Reading “The Parvenue”: Contested Arrivals of Consciousness

by Lucy S.

This is a long essay because it is a final paper for a graduate class, but I am including it because of its connection to the last essay, "Enablers?" in case anyone wants to read it.  It, and even the last one, are more academic than what I mostly prefer to post here on the blog, but I think it is fairly accessible. And I think that anyone who has been in these positions in which our loved ones need help and we struggle to decide how to help them or what we did wrong when it all fails may relate to Fanny's position.  I will include an online link to Mary Shelley's story at the end. 

Parvenu: “one that has recently or suddenly risen to an unaccustomed position of wealth or power and has not yet gained the prestige, dignity, or manner associated with it.”
(Merriam Online Dictionary)

French parvenir: “to arrive, to reach, to manage to do something”

[T]hey come up against the limits strictly imposed upon them by the existing circumstances. Because they are incapable of penetrating these limits with their own thought, they attribute this impossibility, which in truth is inflicted upon them, either to themselves, to the great figures of the world, or to others…. Moreover, the dominant ideology dictates that the more individuals are delivered over to objective constellations, over which they have, or believe they have, no power, the more they subjectivize this powerlessness. Starting from the phrase that everything depends on the person, they attribute to people everything that in fact is due to the external conditions, so that in turn the conditions remain undisturbed.(93)
~ Theodor Adorno “The Meaning of Working Through the Past”

We know that social, economic, and political realities manifest in the lives of actual people. But we know this nebulously and abstractly – theoretically. In a hierarchical, but dizzyingly complicated society with deeply normalized inequality and injustice, these large-scale realities possess and inhabit human lives in ways the possessed and inhabited often misinterpret or fail to see at all.  How can we know where ‘the system’ leaves off and ‘we’ begin?

For my part, I freely assign blame for the devastated real lives I have been all too close to – freely lay it at the feet of the system. My uncle, dead forty-five days now, too quickly destroyed by a neurological disease that ruined his ability to willfully move his body, weakened his voice, made him stutter and drool incessantly, choked him when he tried to swallow, and made him doubt his own dignity?  The system. His identical twin – my father – thankfully remains healthy. Why did that illness attack my uncle?

Was it the plating shop, full of toxic chemicals, that he worked in for three years, way back when his girlfriend got pregnant and they ‘had’ to get married at sixteen-years-old? Was it boxing in his early twenties? Or was it the shock of his son’s twenty-seven year sentence under California’s Three Strikes law for nonviolent crimes related to heroin addiction? Was it his murdered twenty-two-year old grandson, shot with a one-week-old baby boy sleeping on his chest, as a revenge for calling the police to report a carjacking that sent the perpetrator to prison for two years? Was it the chronic stress of the relentless income demands to keep so many people going, to keep them safe? How about the exponentially increased number of chemicals in our food, water, homes, air, and ground since World War Two? How can we ever disentangle all of these threads?  How can we disentangle the systemic from the personal?

I begin here: the system of capitalism continually visits destruction upon the person – the human being. We must confront it and whatever attributes or beliefs in humanity make and sustain it.  In The Condition of England (1844), Frederick Engels argues that private property’s existence itself begins the cycle of ruinous alienation:

Moreover, as long as private property, the basic form of alienation, exists, interest must necessarily be the interest of the individual and its domination will be the domination of property. The abolition of feudal servitude has made “cash-payment the sole relation of human beings” [Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, p. 198] Property, a natural, spiritless principle, as opposed to the human and spiritual principle, is thus enthroned, and ultimately, to complete this alienation, money — the alienated, empty abstraction of property — is made master of the world.  (“The Eighteenth Century:  Vorwärts! No. 71, September 4, 1844”)

Money, “the empty abstraction of property,” intensifies this alienation to a devastating level, resulting in that hollow stand-in for property being “made master of the world.” Contemporary capitalism structures money’s rulership into its most obscured point of abstraction – the corporation – so that the interest of the money-making structure itself subsumes even individual interest. Because the foundational principal – private property – is “opposed to the human … principle,” capitalism as a system contains internal contradictions which inevitably harm people and create dilemmas for them. By its nature, capitalism must be ruthless and insatiable. Ever greater profit, as a goal, means voracious ever-increasing consumption. While it makes others go away, capitalism pushes on – always arriving more fully, taking possession, occupying.

