Beastly Journeys - Travel and Transformation at the fin de siècle

Front matter

LIVERPOOL ENGLISH TEXTS AND STUDIES 63

BEASTLY JOURNEYS Travel and Transformation at the fin de siècle

TIM YOUNGS

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Unchaining of the Beast

I

Conclusion

140 165 197 211

Acknowledgements

This book has had a long gestation. Early stages of it were supported through research leave funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board and through my own university departments sabbatical programme. I am grateful to both bodies. The following people have also helped through, variously, their provision of ideas, information, encouragement, and the hosting of lectures, seminars, and conferences at which early drafts of some material were tried out: Chris Barker, Dinah Birch, Joseph Bristow, Antoinette Burton, Viv Chadder, Stephen Donovan, Justin D. Edwards, R. J. (Dick) Ellis, Charles Forsdick, Shirley Foster, Christopher Gair, Indira Ghose, Mike Green, Lynne Hapgood, Tracey Hill, Peter Hulme, Philip Leonard, John Lucas, Roger Luckhurst, Gesa Mackenthun, Richard Pearson, Lyssa Randolph, Ray Russell, Wim Tigges, Richard White, Martin Willis, and David Woods. My thanks go also to the inter-library loans team at Nottingham Trent University. I am especially grateful to Anthony Cond for encouraging submission of the book to Liverpool University Press and for his patience and good humour in seeing it through to publication. Any weaknesses, oddities, and errors are my own.

Portions of Chapter One and Chapter Three have their origins in three earlier essays, whose ideas they develop: “Stevenson’s Monkey-Business: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, in Peter Liebregts and Wim Tigges, eds, Beauty and the Beast: Christina Rossetti, Walter Pater, R. L. Stevenson and their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), pp-157-170; ‘“Wells’s Fifth Dimension: The Time Machine at the Fin de Siècle’, in Tracey Hill and Alan Marshall, eds, Decadence and Danger: Writing, History and the Fin de Siècle (Bath: Sulis Press, 1997), pp.64—74; and “The Plasticity of Living Forms: Beasts and Narrative in The Octopus and The Island of Doctor Moreau’, Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 1, 1 (April 1997), 86-103. I am grateful to Rodopi, Tracey Hill, and Christopher Gair respectively for allowing me to draw x BEASTLY JOURNEYS on this nascent material. For permission to quote from H. G. Wells’s works I am grateful to A. P. Watt.

As ever, the greater and lasting acknowledgement is to Gurminder and Natty for being who they are.

Introduction

The Unchaining of the Beast

Vile bestiality

In 1936, Georg Lukács wrote of the ‘degradation and crippling under capitalism [that] is far more tragic, its bestiality viler, more ferocious and terrible than that pictured even in the best of these novels’. He was referring to modern realism, which, in his view, had ‘lost its capacity to depict the dynamics of life, and thus its representation of capitalist reality is inadequate, diluted and constrained’.! The present study grapples with this vile bestiality, but examines its earlier manifestation in British texts between 1885 and 1900 — the period that saw the development of realism and its sister movement, naturalism, and which is most commonly described in literary and cultural studies as an ‘age of transition’ During these years, ‘[t]he Late Victorians themselves were intensely conscious of their transitory state’? The literary historian Peter Keating outlines, for example, the transformation of education into a system of social mobility; cultural transformation; the transformation, ‘even perhaps the death’, of the Victorian family; and a ‘revolutionary transformation in every aspect of communications’. To these, we might add urbanisation, whose ‘whetted fangs of change/Daily devour the old demesne’. John Davidson’s lines growl with the sense of class menace. The changes that many experienced in late nineteenth-century Britain are symbolised by the obsessive display of figures of indeterminate or altered shape: beasts with human characteristics; humans who are, or who become, beastly; creatures of dubious or shifting classification. Some of these have been the subject of considerable critical attention, but rather than timeless mythical or psychological examples of metamorphosis — for which they are often taken — these physical alterations might be viewed more productively as reflections of changes to the social body.

