Editor's note: Professor Tratner recently entered hospice care due to pancreatic cancer. While he is unable to respond directly, friends, colleagues, and former students are encouraged to send messages to mtratner@brynmawr.edu to let him know what he means to them. His family continues to check the email and will pass on the messages.
In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the first thing Romeo says when seeing Juliet across a large room is that she is like a “rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.”
“That line has not been much noted in commentary on the play, but it shows the intersection of economic development (Italy having a significant colonizing interest in Ethiopia) and ways of conceiving of the ideal lover, the most desirable person paralleling the most desirable substance for gaining wealth,” points out Michael Tratner, author of the new book Love and Money: A Literary History of Desires.
In the book, Tratner, a professor of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College, looks at the parallel shifts that occur in economics and writing about love and desire during the 400 years from the Early Modern to Postmodern periods and concludes that love and money are not opposed desires but, in fact, congruent ones.
The book is arranged in four sections. In the first three, Tratner focuses on love stories and traditional forms of literature such as plays, novels, and poetry. The final section expands to include books and films in which the virtual expressions of individuals become primary and the true self secondary.
“In the example from Romeo and Juliet, the newly emerging source of value was mercantilism, gathering treasure from colonized realms of the New World,” says Tratner. “By the time we reach the present and as we look to the future, online information and the virtual are the key world economic drivers.”
In addition to Romeo and Juliet, Tratner looks at The Island Princess by John Fletcher, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and various sonnets.
Works highlighted in the book’s second section include Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, written during the rise of industry, when hidden, internal potential becomes more valued and deemed more attractive.
“Capital—wealth that must be invested, not spent or enjoyed—replaces treasure as the key economic value, and character replaces external beauty as the key romantic value,” notes Tratner.
“Juliet was a jewel. The goal is no longer to be a jewel, it’s not to glitter, it’s to be able to work hard,” he adds. “In all of the most important love stories in the 19th century, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, it is not the most beautiful person or handsome person who is valued, it is the person who has an inner something that means that they will produce value.”
The next era examined in the book begins at the end of the 19th century and focuses on literature written during the Keynesian era of economics when the idea that government can stimulate demand by increasing government spending came to the fore.
“There’s now this belief that external forces, like the government, can create desires inside people,” explains Tratner. “And it’s not one person meeting one person and falling in love. It’s a gigantic social order that’s pushing people to pursue their desires.”
To see how this thinking manifests itself in literature, Tratner turns to the cantos of Ezra Pound, quoting Canto 45.
Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man’s courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
Between the young bride and her bridegroom
“The idea that usury, that the amount of credit available in the world, changes sexual desire seems insane, but that’s exactly what he says,” says Tratner.
Other writers whose work Tratner examines in this section include William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, and Virginia Woolf.
In the book’s final section, Tratner traces what he describes as a “half-step into the world of information” in novels including Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, and American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis. The section concludes with a look at several films and works of fantasy including James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar.
“The love story at the center of the movie breaks with a crucial feature of just about every previous love story. This is a love that has no relation to one’s own human body, a love based entirely on what is in one’s mind,” says Tratner.
Tracing four eras of shifting conceptions of what is most valuable, Love and Money: A Literary History of Desires provides a new way of understanding the shifting forms of literary works over the last four hundred years.