Some may argue that I displace my pain about my uncle’s death – or the multitude of other losses, imprisonments, deaths, and ravaged lives of too many people I care about – displace all of this pain onto a huge amorphous entity – an economic system touted as democratic and most preferable. I argue the reverse: that we displace the pain caused by the large onto the small.

The largeness itself – the murky vastness – of contemporary capitalism is what makes it hard to see and, conversely, to not see. Capitalism possesses and occupies humanity and our relationships. Envisioning its demise or a workable alternative eludes most of us. Those who at least recognize its current disastrous nature sometimes react by pointing back to simpler forms of capitalism or private-property-based economic relations, prior to and thus free of the shadow of the modern corporation. But the collectively ‘remembered’ visions of blissful, pastoral, ‘simple’ monetary relations between people are fantastical histories. Yet, there is value in looking back, not nostalgically for times that never were, but to shake off the spell of imaginary nostalgia, to see the same old fundamental dilemmas in that younger, more ‘innocent’ incarnation of this monetary dictator of human relations.

Mary Shelley’s 1836 short story, “The Parvenue,” written less than a decade before Engels’ work on the nation’s condition, fleshes out a piece of the “condition of England” in those earlier, ‘less complicated’ days of capitalism.  Then as now, small lives bear the burden of huge socioeconomic realities. And then, as now, what many think of as choices are, more accurately, dilemmas – irresolvable dilemmas which lead to loss and impasses.

In this story, Fanny, the first-person protagonist, finds herself at what we might call an aporia, a word etymologically rooted in: “not” (a) and “passage (poros)” or “impassable … at a loss” and “not porous.” She cannot find a way into or through the impasse. Her efforts to understand or retroactively think of a solution cannot penetrate the problem as she continually circles around it.  She cannot fathom what she should have done differently at any step of the way in her history to bring about a better outcome.

The waning of feudalism, the new world of bourgeois capitalism, and Fanny’s position as a dependent wife with no earned income leave her trapped inside the logic of her society. The only routes to an alternate outcome – the only ways around the impassable – are outside of Fanny’s thinkable options. Fanny faces an aporia, and readers face that aporia as well if they stay inside the represented consciousness of this first-person protagonist.

But the ideology we bring to stories infuses the meaning we take from them. We read our ideology onto stories, both fictional and those we and others live out. What perpetuates the ideology coursing through this society’s veins – bourgeois capitalist ideology - is reading inside the boundaries of its logic, but at the same time, superficially. Capitalism works best when details and individual lives distract or entertain us, yet never matter enough in themselves. This is the hollowness, the alienation, which Engels identifies – a sense that people and things are easily replaceable as long as one has enough money to fill in the blanks with other people and things. To grasp the implications of “The Parvenue,” then – to begin to read as human beings less colonized by capitalism – we must read against this superficial distraction. Reading outside the logic of the story yet simultaneously remaining tightly bound within its limitations allows us to both understand and feel the entrapment of individual lives in the clutches of something larger.  

The contradictions which demand this zoomed out, yet micro-focused reading begin with the title itself. The parvenu is Fanny – a peasant who, in her late teens, marries an aristocrat. But Fanny is not the sort of parvenu who seeks any of the material opulence that comes with a move into a higher class. She is an ambivalent parvenu, on no chase for “prestige, dignity, or the manner associated with” her “unaccustomed position of wealth,” as per the usual definition of the word.  Quite the opposite: she says that “nothing, since I can remember forming an idea, so astonished and jarred with my feelings, as the thought of how the rich could spend so much on themselves, while any of their fellow creatures were in destitution.” Marrying an aristocrat does not change that.  Having been poor and “brought up among the poor,” Fanny never loses her “instinct or sentiment of justice,” which is what Paulo Freire calls “class knowledge” (Freire 26).

Her radical ideas about wealth distribution undercut her own new class privilege as the wife of an aristocrat. Although she does not imagine broadening her feeling for economic justice into mass societal change (or know how to), she remains convinced that “all had as good a right to the comforts of life as myself, or even as my husband.” Thus, she cannot bring herself to spend money on expensive goods. Fanny’s healthy skepticism for token faux-generosity leads her to repudiate the “patrician charity … which consists in distributing thin soup and coarse flannel petticoats,” so that the wealthy can feel good giving some of the poor a bare minimum of food or clothing while always maintaining the gaping socioeconomic space between the classes. Instead, she uses her ample allowance which could be spent on “a thousand luxuries to which it appeared to me I had no right, for feeding the hungry.” If she cannot redistribute societal wealth more equitably, she will at least redistribute the pieces of it she controls.  

