Andrea Henderson. Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Hardback: ISBN-13: 9780521884020. Price: $93.00; Paperback: ISBN-13: 9780521175449. Price: $39.99

“The desires of […] heroes and heroines of Romantic literature,” writes Andrea Henderson, “would seem to be precisely for the painful nonsatisfaction of desire: they are attracted most to those people who keep them in suspense, dominate them, and even humiliate them. Their lovers are belle dames sans merci and ‘Barbarous, unfeeling, unpitying’ men whom they nevertheless not only find irresistible but actively idealize” (1-2). From this premise, Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life argues that “Desire as we now understand it, as a thing in itself, a mark of healthy subjectivity, and an illimitable fund of energy, is an historical artifact, as is our expectation that desire will always outstrip satisfaction” (17). Deploying cultural materialism to tease out her claim, Henderson acutely and authoritatively situates the shifting definitions of desire within the rise of eighteenth-century commodity capitalism. In a world where everything was being made available for perusal and purchase, a world in which the very excess of accumulable things indicated the degree to which no human being could possibly possess them all, the individual had to learn “how not to have all that advertisers, merchants, and trendsetters proclaimed was essential for happiness” (3). Excess meant negotiating a new relationship to lack, one that, Henderson contends, is being worked out across the field of Romanticism’s representations of erotic, gendered desire. Giving a specifically material and political twist to Mario Praz’s assertion of Romanticism’s “’mysterious bond between pleasure and suffering’” (1), Henderson argues that “‘Romanticism’ is precisely a technique for making self-sacrifice feel like self-indulgence” (5) and powerlessness “a thing of beauty” (38). This eminently readable and thoroughly researched book covers an impressive range of texts—fictional, political, biographical, philosophical—in its consideration of desire’s exquisite tyrannies. Henderson begins with a chapter, teasingly entitled “Finance and Flagellation,” on the work of Hogarth, Addison, and Defoe, to establish the links between “speculation” in its double sense of economic futurism and the determinations of another’s erotic desires. Closely reading a number of Hogarth images (which unfortunately Cambridge UP has reproduced far too small to be legible), Henderson argues the gendered implications of finance capitalism and its relation to the powers of affect: “finance capitalism,” she writes, “taught men to revel in suspense and emotional extremes, and to take new pleasure in a powerful and independent female sexuality. Thus did the gendered metaphors of political rhetoric [particularly of the South Sea bubble] become a potent means for understanding modern sexuality” (46). These gendered metaphors, both masculine and feminine, and the ways in which they subtend the paradox of wanting (not) to have, are the focus for the remainder of the book. Chapter Two examines the novels of Frances Burney over the course of her career, as she links desire to a relatively unproblematic idea of want in the early Evelina to the learning to control desire and its satisfactions in Cecilia, through Camilla’s complex negotiation of desire with its aristocratic associations now being subject to democratic impulses, and finally to The Wanderer, which “defines and celebrates a specifically Romantic-era form of commodity fetishism” that “salvages speculation and the painful pleasures that accompany it by distinguishing political and economic speculation and then roundly denouncing political speculation [eg. the optimism of the French Revolution, now some twenty-five years old] while looking to economic speculation for the equalizing [Burney] seeks” (102). This oscillation between the political and the economic, and between the economic and the gendered, is repeated in Chapter Three on Joanna Baillie who, Henderson argues, invokes a desiring consumerist voyeurism to democratize the passions while inculcating a means to control those …