Blog #4: The Problem of Capitalism

 Trollope’s The Way We Live Now is largely concerned with the pernicious effect of capitalism on who people are and the way they live. One of the profound insights of the novel is that capitalism fundamentally shapes the character of society and the disposition of individuals. Indeed, it is clear that what drives most of the characters in The Way We Live Now is nothing more than a desire for greater and greater wealth—in a word, mammonism. The novel draws a clear connection between wealth—especially the wealth illegally made through financial speculation and commercial enterprises—and dishonesty or greed. The great temptation of the former in a growing capitalist world is intrinsically linked to the pervasiveness of the latter in Victorian society. But this does not answer the difficult question of why some allow this temptation to consume them (e.g., Melmotte and Felix) while others do not (e.g., Roger Carbury). Is it simply a matter of moral integrity, of “honor,” or, as Roger says early in the novel, having a sense of right and wrong? 

Perhaps the better question is whether the answer Trollope proposes in The Way We Live Now is that it amounts to a matter of moral integrity or honor (I am not claiming that Trollope in fact proposes this but rather offering it as food for thought). I think that this is a question worth pursuing as we get deeper into the book. It is also one that the novel itself seems to pose a few times right at the beginning. “Again, who shall say why brother and sister had become so opposite each other,” the narrator asks with regard to Felix and Henrietta, “whether they would have been thus different had both been taken away as infants from their father’s and mother’s training, or whether the girl’s virtues were owing altogether to the lower place which she had held in her parent’s heart” (19). A few pages earlier, the narrator tells us that Henrietta has been socialized to think that the contrast between her and her brother was a product of gender difference: “Henrietta had been taught to think that men in that rank of life in which she had been born always did eat up everything” (16). Of course, the difference in “virtue” here between Felix and Henrietta can be extended to other characters in the novel and approached from a number of angles. I doubt that there is a simple answer to this question, but it is one that I feel is nevertheless worth exploring, not the least because mammonism and the dishonesty and greed that accompany it still plague contemporary society. The critique that The Way We Live Now levels at the Victorian world is one that can certainly be leveled at our own. What Trollope’s novel also shows is how meaning and money are inextricable in a capitalist society (also a major problem today). One would probably search in vain for a page on which money was not on some level in question.