The spirit of capitalism, 2000 - emotional maturity of adults

Public Interest, Wntr, 2000 by David Bosworth

Great expectations (1860)

To understand the nature of the economic assault on the contemporary family, we might profitably turn back to the era and nation where industrial capitalism first took hold (nineteenth-century England), and to the artistic form that evolved, in part, to study the manners and morals of middle-class life: the social novel. Charles Dickens was one of the first and most astute critics of the ways in which the then new regimens of scientific capitalism could imperil the rhythms of domestic life; and nowhere are both the dangers and adaptive responses more entertainingly drawn than in Great Expectations when the orphan Pip, suddenly and mysteriously made rich, is brought to London.

For there, Pip is placed under the care of the new priesthood of the Industrial Age--"the Law"--in the form of the austere and intimidating criminal lawyer Jaggers and his clerk, Mr. Wemmick. At first, Wemmick appears to be punctilious and dry, a man so bereft of civil human gestures that he has actually forgotten that people shake hands. When Wemmick brings Pip to his home, however, we learn that he hasn't lost his capacities for amiability and affection so much as been forced to specialize the locale of their expression. His particular job (and, by implication, the larger economy that defines that job) has required a rigid partition of his behavior--between workplace and homestead, between a strict obedience to the protocols of the law and a strong conformity to the rituals of the heart.

Dickens makes clear which of these two locales (and the separate schedules of behavior they allow) is "under siege" by providing a delightfully comic depiction of a man's house is his castle. For Wemmick's house, although the smallest Pip has ever seen, is a miniature redoubt. With painted Gothic windows, a ditch as a moat, a plank for a bridge, a lattice fence for stone walls, and a small gun as armament, Wemmick has self-consciously constructed his own symbolic castle to keep the modern world out.

While the castle's physical protection is merely symbolic, the psychological border it demarks is very real. Inside his castle walls, Wemmick practices the old economies of farming and craftsmanship--he is a self-reliant, independent "jack of all trades"; outside, he works a middle stratum within one of the new economy's white-collar professions--he is a highly specialized, wage employee. Inside, Wemmick maintains the old allegiances to country and clan--he raises a flag every Sunday and, much more importantly, he lovingly cares for his deaf father, whom he affectionately dubs "the aged parent"; outside, his sole allegiance is to his employer, Jaggers, and Jaggers' often disreputable clients--his loyalty is literally for hire. The man-at-home in his castle is affectionate, generous, gregarious; the man-at-work in his office is pinched, acquisitive, dutifully discreet.

Dickens's comic depiction of Wemmick's divided life captures, a full century earlier, a key ambition behind the suburban adventure of the 1950s and 1960s: the attempt to build a green-belt moat around the American family to protect it not only from physical danger but from the psychological depredations of the postwar economy. And when Pip narrates how the once gracious Wemmick becomes "dryer and harder" as he heads back to work, he might be describing the psychological transformation required of any of 10 million American fathers commuting daily then to their white-collar jobs.