In keeping with this sense of redistribution, what she gives she considers, not “charities,” but rather “the payment of my debts to my fellow creatures.” Appearing “dowdily dressed” at grand parties, angering her husband, she refuses to “spend twenty guineas on a gown” when the same money spent for others could “dress so many sad faces in smiles.” Thus, she uses her elevation in class, her parvenu status, to bring herself back down and lift the poor up – to reduce the space between her aristocratic identity and her fellow human beings. (269)  

Then as now, although the dominant ideology inhabits us, our own experiences, relations with others, and “instinct or sentiment of justice” live within us to varying extents as well. These vying forces result in internal struggles as we try to interpret and act within our particular realities. As much as Fanny refuses to accept the economic inequities of her society as normal, she still doubts herself, countering her disdain for “patrician charity,” for example, with the addendum: “though such is praiseworthy” (269).  And although she ultimately settles on a view of herself as a “martyr” for her “faith,” and will not call her acted upon convictions a “fault,” she remains keenly aware that the rich would judge her as “wrong,” that “to please my husband and do honour to his rank” would, in their view, be her “first duty.”

This dual awareness bears a kinship to the “double consciousness” that W.E.B. Du Bois describes for African-Americans, the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (568). But Fanny’s duality is grounded in class rather than ethnicity (in turn bound to class in America). Although her class loyalty and sense of fairness remain unshakeable, Fanny, unlike Du Bois, lacks the awareness and confidence to take her convictions to the next level – to that of a full societal critique which would link her to others enacting societal change. Thus, as she stammers through interrupted statements about the consequences of her lived out beliefs, she can only call the result “a misfortune” rather than the logical product of her society. (269-270).

Getting ahead of herself, Fanny reveals a portion of this “misfortune,” or rather, the sacrifice paid – her martyrdom to her own “faith.” Allowing readers only a glimpse of the coming “full disaster” which “crushed” her, Fanny says, “[F]or many years, I have wasted at the slow fire of knowing that I lost my husband’s affections for doing what I believed to be a duty.” Again, her “double consciousness” manifests itself.  Two conceptions of “duty” exist in her thinking – the kind the rich would call her “first duty,” and the “duty” to those of her own recent economic condition. The latter for her is her “duty” to her conscience. Along with a knowledge of how “the rich” in a general sense would or do see her, Fanny must be particularly aware of her own husband’s perspective. Yet, although their significant class difference does not prevent the relationship, it seems to impede an ability for either one of them to develop a deeply felt sense of the other’s consciousness. (269-270)

Social position and, most of all, money both attract them to and alienate them from each other early on. Lord Reginald notices Fanny at church and begins walking with her and her sister or calling at their cottage, and the relationship develops enough for Fanny to believe that he loves her even then. Perhaps at this point, the attraction between them is ‘genuine’ in that it is propelled by a mutual affection for one another as individuals.  But what ignites the relationship is an actual fire, and the role Lord Reginald plays as Fanny’s savior. A fire which begins in a pile of hay spreads to their cottage. All survive, but Fanny lives “by a miracle.” The others get out, but she runs to her mother’s room to be sure her mother has escaped. She seems destined to die as the fire traps her, but just then, Lord Reginald appears as her “preserver” to carry her out. “To have been saved by him,” she says, “was to make the boon of life doubly precious.” For his part, “from the hour he saved [Fanny’s] life, love grew into an overpowering passion.” Fanny’s father is “crippled for life,” from here on, but Lord Reginald has the whole family take up “lodge on his estate,” sending food and tenderly caring for them all as they settle in. The old, traditional manorial relations of Lord and serfs working his land now infuse Reginald’s and Fanny’s personal relationship. 

