's busy as a prairie dog collectin' stuff that wasn't disappointed (207)

It seems in the novel that, despite the power wealth has over the Joads, it is not something that they necessarily lust after.  Instead, to have too much is to try and fill a void within with the material in a way that is impossibly quixotic. On the other hand, true wealth is the ability to give to others in need.  Mis' Wilson's ability to give her tent to dying Grampa was far more significant and meaningful than the lonely wealth of  men like Hearst. The Joads and Casy may speak with improper grammar.  They may be covered in dirt and rags, and they may get swindled out of selling all their possessions for lack of ability to negotiate, but their senses of selves are far more rich than even the wealthiest robber baron.  In essence, poverty in The Grapes of Wrath is not a lack of money or possessions, but a lack of control to define personal happiness.  Farmers like the Joads, people tied almost intrinsically to the land they were born on, understand who they are thoroughly and organically.  Their identities are not predicated on a number in their bank account or on performing their class for others (like so many other characters we have seen throughout the semester).  It is the banks that take away the land that impose poverty and lack on the Joads.  It is the anonymous faces who have never felt the land with their bare hands who ultimately come to link possessions with happiness in a way that, as evidenced by the scared and empty "newspaper fella," kills the self and the soul irrevocably.

Fitzgerald's Portrayal of the Idle Rich in "The Great Gatsby"

Throughout his novel, The Great Gatsby, author F. Scott Fitzgerald offers both subtle and flagrant images of wealth, inheritance, exclusivity, and the treachery of this insular world on the self and the soul.  Almost all of Fitzgerald's portrayals of the Buchanans are ripe with social commentary and an acknowledgement of the corrupting power of money.  Both Tom and Daisy are characters with potential: in both Tom and Daisy's emotional (and physical) infidelity they suggest that they do, even if on the most minute levels, have the capacity for authentic feeling independent of their class restrictions.  However, in their ultimate decisions to hide behind the insular and impermeable boundaries of their wealth, they further adulterate their capacity for humanity with denials of authenticity in favor of money.

In particular, Fitzgerald's descriptions of Daisy work to create a vision of the self capable of love and happiness beyond the scope of shallow social constructions of the wealthy class but at the same time marred by an inability to sacrifice these shallow comforts.  Towards the end of the novel Fitzgerald offers a recollection of Daisy and Gatsby's nascent relationship when she was still caught more evenly between the worlds of wealth and love:
                "Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked
                 fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth...Gatsby was
                 overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the
                 freshness of many clothes and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot
                 struggles of the poor" (Fitzgerald, 117).
Daisy is at once untouchably beautiful in her ivory tower of wealth and yet simultaneously imprisoned by the myopic and regressive ideologies of her class.  She is "safe" "above the hot struggles of the poor"-- a position that makes her both ignorant of the struggles of people not like her and vulnerable against a perceived threat of poverty.  This description of Daisy is only one of many offered by Fitzgerald about the Buchanans and their shallow yet exclusive contract of a marriage.  Ultimately, Fitzgerald recognizes the dreams of love, marriage, and the glamorous fantasy of the world of wealth, yet he knows these dreams are corrupt, adulterated by naive perspectives and archaic ideals that remain tragically and fatally fixed in solitude.

What's So Great About Gatsby? The Titular Irony of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"

The Great Gatsby is a novel of skeletons in closets.  All of the characters have a past, and while we are not always privy to the specificities of these haunting secrets, we see their manifest effects on the present throughout the novel.  Battling against the looming pressure of past lives is the universal belief in the possibility of change that all of Fitzgerald's characters cling to.  For Gatsby in particular, the desire to transcend his origins and escape memory allows him to create projections of idealism that he believes are love and authenticity.  That is to say, Gatsby, in his desire for reinvention, confuses the idealization of wealth, power, and Daisy Buchanan with genuine love and inclusion in a way that leads to his ultimate loss of self both physically and metaphysically at the end of the novel.

