The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel

The Ideas in Things

The Ideas in Things Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel

elaine freedgood

The University of Chicago Press




Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
C 2006 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2006 Paperback edition 2010 Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

2 3 4 5 6

isbn-13: 978-0-226-26155-3 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-26163-8 (paper) isbn-10: 0-226-26155-7 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-26163-8 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Freedgood, Elaine. The ideas in things : fugitive meaning in the Victorian novel / Elaine Freedgood. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-226-26155-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Material culture in literature. 3. Material culture—Great Britain—History— 19th century. I. Title. pr788.m37f74 2006 2005037314 823 .8093553—dc22 ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.

For Ruth Stein

The Ideas in Things

Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Reading Things 1 1

Souvenirs of Sadism: Mahogany Furniture, Deforestation, and Slavery in Jane Eyre 30

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Coziness and Its Vicissitudes: Checked Curtains and Global Cotton Markets in Mary Barton 55

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Realism, Fetishism, and Genocide: Negro Head Tobacco in and around Great Expectations 81

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Toward a History of Literary Underdetermination: Standardizing Meaning in Middlemarch 111 Coda: Victorian Thing Culture and the Way We Read Now 139 Notes 159

Index 187

Acknowledgments I am happy to acknowledge my many debts. An American Fellowship from the American Association of University Women provided a semester of leave that assisted me in beginning this book. Sabbatical leaves from the University of Pennsylvania and New York University also provided me with precious time. I wish to thank the librarians in the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at the Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania, especially Dan Traister, and those at the Fales Library of New York University’s Bobst Library, especially Mike Kelly. Many friends read chapters, commented on the ideas presented here, or offered terrific bibliographic advice: warm thanks to Martin Harries, Carolyn Lesjak, Trish Loughran, Sharon Marcus, Anna McCarthy, Christopher Otter, and Talia Schaffer. I doubt there are better students than the ones I have and have had: Maeve Adams, Olga Burakov, Michael Caldwell Cohen, Emily Cone-Miller, Conor Creaney, Adrienne Ghaly, Alyson Kiesel, Tracy Jordan Miller, Sarah Nash, S. Asad Raza, Deborah Shapple, Nicole Pasulka, Alicia Christoff, and Lindsay Reckson in particular have my gratitude for their contributions to this book. Rachel Buurma is a student and friend whose long interest in my work—especially this book—is a particularly cherished gift. Peter Stallybrass and David Wallace were

x Acknowledgments

learned and generous interlocutors at an early stage; their influence is evident throughout the book. Jeff Spear, in a characteristic act of generosity, gave me the title, helping me to understand at an early stage what it was I was working on. Jeff Nunokawa’s encouragement has meant more to me than he probably knows. Deirdre David has been an incredibly important friend and supporter for many years now. At the University of Chicago Press, I am deeply grateful to Alan Thomas for his wise counsel and tactful guidance; to Randolph Petilos for coming to my technical rescue repeatedly; and to Erik Carlson for truly superb copyediting, from the letter of the text to the logic of the argument. G. Gabrielle Starr and Mary Poovey read the whole manuscript, some of it more than once; it is infinitely better because of their exacting criticism and friendship. No matter where we teach, Susan Stewart is a colleague beyond compare. I owe Nancy Bentley more than I can say; we can try to work it out in food and beverages. Gina Dent’s friendship is always central in the landscape of my world. Gauri Viswanathan, beloved friend and teacher, inspires all of my best efforts with her own astonishing scholarship. I am very sad not to be able to put this book into the hands of another beloved teacher, Edward W. Said; I will instead hope that I can add it to the always-growing body of work that remembers his own. I would also like to remember here the many kindnesses of my young cousin Larry Roth, who died during the writing of this book. Debra Roth makes the ink hold fast to the page. Finally, this book is for Ruth Stein, within and beyond all transfers of meaning, and of love. A version of chapter 3 appeared in Novel: A Forum on Fiction; I wish to thank the editors for permission to reprint it here.

Introduction: Reading Things [T]he past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object . . . which we do not suspect. « m a r c e l p r o u s t , Du cˆot´e de chez Swann »

The Victorian novel describes, catalogs, quantifies, and in general showers us with things: post chaises, handkerchiefs, moonstones, wills, riding crops, ships’ instruments of all kinds, dresses of muslin, merino, and silk, coffee, claret, cutlets—cavalcades of objects threaten to crowd the narrative right off the page.1 These things often overwhelm us at least in part because we have learned to understand them as largely meaningless: the protocols for reading the realist novel have long focused us on subjects and plots; they have implicitly enjoined us not to interpret many or most of its objects. Even with the recent critical attention to the detail, the fetish, and material culture, the “things” of novels still do not get taken seriously—that is to say, they do not get interpreted—much of the time.2 What knowledge has remained unexplored and unexamined, safe in the words that have seemed to designate the most inconsequential and uninterpretable of things? The Ideas in Things assumes that critical cultural archives have been preserved, unsuspected, in the things of realism that have been so little or so lightly read.

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Introduction

In the first three chapters of this book, I “read” objects with obvious imperial and industrial histories in three well-known Victorian novels: mahogany furniture in Jane Eyre, calico curtains in Mary Barton, and “Negro head” tobacco in Great Expectations. Each of these objects is mentioned repeatedly, often at crucial narrative moments, but with no attendant indication that it has meaning beyond the limited or weak metonymic function3 that many fictional objects are typically “allowed” in the usual literary reading of the Victorian novel: mahogany furniture signifies that Jane is newly rich but not possessed of nouveau riche taste; the curtains in the Barton home suggest that its laboring-class residents are domestic, and therefore that middle-class readers can safely care about them; Negro head tobacco conjures Magwitch’s identification of himself as a slave, specifically as the black slave of his erstwhile partner, Compeyson.4 These objects are largely inconsequential in the rhetorical hierarchy of the text—they do not ascend to metaphorical stature; they suggest, or reinforce, something we already know about the subjects who use them. But each of these objects, if we investigate them in their “objectness,”5 was highly consequential in the world in which the text was produced. Accordingly, the knowledge that is stockpiled in these things bears on the grisly specifics of conflicts and conquests that a culture can neither regularly acknowledge nor permanently destroy if it is going to be able to count on its own history to know itself and realize a future. The reader who wishes to recover (or rather, imagine) the material qualities of fictional things must avoid the temptations of allegory and follow instead the protocols of the collector as Walter Benjamin describes them in The Arcades Project: “The allegorist is, as it were, the polar opposite of the collector. He has given up the attempt to elucidate things through research into their properties and relations. He dislodges things from their context and, from the outset, relies on his profundity to illuminate their meaning. The collector, by contrast, brings together what belongs together; by keeping in mind their affinities and their succession in time, he can eventually furnish information

Reading Things

about his objects.”6 What this means, in practical terms, is that understanding the widest possible range of meanings for, let’s say, the mahogany furniture in Jane Eyre requires that one learn about the history of the depletion of mahogany in Madeira and in the Caribbean (the two major sources of wealth in the novel); about the subsequent vicissitudes of the cash crops—grapes and sugar—that were planted in its stead; about Madeira as the first site of the modern form of plantation slavery that would later be exported to the Caribbean; and about the history of furniture and the properties of mahogany that allowed certain innovations in furniture style in the eighteenth century—and what those innovations signified, culturally speaking, in the Victorian period. This investigation of the social and environmental vicissitudes of mahogany prevents us from making any headlong assignment of meaning. Mahogany becomes more than a weak metonym for wealth and taste; it figures, first of all, itself. It tells a story of imperial domination—the history of deforestation and slavery from Madeira to Jamaica—that crosshatches the manifest narrative of Jane Eyre, in which empire is banished with the (psychologically assisted) suicide of Bertha Mason. After this death, the novel seems to reestablish domesticity both in a habitational and in a national sense. I argue for a return of the imperial repressed in the violence that inheres in the old mahogany furniture that would otherwise seem (if it seemed at all) perfectly at home. This process does not tend toward a “reading” of the novel in any traditional sense. Instead, it seeks what Pierre Macherey has described as a moment of “splitting” within the novel, the point at which we can catch sight of the “division which is its unconscious, in so far as it possesses one.” This divided unconscious allows us to glimpse “the play of history beyond its edges, encroaching on those edges.” This splitting, this less-than-fully narrated appearance of history makes it possible “to trace the path which leads from the haunted work to that which haunts it.”7 It is along this path that allegories eventually develop in The Ideas in Things: as Benjamin reminds us, “in every collector hides an allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector” (211). But these

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Introduction

allegories develop only after a busy sojourn with the collector’s method, in which metaphors and allegories are constructed later rather than sooner. In other words, I do eventually develop interpretive allegories in which I follow the narrative logic of the novel more closely than I do in the strong metonymic readings with which I begin, but I delay such readings until I have acquired the knowledge of the collector. So I begin with objects rather than with subjects and plots and stay with them a bit longer than novelistic interpretation generally allows. The mid-Victorian novel is a particularly rich site for tracing the fugitive meanings of apparently nonsymbolic objects. Although I don’t think the technology exists by which one could prove, or even begin to argue, that there are actually more objects in Victorian fiction than in the fiction that precedes it, Cynthia Wall has argued that there is a qualitative change—in general—in the representation of objects between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: there is more description of things as the nineteenth century gets going, and minute description becomes more respectable. Over the course of the eighteenth century an “old, deep suspicion of description as something that got in the way of narrative” gave way “to accommodate and then absorb the ornamental into the contextual.” In the nineteenth century, “what Barthes calls the ‘world of goods’ got used to itself ” and things began “to demand visibility.”8 The increasing respectability of increasingly detailed description makes for the emblematic hodgepodge of the Victorian novel. But even with an expanded descriptive apparatus, the novel cannot organize the prolific output of actual nineteenth-century goods: they could not be adequately (realistically) represented and assigned to reliable symbolic places. Thus realism, or more precisely, realism as it manifests itself in the mid-Victorian novels I study here. Because of its very lack of a tight symbolic system, the mid-Victorian novel would seem to offer a rich site for defetishizing the commodities that threaten to burst out of its covers. But defetishizing is an impossible activity if we believe anything at all about the wiles of commodity

Reading Things

fetishism.9 “Unwinding the fetish,” Michael Taussig writes, “is not yet given on the horizon of human possibility.”10 He is one of a number of recent writers who have reconceived of fetishism—a fetishism of things—as a means of understanding the objects, and the social relations, that commodification makes us forget.11 One of the great paradoxes of the mid-Victorian novel is the extent to which it offers us a welter of commodities in its content but cannot regularly cope with commodifying those objects at the level of form; the novel “lets” us, in other words, read them as things. Nonetheless, I will avoid describing what I do here as either fetishizing or defetishizing novelistic objects. Rather, the method of reading things in this book is better described as involving, initially, a moment of taking them literally, followed by a lengthy metonymic search beyond the covers of the text. In that search, I use the research methods Benjamin’s collector might use if that collector were a scholar of Victorian fiction. Taking fictional things literally is admittedly a kind of feint, a temporary and artful dodging of the mediating dictates of literary representation: it allows me to avoid the routinized literary figuration that precludes the interpretation of most of the things of realism. It involves bearing in mind that the “literal is, in most contexts, metaphorical,”12 so that the idea that things might be taken literally suggests a longing or an aspiration rather than a method. The metonymic research that follows this literalizing moment does of course rely on mediations, those of historians of textiles and tobacco, of forestry and furniture. And my choice of objects is influenced by structures of thought and feeling that derive from a line of critical thinking that could be traced from Marxist cultural studies, the study of culture and imperialism, postcolonial theory, and studies of power and subjectivity from Frantz Fanon and Sigmund Freud to Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. The result is the method of the first three chapters of this book: one in which the historically and theoretically overdetermined material characteristics of objects are sought out beyond the immediate

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Introduction

context in which they appear. These objects are then returned to their novelistic homes, so that can inhabit them with a radiance or resonance of meaning they have not possessed or have not legitimately possessed in previous literary-critical reading. In the fourth chapter, I read the narrator of Middlemarch as an early teacher of the kind of literary interpretation that has long prevented or forestalled the kind of strong metonymic reading I perform in the preceding chapters. I argue that George Eliot, as a self-conscious producer of the novel as a particularly “literary” genre, begins to restrict and assign meaning to fictional objects, tying off the metonymic loose ends that the baggier novels of the earlier Victorian period had left—however unwittingly and unwillingly—dangling. The Middlemarch narrator actively dissuades readers from making meanings on their own: Dorothea’s “plain dress,” mentioned in the first paragraph of the novel, is explicated exhaustively by the narrator for several pages, insuring that readers attach exactly the right historical, sectarian, and economic associations to this style of clothing. Structures of meaning making build up in such hermeneutic displays: this is the readerly text in the process of becoming a writerly one, that is to say, this is a text that teaches readers how to rightly “write” that which is unwritten in literary language. The modernist text may ask us to do a lot of work, to “write” the parts of it that are left unwritten, but we don’t write them just as we please. Rather, we write them according to an internalized grammar of meaning that we have learned (as individuals, as a culture) from literary novels and from literary criticism. The readerly text seems to ask much less of us because it makes so many connections for us, but in so doing it leaves many more connections to be made, simply because it must leave things symbolically unattended. In my account of it, the readerly text is a structure in which a reader can be writerly with objects. The figural structure of realism has been described as allowing at once for the expression—and camouflage—of desire. Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire describe metonymy, because of

Reading Things

“its inexhaustible power of displacement . . . [as] made precisely to mark and mask the gap through which desire originates and into which it perpetually plunges.”13 As if to mark almost perfectly the gap between the French and Anglo-American analysis of metonymy in particular and realism in general, a gap that concerns the issue of the gap, Garrett Stewart observes that “literary reading serves desire in the world of form. Realist literary reading serves desire in the form of a world.”14 But the desire served by realism requires a world whose form is a relatively loose symbolic structure, one into which readers can enter and intervene with more ease than later, tighter symbolic structures will allow. And this “ease” of intervention describes the gap or gaps evoked by Laplanche and Leclaire: the places, the openings that metonymy marks and masks, where desire emerges and dives to its death, repeatedly—fortunately enough for nineteenth-century publishing. I use Middlemarch as an early example of the way in which the “literary” novel works to refigure, and stabilize, our perception of the symbolic ground of fiction. Reliability and reproducibility in literary meaning making require the stability of metaphors rather than the unpredictability of metonyms. So in the practice of literary novel reading—as it has been developed by the literary novel itself and by its critics—metaphors, obviously the rarer figure in prose fiction, provide the important armature of the symbolic structure; metonyms, scattered everywhere, decorate that structure but do not determine it. Modernism and postmodernism, structuralism and post-structuralism have of course vastly complicated our ideas about reading; nonetheless, what has by now become a largely middlebrow practice of reading—that is to say, a kind of reflexive, thematic reading that derives from picking out metaphors—still sticks to most of the objects of realist fiction.15 This is a symptom of their commodification. In the coda of this book, I will argue that mid-Victorians, and the objects in their novels, were not fully in the grip of the kind of fetishism Marx and Marxists have ascribed to industrial culture. The abstraction

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Introduction

of the commodity into a money value, the spectacularization of the consumer good, the alienation of things from their human and geographical origins—these were not the only ways of imagining the things of that crowded world. A host of ideas resided in Victorian things: abstraction, alienation, and spectacularization had to compete for space with other kinds of object relations— ones that we have perhaps yet to appreciate. Commodity culture happened slowly: it was preceded by, I will argue, and was for a long time survived by what I call Victorian “thing culture”: a more extravagant form of object relations than ours, one in which systems of value were not quarantined from one another and ideas of interest and meaning were perhaps far less restricted than they are for us. Thing culture survives now in those marginal or debased cultural forms and practices in which apparently mundane or meaningless objects can suddenly take on or be assigned value and meaning: the flea market, the detective story, the lottery, the romantic comedy—in short, in any cultural site in which a found object can be convincingly stripped of randomness. Victorian thing culture makes this book possible. It has left for us a rich archive of stories about things. The kind of works to which I refer—a literature of industrial production, for example, and a connected trove of texts that details the material spoils of empire—has become noticeably obscure given the success of the system it celebrates.16 These works tell stories that literary theory, even in its Marxist, historicist, and postcolonial varieties, has not been wont to tell because they concern objects that we do not usually interpret. The Ideas in Things tells some of the stories about things that this archive offers us; it also considers the ways in which our reading of the things of the Victorian novel has been conditioned by a complex set of dictates that come to us from literary fiction, its criticism, and twentieth- and twenty-first century commodity culture, the combined forces of which have policed the meaning of things such that much of the archive of thing culture and thing culture itself have become nearly invisible.

Reading Things

I. The Lasting Effects of the Reality Effect In his pervasively influential definition of the “reality effect,” Roland Barthes argues that many objects lie around in the realist novel to signify a generic real rather than to suggest something particular about it.17 He suggests that we must understand the significance of “insignificant notation” (which can be determined only in the context of the entire work) as forming the “referential illusion” of modern realism (147–48). “Insignificant notation” gestures toward the real generically, and like the real it seems to produce, it does not mean—it can only be. Barthes’s elegant formulation of a function for so much apparently nonsymbolic stuff allows us to think more clearly about the novel as a ratio that must maintain a convincing equilibrium between the realistic and the allegorical. The idea of the reality effect is a terrific help to us when we are faced with the task of “interpreting” something the size of the Victorian novel: reality effects provide a low-maintenance balance for the meaningful stuff in the novel, ensuring that we can interpret realism adequately and protect it and ourselves from being overwhelmed by allegorical surfeit. It also limits the work of interpretation—only some parts of these long texts really require exegesis of any kind. In the apt description of Leah Price, “learning to read means, among other things, learning when not to. The sheer bulk of many Victorian genres (both fictional and non) requires their consumers to skip and to skim, to tune in and zone out.”18 G´erard Genette elaborates some of the interpretive implications of the reality effect: “[T]he narrator, abdicating his function of choosing and directing the narrative, allows himself to be governed by ‘reality,’ by the presence of what is there and what demands to be ‘shown.’”19 A complicated exchange between narrative agency and the anomie of the real must take place for realist fiction to feel real and at the same time for it to mean something that reality by itself cannot. But the most significant

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10 Introduction

point is that both Barthes and Genette make much of how little we must make of such effects: the presence of reality in realism is oddly useless, except as a kind of scenery. In the paradigm of uninterpretability codified and formalized by Barthes, many if not most of the things of realism are nonsymbolic; they are—and this is a significant, but not, I will argue, a necessary opposition— literal and therefore nonliterary. We can brush by all kinds of things in novels, dismissing them with a brief and paradoxical acknowledgement: oh yes, the real, the literal, never mind. The process whereby objects become metaphors, and therefore potentially meaningful, is a “transaction between contexts,” Paul Ricoeur has written.20 The referential illusion of the novel must perform an exchange with the allegorical component of the text: meaning is paid for with material, with things, that would otherwise simply signify the real. Some objects, in other words, are removed from the work of producing the text’s referential illusion and are promoted to metaphors. But this promotion involves loss (or further loss): an object in a novel, in order for it to have meaning, cannot be itself, even in a two-dimensional, sceneryproducing kind of way; it is wrenched away from that possibility by the metaphorical relation itself: “[M]etaphor is an affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting,” Nelson Goodman has written.21 The predicate— or label—receives narration (it has a past): the object is allowed no history of its own.22 Objects become metaphorical (and meaningful) through a loss of many of their specific qualities. They retain only those that illuminate something about the predicate to which they must yield. In literary criticism, with a few notable exceptions on which this work depends,23 even the use value of most novelistic objects has largely been an abstraction: things are reified as markers of a real in which they can participate only generically. As exchange values, they are indentured to a metaphorical relation in which they must give up most of their own qualities in the service of a symbolic relation. They must do the “metaphysical capering” Marx ascribed to the commodity fetish—in the service of

Reading Things

producing the effect of reality, or in service to a meaning that belongs to something, or, more precisely, someone else. The object as reality effect loses its potential as a material thing outside the conventions of representation; the object as metaphor loses most of its qualities in its symbolic servitude. Metonymy is the trope that might provide a way out of this impasse, but its potential power has long been neglected. In a prescient formulation, Roman Jakobson noted that literary critics, like some aphasics, suffer from a disorder in which the “actual bipolarity [of poetical tropes] has been artificially replaced . . . by an amputated unipolar scheme which, strikingly enough, coincides with one of the two aphasic patterns, namely with the contiguity disorder” (114). Indeed, Barthes’s essay on the reality effect begins with a dismissal of a hypothetical, weak metonymic reading in which he asks if Madame Aubain’s barometer in Flaubert’s tale, “A Simple Heart,” could be read as “constitut[ing] some index of character or atmosphere.”24 The problem with the kind of typically constricted metonymic reading Barthes rightly dismisses is precisely that it does not allow for causal, material, and conceptual connections beyond the covers of the text, or outside the frame of the narrative—such are the basic rules of literary reading. But a literal approach to the literary thing—an approach that breaches, temporarily, the narrative frame and the symbolic system of the novel—would assume that the barometer might be an index of something culturally significant both within the novel and outside it, especially given that the barometer does literally provide an index.25 In The Material Unconscious, Bill Brown gives us a glimpse of what such strong metonymic reading might produce. He describes briefly the fortunes of this instrument in the nineteenth century and concludes by suggesting a large and evocative meaning for it in the Aubain parlor, in the ambient culture in which the story was written, and in our critical reading of it. In measuring atmospheric pressure, the barometer has a “generic capacity to materialize . . . an absent presence.”26 The barometer, like the novelist, conjures up, in symbolic measurement, an otherwise

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12 Introduction

unknowable or illegible aspect of the world for us. We can then know, since we do not feel, the weight of the atmospheric pressure bearing down on us, so insensibly and consequentially.

II. Metonymy: Convention and Contingency The method of the first three chapters of this book takes its cue from Bill Brown’s reading of the barometer: it involves taking a novelistic thing materially or literally and then following it beyond the covers of the text through a mode of research that proceeds according to the many dictates of a strong form of metonymic reading. The strong, literalizing, or materializing, metonymic reading performed here has little in common with the weak metonymic readings I have mentioned earlier.27 In those readings, the object (as in metaphor) is indentured to the subject: a character’s possessions, for example, if they are mentioned with a certain degree of emphasis, are meant to tell us something about that character and not about themselves or their own social lives.28 In the metonymic readings I perform in the first three chapters of this book, the object is investigated in terms of its own properties and history and then refigured alongside and athwart the novel’s manifest or dominant narrative—the one that concerns its subjects. Metonymy is, rhetorically, both too weak and too strong: it tends toward the conventional, the obvious, the literal, the material—it often conjures up the real so successfully that its status as a trope seems to disappear. In a rare article devoted wholly to this figure, Hugh Bredin explains its lowly status: “[M]etonymy neither states nor implies the connection between the objects involved in it. For this reason, it relies wholly upon those relations between objects that are habitually and conventionally known and accepted.”29 Metonymy is ham-fisted: it tells us what we already know by habit and by convention; it is not expected to generate the kind of startling, knowledge-producing connections that metaphor promises: it is not the figure in the carpet, but the one

Reading Things

in the curtains, the sofa cushions, on the soup tureen—in the things of realism whose essences seem representationally stable. But the idea that a figure is regulated and restrained by habit and convention actually suggests a radical instability in its effect on literary form and meaning. Metonymy tends to be read according to habit—that is, according to a frame of reference that goes beyond or lies outside the symbolic structures of the novel— and its meanings are therefore often sought or recuperated in the social structures outside the novel, but inside the social world in which it is read. So the seemingly mundane issue of habit is actually fraught with contingency: Whose habits? When and where? Provoked by what knowledge, memories, unconscious conflicts, political exigencies, emotional upheavals, economic vicissitudes, or religious pressures? What any two readers “get” in the primary reading process will vary enormously; the possibilities in the secondary process of making meaning thereby expand exponentially and chaotically. Metonymy is both routine and random, an invitation to clich´e that comes packaged with the threat of contingency. Or perhaps, as I will discuss, metonymy arrives with the threat of a disavowed historical narrative, one whose return may be its only truly contingent aspect. The neglect of metonymy may be the result of a certain discomfort with the potential vagrancy of this figure—its inability to stop wandering and the unpredictability of the associations that it may spark in the minds of readers. Jane Gallop, reading in a Lacanian mode, figures metonymy as a feminine and therefore disruptive trope—a cagey and canny container of meaning that is always liable to spill its contents inopportunely.30 Naomi Schor argues that the detail is “threatening” in “its tendency to subvert an internal hierarchic ordering of the work of art which clearly subordinates the periphery to the center, the accessory to the principal, the foreground to the background.” The detail is for this reason characterized by Schor as having an affinity for or an affiliation with the feminine, as well as the equally unruly “effete and effeminate.”31 Lee Edelman has characterized

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14 Introduction

metonymy as the figure of queer desire, desire unbound and unclassified: its possibilities are inevitably reined in by metaphor, which halts “the arbitrary slippages characteristic of metonymy into units of ‘meaning’ that register as identities or representational presences.”32 Metaphor defines and stabilizes; metonymy keeps on going, in any and all directions. It threatens: to disrupt categories, to open up too many possibilities, to expose things hidden. It is this idea of metonymy that may paradoxically suggest some of its most powerful properties and allow us to use it as a kind of descriptive and insouciant cultural shorthand. The figure of metonymy is now perhaps more often deployed by critics than interpreted by them. Alan Liu has described the recent critical romance with the detail in “cultural criticism in what may be called its high postmodern forms.”33 “To read at any length in cultural criticism is often precisely to read at length—an effect consisting not so much in the actual number of pages as in the wet-cement quality of the reading experience. Cultural criticism dilates discourse through interpolated arrays of particulars, a sort of blason of the mundane or what Rorty (inspired by a Philip Larkin poem) calls ‘lading lists’ of the world” (84; emphasis in the original). Lists of details become a kind of paradoxically dilatory shorthand for big cultural formations. These details are often left for readers as undecoded metonyms of a larger order that cultural criticisms of various kinds shy away from describing in any totalizing or generalizing way.34 Liu argues that the list of details ends up as a “gesture of incompletion” (80). Metonymy is the figure of arrested development, “thick description,” the readable, the readerly. It embarrasses interpretation because of its apparent contingency, its seeming inability to provide a unitary or singular meaning, or a kind of critical “truth” (or the appearance thereof). It is the nightmarish opposite of the interpretive dead end: an interpretive open end of dizzying potential, metonymy has understandably been read, when read at all, weakly. Paul de Man describes the way that Proust, in Du cˆot´e de chez Swann, tries to pass off metonymies as metaphors, in an effort to

Reading Things

guarantee the truth, both of Marcel’s experience and of Proust’s text. Marcel claims to find the very essence of summer in “the ‘chamber music’ of flies”: this sound is connected to summer in the “necessary link” de Man describes as the most salient traditional rhetorical and epistemological feature of metaphor.35 “In a passage which abounds in successful and seductive metaphors and which, moreover, explicitly asserts the superior efficacy of metaphor over that of metonymy, persuasion is achieved by a figural play in which contingent figures of chance masquerade as figures of necessity” (67). Proust’s (or more rightly, Marcel’s) claim to have mastered a metaphor of summer is, in de Man’s reading, an effort to establish mastery not only over summer, but also over the world outside his bedroom. Marcel is loath to leave the confines of his room, and therefore he must prove that he does not need to leave in order to know and represent the essence of summer, and by extension, the world outside, the “real” world. In the “chamber music of flies” Proust finds the perfect metaphor of summer: summer is this music. In de Man’s masterful deconstruction of Proust’s attempt at a rhetorical mastery of the reality of summer, he shows that the chamber music of the flies is not a metaphor as Proust would have it but rather a synecdoche of summer:36 “a contingent figure . . . of chance.” Once something has been shown to be in the camp of metonymy, and therefore in the realm of the contingent—according to conventional definitions—it can claim no positive, essential, or necessary meaning. This deconstructive demotion from metaphor to metonymy creates a triumphant figural ruin in the midst of Proust’s gorgeous rhetorical landscape, a little wreck of meaning. And it also, in the apparent finality of its demolition of metaphorical connection, reifies the truism about metaphor and metonymy and their relative strength and weakness. But that truism, as I have suggested, may veil a more troubling tropic tendency. The connections I am able make in the first three chapters of this book are not, strictly speaking, contingent: mahogany, calico, and tobacco have left a trail of traces and effects that link them necessarily to the

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16 Introduction

historical situations of the novels in which they appear.37 You could say that the connections I make are historically necessary and culturally contingent. They depend on the continued existence and availability of certain documents; they depend on my location (literally) and access to libraries and collections; they depend on my own education, memories, political affiliations, and so on. The contingency of metonymic relations may more properly rest, in many cases, on our ability and our willingness to recuperate historical necessity. Metonymy’s apparently subversive ability to disrupt meaning, to be endlessly vagrant and open ended, may be attended by an equally subversive ability to recuperate historical links that are anything but random. For now, the most important contingency is that the lowly rhetorical stature of metonymy and the critical restrictions placed on the reading of this figure in the novel have attenuated its possible force; they have blocked the connecting of extratextual historical dots.38 In a telling example of this, J. Hillis Miller, one of the Victorian novel’s most exacting and illuminating readers, explains why certain household items in an episode of Sketches by Boz should not be interpreted. He notes that a pewter pot and a beer-chiller don’t “start into life.” Indeed, Boz himself confesses to a metonymical failure: “[W]e,” he admits, are not in a “romantic humour; and although we tried very hard to invest the furniture with vitality, it remained perfectly unmoved, obstinate, and sullen.” Miller concludes that “[t]he pewter pot and the little beer-chiller are characteristic examples of utensils which in other Sketches are read as metonymic signs of the life which has been lived in their vicinity. In their failure to start into life there is a revelation of the fact that the vitality of such objects does not belong in reality to them. Boz invests it in them, and it is invested according to patterns of interpretation taken from traditional literary forms.”39 But if the force of history replaces or punctures “traditional literary form,” objects may “start into” a life of their own, as it were, evincing a vitality that the novel cannot wholly contain within its system of figuration (especially a baggy pseudo-non-novel like Sketches). The history of pewter

Reading Things

in the nineteenth century—its place in early metal recycling, for example—might render the pewter pot in Sketches resonant: in early recycling, pewter pots were transformed and transubstantiated into plates and mugs and pitchers on a regular basis, lending them a particularly mercurial (if you will) identity, an ephemeral solidity not unlike the momentary realness that we experience when we read and “see” literary objects themselves.40 A strong, literalizing metonymy can “start” fictional objects into historical life and historicize our fictions against the grain of the kinds of allegorical meaning we already know how to find, read, and create.