In ‘one of the most important documents of the fin de siècle’, Max Nordau considers the notion behind the latter term:

It means a practical emancipation from traditional discipline, which theoretically is still in force. To the voluptuary this means unbridled lewdness, the unchaining of the beast in man; to the withered heart of the egoist, disdain of all consideration for his fellow-men, the trampling under foot of all barriers which enclose brutal greed of lucre and lust of pleasure ... And to all, it means the end of an established order, which for thousands of years has satisfied logic, fettered depravity, and in every art matured something of beauty.”

Nordau’s condemnation of the fin de siécle connects avarice, animality, and disorder — a linkage that the present study explores.

If the following pages risk assuming the character of a safari, the metaphors of animality and movement that they track provide an important vantage point from which to survey the literary and social terrain of the 1880s and 1890s. When, for instance, a modern editor of Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) summarises that novel as one ‘about transformation: crossings of class boundaries, metamorphoses of estate’,® she is describing a situation that also applies to its context. Besant himself turns to animal imagery to make his point, writing:

There is one consolation always open, thank Heaven, for the meanest among us poor worms of earth. We are gifted with imaginations; we can make the impossible an actual fact, and can with the eye of the mind make the unreal stand before us in the flesh. Therefore when we are down-trodden, we may proceed ... to take revenge upon our enemy in imagination.?

The immediate referent here is the vengeance pictured by the grasping, cheating Mr Bunker upon the heiress, Angela Messenger, who, in visiting her property and its East End environs incognito as Miss Kennedy, has humiliated him. In a broader sense, however, the passage glances at something else that is happening: Besant uses his imagination to bust Bunker. The author’s remarks quoted above suggest the transformative power of imaginative literature, with both negative and positive effects. While revenge is not always a motive, the metaphors employed by writers of the late nineteenth century attempt to give shape to a society in which so much had become uncertain. The threats to social definition result not only in imaginative projections of beastly confusion, but are reflected, too, in narratives of mixed generic identity.

Surprising transformations

‘Many Victorians were fascinated by transformation and the limits of metamorphosis’, Gillian Beer observes.'° The late Victorians’ fascination with this process and its boundaries was distinctive: it followed a long tradition of interest and curiosity, but was of its own order, driven by circumstances unique to the last fifteen years or so of the nineteenth century. Each age and culture has its own monsters and transformations, often modifying those of its ancestors or neighbours. The Renaissance’s rediscovery of the classics, and their prominence in nineteenth-century élite education, tied modern European culture to the times of Ovid, who proclaimed at the beginning of his Metamorphoses: “My intention is to tell of bodies changed/To different forms.’!! In a study of shape-shifting, Marina Warner recognises both the continuities and changes between the centuries. She detects in Ovid the fact that ‘metamorphosis often breaks out in moments of crisis’; that, more generally, tales of metamorphosis often occur ‘in spaces (temporal, geographical, and mental) that [are] crossroads, cross-cultural zones, points of interchange on the intricate connective tissue of communications between cultures’ and that “it is characteristic of metamorphic writing to appear in transitional places and at the confluences of traditions and civilizations’.'*

It is at such a moment of ‘clash and conflict between one intellectual hegemony and another’ that the texts of the 1880s and 1890s examined here are situated. Wim Neetens has described how, in the 1880s, ‘an already precarious and internally eroded ideological dominant found itself faced with the social unrest in which the working class and a number of progressive, middle-class intellectuals began to produce their own, decentralising and potentially counter-hegemonic discourses’. Through its increased literary and scientific interest in the working class, the British bourgeoisie attempted to reassert its dominance and hegemony. “Under these ideological and cultural pressures, naturalism was foregrounded in English literature as the artistic practice which carried the literature of working-class life to an extreme of colonial self-confidence.'? One might also refer to the significance of ‘racial’ encounter at this time of increased immigration into London and of heightened anxiety towards the figure of the ‘mulatto’. Metamorphoses may be connected across the centuries, but the nature of the crises and contacts differs from case to case and from place to place.'* In Warner’s words, ‘context changes meanings’.'°

Warner extends the idea of metamorphosis by claiming that through its communication of ‘principles and ideas’, it ‘transformed their receivers and readers’!® It does this partly because

[transformations bring about a surprise ... The breaking of rules of natural law and verisimilitude creates the fictional world with its own laws ... Moreover, some kinds of metamorphosis play a crucial part in anagnorisis, or recognition, the reversal fundamental to narrative form, and so govern narrative satisfaction.!”