The king or lord as savior to those bound to him is a crucial part of feudalism’s ideology. Saving Fanny and then her family allows Lord Reginald to more fully inhabit an aristocratic identity which is slipping away from him as capitalism moves in and occupies feudalism’s previous dominance in English society. Giving Fanny life itself excites him because he can be what he was ‘meant’ to be: a full Lord. Likewise, the right to live on his vast lands is a lord’s currency in exchange for the loyalty of ‘his’ peasants. Lord Reginald can thus be the glorious “preserver” to them all. Fanny, too, is deeply susceptible to ‘saving’ ideologies linked to feudalism and chivalry. Furthermore, Fanny’s communistic notions of equally distributed wealth, though undeveloped, draw her to Lord Reginald. She sees him freely, generously sharing what he has with her and her family. Her inability to grasp the embedded patterns and stories informing and driving their feelings steeps the whole forging of their relationship in “much obscurity” for her as she looks back. Neither of them understands the very different ideologically driven desires each bring to the marriage which initially attract but ultimately repel. (267-269)

But bourgeois capitalism’s ever deepening arrival in English society and Fanny’s own family’s consciousness cause the full collision of the contradictions and oppositional ideologies motivating Fanny and her aristocratic husband. Fanny’s father and siblings (with their spouses) want a very different currency from Lord Reginald than simply the right to live on his land as he acts as their feudal lord. They cannot restrain themselves at the proximity of all that heretofore distant wealth. The currency they crave is that “cash payment” Engels names as what becomes “the sole relation of human beings” under the newer system.

Upon returning home from the first two years of marriage lived abroad, Fanny’s husband tells her that her family has been making “exorbitant demands” on him for money. He declares “no wish to raise [her] family from their station in society” and is “resolved not to comply.” Hastening the metamorphosis of his ‘serfs’ into more impudent, new-moneyed capitalists is the last thing Lord Reginald wants. For him, Fanny’s family is reneging on their end of the unspoken deal, refusing to ‘know their place.’ Fanny agrees, but for her own reasons. Believing luxuriant spending wrong, period, she is not about to support their “extravagant demands.”

But upon reuniting with her family, she finds her “earthly angel” mother in almost fatally frail health while the rest of the family begs Fanny to “intercede” with her aristocratic spouse on their behalves. Her father pleads for money, not for immediate tangible luxuries, but for that empty, alienated place-holder for private goods which he has pursued: more money. He has “embarked in a speculation which required a large capital,” and his unsuccessful scrambles to become a capitalist threaten to ruin his honor along with many families grabbing toward their own capitalist success through him. What moves Fanny to mediate for her father, most of all, is her deep concern for her mother’s tenuous health. Her mother never participates in these monetary requests, but the father’s amateurish, scheming business gambles inescapably harm her.

Thus, Fanny asks her husband, and keeps asking, as one new financial crisis after another drives desperate requests. At last, he forces her to “choose” to never see her family again or part from him forever. As an answer, she packs and leaves “in a sort of delirium of grief and horror” – less a choice than a breakdown brought on by a dilemma pushed to its irresolvable edge. The story then ends three years later, with Fanny’s mother and father dead, no reconciliation with Lord Reginald – who wants to marry someone else from his own social class – and Fanny about to abandon her home in England for America, where she imagines herself soon dead. Grasping for capitalistic success has fragmented the family forever and destroyed the lives of many of its broken off individuals. (266, 270-274)

***

Following Fanny’s lead, I want to circle back around now. She begins the story at its end, asking a rhetorical: “Why do I write my melancholy story?” (266). But Fanny does not really write her story; Shelley writes it. And Shelley clearly is not writing the confused, lesson-less tale that Fanny purports to be telling from inside of Shelley’s fiction. In the first question and at every step in this story, Fanny is both an unreliable narrator in her interpretation of her narrative, and a trustworthy one in relaying the events of her life as well as her reactions to those events. She cannot understand her social and thus individual condition, but never willingly lies.  We read Fanny as relaying her story as accurately as she knows how, so that “others may judge” and perhaps determine “what have been [her] errors” (266).  This appeal to others reveals more in her consciousness besides the ideologies of feudalism and capitalism – a fledging reach toward some communal solidarity with her own radical “sentiment of justice” (269). Fanny tells this story for the reasons many tell stories of ruined lives. She wants the consolation, perhaps, of being declared blameless by an abstract audience, but the absolution of blame can do nothing to mitigate the consequences.

Yet, the feeling that she is missing something which could have brought about a better result compels her to reexamine and relay her history. The mind never fully reconciles itself to the aporia. The story’s form echoes the trapped circular feeling of Fanny’s predicament. The circle leads back to her – the individual.

It is vital that Shelley has written the story completely inside the logic of individual experience because this individualism was the prevailing doctrine of the burgeoning capitalist ideology and society in the England of her time. As Engels points out in the same essay, the individual whose rights this society purports to uphold is not the “free, self-conscious, creative” human being, but instead the “crude and blind man who remains within the confines of the contradictions.”