III. Evidence Dickens, one of the master metonymists of all time, seems to betray an anxiety about the potential semiotic waywardness of this trope in the very fact of his overproduction of it. It is as if he would supply us with all possible contiguous associations, leaving no empty signifying space behind for readers to fill in with their own associations. In the description of Barthes, such manic connecting is emblematic of the readerly text: “To end, to fill, to join, to unify—one might say that this is the basic requirement of the readerly, as though it were prey to some obsessive fear: that of omitting a connection.”41 But of course every connection creates many more than can be filled or joined; metonymy sparks contiguities from every millimeter of a word’s surface; it cannot end or be ended. But such connections continue to hold out the promise of semiotic and psychic fulfillment, and the object relations on the page are often quickly analogized by Dickens to the ones “inside” characters. In the second paragraph of Great Expectations, we find Pip trying to interpret a set of desperately unreaderly texts—the epitaphs on the gravestones of his dead family. He wishes that their skimpy lines could supply him with even the slightest raw material for the connections he has never had a chance to make. Pip attempts to sketch for himself a portrait of his parents and

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18 Introduction

brothers according to the “evidence” provided by the writing on their gravestones: As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, “Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine . . . I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trouserspockets.42

Pip reads “unreasonably.” And initially it would seem that he reads unreasonably for lack of reading material; that is to say, he doesn’t have enough evidence to know what he should interpret and what he should simply take at face value—a particularly poignant quandary in this case. Yet Pip’s reading bears an unsettling resemblance to that of the reader of the realist novel, who must also decide on meaning and relevance on an item-by-item basis. The correct procedure for reading things would seem to be less difficult for the novel reader, since the object world that reader confronts is so fertile, so full, so connected. And yet it remains difficult, or indeed becomes more difficult, in the richly developed world of the novel, to discern which things are really important and which are “merely” description—we are not sure when we have arrived at the textual moments when, as Leah Price puts it, we can zone out. We would of course impoverish our reading if we were to take too many breaks in attention or take too much skeptical distance from the possible “evidence” the novel provides. The cruel tickler of Pip’s sister, the rotting bride cake of Miss Havisham, the scented hand soap of Mr. Jaggers—unlike the font on the

Reading Things

tombstones of Pip’s parents, these bits of evidence have much to tell us about their subjects.43 “Take nothing on looks; take everything on evidence,” Jaggers advises Pip. But as readers of the novel, we have to take everything “on looks,” and then decide what can count as evidence. The apparent opposition Jaggers invokes between the superficial (what we see) and the deep (what can count as evidence) describes instead a disorienting sequence in the process of reading realism, and one in which the reader must decide, many times per page, on the possible weight of meaning an object might be able—or be intended—to support. If the wallet stuffed with cash that Magwitch pulls out of one pocket is an important metonym (i.e., it suggests that he’s rich and therefore capable of making a gentleman of Pip), then what of the Negro head tobacco he takes from another pocket? On what basis can we choose to interpret the contents of one pocket but not that of the other? And if we wish to make meaning out of this tobacco, according to what interpretive itinerary can we do so? What counts as evidence is always circumstantial. For us, “evidence” is simply that which can be interpreted. The problem is that we continually forget the extent to which history and convention govern that category. Miguel Tamen has argued that “bits and pieces of the same world” have friends—groups of people who find this thing and that interpretable. Tea leaf readers, art critics, legal theorists, meteorologists—each has an object or objects that seem to “speak” to them. Tamen argues that “there are no interpretable objects or intentional objects, only what counts as an interpretable object, or, better, groups of people for whom certain objects count as interpretable and who, accordingly, deal with certain objects in recognizable ways. Even if there appear to be many, if not always so formally constituted, kinds of such groups, I submit that what allows us to speak of the existence of such societies is roughly the empirical resemblance between what certain (other or the same) people do in relation to tea leaves, cold fronts, novels, or statues.”44 Novelistic objects have remained oddly friendless: unless they are readily metaphorical

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Introduction

or obviously (and therefore weakly) metonymical, we don’t understand them as interpretable. And paradoxically, but perhaps inevitably, the way to start them into interpretive life is first of all to take them up, that is to say, to take them literally. Unlike fetishism, literalism has received no official rehabilitation.45 But I would venture to argue that many major critical paradigm shifts of the last thirty years have depended on broaching the literal, or on taking something literally that was traditionally taken figurally, if it was “taken” at all. Consider the following examples. In a historicist move that is now familiar but was once impossible to perform, given the cloistering canons of humanist or New Criticism, Mary Poovey took the problem of governessing in Jane Eyre literally, rather than as a metaphor for some larger condition of human bondage. As a result, she could analyze the “ideological work of gender” performed by that much-represented figure both in the novel and in its ambient culture.46 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick dared to take the name Fanny Cleaver literally in her reading of anal eroticism in, or into, Our Mutual Friend; the scandal of literal reading opens the text to the perverse and productive practice that is queer reading.47 Edward W. Said, in connecting Mansfield Park and Mansfield Park to sugar and slavery in eighteenth-century Antigua, asked us to consider the literal global economic domination that forms the disavowed fulcrum of a deeply troubled but at least apparently homogenous English domesticity.48 Paul Gilroy has reimagined Hegel’s metaphorical master-slave dialectic literally through an interrogation of Hegel’s attitude toward actual slavery; in so doing, he insists that we reconsider the repressed but constitutive contributions of slavery and of the Black Atlantic to modernity and postmodernity. Indeed, he sees his own work as “complementing and extending the work of feminist philosophers who have opposed the figuration of woman as a sign for the repressed or irrational other of rationality identified as male.”49 Literal women as opposed to female figures, literal slaves as opposed to metaphorical bondsmen—each of these interpretations violates the decorous reading practices that have

Reading Things

often rendered the study of literature (and philosophy) a form of moral and political hygiene. And each of these interpretations expands the possibilities for making legitimate interpretations out of the vagrant processes of what might be called the metonymic imagination.

IV. The Metonymic Imagination The metonymic imagination is marginalized to different degrees by different literary-critical practices, but it is never extinguished: it might be described as the cognitive motor of the reading process. “[M]etonymic force,” Jacques Derrida writes in his eulogy for Barthes, “allows us to read. . . . It lets us think that which it nonetheless never forces open, never shows or hides.” Metonymic force is fleeting, fugitive, and yet compelling in its effects, it “divides the referential trait, suspends the referent and leaves it to be desired, while still maintaining the reference.”50 We “follow” novelistic things out of novels; we wander along the contiguous connections that are available to us given the states of our knowledge, our unconsciouses, our memories, the archives that remain and that remain available and valuable to us. We then bracket most of these connections, if we have had even a year or two of literary study at the secondary school level, as illegitimate: many of these constitute the “irrelevant associations and stock responses” that I. A. Richards attempted to “reorganize” with the procedures of Practical Criticism, and that criticism in general has continued to try to rein in, sort, and hierarchize.51 Happily, various forms of critical reorganization provoke new kinds of readerly wandering: “To read is to find meanings, and to find meanings is to name them; but these named meanings are swept toward other names; names call to each other, reassemble, and their grouping calls for further naming: I name, I unname, I rename: so the text passes: it is a nomination in the course of becoming, a tireless approximation, a metonymic labor.”52 This metonymic labor is at once individual and collective; it depends on drawing from stores of information that reside in individual subjects, but also

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Introduction

outside and around them. Giambattista Vico’s work on the material basis of language describes how cultural knowledge may be stored outside individual minds and thus beyond the boundaries of memory or the unconscious as they are usually conceived. Robert Pogue Harrison adumbrates this “storage” process: Certainly retention as Vico understands it is not reducible to memory. Memory’s diverse powers of recollection have their source in human retention, no doubt, yet the retained is not necessarily remembered. . . . A society of individuals may in fact retain a host of legacies without ever activating their potential. . . . The mind’s synthetic activity extends well beyond our psychic life in its totality, be it on the conscious or unconscious levels, if for no other reason than the human mind is a self-externalizing phenomenon that creates its places of retention outside of its psychic interiorities. . . . Our institutions, laws, landscapes, cities, statues, scriptures, houses, books, ideologies—these are among the many places in its secular topography where the human mind stores both the past and future of what it retains.53

To follow in a Viconian manner the meanings of blue and white checked curtains in and around Mary Barton (a novel about Manchester cotton mill workers), for example, may require that we place these curtains in the context of certain institutions, cities, and landscapes and that we try to find out about their origin, their production, and their use in various houses, books, and ideologies. To do so would allow us to find out what they may once have meant and what they can now mean inside and outside various moments of memory: the sources of knowledge about calico that were available in nineteenth-century Britain and the sources that are available now can be at least partially cataloged. Readers of Mary Barton in the early 1850s, for example, may have had on their shelves not only a burgeoning collection of three-decker novels, but also such works as History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, by Edward Baines, Jr., or any of a large number of other works chronicling the progress of British textile industries.54 Such readers might also have been to

Reading Things

figure 1. The machinery department of the Crystal Palace. From Illustrated London News, 23 August 1857.

the Crystal Palace exhibition and watched spinning jennies and power looms in action at various displays of industrial machinery (fig. 1). These same hypothetical Victorians might also have been readers of various histories of Caribbean slavery and have known that checked cottons were a particularly important object of barter between British and West African slave traders.55 Readers in the 1860s might have been aware of two kinds of famine that could be evoked by this originally Indian fabric:56 the “cotton famine” in Lancashire caused by the cessation of cotton imports from the United States during the Civil War and the famines in India, cotton famines of a different kind, caused in part by the East India Company’s importation of cheap Manchester textiles that put local weavers catastrophically out of business, and made them more dependent than ever on an overstressed agricultural system.57 Cultural knowledge is stored in a variety of institutional forms; importantly for my argument, it is also stored at the level of the word. Vico’s theory of cultural knowledge is grounded in language, and his idea of language is grounded in material practices:

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Introduction

for Vico, “literal” meaning is a cultural achievement predicated on a linguistic history that begins with hieroglyphs, advances to metaphor, and then finally escapes the confines of material origins to reach a level of greater transparency and abstraction. But at this paradoxically advanced level—the level of the literal—there remain many leftovers of the material and figural origins of words. Vico reads “literal” meaning in a materialist way: the custom of putting a golden globe into the hands of a monarch during coronation derives from the practice of using golden globes of grain as a “hieroglyph of the heroes’ ownership of their lands.”58 This hieroglyph has become literalized so that the details of its material origin were lost to most readers of Vico’s historical moment, and retrieved only by Vico’s painstaking recuperation of the meanings of gold and grain in the ancient world. Mark Lilla describes Vico’s awareness of the problems posed by anachronism for symbolizing processes: “The historical sciences face an altogether different obstacle [from the one faced by the natural sciences] to scienza: not the gulf between the human and divine, but that between two minds separated in time and space. Anachronism is a product of man’s fall and the corruption of his faculties, a chasm that opens between two human beings who live at different stages.”59 This gulf of time and space is one of the difficulties that attend the practice of strong metonymic reading: although things, and a host of ideas associated with them, may be stored in words, they are obviously not readily recognizable to all readers, especially across “chasms” of time and space. What did Victorian readers—who were reading in the periodical press about the “extinction” of indigenous peoples throughout the British Empire—make of the Negro head tobacco that Magwitch smokes when he returns from Australia to see the gentleman he has made of Pip? What can we make of it now? The problem of temporal displacement is double: it is difficult but partly possible to recover the meanings that such objects may have evoked in the original readers of the text, and difficult to justify the making of our own. Part of the theory of the retention of knowledge as it applies to reading things must take

Reading Things

account of anachronism, and consider it not only as one of the great sources of metonymic instability, richness, and possibility, but also as a source of great and on-going loss. Memory governs, haphazardly and unreliably, both what knowledge is in actual circulation at a given moment, and what knowledge will be searched for and possibly retrieved from that mass of information that is retained by a culture but not always actively remembered or valued. The antiquarian Walter Johnson, in his remarkable book Folk-Memory (1908), describes the vicissitudes of collective memory, and the extent to which such vicissitudes were an object of study in the Victorian period itself: “By folk-memory we mean the conscious or unconscious remembrance, by a people collectively, of ideas connected with the retention of rites and superstitions, habits, and occupations. Such memory may be clear and sound, the outcome of an unbroken succession of impressions; it may be dim and fugitive, almost to the point of extinction; it may be distorted and misleading; it may, by occasion, represent but the recovery of a clue which has, at an earlier period, apparently been quite lost.”60 In a process not unlike that of Vico’s reading of the golden globe, Johnson posits unbroken but largely unconscious lines of memory that inhere in words: he describes “the currier who speaks of his smoothingiron as a ‘stone’ or ‘sleeker’ [who] knows not that his tool is the direct descendant of a prehistoric smoothing stone. The names are mere literary petrifications” (18). These “mere literary petrifications” mean that words suspend things, and their stories, in representations that seem to be largely about something else, and thus preserve them for our later inspection, allowing us to work backwards to get glimpses, what Benjamin would call “flashes,” of the past that they inhabited without us.

V. Social Hieroglyphics In Vico’s theory of language, the first form of writing for Christians, as for the Egyptians and Chinese, was hieroglyphics. The words and tropes that developed from pictographic symbols are

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Introduction

always rooted in the material practices that generated them, even if those practices are forgotten. In Marx’s theory of exchange, the commodity fetish is a social hieroglyphic: we know that we create in commodities things that require investigation and interpretation, and yet those processes are blocked by commodity fetishism—the state of consciousness in which things are abstracted by a money value that is at once naturalized and obviously symbolic: “[W]henever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language.”61 We create or invest the commodity fetish with a symbolic value that we know we do not understand, and we then seek to decode it—“later on.” We wish to translate these social hieroglyphics into our own language, although Marx notes that our own language—like value, like commodities, and like hieroglyphics (both Egyptian and metaphorical)—is also a social product. There is no outside to which we can escape the elaborate constructions of the social, yet these constructions somehow encourage us to wish for knowledge of them, even though that knowledge will be ultimately largely withheld from our enthusiastic, if inadequate, investigations. The word “hieroglyphic” itself requires complex translation: it contains an archive of nineteenth-century knowledge. Hieroglyphics were a subject of lively interest and debate in the first half of the century, the seedling of what became a long-lived craze, Egyptomania. The debate about hieroglyphics and how to read them begins with the accidental finding of the Rosetta Stone by a French artillery officer digging entrenchments for Napoleon in Egypt. The Rosetta Stone, as is well known, was inscribed in

Reading Things

three languages: in hieroglyphics, in Greek, and in a demotic language of Egypt—a kind of simplified hieroglyphics. This made possible the first “scientific” translations of hieroglyphics, initially undertaken by Jean-Franc¸ois Champollion, the founder of modern Egyptology. But the interesting thing about the debates surrounding hieroglyphic translation is that for many, both before and after the finding of the Rosetta Stone, hieroglyphics promised a kind of immediacy of reference and therefore of representation. In American Hieroglyphics, John T. Irwin notes that in pictographic writing “the physical shape of the sign is taken directly from— indeed, is like the shadow of—the physical shape of the object that it stands for. . . . [T]he shape of a sign is in a sense a double of the physical shape of the object it represents.”62 This is not true of all hieroglyphics of course: Auguste Mariette-Bey, in The Monuments of Upper Egypt (1877), describes how the translation of the Rosetta Stone definitively proved that hieroglyphics are not all pictographic. Nonetheless, the longing for a literal language has meant that down to the present moment, tour guides in Egypt must explain to visitors at the Pyramids that hieroglyphics are not in fact solely pictographic. They are a mix of phonetic or syllabic signs, literal signs, and figurative signs: a chessboard, for instance, stands for the sound “men,” a lion stands for a lion, a cubit for justice.63 In what Mariette-Bey calls this “singular medley” (31) of linguistic signage, an analogy arises between the layers of hieroglyphic representation and the interlocking operations of collective knowledge, conscious memory and the unconscious: some kinds of knowledge may be retained and represented literally, some symbolically, some fetishistically, and some not at all. What knowledge can the specifically “social” hieroglyphic retain? Value is secreted in commodities, filling them with meanings that are both literal and figurative. We might say that the commodity is both a material object and a trope: it is literal as a lion is a lion, and figurative as a cubit stands for justice. The

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Introduction

commodity stands for something that is and is not immediately clear to its beholders, but the extraordinary thing is that we have imagined commodities such that they are somehow capable of letting us know that we have turned them into figures: we need to literalize them in order to re-figure them, that is we need to re-materialize them in order to understand their value differently, less abstractly. We stand in relation to our commodities as early Egyptologists stood in relation to hieroglyphics. And our relationship to the things of realism is similar: we take them figurally, but then wonder about them literally, “later on,” in the peripheries of readerly awareness. Hieroglyphics, commodities, fictional objects: all of these fetish-like forms have to be taken both literally and figurally; if we stay with only one pole of the interpretive process we incur the kind of loss Marx describes when he describes commodity fetishism. The things of realism have been fetishized by an emphasis on metaphorical reading: the kind that tends to slight the literal, material qualities of things, and the large, historically enriched figural possibilities these qualities might eventually generate, in favor of their immediate, contextual, conventional figural possibilities. And although this kind of very basic literary reading has of course been supplanted many times over by waves of critical and theoretical change, it has remained largely stuck in place when it comes to the realist object. The Ideas in Things tries to subvert or upend the literary reading—and not reading—of the things of realism. But it does not pretend to engage in an innocent project of reclamation. Fictional things have become fetishes, and the fetish gives us back nothing as it was: it “demystifies and falsifies at the same time. . . . [It] reveals its own techniques of masquerade while putting into doubt any fixed referent.”64 This shadowy nonrevelation reminds us of the extent to which our need for resolution, even of a fictional kind, is at once urgent, poignant, and impossible to meet: our historical investigations do not allow us to transcend historicity—we cannot outsmart our own forms; indeed, we can scarcely read them. But the fetish performs this great service: it “stays in touch with its

Reading Things

original traumatic real and retains a potential access to its own historical story.”65 That access will always be nearly impossible to find and to navigate, and what it reveals or seems to reveal will be difficult and risky to interpret, to write about, to attach properly to the past we need to know and to forget. This book proposes a method of reading the things of the novel that have remained, interpretively speaking, at large. And it tries to explain why such readings, which occur in the margins of everyone’s reading all the time in abbreviated or fleeting form,66 have not been legitimated. “Literal” and “literary” have their common origin in describing letters, in literal letters: in their first usage, both adjectives referred to the alphabet. This book tries to rejoin them after a long and unfriendly separation. As yet unseen connections between historical knowledge and fictional form are recorded in the letter and letters of novelistic things: things that are at once material and figural, fetishized and fugitive, here and gone.

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1 Souvenirs of Sadism: Mahogany Furniture, Deforestation, and Slavery in Jane Eyre The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was. « k a r l m a r x , Capital, v o l . 1 »

Thinking guides and sustains every gesture of the hand. . . . We chose the cabinetmaker’s craft as our example, assuming it would not occur to anybody that this choice indicated any expectation that the state of our planet could in the foreseeable future, or indeed ever, be changed back into a rustic idyll. The cabinetmaker’s craft was proposed as an example of our thinking because the common usage of the word “craft” is restricted to human activities of that sort. However—it was specifically noted that what maintains and sustains even this handicraft is not the mere manipulation of tools, but the relatedness to wood. But where in the manipulations of the industrial worker is there any relatedness to such things as the shapes slumbering within wood? «martin heidegger, “what is called thinking” »

Souvenirs of Sadism From today’s perspective, the subject of timber may seem a bit obscure, but to generations past it was exceedingly mundane. No contemporary resource can match timber’s preeminent ranking in the pre-industrial world. Timber was not only the steel, aluminum, plastic and fiberglass of past ages, but oil, coal, and gas as well. . . . From the cradle to the coffin, the largest percentage of all past material culture has been wooden. « s h a w n w i l l i a m m i l l e r , Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil’s Colonial Timber »

I. Furniture Jane Eyre has been widely discussed as a text of empire; it has less often been commented on as a work about interior decoration. Yet this is a novel that is flush with the details of furniture and drapery; in particular, Charlotte Bront¨e seems to have been something of an aficionado of wood, and we would do well to note whose furniture is made of what. At Gateshead, the residence of the despicable Reed family, there is massive mahogany furniture. At Lowood School, the teacher’s room is furnished in mahogany—undoubtedly in a plainer style and probably in a cheaper variety than that of Gateshead—but the students’ dining room has long “deal tables.” Deal—planks of pine or fir—was the lowliest Victorian wood. Indeed, mahogany and deal are two of the great class markers in Victorian fiction: mahogany, which is always being polished or burnished, represents tasteful opulence or nouveau riche groping for the trappings of bourgeois arrival; deal, which we usually find being scrubbed, can’t approximate the luster of the much more expensive wood, but if it’s clean it connotes honesty and employment in some form of hard work that doesn’t pay well. A third kind of wood gets special mention in Jane Eyre: Thornfield has walnut-paneled walls, and the Rivers siblings have several pieces of walnut furniture. The “age of walnut” in English furniture history runs from 1660–1720, so that possession of walnut furniture in a novel in which empire has spawned much new richness indicates the relatively long duration of a family’s gentility and lineage. The Rivers are cash poor now, but their walnut dresser

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suggests they’ve got good blood (as does Jane, their first cousin, as it miraculously turns out in this most improbably plotted of realist novels). Jane redecorates two residences in the last third of the novel: Moor House, the home of the Rivers siblings, where she is taken in by chance (no one knows yet that they are cousins) after she leaves Thornfield upon learning that Rochester is already married, and Ferndean, to which Rochester decamps when Thornfield conveniently burns to the ground, taking Bertha Mason with it. Jane avoids refurnishing Moor House too extensively; she allows this rural cottage to retain its own history and culture in the fact of its plain, but old and elegant, furnishings. She most aggressively tackles a few rooms that are only minimally furnished. Turning them, oddly enough, into replicas of the infamous red room at Gateshead, she fills them with the “old mahogany” furniture and crimson drapery that contributed to her terror during her imprisonment in the room where her kindly uncle died, taking all of her immediate prospects of happiness with him. She thus creates for herself a souvenir of the sadism she endured at the hands of her cousins and her Aunt Reed at Gateshead; she makes it her own. Jane also buys souvenirs of what might be described as another form of sadism: the deforestation, colonization, and implementation of plantation slavery in the two critical sources of wealth in the novel, Madeira and the Caribbean. “Old” mahogany is probably, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, furniture made in the age of mahogany, 1720–60, when this wood, and furniture made from it, was still being imported in large quantities from those islands.1 When Jane returns to the environs of Thornfield at the end of the novel (after the famous Gothic eruption in which she “hears” Rochester calling her name), an innkeeper tells her about the fire that has burned down the house: “Thornfield Hall is quite a ruin;” he says, “it was burnt down just about harvesttime. A dreadful calamity! Such an immense quantity of valuable property destroyed. Hardly any of the furniture could be saved.”2

Souvenirs of Sadism

It is worth remarking that furniture is of paramount importance; it takes about five more pages for the innkeeper to mention Bertha Mason’s suicide during the fire. And at the end of the novel, the first thing we learn about Ferndean is that it “has been uninhabited and unfurnished” (455). We can only speculate about Jane’s designs on this new residence—no specific plans or purchases are mentioned—but the most important point for now is to notice the benefit of unfurnished space in this novel. Like the fictitious but still convincing “blank” spaces on the map of empire, the idea of empty space invites the exercise of habitation as a demonstration of power.3 The disposition of things in space is also a way of externalizing an internal arrangement of objects and of enacting, however unconsciously, a strict control over them. And it is no mistake that a character like Jane—tough, practical and resilient as she is—would choose mahogany furniture. Because mahogany, according to a handy little book called Wood,4 is termite resistant; it is not subject to dry rot; it has little tendency to warp or twist; it is hard-hearted, which is a good thing for wood, making it dense and heavy; it has a fine straight grain and it polishes up beautifully to a reddish brown hue. It also takes glue exceedingly well, an important characteristic for Victorian furniture making. The great size of mahogany logs and the strength of the wood changed furniture design in the eighteenth century: very large and yet still delicate pieces could be made; the intricate carving and fretwork, skinny legs, and wafer-thin splats, seats, and table tops that characterize much eighteenth-century mahogany furniture (fig. 2) might be imagined as attempting to ornately reverse, in the light airy quality they produce, the literally and figuratively heavy legacy of this wood’s arrival in England. R. W. Symonds, in English Furniture from Charles II to George II, recounts a curious anecdote about the advent of mahogany in England; he cites A Book of English Trades (1823) as his source.5 In the late seventeenth century, one Dr. Gibbons had a brother who was a “West India captain.” This brother brought some planks of mahogany back from the Caribbean because he needed ballast on his return journey to make up for the weight

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figure 2. Mahogany Settee (1760). From Herbert Cescinsky, English Furniture of the Eighteenth Century, Vol. II. (London: The Waverly Book Company, Ltd., n.d.—circa 1928).

of the slaves he had delivered. On his return to England, he gave the planks to his brother Dr. Gibbons, who was in the midst of building a house. Initially the builders employed by Dr. Gibbons found the wood too hard to work with, but eventually he prevailed on them to make a candle box. The beauty of the wood was so striking that he commissioned a chest of drawers, which visitors admired immensely, and from this humble start, according to Symonds, mahogany as a furniture wood began to be imported into England in large quantities. Jane can afford to refurnish and refurbish Moor House and Ferndean because she inherits a large sum from her uncle, an agent in Madeira of a trading company owned, in another almost unbelievable coincidence of connection, by the Mason family in Jamaica. During this period, Jane’s uncle, John Eyre, was probably exporting the very popular madeira wine to the West Indies and Britain. Thornfield and Ferndean can be maintained because of the proceeds of this trading company in Madeira and

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because of the profits from a sugar plantation, also owned by the Mason family, in Jamaica. Curiously enough, some of the finest mahogany once came from Madeira and the Caribbean; indeed, in the Caribbean the word “madeira” meant mahogany (as well as wine) well into the nineteenth century. The world of Jane Eyre is decorated with the literal and figural proceeds of Atlantic trade in these two crucial locations. Both places were deforested of mahogany and planted with the cash crops that allow Jane Eyre to furnish her world with souvenirs, in the form of mahogany furniture, of the original material source of her wealth. I’m going to argue in this chapter that Jane’s purchase and placement of mahogany furniture symbolizes, naturalizes, domesticates, and internalizes the violent histories of deforestation, slavery, and the ecologically and socially devastating cultivation of cash crops in Madeira and Jamaica. In a recent book on consumer protest in the eighteenth century, Charlotte Sussman has argued that colonial products like tea and sugar made consumers anxious because they threatened to bring home the violence that attended their production.6 This anxiety suggests the ways in which acts of consumption were regarded as moral choices at a moment that seems to be prior to the development of the consciousness Marx called commodity fetishism. Rather than being disavowed in the form of fetishes, the social relations of production that inhere in commodities were still all too present to protesting eighteenth-century consumers: an anxiety-reducing containment system for such cultural knowledge had not yet been developed. And for at least some consumers in the following century, the social relations of production also remained available to consciousness, but quite happily in many cases. The symbolic compression of violence in mahogany furniture was not a source of anxiety for a character like Jane—a poor, small, female person—but a source from which to draw consolation and a sense of power. Jane’s ability to buy this fetish means that she can avow and disavow its history, and so can we: it will hide in plain sight in the rooms of her home and it will hide interpretively as a reality effect for the

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very readers of the novel who would otherwise have made this connection long ago, especially feminist and postcolonial critics who have been confined, by critical canons, to allegorical modes of reading.7 The ability to read fables of gender into the nineteenthcentury novel, or to historicize the stories of poor governesses and creole madwomen, has revolutionized the criticism of the novel, and without it, the reading I do here would be impossible. But the intransigently allegorical mode of criticism blocks the reading of the material properties and relations of objects that don’t give us immediate clues that will help us construct what we have come to understand as literary, rather than literal, meaning. For “the allegorist,” Benjamin reminds us, “objects represent only keywords in a secret dictionary.”8 In the secret dictionary of novel criticism—the dictionary about which initiates must prove their knowledge—objects are weak metonyms for the subjects they adorn or generic markers of the real they indicate. The method of this book, that of the collector, requires a moment of forestalling allegory, and of taking things literally. My project here is to imagine, like Benjamin’s collector, that “the world is present, and indeed ordered” in certain objects.9 That ordering is not an allegory, but a history. And it is not the history that the novel narrates, but the history that the novel secretes: the history it hides and emits, the one it conceals and produces as it calls to mind the locations of deforestation and slavery for which mahogany is a metaphor, a metonym, and a literal representation.

II. Forests The geographical coordinates of Jane Eyre—Britain, Madeira, and Jamaica—allow the novel to revisit and remember the violence that inheres in the history and geography of British colonization, slavery, and trade. The first step in these processes, wherever they take place, is to clear land. If, as ecology and now ecocriticism have taught us, civilization and forests have

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been historically at odds with one another, empires and forests are particularly and chronically in conflict. Robert Pogue Harrison points out that “Rome . . . triumph[ed] over the great forest mass of the ancient world. The forests were literally everywhere: Italy, Gaul, Spain, Britain, the ancient Mediterranean basin as a whole. The prohibitive density of these forests had once safeguarded the relative autonomy and diversity of the family- and city-states of antiquity, precisely because they offered a margin of cultural privacy. . . . The forests were obstacles—to conquest, hegemony, homogenization. . . . [T]hey enabled communities to develop indigenously, hence they served to localize the spirit of place.”10 Deforestation had already become a serious problem in England by the sixteenth century. Measures were being taken for conservation, and books were being written on what would come to be called sustainable forestry. In 1598, for example, John Manwood (a person obviously destined to do such scholarship) wrote A Treatise of the Laws of the Forest, a work that anticipates descriptions of contemporary ecology: “Before this nation was replenished with inhabitants, there were many great woods full of all sorts of wild beasts then known in England; and after the same came to be inhabited, the woods were, by degrees, destroyed, especially near the houses; and as the land increased in people, so the woods and coverts were daily destroyed, and by that means, the wild beasts retired to those woods which were left standing, and which were remote from their habitations.”11 Acts for the preservation of woods were passed to “safeguard future timber supplies” even before Manwood’s work appeared.12 The aptly named Manwood, in other words, is reflecting an environmental consciousness that is already well formed by the late sixteenth century. Jane Eyre remembers the deforestation of England: Jane comes to understand, as a child reading Gulliver’s Travels, that there are no elves left in England, because they have all gone “to some savage country where the woods were wilder and thicker, and the population more scant” (53). The deforestation of England

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was initially the result of imperial aggression visited on Britain by Rome; it was extended by the need for firewood and building materials—especially for the ships of the Royal Navy, and by the aggression against the landscape produced by enclosure—a process that was reaching the culmination of its official, that is to say, parliamentary phase at the same time that Jane Eyre was being written and published. The enclosure of common or unowned land seals the gate against one of the final vestiges of feudalism in England: “the commoning economy.” Commoners, the historian J. M. Neeson tells us, were the last of the English peasantry; enclosure made them into a working class.13 The “closing of the countryside”14 begets a new class that must figure out how to get its living within an economy that is unforgivingly modern and grossly underdeveloped, especially for women, especially in rural areas. When Jane leaves Thornfield on learning that Rochester is married, she arrives in the town of Whitcross, asks what the “chief trade” of the place is, and learns that some are “farm labourers; a good deal work . . . at Mr. Oliver’s needle-factory, and at the foundry.” Mr. Oliver does not employ women, it turns out. Jane then asks, “[W]hat do the women do?” She gets the vague but nonetheless accurate answer for much of rural England at this time: “Some does one thing, and some another. Poor folk mun get on as they can” (353). In Jane Eyre, enclosure is imagined twice. First, at Lowood School, where the whole system is writ small: “The garden was a wide enclosure, surrounded with walls so high as to exclude every glimpse of prospect; a covered veranda ran down one side, and broad walks bordered a middle space divided into scores of little beds; these beds were assigned as gardens for the pupils to cultivate, and each bed had an owner” (80). Part of the making of the modern individual, a process to which Jane Eyre the novel and Jane Eyre the character made, and continue to make, a powerful contribution, is this kind of competitive individuation: one girl, one plot of land, one set of results accruing to each owner.

