ENGL 200 D: Reading Literature: Literature in the Marketplace

My name is Becca and I just finished freshman year at the UW. I am thinking of being an English major. I like to read.

John Locke explains what money is: the means man has invented to appropriate goods. However, I would go further to say that money is merely a catalyst for the fluid exchange of wealth. Whereas trading involves dealing in perishable items, money can be easily stored and kept. It also makes it easier to determine the relative value of merchandise when everything is priced in dollars.

So, money is a paper representation of physical value that was invented so that people could exchange labor for goods. When one goes to work, one gets paid the value of one’s labor in dollars. Then one can exchange those dollars for goods and services that one has earned. The money system is most convenient because it allows for the fluid transfer of goods and services. Money can be exchanged for anything. In short, money is everything one needs to live.

If money is used to distribute how much each person gets, the economy is how much there is to go around. In a bad economy, the value of money is lower because there is less to go around. When the economy is bad, everyone suffers. When it is good, everyone is happier. The economy effects people collectively, whereas the distribution of money effects individuals. Still, bad economies effect people unevenly- those at the very top might notice little difference. This can be the difference between having to sell a third car and having to donate an extra kidney to pay rent.

The economy is a nation’s collective wealth and money is the means of measurement and exchange.

major paper 2

Becca Prashner

Major Paper 2: Rough Draft

            Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments can be used to explain Dan’s actions, popularity, and role as a character in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. If Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment is an outline of morality, or what makes an individual respected in a monetary society, than Dan is an example of a person who obtains all of Smith’s admired qualities. His every action in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is geared towards gaining the admiration of others, which in Disneyland translates directly into wealth (Whuffie). Even when Dan does not behave in a moral way- such as when he has his best friend murdered in order to increase his own Whuffie- he keeps up the appearance of being an upstanding individual. The difference between Dan in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and someone who accumulates power and good “moral sentiment” in today’s world, is that Dan singlehandedly bought his standing by helping a rival plot Julius’s death. Dan’s plan works, and his Whuffie skyrockets. Dan’s underhanded success in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom raises a few significant questions about the real difference between Disneyland, today’s world, and the time of Adam Smith: can status be bought for a price, and to what extent is one’s standing in society an actual gauge of one’s real moral worth? In Disneyland, the respect of others is a commodity that can be paid for. Though this may not be completely true in today’s world, the modern era does share some of this quality with Disneyland.

Dan measures his entire worth as an individual against his reputation with others. Once his job convincing technophobes, or skeptics, to become immortal in Disneyland is obsolete, his reputation plummets. Dan loses the will to live, and decides to go to a “death parlor” to have himself killed. However, he is convinced to stay around and improve his social standing, and accumulate Whuffie, because as Lil puts it, “If you killed yourself right now, you’d just be a washed-up loser who couldn’t hack it… Get that Whuffie up, too. Then he can kill himself with dignity.” Lil meant that if Dan were to kill himself in such a lowly state, nobody would care because of his low social standing. The fact that Dan is convinced by this argument shows how important popularity is in The Bitchun Society. That one who was about to kill himself would put it off until he increased other’s opinion of himself shows how much the value of the individual is tied up in how he is perceived by others. And, what makes an individual popular in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is exactly what makes a person valued in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment: success, or the appearance of it. In this way, Disneyland is directly subject to Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment. Dan must raise his status in order for others to take his misfortune seriously. For, as Smith’s puts it, society’s sympathy for an individual can be measured by their socioeconomic standing: “It is the misfortunes of Kings only which afford the proper subjects for tragedy… All the innocent blood shed in civil wars, provoked less indignation than the death of Charles the 1^st.” Adam Smith echoes Lil’s statement to Dan. Society cares more for one king than any number of undistinguished individuals. Similarly, if Dan should die poor, he would die in obscurity and disgrace. Therefore, it is most important that he accumulate Whuffie and increase his status in any way he can.

