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BOOK REVIEW

Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Libidinal Lives. Edited by Jane Ford, Kim Edwards Keats, and Patricia Pulham. New York and London: Routledge, 2016. 209pp. ISBN: 9781138826342. £110.00.

Reviewed by Mariam Zarif.

The late Victorian period saw a movement towards new models of gender and sexuality. While Victorian scholars have demonstrated the intersection between this movement and modern consumer culture, the study Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Libidinal Lives, edited by Jane Ford, Kim Edwards Keats, and Patricia Pulham, reveals the centrality of queer desires and economy as transmitted by way of literature to culture at the fin-de-siècle. This study takes a stimulating approach to “interrogate how and why issues of sexuality, queer desire, and economic thoughts intersect in the literature and broader culture of the Victorian fin de siècle” (i). Drawing from the theoretical and conceptual approaches on social and psychoanalytic writings of Luce Irigaray, Regenia Gagnier, Martha Vicinus and others, the collection explores the works of canonical writers including Oscar Wilde, Amy Levy, and Vernon Lee. It also offers an invigorating analysis of works by lesser-known writers, such as A.E. Houseman, and Baron Corvo.

One of the important aspects that the study focuses on is with the “political, theological, and aesthetic ends” that operate between “economy” and “desire.” It also characterizes the development of the “economic man” as an “unproductive, self-maximizing consumer,” and describes the transition of the economic marketplace from the fulfilment of needs to potential desires, which took place at the end of the nineteenth century. Acknowledging this development, the editors give detailed readings in each part and offer cross-references to similar social theories and sexological thought, and, consequently, overturn a number of critical assumptions about literary representations of “sex, pleasure, and desire” (2).

The nine essays discuss the themes of sexuality, feminism, fetishism, and economic behavior envisaged in the literary marketplace, reconfiguring past studies on queer desire into new arguments. The arguments in these essays extend beyond the literary, and engage with discourses (such as Freudian metaphors, homosexuality and homoeroticism, and decadence) to explore how nineteenth-century writing attended to the libidinal and somatic aspects of economic exchange. The essays are categorized into three sections: “Articulating Desire,” “Human Currencies,” and “Queer Performativities.” They balance the focus on desire and economic thought across a wide collection of literary genres for analysis: novels, plays, poems, and short stories. This structure is effective and does use the materials deftly, offering new insights that engage works through the lens of economical thought and the libidinal lens of the Victorian marketplace. However, while the themes and subject titles are engaging, a degree of ambiguity arose due to the lack of a concluding section to bring together the different strands of research stated in the introductory chapter.

“Articulating Desire” continues established inquiries into the relation between sexuality and consumption through the economy of desire as transmitted through the medium of literature. Ruth Robinson’s chapter on Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893) identifies desire as fatal and argues that the rhetoric of the play illustrates Wilde’s sentiments towards “language’s intransitivity: its inability to define the world” (30). Implicit in the essay is a dispute that focuses on desire, sexual inversions, and semiotic representations functioning in the play – Salome embodies the New Woman and is a figure of the femme fatale. To support her argument Robinson draws from Lyotard’s theory of libidinal economy and Foucault’s ideas regarding the displacement of desire in language. She argues that Salome’s desire for Jokanaan transforms everyone into a commodity and desire does not belong to equal subjectivity.

Veronica Alfano’s essay explores A.E. Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896) and examines the “ballad economy” in these poems whilst articulating its potential to conceal and expose desire. The poet’s adherence to strict conventions and monotonous models of language “both generates and disguises the subtle homoeroticism of his poetry” (35). Alfano claims that the ballad form in A Shropshire Lad highlights the “inextricability of remembering and forgetting.” The stanzaic division authorizes the ‘“amnesiac remembrance” (36), indicating that the treatment of memory in Houseman’s poems can be “read through the lens of homoerotic desire” (38). Alfano suggests that even if the possibility of erotic fulfilment is disclosed, the structure of the ballad conceals all hints of erotic self-revelation.

Discussing Arthur Symon’s 1895 London Nights, Jane Desmarais examines English decadence in relation to the insatiability and immateriality of aesthetic concerns and consumerism. The author draws a parallel between scent and libidinal desire, which is apparent in Symon’s poems. In her close reading of the poems, Desmarais argues, “decadence, desire and the over-consumption of decorative superfluities are clearly gendered” (64). Applying Regenia Gagnier’s theory of “the insatiability of human wants,” she concludes that allusions to perfume in Symon’s collection of verse herald a "symbolist contemplation of immateriality” (76).