Such a process can be seen to operate in the texts that form the subject of Beastly Journeys. Since the social and cultural changes that were happening at the time are reflected symbolically in the alteration of shape that humans and (other) animals undergo, the shock of physical disruption may, if we pursue Warner’s argument, be said to force recognition of the new social juxtapositions. In fact, while this might have been the case for some contemporary readers, who cannot fail to have seen the economic basis of the literary transformations, the recognition that Warner describes seems largely to have been overlooked or misapprehended by subsequent readers. The further changes that these late nineteenth-century tales of transformation have undergone in film, stage, and prose adaptations have diluted their radical force. The social and economic anxieties of the original texts have generally vanished. Dracula, Mr Hyde, Dorian Gray, the Martians and the Morlocks are not what they once were. Beastly Journeys is, in part, a journey backwards to (re)discover their former identities and situations.

The last couple of decades of the nineteenth century seem to have housed an especially remarkable menagerie. Apes (white, as well as black),'* wolves, bats, beetles, hyenas, alien beings, and countless others swing, prowl, fly, creep, crawl, and slither along. Many are still gawped at uneasily. These are the years of the Beast-People, the Ripper, the ‘Elephant Man’, and others. There were overtly political beasts, too: ‘Some of the political implications of Nietzsche’s views were taken up by Shaw and Wells; references to the Ubermensch, “Superman”, or “blond beast” occur with some frequency from the mid-1890s; and there were real enthusiasts, like John Davidson. !?

‘They are remarkable both in their number and in their transmutation from or into other forms. One can say of them, as one critic has of metamorphosis generally and its literary representations in particular, that ‘it is obvious ... metamorphosis has something to do with the search for identity, or in some cases its antithesis, the refusal to develop’*° The condition of the creatures rounded up in this book is symptomatic of the society that has spawned them. For an understanding of them, we must add to the six broad headings of metamorphosis that Irving Massey proposes — scientific, philosophical, anthropological (including lycanthropy and vampirism), religious, psychological, and aesthetic?! — a seventh: economic. It is the economic and social changes of the late nineteenth century that drive the shape-shifting of these years and the science of Darwinism that frames it.

Three aspects to these beasts underlie the present study. First, many of these creatures are avatars of humans, their transformation from their original condition due to the deforming effects of capital. And yet, second, the socio-economic environment that has so shaped these ghastly apparitions has disappeared from most retellings and readings of the original narratives. Third, the motif of travel forms an important part of the texts, effecting the alteration itself or leading to the discovery of that transformation. Both the mode of travel and the discoveries that are made throw light on the preoccupations of the period.

Framing the changes: beastly journeys

This will be a book about the fin de siécle, but I shall try to resist easy generalisations about the character of those years. Max Nordau objected to the idea of classifying parts of a century as though it were a ‘kind of living being, born like a beast or a man, passing through all the stages of existence ... to die with the expiration of the hundredth year, after being afflicted in its last decade with all the infirmities of mournful senility’.*? One can make a case for any period being a ‘time of’ something to someone. In doing so, one will dangerously overlook the counter-examples and anomalies that do not fit the general pattern. As Simon Dentith, denying the possibility of speaking of ‘a Zeitgeist for the nineteenth century, or any portion of it, such as the “Victorian Age”, states: “every period of history is characterised by multiple and contradictory ways of thinking, seeing and feeling’? And as a critic of 1890s decadence has pointed out, plenty of people lived through the decade untouched by the reference point we give it. On the other hand, as the same critic has remarked, ‘[t]he origins of the nineties myth lie within the period itself.?4 Generalisations are finally inescapable, and perhaps all that one can do is to treat them with caution. To claim that the end of the century was a time of nervous introspection, marked by anxiety about the social changes associated with shifts in power and class relations, about gender tensions and international relations, and precipitated by the feeling that the end of a long era was approaching, is no doubt true, even if it tends rather too neatly to remove similar fears from other decades and there were some in society who felt no such insecurity. Sturgis may be right to claim that

[pleople in the nineties were very aware of the distinctness and significance of the decade: it marked the end of the century. Side by side with the enthusiasm for the ‘new’ was a consciousness of the ‘end’.?°