The only difference between Adam Smith’s time and the futuristic Disneyland, is that the appearance of success, youth, and beauty can be bought more cheaply in The Bitchun Society. In the Bitchun society, all one has to do to keep up one’s youth is make a younger backup of oneself. The appearance of success and popularity, or Whuffie, can also be bought by doing favors for others. All Dan does to accumulate status is cooperate with Debra in murdering his own friend, Julius. Still, as in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment, it does not matter what Julius actually did to accumulate the wealth. All that matters is his apparent status. In the Theory of Moral Sentiment, Adam Smith explains how the actual character of the rich and powerful has little to do with how society perceives them. They are judged by their status alone. Speaking of wealth and posterity, Smith elaborates, “Compared with these, in his own times, and in his own presence, no other virtue, it seems, appeared to have any merit. Knowledge, industry, valour, and beneficence, trembled, were abashed, and lost all dignity before them.” In this way, the world of Adam Smith and The Bitchun Society are not so different. It does not matter by what merit Dan acquires his wealth, as long as everyone can see that he has it. This discrepancy between the actual merit of the rich and powerful and their esteem in society is noted in the Theory of Moral Sentiments:

“It is scarce agreeable to good morals, or even to good language, perhaps, to say, that mere wealth and greatness, abstracted from merit and virtue, deserve our respect. We must acknowledge, however, that they almost constantly obtain it; and that they may, therefore, be considered as, in some respects, the natural objects of it. Those exalted stations may, no doubt, be completely degraded by vice and folly. But the vice and folly must be very great, before they can operate this complete degradation.”

Smith means that wealth and power alone garner respect, apart from merit and virtue. He even suggests that the wealthy and powerful may be absolved from a certain degree of corruption by virtue of their social standing. This would explain Dan’s sudden popularity when he accumulates large amounts of Whuffie from Julius’s murder. Lil immediately dumps Julius for Dan, and Dan gains the admiration of Disneyland. Although throughout the story no one knows the circumstances of Dan’s new wealth, the very fact that he has it gets him respect. However, when he admits that he killed Julius for Whuffie, his social standing plummets. This may be a case where “the vice and folly” was great enough that Dan’s social standing was completely degraded. Dan’s case is an example of how society reveres the rich without examining how they came by their wealth. That someone like Dan could plausibly get away with the murder of his best friend affirms Smith’s statement that wealth and greatness alone should deserve respect.

Dan is a literary example of a real phenomenon. Many people come by wealth and power through dishonest means. This illustrates the chief moral conflict of both Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom: one’s status in society does not necessarily coincide with one’s actual value as an individual. Wealth, power, and Whuffie are poor gauges of individual merit. As Adam Smith says in his Theory of Moral Sentiment:

“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.”

The “disposition” to admire the wealthy and despise the poor is what leads Dan to murder Julius for Whuffie. In this example, Adam Smith’s statement that admiration of wealth corrupts our morals is correct. In the real world as in Disneyland, it is backwards that a man should murder his best friend in hopes of gaining status. Still, people gain wealth and admiration in dishonest ways every day.

Dan is one example of the corruption of moral sentiment by the admiration of wealth alone. Disneyland is the ultimate example of a morally corrupt society. The “moral sentiment” of Disneyland is entirely based upon wealth, for one’s wealth is the opinion of others and the opinion of others one’s wealth. This is what causes Dan to murder his best friend to gain social standing. The value of human relationships loses all meaning when there is a direct price on acceptance. In this way, The Bitchun Society is the ultimate example of putting monetary prices on human beings. Dan is, therefore, a complex character. The morally bankrupt state of Disneyland, to which he converted others, stamps out his will to live. At the same time, he exploits the worst aspects of The Bitchun Society in order to achieve his ends. Dan’s character is aware of the emptiness of a society that places such value in an individual’s social standing, so he has no problem exploiting it.

For major paper one, I will focus on Dan from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I will use Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment to analyze Dan’s position in Disneyland. Dan’s Whuffie is low, so he can’t kill himself with dignity. Whuffie makes sense in the context of Theory of Moral Sentiment because the rich and powerful automatically have more Whuffie. So, if Dan killed himself with low Whuffie, people would look down on him. However, if Dan is rich and powerful, he can go ahead and do it without censure. This is just one example of how the concept of Whuffie is directly tied to the Theory of Moral Sentiment. Whuffie is a direct measure of one’s personal capital, so it is an even more accurate measure of value than money. Personal capital is a measure of one’s standing in the eyes of friends, family, and society. Once Dan’s Whuffie goes up, he even steals Lil from the narrator. And because his Whuffie is also high in the narrator’s view, he isn’t even angry about it. Dan gains power as he gains the opinion of others. So, in Disneyland, real power comes straight from one’s popularity. This makes Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments even more applicable to the Bitchun society than our own.

