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Economies and Desire: Gifts and the Market in ?Moments of Being: ?Slater's Pins Have No Points??

2005; Indiana University Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/jml.2005.28.2.18

1529-1464

Kathryn Simpson,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

Economies and Desire:Gifts and the Market in "Moments of Being: 'Slater's Pins Have No Points'" Kathryn Simpson Woolf, The Market, and Gifts For well over a decade there has been a sustained critical interest in Virginia Woolf's ambivalent engagements with the literary marketplace and commodity culture which has opened up exciting new ways of reading Woolf's writings. Existing critiques elucidate Woolf's complex and contradictory engagement with market economies and relate this to the sexual and class politics of her writing, to her own practice of publication, to her personal attitude to the commercial world, and to her sense of herself as a modernist writer.2 As co-owner of The Hogarth Press and as a woman writer intent on making money from her pen, Woolf was interested in markets and profit margins.3 Sales figures feature significantly in her Diaries, as both a marker of her artistic achievement and an indication of her financial success. Clearly, profits from her work enabled her to gain greater financial independence, to have purchasing power, and to experience the pleasure of commodity culture. However, she also felt considerably uncomfortable about her own place in the commercial world (her writing for Vogue, for instance, brought anxiety and concern about the debasement that mass production and commercialism can imply).4 For Woolf, participation in the market and being active in the public domain are also clearly bound up with her feminist politics, but in a problematic way. Such participation in the public realm is seen as part of the experience of modernity from which women should not be excluded. Her texts capture the impact of these aspects of modernity on perception and experience, and participation in the market as shopper/consumer figures significantly (if [End Page 18] sometimes ambivalently) in several of Woolf's texts (Mrs Dalloway, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street," "Street Haunting," "Oxford Street Tide" and others).5 In Three Guineas Woolf argues that women's right to earn money and to have a profession is liberating and brings a changed perception of the world, a freedom to express opinions and, importantly, a freedom from the need to charm and allure men. With increased earning power and career opportunities women have a different sphere of action and vision: "[i]n every purse there was, or might be, one bright new sixpence in whose light every thought, every sight, every action looked different" (TG 19). However, participation in capitalist market economies also signals a complicity in a patriarchal system, a system that Woolf sees as tyrannous and as operating in a way similar to a European Fascist state.6 She describes middle-class women's engagement with capitalist economies as being caught "between the devil and the deep blue sea" (TG 86). She is clearly resistant to the politics and sexual politics of the market place and, as critics Bridget Elliot and Jo-Ann Wallace argue, for Woolf the exchange of commodities in a capitalist economy and the exchange of women in a patriarchal sexual economy are interrelated (73). Participation in market economies, then, seems to be in tension in Woolf's work with a resistance to the male-dominated capitalist system, based as it is on possession of things, money, and people. It is a rational system focused on calculation and fixing of value, intent on maintaining clear boundaries and distinctions (between buyer and seller), and rigorously organized by the laws of profit and loss. As Tratner argues, Woolf (along with Joyce, Eliot, and Yeats) is critical of hegemonic capitalism and the limitations it imposes. He argues that capitalism hides and represses certain aspects of the social order, silences and denies certain groups of people, and represses elements of the psyche which Woolf (and other modernists) sought to release (Modernism 11).7 However, the operation of commodity culture also stimulates and mobilizes a profusion of desires in the consumer, as it fuels fantasy and excites imagination. The exhilarating proliferation of commodities in such an economy not only engenders new desires for objects and experiences, but simultaneously creates spaces and opportunities for potentially subversive sexual desires to surface. In this way, capitalist commodity culture can be seen to elicit desires...