But that is not to say that anxieties about change did not exist at other times. Nevertheless, the worries at the end of the nineteenth century have to do with uncertainties about identity. They are generated by many factors, including class mobility and conflict, sexual confusion, international competition and threats, loss of confidence in the ability to control one’s environment, and a fear of being overtaken by latent urges. All of these owe their force and character to the social and intellectual contexts in which they occur. In particular, much of the imagery and the impetus for its expression are provided by Darwinian and psychoanalytic metaphors, and this imagery, too, must be historicised. Of course, Darwin’s ‘daring and momentous conviction that species were mutable’ supplied both reason and image for much of this concern, *° as we shall see below, but — as with Freud’s ideas later — it is doubtful that the impact of Darwin’s writings would have been so great had they not spoken to other contemporary fears. In Adam Phillips’s words:

The new Darwinian or Freudian person — born and growing up in the newfound flourish and terror of a mercilessly expansive capitalism — had to be committed to instability. It was, unsurprisingly, economies of loss, in their secular versions, that preoccupied Darwin and Freud.?”

Both Darwinism and psychoanalysis depend also on ideas and metaphors of travel (evolution, reversion, and interior). The language in which these are communicated reflects the intellectual and social structures — and subsequent responses to them — that characterise the age. Outward and inward change preoccupies Darwin, Freud, and their contemporaries. Motifs of travel and animality predominate. Focusing on the presence of these in popular texts of the late nineteenth century allows us to recover the context and force of elements whose significance has often been underplayed in readings that concentrate on their generic qualities (science fiction, gothic, horror, and so on). The shape-shifting that is discussed in this study invariably happens within, or itself constitutes, some kind of journey. Travel functions as a structural metaphor within the literature: for example, the time travel of H. G.

Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), the space travel that brings the Martians to London in the same author’s The War of the Worlds (1898), the journey to the island on which are practised the ghastly experiments in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), again by Wells, and the journeys that precipitate the ‘reverse colonization’ of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897).°8 More obliquely, perhaps, Jekyll’s experiments in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1888) can be interpreted as a psychological voyage into his unconscious (a not uncommon reading) or a social exploration of class differences in which the most frightening aspect is not Jekyll’s turning into Hyde, but rather the latter’s standing to inherit Jekyll’s fortune of a quarter of a million pounds;”? while the urban exploration of General Booth’s In Darkest England (1890) consciously reverses the journey undertaken by Stanley in his In Darkest Africa (1890),°° though its author seems unaware that Stanley himself, when writing about Africa, was reflecting on Britain. In all of these texts and many more, bestiality is present as a signifier of travel, as subsequent chapters will show.

Travel is especially important as a motif in the mid- to late nineteenth century, in view of what Raymond Williams has called the ‘crisis of the knowable community’! which occurred with the transition from a predominantly rural to a mainly urban society and led authors to explore the new conditions and relationships of existence through a development of the novel form. Williams praises Dickens for the skill and curiosity with which he charts relationships, frequently between people who seem at first to have no connection to one another.*? This concern provided the impetus for many of the ‘condition of England’ novels from the mid-century onward. One thinks, for instance, of Elizabeth Gaskell’s description of the Davenports’ cellar contrasted with the opulence of the factory owner Carson’s home in Mary Barton (1848). For the later novelists this preoccupation continues, but it is often presented as a need to establish links between the surface and subterranean, preserving in its verticality the idea of a hierarchy, even as the security of those on top was threatened by the return of the socially and psychologically repressed. But at the close of the century, when Darwinism had taken root (The Origin of Species first appeared in 1859) and psychoanalysis was in its infancy, the poles of civilisation and savagery acquired a personal, psychological basis in addition to the familiar aspect of social investigation. The theme of duality, which had been used forcefully to convey the sense of a divided society, became more self-centred as evolutionary and degeneration theories combined with growing attention paid to the unconscious with the result that the emphasis fell on a split personal subject.

Travel offers a means of discovering, exploring, and connecting such divides. Wells’s The Time Machine, which readily lends itself to social and psychoanalytic criticism, uses time travel as a device through which the relationship of the underground dwellers to those above ground can be examined, with the Time Traveller continually modifying his understanding of what he sees. In its very title, George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889) symbolises the image of the socially subterranean (as, of course, does the label: the ‘underclass’). Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) — not a focus of this volume, but worth noting here — charts the tragic journey of one of many hidden from view. In the chapters that follow, we shall encounter social exploration, time travel, space travel, interior voyages, sexual adventures, journeys to and from colonies, subterranean burrowing, and forays into fairyland.