This is the individual upon whom Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism is founded, Engels argues. Bentham, he says, “in accordance with the national trend of that time makes the individual interest the basis of the general interest.” Engels goes on to trace out what that means:

Bentham makes free competition the essence of morality, regulates human relations according to the laws of property, of things, according to the laws of nature, and thus represents the culmination of the old, naturally evolved Christian world order, the highest point of alienation, and not the beginning of a new order to be created by self-conscious man in full freedom. He does not advance beyond the state, but strips it of all meaning, substitutes social principles for political ones, turns the political organisation into the form of the social content and thus carries the contradiction to its extreme limit. (“Vorwärts! No. 73, September 11, 1844”)

Shelley, too, “carries the contradiction to its extreme limit,” but in ways oppositional to Bentham’s conception of society.  Bentham’s society, founded upon “enlightened egoism” as an expression of “the general good,” creates the contradictions; Shelley’s story drags them out into the light by demonstrating the dilemmas to which a society undergirded by selfishness ultimately leads.

 As the daughter and widow of English radicals, Shelley was well versed in these social and political issues. In fact, as Engels explains, it was Shelley’s father, William Godwin, in his book, An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), who made the case for an entirely different conception of “the principle of utility” than Bentham’s. Godwin, says Engels, defines “the principle of utility quite generally as the duty of the citizen to live only for the general good without regard to his individual interest” – a principle Bentham completely inverted. Shelley has written a character who embodies this principle. Yet trying to live it out as a sole individual amidst a society in which “competition” and “the laws of property” infuse human relations wreaks havoc on Fanny. The “contradiction” of the society is carried “to its extreme limit” in her story. Trying to do what should be the ‘right’ thing becomes the ‘wrong’ thing in this society. The one individual cannot privately right its wrongs.

Fanny follows her opening “why” question with another: “Is it as a lesson, to prevent any other from wishing to rise to rank superior to that in which they are born?”(266) The question implies agency, and with it, the visibly available choices, which are either to accept one’s socioeconomic place or individually attempt to rise above it. Feudalism affirms the former choice; the promises of capitalism, the latter. Anyone trying to manifest this kind of agency (inside the obvious parameters of this story and society) would end up choosing between feudalism’s conservative acceptance of the old status quo and bourgeois capitalism’s aggressive making of new socioeconomic realities, allowing some to force their way up the ranks.

But Fanny’s case cannot even speak to the issue of someone “wishing to rise to rank superior,” if by wishing, some action to make it happen is implied. Fanny slips upward through her marriage to an aristocrat, yet the elevation appears to ‘happen’ to her as a passive recipient. The antithesis to someone scheming to rise by marrying up, Fanny’s impulses, if carried out in full, would result in a leveling out of her new aristocratic role and her husband’s wealthy lordship with the masses. Furthermore, in more general terms, for a woman, the choices are one step removed, because the question of whether she will “rise to rank superior” is bound to whether she marries someone who is either of higher rank or will try his hand at market economics to push his (and thus their) way up.

Fanny can conceive of no lesson from her story, because the outcome seems to depend upon luck.  She and her family were unlucky; others may fare differently.  Beyond luck, the only ostensible lesson for the reader can be to not do as Fanny has done. The deeper lesson is quite the opposite, but it is not simply self-interest’s acted out antonym which would leave someone else in the same place as Fanny, cornered into sacrificing for those who themselves act selfishly. What is left out is the option to do away with hierarchical rank – radical socioeconomic transformation. Thus, the real lesson is completely outside of the question’s implications.

  

Fanny continues, answering her own question: “No! miserable as I am, others might have been happy … the chalice has been poisoned for me alone!” Buying into the individualist logic of newly arriving capitalism, she believes in the alienated singularity of her story. Misery and happiness are thus the private emotional states of each subject without commonality. The chalice – the goblet – often the Eucharist cup to be drunk in remembrance of the individual (Christ) who died to redeem the many – is “poisoned” only for her; redemption is denied to her “alone.” The blood of sacrifice harms rather than heals. Fanny’s efforts to “intercede” between the many and the one with power in their lives – Lord Reginald – culminate in a casting off, not only of those requiring intercession, but of the intercessor herself, a withdrawal of salvation.