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In this school and in its garden, Jane learns how to perform another kind of enclosure, the enclosure of the self. When she believes that Rochester and Blanche Ingram are going to be married, she forcefully reins herself in: “When I was once more alone, I reviewed the information I had got; I looked into my heart, examined its thoughts and feelings, and endeavored to bring back with a strict hand such as had been straying through imagination’s boundless and tractless waste, into the safe fold of common sense” (190). Subjectivity has no limits or boundaries: it is a wasteland, a wilderness that must be enclosed by a strict “hand” reaching inside the self, ordering its contents, and closing its borders. Enclosure requires deforestation; deforestation in turn guarantees the legible demarcation of space—its visibility and its representability. And yet the ugly remains of deforestation haunt Jane Eyre just as surely as its benefits underwrite crucial ideas and practices concerning the organization of subjective, domestic, and national space. In a desperate moment, after Bertha Mason attacks her brother and he is treated and removed from Thornfield, Rochester figures his home as a collection of the waste products of the deforestation process. He tells Jane that she cannot discern that the “polished woods” are mere “refuse chips and scaly bark.” Pointing to the “leafy enclosure” they have entered, Rochester continues, “Now here . . . all is real, sweet and pure” (244). This bit of artificial wilderness on the grounds of Thornfield promises a form of wildness that can be strictly controlled: arbors, hedges, gardens, and enclosures seem to offer protection from both civilization and nature.15 Or perhaps such cultivations promise a respite from attempts to balance what have long been imagined as the competing claims of the structures imagined oppositionally as “civilization” and “nature.” A novel haunted by the ecological devastation of two far-flung archipelagoes, by the advent of a particularly horrific system of plantation slavery, by an inability to properly—which is to say spontaneously— domesticate national space might well need such a respite.

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III. Trading Places The Madeira Islands, an archipelago some four hundred miles off the coast of Africa between the Azores and the Canary Islands, were colonized by the Portuguese in the early fifteenth century, or more accurately, peopled by them, since the islands were uninhabited.16 Madeira, the largest island of the group, means “wood” in Portuguese, and indeed, when it was discovered, the lower reaches of this very mountainous island were thickly timbered with a variety of fine wood-producing trees, including mahogany. Colonists burned off much of this wood in legendary conflagrations that lasted between seven and ten years and that, perhaps apocryphally, sometimes sent colonists fleeing into the ocean to prevent themselves from being devoured by flames along with Madeira’s trees. Once the island was adequately deforested, cash crops were brought in. Sugar cane came from Sicily, and it thrived (as sick Britons would later) in Madeira’s mild climate, and by 1500, most of the sugar consumed in Europe came from Madeira.17 Grapes were also imported, from Crete and Cyprus, and by 1700, wine replaced sugar as the chief export, and this wine was largely exported to the West Indian and North American colonies, often in exchange for, ironically, timber—the resource Madeira had once had in abundance. The export of wine was facilitated by Madeira’s critical position in Atlantic trading routes: ships from England headed to the east or the west often stopped at Madeira for revictualling. Both the sugar and the grapes of Madeira were harvested by slaves. The first slaves in Madeira were Guanches, the indigenous people of the Canary Islands, who were taken as prisoners of war during Portuguese raids on the Spanish colony. In Ecological Imperialism, Alfred Crosby notes that only the Arawak Indians of the Caribbean compare to the Guanches in the earliness of their extinction due to the depredations of European colonization.18 Once the Guanches had been entirely killed off, Madeirans turned to Africa for their slaves, and Madeira became one of the first places in which African slaves were used

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exclusively in a plantation system, marking an epoch in the history of slavery, forming “the pattern” that was then “to dominate the New World.”19 In an 1890 memoir that surveys much of the Victorian period, Leaves from a Madeira Garden, Charles Thomas-Stanford notes that “Madeira has indeed been long a household word in Great Britain. Its generous wine has played an important part in producing the hereditary goutiness of the nation; and its genial climate is remembered in many families as having mitigated the sufferings of an invalid relation.”20 Less happily, the Madeira diary of Fanny Burney’s great niece, Fanny Anne Burney, is punctuated by a death count of Britons from tuberculosis: she notes how difficult it can be to procure traditional British mourning clothes in Funchal when “several invalids have died in a short space of time.”21 Such descriptions alternate with more typical travel writing, including enthusiastic descriptions of the “extremely picturesque” Vinhatico, or “island mahogany,” and minute detailing of the varieties of grape used in making madeira wine.22 The familiarity of Madeira to nineteenth-century Britons is also suggested by Jane herself: when Bessie tells Jane about her uncle, John Eyre, Bessie can’t remember the name of the island where he lives, but Jane guesses it immediately based on the single fact that Bessie can recall: that it produces wine. Two hundred years after the deforestation and colonization of Madeira, that is, in the seventeenth century, Jamaica and other Caribbean islands were also heavily deforested and colonized for the purpose of producing cash crops, chiefly sugar. Just as Madeira had been the principle supplier of sugar to Europe until the seventeenth century, the Caribbean colonies became the principle supplier of sugar in the eighteenth. As it was in Madeira, and in Thornfield, I might add, much of the wood was cleared through burning, but fine furniture woods like mahogany were also exported in large quantities, causing what A World Geography of Forest Resources describes as a “heavy drain in precious woods,” which combined with “clearing for plantations and subsistence crops . . . led to the destruction of most of the accessible forests

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[not only in Jamaica but throughout] the West Indies.”23 Jamaica, like Madeira, was also a major port of call in Atlantic trade and functioned as a distribution point for both slaves and sugar, so that it had a critical imperial role as both a trading and a plantation colony.24 One crucial difference between the two islands is that although Madeira’s economy was unofficially but for all intents and purposes run by the British from the seventeenth century until the 1970s, it was not a colony.25 It was and is a province of Portugal. Madeira, politically (or theoretically) speaking, was free to trade with Europe and European colonies without protection or impediment from a home government. Jamaica was, of course, a colony of Britain, and like all the West Indian colonies, heavily protected until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The British government kept the price of Caribbean sugar high by barring imports of sugar into Britain (and British colonies) from other places. In other words, the West Indian plantocracy did not have to compete in an open or “free” market either in terms of production (since they relied on slave labor) or distribution (since their monopoly on British and colonial markets was government protected). Jane Eyre, in an implicit brief for free trade, suggests the result of this protection in the characterization of Richard Mason, Bertha’s brother. He is weak, effeminate, and unable to tolerate the lack of central heating in Thornfield. The contempt with which Mason is treated in Jane Eyre by Jane— who knows nothing of “creole” stereotypes, and by Rochester, who finds them confirmed in this sickly and ineffectual man— suggests the extent to which the planter class became despised by many metropolitan Britons both for its wealth and for the fact that it was not earned competitively—even if those critical souls had not themselves earned their own wealth on a particularly level playing field. Jane Eyre was written and published at the height of the free trade debates that raged throughout the first four decades of the nineteenth century; the Corn Laws were repealed finally in 1846, one year before the novel’s publication. Free trade produced,

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according to its advocates, a kind of wealth any Briton could be proud of because the competition involved in it was imagined as fair. And it is no mistake that it is wealth from the informal, or what some historians have called, often with intended irony, the “free trade empire,”26 that saves the day (and provides new furniture) in Jane Eyre. In the pro-free-trade argument, the noncolonizing form of imperialism is a far less expensive and less politically arduous way to get the stuff—the natural resources and the cash crops—out of various places in exchange for British manufactures. The case of wood reveals starkly the uneven playing field of so-called free trade. Places that are deforested are put in the paradoxical position of then having to get their timber elsewhere. Either they can consider places in the north where conservation and property laws disallow the kind of ransacking that makes natural resources cheap in the south, or they can look to other parts of the south that are currently undergoing the ransacking of their natural resources by the north—Madeira, for example, turned to Jamaica for lumber in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An ecological economist points out that “the environment, which is one of the factors of production, is owned as unregulated common property in the South, and as private property in the North.” She goes on to argue that “the south produces and exports environmentally intensive goods to a greater degree than is efficient, and at prices that are below social costs.”27 Adam Thorpe argues that although “the richest long-term resource of equatorial Africa is the forest . . . known officially as the Congo Basin Rainforest. . . . [W]e Europeans are busy getting rid of it. Most of the damage is done by European mining and logging companies, and most of the clientele are European—lovers of mahogany wardrobes.” He points out that “Nigeria, once a major exporter of timber, now has to import the stuff.” A “mature mahogany,” he continues, “is worth about $30,000, of which some $30 goes to its country of origin.”28 Compare this statement to a report in the London Times in 1823 of “the largest and finest log of mahogany ever imported into this country.” It is

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purchased by one James Hodgson for 378 pounds, and afterwards sold by him for 525 pounds, “and if it open well, is supposed to be worth a thousand.” In free trade, practice seems to make for ever more perfect profits.

IV. Souvenirs and Selfhood John Maynard Keynes described free trade as the “most fervent expression of laissez faire,” and we might imagine that, as such, it forms the global analogue for the nineteenth-century fantasy of an intensely self-determining individualism—a fantasy that arises, as Marx notes in the Grundrisse, at the moment of the “most developed social relations.”29 Gayatri Spivak has famously argued that in Jane Eyre, “[w]hat is at stake, for feminist individualism in the age of imperialism is precisely the making of human beings, the construction and ‘interpellation’ of the subject not as individual, but as ‘individualist.’”30 In this highly compressed formulation, Spivak links feminism, liberal individualism, and imperialism and suggests that the master narrative is imperialism. Imperialism dictates or requires a certain narrative of liberal individualism, and that becomes the narrative available to both nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberal feminists. She later calls this narrative “abject.” I agree to the extent that it is essentially contradictory for a nineteenth-century British woman to think of herself as an individual, although she can be an individualist. By this I mean that although socially, legally, politically, and economically women were not recognizably individuals throughout most the nineteenth century, they were still free to subscribe to the ideology of individualism and therefore could be individualists. They could be individualists without being able to be individuals themselves; they could aspire—like the poor, the colonized, the racially, ethnically or religiously disenfranchised—to a condition that they could not attain. Imperialism, ever productive of ideological bounty, offers Jane a second narrative, and this one is not abject, but instead usefully

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sadistic. In this narrative, subjection, first of the self and then of others, makes for subjecthood.31 This narrative runs counter to Freud’s trajectory of sadomasochism, in which sadism precedes and evolves into masochism. In Freud’s account, aggressive impulses are initially directed at objects outside the self; only then are these impulses turned inward, against the self.32 But in the imperial narrative of sadism, the narrative that forms the structure of Jane Eyre as bildungsroman, and that suggests a template for female individualism, masochism comes at the beginning of the story. In this narrative, the psychoanalytic progression of sadism to masochism is reversed, destructive impulses are usefully remembered as originating in a relationship with the self, and, in a movement we think of as characteristic of empire, such impulses are then directed outward, in an ever-expanding scope, to objects outside the self. I would argue that selves and empires are imagined to work from the inside out in order to provide fantasies of a tradition or a history of mastery. Nationalism is often imagined as prior to empire; this precedence is often referred to casually, as though it were self-evident that it is the originary, motivating and sustaining ideology of imperial expansion. But there is much evidence to suggest that nationalism comes after empire,33 in the same way that the word (and to some extent the concept) “heterosexuality” postdates the word “homosexuality.” In other words, a “normative” identity is often constructed on the run, after the need for it is realized because of the presence of something alien or something that needs to be made alien. In the early colonization of the Caribbean and South Asia, Britons initially formed new and hybrid cultures, however problematically, with indigenous people and with slaves—the terms “creole” and “Anglo-Indian” suggest such cultural mingling. It was not until the nineteenth century that a national identity took shape in a form we now recognize, and some historians have argued that what we regard as a nearly antediluvian “Englishness” is largely a late nineteenth century invention.34

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Jane, like the small island of England at the heart of a largely overseas empire, needs to remember herself as master of herself. Jane the adult recounts Jane the child executing extraordinary feats of self-discipline and control.35 Jane the child, for example, finds out how to tell her story to her beloved teacher Miss Temple in a way that will give it credibility. She learns (from no less of an authority on masochism than her tubercular schoolmate and romantic friend Helen Burns) that if she withholds the “wormwood and gaul” from her narrative, even though she genuinely feels the bitterness they evoke, she is more likely to be believed. Jane alienates her story from her self and imagines it as the object of another’s attention. It becomes a souvenir of her self, an object through which she can remember her own mastery. She becomes the kind of first-person narrator of a realist novel that we now immediately recognize as somehow normative, as is the fact that this novel can be subtitled “an autobiography.” In the process, Jane delimits a space for her own subjectivity; she sets the boundaries across which the self cannot venture, because she knows that selves, when left to themselves, tend toward an infinite vagrancy. The enclosure of the self makes a clearing, a space around the edges of which disorder is kept at bay. One of the lessons of Jane Eyre, and one of the reasons it is something of an owner’s manual for the modern self, is that it imagines subjective interiority in terms of space: space that can be enclosed. Like the modern nation-state, the self has borders beyond which it will no longer be itself. But if the modern self follows the logic and ideology of enclosure in this novel, it also follows the logic and ideology of free trade. The bounds of the self must be strong and yet permeable, able to open up to exchange with others; subjectivity thrives when it can get from others that which it cannot produce for itself. The subjective analogue to free trade occurs in the novel at the level of metonymy: its details are drawn from a truly international frame. The claustrophobic spatial limitations of Jane’s life stand in remarkable contrast to the extraordinary range of reference her

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intellect and imagination produce. Jane conjures up seraglios, harems, suttee, and slavery, and critics have responded with a usefully complex set of arguments about Bront¨e’s alignments and nonalignments of Jane with “Oriental,” colonized, and enslaved peoples.36 What I want to point out here is that Jane marshals experiences of abjection to build her own sense of subjectivity and a sense of control over it. She transforms the practices of domination she has experienced and those she imagines into material out of which to construct and understand her self; there can be no limits placed on her use of this material and in this sense she is free to trade in that which she has discovered about the world and the conditions of oppression in it. Jane’s experiences of mastery are very specifically built on her knowledge of oppression in general and slavery in particular. She feels herself to be held unjustly captive by her cousin John Reed early in the novel and declares herself a rebel slave; she claims this identity again in the face of what she experiences as Rochester’s oppressively intense affection. Jenny Sharpe and Susan Meyer have pointed out that Jane threatens to organize precisely the kind of uprisings that rocked the Caribbean throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.37 The novel invokes a metaphorical slavery to enact its metaphorical overthrow in a risky allegorical gambit: the rebellions of slaves have only recently overthrown French domination in Haiti (in 1803) and have very nearly overthrown European hegemony time and again throughout the Caribbean. And former slaves are still rebelling in the region when Jane Eyre is being written: the historian Woodville Marshall points out that “[r]iots were a commonplace of the post-slavery British Caribbean in much the same way that slave revolts were a feature of slavery.”38 In Jane Eyre, Bront¨e dares to use a pressing historical issue for secondary symbolic gain, and although women and workers have “harnessed” the language of the antislavery movement “for articulating their own struggles for equality,”39 the particulars of a very recent form of slavery come into scandalous analogy with the workings

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of domination and submission in one of the emblematically heterosexual relationships of nineteenth-century British literature, that of Rochester and Jane.

V. The Politics of Shopping Jane decorates, but she refuses to be decorated. On the prenuptial shopping trip to Milcote, she refuses to buy much of anything, she will not be “tricked out in stage trappings” to become one of the many characters in Rochester’s busy imagination: “I will be myself,” she says flatly (288). But of course she knows that is not enough. Acutely aware of the fine-tuning that must be continually performed on the dynamics of power relations, Jane learns quickly how to maintain the upper hand with Rochester, teasing and torturing him to just the right distance from the edge of the brink: “[Y]ou master me,” Rochester says, “[Y]ou seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I am twining the soft, silken skein, round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm to my heart. I am influenced—conquered; and the influence is sweeter than I can express; and the conquest I undergo has a witchery beyond any triumph I can win” (289). In what might be described as a high-speed Hegelian master/slave dialectic, Jane and Rochester change places every other paragraph or so. Readers, like onlookers at a shell game, are never sure who is master at what moment, or if the apparent master is really the slave of a canny and apparently powerless master. Perhaps power is best held on to by someone like Jane, who can disavow and thereby maintain mastery behind a screen of cunningly convincing abjection. When Rochester asks Jane to give up what he calls her “governessing slavery” once they decide to get married, Jane insists on continuing it. In this exchange, Jane Eyre and Jane Eyre do a quintessentially Victorian ideological thing: the novel and its narrator-heroine begin to make an actual historical problem into a part of a newly constructed unchanging human condition.40 In rendering a problem transhistorical, and thereby spiritual and

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psychological and above all, individual, its solution lies also in the realm of the spiritual and what will become the psychological—in the realm of individual interiority. You don’t have to be a slave if you don’t want to be one; if you think of yourself as free, you are free. This is the language and ideology of much of the self-help movement, from Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help of 1859 to the current crop of works that would teach us to how to live happily in the world no matter how terrible it is. These radically individualist ideas were the paradoxical lot of smart women in the nineteenth century, some of whom refused feminism in any of its early forms because they did not want to be identified with or reduced to the limitations of their gender.41 Being a woman first and foremost and part of a group of women would be incompatible with being an individual. So returning to Spivak’s idea of the centrality of Jane Eyre in the imagining of the female individualist, women are abject as women, but they are subjects as genderless individuals—a condition women can attain only in the privacy of their own minds, the place where novel reading goes on.

VI. Metonyms of Mastery The curious thing about madeira wine is that like mahogany, like Jane, and like the individualist that Jane would teach us to become, it is almost preternaturally rugged and resilient. The wine of Madeira actually gets better during its passage across the Atlantic: “Madeiras do not spoil in hot weather; heat actually ripens and improves them, and a passage in the hold of a sailing ship, through burning tropical waters, results in a better wine. Madeiras do not mind being moved about, transported by ship or cart, and no amount of rough handling will damage them; quite the contrary, the more madeira is banged about, the better it tastes. Thus it was that the nineteenth-century Englishman demanded that his madeira be imported, not directly from the island, but by way of the West Indies or Brazil, where it would benefit from the hot and agitated voyage.”42 Madeira wine is thus

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a poster child for Atlantic trade, perhaps the only “commodity” that actually benefited from the rigors of its journey. Some of the cost of the millions of African people who died in the same passage is literally, symbolically, and horrifically recuperated by the extraordinary profits made on this peripatetic aperitif (or digestif). These profits allow Jane to buy the furniture that remembers, as it were, the ubiquity of slavery in the geography and the history of Atlantic trade. Slaves—despite their problematic propensity to die in transit, to commit suicide from ships or once landed, to escape to what was left of the Caribbean forests and live as Maroons—are remembered, along with the mahogany that they cleared and to which brown and black people have since been likened endlessly, in the furniture that Jane buys as the sign of her own independence and financial freedom.43 They are remembered in this symbolic reification, despite the extent and near success of their rebellions, as permanently subject to British control. And the bad news continues: someone like Jane needs souvenirs of this kind of sadism. They are the coordinates on the map of selfhood drawn by a small, poor, plain girl who would be a rebel slave. She becomes instead a master, and a master of Atlantic metonyms of mastery. And this is not a paradox: it is the logical narrative trajectory in an individualist meritocracy. Victorian novels would seem to proffer a limited set of narrative possibilities, tricked out, to borrow Bront¨e’s phrase, in an infinite wardrobe of significant and insignificant detail. Our endless task is to undo what Susan Stewart has called “the hierarchy of detail,” the structure that generates various ideologies of the real, invisibly and insidiously: “Realistic genres do not mirror everyday life,” she writes, “they mirror its hierarchization of information. They are mimetic in the stance they take toward this organization and hence are mimetic of values, not of the material world.”44 What we “figure out” about a novel and its meanings has been prefigured by the order of detail, as well as by the

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history of the literary novel and of novel criticism and the directions that criticism gives us about how to read, or more importantly how not read, those details. To fasten on certain details— and undoubtedly mahogany furniture is one such detail—is to risk making an incredibly goofy interpretive blunder. It cannot be a symbol, or fetish, or symptom: furniture, after all, is not “the superfluous, perplexing, derailing detail” Emily Apter describes as the fetish in fiction.45 There is nothing particularly confusing, alarming, or notable about the presence of wooden furniture in a Victorian novel: it doesn’t stand out, it just stands. I am trying to make the furniture of Jane Eyre into what Marx would call a “social hieroglyphic”: to treat it as a complex and partly legible sign, to help us get “behind the secret of our own social products.”46 The fact that furniture is not generally interpreted in all its woody splendor means that it can do lots of unapprehended symbolic work in the novel. An apparently innocent object like a mahogany dresser or a walnut panel decorates the moral and moralized space of the novel’s winners, while sneaking in the true extent of their morally precarious triumph and evoking useful and self-protective memories of imperial mastery. Britons knew where their wood was coming from, especially that tropical treasure, mahogany. Even the slightest end table, the most unassuming side chair, could be a souvenir of sadism for Victorian readers of the novel. But like the hieroglyphic, or the fetish, it can also remain illegible, its knowledge disavowed. In literary criticism, this second option has seemed the most reasonable one for a long time in the reading of prose fiction: it is the one I am trying to make strange. Because we contemporary readers of Victorian fiction have lost many of the possible meanings of the things of those bulky, item-ful novels, what might be called the social destruction of meaning47 in the novel has unwittingly been abetted by practices of reading that ignore the literal or material qualities of objects, the very qualities that might take us back in time to the meanings and resonances these objects may have had for earlier

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readers. What we take to be our interpretive and theoretical canniness becomes a kind of disability: the long standing, and largely unnoticed, degradation of metonymy has moved “things” further and further away from the possibility of meaning anything. To interpret most of the things of realism means performing a kind of broad-based recovery effort: scouring archives of all kinds; following the things of the novel as if they might be significantly, rather than weakly, meaningful, as if they might have ideas about history in them that the novel does not and perhaps could not narrate explicitly. Eventually, metonymy might be removed from its place as the figure of hopelessly flighty contingency48 and reread as a figure of compellingly significant contiguity.

VII. Tourism and the Pastoral At the end of Jane Eyre, Ferndean must be transformed from its former status as a hunting lodge into a haven of domesticity. Its wooded surroundings are initially described as “ineligible and insalubrious” (455), but in just a few pages it becomes a paradise found. Jane and Rochester, after deciding (again) to get married, “entered the wood, and wended homeward” (473). The novel seems to slip its generic constraints and enter the pastoral, symbolically undoing the violence to various landscapes and peoples that it has so faithfully recorded. Jane and Rochester, who have long described one another as various kinds of woodland creatures—fairies, sprites, elves, and brownies—return to what has been rhetorically invoked and evoked as their natural habitat. Their naturalization in this environment reaches its apex when they both agree that Rochester himself is something of a tree: not the “old lightning-struck chestnut-tree at Thornfield” (469), as he describes himself, but rather, as Jane has it, a “green and vigorous” tree around which plants will grow with the “safe prop” of his strength. And sure enough, some sketchily narrated reproduction follows.

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Like Jane and Rochester, Madeira and Jamaica are returned to a pastoral condition in the second half of the nineteenth century, even as they continue to be bound in relations of domination with the North Atlantic: both islands become, from the mid-nineteenth century, increasingly reliant on the tourist industry, which is, in the description of the historian Frank Taylor, “a South Atlantic system . . . of hotel chains and of profiteering based on a new kind of trade in human beings.”49 Indeed, in the nineteenth century, the two islands begin to compete for visitors. Both become places where invalids can regain their health, even though Jamaica had long been associated with yellow fever in particular and broken health generally. It becomes suddenly safe: Robert Baird, in his memoir, Impressions and Experiences of the West Indies and North America in 1849, observes that “Jamaica as a place of sanitary resort” is likely “if not to supersede, at least greatly to interfere with the island of Madeira in that respect, and certainly truth compels me to admit that there are few places to which an invalid from Europe could go with better hope or benefit than the salubrious island of Jamaica.”50 Visitors from the North Atlantic return to the scene of their collective historical crime, to enjoy and to benefit from that which they very nearly wiped out—the natural habitat. The habitat they find, and the one we find in tourist brochures, is of course a recent habitat, one created by heavy deforestation, cash crops, and an enrichment of the soil produced by literally working people—in all their nitrogenous richness—into the ground. The social relations of these people, the nameless inhabitants of the Caribbean who do not find subjecthood in the Victorian novel or in histories of the “first world,” are recovered through reading the properties and relations of objects like mahogany furniture. Through such readings, we can move beyond the impasses that are soon reached in discussions of the identity and meaning that can or should be assigned to the mad creole woman in the attic. The explicit subjects of fiction are not the only subjects of fiction. The idea of reification as we have long understood

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it ought to have indicated this to us before now: social relations hide in things. When we start looking into them, the long violence of empire reaches home, not only to Moor House and Ferndean, but also to the home in which we read Jane Eyre, the novel that teaches us how to be at home in a place as uncanny as the world it describes.

2 Coziness and Its Vicissitudes: Checked Curtains and Global Cotton Markets in Mary Barton I cannot manage politics. « e l i z a b e t h g a s k e l l , Letter to George Smith, 26 August 1857 »

“Fustian” means bombast and both mean cotton: cotton was used to stuff one’s ears against the kind of overblown language that was then named, in a kind of metonymic somersault, for the ear plugs that protect against it. “Bombast” originally referred to raw cotton, or cotton wool; fustian—the ancient textile of Manchester—was a cotton and linen fabric.1 Made at first by hand, on spinning wheels and handlooms, then on spinning jennies and power looms, then on throstle spinners and mule spinners and even bigger power looms, fustian was used for clothes, upholstery, and drapery—blue and white checked curtains, for example. Fustian was originally a coarse, thick textile, with a tough linen warp and a thinner cotton weft; eventually (with the advent of the mule spinner, to be precise) it was made from cotton exclusively and began to be called (and this will be significant) calico. In the nineteenth century, the term “fustian jackets” became a metonym for

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laboring-class men; when the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor (himself accused of bombast more than once)2 returned in 1841 to speak in Manchester after a long absence, he began his address: “I have appeared Brother Chartists and working men amongst you in fustian, the emblem of your order, . . . to convince you, at a single glance, that what I was when I left you, the same I do return to you.”3 This partial etymology suggests a history of the metonymic range fustian has commanded, giving us a sense of how ideas lurk in things. It demonstrates as well how metonymies occasionally pause in their onward, or wayward, narrative movements to become metaphors, that is to say, definitions. Indeed, metonymy is largely ignored until it becomes metaphor: only then does it form what seem to be unitary or necessary meanings. As a result of this neglect, a thing in a novel can enclose and encode far-flung peoples, practices, and places in a loose, nonsymbolic grip because we don’t typically “read” such things; they have historically fallen below the threshold of literary interpretation. Fustian and calico hold a host of meanings in their names, in their histories, and, quite literally, in their rough and smooth textures. Part of the genealogy of coziness that we can trace in checked curtains is that they mark a continuity with the preindustrial past of East Lancashire, which was geographically and geologically ideal for the textile manufacture before it became a commercial and technological center of the factory-based industry. The numerous nonnavigable rivers of the region were used solely for their currents, which were kept swift by streams running “from the great natural reservoirs formed by the peat bogs of the uplands.” And the water of these rivers was ideal for printing textiles, since it was “filtered by the millstone grit beneath the peat,” making it soft and lime free and thus it enabled fabrics to take soap well and not resist dye.4 The seeming newness of the cotton manufacture is belied or mitigated by the presence of a textile that some readers would remember in its former handmade state—readers in 1848 (the date of Mary Barton’s publication) might even still own such a textile, or remember owning it in childhood. Fustian came

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before the spinning jenny and the factory system that followed it: it might have suggested to many Victorian readers of the novel a textile heritage and tradition capable of smoothing the rough edges of industrial rupture. Indeed, fustian retains its old meaning well into the nineteenth century, even though it has come to include, after 1780, not only the heavy cloth like denim and jean that was associated with the laboring class, but also the more expensive (because handfinished) “raised pile fabrics such as velveret and corduroy.”5 To some extent, fustian and calico have changed places by the time of Mary Barton: calico, which in its Indian form was a luxury import, becomes in its British incarnation a low-priced and utilitarian textile. The checked curtains that recur at significant narrative moments in Mary Barton were probably made of English calico (although in their checked-ness they still recall fustian); they indicate domesticity, and hence orderly relations between men and women, children and adults, home and world. But calico contains within its very name the history of the deindustrialization of the Indian textile manufacture, and the rise to dominance of British cotton production. This cloth contains in its very warp and weft, we might say, significant historical threads of the uneven development that characterized (and characterizes) a global economy. Meant to mark a definite boundary between the domestic and the foreign, the inside and the outside, calico—with its inescapable (and for the Victorian readers of the novel but not for us, obvious) international affiliations—suggests how difficult it is to draw such boundaries by the mid-nineteenth century. The selective history of calico that I tell in this chapter is not an allegory of the story of Manchester life that Mary Barton tells; it is, rather, a disruption. Thus, what follows is not so much a “reading” of that novel as it is a meditation on the way that the history of calico unravels the ideological work of domesticity as Gaskell tries to deploy it. The blue and white curtains that promise protection at key narrative moments have been purchased at the expense of the laborers who make them in England, and the laborers who no longer make them in South Asia.