The line between fictional and non-fictional treatments of social journeys is not always easy to find. In his introduction to an anthology of some of the important works of social exploration from the second half of the nineteenth century, Peter Keating argues that they are ‘more a frame of mind than a literary form’, and that the role of social explorer is assumed by novelists and characters as much as by figures like Mayhew.°? There does seem to be a shared use of metaphor, structure, and rhetoric, but these need to be examined in their own particular contexts, otherwise this gives the false impression that these all originate in social exploration and spread beyond it. Rather, the language and typologies of social exploration are influenced by expressions and developments in other arenas. Indeed, without elaborating on it, Keating himself points to one of these: external travel, especially in the imperial sphere. In the literature of social exploration, Keating notes the ‘constant references to “wandering tribes”, “pygmies”, and “rain forests”, but he comments simply that these descriptions are used to make the social explorer sound as adventurous and hardy as his counterpart overseas.>4 There is much more to it than this. The terminology applied to non-white ‘races’ and to the working- or under-classes is often interchangeable, as several commentators have noticed.*° So it is at once true and yet not enough to write, as Keating does, that

[tlhe upsurge of interest in the East End of London during the 1880s and 1890s had at hand a ready-made contrast between East and West which could be used to refer simultaneously to both London and the Empire, and this became so popular that it led to what can almost be considered a sub-genre of exploration literature.>°

This makes the process sound too automatic. Further, while Keating rightly claims that the imagery of exploration was ‘clearly as important to the romance as to the realistic novel and social documentary’ and operated on a metaphorical and literal level, I think he is wrong to assert that its emphasis is ‘totally different’. According to Keating, the ‘realist, the journalist and the sociologist ... draw the reader’s attention to neglected areas of contemporary life’, but the writer of romance ‘employed the same imagery in order to escape from the present, or, if he had a point to make of direct contemporary relevance, to set up a process of extrapolation that the reader was expected to follow through’%’” In fact, as I hope my discussion of Wells, Wilde, and MacDonald will make clear, the writers of romance and other forms of fiction were concerned just as directly with those present conditions. They were not escaping, but offering vantage points from which those neglected areas could be seen more clearly, from a different perspective.

Elaine Showalter has observed that: “Ihe ends of centuries seem not only to suggest but to intensify crises. Given this fact and the perception of critical states it is not surprising that the fin de siécle should be so rich in the types and number of textual travels: characters must journey between conditions if crisis is to be registered, let alone resolved.*? Showalter goes on to comment that: ‘In periods of cultural insecurity, when there are fears of regression and degeneration, the longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender, as well as race, class, and nationality, becomes especially intense.4° The conservative longing for inviolable demarcation zones is only one side of the story, for it depends upon the desire to transgress, and this desire may exist overtly in others or latently in oneself. Whichever applies, the metaphor of travel provides a way through, be it by passport or illegal entry. Like metamorphosis, ‘itself a process of exchange in which “body” connects the two forms’,*! travel also affords the perfect opportunity to consider two or more states at once, even if this is not the acknowledged aim. Beastly travels permit the metaphoric contemplation of migration, naturalisation, and transformation.

IO BEASTLY JOURNEYS

Metaphors, money, and Marx

Since I wish to view these processes not as unchanging psychic tendencies, but as historically inflected, an outline of some of the events from 1885 to 1900, suggesting their significance for fictional travels, should now be provided, together with statements on the role of money in effecting change.

‘Until the 1870s’, writes David Cannadine, ‘there was an exceptionally high correlation between wealth, status, and power, for the simple reason that they were all territorially determined and defined.’4? In the literature that I shall be examining, the collapse of this correlation and the loss of this definition are expressed by gaps between appearance and meaning and by a confusion of shapes and places. It is especially apt, then, that Cannadine should describe his historical survey of the aristocracy’s decline as ‘this monstrous and overbearing enterprise’? for the social and political changes that he records are very often reflected in representations of monstrosity. This process is not, of course, unique to the period. But the details of what it reflects are. Tracing the etymology of the word ‘monster’, Marina Warner writes that it ‘resonates with the word for “to show” monstrare, influenced by monere “to warn”, thus implying a portent, a warning “4 What it is that is shown and warned about will vary from one time to another.

