Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver (2018).
Many of the entries in this database have a few passages with economic themes, or some interesting worldbuilding with intriguing economic implications. Novik's Spinning Silver is different. The entire novel is a sustained meditation on value, debt, and exchange, also touching on themes of debt peonage, honour and gift-giving, justice and mercy, economic antisemitism and pogroms, sexual division of labour, bridewealth and dowry, affective labour, the objectification and commodification of women and girls, domestic violence, and sisterhood and solidarity.
The book is filled with instances of expansive and transformative magic, from the everyday metamorphoses of the market, to gowns that are made more splendid by dearly-bought sorcery: all these moments speak of Novik's method of spinning this rich adventure from her slight source material, the story of Rumpelstiltskin. Or perhaps more accurately, from the cluster of Rumpelstiltskinesque fairytales called 'Name of the Helper' stories. Here is one, for instance, that features an elf kingdom:
One time a beautiful peasant girl was gored by a steer. She screamed aloud and called for help. The friendly elf came immediately, comforted her, and promised to help and rescue her, if she would marry him and go with him to the elf kingdom. She had no choice but to say yes, and upon her agreement the elf rescued her.
The episodes in the cottage at the edge of the Staryk kingdom, with its glitching domestic space and invisibilised labour, offers another subtle link: a rumpelstilt is a sort of poltergeist or goblin. These episodes might equally suggest 'The Elves and the Shoemaker', just as the magic mirror and abduction to a wintry kingdom might suggest 'The Snow Queen.'
So what is the deal with Staryk society? It has strong elements of a heroic, honour-based society, except that these elves also seem ... kind of libertarian? Any gift obliges you to the giver in complex ways (cf. Mauss, Levi-Strauss, Strathern, etc.), but for the Staryk these obligations have a magical, binding quality. They therefore shun gifts (even in the sense of simple instinctive acts of kindness and care) and try to turn everything into explicit exchange.
The story opens with young Miryem, uninvited, taking over her soft-hearted moneylender father's business. As I interpret the story, it is partly about Miryem encountering, in the Staryk, the preposterousness of her own chilly and indignant ideas of fair dealing, writ large. Debts, whether formal or informal, are not necessarily bad, exactly, but ... the equal moral worth of contracting parties should never be confused for equal power or freedom. What actions count as gifts, which obligations need to be repaid, what should count as repaying them? The answers are always matters of power, circumstances, feelings, perceptions, and imagination, much more than they are the kind of thing that can be carefully written down in a ledger.
But does Miryem actually ever learn this, or anything like it? Miryem has a kind of fairytale comeuppance, and she does grow and change in various ways (making a boast and stepping into the shape she has made), but in all the excitement I'm not sure she ever really does revisit her early mercilessness. Perhaps it is the limitations of a critique of commercial society (nascent capitalism) that is rooted in feudal ideals (hospitality, the abundant table, the honourable household where hard work and loyalty are rewarded). I'm not completely sure, but I think that -- although I kind of love this book -- its politics are pretty abhorrent to me.
Further reading:
- Carol Jones, Women's Worth: A Western Misconception
- David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
- Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews
- Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract
- Amanda Mandzik, Once Upon an Economics Course: Using Fairy Tales to Teach Economics
- Workers' Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables and Allegories from Great Britain
- Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