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I. Coziness Mary Barton opens with two mill-working families, the Bartons and the Wilsons, on a holiday walk in the countryside just outside Manchester. They are on their way back to the city and as the characters traverse the space between the country and the city, we as readers move through time. The rural backgrounds of many of the now-urban characters in the novel are implied as are the enclosure of the British countryside and the movement of agricultural laborers toward the initially (and relatively) high-paying jobs that early factories offered. Cotton mills are often pictorially represented during this period as surrounded by undeveloped land—with cows or sheep and a shepherd for emphasis, as if to invoke—or more precisely, to invent—an industrial pastoral (fig. 3).6 Such illustrations enact a partial compression of space in order to suggest at least a partial continuity of production and ways of life over time. Although for most of the eighteenth century mills had to be on rivers for the power provided by their currents—the mill on the Floss, for example—by the time of Mary Barton (the midthirties to the midforties), steam power has made such geographical restriction unnecessary. Factories gather together and great towns are built up around them haphazardly. The careful representation of the proximity of city and country—by Gaskell and by writers on the cotton industry—reassures readers that what will be called the urban proletariat is not completely urban and therefore not entirely a proletariat either: these are former peasants with many peasant ways. Indeed, in 1851, only 25 percent of Mancunians were actually Manchester born; at the time of the novel that figure would have been even lower. When Mary Barton (the mother) sends Mary Barton (the daughter) to get provisions for tea when they return home from their walk, she instructs her to be sure to buy Cumberland ham for George Wilson, who has emigrated from that rural place. And we quickly learn that Alice Wilson, the sister of George, keeps her country ways in Manchester. When Mary goes to invite her to take tea

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figure 3. Untitled illustration of a cotton factory. From Edward Baines, Jr., History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1832).

with the Barton and Wilson families, we learn that she has been out gathering “wild herbs for drinks and medicine, for in addition to her invaluable qualities as a sick nurse and her worldly occupation as a washerwoman, she added a considerable knowledge of hedge and field simples; and on fine days, when no more profitable occupation offered itself, she used to ramble off into the lanes and meadows as far as her legs could carry her.”7 Alice lives in two worlds, but only one is “worldly.” Her town existence has not destroyed her rural inheritance. She goes along with the need to perform “profitable” work, but she maintains her connection to another kind of profit, that of gathering plants, which the narrator notes “we are accustomed to call valueless, but which have a powerful effect either for good or for evil.” (51). Early in the novel Gaskell makes two key political economic points: first, she posits the continuing existence of a world in which what Marx will call “use value” still obtains: the plants Alice collects are “valueless” to those urban dwellers who have lost the knowledge she retains: she can thus gather them freely. It’s important to note that Gaskell’s liberal configuration of use value

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makes a point rather different from that of Marx: she, like many defenders of the nineteenth-century industrial economy and the present advertisers of MasterCard, make it clear that there is much of value that money can’t buy. The level of wages is not, happily enough, the final determinant of one’s quality of life. The second point made here is simply that Alice’s knowledge can have either benign or malignant effects: her herbs can cure or poison, as she sees fit. Gaskell makes sure that her middleclass readers note this potential volatility in the laboring class by representing it in several guises; she also recommends the kinds of gestures—individual and moral ones—that middle-class town dwellers might take to quell it.8 (All of this by a writer who, on the one hand, famously disavowed, in the novel’s preface, that she knows anything at all about political economy and on the other, took, early in her career, the rather overdetermined pen name of Cotton Mather Mills).9 So the country still resides in the town; there is something comforting and even cozy about this idea: traditions, foodways, and other regional cultural trappings can be imagined as capable of mitigating the homogenization and degradation of the new laboring class.10 A sense of coziness persists when we arrive at the Barton home. Gaskell gives us a poignant inventory of the humble domestic items in the downstairs room of that house: plates and dishes, cups and saucers, a dresser, a deal table covered with a “gay-colored oilcloth,” a jappaned tea tray, and a crimson tea caddy, “also of japan ware.” The window gets quite a bit of attention: there is a gangly geranium on the sill and “blue and white check curtains” hang above it. Now this is a novel that is in one sense precisely about where curtains come from, so it is notable that our first encounter with them is as a consumer good and not as a commodity produced by workers like John Barton (a power loom weaver), who might well have participated in making the fabric at a local mill. That is to say, Gaskell would have us experience cotton as a thing rather than as a commodity, as something that is consumed pleasurably rather than produced miserably.

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A weak metonymic reading readily suggests the most obvious “meaning” of these curtains: the Bartons are properly domestic. To represent a laboring-class family as in possession of domestic necessities like furniture, and of domestic embellishments like curtains, was tantamount, in the early Victorian period, to declaring their moral worth. It also promises the possibility of political stability, for domestic order is typically imagined as the opposite of what James Phillips Kay, in The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, describes as “recklessness,” which he tells us, can “often be traced in a neglect of that self-respect, and of the love of domestic enjoyments, which are indicated by personal slovenliness, and discomfort of the habitation.”11 Other “condition of the working class” studies—those of Edwin Chadwick and Peter Gaskell (a distant cousin of Elizabeth), for example— also note with disappointment and often with alarm the lack of furnishings in working-class dwellings, and the disregard for a wholesome home life such a lack suggests. Disorderly domestic arrangements are the symptom of the disorder of gender and family relations that industrialization wrought on the poor: women were often employed rather than men because they could be paid lower wages for the same work; children were also desirable workers for the same reason, and often outearned their fathers. Domestic and industrial divisions of labor came into distinct conflict; the burden of resolving this problem fell to women— whether or not they worked sixteen hours a day in the factory, they were expected to maintain a proper home and thereby the patriarchal authority its arrangements seemed to guarantee. The physical arrangements of domesticity were necessary in preventing sexual anarchy as well. The locus classicus of this problem—both in representation and, statistics suggest, in reality12 —was in the fact that whole families (and sometimes boarders as well) shared one bed, or piles of rags or feathers that substituted for beds. But if a family has curtains, we can hope that they also have enough beds to go around, although of course we can’t actually go to anyone’s bedroom in a Victorian novel unless someone gets sick. And indeed, when Mary Barton (the

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elder) sickens and then dies in childbirth, we are taken upstairs by the narrator, who carefully notes the fact that the younger Mary retires in grief to her own bed. The sexual disorder introduced early in the novel by the mention of Mrs. Barton’s sister Esther, who has become a prostitute and disappeared, is reordered by the curtains that augur the general adequacy of the domestic arrangements we will eventually “see.” Curtains, in what is now a traditional reading of this novel, do a great deal of ideological work. My project is to show how that work unravels if we look closely at the fabric out of which it is constructed.

II. Global Cotton Markets and the Costs of Home If the curtains in the Barton home are imagined as being made of fabric produced in Manchester, a historical irony kicks in: the cotton industry’s “products were intended for sale rather than for use by their producers: increasingly they were designed for consumption in the widest of markets and were manufactured to satisfy a constantly renewed demand amongst the poorer populations of the world.”13 About halfway through Mary Barton, John Barton has returned from his participation in the failed 1839 attempt to present the People’s Charter to Parliament and is more bitterly class conscious than ever. An apparent conflict of interest between labor and management over a new foreign market arises: An order for coarse goods came in from a new foreign market. It was a large order, giving employment to all the mills engaged in that species of manufacture: but it was necessary to execute it speedily, and at as low prices as possible, as the masters had reason to believe a duplicate order had been sent to one of the continental manufacturing towns, where there were no restrictions on food, no taxes on building or machinery, and where consequently they dreaded that the goods could be made at a much lower price than they could afford them for; and that, by so acting and so charging, the rival manufacturers would obtain undivided possession of the market. It was clearly their interest to buy cotton as cheaply, and to

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beat down wages as low as possible. And in the long run the interests of the workmen would have thereby benefited. Distrust each other as they may, the employers and employed must rise or fall together. There may be some difference as to chronology, none as to fact. (220–21)

Not only is cotton not made for its producers to wear, but it is not made to immediately satisfy their needs via their wages either. Rather, an unstable combination of foreign markets and competitors rules everyone in British factories; owners and workers must “rise and fall together” in the face of this outside competition. This is an article of faith in laissez-faire economics, from David Ricardo forward,14 and suggests a variably useful xenophobia at the ideological heart of a global economy: British workers and their employers are together at the mercy of external economic forces. And raw cotton had indeed by 1825 outpaced wine, tobacco, silk, tea, coffee, and finally even sugar to become Britain’s primary import and, in its manufactured form, became by the midcentury its primary export. The world outside Britain can be imagined, at moments of class conflict, as controlling supply and demand as well as masters and men; at other moments, of course, Britain is imagined, in its role as the workshop of the world, as its commercial ruler. Checked fustian also recalls another key feature of the immediate preindustrial past: checks were very popular in West Africa and became a key commodity in the slave trade during the eighteenth century when, as Herbert S. Klein describes it in his work on the Atlantic slave trade, “textiles were the primary products used to purchase slaves.”15 These fabrics were also used for clothing slaves in the Caribbean. At this moment of metonymic wandering through the history and geography of checks, the domestic idyll so far invoked—of home in both a habitational and national sense—is radically interrupted twice over: first, checks are associated with the African-Caribbean slave trade, and second, the slave trade is in turn associated with Indian calico. This seemingly homely (Euro-American) word actually derives

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from Calicut, the village in Southern India famous for producing this textile, as was discussed in the introduction. It was either woven into blue and white checks by means of differently colored warp and weft yarns or printed with blue and white checks and was more popular in Africa (and pretty much everywhere else, for that matter) than the rougher British stuff. Klein points out that “the African consumer market was unusual in that the Portuguese, the French, and even the English had to import foreign goods to make up their cargoes. Top on the list were East Indian textiles.”16 These textiles were of much better quality than British ones until the early nineteenth century, when the mule-spinner made it possible to spin fine, strong cotton yarn of a kind to rival the quality of the yarn spun by hand in India.17 The slave trade was, paradoxically, the only truly free market in which British textiles had to compete: they benefited from “extreme protectionism”18 at home, and thus, there was little competition with the finer cottons of India. The West African slave trade forced the British to compete in an international market and may well have provoked much of the revolution in cotton textile production. Checks led the way: “[T]he export sector of the English cotton textile industry began with the check branch.”19 Checked cotton was thus a key player in the globalization of textile production and distribution and a critical symbol of the competitiveness of British products in the world marketplace. Not surprisingly, Mary Barton cannot fully domesticate the history of checks: the final mention of checked curtains occurs near the novel’s end, when Mary is recovering at the home of strangers in Liverpool and is nearly ready to return to Manchester: “[T]he very check bedcurtains became dear to her, under the idea of seeing them no more” (419). Checks have moved away from the liminal space of the window: they enclose a bed that is already enclosed in a room that is in turn enclosed by a house in Liverpool, a city that became a city because of the slave trade and a city that in turn enabled Manchester’s rise and growth because of its port and shipping capabilities. Layers and layers are needed to resolve the crisis of coziness, to address the problem of

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keeping inside spaces safe from the violence in the world outside that produces their furnishings. Indeed, domesticity, and more particularly its narration, which has initially seemed to be a cure for everything that ails the poor within the novel, including even the failure of the people to present their charter, becomes less and less resilient as a protective, healing place.20 It is perhaps for this reason that Mary Poovey has described Gaskell as having to begin to invent a psychological domain as we now know (or imagine) it, “to delineate a domain that does not precisely coincide with the social domain her domestic narrative supposedly illuminates.”21 We’ll see that the novel’s ending suggests just how limited such spaces were, especially for the laboring poor, within mid-nineteenth-century England.

III. Famine Famine haunts Mary Barton. Characters hunger, starve, and die at an alarming pace. At one of many points when the younger Mary is faint with hunger, painfully yearning for food, the narrator remarks that she has not learned how to “clem”—Manchester dialect for the verb “to starve.” The Irish Famine hovers in the immediate past of the novel’s publication, and Gaskell curiously and perhaps symptomatically does not mention the presence of the Irish at all in a novel about a city in which she lived and in which that population would have been increasing during the time of the novel’s setting and writing (the late 1830s to the late 1840s).22 For readers of Mary Barton in the 1860s, the constant hunger of characters in the novel might easily evoke famine in two other forms and locations: first, the metaphorical “cotton famine” that occurred in Manchester during the U.S. Civil War, during which there was an acute shortage of cotton available for import into Britain, and therefore unemployment and severe economic depression in the industrial north; and second, the wave of famines in India during the second half of the nineteenth century. Baines, in his 1835 study, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, points out the “revolution” in cotton production in

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the century that precedes his work: “[N]ot more than a century ago, the cotton fabrics of India were so beautiful and cheap that nearly all the governments of Europe thought it necessary to prohibit them, or to load them with heavy duties, in order to protect their own manufactures. How surprising a revolution has since taken place! The Indians have not lost their former skill; but a power has arisen in England, which has robbed them of their ancient ascendancy, turned back the tide of commerce, and made it run more rapidly against the Oriental than it ever ran against the English.”23 The history of cotton production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is largely a history of increasingly successful British imitations of Indian cottons, the destruction of the indigenous industry in India, and the subsequent need—an ironic and horrifically consequential one—for India to import cloth from Britain, leading to poverty and famine. Histories of cotton routinely narrate the “origins” of cotton production in India: a discussion and an illustration of the South Asian handloom industry is de rigeur in nineteenth-century accounts of cotton, even if, like that of Baines, they describe the manufacture in Great Britain (fig. 4).24 The 1832 Report from the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company, the fact that India is losing to British competition her “sole manufactured export” is leading to a “commercial revolution, productive of so much suffering to numerous classes in India and hardly paralleled in the history of commerce.”25 This is one beginning of the “worlding” of the third world, to use Gayatri Spivak’s suggestive term. Although India became, during the American Civil War, a possible alternative site for raw cotton,26 the finished textiles of India were, because of their quality, too much of a threat to Lancashire-made cottons. The historian B. M. Bhatia argues that economic progress in India was essentially thrown into reverse by the combination of British industrialization and the restrictions imposed on trade by colonial rule: the “manufacturing industry [in India] threw out labour to be absorbed in stagnating agriculture.”27 Adding to the potential for famine,

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figure 4. Untitled illustration of Indian handloom weavers. From Edward Baines, Jr., History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1832).

India began to export surplus grain (which used to be held back as insurance against years of bad crops). This exporting was necessary in order to keep up a balance of trade, now heavily weighted against India by the increasing importation of Lancashire cotton goods.28 Mike Davis, in Late Victorian Holocausts, chronicles the continuing fallout of these conditions in the famines of the late 1870s: The worsening depression in world trade had been spreading misery and igniting discontent throughout the cotton-exporting districts of

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the Deccan, where in any case forest enclosures and the displacement of gram by cotton had greatly reduced local food security. The traditional system of household and village grain reserves regulated by complex networks of patrimonial obligation had been largely supplanted since the Mutiny by merchant inventories and the cash nexus. Although rice and wheat production in the rest of India (which now included bonanzas of coarse rice from the recently conquered Irrawaddy delta) had been above average for the past three years, much of the surplus had been exported to England. Londoners were in effect eating India’s bread.29

Famine, as Davis and other have noted, is a description of power relations, in which the powerful can blame nature (in the nineteenth century with the help of Thomas Malthus) for their own depredations.30

IV. The Social Destruction of Meaning This book is in part about the loss of interpretability, what might be called the social destruction of meaning. If metaphors lose their force through overuse, metonymies lose theirs through underuse. We have lost connections to many of the things of nineteenth-century fiction. The curtains in Mary Barton do not seem to form the punctum described by Barthes, which is perhaps the opposite number of the reality effect: “[A] photograph’s punctum,” he writes in Camera Lucida, “is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”31 Once we are pricked or bruised by it, “the punctum has . . . a power of expansion. This power is often metonymic” (45). The curtains in Mary Barton do not, in general, have this power for early twenty-first century readers, but they may have had the possibility of metonymic expansion for their readers in the past. I am trying to recuperate meanings that may have attended things for earlier readers; but if such meanings are in fact new, they are also “already there” in some sense: I could not retrieve them otherwise. Reading calico in Mary Barton through reading the history of calico recalls my discussion of Vico and Marx in the introduction:

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hidden relations accumulate and abide in the words that name things, whether or not we know them fully, consciously, avowedly, or at all. As long as the meanings of things are still available in some depository of cultural memory, metonymic expansion can begin, or resume, its informative wandering. We must recover the ability to be “bruised” by novelistic details, knowing that our historical consciousnesses, are perforce, always becoming duller. The fact that most contemporary American and British readers won’t associate checked curtains with the British or American slave trade, or with the deindustrialization and famines that became endemic to India during the second half of the nineteenth century, does not mean that the cultural memory of these disasters has been annihilated. They survive in textual form; they also survive in what has been described as “incidental memory.”32 In a recent memoir, the novelist Hilary Mantel describes her grandfather as someone who knows “the wherefores of cotton production, not just the facts of working in the mill. He knows about the American slaves and the Confederacy.”33 Mantel’s grandfather might attach this memory to the curtains that decorate an industrial novel in a fleeting but consequential metonymic flight of association. Similarly, South Asian readers of Mary Barton during the last hundred or so years might associate any cotton textile made in Britain with political oppression and famine, at least in part because Indian handloomed fabric was refreighted with meaning by Gandhi: during the early phases of Indian nationalism, buying “handloom” became a significant gesture toward swaraj, or self-rule.34 The original readers of Mary Barton might have made many of these connections: Baines’s history is part of an archive of information about cotton in which global aspects of production and distribution are heavily detailed.35 Indeed, the nineteenth century saw an extraordinary output of histories and handbooks of the cotton trade, including rhymed children’s stories about the production of a bale of cotton, as well as books describing cotton to the working classes by the Societies for the Promotion of

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Useful and Christian Knowledge. What we see in these writings about textile production is what we do not see in many industrial novels, including Mary Barton: we see precisely where curtains come from and how. These kinds of texts—and they are part of a whole literature of industrial production—were readily available to middle-class Victorian readers, and they remain available to us, although less readily.36 The knowledge they contain is outside the memory of the novel, as it were, but not outside the culture, or now cultures, of which it has long been a part: “The discursive world that is excluded from the text cannot fail to be tacitly reinscribed by the reader familiar with that world.”37 My project here is to legitimate such reinscriptions, to give them critical voice. Once we have retrieved the history of calico and its significance in the middle of the nineteenth century, we can refigure the checked curtains of Mary Barton. The curtains might be imagined as veils that hide and attempt to replace a traumatic loss or lack. Perhaps the loss in question is that of home as a totalizing or definitive social, political, and geographical concept. And this loss of home occurs before the idea of home is even fully instantiated as an idea, an ideology, or a practice: lost before it has been truly found or founded, the domesticity of the nineteenth century is in crisis from its beginning.

V. Consuming Artifacts If we investigate the world that the Bartons inhabited as consumers, we find that the presence of checked curtains suggests the exceptionally high price of domesticity for the poor. If we don’t see where curtains come from in terms of their production, neither does Mary Barton suggest where they might have been purchased or how. The laboring class in this period was still uncomfortable in many kinds of shops, according to David Alexander in his history of retailing during the Industrial Revolution.38 When John Barton goes into High Street to buy necessities for the Davenport family, the “magical qualities” of the shop windows, Christoph Lindner notes, “neither capture

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nor excite [his] imagination.” Shopwindows in this novel deny entry to a “strangely alien world”—the world of consumption that Gaskell’s readers, then and now, inhabit so easily.39 For actual Mancunians like John Barton, the most common and comfortable form of retail consumption for durable goods was through hawkers and peddlers who came directly into workingclass neighborhoods, having bought their wares either from shops or directly from manufacturers. Some of these hawkers were tally traders. The tally trade was the beginning of what we now in the United States call buying on the installment plan or layaway—it’s the system in which the poor must pay far more for their goods than do more affluent consumers through buying them over time. It is no small irony that the tally trade did a particularly brisk business in textiles of various forms, from bolts of cloth to ready-made clothing—that is, in the big-ticket items that other hawkers did not handle. J. R. McCulloch upbraids this trade in no uncertain terms in his much-reprinted Dictionary of Commerce: “We believe this is the very worst mode in which credit is afforded. The facility which it gives of obtaining an article when wanted, and the notion so apt to be entertained that the weekly or monthly installments may be paid without difficulty, makes those who resort to the tally-shops overlook the exorbitant price, and usual bad quality, of the articles they obtain.”40 The typical or average retail values of the luxury items in the Barton home were essentially illegible to their purchasers—there was little way for the mill-working Mancunian to know the usual retail price of a tea caddy, since the working class did not typically shop in stores that would carry such items. The inexperienced laboring-class consumer thus had value doubly and trebly mystified in this process: the installments, as McCulloch notes, seem seductively manageable, and the consumer would have little or no idea of how much the item would cost on a nontally basis. Having spent too much money on household goods, clothing, or decorative items, purchaser’s would find the pawnbroker’s shop always available as a source of very temporary “redemption.”

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A veritable epidemic of pawnbroking courses through Mary Barton: although the consumption of small luxury items and the presence of curtains to enclose and protect domestic life are essential to making the working class seem human for middle-class readers, this consumption was often based on a system of credit that meant that in hard times the curtains, tea tray, and tablecloth might well have been pawned to pay for necessities. Mary Barton directs our attention, if we take its domestic goods literally, to two “shadow” economies that haunted the poor: the hawking and tally trade system and the extensive and intensive system of pawnbroking. Indeed, the purchase of luxury items seems to have been a form of brutally expensive insurance against hard times, when such items could be pawned. To have a japanned tea tray or a pair of curtains—readily “pledgeable” items—was to symbolize, for oneself and one’s neighbors, a lack of want now and in the immediate future. The ownership and display of such small luxuries was like putting a small savings account on display.41 In her history of working-class credit, Melanie Tebbutt points out that pawning one’s possessions was not as “extreme as selling them”; the “hope of redemption” poignantly abides in this intermediate gesture.42 Gaskell represents so much pawning in Mary Barton that a pile of goods seems to gather in the margins of the text, waiting to be reclaimed. In the home of the Davenports, another millworking family, unemployed because of a fire at a local mill, we find the father, Ben Davenport, lying on the floor dying of typhoid; his wife, faint from starvation, falls from a chair to join him there. When John Barton and George Wilson go to help the family, they can find nothing other than loose bricks on which to prop Mrs. Davenport’s head. Barton borrows a saucepan from a neighbor and makes gruel. Fortunately, the Davenports still own a “battered iron” tablespoon, with which John Barton feeds the nearly unconscious Mrs. Davenport with food that he buys with the proceeds of pawning his own “better” coat and a red and yellow silk handkerchief. Gaskell notes that this spoon had been kept by the Davenports “when many other little things had been sold in a lot” (100). If the verb “sold” here is precise and not a

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middle-class conflation of selling with pledging, then the novel suggests the extent to which the Davenports have given up hope of several kinds of redemption. The Davenport’s reduction to profound penury prefigures a similar reduction that will occur in the Barton home. As John Barton sinks, during his short hours and then unemployment, into greater opium addiction and greater despair, Mary pawns the tea tray, the tea caddy, and the blankets (the narrator consoles us with the observation that since it is summer the blankets are not necessities). In Gaskell’s representation of the ubiquitous pawning practices of the laboring class, her wish seems to be that it is only “superfluities” that get pawned, but the inventory of a shop in Glasgow, taken in 1836, suggests the chronic sale (or pledging) of both necessities and superfluities: “539 men’s coats; 355 vests; 288 pairs of trowsers [sic]; 84 pairs of stockings; 1980 women’s gowns; 540 petticoats; 132 wrappers; 123 duffles; 90 pelisses; 240 silk handkerchiefs; 294 shirts and shifts; 60 hats; 84 bed ticks; 108 pillows; 206 pairs of blankets; 300 pairs of sheets; 162 bedcovers; 36 table-cloths; 48 umbrellas; 102 bibles; 204 watches; 216 rings; 48 Waterloo medals.”43 This list suggests the way in which pawning turns “home” inside out: photographs of pawn shops show pillows and bed ticks, blankets and petticoats, all on dispiriting display. Although Mary does not pawn the blue and white checked curtains, they fall into dangerous disuse. John Barton takes to sitting by the window in the evening, insisting on keeping it “uncurtained.” Mary is frightened by “[s]trange faces of pale men, with dark glowing eyes, peer[ing] into the inner darkness, . . . seem[ing] desirous to ascertain if her father were at home. They were all desperate members of Trades’ Unions, made ready by want for anything” (162). The “recklessness” described by James Phillips Kay in his study of the working class is realized and connected to the condition of being “uncurtained.” The decorative items in the Barton home are an unstable fetishistic recuperation and refiguration of the wish that some humble variant of middle-class “civilized” domesticity could

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obtain among those who were, in the most dehumanizing conditions, mass-producing its crucial accoutrements while remaining unable to afford most of them. Indeed, as we have seen, cotton was not by and large produced for a domestic market. Job Legh, an intellectually active retired cotton worker, points out that there are “thousands and thousands of poor weavers as han only gotten one shirt i’ th’ world.” (130). Gaskell frequently points out the wretched state of worker’s clothing: it is always old and full of what she describes as “air gaps,” a euphemism that weirdly suggests that ragged clothing produces a positive ventilating effect for its wearers (233). These tattered vestments threaten to trump the significance of the curtain concept altogether: what hope is there for the benefits of domestic decoration and comfort when the clothes of so many laboring-class people are virtually falling apart? Surely covering bodies is more fundamental to Victorian ideas about decency than is covering windows. Although Gaskell is certainly not reaching for irony in her descriptions of the clothing of the poor (there is virtually not one ironic moment in the novel), it is necessarily ironic that the cheapest cloth, the kind intended for the poorer people of the world, is largely beyond the reach of the poor who produce it. Thomas Carlyle, in Past and Present, bewails this particular situation—the Manchester-made shirt becomes symptom and symbol of a hopelessly irrational mode of production: “Cotton is conquered,” he comments, “but the ‘bare backs’—are worse covered than ever!”44 But Carlyle was, of course, on the losing side. Gaskell ameliorates the triumph of the middle class and their mode of production with a novel that allows its readers to contemplate how factory workers lived and died in the hungry forties, but without asking such readers to sacrifice their allegiance to industrialization and the factory system. Without it, after all, there would be many fewer checked curtains available “to shut in the friends met to enjoy themselves” in rooms like the one that functions as the Barton’s parlor. The very presence of these curtains seems to promise to provide for everything—privacy, friendship, leisurely meals that include significant amounts of protein—that the

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exigencies of their production have made almost, but not quite, impossible. And yet this promise is destabilized by the exigencies Gaskell—to her credit, and to the credit of the realist tradition— does not stint on representing, including the hopelessly ragged clothing of many mill workers. Checked curtains cannot be stabilized in Mary Barton: in their vast metonymic potential they contain and display both domesticity and globalization, and more cryptically for us, but perhaps not for many of the Victorian readers of the novel, a domestic and a global economy that are in fact already one. They screen one realm from the other—I am arguing (subtly enough) that curtains function as curtains—but they do not screen us as readers from the harshest effects of the social world they require for their production. And this may not be bad news in terms of the ideological aspirations of laissez-faire’s promoters and apologists: these curtains allow their readers, in all their unsteady symbolics, to celebrate, if any readers are so inclined, the brutal and compelling power the middle class wields: in production, consumption, and the ideologies that govern both. This celebration of the social relations of production does not, paradoxically and productively, rule out the reifications and repressions of commodity fetishism; rather, it makes curtains into highly overdetermined social hieroglyphics, available for multiple translations and interpretations, including the one I am performing here. Curtains can be things and commodities; they can retain their objectness and social relations at the same moment that those very qualities are becoming fetishized. This is what makes commodity culture require such complex representational machinery: it must constantly reshape the way that, as human beings, we tend to experience things as things, to remember and to want to remember and experience their sensuous material qualities and even, selectively and for all kinds of humane and less than humane reasons, the social relations of their production. It has long been a practice of commodity culture to fetishize—to alienate in representation—precisely those aspects of things that we think we lose in commodification.45 But the very persistence

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of the experience of that loss also testifies to the persistence of our desire for things, or the ideas in things, in commodity culture. We resist, I think, the complete colonization of the thing by the commodity; we to hope to find object relations other than those of the commodity fetishist. Victorians possessed more of “thing culture” than we do now; in the coda of this book I will discuss its fate. In the last window scene of the novel, Mary, after an encounter with her ruined Aunt Esther, puts “the shutters up against the window, which had all this time remained shaded only by the curtains hastily drawn together” (299). The curtains can no longer form enough of a boundary between inside and out. The social realities that checks evoke have perhaps finally exerted too much pressure on the novel’s political unconscious to remain innocuously cozy and protective.

VI. Genre and Geography So far I have been discussing a novel called John Barton, the novel Gaskell set out to write. About halfway through that novel, her publisher became anxious about the audience for such a work and convinced her to switch her focus and write a novel called Mary Barton. Gaskell complied but came up against a historical and a formal problem: she has already imagined Mary as a dressmaker, not as an industrial worker—the early plot of the novel, in which Aunt Esther has become a prostitute and disappeared, has meant that her father wants Mary to stay out of the mills and away from the loose ways of the women who work in them. So a novel that has begun as an industrial, social problem fiction now has a nonindustrial heroine who is also not supposed to have social problems (although she does flirt with Harry Carson, so she has acquired some mildly bad habits). Catherine Gallagher has argued that generic confusion in Mary Barton results from a literary historical problem: there is no form in the nineteenth century that can adequately contain the tragedies that form the plots of so many laboring-class lives.46

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This confusion is acutely thematized in the confusion of texts in the text itself: the valentine that Jem once sent to Mary and that she has overwritten at her father’s request with some lines from the Chartist poet Samuel Bamford becomes the wadding in the gun used by John Barton to kill Harry Carson. Since Jem is the only apparent “author” of the text, it seems as though he might also be the author of the crime. Gaskell similarly “overwrites” the novel at least twice: she writes a story of the industrial working class “onto” a middle-class form, and she then writes two conflicting stories of that class, one over the other, as it were: in the first story, John Barton becomes a murderer and then a dead man; in the second story, Jem Wilson and Mary Barton must redeem laboring-class domesticity, but they cannot do so in England, so that domesticity must be reestablished in a foreign place, rewritten, as it were, elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, alternate plot lines emerge chaotically in the second half of the novel: Jem Wilson is accused of shooting Mary’s mill-owning admirer Harry Carson. Mary then takes an awful and awe-inspiring train ride to Liverpool to testify at the assize court on Jem’s behalf, but she has already destroyed the crucial piece of evidence that would have exonerated Jem because it would have convicted her father, who is indeed guilty of the murder. All of this is straightened out: Jem is acquitted, John Barton dies, Jem and Mary wed, and the temporal solutions we expect of plots are abandoned for geographical ones. At the novel’s awkward end, Jem and Mary repair to suburban Toronto. As Raymond Williams puts it, apparently with no intended irony, “there could be no more devastating conclusion.” Presumably this is not a slur on Canada, but rather a reaction to what he symptomatically calls “removal,” recalling the tradition of traumatic ejection of poor people from Great Britain.47 The eyewitness narrator does not emigrate with the characters, so that what we get of their new Canadian home is a vision rather than a visual report: “I see a long low wooden house, with room enough, and to spare. The old primeval trees are felled and gone for many a mile around: one alone remains to overshadow the

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gable end of the cottage” (465). We don’t get to go inside this house to see either its furnishings or the lack thereof. But we know one thing, and that is that the “gable end” of the house does not need curtains: one primeval tree provides shade. It is as if the whole curtain idea—from the slaves who pick cotton to the workers who spin it and weave it in Britain to the workers who are impoverished in India because they no longer spin and weave it—had been a bad one after all. Gaskell returns us to nature in the form of Canada and to the possibility of a preindustrial self-sufficiency that would disable the proliferating forms of exchange that work to obscure value—of life and limb as of tea caddies and curtains. The death and disaster that attend the emigration to and the “settlement”—that lovely colonial euphemism that includes both genocide and home construction—of Canada remain beyond the text, just hinted at in the fallen primeval trees. And Toronto was, by the mid-1840s, an industrializing, rapidly developing city. But were it not, Gaskell sends the necessary destruction of this pastoral in the form of Jem, who “brings a ‘storm cloud’ with him to paradise,” Diana C. Archibald points out, “for he carries his knowledge of industrial machines” with him.48 Catherine Gallagher has famously argued that the novel resolves the threat of tragedy in a genre that Gaskell “pioneers,” the working-class domestic tale,49 but I’d like to suggest instead that Mary Barton regresses generically to a protonovelistic form, the Robinson Crusoe–like starting-over-in-the-newworld story. Mary Barton runs into the kind of formal and ideological mismatches so brilliantly articulated by Roberto Schwarz in his work on the Brazilian nineteenth-century novel. The novel, as a middle-class form, demands a certain ideological fidelity at the same time that it demands a fidelity to the social reality it promises to reflect. Schwarz delineates the way in which the “prestigious ideology” of the West—of industrial capitalism and its attendant mores—“cuts a ludicrous figure” in the Brazilian novel of the nineteenth century because Brazil is still a slave-holding society, based on principles that are largely

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outmoded or in conflict with the prestigious ideology the realist novel indemnifies in its very form.50 Gaskell, unlike the novelist of nineteenth-century Brazil, is writing in and of a society in which much of this ideology originates, and yet it cannot be applied—in the form of the novel—to the very group of people, the industrial working class, whose arrival signifies the instantiation of industrial capitalism and therefore of the true political and economic arrival of the middle class. The plots of ideology, the form of the realist novel, and the exigencies of the lives of the poor in nineteenth-century Manchester cannot be aligned. This set of incompatibilities sends the novel into a generic breakdown and, finally, into a regression to an early eighteenth-century, and therefore preindustrial, novel form. The industrial novel is, like a novel of the preindustrial South, also “ludicrous,” to use Schwarz’s word, but it ought not to be: Manchester should be the capital of the nineteenth-century novel. The ideology of industrial capitalism functions best at a safe remove from its processes—in London, say, or Paris. It can even move to the countryside, to the provinces; it just can’t run smoothly in the factory or in the factory town. Its prestige is undermined by the very processes that make it so admirable and enviable to cultures that are less “modern” in their forms. When Virginia Woolf writes in her diary about curtains in 1915, she makes it clear that they are part of the trashy and distinctly lower-middle-class Victorian aesthetic that budding modernists of classless (and therefore extremely rarified) taste have pointedly left behind: “One of the queer things about the suburbs is that the vilest little red villas are always let, & that not one of them has an open window, or an uncurtained window. I expect that people take a pride in their curtains, & there is great rivalry among neighbours. One house had curtains of yellow silk, striped with lace insertion. The rooms inside must be in semi-darkness; & I suppose rank with the smell of meat & human beings. I believe that being curtained is a mark of respectability—Sophie [a cook to the Stephen family] used to insist upon it.”51 The curtains which for Gaskell signified a respectable if finally inadequate

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attempt to guarantee cozy domesticity have lost their strong ethical valence (and there’s a terrible pun there if you know your window treatments) and have become instead odiferous and pathetic in the writing of Woolf some sixty years later. But the modernist (or protomodernist) rewriting of Victorian meaning leaves the structures of meaning making intact. The structure I wish to question is the one that dictates that curtains in a novel indicate domesticity, whether it is heroic or pathetic, but not slavery or famine or deindustrialization or working-class immiseration. If that structure of meaning making were dismantled, we might appreciate the extent to which the nineteenth-century novel has done the figural work of hiding history without cover or camouflage in the things of the novel. A novel like Mary Barton holds in strange (or estranged) trust the extraordinary violence that attended the reorganization of markets in the global economy of the Victorian period and the creation of underdevelopment. This economy continues to be rendered anodyne in representations that dictate more than what counts as real or credible; they also manage to dictate the very structures and protocols of legitimate interpretation.

