Deidre Lynch. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-03

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Deidre Lynch. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. 317. $45.00.

While attempting to work her magic on Isabel Archer, Mme. Merle says, "I have a great respect for things! One's self--for other people--is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's furniture, one's garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps--these things are all expressive." Isabel protests: "I think just the other way. I don't know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; everything's on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one" (Portrait of a Lady, ed. Leon Edel, 230). It's possible to see the rest of the novel as an instance of Henry James taking revenge on his heroine for harboring such romantic views. Don't ever say to a novelist engaged in the act of delimiting character via very material words on a page describing materialities of all kinds that nothing expresses selfhood except a person's conscious, intentional, and direct efforts at self-expression--or, as Isabel learns, do so at your own peril!

Deidre Lynch's book is about the problem of representing psychological depth, and about the awareness among novelists working on that problem that, to loosely quote Foucault, depth is nothing apart from surfaces. In demonstrating that awareness, it beautifully complicates the notion that one is either a sinister, pragmatic, materialistic Mme. Merle, or a romantic, isolated and star-crossed anti-materialist such as Isabel Archer: Lynch's study wonderfully complicates the whole notion that deep subjectivity is achieved--either in representation or as a personal accomplishment--by turning away from the conventional world of things. Lynch's very term...

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