Throughout the novel, Gatsby, in his luxurious mansion, throws elaborate and expensive parties fraught with all facets of 1920s hedonism and elitist escapism.  His guests clamor to know the elusive Gatsby who, in his fabulous displays of material excess, becomes a sort of god of nightlife and glamour.  Yet as Gatsby's past begins to emerge at the end of the novel, his popularity disappears along with his guests who we realize were never really Gatsby's friends in the first place.  In Gatsby's ultimate solitude and relative anonymity at the end of the novel, Fitzgerald posits a very clear binary between being noticed versus being known.  And beyond that, being known versus being loved.  The world of Gatsby was one of fetish and fantasy, and in his ultimate downfall, it is clear that he had confused signifiers of wealth and affection, as well as the means to an end, with real love.  When Gatsby finally realizes that Daisy is as superficial and protected as he had been trying to be, we readers are forced to see that, in the metaphysics of the novel, self knowledge is ultimately impossible.  After all of his lavish parties, his countless colored shirts, his beautiful rooms, and his fatally fast cars, Gatsby is left vacant and anonymous to the world he had so desperately tried to (and almost succeeded at) being a part of.  In the end, we see that Gatsby was never really great at all.  He was a human who, like the rest of us, just wanted to be loved in a way that was genuine amidst superficial and imageaic constructions of wealth, selfishness, and dishonesty.

The Meaning of Travel as a Symbol of Wealth in "The House of Mirth"

After examining Lily Bart as a character in a more generalized, over-arching sense in my last post on Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, I want in my second post to essentially zoom-in on a more specific facet of the novel, travel.  In the beginning of the second book we find Lily traveling aboard the Dorset's yacht, Sabrina.  Her escape to the Mediterranean immediately follows on the heels of her near-mental collapse at Gerty Farish's after realizing how truly limited and dependent she is not only financially but inherently as well because she is a woman.  For we readers, this escape to Europe immediately seems like a tactical avoidance of personal problems on Lily's part, yet we soon realize that for the upper class abroad, the drama, gossip, and aloof idleness is as omnipresent as ever and Lily, try as she might to deny it, cannot run from her problems.

Instead, Lily's wealthy circle of friends is as insular as ever, and for Lily, having new people to admire her beauty only makes her critics more vicious.  While I have always felt that Lily's ego is her primary downfall, and her unwillingness to play by the rules for the things she wants ultimately prevents her from getting anything, her beauty is something that she cannot help possess.   Lily is widely resented and judged more quickly by her alleged "friends" because of the attention her looks receive, especially from married men.  Regardless of what she does, or who she speaks to, she is always scrutinized and gossiped about by so called friends who care little about whether these rumors are true.  Fueling the drama's inescapable nature is the fact that, though in Europe, Lily's friends refuse to leave the security of their isolated yachts and quasi-incestuous social groups.  With the exception of a few carefully calculated interactions with royalty, Lily's friends essentially transplant their existing social scene in New York to Europe with little change from their life at home: the backdrop may change but the drama remains the same.

This passive absorption of other cultures by the wealthy upper class reminded me of Mark Twain's "The Innocents Abroad".  While Twain's narrator takes a more observant, journalistic tone in his exposé of traveling to the middle east, his fellow luxury liner passengers engage Europe with an air of superiority that I think is highly reminiscent of Lily and her friends.  First of all, both wealthy groups can afford to spend months away from their lives in the United States.  Ironically, the people who do very little are the ones who feel most justified in escaping the not-so-harsh realities of their normal lives.  Second of all, both the characters in Twain's piece and Lily's friends do not seem to have any desire to understand or experience the cultures of the countries they visit; they merely want to consume them.  Ultimately, I believe that the characters' travel to Europe in The House of Mirth becomes richly telling of their lives and interactions in the novel: they seek to escape the insularity and exclusivity of idleness they themselves have created, only to find that the drama they both thrive on and fear in New York is as omnipotent and pervasive as ever.  Wharton's exposure of the leisure class's dark underbelly forces we readers to recognize the treacherous and fictitious nature of elitism and the a-moral and degenerative forces it creates to destroy Lily.

Response to Veblem's "The Theory of the Leisure Class"

Despite the density of Veblem's turn-of-the-century language in his "The Theory of the Leisure Class," his work sheds necessarily objective light on the practices, ideologies, and characteristics of the upper class much in the same way Jacob Riis did for the ways of the lower class in "How the Other Half Lives".  With an expository style, much of Veblem's writing focuses on the upper classes relation to labor and consumption.  In doing so, I thought that Veblem exposes one of the great ironies of the upper class: they have earned the most money and yet accomplish the least.  As we have discussed, much of the money these members of the upper class had was passed down through generations, and hence there was no need for them to work.  Regardless however, money is finite, and the "conspicuous" spending that forms the crux of upper class activities undoubtedly eats into these funds significantly.

This often inexplicable phenomenon lies at the heart of Veblem's work, and in his exegesis he illuminates how the appearance of the ability to do nothing, that is, to have someone else do all of the work instead, dominated upper class ideologies.  Furthermore, within the hegemony of wealth there were a number of sub-stratas, characterized by the number of servants one had and the triviality of tasks that could be avoided through the help of servants.  This is of course, where Veblem comes to define the term "Conspicuous Leisure": as much as wealth was (and often still is) a performance for the upper class, more often than not this performance involved doing literally nothing or as little as possible.

