Finance, Sexual Desire, and Modernity in Dreiser’s The Titan
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Complaining that sex and finance are two seemingly incongruous threads that generate the narrative fabric of Dreiser’s The Titan, critics have drawn a disproportionate amount of attention to Frank Cowperwood’s public feats, relegating the sex plot to an irrelevant distraction. Reading how sexual desire emulates the dynamics of finance capital in The Titan, this essay claims that financialization is at the core of Cowperwood’s promiscuous sex life. In the first section, I argue that finance seeks to disengage from the production of material goods by drawing from what is now called critical finance studies. Refusing to be anchored in any one particular corporate entity, finance prowls and extracts profits through ghostlike predation. In the second section, I contend that Cowperwood’s sexual desire approximates such deterritorializing movement of finance capital. I examine the ways in which Cowperwood refuses to bind himself to monogamy and any one individual female subject. Cowperwood roams and derives pleasure from as many affairs and flirtations as he can manage. In this financialized economy of sexual desire, female subjects transmute into mere effects of fluid sexual desire, just as things become the hollow shells that circulating finance leaves behind.
Abstract
Complaining that sex and finance are two seemingly incongruous threads that generate the narrative fabric of Dreiser’s The Titan, critics have drawn a disproportionate amount of attention to Frank Cowperwood’s public feats, relegating the sex plot to an irrelevant distraction. Reading how sexual desire emulates the dynamics of finance capital in The Titan, this essay claims that financialization is at the core of Cowperwood’s promiscuous sex life. In the first section, I argue that finance seeks to disengage from the production of material goods by drawing from what is now called critical finance studies. Refusing to be anchored in any one particular corporate entity, finance prowls and extracts profits through ghostlike predation. In the second section, I contend that Cowperwood’s sexual desire approximates such deterritorializing movement of finance capital. I examine the ways in which Cowperwood refuses to bind himself to monogamy and any one individual female subject. Cowperwood roams and derives pleasure from as many affairs and flirtations as he can manage. In this financialized economy of sexual desire, female subjects transmute into mere effects of fluid sexual desire, just as things become the hollow shells that circulating finance leaves behind.
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