3 Realism, Fetishism, and Genocide: Negro Head Tobacco in and around Great Expectations [A]rtworks are like picture puzzles in that what they hide . . . is visible and is, by being visible, hidden. « t h e o d o r a d o r n o , Aesthetic Theory »

Dickens could not make up his mind to go to Australia, although a proposed reading tour promised to be lucrative. His correspondence chronicles the history of this long (in)decision: If there were reasonable promise, I could make up my mind to go to Australia and get money. (Letter to John Forster, 22 October 1862) I cannot resolve altogether to abandon the idea, and yet it is immensely difficult to resolve to pursue it. (Letter to R. H. Horne, 3 November 1862) As to me, I have decided nothing; though I rather think the balance is slightly turning in my mind against Australia. (Letter to Mrs. Henry Austin, 4 December 1862) I think (I cannot at present be quite sure) that I shall NOT GO to Australia. (Letter to Mrs. Henry Austin, 20 December 1863)

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I have had ambassadors, well backed with money, from Australia. But I couldn’t make up my mind to go. (Letter to Captain E. E. Morgan, 6 July 1863)1

Dickens did not, in the end, go to Australia, but he sent many others on that trip, perhaps in some sense in his stead. He sent Abel Magwitch and Wilkins Micawber, who mended their ways and got rich; he plotted the transportation of Wackford Squeers of Nicholas Nickleby and the servant boy of David and Dora Copperfield; he dispatched two of his many sons—Alfred Tennyson Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens—to be sheep farmers in the bush; and he shipped off many (hopefully) reformed prostitutes from the home for homeless women, Urania Cottage, he ran with Angela Burdett-Coutts, to remake their lives in Australia; he sent off fictional women in need of reform as well: Little Em’ly and Martha Endell “are saved from the usual ignominious death dealt to fallen women and are allowed to immigrate to Australia where they lead happy, or at least fulfilling, lives.”2 Dickens could not go, even though Magwitch and his son Alfred Tennyson did very well there, making money at a rate they could not have begun to approximate at home. In the indecision recorded in Dickens’s letters, Australia beckons and threatens: a source of potential wealth, it seems also to be a source of repressed horror. This horror circulates in Great Expectations in many forms, including domestic abuse, state violence, slavery, and cannibalism. I argue that there is a particularly overwhelming horror that cannot be named but only encoded fetishistically in the most apparently negligible of details. The “negligible” (uninterpretable, insignificant, nonsymbolic) detail on which this chapter focuses is “Negro head” tobacco; the horror in question is Aboriginal genocide in Victorian Australia.

I. Aboriginal Genocide in the News When the convict Abel Magwitch, now a wealthy sheep farmer, returns from New South Wales to examine the gentleman he

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has “made” of Pip, we read repeatedly that he fills his pipe with, and smokes, Negro head tobacco. Curiously, Dickens refers to this tobacco by name three times in two chapters.3 The Oxford English Dictionary offers an evocative, if abbreviated, tour of the international circulation of the term “Negro head,” beginning with a 1781 usage in which the term refers to a nest of tree ants in the Caribbean. The second entry, which hails from Virginia, where this form of tobacco originated, describes Negro head as “a strong plug tobacco of a black colour” (1839). (Also called “Cavendish,” this kind of tobacco was dried, then mixed with molasses and pressed into cakes, or “plugs,” making it particularly resistant to heat and humidity and thus especially well suited for export to places like Australia.) In a long geographical leap, “Negro head” then comes to name an Australian beech tree that provides “a hard richly-coloured furniture wood” (1889). Finally, the name lends its figural panache, according to the Dictionary of Australian Slang (quoted in the OED) to “an anthill-like peak of coral showing above water” (1943). In this highly flexible trope, we see the beginning of a global movement of commodities and racial symbolics from the New World to the Old World to what Peter Conrad has recently dubbed the “New New World.”4 The wide-ranging currency gained by the epithet “Negro head” in Australia (the name of an American style of adulterated tobacco comes to name both a beech tree in the nineteenth century and a coral reef in the twentieth) suggests some connection with the “Negro” heads of Australian Aborigines, who were seen by British settlers as similar to Africans and are in Australia to this day called “blacks.” The repetitive mention of this tobacco in Great Expectations might be interpreted as a strange and circuitous attempt to memorialize a people who were very nearly destroyed by white settlement. Great Expectations “remembers” Australian Aborigines, I’m going to argue in this chapter, by way of this popular tobacco. The fragile linguistic marker of Negro head tobacco forms a very particular kind of memorial: it suggests a fetishistic form of remembering. I want to propose that the presence of Negro head

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tobacco symbolizes the crime of Aboriginal genocide without requiring conscious acknowledgement of it, and therefore without forcing the reader to deny, repress, or oppose the fact of genocide. In Derrida’s description, “the economy of the fetish is more powerful than that of truth [because] . . . the fetish is not opposable. It oscillates like the clapper of a truth that rings awry.”5 The fetish communicates its meaning awry, so that it need not be consciously understood. Fetishistic representations are culturally and psychologically economical: they do not demand the massive efforts required by repression precisely because they allow for what Freud describes as a “to and fro” relationship with reality, a constant and nearly imperceptible movement “between disavowal and acknowledgement.”6 In this chapter, I will follow these oscillations in the form of the disavowed history of Australia that Great Expectations secretes—in both senses of the word. Realism, as I have argued in the introduction to this book, can transform a seemingly meaningless detail into a fetish through its peculiar (and peculiarly rich) relationship to cultural knowledge. The things of realism—the exuberant itemization with which it is so routinely identified—constitute a kind of unsupervised metonymic archive: a nearly infinite catalog of compressed references to social facts that have, in the history of novel reading, remained largely unread. I am going to read one such compressed reference here, and with it, part of the history of noninterpretation that has rendered realism all too readerly. When I began to research the connections between Great Expectations, the transportation of convicts to Australia and Negro head tobacco, I assumed that the links between this tobacco and Australian Aborigines resulted from my own postcolonial acuity. I imagined that Dickens, and the British reading public that encountered Great Expectations (which was published in serial form beginning in 1860) knew very little about the “extermination” (the Victorian term) of Australian Aborigines. This assumption arises from what many historicist critics, myself included, frequently disavow but endemically rely upon: the relationship, however poststructurally vexed, between the realist novel and social reality,

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or our critical ability to pry that reality from recalcitrant representations. And indeed, if we take a novel like Great Expectations as in any way exemplary, it would appear that the social conditions and race relations of Australia were not much thought about in Britain. But turning from Great Expectations to the Victorian periodical press, one finds a massive chronicling of Australia in general and of Aboriginal everyday life—and death—in particular, beginning in the 1830s and persisting through the 1860s, the decade of the novel’s publication. Journals and newspapers, including the politically various Monthly Review, Bentley’s Miscellany, Blackwood’s, and the Westminster Review, provide numerous protoethnographic accounts of Aboriginal culture, including descriptions of the “transcendent caper” of a dance called a “corobbery”;7 admiring stories of the extraordinary tracking, hunting, and diving abilities of Aborigines; and wildly varying determinations of their hostility or friendliness to white settlers. There are also many reports of violence: by Aborigines against each other, by Aborigines against white settlers, and, depending on the political valence of the publication, by whites against Aborigines. The most striking discussions about the status of Aboriginal peoples throughout the British Empire are those that explicitly concern the propriety or impropriety of what we would now call genocide. And although the word “genocide” was not yet available,8 near synonyms are not hard to find—acknowledgements of the “extirpation,” “extermination,” and “decline” of these peoples abound in articles about South Africa, Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the Indian Subcontinent. Patrick Brantlinger has argued eloquently that whether the arguments about the mass death of indigenous peoples were approving or horrified, they constitute parts of the same discourse: that of “proleptic elegy,” which mourns the “lost object before it is completely lost.” This discourse, Brantlinger contends, was “performative in the sense that it acted on the world as well as described it.”9

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In the 1830s, the discourse against genocide and in favor of Aboriginal “protection,” although problematic in its emphasis on the need to “civilize” indigenous people, sometimes displays a sophisticated rhetorical analysis that anticipates recent criticism of culture and imperialism. In an unsigned article in the 1836 Information Respecting the Aborigines in the British Colonies, for example, a diatribe against euphemism predicts the kinds of analysis that postcolonial critics will perform 150 years later: “It has been said . . . that the natives became extinct rather than that they are exterminated, but it must be a voluntary self-delusion which can make us contented with this mode of stating the case.”10 In a letter from “A Lover of Justice” written to the editor of the South Australian in 1838, the author complains that in “the Act of Parliament which constitutes South Australia a British province we find no mention made of the natives of the country, or their rights; on the contrary, the country is set forth as ‘waste and unoccupied.’ . . . Have we who have come hither found these lands unoccupied? Have we not, on the contrary, found them possessed by native tribes?”11 We find, in the 1830s, an advanced discussion of the morality and even of the legality of imperial usurpation of land, and considerable awareness of the rhetorical underhandedness that attends attempts to moralize colonization. The trope of emptiness resonates particularly strongly in fiction and in law. For students of literature, this figure finds its ultimate canonical expression in Heart of Darkness (1902), when Marlowe recounts seeing, as a child, “blank spaces” on the map, spaces that seem to await the fulfillment of his arrival. But for the First Australians, the doctrine of terra nullius has had a lasting impact: “From the First Fleet in 1788 until the 1970s, white appropriation of Australian territory was legitimized by the doctrine of terra nullius, a phrase that, as Henry Reynolds notes, carries a double meaning: ‘both a country without a sovereign recognized by European authorities and a territory where nobody owns any land at all, where no tenure of any sort existed.’ This was almost tantamount to the convenient notion that the aboriginals were not there, an idea often expressed in colonial legal decisions.”12

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In the 1830s we find some writers arguing for the idea that Aborigines have a sense of “property in the soil.”13 Given that one of the recurring justifications of colonization was the idea that the land was not used or owned or understood as property by indigenous people, this is a surprising and potentially explosive assertion. By arguing that Aboriginal people grasp the idea of private property, these writers raise an indigenous people considerably in the human hierarchy as it was imagined in the nineteenth century.14 Articles like this were regularly bound together into book form, and it is worth remarking that at least one such volume crossed the desk of Charles Dickens: L. A. Chamerovzow, the secretary of the Society for the Protection of Aborigines, sent Dickens a volume of collected writings in 1850, along with his own book, The New Zealand Question and the Rights of Aborigines. Dickens thanked him for the two volumes by letter.15 The Negro head tobacco mentioned with ticlike repetition on Magwitch’s return from New South Wales might be understood as a metonymic reference to such a volume of writing, a glancing and undoubtedly unconscious gesture at an archive of genocide. Consider Marc Angenot’s description of the literary writer as someone who listens to the immense disseminated rumor of social discourse that comes to the ear of man-in-society as erratic fragments, images, utterances still bearing traces of issues and debates they were engaged in, bearing the stamp of migrations and changes they have undergone. These utterances that migrate in social exchange, recurring in conversation, bill-posting, newspapers, official eloquence, books of different kinds, are not only polysemic; they are also charm-carriers, carriers of societal efficacies, of maker’s names, of ideological imprints, that build up a confused memory of the doxa. . . . The writer, at least the realistic writer, is someone for whom the real, mediated by social discourse, offers itself as a scattered puzzle.”16

The debate about the condition and indeed the survival of Aboriginal people through the empire was part of the “hubbub” of social discourse to which Dickens listened; it generates an odd connection between genocide and cannibalism—a connection

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that I am arguing haunts Great Expectations—in an article inveighing against censorship that appeared in All the Year Round: “Imagine a Total abstinence edition of Robinson Crusoe, with the rum left out. Imagine a Peace edition, with the gunpowder left out, and the rum left in. Imagine a Vegetarian edition, with the goat’s flesh left out. Imagine a Kentucky edition, to introduce a flogging of that tarnal old nigger Friday, twice a week. Imagine an Aborigines Protection Society edition, to deny the cannibalism and make Robinson embrace the amiable savages whenever they landed.”17 Cannibalism is not, outside Robinson Crusoe and other fiction, usually given as a justification for Aboriginal genocide, although other crimes are often simply omitted: the progenocide writers merely represented Aborigines as scarcely human, as a people whose “final extirpation” constituted “an inscrutable ordinance of Providence.” The anonymous author just quoted, in a review of Three Expeditions into the Interior of Australia, by Major T. L. Mitchell, written for the Monthly Review in October 1838, goes on to say “that the instruments by which this mysterious event is brought about have seldom been guiltless, but on the other hand, like the earthquake or the tornado, the evil precursors of gracious ends” (274). Even the handy invocation of natural law, a routine Victorian explanation for certain human depredations, cannot dispense with the guilt caused by so much death—even when it produces “gracious ends.” The mass death of Aborigines was no mystery to the British reading public in the 1830s and 1840s. Frequently published statistical tables show terrible rates of “decline.” In a dramatic but typical example we find that “[b]y 1845 a combination of violence, alcohol and disease had extinguished the original Sydney tribe and reduced the Botany Bay tribe to one man and three women.”18 The historian Richard Broome points out that tribes “throughout southern and eastern Australia were on the point of extinction by 1850 and in fact were gone by 1900. The ‘last of his tribe’ became a great colonial clich´e.”19 The murder of Aborigines was an all-too-regular occupation of settlers—free

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and bond—and one that successive colonial governments essentially winked at for many years. In a review of Godfrey Charles Mundy’s Our Antipodes; or, Residence and Rambles in Australia, a writer for Blackwood’s describes Mundy’s accounts of “wholesale massacres of men, women and children. He entertains no doubt that the black population is being rapidly extirpated. These terrible razzia, occurring in the remote black settlements and pastures, are for the most part ignored by the local authorities, crown land commissioners, police magistrates, and others, or else considered as justifiable negrocide” (Sept. 1852).20 The very existence or usage of the word “negrocide” suggests the extent of the activity it names. Nonetheless, in what might be described as a process parallel to the implicit policy of the Australian authorities, the London Times regularly reports, between 1840 and 1860, on violence committed by Aboriginal people against each other and against settlers but does not report on the continuing “reprisals” of settlers long after the crown had directed the colonial government of Australia to “preserve” native Australians “from violence and injustice.”21 In the notorious Myall Creek Massacre—which gained infamy largely because seven white settlers were hanged for it— forty to fifty Aborigines were killed and many decapitated in what was probably a “series” of such incidents.22 In his memoir of colonial Australia, Settlers and Convicts (1847), the pseudonymous “Alexander Harris” observes, in connection with this event, that “[f]rom time immemorial [sic] it had been the custom for influential settlers to head parties like this, against the blacks. All former governors had sanctioned this method of proceeding, by immediate reprisals, and some of these men had thus been initiated into it. They were hanged for doing what they had been taught was perfectly lawful by the masters, and some of those masters were magistrates of the territory.”23 The disjuncture between a regular practice that seemed legal and what was actually legal echoes the disjuncture between two kinds of discourse about Aborigines. In one discourse, Aborigines can

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be killed without the authorities, the London Times, or novelists taking notice. They disappear once in reality and again and again in representation. The other, largely ephemeral discourse fully admits that there is something illegal and in fact horrendous going on that must be stopped; in this discourse “negrocide” is recorded in great detail. The objections raised against colonial violence in the periodical press, in memoirs, and in government documents suggest that the portrait drawn by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism in 1993 needs to be supplemented by an account of the less celebrated writing from the same period.24 In the enduring cultural monuments of the nineteenth century, including the canonical novels Said considers, the vibrant and various discussion found in journalistic writing suffers considerable compression. Brief mention of empire and its consequences can be found in virtually any Victorian novel set in Britain, but they—like the overseas empire itself—remain, as Said argues, at the very fringes of the text. There is virtually no elaboration of what was going on “out there” in the colonies that might be affecting, or more accurately underwriting, the domestic worlds of novels like Jane Eyre (1847), Dombey and Son (1848), or Vanity Fair (1848). A silence falls: it begins perhaps a generation before the Victorian period, when, in Mansfield Park (1814), Fanny Price finds that when she asks her uncle about slavery, conversation stops abruptly.25 We can hear this silence fall again in Daniel Deronda (1876): “[Gwendolen] had no notion how her maternal grandfather got the fortune inherited by his two daughters, but he had been a West Indian—which seemed to exclude further question.”26 Britons who stayed home are routinely represented in novels about them as rigidly taciturn or blithely unknowing when it comes to empire. Given the massive detailing of imperial and colonial issues in the periodical press, the political partisanship of this press, and its wide readership, the novel’s suppression or elision of such discussion suggests the ways in which realism can homogenize the chaotic multiplicity of a given episteme, rendering it smooth, intelligible, consistent—in short, rendering it what we have come

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to think of, in representation and in experience, as realistic. Indeed, the slang usage of “unreal” or “surreal” to describe anything unusual within the real suggests the extent to which we expect to experience reality as homogenized. It also suggests the extent to which “the novel,” or literary texts more generally, have for a long time been coextensive with our idea of the “writing” of a period, even since Foucault: large parts of the larger archive of discourse (perhaps especially the journalistic archive of the nineteenth century) are so daunting and often unreadable as to reinforce this epistemological habit.27 In Great Expectations, the chaos of the historical period in which the novel is set regularly threatens to break out of confinement, not least in Magwitch’s return from Australia, the place Robert Hughes has described as the “geographical unconscious” of empire.28 (Indeed, Great Expectations in a sense prefigures this metaphor: the only time the word “Australia” occurs in the novel is as an analogy for depth: when Pip asks Wemmick about Jaggers’s litigational skill, Wemmick answers, somewhat cryptically, given the questions, that Jaggers is as “deep as Australia.”) And not only does Magwitch return, he returns with his pockets full of a kind of tobacco bearing a name that is highly overdetermined: it might call to mind (consciously or unconsciously) not only several possible groups of “black” people, but this tobacco was also—like Magwitch—a banned substance in Britain (because it was adulterated) and available only as a “smuggled delicacy” between 1842 and 1863.29 Great Expectations exemplifies a process in which some widely discussed aspect of the imperial project— in this case the destruction of Aboriginal peoples as a result of banishing British convicts to their land—is encrypted in a highly desirable object, a fetish that allows for covert but efficacious symbolization. In the case of Negro head tobacco, the possible meanings of the fetish linger dangerously close to the surface; paradoxically, this closeness to historical actuality is what makes the fetish an effective, safe, and economical representation. It can hide in plain sight, too “real” to require interpretation. As I have argued in the introduction to this book, the rules that

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have long governed the reading of realism determine that such real things specifically are not interpretable, as reality itself must be recognized (by all certifiably sane people) as largely devoid of symbolic meaning.30

II. Nicotine “Baccy” was a currency often more precious than money in colonial Australia; it helped convicts cope not only physically but also psychologically with chronically short food rations, punishing physical labor, and the brutal heat of the desert. E. S. Hall, an early settler, recalls that “the convicts in the interior cannot or will not work without it. Many a time have our own convicts at Lake Bathurst offered us to forego half their ration of food, for half the value thereof in tobacco.”31 Magwitch describes it as a medication that keeps him human: “I must have my smoke. When I was first hired out as a shepherd t’other side of the world, it’s my belief I should ha’ turned into a molloncolly-mad sheep myself, if I hadn’t a had my smoke.”32 Tobacco circulated both as currency and commodity in many locations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and this economic overdetermination is matched by a symbolic overdetermination. In the case of Negro head tobacco, the social relations of production are exposed and indeed celebrated in the very name of a tobacco that is named, however inadvertently, for the slaves who pick and process it. The production process, “far from being the secret locus of the prohibited, of what cannot be shown, of what is concealed by the fetish, serves as the fetish which fascinates with its presence.”33 Or perhaps the commodity, much less the social relations of production, has not yet been thoroughly fetishized, and the British smokers of American tobacco are interested in the social relations of the production of tobacco, as they were interested, to some extent and often for the least humane reasons, in the production of furniture and textiles. Like the name “Negro head,” early advertisements for tobacco, including the six hundred largely British eighteenth- and

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nineteenth-century “tobacco cards” (small paper advertisements) in the George Arents, Jr., Collection,34 reveal the ubiquity of Africans, African-Americans, and Native Americans as “logo” material in tobacco advertising and brand designs. Often, two African or African-American slaves simply hold up a sign with a tobacconist’s name printed on it. But numerous cards depict slaves picking tobacco, pressing it into hogsheads for transport, and sometimes consuming it. Many cards show slaves laboring while white American colonists lounge near by, with a pipe in hand or in mouth (fig. 5). Rather than concealing the labor of slaves (and Native Americans) in the United States, this style of advertising, and the naming of a particular type of tobacco “Negro head,” actually calls to mind the suffering and death that made the cultivation of tobacco possible in the first place, a “culture productive of infinite wretchedness,” in Thomas Jefferson’s famous description.35 Sometimes what appear to be Native Americans are pictured on these cards (fig. 6), and in a most bizarrely compressed representation of social relations, many cards depict what appear to be African slaves dressed in what appears to be Native American garb, but which, on closer inspection, turns out to be headdresses and skirts made out of tobacco leaves (figs. 7, 8). The Virginian American-ness of the tobacco—a guarantee of the highest quality—is vouched for in the hybrid figure of the slave in Native American tobacco leaf drag. Negro head tobacco—in its circulation within Great Expectations and in nineteenth-century Australia—exemplifies the symbolic efficacy of an impure commodity fetish. In the third volume of Capital, Marx describes interest-bearing capital (i.e., money that makes money from itself) as the “pure fetish form,” because the “result of the capitalist production process . . . obtains an autonomous existence.”36 The pure fetish represents both a moment of exquisite unfetteredness from social and political actuality and an economic entity disconnected from symbolic labor—precisely because of its double abstraction. The efficacy of the impure commodity fetish is that it does so much more than circulate as itself and as an exchange value; it circulates itself, it circulates capital

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figure 5–8 Tobacco cards (1725–1850?). George Arents Jr. Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

figure 6.

figure 7.

figure 8.

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(or causes capital to circulate), and it circulates what seems to have become a soothing symbolics—in this case, of racial subjection. Slavery advertises tobacco and tobacco advertises slavery, suggesting not only that such a form of production can be made locally acceptable, but also that it has been rendered globally acceptable in the circulation of tobacco. This global commodity fetish is paradoxically closer to Freud’s idea of the fetish than to Marx’s in that it proffers a partial knowledge of social relations, rather than a complete repression or reification of them. It provides for a less veiled form of exchange; indeed, the social relations of production—in the form of the slaves used to advertise tobacco—become commodified twice over: as slaves and as “brand” material. And once commodified, Negro heads can still both serve and potentially disrupt the system that has rendered them symbolic: they can store information not only about the cultivation of tobacco, but metonymically and metaphorically, about racial terror and genocide as well. Tobacco advertisements brought African and African-American people into the symbolic imagination of colonial Australia and made them “available” for these purposes: “Colonial tobacconists began to ‘advertise’ their tobaccos using the iconography of the plant’s origins and political economy. Whereas in the United States, figures of Native Americans adorned tobacconist shops, the symbol of the ‘happy’ African American slave with a garland of tobacco leaves was adopted in Australia by Damman [tobacconists in the gold fields of the 1850s] and others as recognition of the exotic origins of the product in the slave south.”37 It is curious that the slave South of the United States would hold “exotic” appeal for white settlers in Australia, and this is perhaps a symptom of the disavowal involved in fetishism, in which knowing can be comfortably combined with not knowing. Nineteenth-century white Australians could contemplate American slavery and its depredations as distant, and therefore decidedly different from the all-too-similar depredations of their own colonizing process.

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We find the opposite process in Great Expectations: slavery is neither distant nor exotic; it is used as a metaphor for thoroughly British relations, and is very nearly interchangeable with imprisonment and transportation. Pip and Joe empathize with Magwitch when he is recaptured as if he were a runaway slave, but we soon learn that other characters in the novel are also symbolic prisoners or slaves. Pip and Joe are enslaved to Mrs. Joe’s “rampages,” during which she wields her favored weapon, the “tickler,” to painful effect. Pip is seduced and emotionally enslaved by Miss Havisham and Estella; Estella is also a slave to the wishes of Miss Havisham, as she reminds Pip when she journeys to London: “We have no choice, you and I, but to obey our instructions. We are not free to follow our own devices you and I” (265). Pip is indentured to Joe; when his indentures are burned upon learning of his expectations, he feels “free,” but in London he becomes the slave of his servant, who is aptly named the Avenger. There seems to be nowhere to turn for liberation in the world of Great Expectations: apparent freedom becomes another form of enslavement; we learn from Magwitch that even when he was nominally free, he felt like he was the “black slave” of his collaborator Compeyson (350). Our indignation is carefully directed by the text as we are moved to pity British orphans, hapless males of various ages who have been undone by women, and hapless males who have been undone by the criminal justice system—a system that seems like an extension of Mrs. Joe’s harsh model of domesticity. In this metaphorical proliferation, slavery becomes part of the human condition, and in this universal mode, it need not be abhorred or even mentioned in all of its specific instantiations. The very plot of Great Expectations relies on wealth produced by colonial Victorian labor practices in which both convicts and Aborigines are something less than free; but of the two groups—convicts and Aborigines—only one group can find explicit representation. This elliptical representation of suffering in Australia persists well into the twentieth century: in a 1987 miniseries, Charles Dicken’s

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[sic] Great Expectations: The Untold Story, produced by the Australian Broadcasting Company, we follow Magwitch to New South Wales and learn about the horrors visited on convicts by the colonial authorities. In over four hours of video, in a remarkable feat of forgetting, not one Aborigine is seen or heard from. It would thus be shocking to find the story of the oppression and murder of Aboriginal people in a Victorian novel; to tell that story is unthinkable—not in fact, in journalistic writing, where, as we have seen, it was being told, but in fiction, where Victorian historical difficulties often found more suitable arrangements. The novel, which will eventually be taken for something very like social history, carefully disentangles itself from what would be the disturbing narrative complication of Aboriginal genocide. Magwitch suggests how problematic such a narrative could become: when he is about to tell Pip and Herbert Pocket the story of his collaboration with Compeyson, he takes out his pipe “to fill it with Negro head, when, looking at the tangle of tobacco in his hand, he seemed to think it might perplex the thread of his narrative. He put it back again” (345). The people this tobacco evokes would indeed “perplex” his narrative; if he is going to enjoin the sympathy of his audience for the suffering he has endured as the result of becoming Compeyson’s “black slave,” the presence of “Negro head” might also prod him to mention the other “black slaves” of colonial Australia. His narrative would be “perplexed” by substantial moral ambiguity, and the indignation of his audience might be diffused and confused beyond recall. If in Great Expectations it is common for Britons to be slaves, it is also not unusual for them to be cannibals.38 In the first chapter, for example, Magwitch threatens to cook and eat selected parts of Pip. Since Victorians did not typically imagine that the practice of cannibalism occurred within British borders, the presence of cannibalism “at home” makes not only for a strange and telling import; it suggests that a certain globalization of trade has led to a concomitant globalization of culture, and that certain customs, like certain commodities, can be horrifically at home anywhere. People are transported like goods, and it is unclear how such a

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massive movement of people, things, and their attendant meanings can be stabilized. Indeed, the threat of cannibalism is not contained in the figure of the convict; that menace has already spread to members of the (barely) middle class: Miss Havisham accuses her always-assembled relatives of waiting to “feast” upon her (88). Catherine Gallagher reads cannibalism in Great Expectations as part of a larger set of Victorian anxieties about the precise physiology of death, an anxiety that finds its most wonderful expression in the reform group called the Society for the Prevention of Premature Burial. The difficulty of determining whether a given body is really and truly dead reverberates in the novel as a wishful uncertainty about the permanence of loss. Gallagher writes of Pip as a narrator trying to forestall or undo loss by imagining it intensely: “[T]he same orphaned mind that conjures a society maintaining itself by setting rafts of helpless people adrift on the seas of oblivion brings them back by the very intensity with which it imagines their loss.”39 One of the few comforts offered in this uncomfortable fictional world is the possibility that lost objects can be made present in the imagination and thereby recovered or resuscitated. The novel also undermines and attenuates this comfort in two grisly revivifications that adorn Jaggers’s office: on a shelf sit “two odious casts” of the faces of hanged men. They bear a “twitchy leer” upon their dead countenances, the leer produced by hanging. Pip asks Wemmick if one of the casts is “like” its original. Wemmick answers, “Like him? It’s himself you know” (200). The representation is the lost thing it represents. The novel might be seen as an analogous form of representation: as an institution, it could be imagined as performing a massive cultural reclamation project, revivifying lost objects and lost persons without discrimination, bringing back both the mourned and the unmournable in a potentially disturbing mix. Gallagher describes this problem as an overpopulation, in the novel, of the “undead”: “As Magwitch puts it,” she writes, “‘There’s o’er much coming back’ in this novel” (187). This movement between life and death “allows an incessant play of the imagination across the

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life-death divide” (188). This play of the imagination suggests the extent to which certain novels allow us a “free zone” in which we can reimagine our object relations without any constraining reference to reality. This is a distinct benefit of fetishistic representation, which allows a representation to substitute for something lost in reality, bringing intensity to bear on a loss, whether or not this loss can be named or acknowledged. Freud writes that in fetishism there are “subtle instances” in which “both the disavowal and the affirmation of the castration have found their way into the construction of the fetish itself.”40 Substituting (in good fetishistic form) genocide for castration, we can see in Negro head tobacco an instance in which a loss receives intense, almost too literal symbolic expression. But this expression need not be consciously understood or historically explicated, because realism, in a kind of ambivalent generosity, provides its readers with lots of objects and details that do not demand interpretation. Indeed, to interpret certain “reality effects” would be tantamount to standing on the sidewalk and interpreting the meaning of the traffic before you. Barthes explained the “meaning” of many of realism’s details: “Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of ‘the real’ . . . which is then signified.”41 In the introduction, I discuss how Bill Brown, in the The Material Unconscious, resists the symbolic emptiness of the barometer as mere reality effect and reads it instead as an instrument that, in its capacity to read the atmosphere beyond local fluctuations, can “materialize . . . an absent presence.”42 It is the materialization of such absent presences that I am arguing for here: the seemingly nonsymbolic quality of Negro head tobacco works to protect it from interpretation; the loss the tobacco might intimate if it were interpreted goes up in figurative smoke.