The second section of the book, “Human Currencies,” turns to decadent and modernist imaginings of the female body as modelled by women writers. It aspires to understand how women writers “represent human bodies as objects of economic exchange within (hetero-patriarchal) capitalist society” (10). Sarah Parker explores the representation of the dead or dying woman by drawing parallels between Amy Levy’s and Djuna Barnes’s poems. Parker argues that “female corpses are categorised and commoditised” denoting that both writers transform the image of the dead-woman muse by redefining the aspects of the masculine flâneur (83). Acknowledging the recurrent figure of the New Woman in Levy’s poems, Parker cites Deborah Parsons’s theory on the “urbaneness” of this modern figure who was increasingly visible in the late nineteenth century. According to Parsons, the New Woman was the “result of the circumstances and qualities of a growing metropolitan society” (82-3). Nevertheless, this new public figure continued to circulate as an “aesthetic object” (94). Parker suggests that the spectral figure in Levy’s poems is an aesthetic model wandering through the urban city. In contrast, the model Barnes presents emphasizes the objectification and dehumanization of the female body. The result of these circumstances is that women continue to serve as commodities scrutinized by the male gaze.

Jane Ford discusses the libidinal economies and the act of gift-giving in her essay on Vernon Lee’s supernatural tales. Ford links the anthropological and sociological theories with Lee’s writings on supernatural and classical Greek mythology, arguing that Lee equates female bodies to things which are “given” and exchanged. Ford describes the form of “gift-event” and suggests that for Lee, the patriarchal mythology embodied in the Christian and Greek epic narrative supports “an economy of giving that involves the subjection and/or exclusion of women” (106). In these stories, women participated in an economic exchange in which they became “erotic commodities” presided over by patriarchal structures.

Catherine Delyfer’s essay on Lucas Malet’s novel The Far Horizon (1906) examines its socio-political context. According to Delyfer, the work is “a unique, if forgotten, late-aestheticist reflection on self-interest and social good at the end of the nineteenth century” (122). Delyfer suggests that Malet’s novel transfers the reader’s attention from a “commodity-oriented economy” to a “gift-oriented economy”; at the same time, she revises the conventions of flânerie and redirects our attention to the struggling female (123). While Delyfer’s essay demonstrates how exchanges of a social nature permeated economic language, she missed the opportunity to reflect upon how this might relate to the libidinal economies and bodies as gifts of exchange.

The final section on “Queer Performativities” concentrates on sexual difference and textual performance, endeavoring to set aside the works of canonical authors in favor of rediscovering those which are underrepresented. Matthew Bradley’s chapter focuses on the wild eccentric Count Eric Stenbock, the Baltic-Swedish decadent writer, asking if “bad writers” have the right to perform their sexuality. Bradley contends that Stenbock is the “unacceptable” model of decadent, as his performance of parodic perversity moves beyond the decadent movement (146). The essay’s principal argument is about sexual performance and value, the paradox between a liberating discourse of “subversive performativity,” and the extent to which the individual performances depend on cultural capital. Bradley’s reading of Stenbock provides an invigorating insight into the “perverse decadent aesthetic,” and reconsiders the economy of sexual subversion mediated through literature (159).

Kristin Mahoney offers an extended appraisal of the sexual turmoil following Wilde’s trial in 1895 by analyzing Baron Corvo’s “Toto” stories, which exploited the dynamics of sexualized power. The essay begins with the claim that publishers like John Lane did not wish to publish works that engaged with homoerotic desires. Following the volatile rage Wilde’s trial stimulated and that threatened class boundaries, several short stories by Corvo were published in Lane’s The Yellow Book between 1895 and 1896. The “Toto” stories allow us to interrogate the dynamics of hierarchy and rank which empower one individual while dismissing another. Mahoney then proposes a re-reading of the fin-de-siècle in relation to inequality and oppression, suggesting that we must acknowledge the wider arguments and critical responses on class and economy which emerge during this period.

The concluding essay by Jill R. Ehnenn discusses how the poets known as “Michael Field” (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper) complicate representations of queer desire, femininity, and cross-gender identification. Ehnenn suggests that Bradley and Cooper heighten the relationship between subjectivity and sexuality by redirecting their focus to the “heteropatriarchal” models of marriage and by adopting an inclusive approach to gender and roles. In Field’s representation of sexuality, desire, and identity, the individual’s needs for freedom in a relationship are celebrated. Ehnenn’s discussion opens a new area for critical debate, which suggests that we must continue to consider the wider spectrum of the argument, and also explores how writers like Bradley and Cooper negotiated their identity when representing queer poetics and aesthetic vision.

Economies of Desire makes a valuable contribution to the rich field of fin-de-siècle studies, opening new arguments on economy and desire. To this end, it is sure to encourage revisions of the period’s textual legacies for future research.

Mariam Zarif is a doctoral candidate in English, nineteenth-century Literature, and Journalism at King’s College London. Her work focuses on New Woman fiction by male writers and the intersections between gender, sexuality and authorial disguise at the fin-de-siècle. She is currently organizing a conference on Women in Punch 1841-1920, which looks at the contributions of women in Punch: or the London Charivari, and the representations of the New Woman in this popular magazine.