ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that inheritance as a political and economic discourse informs the novel’s thematics, its representation of emotions, and its uses of sentimentality. It also argues that the passage of money and objects between characters and across generations and the transfers of affect between characters and the novel’s readers reveal a complex interweaving of the political and economic with the affective and the sentimental. The chapter considers how the visible dimension of the political economic problematic may operate in a literary text as an articulation of the counted and the felt. It explores how quantity and quality may operate upon one another, and how the passage of objects and of intensities functions across different levels of being, modes of experience, and discourses of knowledge-making. Anxiety seems omnipresent in this text, and yet, as phrases like “care and anxiety” and “anxious and uneasy” indicate, it is an emotion that seems to lack its own textures.