III. Hapless Metonyms, Replacement Worlds If fetishists—unlike neurotics—famously attain something like happiness because they imagine that they have circumvented

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lack, then cultures that can produce fetishistic representations of their worst shames can also imagine gaining some of this form of happiness. Fetishism finds in realism (a genre that attempts to circumvent lack with an abandoned abundance) a particularly comfortable home because of the predominance of things, of details, of qualities—in short, of metonymy—in its figural ground. Metonymy is traditionally defined as a figure of contiguity: one object or characteristic calls to mind another with which it is associated. Readers of metonymy routinely and unconsciously recuperate all kinds of relationships between the thing in the text and those things outside the text with which it can be connected. We can recall here Hugh Bredin’s useful treatment of metonymy: “A metonymy neither states nor implies the connection between the objects involved in it. For this reason, it relies wholly upon those relations between objects that are habitually and conventionally known and accepted.”43 I would like to offer a variant definition and suggest that metonyms, like commuters, do not or cannot always make their connections. Some metonyms are not the beginning of a chain of associations but the stop sign, the end point which could lead to other objects and form a story only if pressure were applied. But for various reasons pressure is often not applied. Some metonyms are stopped in their tracks by various social and psychic taboos; some, by a lack of knowledge or memory; others, by the rules that guide the reading of the novel, rules that are dictated to some extent by the novel itself and to some extent by its criticism. These “rules” have been able to dictate which parts of the novel are about the real (that is, which parts are uninterpretable) and which parts contain “meaning” (and are thus allegorical and inherently unrealistic). Even slightly sophisticated readers learn to bypass and even resist any interpretation of the heady cavalcade of what will eventually be called the novel’s “reality effects.” We have learned to understand realism as a form that produces underdetermination because of its apparent ability to lower the threshold of interpretation and economize on meaning.44 But this does not mean that apparent “reality effects” aren’t performing

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considerable cultural work: they can do that work at many levels of cultural consciousness and unconsciousness. Novelistic things may be doing this work even, or even particularly, when the things of the novel slip into the register of the unconventional and hapless metonym, the one that does not make a riot of connections but rather the kind in which the metonym substitutes for those things with which it might be connected and creates a static fetish rather than a proliferating semiotic chain. Typically, a metonym is stabilized as a metaphor as the final step before its transformation into a fetish. But in the case of the metonym that misses its connections, or more precisely, whose connections we miss, metaphor is bypassed as a step in the stabilization of meaning: the metonym is frozen into fetish form before the definitional dust settles; its connections can register only unconsciously. As I discussed at greater length in the introduction, Paul de Man, in his reading of Proust, rehearses the conventional associations of metaphor with necessity and metonymy with contingency, noting that in this traditional hierarchy “metonymy is per definition unable to create genuine links.”45 De Man reminds us of the sleight of hand involved in metaphor’s dominance: the “superior efficacy of metaphor over . . . metonymy” lies precisely in metaphor’s ability to achieve a “figural play in which contingent figures of chance masquerade . . . as figures of necessity.”46 This reading usefully deconstructs the apparent difference between the two figures, leaving metaphor, along with metonymy, in a state of representational limbo. What I would like to recuperate here is the highly variable but ruggedly enduring efficacy of contingent figures: one reader’s reality effect can be another reader’s fetish and yet another reader’s conventional figure of contiguity; cultural meanings are stored variously and unpredictably, but for this very reason they tend not to be extinguished. For the Victorian resident of London, Pip’s walk past Smithfield to the office of Jaggers would have conjured up the blood and guts of this meat market; to the twenty-first century American college student reading the novel for a course in Victorian literature, it

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may evoke only the vaguest association with ham, if that. Such an association might be nearly “unconscious.” The place-name may simply strike a reader as worth looking up in a dictionary or in an encyclopedia. But the gore of Smithfield can be recuperated: it is latent in the word—in the metonym and its contingent, contiguous associations—as long as cultural memory and historical records preserve its earlier associations. Part of the value of “reading” novelistic things according to the strong metonymic method I propose in this book—and of having the habit of such reading—is precisely to recuperate and thereby maintain such latent meanings. The nineteenth-century novel, especially in its midcentury form, when it is full of things that are not well organized symbolically speaking, is a rich field in which to undo some of the social destruction of meaning that our neglect of reading things has unwittingly produced. Dickens seems to at once create and try to solve the inherent problem of the readerly recuperation of metonymic connections by the practice of a nearly crazed supplementation: lists, catalogs, reports, inventories, and descriptions are so excessive as to be hilarious; it is as if the Dickens novel represented an attempt to create a text that in its intense plenitude could not become the least bit writerly even in the hands of the most unruly reader. In this sense, much criticism of realism has in general obeyed what seem to me to be the dictates of or the exigencies that Dickensian realism seems to aim to create: most novelistic things are regarded as needing no explication or complication. Or there are just too many of them to interpret: where to begin? When to end? In the myriad of things that stack up in piles of overstocked paragraphs, Dickens seems to be trying to name all things, and to leave no thing lying around unconnected. His perfect novel might be like the shop of the ship’s instrument maker Sol Gills in Dombey and Son: The stock in trade of this old gentleman comprised chronometers, barometers, telescopes, compasses, charts, maps, sextants, quadrants, and specimens of every kind of instrument used in the working of a

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ship’s course, or the keeping of a ship’s reckoning, or in the prosecuting of a ship’s discoveries. Objects in brass and glass were in his drawers and on his shelves, which none but the initiated could have found the top of, or guessed the use of, or having once examined, could have ever got back again into their mahogany nests without assistance. Everything was jammed into the tightest case, fitted into the narrowest corners, fenced up behind the most impertinent cushions, and screwed into the acutest angles, to prevent its philosophical composure from being disturbed by the rolling of the sea. Such extraordinary precautions were taken in every instance to save room, and keep the thing compact. . . . [T]he shop itself, partaking of the general infection, seemed almost to become a snug, sea-going, ship-shape concern, wanting only good sea-room, in the event of an unexpected launch, to work its way securely to any desert island in the world.

The instruments by which one finds one’s way in the world—the ones that provide the right kinds of signs and information— are “jammed,” “fitted together,” “fenced up,” and “screwed into” place. There is no room for interpolation: the shop, like the Dickens description, keeps its things—the things by which we read the world—so close together that no more things (it would seem) can be added or fitted between them. The metonymic sublime produced by such compactly stored things means that no further metonymic wandering can be undertaken by the reader; the wandering that can occur now involves taking the whole seagoing concern, the whole novel, to “any desert island.” Why a desert island and not Madras or Kingston or Cape Town? The novel, like its safely stowed chronometers, barometers, and telescopes, guides us to a real that is itself empty of referents. The imperial fantasy of empty space is also a representational fantasy: the novel in this version of it does not represent experience; it is itself an experience of plenitude that cannot be found in the desert of the real. The novel can guide you to that desert, but you will still need it for sustenance upon arrival. The realist novel in this imagining of it is a world unto itself, a world otherwise, a replacement world. It is a fetish. But for a novel to

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realize such a self-contained condition it has to be shipshape, and realism is a particularly porous system of representation because of its very generosity; its “philosophical composure” can be undone by the metonymic imagination of each reader because it gives each reader so much stuff to read, to interpret, and to wonder about. Each readerly imagination will jiggle objects loose from the most tightly fitted novelistic places and put them into play with other objects and with other subjects as well. These subjects and objects will be imported from the world beyond the text, but connected to it by the infinite metonymic threads that can never be drawn tight enough to enclose (or close off ) a world between the covers of a book. The (attempted) metonymic sublime of the Dickens novel marks the end of a chapter in the history of the novel: the apex of the random accumulation of objects in the novel must also mark the moment of its decline. No future writer will be Dickensian, pace the frequent use of this adjective in the New York Times Book Review; they will only be able to parody a style that itself parodies, intentionally or not, the ambitions and limitations of realism as a hopeless project—because of its tendency to mean at once too much and too little: the metonymic sublime tips over immediately into the metonymic ridiculous. Hippolyte Taine observed long ago, in describing the passage from Dombey and Son I have just cited, that “the barometers, chronometers, telescopes, compasses, charts, maps, sextants, speaking trumpets and so forth . . . swamp [Dickens] from so many sides, and in such abundance, that he loses his judgment.” Taine concludes: “The difference between a madman and a man of genius is not very great.”47 The metonymic madness of Dickens marks a transition in my argument, a moment that is both historical and rhetorical, in which the representation of fictional objects begins to change, to become more self-conscious: the novel begins to organize its object relations with more symbolic care. In a few decades, the things of fiction become more subject to control from outside the novel as well: they will become increasingly subject to literary criticism and literary pedagogy.

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The inability of Dickens, or anyone else, to actually control or limit metonymy without transforming realism into something else (something like modernism, for example) means that history can find an especially rich figural place in what we call realist fiction. Formally speaking, the things of the Dickens novel are not, in general, commodified: we can read them as things. This, in turn, also means we can avoid, and in general have avoided, reading them altogether. And this is where realism can get away with murder: Magwitch can consume Negro head tobacco before our very eyes and we are not likely to connect this consumption with the “consumption” of Aborigines caused by convict transportation and white settlement in Australia. There is no “habitual” or “conventional” relationship, to recall Bredin’s terms, between the tobacco and the people it names but does not necessarily evoke. Negro head tobacco encodes with a minimum of symbolic expenditure a staggering loss: by the time of the novel’s publication in 1861 the near genocide of Aborigines had been accomplished. Repression, on the other hand, requires the expenditure of extravagant cultural resources: defenses against the repressed part of reality must be constantly shored up and even thoroughly renovated to maintain their efficacy, because the repressed always has plenty of energy to make a return trip to consciousness. Psychoanalytically inflected literary criticism, including that by theorists as diverse as Peter Brooks and Fredric Jameson, suggests that literature is to a great extent like Freud’s dream work, born of the need to symbolize unconscious conflicts—whether “personal” or “political.” Such criticism relies fundamentally on the idea of repression: the canny critic, like the perspicacious psychoanalyst, makes plain those things that writer and reader unwittingly collude—for psychological and/or ideological reasons—in denying. Indeed, in Brooks’s reading of Great Expectations, he imagines an “‘official’ and censoring plot stand [ing] over a ‘repressed’ plot.”48 Brooks connects these plots, revealing to us a “dialectic of return” that cures us of earlier thematic readings that preserve the mystifications disarticulated plots allow.49 And although I hardly need to emphasize the importance of the work of these two critics, I

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want to argue that the reading of repression—whether the repressed content is personal or political—leaves the wily instability of metonymy free to effect its shifty symbolics. I am arguing that although repression is certainly a critical function of realist fiction (and probably of every other kind of representation), realism also has at its disposal, and indeed must have at its disposal, the more economical form of fetishistic metonymy I am elaborating here. In this kind of metonymy there is a partial symbolization in unconventional terms, so that the fractional symbol becomes the object of attention, and thereby of a specific inattention. The metonym I am describing is more than a “reality effect” but less than a link in a dangerously mobile semiotic chain; no frightening or anxiety-provoking associations need be made to it. Through this mechanism, loss and consciousness of guilt are contained and conscious knowledge of them is forestalled. This means that readers do not habitually or reflexively stop and ponder the meaning of Magwitch’s preferred tobacco— realism doesn’t work that way, or rather, we haven’t allowed it to as yet. (Perhaps part of our problem with this form is the amount of agency we have granted it and the amount of cultural work we have attributed to it at the manifest level.) As I’ve noted earlier, realism has seemed to have a low threshold of interpretability and therefore we must be careful about what we choose as meaningful in the welter of detail it serves up—indeed, such care is the hallmark of sophisticated criticism, or literary reading as we have so far known it. This is also a crucial element in the circulation of commodities within realist representation: because commodities can circulate themselves and their symbolics at a level below that of interpretability—because they can circulate as things, the bad news of history can risk representation, since it will probably be left undecoded. The need for repression is bypassed by the ability of metonymic material to lie low on the horizon of legitimate styles of novel reading. In Great Expectations, Negro head tobacco compresses what was in the nineteenth century a well-known history of violence

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against Aborigines in Australia and in so doing creates a comfortingly realistic fictional realm in which full knowledge of this violence is unnecessary. Knowing some of what happened through symbolic representations that don’t get fully translated or fully connected to their historical referents produces a form of knowledge that is fetishistic and therefore satisfying in its very partiality. Realism, then, makes possible a satisfyingly deficient relationship to the real. Indeed, it protects us against the very real that it promises to deliver. The horrors of that real, the ones that could be known, however partially, through other kinds of representation—long-forgotten memoirs, journalism, and government documents, for example—are condensed and compressed into a global fetish that is also a global commodity fetish. This process makes goods and their symbolic burdens capable of traveling virtually duty-free from one site of imperial violence to the next—from the Caribbean to Virginia to Australia—promising the blandishments of nicotine and neutralizing (through calm acknowledgement and apparently effortless disavowal) some of the effects of slavery and genocide. But realism provokes a contrary process, one that is evident in the very methodology of this essay. Various historicist critical methods stake the work of interpretation precisely on making connections between some metaphorical or metonymic potential in the novelistic world and the real, historical world “outside” the novel. This is fine, it seems to me, as long is it does not become itself a triumphal process, allowing for the critic to imagine herself as the master demystifier of history’s ugly traces. The question for such readers must be: if fetishistic representation allows for a particular kind of satisfaction or serenity in which one both retains a belief and gives it up, then what pleasant feelings does the critique of a fetishistic representational practice make possible? One could argue that I have fetishized Australian Aborigines in this essay. If so, then I have used this people (or peoples, more accurately) such that they must symbolically contain an

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acknowledgement and a disavowal of my own. A to-and-fro relationship must be at work here, perhaps one that is common among certain professors of literature these days. Many of us are both deeply connected to, and admiring of, the texts we read, teach, and write about for a living, but we are also haunted by the cultural work such works have performed. Many of us have “grown up” critically in the shadow of Benjamin’s well-known thesis on the horrific connections between historical winning and enduring representation: Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.50

The ineluctable aspect of this process, this procession, is that it is always ongoing—“to this day”—to the day on which we read or reread Benjamin’s “Theses on History,” or Great Expectations, or any other document of civilization and barbarism. My response to this predicament is to attempt to remember a people who have been largely removed from this world and from enduring representations of it. I have thereby tried to create another kind of memorial, understanding that an academic essay is undoubtedly a poor genre in which to make such an attempt. But this is a memorial of particular kind. It is a fetishistic form of remembering, one in which I both admit and disavow my own inevitable participation in the processes I describe in a novel that I will continue to valorize by reading, teaching, and writing about it. Any admission is perforce also a disavowal, in that to admit

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is also to ask for leniency or to assume a lack of complicity and responsibility. For this reason, perhaps all historicist work should be read, to recall Derrida’s evocative word, awry: with one eye on the exigencies of the text being written about, and the other on the needs of the critic writing about it.

4 Toward a History of Literary Underdetermination: Standardizing Meaning in Middlemarch I have written about 236 pages of my Novel, which I want to get off my hands by next November. My present fear is that I have too much matter. « g e o r g e e l i o t , journal entry, 19 February 1871 »

I. Literary Authority and Novelistic Subjection Milton, Medusa, moisture, mist, monastic orders, musical instruments: the entries under “m” in the index of A Writer’s Notebook suggest the range of George Eliot’s reading and research interests. These included not only all of English, European, ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit literature, but also cell theory, contract law, the stethoscope, nympholepsy, the dietary habits of rural English people in the eighteenth century, antique gems, ecclesiastical vestments, British forest trees, and ancient sculpture, to create a list that is representative only in the diversity it suggests.1 While working on Adam Bede (1859), Eliot researched clouds and read J. Holt’s “Meteorological Diaries for July and

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August, 1799” in an old issue of Gentlemen’s Magazine so that she could accurately represent the weather in the Midlands during the period of that novel.2 It is no mistake that Eliot named her research “quarry,” the place from which, after great effort, an implacably material resource is removed. The excerpts that fill her wondrously various notebooks amount to an extraordinary bricolage of literary and material culture, an intense commingling of the literal and the figurative. They also indicate how vigorously Eliot tried to reduce or anticipate the random way in which things, as they are read by readers, can take on meaning.3 Indeed, the literalness of Eliot’s research suggests the extent to which she realized the intensity with which ideas can inhere in things, and the extent to which the range of such ideas cannot be anticipated: “Signs are small measurable things,” she writes in Middlemarch, “but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and coloured by a diffuse thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge.”4 Remarkably, knowledge takes material form in this description: it comes between the sign and its meaning, providing “colour” rather than clarity. The infinite digressions of meaning making that sweet, ardent girls might pursue can be vertiginously multiplied by all the other kinds of readers Eliot might well have worried about. Eliot was not alone: readers were a source of chronic anxiety in the nineteenth century, and their unpredictable interpretive habits pressed writers of Eliot’s self-consciousness to construct literary authority as a bulwark against the uncontrollable reading practices that a mass public threatened to produce. Jon Klancher argues that the Romantics were the first writers to be radically unsure of their audience;5 this lack of certainty only intensified as the century went on. Clifford Siskin describes the Romantic invention of “Literature” as a tool to encourage psychological conformity to an imagined human community;6 studies of early literary pedagogy bear him out.7 Because of, or despite, the fears of an “anonymous, phantasmal, ever-growing reading public,”8 countless institutions and cultural practices encouraged

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the middle-class philistine, the working-class autodidact, and the lower-middle-class would-be social climber to read.9 And specifically, to read literature. “The literature lesson would come to function as a surface on which a variety of social and personal deficits could be brought to the attention of a range of special knowledges,” Ian Hunter writes in his account of “English” as an emerging “technology combining therapeutic and ethical functions.”10 The novel was specifically useful in this enterprise because of “its unique capacity to delineate the formation of character and depict the struggle of reason and passion within the mind.”11 In the 1820s these new readers were taken in hand by a relatively new group of cultural commentators: literary critics. Ina Ferris suggests that since the new “‘reading public’ [did not] represent the commonality and consensus (the clubbiness) that the liberal public sphere ideally embodied . . . the space of criticism became less the social space of conversation and exchange among equals (its ideal figuration in the early eighteenth century) than a juridical space of judgment and discipline.”12 In the phrase of J¨urgen Habermas, a “culture-debating public” is replaced by a “culture-consuming public.”13 The more affluent portion of this wave of new readers of literature could assimilate legitimate interpretive practices through reading review essays in influential periodicals: “Attempting to shape and control reading practices so as to counter the disseminative force of the entry of new groups of readers, the new critical discourse sought to forge a unity that would replace the disintegrated public sphere.”14 The goal of cultural unity seems itself to have disintegrated as the nineteenth century wore on. T. W. Heyck argues that the readoption and increasing use of the word “intellectual” in the 1870s signals “the formation of a separate and learned class.”15 The intellectuals of the 1870s faced an even more heterogeneous public than did the writers of the earlier nineteenth century: not only the philistines of the middle class (who could at least afford to purchase the periodicals that would help them learn to read rightly), but also a rapidly expanding working-class readership,

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and perhaps most threateningly, a new group making itself felt in its ability to consume larger and larger amounts of everything from books to bacon: the lower middle class.16 Richard Altick has called this group “the amorphous stratum between the oldestablished middle class (merchants and bankers, large employers of labor, superior members of professions) and the working class proper—the ranks of unskilled labor. This increase, brought about by the changing economic basis of English life, has special significance in the history of the reading public. It was principally from among skilled workers, small shopkeepers, clerks, and the better grade of domestic servants that the new mass audience for printed matter was recruited during the first half of the century.”17 It is the coming to maturity of this motley group, with perhaps an even greater belief than the professional middle class in the efficacy of literary knowledge as an aid to social mobility, which may have most threatened the late Victorian literary elite. We will see that class aspirations are implicitly addressed in the opening paragraphs of Middlemarch: readers are put in their social and cultural places by a system of allusion so dense that social mobility and the acquisition of substantial cultural capital is a prerequisite for rather than an effect of reading. Eliot, herself of lower-middle-class origin and someone who achieved class mobility through education,18 was a significant contributor to the efforts of an elite minority to construct and then actively police the boundary between what we can now broadly define as the literary or highbrow novel, on the one hand, and the commercial or middlebrow novel, on the other.19 The threat from too many undiscriminating readers was increasingly augmented by the threat of too many undiscriminating writers: silly novels by lady novelists, Eliot famously contended, were the result of every woman who could pick up a pen imagining herself as capable of writing fiction. Interestingly, Eliot calls these writers to task for the “want of verisimilitude” in their portrayal of social class: “The fair writers have evidently never talked to a tradesman except from a carriage window; they have no notion of the working-classes except as ‘dependants’; they think

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five hundred a year a miserable pittance; Belgravia and ‘baronial halls’ are their primary truths; and they have no idea of feeling interest in any man who is not at least a great landed proprietor, if not a prime minister.”20 These inept novelists suggest the cultural degradation that ensues when social aspiration—in the form of the middle- or lower-middle-class author masquerading as wealthy aristocrat—contaminates writing (and by extension, reading). Thomas Arnold, writing in 1865, describes the problem of a truly commercial class of writers mass-producing texts: “Our literature—like our commerce, our house-building, or our railway system—grows and spreads at a wonderful rate; on the whole, doubtless, with beneficial result; yet who has not sometimes sighed for a despotic hand to prune its luxuriance and chastise its follies?”21 In this chapter, I am concerned with tracing the structure and ideology of underdetermination, a figurative practice that attempts to prune away the highbrow or literary text from middlebrow or nonliterary text. The hierarchizing effect of underdetermination extends to readers as well: we come to know our cultural places through a rhetorical interpellation that is subtle but inescapable. Rehearsed for us again and again by the Middlemarch narrator, underdetermination curtails metonymic restlessness—that anarchic possibility of reading I have pursued in the three preceding chapters—in which individual readers can wonder about the meanings of things within and beyond the pages of the novel, using their own idiosyncratic thimblefuls of knowledge. Meaning is stabilized in Middlemarch so that metonymic relations (which, strictly speaking, stop nowhere) can stop just when they should, a moment that requires the acuity of Eliot’s narrator to discern. Metonymy, as we’ll see in a reading of the opening paragraphs of the novel below, is narrated to the point of exhaustion: all possible (that is, correct) connections are made by the narrator. The infinite individual possibilities for metonymic interpretation are reduced to proper metaphors. And metaphors, because of their stability, become the figure around which an interpretive consensus can develop. To render

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the metonymic ground of the novel selectively and intensively metaphoric guarantees its reproducible symbolic coherence and allows for consensual, predictable interpretations of it as a literary work. This newly restricted literary meaning makes the things of fiction symbolically alienable: meaning can be assigned and reassigned according to a symbolic logic that is bounded by the covers of a text rather than by the knowledge trove of a culture. In the truly literary novel as it was invented by George Eliot, the narrator dictates transfers of meaning, and no particular meaning can inhere in a thing if that meaning derives from a symbolic system beyond the novel’s pages. Novelistic things are reified in this process, and along with them, literary meaning. We might say that in Middlemarch, Eliot industrializes the literary pedagogy begun by the Romantics and the early literary critics: far-flung readers can reproduce the same reading of a text, a reading based on metaphors that are legitimated from within the novel itself.22 Soon, the minutely interpreting narrator will disappear from the novel, as a grammar of interpretation diffused by diverse educational and cultural institutions supplants its functions. In this particular institution of the novel as a literary form, a process that happens, and has to happen, over and over again,23 Eliot sets the rhetorical stage for the more structured and restricted figuration of Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, as well as for modernism and its near abolition of randomness. The distribution and therefore the interpretation of novelistic things in literary fiction becomes, after about 1870, less and less metonymic and contingent, and more and more metaphoric and apparently necessary. The literary novel attempts to separate itself decisively both from the horde of novels beneath it and, by withholding the full extent of its meaning, from the mass of readers who cannot otherwise distinguish the literary novel from its inferior counterpart. Modernism is the culmination of this process: the “writerly” text demands our participation but also dictates, from long-disembodied grammars of meaning (the skeletal remains of the now superannuated didactic

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narrator), how we will participate in “writing” that which, in Barthes’s famous formulation, is unwritten in the novel. What I am trying to sketch here, and will discuss in more detail below, is the way in which the content of the novel has been gradually fetishized by the exigencies required for its qualification as a truly literary form, and by the institutionalization of a mode for writing and reading that form rightly.

II. Eliot’s Realism It will strike many readers as odd to argue that the standardization of meaning is a central project of Middlemarch. This is, after all, not only a realist novel but “the English masterpiece of the genre.”24 In a realist masterpiece we expect to get the highly individual stuff of everyday life, not a standardized rendering of it. But, as I have suggested, it may be the case that around 1870, the representation of the object matter of reality began to require greater authorial intervention. Eliot, I want to suggest, was among the first novelists to decide that the stuff, that is to say the things, of everyday life could have meanings for readers that narrators ought to restrict by way of interpretation. Critics have long noticed the ubiquity of interpretation within this novel. J. Hillis Miller describes the teleology of Middlemarch succinctly: “George Eliot’s apparent aim in Middlemarch is to present a total picture of provincial society in England at the period just before the Reform Bill of 1832. She also wants to interpret this picture totally.”25 Daniel Cottom asserts that “[i]t appeared to intellectuals like Eliot that interpretation of a radically new kind was required to subdue [the] modern world.”26 Catherine Gallagher discusses Eliot’s long-standing misgivings about realist representation in terms that suggest considerable anxiety about the vicissitudes of reader reception: “Despite her explicit professions of faith in a readable universe, her very earliest fiction manifests a deep skepticism about the legibility of facts, the apprehendable significance of appearances.”27 Eliot seems to have gained confidence in her own ability to read the universe rightly, but

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not in her readers’ ability do so without a great deal of narratorly assistance. Many readers carp and have carped about the didactic mode of the Middlemarch narrator, from Henry James, Leslie Stephen, and F. R. Leavis to my current students, friends, and colleagues. James complains that “[w]e feel in her always, that she proceeds from the abstract to the concrete. . . . The philosophic door is always open, on her stage, and we are aware that the somewhat cooling draught of ethical purpose draws across it.”28 Leslie Stephen writes, in the first book-length study of Eliot, that “she seems to be a little out of touch with the actual world and to speak from a position of philosophical detachment.”29 Leavis accuses Eliot of disturbing the realness of the world she creates by virtue of being “peculiarly addicted to moral preoccupations.”30 It seems that one “product” of Eliot’s realism as it manifests itself in Middlemarch, the practice of reading things minutely, is to allow her to develop and teach a moral philosophy of reading the novel and the world. Importantly, the two are not isomorphic. The writer must “translate” the world rather than copy it: “The aim of Art, in depicting any natural object, is to produce in the mind analogous emotions to those produced by the object itself; but as with all our skill and care we cannot imitate it exactly, this aim is not attained by transcribing, but by translating it into the language of Art.”31 The writer doesn’t “transcribe” the things of the world, but gives us instead some “translation” of them that will produce in us emotions that would be similar to those produced by the real stuff were it present: a subjective correlative, as it were. We might call Eliot’s doctrine here “No things but in ideas,” or, less aphoristically but perhaps more accurately, “No things except as they arise from ideas as they are processed in the reader’s mind.” As we begin Middlemarch, Dorothea begins her adulthood with a highly personal and largely confused (and confusing) approach to the interpretation of objects. She is variously oblivious or indifferent to, or overwhelmed by things—including such things as her dead mother’s jewelry, Casaubon’s piles of papers,

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her uncle’s paintings, the “writhing” artworks in the Vatican Museum, the ruins of Rome. Like many other characters in the novel who must learn how to have a realistic, or perhaps a realist, relationship to money, Dorothea enacts the bildung not so much of the post-Enlightenment individual, but of the modern consumer. By novel’s end, she clinches her avowal of love to Will Ladislaw with a promise to learn the ropes of commodity exchange: “In an instant Will was close to her and had his arms round her, but she drew her head back and held his away gently that she might go on speaking, her large tear-filled eyes looking at his very simply, while she said in a sobbing childlike way, ‘We could live quite well on my own fortune—it is too much—seven hundred-a-year—I want so little—no new clothes—and I will learn what everything costs’” (870). Dorothea’s promise to understand value in the rationalized terms of money is of course the key to her descent (which in the novel’s thematic terms is an ascent) into the middle class. The choice of a stable if alienating process for understanding what things are worth makes for an ending that, in its blend of fiscal hardheadedness and romantic softheartedness, is unimaginable in any reasonably straight-faced twentieth-century romantic or domestic plot. We might say that Middlemarch makes such endings impossible. By the time of the novel’s publication in 1871–72, Dorothea is one of the last women in Britain and in British fiction who has yet to learn how much everything costs. The condition of not knowing what everything costs is for us now an unfathomable state, and that is part of what makes it a truism to suggest that middle-class values triumph in Middlemarch. I am suggesting that a middle-class construction of value and meaning also wins the day, with complex consequences for object relations. If, as I will argue below, the virtues of standardized meaning are central to the novel’s form, the virtues of standardized value are central to its content. Several characters have insufficiently realistic relationships to money: Lydgate knows he isn’t rich, but has never felt poor; Rosamund refuses the necessity of selling things even after too many have been bought; Fred

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Vincy is always optimistic that somehow his debts will be paid. Caleb Garth’s moral worth as a businessman is based on the fact that he “could not manage finance: he knew values well, but he had no keenness of imagination for monetary results in the shape of profit and loss” (284). Each is squeamish about looking too closely at actual money. Fred doesn’t want to count the money he receives from his uncle. Lydgate doesn’t ask the prices—indeed, doesn’t even think of the prices—of the fine goods he chooses for the clothing of himself and the furnishing of his home. Rosamund insists that she and Lydgate leave Middlemarch in order to remove themselves physically from their financial shame. It is no mistake that the middle-class ideology of marriage triumphs amid a narrative that is motivated by financial debt, scandal, and shame. In this “tragedy based on unpaid butchers’ bills,”32 everyone must learn, however painfully, exactly “what everything costs.” If the proper procedure for determining value is largely worked out in the novel’s content, the formal device by which standardized meaning becomes naturalized in the novel is a mode of narration in which readers are patiently instructed to give up their own subjectivity, their own valuations, their own associations, and instead to process information according to the precise dictation of a narrator who makes connections and comparisons exhaustively and authoritatively. If the didactic narrator since Henry Fielding has long been focused on character—on preventing the misinterpretation of subjects—the Middlemarch narrator is intent on preventing the dangers that inhere in misinterpreting objects as well.33 An early forecloser of metonymic plenitude, the narrator of Middlemarch is among our first metacritics of the material, our first guides to the correct process for assigning ideas to the things of fiction.

