3 - Bouguereau is Best: Disentangling Economic and Aesthetic Values in Norris and Du Bois

Summary

By the early twentieth century, art itself becomes the commodity scrutinized by novelists. This chapter will focus on two examples of such work: Frank Norris's 1903 novel about the global wheat market The Pit, and W. E. B. Du Bois's 1911 novel about the global cotton market The Quest of the Silver Fleece. By juxtaposing these novels’ shared economic concerns and strikingly similar aesthetic references, we can more clearly see Du Bois's revision of Norris's operatic drama, and his reflection on the gendered and raced conditions through which norms of taste are established and negotiated globally. If, as Simon Gikandi argues, the “signs of a black presence in the making of high culture often tended to slip away, not because of the invisibility of the enslaved but because the construction of the ideals of modern civilization demanded the repression of what it had introjected” (9), then Du Bois unearths the “black presence” lying dormant in economic narratives such as Norris’s. Anticipating Gikandi's critical methodology, Du Bois, too, calls attention to “what was excluded from the discourse of taste and the series of omissions, repressions, and conceptual failures that were its condition of possibility” (Gikandi 35). The implicit iconography of women's bodies in Constance Fenimore Woolson's Anne and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's Who Would Have Thought It?, as discussed in the previous chapter, becomes more self-referential in these novels by Norris and Du Bois, allowing these later writers to more fully question the way in which aesthetic values can shore up or disrupt economic values.

In this sense they anticipate Pierre Bourdieu's insights in his seminal sociological study Distinction, which argues that aesthetic values are not natural but socially constructed, operating in a system of coded knowledge that works to distinguish elites from those less educated or less privileged. Furthermore, the homogeneity of aesthetic taste among elites works to naturalize those distinctions so that they appear essential, rather than socially conditioned. This process of distinction relies on knowledge of a field of references that forms an “interminable circuit of inter-legitimation” (45), so that “to the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers. This predisposes tastes to function as markers of ‘class’” (xxv).