Illusions of Wealth and Self: Escapist and Imprisoned Sentiments in "The House of Mirth"

Edith Wharton, in her novel "The House of Mirth" creates a vision of wealth that is simultaneously painfully vapid and heartbreakingly complex.  That is to say, as objective outsiders, we readers see the aloof idleness of Wharton's upper class New York elite at an altitude: the realities of their shallow cliques and menial gossip are too trivial to be real to our more modern gaze.  However, when we become privy to this world of idle wealth through the personal lens of Wharton's main character, Lily Bart, we are able to glimpse the very real complexities of the pressures and performative expectations that someone like Lily, who lacks necessary financial means, experiences in trying to keep-up with her cohorts.

Wharton's dichotomous contrast between objective scrutiny of wealth and class and subjective sympathy for Lily is somewhat of a revelation of the novel's contents.  Like the dualities we readers experience in our perspectives of the novel's themes and ethos, the contrast between the desire to be wealthy and the desire to be free plagues Lily Bart's sense of self throughout the text.  For Lily, wealth represents a freedom from creditors and the stress of trying to act above her means.  At the same time, the calculating nature of her "friends" and their predatory gossip appalls her on a deeply personal level. She sees the "world" of wealth as a "cage" and the world beyond this cage as "alluring" (Wharton, 55).  As much as she needs money, she sees the idle, conformist nature of her wealthy companions.  Their relationships are guised and inauthentic and fraught with quick, eager, self-serving malice.  As someone just beyond the outer limits of this class from a financial standpoint, Lily recognizes the more genuine, honest world that exists outside the pressures of wealth for someone like Lawrence Seldon.  While Lily needs money to soothe her material desires, her emotional sense of self, the self that is not a performance, desires Seldon's world of honest contemplation and forgiven, detached non-conformity. 

Conversely however (and I find this antithesis ironic), Lily often finds herself drawn to the tempting glamour of wealth in a way that is not just remediate but veritably desirable, albeit materialistic.  When looking at Gwen Van Osburgh Stepney's wedding jewels, "the glow of the stones warmed Lily's veins like wine.  More completely than any other expression of wealth they symbolized the life she longed to lead" (Wharton, 89).  Lily, like an indecisive magpie, sees freedom beyond the bars of her cage and yet is drawn to the glittering bars themselves as well.  It is this soul-splitting indecision that I believe ultimately incarcerates Lily, who cannot reconcile her material desires to resurrect her childhood class with her adult aspirations to find the space to be herself. Thus, wealth (and the renunciation of wealth as well for that matter) is both an escape and a trap for Lily who seeks both financial and intellectual/ emotional freedom in a social realm where having both is not only impossible but taboo.

A Titular Twist in Howell's "The Rise of Silas Lapham"

To be perfectly candid, I have to admit that I feel like a bit of an asshole.  After finishing "The Rise of Silas Lapham" last night, I could not help but feel that the title was ironic: Silas Lapham doesn't rise, he falls!  However, after today's discussion, I realize that my myopic conclusions about the text in relation to the novel's title overlook the possibility that "rises" are not limited to the monetary sort.  Silas Lapham, and many of the novel's other characters, experience a moral uplift at the end of the story in the face of great material loss (and thus loss of class status as well) which is indeed a "rise" on its own accord.  Not only do I feel somewhat materialistic for being blind to this possibility, I have to admit that my resolutions about the ending of the novel have greatly improved since our class discussion.

Ultimately, I am more satisfied by the novel now knowing that while Silas Lapham lost what money he had earned, the experience left him and his family vastly wealthier from a moral standpoint. To see Silas Lapham's fate as a tragedy is to deny his capacity for tenacity, vigor, and strength--faculties we know he possesses not only in the realm of business but at home in a more personal sphere as well.  At first I saw Silas Lapham's return to his Lapham paint farm as a pitiable downgrade--Silas is right back at that proverbial square one after years of hard work and sacrifice.  However, Silas's journey is anything but a futile failure.  While he does return to his humble roots, it is not without immense personal growth and the recognition that the upper class, while seemingly glamorous is a morally debunk caste of exclusivity and wasted potential.  Silas no longer can afford the luxuries he and his family had become used to, but his recognition of true morality and honest values is a triumph far more endearing and permanent than anything money can buy.