Economic Neurasthenia
Francesca Sawaya
College of William & Mary
Francesca Sawaya is Professor of English and American Studies at the College of William & Mary. She is the author of Modern Women, Modern Work: Domesticity, Professionalism, and American Writing and The Difficult Art of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market, both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. She is currently at work on a book about transatlantic feminist theory and narrative in the nineteenth century.
Abstract
Francesca Sawaya (William & Mary) looks at Rebirth of a Nation where Jackson Lears’ provides a psychological diagnosis of both the economy and the elites of the time period. He writes, “The manic-depressive psychology... [ view full abstract ]
Francesca Sawaya (William & Mary) looks at Rebirth of a Nation where Jackson Lears’ provides a psychological diagnosis of both the economy and the elites of the time period. He writes, “The manic-depressive psychology of the business class mimicked the lurching ups and downs of the business cycle” (70). This paper pursues Lears’ suggestive but unsubstantiated argument about the connection between the dominant economic ideology of the Gilded Age and elites’ “mental illness.” She focuses on one repeated representation of “economic neurasthenia” in Spencer, Sumner, Rockefeller, Howells, and Addams. This representation juxtaposes elite commitment to liberal economics’ prohibition against “intervention” with different forms of economic suffering and inequality. Exploratory in its argument, the paper borrows from contemporary affect theorists of our own neoliberal age (Cvetkovich, Ehrenberg, Lazzarato) to analyze the ways a debilitating set of feelings can be linked to a fundamentalist economic ideology.
Authors
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Francesca Sawaya
(College of William & Mary)
Topic Area
Panel
Session
P41 » Ecologies of the Mind in C19 America (10:15 - Friday, 23rd March, Enchantment F)
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