III. Poor Dress “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed

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that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those with which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph from today’s newspaper” (29).The word “that” in the first sentence of the novel immediately suggests restriction: not just any kind of beauty, not some kind of beauty left to the vagaries of the reader’s imagination, but a specific kind of beauty that, if the reader does not recognize it from the data in the first paragraph, will be explicated further in several of those that follow. The meanings of “poor dress” are also not left to our own musings; the narrator explicates at great length the “mixed conditions” that ramify this particular case of poor dress.34 Our first thought might be that such dress is caused by poverty, but it turns out that poverty has nothing to do with it, and so we learn quickly that we cannot trust our own reflexive associations: we need a guide. This guide, the narrator, explains that both Dorothea and her sister Celia eschew “frippery” in favor of plain clothes because too-fancy dress would suggest a demeaning familial connection to retail sales—“yard measuring or parcel-tying forefathers” (29). Imagine how many of the original readers of the novel must have winced at this nose-holding disavowal of a background that was more or less precisely their own. Indeed, Eliot includes a number of middle-class fractions in this description of the retail clerk: the activities of measuring and tying would have been performed by shop owners early in the century; later in the century, with the growth of retailing, this work might have been performed by salaried clerks. Both the traditional middle class and the new lower middle class are evoked in this allusion to retail practice. To keep this gaggle of readers in their right social places, Eliot creates, in the hierarchy of her allusions, a hierarchy of readers. Readers will find their places in this hierarchy on the basis of a self-test: do I resemble someone like these characters, or do I resemble those types from whom these fictional gentlefolk

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are being carefully distinguished and deftly distanced? The novel is historically the genre in which readers become “conscious through heteroglot encounter, of that audience to which [they] cannot or will not belong.”35 Eliot’s busy narrator raises the stakes of the heteroglot encounter through her intricate interpretations and what those interpretations help us experience as the dense rhetorical grain of the novel. Dorothea and Celia come from a “good” family, including a flexible Puritan ancestor who “served under Cromwell, but afterwards conformed” (29), and this blend makes for a “wellbred [rather than a fanatical and therefore ill-bred] economy” in dress. The metonymic possibilities of poor dress are strictly delimited and contained: these are not impoverished aristocrats, or rural shut-ins who have become slovenly, or ethereal types who don’t care about clothes. These are women of a very particular economic and religious background whose beliefs dictate this sartorial plainness. The metonym is stabilized; that is, it becomes a metaphor, and metaphoricity will eventually allow for the more subtle transition to fetish: once meaning has been radically reduced (underdetermined) it can be stabilized most efficaciously in a figure that includes and veils (acknowledges and disavows) the jumble of meanings that “poor dress” can produce in the minds of various readers. But first we must work through the explication of the figure “poor dress,” which itself is intensely figured: allusion is used to clarify or expand the meanings of this dress, creating in itself a host of interpretive quandaries. In order to understand the kind of beauty that poor dress throws into relief, we have to imaginatively place Dorothea’s hand and wrist into the sleeves of the garment of the Blessed Virgin as she appears in Italian paintings. If we have never seen Italian paintings of the Virgin, we may be more than a bit stuck. Allusion performs a rhetorical and a social function here: it takes us to the right metaphor; it escorts us, as well, to the right sense of our own social and cultural place. The network of allusion that begins on the first page of Middlemarch and renders the novel dense, intellectual, and

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intimidating throughout suggests a complex construction or interpellation of an interpretive community. The use of particular allusions assumes that someone or some group of readers will understand enough for them to generate their intended meanings. You have to decide if you “get” enough of Middlemarch‘s allusions to belong to the group summoned into being with the use of the word “that” in the novel’s first sentence. Individual readers must then decide whether or not they can or want to belong to this community. If you find that you do not belong, you might begin to imagine the kind of self-improvement that would eventually make you eligible for membership. Allusion works to exclude and include certain readers in the same painful moment—that is, we are all included by way of interpellation (we all have to confront the “that” of the novel’s first sentence), we then must decide if we really understand “that kind of beauty”; we must decide if the subject position “fits.” Susan Stewart has argued that “every allusion . . . is the articulation of a statement of membership.”36 It is necessarily an articulation of nonmembership as well: only some readers of the novel will be qualified to understand it. Allusion, Stewart writes, “is the articulation not only of a relation to a tradition, but of the degrees of access available to that tradition. Its mystification and separation from tradition serve as a metaphor for the escape from one class to another; the abandonment of the object for its connotation, which, at the same time, quantifies and fetishizes the object” (1151). Allusion becomes metonymy and then metaphor and then fetish: an object is “abandoned” for one particular connotation (one is singled out; many are suppressed). Things are then replaced by one of their qualities, but most importantly by an assigned quality: the narrator works the allusion through to its rightful reduction. These are steps in what I call the “standardization” of literary meaning. Allusion creates a tradition that it seems to access only without manipulation or interpretation; the individual reader must either sign on to that tradition or consign herself to an interpretive isolation that will eventually make institutionally legitimate (or legitimate-able) readings impossible.

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At the same time, the rhetorical plot allegorizes a plot of class mobility: if you can access a tradition, you can, potentially, move up in the world. Middlemarch holds out the promise of a connection between social advancement and interpretive plenitude: if you knew Italian painting, you would know what kind of beauty Dorothea has, and thus, you would be cozily in on the “that” of the novel’s first sentence, and an honorary member of a social class to which you might eventually gain substantive admission. But allusion, as a fetishistic process, actually stops certain readers in their tracks. It turns out that the point may not be to know certain paintings in detail; the point may be to know what the mention of certain paintings means: this kind of information can only be acquired through participation in the social life of certain classes, not in self-improvement through reading or museum going or European traveling. And it is this need to be in the know in order to properly “know” that contributes so mightily to the tragedy of autodidacticism, from Bradley Headstone and Jude Fawley on down. The rhetorical block Eliot puts up for such readers is the allusion fetish: midway between Freud’s sexual fetish and the commodity fetish, it is chosen but shared, yet shared sparingly. It circulates just above the heads of the newer readers of the novel in the second half of the nineteenth century: “the devices of allusion,” Stewart notes, “work by display, not by explanation” (1129). Deidre Lynch describes an earlier moment of novelistic community making (and breaking) as it functioned for the readers of Jane Austen’s novels: “Austen’s concern throughout her work with readers’ relations to texts is a response to historically new uses of reading matter in which . . . literary response could serve as a mode of distinction and in which the pleasures of the imagination and the pleasures of social calculation were mutually enhancing.”37 Many of the new readers of the later nineteenth century inherited and retained precisely this ideology of reading; in fact, with the increase in readers over the course of the century—and the ensemble of institutions and practices promoting

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the value of reading—the imagined connection between literary responsiveness and social success was perhaps even more intensely ingrained in Eliot’s readers than in those of Austen. But Eliot’s hopeful reader is harder pressed to gain a “mode of distinction.” Correct interpretation, the figuration of Middlemarch suggests, requires a context that cannot be supplied simply by extensive reading and diligent study. This is an internal bid, I think, to render the novel unavailable to the aspiring reader: the lower-middle-class or petit bourgeois reader, as Pierre Bourdieu has argued, is a source of chronic danger to highbrow culture: “[L]egitimate culture is not made for him (and is often made against him), [and] it ceases to be what it is as soon as he appropriates it.”38 Michel de Certeau describes the struggle that attends the legitimation of interpretation and the maintenance of a strict hierarchy of readers: “Reading is as it were overprinted by a relationship of forces. . . . The use made of the book by privileged readers constitutes it as a secret of which they are the true ‘interpreters,’ who transform their own reading (which is also [the] legitimate one) into an orthodox ‘literality’ that makes other (equally legitimate) readings either heretical . . . or insignificant (to be forgotten). . . . By its very nature available to a plural reading, the text becomes a cultural weapon, a private hunting reserve, the pretext for a law that legitimizes . . . the interpretation given by socially authorized professionals and intellectuals.”39 In the relationship of forces “overprinting” Middlemarch, an esteemed member of an essentially middle-class cultural elite, which is fully tied to the market and therefore to the tastes and desires of those readers from whom it wishes to distinguish and distance itself, imagines a mode of literariness that would, ideally or eventually, place its invaluable works outside the market and beyond the reach of these readers. This mode is based on the intensification of metaphoric figuration in the novel, elevating the level of cultural sophistication required for reading it. But this metaphorization is effected by the allusions and explications of the Middlemarch narrator such that it beckons all readers, including those who are

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least able to decode the riches it promises. The things of the novel are doubly fetishized: they enclose and veil the secrets related to their material existence outside the novel, and they enclose and veil the cultural secrets of an intellectual elite whose membership, tantalizingly, includes at least one person who has worked her way up from the lower ranks of the reading public—George Eliot.

IV. Emeralds “It was no great collection, but a few of the ornaments were really of remarkable beauty, the finest that was obvious at first being a necklace of purple amethysts set in exquisite gold-work, and a pearl cross with five brilliants in it” (34). We are still in the novel’s first chapter when Dorothea’s sister Celia asks that they divide their dead mother’s jewelry.40 Dorothea has no interest in the jewelry initially: she tells Celia to take it all. But for Celia to take pleasure in it, she needs Dorothea to agree to take and wear something too. Celia chooses the most obviously fine ornaments (the amethyst necklace and pearl cross) at Dorothea’s insistence, at which point, in a parable-like turn of the plot, two even finer pieces are discovered: an emerald ring and bracelet. Dorothea’s reaction to the emeralds suggests the difficulty of object relations when they are insufficiently restrained by some impersonal form of value: “‘How very beautiful these gems are!’ said Dorothea, under a new current of feeling, as sudden as the gleam [of sunlight on the emeralds]. ‘It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scent. I suppose that is the reason why gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St. John. They look like fragments of heaven. I think that emerald is more beautiful than any of them’” (35). From renouncing the jewelry altogether to taking the most beautiful (and valuable) items is only a matter of narrative moments. Dorothea falls in love with the emeralds and then, in a swift rationalization or justification of her love, goes on to transform them into spiritual emblems. But in the tumbling scheme of value to which Dorothea is prey, the biblical

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allusion to emeralds as fragments of heaven immediately gives way to a metonymic consideration of the social relations of their production: “‘Yes! I will keep these—this ring and bracelet,’ said Dorothea. Then, letting her hand fall on the table, she said in another tone—‘Yet what miserable men find such things, and work at them, and sell them!’ She paused again, and Celia thought that her sister was going to renounce the ornaments, as in consistency she ought to do” (36). Dorothea cannot make the move that would reduce metonymy to metaphor, which would then allow the shift to fetish: she cannot look at these jewels without remembering the human cost of production, and without some pain. Yet, they remain beautiful to her, and thus, she struggles to allow them to retain the spiritual aura with which she has initially endowed them. If she could stabilize them as “fragments of heaven,” then only one aspect of their possible meanings would remain explicit and they could become fetishes. But she continues to think about their production, and that knowledge remains conscious even as the jewels seduce her with their ability to catch and magnify light. Her pleasure is interrupted—but not canceled altogether—when she thinks of the “miserable men” who “find such things, and work at them, and sell them!” (36). Celia thinks that this knowledge will lead Dorothea to “renounce the ornaments,” but Dorothea continues in a highly ambivalent state: she acknowledges the misery that attends the mining, cutting, and distribution of emeralds and continues to desire them for their beauty, which she legitimates through a symbolic connection to heaven. This unstable compromise indicates the disorganization of desire produced by Dorothea’s simultaneous engagement with multiple ideas of value. Joseph Wiesenfarth has argued that Dorothea’s seduction by the emeralds and her choice to keep them suggests the way in which her “[m]oral commitment tempers a response to aesthetic objects with an awareness of social responsibility.”41 But this “tempering” is more rightly a tampering: she can neither resolve this conflict through the repressions of commodity fetishism nor renounce her desire. Hobbled by the

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disorganization of her object relations, Dorothea has the overwhelming task of having to decide the value of things on a thingby-thing basis. One argument of this novel of consumer development (and of a liberal version of modernity more generally) is that exchange value liberates us from this crippling task. In The Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel argues that this “objectification” of economic exchange extends the possibilities for freedom and justice in the transfer of goods and initially effects a positive “restraint of direct subjective desire.”42 “Exchange . . . is the source of economic values, because exchange is the representative of the distance between subject and object which transforms subjective feelings into objective valuation” (90). Abstract value organizes meaning; it also disconnects immediate and individual private desire from an apparently consensual and reasonable public value.43 Desire becomes (or comes to seem like) a fully private matter, and, even better, one that can maintain all of its original chaos without disturbing social relations in any systemic way. Individual cathexes or decathexes, we might say, can occur without social consequences. If you suddenly like your forks and spoons more than you did last week and want twice as many eggs in exchange for them, the consequences to the economy are slight at the very most, since their money value is fixed by the workings of a market that cannot be tipped by individual valuations. You will sell your cutlery for their money value and buy eggs at their money value, and neither value is yours to make. To disconnect desire from demand is to make desire less consequential and therefore easier to submit to or to enjoy. We might imagine that Dorothea would be less anxious or indifferent about her relations to things if the process of valuation didn’t seem to be entirely in her hands: with less at seemingly public risk, more could be risked privately in the way of affection or investment. And when you no longer have to decide value, you no longer have to imagine its component parts. Heaven, “miserable men” (and women), sibling relations—all are privatized or else consigned to the near oblivion of reification. Reification and underdetermination

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perform crucial cultural work: they allow us to rehearse the process whereby we can enact and represent substantial and useful social forgetting. But the forgetting involved does not involve loss; the fetish contains history in a kind of shifting, or maybe just shifty, utopian mix of plenitude and diminution. In his magisterial account of British retailing, James B. Jefferys contends that little changed in British shopping between the Middle Ages and the mid-nineteenth century. Although this claim has been challenged by new studies of the unevenness of retail development,44 it remains true in its large outlines. Before 1850, the window tax still obtained, and plate glass had yet to be mass produced in large panes: stores advertised their wares by way of discrete signs. After the window tax was repealed and plate glass became more readily available, ostentatious window display (outside London) was still widely considered distasteful. Customers had to ask salespeople for goods that were not on display; they then “haggled, higgled and chaffered” over the price.45 Each transaction was slow; each was governed by individual knowledge, abilities, needs, and ideas of value. Abstraction, rationalization, and objectification had yet to be consistently achieved at the level of the shop. In the recent work on Victorian consumer culture, much attention has been paid, understandably, to the dizzying proliferation of things that characterized the period. Less attention has been paid to an equally important nineteenth-century trend: the stabilization of price. The three innovations that account for the sea change in retailing ascribed to the last half or third of the nineteenth century all contributed to this standardization: “multiple shops” (chain stores), cooperatives, and department stores. The multiple shops, which took hold on a large scale in the 1870s, were characterized by increasingly standardized goods with set prices that were often marked by labels visible in window displays.46 The multiple shop, like the cooperative, sold staples to a largely laboring-class clientele. Cooperatives—stores owned and run by workers—also set nonnegotiable prices. The department store, which catered to more affluent customers, set fixed prices on

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luxury goods as well as staples. An exchange value dictated by a larger market than that created by a town’s worth of customers extended more deeply and consistently into the realm of retail selling. A metonymic version of estimating value—“haggling, higgling, and chaffering” over highly variable versions of a given commodity—was coming to be replaced, in the second half of the nineteenth century, by a metaphoric one, in which one half of the metaphor became an increasingly predictable unit of stuff—a sugar cube, a standardized white loaf, a prepacked half pound of tea47 —and the other half was, handily, a universal equivalent. The social relations of consumption, like the social relations of production, were coming to be enclosed in the tight symbolic logic that came to characterize both literary and economic objects by the end of the nineteenth century. Dorothea’s calculations of value take place in a zone in which exchange value overlays and overlaps the multiple forms of value that came before it. Given this, it is notable that the jewelry is not discussed in terms of its most obvious noncommercial status: that of the heirloom. In that capacity, the emeralds might be imagined as removed from the vagaries of commodity exchange and could instead be ensconced in a system of private value. This economy is left unconstructed in the novel, perhaps because, like the things of Rome I will discuss in the next section, it would bring with it the unbearable weight of inalienable historical significance. The novel (or rather, this novel), proves and provides—through its management of the ideas in things— the alienability of all meaning. Indeed, Eliot faces this apparently anomic force with her own meliorist aplomb, and suggests its virtues. Alienability, as a component of underdetermination, suggests a form of symbolic mobility, which, if properly managed, can be put to good cultural use. It is a symbolic practice in which figuration is micromanaged and thereby stabilized and standardized, alienability is neither demoralizing nor disruptive: it makes fictional things, like commodities, capable of meaning or not meaning on what might be roughly described as demand. “Literary works,” Marc Shell writes, “are composed of tropic

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exchanges . . . some of which can be analyzed in terms of economic content and all of which can be analyzed in terms of economic form.”48 Eliot undoubtedly would have quailed at such a formulation, but Middlemarch takes tropic exchange to new heights: she in a sense borrows economic form—or perhaps it borrows her—to systematize the mode within which fictional things can mean, and therefore in the way they can be “exchanged” within the novel. Dorothea’s true heirloom, the novel suggests, is her plain dress. The correct assignment of ideas to things is hinted at in this paradox: the history of Dorothea (and of England for that matter) is stored, in Middlemarch, in a commodity. Theodor Adorno has suggested that “on the one hand, the commodity is the alienated object in which use value withers; on the other hand, it is the surviving object that, having become alien, outlives its immediacy. We have the promise of immortality in commodities.”49 Alienation is extraordinarily good news for nineteenth-century progressive thought: if we follow Eliot’s subtle prescription for the assignment of ideas to things, the weight of history will not detain us. Its burdens can be shifted and balanced: the rhetorical structures of the novel can provide an endlessly capacious and yet easily portable storage space for the stuff of the past that can be neither regularly remembered nor permanently relinquished.

V. Roman Things Rome regularly threatened to overwhelm its Victorian visitors: “[A]n excess of matter has paralyzed my pen,” Charlotte Eaton writes in her popular account of her Italian travels, Rome in the Nineteenth Century (1852).50 On one day of touring, she has to make it her “particular request not to see the Laocoon; [she] could bear no more” (106). Indeed, Eaton gives very particular directions for the safe consumption of Roman art and antiquities: go to Saint Peter’s for the first time and “give its splendours only a transient glance” (70). It is as if one must be inoculated with a bit of the toxin from the very treasures one has presumably

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traveled to Rome to see. Similarly, Emil Braun, an early secretary of the Archeological Institute of Rome, warns that “[t]he lover of the antique generally thinks that the most important thing to be done is to hasten to the Vatican which, doubtless, contains the first and largest museum in the world. But if the object be to regulate the impressions received, and, by a judicious distribution of them, to induce a method which shall conduct speedily and safely to the goal,—we should advise every one desirous of instruction and permanent enjoyment, to begin with the works of art in the Capitoline Museum.”51 Braun and Eaton are part of a much larger group of Victorian travel advisers who warn visitors against any headlong engagements with Rome and its stuff. The “antique” things threaten at least in part because they carry within them a history—of empire, of republic, of rise, and of fall—about which Victorian Britons were understandably ambivalent: Republican Rome was uncomfortably associated with the French Revolution and a radical republicanism; Imperial Rome, on the other hand, “insistently proposed itself as a model and a warning in a Britain which had become a consciously if controversially imperial power.”52 The fact of the previous colonization of Britain by Rome was a complicating factor in this identification: British historians and antiquarians made much of Roman ruins in Britain, even though they were “evidence of Britain’s subjugation to a foreign imperial power.”53 But Roman things may have threatened nineteenth-century tourists at another level as well: the sculptures, frescoes, paintings, and ruins, which left even George Eliot with a “sense of awe” at the “solemnity of suddenly arrested life,”54 are what the anthropologist Annette Weiner has called “inalienable possessions.” Inalienable possessions are objects that, unlike commodities, cannot achieve anonymity, but resiliently retain memories and meanings (specious or real): “[O]wners of inalienable possessions [are empowered] with hegemonic dominance over others. It is then not the hoary idea of a return gift that generates the thrust of exchange, but the radiating power of keeping inalienable possessions out of exchange.”55 Inalienable possessions may

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be given as gifts, but they stay outside exchange, and no matter who owns them at a given moment, the prestige of history and of the original owner is retained. “The motivation for keepingwhile-giving,” Weiner explains, “is grounded in . . . the need to secure permanence in a serial world that is always subject to loss and decay.”56 Permanence for whom or for what? The glories of Rome, even if Britons could possess them (and they did buy, steal, and copy a huge number of antiques and antiquities), were still and always Roman: “[I]nalienability negates the possibility of separation.”57 A fallen empire maintains the power, ultimately, to deprive a thriving one of its spoils. So it is unsurprising that the power of the past is actively resisted in the Roman chapters of Middlemarch; a large part of this resistance is a subtle but systematic devaluation of the very treasures that brought Victorians to Rome in the first place. Their fixity—in Rome and in the Roman past—makes them diametrically opposed to the novel’s principle and promise of a portable form of history and its meanings. Casaubon epitomizes the deadening effect of intense attachment to the antique and the inalienable. During the honeymoon of the Casaubons, any hope of reproduction seems to be forestalled by the vicissitudes of his research in the Vatican Museum. And this research, Dorothea learns in Rome (from Will Ladislaw) is largely if not entirely useless, because Casaubon has ignored crucial German scholarship in philology. He is revealed as the definitive amateur, the kind of scholar of the past who is marginalized in the nineteenth century by the rise of the professional and professionalized historian.58 Ladislaw, the self-conscious and unpretentious amateur, compares Casaubon’s work to “the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor’s back chamber” (237). The deluded nature of Casaubon’s work makes it a forgery of research, a reproduction that is not only “false” but (perhaps worse) “surplus.” Dorothea is left to consume Rome with the help of guides. She is not only overwhelmed by what she sees; she fails to find the value of the seemingly invaluable things before her, a problem she has had before: “I never could see any beauty in the pictures

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which my uncle told me all judges thought very fine. And I have gone about with just the same ignorance in Rome. There are comparatively few paintings I can really enjoy” (238). The narrative reply to this apparently perverse devaluation comes from Will Ladislaw, echoing John Ruskin and anticipating, oddly enough, Bourdieu: “Art is an old language with a great many artificial styles, and sometimes the chief pleasure one gets out of knowing them is the mere sense of knowing” (238). Knowing is abstracted from the known; pleasure derives from amassing cultural capital rather than from the things of culture themselves. Will also makes it clear that he picks and chooses among Roman things, refusing a slavish, guidebook form of admiration. He enacts a profoundly important cultural performance: an agile removal from the teeming mire of the advancing middlebrow to the magnificent and lightly populated plateau of the highbrow. This ever-upward cultural mobility is crucial to maintaining the always shifting and often breached boundary between high- and middlebrow culture: “[O]ne of the most significant properties of the field of cultural production . . . is the extreme permeability of its frontiers.”59 Rome is a crucial site in the Victorian phase of the battle for primacy in this field: as more and more middle-class tourists arrive, with the help of Cook and Baedeker, more affluent and educated visitors struggle to differentiate themselves from the guide-carrying horde.60 Dorothea easily, almost spontaneously, rejects the middlebrow, mass-produced idea of universal greatness in Rome but has virtually no access to the stuff out of which an idiosyncratic or highbrow (what Eliot calls a “Protestant”)61 response could be made: “She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken to the chief points of view, had been shown the greatest ruins and the most glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and sky, away from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes” (224–25). Dorothea cannot experience aesthetic greatness from within the

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claustrophobic hold of this city of “visible history.” Refusing to divide the content from the form of the representations around her, she violates primary principles of both commodity fetishism and realist aesthetics: “The painting and sculpture may be wonderful, “she observes, “but the feeling is often low and brutal, and sometimes even ridiculous” (252). If the “feeling” or content of a representation is “low and brutal,” how can representation rise above that level? Dorothea must discover what George Eliot helps the novel “discover,” and that is that “the object of representation could be deprived of value in the very process of representing it and that the value thus subtracted from the thing depicted could be appropriated by the representation.”62 Paradoxically, the fetishism of commodities and the rationale of later nineteenth-century realism require that we reflexively appreciate form before content, which requires that we also know how to distinguish between the two: “[M]oney implies the separation between the value of things and their substance,” Marx writes in the Grundrisse—that separation is precisely what commodity fetishism makes us forget.63 What Marx keeps asking us to do is to return the commodity to its former status as a metonym: a thing connected to people and other things through its use value. Part of the reason we cannot do this, and what makes it difficult to even imagine, is the way in which representational practices have reinforced this split by erasing it: realism, for example, implies the separation between the meaning of things and their substance, or more precisely, it teaches us to decide which things can have meaning (and how they have it) and which things are merely substance and therefore uninterpretable: “Through systematic, abstract reductions based upon a consensus of views, realistic perception moves to higher levels of generalization.”64 This is a perceptual process that becomes “naturalized” only in modernity—and perhaps not fully until its middle moment, the mid-nineteenth century. Our relationship to things involves bypassing their materiality in order to get to an abstraction or generalization that tells us their meaning or import or value, or even, as in the case of realism, their realness.

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Acquiring the structures of cognition that will eventually (beyond the novel’s ending) make her a commodity fetishist and a more comfortable consumer of the things of her world generally, Dorothea learns how to abstract a general thematic from what she sees in a painting, bypassing the particularity of representation in favor of a larger meaning that goes beyond, or leaves behind, the details that disturb her when she examines “the pictures one by one,” a process—and this should be a paradox but tellingly is not meant to be one—that makes “the life [go] out of them” (238). Dorothea goes on in this scene to understand the paradoxical connection between an ugly reality and its beautiful representation. She observes about painting that “it must be difficult to do anything good. I have often felt since I have been in Rome that most of our lives would look much uglier and more bungling than the pictures, if they could be put on the wall” (252). Representation abstracts meanings from experience, making it look less ugly and bungling both in the moment of representation and in the remembrance of the experience of seeing something hanging on a wall that is likelife, but better organized and therefore less ugly and more reliably meaningful. The soothing processes of standardizing and apportioning meaning in Middlemarch suggest that history can be put to one side, in a kind of spatiotemporal equality with the present. There is marked critical agreement about this flattening of time. J. Hillis Miller suggests that the narrative executes “a metaleptic assumption of the past, preserving and annulling it at the same time.”65 Daniel Cottom calls it a “cancellation of history”: the necessary move for “surveying modern society from a perspective superior to individual interests and in projecting a future.”66 U. C. Knoepflmacher describes it as “the annulment of time.”67 Terry Eagleton contends that the novel replaces the historical with the ethical in an attempt to avoid the political: “Middlemarch works in terms of egoism and sympathy, ‘head’ and ‘heart,’ self-fulfillment and self-surrender.”68 In spatializing and synchronizing time, Eliot sets the stage for the novel to subsume historiography. The novel, or that

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version of it that is Middlemarch, can claim a superior ability to achieve plenitude in the representation of temporality. History matters in Middlemarch, but not as much as, or not precisely in the way that, we might expect it to. Railroads, the Reform Bill, medical advances, new directions in German philology—these are all important, but for most of us, the history recorded in a “home epic” is more significant and has more to do with what we will actually do (and what we should do) in the world. In the history that happens at home, our actions have an impact on large events, but minutely, slowly, unintentionally. There are no sudden moves or mass movements. Novelized history is powered by good intentions, kind actions, and widening sympathies and not by passionately held political beliefs or (worse) programs for change. This version of a domesticated and invidualized history relies on the underweighting of the meanings that accrue in things. The inalienable antique, with its oppressive overdetermination, is replaced by the fully alienable metonym, which can be endlessly invested with and divested of meaning. This mobility of meaning is restricted and thereby secured by the symbolic structure of the novel in which it occurs. The novel’s final paragraph describes Dorothea’s future in the past tense, placing both times in the present. The reader, in the present tense of reading, has the past and the future to contemplate in the kind of disinterested because atemporal perspective that Eliot would have us be capable of imagining, even though we, as humans rather than narrators, cannot achieve such omniscience.69 This space of synchronic time is like the twodimensional “space of exchange” offered by the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace as described by Andrew H. Miller, in which things lose meaning through radical decontextualization.70 This is the space and time that we can experience only as novel readers; in its synchronic flatness, subjects can master objects. Dorothea’s future, like that of the Roman Empire and Republic, has already taken place: “Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels

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which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts: and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs” (896). The incalculable diffusion of Dorothea’s “fine issues” describes the achievement of a particular kind of individual experience of historical plenitude. It is, importantly, a vague description. This mysterious, quietist, and comforting idea of fulfillment is a deeply sentimental form of plenitude, perhaps the only kind available in the middle moment of an industrial modernity. A selective fullness of meaning is attributed to small, private, unnamed processes in the foreground, while, in the background, the larger historical processes that cannot be domesticated are reified in and as objects, and they are not allowed to mean too much; they will not be allowed to disturb us unduly. If the realist novel can make meanings that history cannot, it also “learns,” by the last third of the nineteenth century, to restrict meanings that history might let slip. It is no mistake that historicism became the dominant critical mode, as early as the 1920s,71 for interpreting the Victorian novel. Eliot, in a sense, planned it that way. The underdetermination of Middlemarch allows it to produce literariness and historicity together, and to make its meanings limited, legible, and reproducible. It marks a signal moment in the history of fugitive meaning.