With money as “master of the world,” the potential supplier of that money for Fanny’s family – Lord Reginald – becomes their God figure. In a money-centered society, money is life, and he is the one who can bestow that life. Money washes away their ‘sins’ and money saves (the only salvation available under capitalism). And because money becomes the only facet of his identity which matters, Lord Reginald must become only money. The grace he can bestow is money, but in distributing that grace, he diminishes himself. As Fanny’s “preserver,” Lord Reginald meant to pluck just the one individual from the fire, to save the one (267). He loved his role as the savior of one, the granter of actual life for Fanny. But the entire economic system forces him into his God as money / money as God role for the many bound to the one saved. Thus, “the chalice is poisoned” not for Fanny “alone,” but for everyone “alone.” The oceanic pain of the many distills into the concentrated poisoned cup for each individual.

What Du Bois describes for the African-American of his time and nation thus applies to Fanny and her family as well: “This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand people, – has sent them wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves.”(568)  

“Ashamed” is not precisely the emotion Fanny feels in the aftermath of her “crushing,” Shame may have been what drove her father and siblings to chase money and a nouveau- riche status as a “false means of salvation” from their precarious impoverishment. But Fanny herself is “miserable” and “bewildered” (266). Though its ideology unavoidably infiltrates her consciousness, Fanny has not run to capitalism for salvation, but she has sought refuge in feudalism’s comfortable old promise of security. Her own undeveloped revolutionary consciousness, her “instinct or sentiment of justice,” inevitably could not mix with feudalism’s answers.

Fanny does not understand how to transform her more radical consciousness into action because she appears to be isolated as she contemplates her fate thus far. Perhaps she writes her “melancholy story” to know what to do with her future. Right now, only the “last decay” of death is visible on her horizon. But if Fanny keeps circling around, her story may save her in a way that Lord Reginald could not. Allowing the fullness of her own story to seep deeply into her consciousness may bring her to life.

***

But Fanny (or Shelley) writes this “melancholy story” to someone. What do readers find as they (we) keep circling it? Clearly, this story’s ostensible (as well as actual) author needs readers to empathize with the protagonist for the story to ‘work.’ Feeling had been posited as an important part of stable society in European moral philosophy, but the empathy Fanny (or Shelley) attempts to evoke from readers would, if acted upon, have a decidedly destabilizing effect on a society structured hierarchically and inequitably.  Kristin Boudreau explains how sympathy was supposed to work to maintain stability in the new bourgeois society precariously driven by each one’s self-interest:

Liberal society, which empowered individuals to a degree that had never existed under absolute rulers, recognized the need to protect itself against the warring claims of different individuals. Like the religious experiment that would surely fail if its covenant were abandoned in favor of private interests, the social contract demanded a balance between self and society, freedom and regulation. Moral philosophers responded to this challenge of liberal society by locating the mechanism of social control in the individual’s “natural” response to other subjects and to other situations. By seeing another person’s suffering through one’s own eyes, one might respond privately to scenes which would bring different selves together in sympathetic union. (5-6)

We as readers feel Fanny’s dilemmas, but the result of deeply sympathizing with her leads us to conclude that liberal capitalism’s “social contract” with its “balance between self and society“ does not work, that the individual (and by extension, the many) cannot be protected against “the warring claims of different individuals.” The only answer within its logic is to not feel, to not be as Fanny is – to become one of those individuals making “warring claims.”

The temptation for readers of that time might then be to retreat from the contradictions and instability of bourgeois capitalism back to the stable ‘good old days’ of feudalism, as some now want to skip back to the ‘kinder, gentler’ days of capitalism. But Fanny has one foot back in feudalism and one foot forward in capitalism; the one has led to the other. To go back would be to keep Fanny and people like her family in a perpetual subservient state, dependent upon the whims and graces of an aristocrat who will never share resources or power equally with others, but will only give them what does not topple his own material or political position. At any rate, retreat is not possible. Engels writing with Karl Marx sums up the situation, a summation which speaks for the realities dramatized in “The Parvenue”:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash-payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. (32)

This is the social condition arriving in Fanny’s England, vying with and overcoming the remnants of feudalism. Whatever readers then might imagine they wish for, bourgeois capitalism rips off the ‘veils’ of older ideologies and forces them all into the non-genteel “icy water of egotistical calculation.” The up-and-coming merchant class is not about to throw away its single “free trade” freedom and submissively move back onto the lands of the aristocracy, any more than the corporations of today will devolve into the mythical mom-and-pop shops of yesteryear. Aristocrats like Lord Reginald adapt by becoming capitalists themselves, if they are to maintain their wealth. Thus, as Marx and Engels write, “The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.”