However, Whuffie does not necessarily keep people moral. Although Dan “gets his Whuffie up” in a fair way, Debra directly manipulates people. This raises the question of whether or not Whuffie is a better tool than money for regulating business. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments applies whether using money or Whuffie, but neither way necessarily regulates the moral conduct of society.

“Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or by anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.”- pg. 150

This means that above all else- intelligence, consciousness, morality- it is man’s ability to produce his own goods that separates him from other animals. I think that Marx & Engels are correct in this view. John Locke would probably agree. He even uses the bible as a reference- God gave plants and animals to man so that he could make use of them. This stance makes since, because the only thing that really separates us from nature is the world we manufacture. Maybe we didn’t directly set out to do this- we just want more comfortable lives. It just winds up happening that way.

For instance, take modern houses. We live in them. They were also manufactured. So, the places we live in are products of society. Man took a few naturally occurring resources and made something entirely different- and of much more value than the original raw materials (trees, metal, etc.).

That man is separate from nature mostly because of his inventions is an apt standpoint for any economic text. Labor and the production of our world, and the economy, is truly what separates man from nature. Not morality, not intelligence- though they may be components of the process. It is the production of goods and the use of money that really make humans different from other animals. We create our own world apart from them.

Paper 1 rough draft (Becca)

For my first major assignment, I will create a discussion between Defoe’s “On Credit” and Stein’s “Money.”

I chose these two texts because there is conflict between them. Stein states that money is money and it is foolish to distort the value of the dollar. Defoe argues that credit, what could be described as taking more money than one has, is necessary. Both writers’ stances on the value of the dollar and fiscal responsibility are sound, and one does not negate the other. Money represents physical value and it is therefore unwise to borrow too much at once. When one can’t come up with the money in time to pay back a loan, then there is a net loss of wealth on both sides. However, if like Defoe’s prudent shopkeeper in “On Credit,” one borrows modestly and is fiscally responsible, the use of credit and interest is profitable for borrower and lender. This dynamic of credit points to the chief difficulty man has with the monetary system.

We are always driven to obtain more than we have. With good control over our desires, this drive is ambition. When one is reckless, like the irresponsible shopkeeper who purchases lavish decorations, this is greed. Greed and ambition make it difficult for man to be fiscally conservative, or remember that “money is money.” However, greed is also necessary to a thriving economy- without greed there would be no ambition. And Defoe’s successful shopkeeper would never have taken out a modest loan to open a storefront.

Rereading “The Ladies’ Dressing Room,” I realize that the poem is not about two lovers at all, but about a john frustrated with the quality of a prostitute. Strephon feels he has been had, having to pay so much for a defective product. He finds Celia is worth less than he paid, and so feels cheated, because she uses the bathroom, has dirty stockings, leaves hair in the brush, and wears makeup. In short, he finds her humanity disgusting. In my opinion, he has no right to object if he still chooses to purchase her services. Swift’s poem is misogynistic, but still has some self-conscious humor. Strephon does still choose to sleep with Celia despite her imperfect hygiene. In the end, he is the butt of the joke: men are not picky: When Celia in her Glory shows, [135]
If Strephon would but stop his Nose;
(Who now so impiously blasphemes
Her Ointments, Daubs, and Paints and Creams,
Her Washes, Slops, and every Clout,
With which he makes so foul a Rout;) [140]
He soon would learn to think like me,
And bless his ravisht Sight to see
Such Order from Confusion sprung,
Such gaudy Tulips rais’d from Dung.”
In the end, Celia is still a woman, and Strephon a man. No matter how disgusting her hygiene habits, or how ugly or fat, men will sleep with anyone if they want it badly enough. So, when Celia finally “in her glory shows,” he must learn to stop his nose and go through with it.
Lady Montague’s poem is a counter to Swift’s male-oriented view of prostitution. Montague writes that the cause of Strephon’s ire at Celia, which led him to bash her hygiene, was that she wouldn’t sleep with him. Montague accurately takes the standpoint that the most likely reason for a man to bash a woman is because he has been spurned. It is a direct affront to a man’s masculinity when a woman will not sleep with him, and he in turn must undermine her value as a woman. This, according to Montague, is what would lead someone like Smith to write a poem about a woman called “The Lady’s Dressing Room.” Smith was attempting to make up for his own loss of esteem by devaluing someone else. If romance is a game of relative value, then this stance makes since.
Rereading both poems, the most important words are still “Strephon,” “Celia,” and “Gold.” This is because the poems are about a competition for value in relationships between a man and a woman. This competition for worth dictates who has the upper hand in a sexual partnership, or even between a prostitute and a john. Swift writes from the point of a generic male, Strephon, who feels that he is worth more than he is getting. Montague provides another scenario where Celia will not sleep with Strephon because he is not good enough for her. Though each author takes opposing viewpoints, both poems center around the same struggle: the economic battle of the sexes.

