The Nature of Trauma in American Novels by Michelle Balaev (review)
pursued, and where "Rhys shows melancholia to be economic, not simply personal" by exposing the "tension between a newly prevalent culture of cheap shopping and its fantasies of plentitude, on the one hand, and capitalism's imbalances of exchange and distribution, on the other" (182). Rhys's economic melancholia is convincingly demonstrated in readings that implicate her heroine's emotional and social dispossession with her attempts to fill such losses through ever-deeper investments in the very consumer culture by which she is alienated. Ultimately, Mickalites positions Rhys's novel as a late modernist rejection of experimental attempts to change or manipulate market fantasy (194). As such, Rhys makes a fitting conclusion to this study, which treats a range of responses to a number of capital's institutional and formal manifestations in a way that recognizes their collective prevalence without specifically differentiating between their histories and effects. Mickalites's contribution consists not only in his many sharp and detailed readings but also his conveyance of the aforementioned cumulative effect of market saturation. In many ways, then, Modernism and Market Fantasy evidences one of the primary challenges of executing economically oriented criticism, which is the difficulty of unraveling capitalism's mutually supporting "fantasies" in the first place.