Heterosexual exchange and other Victorian fictions: The Eustace Diamonds and Victorian anthropology

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1999 by Psomiades, Kathy Alexis

Victorian novels and the people who read them have long been fascinated with the intersections of money and sex. When the economic and erotic come together and seem to resemble, explain, or reflect upon one another, money makes sex important and sex makes money, well, sexy. In particular, the notion that women circulate in heterosexual exchange in the same way that commodities circulate in capitalist exchange and that words circulate in language has powerfully shaped the way we read novels. When we refer to women as "circulating," feminine sexuality as "on the market," the desire for commodities as resembling the desire for sexual objects, relations between men as the true force between struggles over goods and struggles over women, we draw upon theoretical approaches that see heterosexuality and capitalism as homologous social structures, money and sex as connected because they somehow work in the same way to organize the world in which we live.1

Anthropologists have criticized this notion of exchange as the governing force of social life, pointing out that it merely projects a Western market concept onto the interactions involving people and goods across the globe.2 Yet for the readers of Victorian novels, heterosexual exchange still seems to hold explanatory power. Situated between the old world and the new, between a world organized by marriage and kinship and a world organized by the market, Victorian women seem to circulate both literally and figuratively. In the fact that married women cannot own property or earn money for most of the nineteenth century, we can see how the old structures of kinship and alliance trafficked in women; in the association of women with commodity culture, we can see how this old structure is written over with the new economic relations of the market.3 Heterosexual exchange, with one foot in the past of kinship, and one foot in the present of capitalist circulation, seems the perfect device for explaining how desire and economics function in Victorian novels, and why they still function that way, albeit perhaps more metaphorically, today. What I want to add to this account of how the Victorians and we their heirs live in a world organized by heterosexual exchange, is an account of how they didn't and we don't. I don't mean to imply that this construct didn't and doesn't have material effects. But the great paradox of the idea of heterosexual exchange is that it describes with greater and greater clarity woman's position as circulated sign and commodity at precisely the historical moment in the West in which middle-class women and men to a greater and greater extent are seen as having a claim to equal economic and political agency. Investment in the notion that women circulate seems to increase in direct proportion to their no longer doing so; investment in the archaic nature of heterosexuality seems to increase in direct proportion to changes in marriage and property law that make marriage less like the marriages of alliance than ever before.

The alternative narrative I am hypothesizing goes like this: heterosexual exchange emerges as a concept in precisely the time and place at which a) the exclusion of women, and married women in particular, from economic life comes to seem irrational, b) capitalism thus begins to seem at odds with the economics and ideologies of gender difference, c) cross-sex object choice is in the process of being disconnected from the old institutions of alliance-marriage and articulated as embodied desire both for men and for women, d) cross-sex object choice is being articulated as a sexual identity among other sexual identities: what might at the beginning of the century be seen as the normative center from which the perversions are expelled has itself been altered by the articulation of the perverse, thus the emergence in the 1880s of the word "heterosexual" to provide a complement to "homosexual." Heterosexual exchange makes marriage, that old vestige of alliance, look compatible with the market once again by making a homology between the two. If in alliance money and sex are intimately connected through reproduction, in heterosexual exchange money and sex are intimately connected because they participate in two systems whose similar structure makes them equivalents. In this way, alliance may be collapsed back into sexuality by becoming a sort of market precursor, and what is actually a new sexual identity based in cross-sex object choice can be systemized, archaized, and universalized. Rather than providing an explanation of how heterosexuality has functioned across time and space, heterosexual exchange is part of the process whereby in a very specific time and place heterosexuality is invented.

In what follows, I will be using Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds and some of the early texts of Victorian anthropology-Henry Summer Maine's Ancient Law and John McLennan's Primitive Marriage-to examine some of the labor that goes into that invention. Late-Victorian meditations on women as property do not, I am claiming, reflect a state of fact, analyze an existing social order, or even merely seek to provide an alternative economic system to the somewhat threatening circulations of capital, although they make claims to do all of these things. Rather, these meditations constitute an attempt to think through the relations between marriage and capital, the structures of alliance and the newly emergent structures of sexuality, the relations between the gendered individual and the market individual, and the changing relations between sexuality and reproduction in such a world. To see the trouble Trollope takes to produce a metaphorics of circulation that runs contrary to the economic activity he describes, to see how much wild speculation is necessary to make patriarchal marriage look civilized instead of primitive, is to see heterosexuality not as a constant across historical time, but as something that has to be invented and reinvented. While Maine, McLennan, and Trollope assume universal cross-sex object choice, their efforts to describe and systematize that choice and describe its relation to private property have as their bi-product the opening of a space in which sexuality may be thought apart from gender and reproduction, a space as necessary to imagining modern heterosexuality as it is to imagining any other modern sexual identity.