CENTURY LITERATURE A Dissertation by JUNG SUN ... - Repository

and sex, in constructing normative human relations, these domains accompany each
other in the interplay for the political benefits of the dominant groups. In other words,
money can be more than an exchange means; it is rather a sign of power or domination
for the middle class to exercise normative moral rules upon the Other classified as
working-class people.
The Figure of the Counterfeit
As many money scholars point out in their analysis of cultural meaning of money
in relation to language, the nineteenth-century cultural concern with money is
preoccupied with a set of problems organized around the ideas of truth, authenticity, and
sincerity in contrast to those of artificiality and theatricality. The nineteenth-century
admiration of or obsession with the truth suggests its antipathy to artificiality and
theatricality as a copy of the real. Conyers and Hargraves play villain roles based on
their association with counterfeit and base coins respectively. While Conyers, whose
beautiful face is perfect and his agreeable manners apparently flawless, is a figure of the
counterfeit that contrasts with the genuineness of Aurora, Hargraves in his ugliness and
disability is a figure of unnaturalness and repulsion that contrasts with Aurora’s
attraction and popularity. Conyers is introduced to the reader as perfectly handsome and
attractive as if an artistic product. As she points out the unnaturalness in things that are
more real than the real itself in the opening page of the novel, the narrator describes the
flaw to this beautiful picture, the insubstantiality of the beauty, saying that “there is
something anomalous in this outward beauty and inward ugliness” (242).
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