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The Birth of the New Bourgeois: Finance and Morality in Dreiser’s The Financier

The Financier interweaves scandals and deviancies in Frank Cowperwood’s financial career and private life. This paper claims that moral transgression in the private realm is informed and enabled by the increasing abstraction of finance away from tangled social life. Moral integrity in corporate enterprises was increasingly irrelevant in the late nineteenth century. Some trace such moral bankruptcy to social Darwinism as well as robber barons. But The Financier tells the story of finance, which grows abstract, arcane, and self-enclosed. Cutting its subservient tie to corporate management, finance begins to decontextualize. In financial money-making, social relations and networks, which were once pivotal in old commercial practices, are displaced by highly sophisticated tricks and schemes that often confound and deceive the uninitiated. Cowperwood’s affairs with Eileen approximate the disembedding of financial economy from the social. Sexual desire turns unmoored and free-floating, just as finance becomes disembedded and abstract. Sexual desire and finance carve out autonomous realm of freedom on the ruins of social relations.