Money

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Contents

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General Resources


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Martin Amis -- Biography


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Historical/Cultural Background


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Reviews


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Critical Resources

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Articles

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Postmodernism

  • Postmodernism (Dr. Mary Klages, English Department, University of Colorado, Boulder)
  • Postmodernism FAQ (Van Piercy, English Department, Indiana University)
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Gender, Sex, and Visual Culture

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Simulacra

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Money



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Critical Controversies: Is Money a Misogynist Text?

  • "The Satirical Theater of the Female Body: The Role of Women in Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, and Money: A Suicide Note" (1998). By Robert Martinez, College of William and Mary. Undergraduate Senior Research Project. full text: 
Despite the reformation that Self almost undergoes through the efforts of Martina Twain, his journey through the novel is still 
largely constructed with the sexual manipulation of women. Thus, it is difficult to consider Money as a feminist text precisely
because of this sexually subjugated role women possess: while Amis consistently illuminates the misogyny present in John Self’s
sexuality (and of his other male characters), his novel rarely deals with or attempts to articulate the consciousness of women. One
of Amis’s obvious goals is to examine the capitalistic victimization of women and attack Self’s treatment of women; but while
performing this satire on materialistic and sexual greed, Amis continues to use the female body as a narrative prop to stage male
corruption. In Money, women ultimately function as symbolic mirrors that reflect and give voice to Self’s internal degeneracy.


  • "The Amises on Realism and Postmodernism: Stanley and the Women and Money." By Gavin Keulks, excerpt from Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel Since 1950 (2003). full text 
It is patently wrong, however, to label the book misogynist, as Laura Doan has done; nor is it enough to theorize, as does Robert
Martinez, that Martin’s satires use “women as vessels to articulate a vision of modern sexuality polluted by male misogyny.” 
Although Martinez is right to contend that Money “rarely attempts to articulate the consciousness of women,” women are certainly not
“sexually subjugated”; instead, they are equally as manipulative as Self and, in the case of Martina Twain, more enlightened and 
hence more powerful.26 Instead, it is more illuminating to contextualize Martin’s embedded use of feminism in ways that Sara Mills 
and Adam Mars-Jones have done, examining the conflicting messages about women that Martin weaves within his text. These messages
emerge when one probes the novel’s treatment of metaphysical issues and their corresponding effects upon authenticity.


John Self revels in his pornographic experiences, but they are part of the general exhaustion, iterability, and superficiality that 
inflict postmodern existence. Jean Baudrillard’s famous diagnosis about the “loss of the real” seems especially applicable to Money,
as Self’s reality is both an illusion and an elaborate joke. Money further engages Baudrillard by questioning the nature of 
authenticity in the postmodern world, especially through the characters of Martin Amis and Martina Twain, both of whom attempt to 
teach Self lessons in authenticity.  Martina, for example, gives him a “how-to kit for the twentieth century” (308), composed of 
books written by or about such figures as Freud, Orwell, Marx, Einstein, and Hitler. Intending to teach Self about higher ideals and
the dangers that await those who violate these ideals, she comes to epitomize what James Diedrick and Tamás Bényei define as the 
moral center of the novel, its crisis-point of value and genuine emotion.27 Similarly, the Martin Amis character attempts to explain
to Self some of the changes that have beset motivation and character in the twentieth century, warning him about breakdowns in 
logic, meaning, and closure.
  • Martin Amis. Interview with Dave Weich. Powells.com. Undated. 
Dave: Readers often fail to make a distinction between author and narrator, and that's certainly been the case with several of your
books. You've been accused of misogyny, for instance; Money was quite controversial when it was published, and that wasn't so long 
ago.


Amis: And I think it's a feminist novel. The lesson of feminism is presented to him. He doesn't quite get it, but it's there and
it's dramatized.


When I look at my first novel [The Rachel Papers], there is some misogyny there, but I think it ceases to be an issue. My readers 
used to be predominantly men, and I think now, particularly in America, it's much more fifty-fifty. I think women have grown up 
enough and there's not the pitch of politicization where just a word like rape sets off an alarm. You know what it's like being 
politicized — you're het up and overcompensating in every direction. Now that's quieting down.


Someone said, "If you had, in one word, to say what you'd been writing about these last thirty years, what would it be?" I said, 
"Masculinity." And I noticed the first section in The War Against Cliché, when I was grouping together these pieces, it's called "On
Masculinity and Related Questions," so even at the book reviewing level, this is the preoccupation.


No woman has anything to fear from what I write. On the contrary, I'm much harder on men than on women.


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Course Reserves

Available in the library:

  • Keulks, Gavin, ed. Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2006.
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