A nasty book that while apparently trying to valorize the meek Amelia and castigate the brilliantly manipulative Becky, constantly veers off course and does the very opposite it claims to want to do. Vitality and life are seen in the schemes that Becky uses to take advantage of the present organization of capital—its insertion into a love narrative and gender politics, its non-laboring methods of obtaining money or of obtaining the effective use of money (inheritance, gambling, pawning, personal attractiveness or force of character as capital), and the evolution of a modern faceless credit system—rather than in the old forms of meaning: chivalry, romantic love, honest work, and friendship. To me, Becky is like the mad dream of the anti-laborer, the laborer (ie someone who has nothing but his/her labor potential for capital) gone bad: the laborer that doesn’t use the productive forces of one’s natural capital (your body and mind) but instead who uses the same things just as a capitalist entrepreneur would. She shows the pores, the gaps of capitalism, the spaces it allows for exploitation because of the very methods of exploitation the entrepreneurs use for their own gain. She is pure surplus value, pure flux.