This quote from Smith explainstheabsurd lengths Americans go to with their celebrity worship/ imitation:

Even their vices and follies are fashionable; and the greater part of men are proud to imitate and resemble them in the very qualities which dishonour and degrade them.

Because people want to be popular, what Smith would refer to as “admired” or “receiving approbation,” they imitate rich and famous people who are already celebrated in hopes that they might achieve similar results. Often the results they get aren’t so fortunate. Some examples of this phenomenon would be women who die their hair blonde and acquire orange tans and basketball boobs in hopes of looking like the front cover of People magazine. Anorexia is another celebrity folly that many women imitate. Celebrities get a lot of attention for extreme changes in appearance, and those who imitate hope to achieve the same result. However, such attempts to stand out, more often than not, appear desperate in normal humans.

South Park enthusiasts might remember one episode in which the town’s population of little girls becomes obsessed with Paris Hilton. The girls in South Park openly refer to Paris as a “stupid spoiled whore,” yet they aspire to be like her because she is “rich and totally spoiled.” The creators of South Park are in the dark as to why any girl would aspire to be like Paris Hilton, who is a “stupid spoiled whore.” This quote from Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiment” explains: she’s, like, totally rich and fabulous.

Gertrude Stein’s “money” states that the value of the dollar is a set thing with real material value that we should not attempt to distort. Three horses is three horses, and three dollars is three dollars. Stein would therefore agree with Daniel Defoe that dependence on loans is shaky, given the nature of credit: getting more than what you can pay for in money. Credit is thus a shaky thing to rely on. If, as Stein says, “money is money is money,” than one should be very careful with trying to make money more than it is worth. One who borrows more than one can pay back gets bad credit, and then there is a net loss of money for both borrower and lender. The money system relies on a stable dollar, and credit, although necessary, threatens this stability. Defoe advocates the responsible use of credit. It may be necessary to borrow some money to open a shop, but it is not necessary to borrow more money than needed to decorate it. Stein, however, might say that the use of credit is inadvisable. One who uses credit, in Stein’s view, might be like the little boy who wants to pretend that three horses are a million horses. Stein and Defoe would agree on the fickle nature of credit. Defoe’s “On Credit” describes the fickle nature of the credit balance, but Stein’s piece explains why that might be. If money is money, than acquiring more leads to an imbalance of trade. That is where problems in the economy stem from. When people can’t pay back debts, everyone loses.

Words that I found important from Monday’s readings are:

1. Strephon and Celia,

and

2. Gold.

Strephon and Celia are names of classical pastoral poetry and romance. Gold is a form of currency, which the pound was once valued against. The names Strephon and Celia appear throughout Swift’s poem, “The Ladies Dressing Room,” which is about a man who is spurned by a lady because he is not wealthy enough for her. Swift, an influential 18th century British poet, laments gender roles and materialism in “The Ladies Dressing Room.” He makes it clear that women, no matter how pretty, who value possessions and wealth over love are not beautiful at all but rather “satiras,” or worthless women. The woman in “The Ladies Dressing Room” is described as such. She, Celia, snubs Strephon because he has not much to offer her in the way of gold. She is haughty and vain, spending all day in her dressing room applying a grotesque amount of beauty products. This is an indication of her own self-absorbption. Also, no matter how much make-up she puts on, or how pretty she looks, Swift views her as essentially ugly. He puts it thus: “Such gaudy tulips spring from dung.” So, Celia, Swift’s archetypal female, is a worthless strumpet who is only interested in money. Swift’s man, Strephon, is an unfortunate fool to be taken by a typical materialistic female’s beauty when all she was really interested in was his money. Swift’s poem, “The Ladies Dressing Room,” is about how love of Gold degrades love.