'The Perfect Hostess': Mrs. Dalloway, Gift Exchange, and the End of Laissez-Faire. Issue 2 (October 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Colesworthy, Rebecca
• Is Part Of: Modernist cultures. Volume 9:Issue 2(2014)
• Page Start: 158
• Page End: 185
• Publication Date: 2014-10
• Subjects: Arts, Modern -- Periodicals; Civilization, Modern -- Periodicals; Modernism (Aesthetics) -- Periodicals; 700.904
• DOI: 10.3366/mod.2014.0082
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2041-1022

Abstract

<abstract xml:lang="en"> <title> <x xml:space="preserve">Abstract</x> </title> <p>This paper intervenes in the longstanding debate over modernism's relationship to the market by taking the publication of Woolf's <italic>Mrs. Dalloway</italic> and Marcel Mauss's landmark essay, <italic>The Gift</italic>, in 1925 as a prompt to remap the historical and conceptual intersections between Anglo-American modernist literature, economic discourse, and twentieth-century theories of gift exchange. Drawing a crucial distinction between a modernist fascination with the gift and a modernist fascination with the primitive, I argue that Mauss uniquely conceived what John Maynard Keynes called the "end of laissez-faire" in terms of a shift in our collective thinking about gifts and exchanges. Via her sympathetic and critical characterization of Clarissa Dalloway, Woolf then figures this shift in terms of the emergence of a feminine ethos of hospitality. In furthermore establishing literature's centrality to fostering this ethos, she also anticipates, while historicizing and gendering, the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, one of Mauss's primary heirs.</p> </abstract>