Our Desires for Love and Money

Michael Tratner, Mary E. Garrett Alumnae Professor of Literatures in English, died on Aug. 27, 2021, following a long illness. Michael joined the Bryn Mawr faculty in 1997, and was a much-loved teacher, accomplished scholar, and valued colleague.

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the first thing Romeo says when seeing Juliet across the room is that she is like a “rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.”

“That line has not been much noted in commentary on the play, but it shows the intersection of economic development (Italy having a significant colonizing interest in Ethiopia) and ways of conceiving of the ideal lover, the most desirable person paralleling the most desirable substance for gaining wealth,” said Michael Tratner, author of the recently published Love and Money: A Literary History of Desires.

In the book, Tratner, a Bryn Mawr English professor, looks at the parallel shifts that occur in economics and writing about love and desire during the 400 years from the Early Modern to Postmodern periods to show that love and money are not opposed desires but, in fact, congruent ones.

“In the example from Romeo and Juliet, the newly emerging source of value was mercantilism, gathering treasure from colonized realms of the New World,” Tratner said. “By the time we reach the present, and as we look to the future, online information and the virtual are the key world economic drivers.”

Works highlighted in the book’s second section include Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, written during the rise of industry when hidden, internal potential became more valued and deemed more attractive.

The next era examined in the book begins at the end of the 19th century and focuses on literature written during the Keynesian era of economics, including William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Louis Zukofsky, when the idea that government can stimulate demand by increasing government spending came to the fore.

“There’s now this belief that external forces, like the government, can create desires inside people,” Tratner explained. “And it’s not one person meeting one person and falling in love. It’s a gigantic social order that’s pushing people to pursue their desires.”

In the book’s final section, Tratner traces what he describes as a “half-step into the world of information” in novels including Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. The section concludes with a look at several films and works of fantasy, including James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar.

“The love story at the center of the movie breaks with a crucial feature of just about every previous love story,” Tratner said. “This is a love that has no relation to one’s own human body, a love based entirely on what is in one’s mind.”