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鈥檚 Romeo and Juliet, the first thing Romeo says when seeing Juliet across a large room is that she is like a 鈥渞ich jewel in an Ethiop鈥檚 ear.鈥
鈥淭hat 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,鈥 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 老王论坛, 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.
鈥淚n the example from Romeo and Juliet, the newly emerging source of value was mercantilism, gathering treasure from colonized realms of the New World,鈥 says Tratner. 鈥淏y the time we reach the present and as we look to the future, online information and the virtual are the key world economic drivers.鈥
In addition to Romeo and Juliet, Tratner looks at The Island Princess by John Fletcher, Shakespeare鈥檚 Merchant of Venice, and various sonnets.
Works highlighted in the book鈥檚 second section include Charlotte Bront毛鈥檚 Jane Eyre, written during the rise of industry, when hidden, internal potential becomes more valued and deemed more attractive.
鈥淐apital鈥攚ealth that must be invested, not spent or enjoyed鈥攔eplaces treasure as the key economic value, and character replaces external beauty as the key romantic value,鈥 notes Tratner.
鈥淛uliet was a jewel. The goal is no longer to be a jewel, it鈥檚 not to glitter, it鈥檚 to be able to work hard,鈥 he adds. 鈥淚n 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.鈥
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.
鈥淭here鈥檚 now this belief that external forces, like the government, can create desires inside people,鈥 explains Tratner. 鈥淎nd it鈥檚 not one person meeting one person and falling in love. It鈥檚 a gigantic social order that鈥檚 pushing people to pursue their desires.鈥
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鈥檚 courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
Between the young bride and her bridegroom
鈥淭he idea that usury, that the amount of credit available in the world, changes sexual desire seems insane, but that鈥檚 exactly what he says,鈥 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鈥檚 final section, Tratner traces what he describes as a 鈥渉alf-step into the world of information鈥 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鈥檚 blockbuster Avatar.
鈥淭he 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鈥檚 own human body, a love based entirely on what is in one鈥檚 mind,鈥 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.