Observing that ‘[a]s the last quarter of the nineteenth century opened, the traditional, titled, landowners were still the richest, the most powerful and the most well-born people in the country’,4? Cannadine calculates that in 1880 more than 6o per cent of the land of the British Isles was owned by fewer than 11,000 people who held estates of over a thousand acres. From 1875 and over the next seventy years, British landowners suffered a loss of economic and political control. The new fortunes that were made during the rapid rise of the international plutocracy, notably in the United States, were, for example, in business and industry, not from agricultural land; they were, in other words, ‘in more liquid form’4” — a term that suitably conveys the fluidity of the social order.

Karl Marx wrote of ‘the change in form or the metamorphosis of commodities through which the social metabolism is mediated’4* He used this image to describe the process by which labour transforms itself into a product, which then becomes a commodity when it is exchanged for money. At this stage, the opposite forms of the commodity as use-value and exchange-value confront each other. “These antagonistic forms of the commodities’, stated Marx, ‘are the real forms of motion of

INTRODUCTION II the process of exchange’ (p.229). A further transformation occurs when the money that is handed over for a commodity is itself exchanged for a commodity. This transaction also results in a change of role for the original seller of the commodity, who now becomes a buyer. Indeed, as Marx pointed out, ‘[b]eing a seller and being a buyer are therefore not fixed roles, but constantly attach themselves to different persons in the course of the circulation of commodities’ (p.206). Additionally, Marx wrote of the ‘personification of things and the reification of persons’ in modern society (p.1054).4?

Whether Marx’s account simply employs a metaphor or whether capitalism has, in fact, naturalised the processes he describes to such an extent that we have lost sight of transformations that actually underpin the economy may be debatable. What seems surer is that metamorphosis helps us to understand what is involved in the ownership and transfer of property. According to Marx, if exchange is to occur at all, then ‘a change of form [in the commodity] must always occur. Change is inherent in the process: ‘the conversion of a commodity into money is the conversion of money into a commodity’ (p.203). These dynamics of exchange ensure that transaction always involves transformation. They also involve motion. If this is the normal way of things in capitalist societies, then it is easy to see how moments of economic and social crisis will generate intense and worried attention to both the metamorphosis and the movement. A particular focus is likely to be money and the relationship of people to it; not just because money may be lost or gained at such times, but because so much is invested in it. It is ‘all other commodities divested of their shape, the product of their universal alienation’. It is ‘the absolutely alienable commodity’ (p.205). Neither the commodity nor the role of its producer or seller is fixed. Indeed, Marx assumes that the ‘complete metamorphosis of a commodity, in its simplest form, implies four dénouements and three dramatis personae’ (p.206). Transformation thus seems intrinsic to a description of the economy, whether that term is meant metaphorically or literally.

Marx’s views have, of course, been widely criticised. Yet, in an essay that outlines the opposing ideas of Marx and Adam Smith and that notes the ‘very large number of intermediate positions’ held by those such as Georg Simmel, two of Marx’s latter-day critics, Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, write that: ‘what all these different strands in our cultural tradition appear to agree about is that — whether for good or ill — money acts as an incredibly powerful agent of profound social and cultural transformations’.*° Parry and Bloch argue that the role of money as an

I2 BEASTLY JOURNEYS agent has been exaggerated. They doubt that it has the intrinsic power often ascribed to it. There is not, they claim, such a gulf between the significance of money in capitalist and pre-capitalist societies or between monetary and non-monetary economies as is usually assumed. Marx’s writings, they imply, are marred by a mistaken assumption of universal rules and features. Instead ‘[n]ot only does money mean different things in different cultures, but ... it may mean different things within the same culture’ (p.22). Whether or not one accepts Parry and Bloch’s thesis, their proposition is testament to the power and pervasiveness of the idea they are countering: money as a force for transformations. Even they see money not as having any ‘fixed and immutable meaning’ (p.22), but as having its meaning ‘situationally defined’ and ‘constantly re-negotiated’ (p.23).