Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Capitalism—especially capitalist consumerism—pervades the setting of 1930s London. In fact, advertisements play a key role in shaping Gordon’s broader ideas about money: “Curiously enough, it was the advertisements in the Underground stations that first brought [the problems with capitalism] home for him” (43). Later in life, Gordon’s feelings about money compel him to leave his job at the advertising firm New Albion even though he is very good at copywriting: “There was hardly a soul in the firm who was not perfectly well aware that publicity—advertising—is the dirtiest ramp that capitalism has yet produced” (51). Gordon and the other employees’ awareness that they’re contributing to a “dirty ramp” reflects the broader difficulty of avoiding complicity in a capitalist economy. Advertising is itself a mechanism of that complicity since it persuades people to endlessly accumulate consumer goods while padding the pockets of those who produce (or rather, own the factories that produce) those items. 

Capitalism also tends to judge people based on their wealth, often through the ideal of the ”self-made” man—someone whose wealth reflects his perseverance and industry. Despite his war on money, Gordon shares the view that money determines people’s worth (though in his case, he views wealth as the factor that enables virtue, creativity, etc. rather than as evidence of those qualities). He attributes Ravelston’s open-mindedness to the fact that he comes from a wealthy background, noting that “the rich can afford to be intelligent” (54). Likewise, he identifies most of the customers at the bookshop according to their class. Further, he views being a writer as impossible unless one has money to provide one with educational opportunities or, at least, “peace of mind”: ”Could you even write a penny novelette without money to put heart in you?” (9).

This is not just Gordon’s mindset. Money is indeed very crucial to society. It is because of money that Gordon’s father became an accountant on his own father’s wishes—an act that foreshadows Gordon’s own return to copywriting in the wake of Rosemary’s pregnancy. Gordon comes to believe that you can be concerned about money and still be “bound up in the bundle of life” (239)—in other words, that there is more to life than just money. Although one could see this as selling out, it is arguably just a recognition of the impossibility of remaining pure in a corrupt system.