The bourgeois revolution sweeps readers of that time forward into capitalism with no way back to the old manorial relations. Ultimately the readers of then become the readers of now as capitalism continually arrives. What do we as contemporary readers find as we circle this story and allow it greater porosity into our own consciousness? Do we, too, see Fanny’s ideas as “sordid,” as Lord Reginald called them? Would we like her better if she spent freely on gowns and was “outshining competitors” at the nobility’s parties rather than spending her allowance on the poor in her vicinity? (269)

The only way to a different result inside bourgeois capitalism’s options for Fanny  is one in which she would have disregarded her empathy and urges to care for the poor and keep her loved ones as safe as her position made possible, or if she had just been luckier by having other family members who behaved or fared differently. These are the ways to salvation which capitalism offers the individual: the ‘practical’ route of narrow self-interest and/or luck.  Reading “The Parvenue” as it must be read forces readers to more fully confront what Marx and Engels describe – the “naked, shameless, direct, brutal” realities of capitalism. If there are no acceptable answers within the choices available in a structure – if we find only ruination of the self in one way or another in that structure – then the only answer can be to break out of that structure completely.

Whatever her intention, Shelley represents for us the feudal, bourgeois capitalist, and radical consciousness warring in one individual and in larger society. Like the people Adorno writes of in the opening passage excerpted from his essay, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” Fanny is “working through the past,” and we as readers must work through it with her. Adorno writes about a nation of people who allowed Nazism to take over or even embraced it; in the aftermath, they try to understand who to blame, how it happened, and why. Or they try to forget, or to convince themselves that not all aspects of life under Hitler and National Socialism were so bad. Fascism attempts to reconcile the three warring consciousnesses in its nationalistic mix of Fuhrer (mythologized in ways akin to the feudal lords of the past), business, and a social safety net for those deemed equal (with others excluded, attacked, and/ or exterminated). 

Fanny writes as a lone subject, and the ruined life is her own. She does not potentially have the blood of millions on her hands. But capitalism does. It kills overtly in its own wars to sustain or increase its possession and consumption. It kills by pursuing profit even though the pursuit in its varied forms harms life. And it kills by willful negligence, by withholding what is needed for life, by requiring money from those who cannot pay for life.  We – like Fanny – like the post-Nazi-era Germans –   subjectivize our powerlessness, leaving us in that circling quandary which moves between us, others, and “great figures.” For specific atrocities or catastrophes, the dominant ideology asks but does not really want to answer: who or what is responsible?

Ultimately, the parvenu Shelley profiles is not Fanny, but continually arriving capitalism. Yet, with it comes another parvenu, inevitably pushing its way in with the socioeconomic conditions and internal contradictions capitalism inevitably creates and drags along – the radical egalitarian consciousness germinating in people like Fanny.  The capitalist system functions best by requiring us to not love who we do love, to not even love our own lives, but to place everything into its service.  If we identify these two consciousnesses as Du Bois’s “double aims,” then the “two unreconciled ideals,” the profoundly different choices are either the “domination of property,” as Engels calls it, with its hollow, alienated “money as master” form of self-interest or life in free relationship with other human beings

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. “The Meaning of Working Through the Past.” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. New York: Columbia University Press. 2005. Print.

Boudreau, Kristin. Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. 2002. Print.

Du Bois, W.E.B. “[On Double Consciousness]from The Souls of Black Folk” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 2007. Print.

Engels, Frederick. “The Eighteenth Century: Vorwärts! No. 71, September 4, 1844” The Condition of England.  Marxists Internet Archive. Web.  14 Nov. 2011.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Continuum. 2004. Print.

Engels, Frederick. “The Eighteenth Century: Vorwärts! No. 73, September 11, 1844” The Condition of England. Marxists Internet Archive. Web. 14 Nov. 2011.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. “The Communist Manifesto.” Manifesto: Three Classic Essays on How to Change the World. New York: Ocean Press. 2005. Print.

Shelley, Mary. “The Parvenue.” Collected Tales and Stories. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. 1990. Print.

Online version: http://arthursclassicnovels.com/shelley/parven10.html