"A SPECULATING SPIRIT" Trade, Speculation, and Gambling in Early American Fiction
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Karen A. Weyler, Associate Professor (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
Abstract: The excerpt quoted above, from a poem printed in pamphlet form in 1791, captures both the hope and the disappointment wrought by changing economic conditions in the newly formed United States
after the Revolution. "Speculation" and its companion vices avarice and greed dismayed republicans throughout the United States as the self sacrificing civic virtue of the war years gave way to more profit-oriented forms of individualism.1 Novels written in America arose at precisely the
time when this postcolonial economy was in great flux, and they point to
the possibilities and dangers inherent in a capitalist economy that placed
grave demands upon trust between widely separated and differing individuals.
Novelists, poets, political writers, and belletrists, regardless of
their political orientation, expressed considerable anxiety about how this
changing economy would affect the moral virtue of American citizens. The
luxuries resulting from this changing economy became a locus for these
fears, and luxury came to refer not only to specific items procured in international
trade, but also to an urbanized, sophisticated lifestyle.2 Although
novelists were concerned about abuses of luxury, they were perhaps more
concerned about the problematic issue of accumulating capital. While most
early American novels exalt industry and the potential for economic advancement that the American economy offered, these novels simultaneously
point to contemporary economic anxieties, primarily the fear that people
would attempt to make money without industry through such means as
gambling, speculating, and counterfeiting. I argue in this essay that reading
novels alongside political pamphlets, economic tracts, and belles lettres reveals
that American fiction was an active and significant link in the nexus
of public discourse during the 1790s and the first two decades of the nineteenth
century. Deeply engaged with economic issues facing Americans of
the rising middle-class, fiction contributed to public economic discourse
by exploring ways to reconcile desire for personal economic advancement
with larger civic interests; at the same time, fiction contributed to the gendering
of the American economic system by presenting trade as a virtuous
means of making money and by simultaneously constructing economic
desire as a specifically masculine prerogative.
"A SPECULATING SPIRIT" Trade, Speculation, and Gambling in Early American Fiction
PDF (Portable Document Format)
2974 KB
Created on 6/9/2011
Views: 1898
Additional Information
- Publication
- Early American Literature 31.3 (1996): 207-42.
- Language: English
- Date: 1993
- Keywords
- Gambling, American literature, 18th century, Novels, Trade, Commerce, Wealth