Coda: Victorian Thing Culture and the Way We Read Now Should I describe the room? No. « s a m u e l b e c k e t t , Molloy »

I. Victorian Thing Culture In the last chapter, I argued that the development of a particularly literary novel, as it was pursued by Eliot in Middlemarch, paradoxically depended on a narratorial strategy that had the effect of “commodifying” fictional things. The hermeneutical policing1 performed by the Middlemarch narrator has the effect of reifying the novelistic object in some of the same ways that capitalist exchange reifies the commodity: what we might otherwise appreciate as its material qualities are abstracted, and any glimmer of the social relations of its production are obscured from our readerly “view.” When pressed into the increasingly rigorous metaphorical service required by the symbolic organization of the literary novel, the fictional object enters an alienating system of figural exchange. And critics, early and late, have not resisted this form of commodification: as long-term residents and resisters of commodity

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culture, we tend to become nervous about things—they all seem to be commodities. As Rey Chow points out, in Marx’s description of the commodity fetish, the commodity becomes a “false representation,” and “despite the ambiguities that may be detected in Marx’s memorable portrayal, this portrayal has nonetheless given rise to a prevalent modernist intellectual tendency to regard things as superficial and morally suspect phenomena.”2 This “tendency” means that we conflate things and commodities; we often read the welter of things in Victorian novels as symptomatic of what we reflexively understand to be the bad materialism of commodity culture. Indeed, in the perhaps overly generous but certainly symptomatic estimation of Jeff Nunokawa, “our sense of the commodity’s invasiveness may owe its largest debt neither to the eloquence of social prophecy . . . nor the elaborations of social theory . . . but rather to the Victorian novel and its narrative heirs.”3 The history of Dickens criticism in particular would seem to bear him out: the surfeit of objects, the objectifying of subjects, and the animating of objects in the Dickens novel have long caused considerable critical discomfort. Early on, Hippolyte Taine, in his History of English Literature, complains that “Dickens does not perceive great things. . . . Enthusiasm seizes him in connection with everything, especially in connection with vulgar objects.” He takes Dickens to task for the “minute and impassionate observation of small things” and the neglect of “beautiful forms and fine colours.”4 G. H. Lewes, a sort of rueful and slightly embarrassed admirer of Dickens, points out the mechanical, thinglike nature of Dickens characters: they make him think of “the frogs whose brains have been taken out for physiological purposes, and whose actions henceforth want the distinctive peculiarity of organic action. . . . [T]hey are as uniform and calculable as the movements of a machine.”5 For Victorian critics of Dickens, the failure is an aesthetic and compositional one that belongs to Dickens; by the mid-twentieth century critics understand the failure as belonging to the social world he is anatomizing. Dorothy Van Ghent’s discussion of

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Great Expectations, written in 1953, focuses on the way human beings are “thinged”: “[C]haracters are described by nonhuman attributes, or by such an exaggeration or emphasis on one part of their appearance that they seem to be reduced wholly to that part.”6 (129). Dickens, as Van Ghent understands him, tries to rescue his readers from the fate of his characters: we must decommodify ourselves, and our fellow humans, in order to regain some form of humanity that industrialization continually threatens to destroy. The awful thing is to be like a thing; there is no sense that we might learn something important about subjects from objects. Catherine Gallagher has recently noted the extent to which the object world is rendered vital in Dickens. The problem, in Gallagher’s reading, is not that people are like things, but rather, that things promise to live, and therefore, people seem also to be at the disposal of animation processes outside themselves, and of nature as it had been previously conceived. The materialism of the nineteenth century “dramatically expanded the zones of the organic, vastly multiplied the entities that could be described as alive or dead.”7 The novel displays a “flattened ontological space” in which the difference between subjects and objects, between animate and inanimate things, is blurred by the possibility of animation, reanimation, vivification, and revivification. In a sense, the argument about subject-object relations has not changed a great deal: objects are still too much like subjects, which results in subjects’ becoming too much like objects: the dead subject, like the inert object, can live or live again. The price paid by subjects in the realist novel is made clear by Taine, Lewes, Van Ghent, and Gallagher, but what of the price paid by objects in the process that we call, with concern and disdain, objectification? Fictional objects become exchangeable figures used in the novel’s symbolic system to make a point about the mechanicalness, one-dimensionality, and deadness of industrialized people. Thus, fictional things are themselves commodified.8 But importantly, they are commodified by criticism. It is not clear, after all, that being like an object is always a bad thing in Dickens or in Victorian fiction in general.9

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To return to Nunokawa’s formulation, the extent to which our sense of the commodity’s invasiveness derives from the Victorian novel may be due to largely to the literary-critical tradition that has attended that novel. I would like to suggest in this coda that our readings are often more symptomatic of our own immersion in commodity culture than of the critical dictates or demands of realism itself—especially in its mid-nineteenth-century form. We imagine that the realist novel “thinks” about things the way that we do, or that we have learned commodity thinking from the novel and its representational traditions. We then fail to discern a culture that may have preceded commodity culture: what I call “thing culture.” Indeed, it is in large measure Victorian thing culture that made The Ideas in Things imaginable and then possible: the textual archives available to me on the evolution of cotton machinery, on the fate of mahogany logs in their travels from the Caribbean to England, on the details of furniture styles, on the early connoisseurship of madeira wine, on the banning of adulterate tobacco, on the history of handloom weaving in Britain and India and Egypt—all of the Victorian detailing of matter and its making into consumable things has meant that I readily could find the connections for the strong metonymic readings I perform in the first three chapters of this book. Working on The Ideas in Things, and on the collection of factory literature that preceded it,10 has led me to think that although we are all commodity fetishists now, and our literary criticism often reflects this problem, our nineteenth-century forebears may well have maintained a more complex relationship to the goods by which they were surrounded and intrigued. Ideas swarmed in the many and various things of that world: the processes of commodification—abstraction, alienation, and spectacularization—were achieved slowly rather than suddenly, unevenly rather than consistently or finally. I want to suggest that thing culture preceded commodity culture and still persists within it, however vestigially or invisibly. Indeed, thing and commodity culture are perhaps always locked in struggle; thus the need for

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the kind of policing of the object world that we both analyze and practice. The Great Exhibition might be imagined as an epic face-off between thing and commodity culture, although it has usually been understood as a thoroughgoing triumph of commodity culture. It showed, Thomas Richards has influentially argued, following the argument of Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle, “once and for all that the capitalist system had not only created a dominant form of exchange but was also in the process of creating a dominant form of representation to go along with it. Capitalism was now consolidating its hold over England not only economically but semiotically. The era of the spectacle had begun.”11 The enormous success of the exhibition consisted in a “grandeur [that] does not consist in one thing,” as Charlotte Bront¨e wrote, “but in the unique assemblage of all things.”12 The truth of Bront¨e’s observation suggests the extent to which Victorians liked to look at things, any and seemingly all things, things that were not yet commodities in a semiotic, spectacular sense: piles of pins, “improved fuses,” ordinary cakes and biscuits, aromatic vinegar, barrels of Kildrummie oats, hemp, lumber—many displays seem to have been striking only in what to us seems like their lack of apparent interest as displays (fig. 9). Illustrated catalogs have perhaps misled us into imagining an exhibition hall rife with elaborate gewgaws and baroque birdcages and grotesquely large diamonds (fig. 10): a careful perusal of the written lists in these catalogs suggests that splendor and spectacle are balanced by a significant showing of the mundane, the everyday, the eminently nonspectacular (fig. 11). Fuses, vinegar, and oats were also important to the triumph of presentation Bront¨e describes. The success of the exhibition was of course a feat of representation: like the realist novel, the Crystal Palace gave the impression of displaying everything; any selection process seems to have been annulled. This triumph was accomplished by a monumental sleight of hand: “[T]he spaces of production and consumption,” Andrew H. Miller points out, “were evacuated and replaced in the Exhibition by one spectacular

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figure 9. Canadian timber trophy. From Illustrated London News, 21 June 1851.

space of exchange.”13 And yet Miller goes on to point out that exchange—literal exchange—was controversial within the exhibition; after a long debate, price tags were banned: “[A]ll signs of commerce were banished and the objects were thus not to be considered in relation to their monetary value.”14 As a result, “relational categories of gender, nationality, labor, and taste implicitly articulated objects into new practical and conceptual orders” (63–64). I take issue with Miller here to underscore the originality of an insight that I think he makes too little of in his own argument: there is an “order of things” that is not commercial at work in the exhibition; there is a culture that is not commodity culture animating the “relational categories” he so vividly observes. Thomas Richards argues that the spatial and temporal restrictions of the exhibition altered perception: “[V]isitors were virtually forced to acquire a limited attention span. Like it or not, they had to adjust themselves to the serial rhythm of the place. . . . [T]he Crystal Palace turned you into a dilettante, loitering

figure 10. Page from The Great Exhibition—London 1851: The Art-Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Industries of All Nations (London: G. Virtue, 1851).

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figure 11. Page 147 from Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851 (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851).

your way through a phantasmagoria of commodities.”15 The exhibition instilled in its viewers the frame of mind in which reification comes to feel natural: things have to be understood and evaluated quickly and successively. To cut to the cognitive chase is to understand that things mean something that a close inspection and consideration of their material form will not yield. Meaning is not immanent in things; meaning is created in the organization of things into exhibitions, pictures, novels, and other “realist” representations. This split is cognitively similar to the one that divides a commodity from its use value. Indeed, the economic processes that characterize modernity—Max Weber’s rationalization, Simmel’s objectification, and Marx’s

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abstraction—are first and foremost representational practices: we have to become inured to the idea that the meaning and value of things can be separated from their materiality. And to the idea that we can only “know” these meanings and values in a process apart from knowing the things from which they are so easily detached. Yet the impulse to visit an exhibition of “all products of industry” suggests the vestiges of a very different consciousness, the one that might have belonged to the precursor of the dilettante who cannot stop to touch or scrutinize or think much about the objects on display. In that earlier consciousness, “industry” was still a largely human practice, including machine and factory as well as hand and home production.16 In the catalog of the Great Exhibition things are often elaborately annotated, not only with the names of the person or company who made them, but with the process or conditions of production, extraction or cultivation: “[A] carved book-tray, executed by a ploughman, in the evening, by candle-light, without the aid of any model or design, and solely with a penknife,” reads the entry from an exhibit sent in by J. Barrie of Edinburgh.17 By hand, by spade and dibble, by power loom, with a penknife, at night—the purchase and perusal of these catalogs suggests that visitors wanted to know about the provenance of these humble objects not only in terms of country, city, town, manufacturer, and person, but also by process. In a special foldout panorama of the Great Exhibition in the Illustrated London News, many visitors are represented as in possession of a catalog, and many are actually pictured busily referring to them. The catalogs become objects in as well as of the exhibition. The visitor to the exhibition might well have come to see the products of human endeavor, and to imagine, particularly at the many very popular exhibits that featured working industrial equipment, in what that endeavor consisted. The tumble of objects on display, because of their indiscriminate abundance, their literal and figurative lack of polish, their wildly varying states of manufacture—the autumn leaves from Vermont in the United

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States exhibit, the pig plums and purple peppers from Barbados, the cocoons of silkworms from Berlin, for example, are products of industry only if those terms are construed so broadly as to become almost meaningless—suggests that Victorians had a relationship to things, or to things in the process of becoming commodities, that we have perhaps not fully appreciated. I wonder if it isn’t thing culture rather than commodity culture that so often confuses and embarrasses us about the prolific, even promiscuous object relations of our daunting cultural progenitors. Thing culture, in its profusion, intensity, and heedless variety, displays that appalling lack of irony, of distance, of coolness that we so often cringe at in the worst examples of Victorian middle-class taste. But the riot of stuff that we imagine when we imagine the claustrophobically cluttered Victorian parlor is not only or perhaps even mostly comprised of what can properly be called commodities. Curiously, as the work of Talia Schaffer has taught us, some of the most outr´e ornaments that produce that characteristic clutter are the crafts made by women, often out of rubbish. The fish-scale or cucumber-seed collage, the shell sculpture, the dried flower arrangement—there is little in the way of exchange value in these homemade goods.18 That from our point of view there is also little in the way of use value is perhaps because we cannot remember or imagine relationships to things based on such an unembarrassed sense of the elasticity and capaciousness of value as a concept; our sense of value is, after all, constrained into a rather small number of distinct categories, many of which are quarantined from one another. The aesthetic, the economic, the personal—whole disciplines are now deployed to maintain the distinctions between what we hope are incommensurable realms of worth and worthiness. The emblematic experience of the Crystal Palace was reinforced in more quotidian practices of the midcentury. In the huge nineteenth-century literature of industrial production— including multiple multivolume histories of goods like cotton and pottery; periodical articles on the manufacture of buttons, umbrellas, and screws; illustrations of spinning jennies and steam

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engines that are impressive if indecipherable—Victorians built up reservoirs of detail from which associations could be drawn or from which they flowed spontaneously. These associations had two large perceptual consequences. In economic terms, commodities might continue to “speak” of the social relations of production to those who bought and used them. In a parallel literature of empire, the writings of missionaries, explorers, travelers, and colonial civil servants and their families built up equally dense catalogs of the raw materials of the world outside Britain.19 In literary terms, anarchic metonymic processes were always receiving new infusions of energy and detail. Yet these representations, whether they sanitized or decried the conditions of mass production, whether they made distant places and peoples more or less “real,” at the same time contributed to a change in subject-object relations simply by virtue of being representations: readers, in the very act of reading, could distance themselves from the content of what they read and imagine a world of exchange in which objects relate primarily to one another while subjects watch, wonder, and consume. Moreover, the representations of industrial processes and of the social conditions of the laboring class, like the prose of empire, developed their own modes and conventions: as such, formal repetitions can produce a kind of cognitive dulling, so that the very curiosity—however wholesome or unwholesome it may have been by our standards—that would have lead a middle-class Victorian to buy George Dodd’s Days at the Factories (1843) or W. C. Taylor’s Factories and the Factory System: from Parliamentary Documents and Personal Examination (1842), or the lushly detailed memoirs of Africa by David Livingstone or Mary Kingsley, for example, might have been partially transformed, by the very experience of repeated reading, into the alienated and abstracted relationship to production that characterizes, eventually, commodity culture. Thing culture, stimulated by production, display, and reproduction, inspires the representational practices that contribute to the formation of commodity culture. What I want to emphasize

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here is how slowly this may have happened and the extent to which a thing culture remained vibrantly extant well into the Victorian period, perhaps only becoming truly vitiated toward the end of the century. Even then, it left powerful traces of itself in those marginal or debased cultural forms and practices in which a found object can be invested with a consoling or even redemptive degree of meaning. In such forms and practices we can revisit, if only as temporal tourists, thing culture.

II. The Way We Read Now We might say that Sherlock Holmes, for example, inhabits thing culture. He has written monographs on 140 different kinds of tobacco ash, on tattoos, on ears; he is a scholar, literally, of dirt and can tell from whence a client has traveled to London based on the composition of the mud that adheres to his boots. He can make the intense metonymic connections to and from things that commodity culture has made ridiculous and ridiculously admirable—hence his perennial popularity. We live with Dr. Watson in commodity culture, and think that we understand common things well enough, or rather, we think that we understand their meaninglessness well enough, which is to say, properly. What we lose, in the reading of the Sherlock Holmes story, is just that meaninglessness. In the typical scene between Watson and Holmes, an ordinary object seems pregnant with no mystery. Holmes hands Watson a battered felt hat; Watson can make nothing of it—it has no meaning beyond its mute materiality. Holmes“reads” it: “That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years, although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him.”20 Holmes derives the fact of

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intellect from the size of the hat; he discerns from the style of the hat, its quality, and from the excellence of its lining that its owner has been well off in the last three years; he can see that the hat’s owner once had foresight from the addition of a hat securer after the hat’s purchase, but the fact that its elastic has broken and not been replaced suggests that its owner has “less foresight now than formerly, which is a distinct proof of a weakening nature” (379–80). The hat’s dustiness shows that his wife has not brushed it and, ergo, does not love him. The enjoyment of the Holmes story seems to come in the experience of such “revelations,” no matter how silly, when we are humbled by a display of interpretive power in which a “trifling” detail is “suddenly invested with immense significance.”21 Commodification is undone in such interpretations: a mass-produced object becomes entirely individual; its exchange value is reversed and replaced by the “use value” of the clue. And what that means for us, as commodity fetishists—the least happy of fetishists—is that a thing can have meaning and that that meaning can be made fully manifest; it can be happily exhausted.22 It is no wonder that the clues of the Sherlock Holmes story—which are mundane and arcane in a weirdly thrilling ratio—have ravished us with the plenitude of their meaning. An inky glove, a spatulate thumb, an inordinately valuable Christmas goose—Holmes will tell us which things in a story really count and why. And in this telling, this full decoding of things we think we already know or understand, the narrative is itself extinguished in that most perfect of endings: the kind where there is nothing left over for us to wonder about. This is the promise (and relief) of forensic meaning. The object in the literary novel cannot provide this experience of legibility. Indeed, commodity culture and its attendant novelistic forms paradoxically “conspire” against such legibility: meanings do not inhere in literary things themselves; rather, they are generated by the symbolic grammars—the systems of meaning or value— in which they are found. It is significant that the potential for making extravagant metonymic connection moves, by the end of

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the century, from the mainstream tradition of the novel to the subgenre of detective fiction, from the literary to the forensic, from symbol to clue. Ears or cigar ashes or orange pips can no longer be meaningful in the central current of novel meaning by the beginning of the twentieth century. The detective story is the utopian resting place of the realist thing in its vagrant, midVictorian state; it is the literary form in which the meaning of materiality can attain an ecstatic but generically enclosed plenitude. In a fully realized commodity culture, metonymic meaning of this magnitude must be exhaustible, legal meaning: it is banished to the genre where it is literally, at the end of the story, turned over to the police. Indeed, in the confines of the genre of detective fiction, metonymy can be “solved” in that it can be socially and semiotically stabilized. A “reader” like Holmes can establish and secure the kinds of connections sought by Pip, in the opening scene of Great Expectations, as he tries to imagine what his parents looked like based on the “character and turn” of the literal letters on their graves. And Pip’s reading problem, when we read it closely, is also our own: we can never be sure which things in the realist novel are meant to mean, and then what exactly they do mean once we decide that they are indeed endowed with some larger consequence than that of a scenery-shaping reality effect. Detective fiction not only tells us which things to read for meaning, in the person of Sherlock Holmes, the first “scientific” detective (we meet him, in his first appearance in print, in his laboratory);23 it allows us to witness a “reader” who almost always possesses the necessary empirical information to tease out the precisely right meanings in each case. What Holmes doesn’t know is often literally within his reach, in the trusty Gazeteer, the right volume of which seems always to be on the shelf just above his head: his arm snakes up, the proper number comes down, the data is retrieved. Metonymic meaning making proceeds expeditiously and without detour; it is also contained. The problem of vagrancy that metonymy seems always to threaten is solved: the readerly text—the world—is read, once and for all. If only

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for the moment. Possibilities, the kind of historical difficulties or potential embarrassments that often nibble the edges of the Holmes story in the form of Lascars and Andaman Islanders and Ku Klux Klan members are organized, story by story, into local and individual plots of bad faith, betrayal, revenge, and, of course, murder. As V. S. Pritchett puts it, in the modern tradition of the mystery novel, which he distinguishes from an early Victorian one, we have “murder for murder’s sake, murder which illustrates nothing.”24 Literary things must find other arrangements. If the Middlemarch narrator restricts the ways in which we can read the novel’s objects from the first paragraphs, in which we are guided with notable care through the meanings of Dorothea Brooke’s “plain dress,” Hardy’s narrator in The Woodlanders (1887) tells us why we can no longer read any meaning at all into some of the apparently telling things of that novel. The dress of Grace Melbury, for example, displays a “natural fitness,” but “had it been quite striking, it would have meant just as little. For there can be hardly anything less connected with a woman’s personality than drapery which she has neither designed, manufactured, cut, sewed, nor even seen, except by a glance of approval when told that such and such a shape and colour must be had because it has been decided by others as imperative at that particular time” (39).25 Dorothea Brooke’s sartorial choices are organized by her family’s connection to the history of Protestant dissent in England, and by her class position as someone with no blood relation to any belonging to the “yard-measuring” and “parcel-tying” lower middle class. Grace Melbury’s clothing can do none of this work of meaning; she is alienated from it, because she has not cut or sewed it, because its “shape and colour” are decided by others according to fashions dictated by yet more distant agents. Hardy represents a fully alienated form of consumption that is also a doubly alienated one: the characters within the novel are severed from their own relations to the things they own, and the readers of the novel are estranged from the subjects and objects of the novel by this internal alienation.

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The splitting of the conventional metonymic connection between clothing and character signals an intensifying alienation between people and their belongings in the last quarter of the nineteenth century: we have come to understand this as a typical form of novelistic “complaint” against commodification.26 What is most interesting here is that the squelching of metonymy presses objects toward either metaphoricity or nonsignifying materiality, and this representation of commodification causes, however unwittingly, formal commodification. The metonymic thing in earlier Victorian fiction—even if it is, at the level of content, a commodity—has a chance to remain a thing—a sensuous object with connections to people and places beyond the novel that have meaning in the novel. The metaphorical thing and the reality effect, as I have argued in the introduction, are much more like commodities—at the level of form—in that they are alienated from so many of their own qualities in the service of the figural or “scenic” exchanges in which they participate. I am insisting on these somewhat forced distinctions here to make a point about the changing representation of things in a form that is otherwise, in its largest features, in many ways roughly continuous over the course of the Victorian period—the form that we think of as the Victorian novel. In the last third or so of the Victorian period, some writers— Eliot and Hardy, for my purposes here—begin to underdetermine the meanings of things. If Eliot guides us firmly toward the right meanings of things, Hardy, as early as The Woodlanders, deters us at key moments from making any meaning at all—even the most “natural” assumptions are literally cut off by the narrator or the narrative itself. The novel begins with Marty South deciding to sell her hair to a perruquier even after an initial fierce resistance in which she maintains that she cannot sell a part of herself. “What belongs to me I keep,” she insists, with apparent finality, at the end of the second chapter, even though her poverty makes the wigmaker’s terms attractive (15). We learn that she has changed her mind at second hand, through the startled reaction of her neighbor, Giles Winterborne, who notices suddenly that her

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head “has shrunk to nothing—it looks like an apple upon a gatepost” (23). The sudden change in her sense of her own hair—from a body part to a fully salable commodity—is unexplained. A body part becomes, without explanation, alienable. This suggests that for us as readers to assign meaning to things in the world of this novel is to risk profound and destabilizing loss. To avoid such risk, we must obey the rules for reading that the novel gradually (over the course of literary history and over the course of reading a given novel) teaches us. The kinds of historical connections that strong metonymic reading might produce and that were (and are) possible to make in earlier, less tightly organized Victorian fiction are foreclosed. Such readings become embarrassingly literal minded if objects have been declared void of the kind of culturally conventional contiguities such readings require. Literal reading, a species of which I have tried to recuperate in the first three chapters of this book, increasingly becomes the precise opposite of literary reading. Describing a group of rural workers, Hardy’s narrator declares bluntly that “none of them calls for any remark, except perhaps Creedle”: “To have completely described him it would have been necessary to write a military memoir, for he wore under his smockfrock a cast-off soldier’s jacket that had seen hot service, its collar showing just above the flap of the frock; also a hunting memoir, to include the top-boots that he had picked up by chance; also chronicles of voyaging and shipwreck, for his pocket-knife had been given him by a weather-beaten sailor. But Creedle carried about with him on his uneventful rounds these silent testimonies of war, sport, and adventure, and thought nothing of their associations or their stories” (26). These personal possessions are full of history but entirely ahistorical in this context; they contain meaning, but it is entirely separate from its wearer: it does not pertain to Creedle himself and he doesn’t know it; therefore, it can have no meaning for us as readers except as a metonym of loss: the loss of the “associations” and “stories” of “war, sport, and adventure” contained in his jacket, top-boots, and pocket-knife—all lost in the process of

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exchange. Indeed, Creedle’s belongings do not even constitute a reality effect: they gesture toward a real inhabited by characters we will never know—the soldier, the hunter, and the sailor; they inhabit the novel by accident and without any illustrative value. Indeed, they “illustrate” absence, a blank space created by the disconnected social relations of secondhand clothes. The social relations of the secondhand words out of which fiction is made are perhaps metaphorically voided here as well. Perhaps our own associations to the words we have previously read or used should be absented in the present context, replaced by the meanings conferred, or not conferred, by the narrator and the symbolic structure that narrator helps us to “see.” The objects of The Woodlanders are commodities and they are metaphors of commodities; they fail to be “themselves” twice over, we might say. Hardy continues the process begun by Eliot: directions for reading things are supplied; the novel increasingly builds within itself the structures that limit the meanings of objects, setting them more firmly in a system of figuration so that more coherent and reproducible meaning can issue from the text. More meaning from within the novel, less from the reader might be one way of imagining this change. Or the use value a reader might attribute to a novelistic thing is increasingly displaced by an exchange value dictated by the figurative system that the novel is able to establish more and more decisively. But whereas for Eliot such a system of representational order and control served to organize readers into proper pieties and polities, for Hardy the increasing semiotic austerity and alienation within the novel registers social, historical, subjective and objective loss. Weirdly, hauntingly, these ideological differences make little difference to the ideology of form as I am trying to describe it here. We might say that objects after realism go into long-term rehabilitation. Virginia Woolf famously accused realism of a humdrum materialism better suited to the representational practices of “Government officials.”27 Samuel Beckett’s Molloy refuses to describe the room he finds himself in, as if evoking material things would only increase the alienation from which he, and

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we, suffer. The objective correlative, the “objectivity” of Imagism, the ideas in things, the wish to remove the subject from tampering with the object—there is a sense in many modernist slogans and texts that objects have been exploited, misused, and misunderstood.28 It is perhaps our inevitable inheritance of bits and pieces of this aesthetic that has continued to convince us that the welter of things produced by the combined forces of industrialization and imperialism immediately created a commodity culture in which modern object relations were thoroughly and even uniformly corrupted—or corrupted in one particular way. Realism may criticize but it also inevitably reproduces commodity culture—in part because the realist novel, in all its three-decker splendor, was itself a highly desirable commodity. But if I’m right about Victorian thing culture, then commodification was less secure, less consistently triumphant than we have imagined: things and commodities had a long struggle for priority in reality and in representation. That struggle continues: commodification has to constantly fight to regain the field: we always want things even though we always get commodities. As Marx writes in the description of the commodity as a social hieroglyphic, we participate in exchange, but “later on” we want to know the secret of value. Commodification has to continue to address that moment of “later on”: a criticism rooted in the flotsam and jetsam of thing culture can prolong that moment, the moment when we see that an exchange—of a tropic or an economic kind—might be worked out otherwise. If one argument of this book has been that the early instantiations of a self-consciously literary novel paradoxically commodified fictional things, and in so doing tried to restrict and define the kind of meaningful connections that readers could legitimately make to and from the novel’s objects, its correlative is equally paradoxical. The Victorian novel in its unapologetically commercial form did not and could not consistently or systematically commodify, at the level of form, the commodities it so abundantly represented in its content: it was simply not up to the

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representational task of being faithful to its densely populated object world and organizing that world into a state of symbolic coherence. Had it been able to do so, we would have missed out on much of the genre we call British realism. Instead, we have, in the mid-Victorian novel especially, a form of fiction that more often than not allows us to read things along the potentially treacherous routes of metonymic contiguity. At the level of form, the commodities that pile up in the mid-Victorian novel are still, to a great extent, things. By that I mean that they are symbolically unencumbered; they are not always semiotically severed from their materiality or their relations to subjects and objects beyond the narrative frame. And they have ideas in them, ideas whose meanings remain largely fugitive.

Notes introduction

1. There are of course Victorian novels that do not do this, especially those of Trollope: for especially interesting discussions of the spareness of his fictional world, see Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Bury St. Edmunds: Folio Society, 1996); and Andrew H. Miller, Novels behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), chap. 5. 2. A preliminary list of works that do take things seriously would include Emily S. Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991); Emily S. Apter and William Pietz, eds., Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993); Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996); Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003); the special issue of Critical Inquiry, “Things,” ed. Bill Brown, vol. 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001); Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000); Patricia Spyer, ed., Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (New York: Routledge: 1998); and Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987).

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3. In this introduction, I will elaborate a method of “strong” metonymic reading that differs from what I label conventional, or “weak,” metonymic reading. I will elaborate my definition of metonymy as well: for the moment, I am relying on an inherently unstable and inadequate handbook definition, in part because I am describing our traditional understanding of this figure in prose fiction, in part because we routinely use such definitions as departures. 4. On his return to England, Magwitch explains to Pip that he felt like the “black slave” of his accomplice, Compeyson (Charles Dickens, Great Expectations [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986], 364). 5. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass point out that Marx’s theory of fetishism was “a theory of the fetishism of the commodity, not of the object. . . . Only if one empties out the ‘objectness’ of the object can one make it readily exchangeable on the market” (Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, 8). This point essentially derives from Georg Luk´acs, who argued that “rational objectification conceals above all the immediate—qualitative and material—character of things as things” (History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968], 92). 6. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1999), 211 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). 7. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 94. 8. Cynthia Wall, “The Rhetoric of Description and the Spaces of Things,” in Eighteenth-Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections and Occasional Forms: Essays in Honor of J. Paul Hunter, ed. Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2001), 261. Thanks to Adrienne Ghaly for this reference. ˇ zek has pointed out that “the notion of fetishism seems 9. Slavoj Ziˇ to unite, inextricably, the critique of ideology and ideology itself: in the very gesture of rejecting ideology (criticizing the illusions and blindness of the ‘primitive’ Other, his veneration of false idols), the critique repeats the ideological gesture” (The Plague of Fantasies [London: Verso, 1997], 98). 10. Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), xviii.

Notes to Pages 5–10

11. See the works listed in n. 2 and Taussig, My Cocaine Museum, for example. 12. G´abor Bezeczky, “Literal Language,” New Literary History 2213 (1991): 610. 13. Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire, “The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study,” trans. Patrick Coleman, Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 151. 14. Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), 3–4. 15. Douglas Mao describes “one of modernism’s defining passages, from an older tradition in which the object appears principally as a signifier of something else or a component of scenic plentitude to a newer order in which its value depends neither on metaphoricity nor on marginality” (Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998]), 13. I am taking issue in this book both with this definition of modernism and with the definition of realism, or of Victorian literature, that it implies. 16. An excellent corrective can be found in Joseph Bizup, Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2003). The second chapter, on the writings of Charles Babbage, is especially valuable. 17. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” originally published in 1975, reprinted in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989), 141–148 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). 18. Leah Price, “Reader’s Block: Response,” Victorian Studies 46, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 233. An extended version of this argument can be found in Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliiot (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000). 19. G´erard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980), 165. 20. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Pres, 1979), 80. 21. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackettstown Publishing Co., 1976), 69.

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Notes to Pages 10–15

22. Goodman uses the words “predicate” and “label” to define that half of the metaphor that we refer to unthinkingly in what might be called dead metaphors: in the phrase the “picture is sad” for example, “sad” is a predicate or label transferred to pictures from humans. 23. See the works listed in n. 2. 24. Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” 141. 25. Thanks to Sharon Marcus for this point. 26. Brown, The Material Unconscious, 16. I am using the term “literal” where Brown would use “material.” Both terms suggest an attempt or an intention, however impossible, to stave off or postpone the figural. See also Christopher Prendergast: “[S]ince weather in Flaubert’s Normandy is predictably boring, the barometer could be connotatively construed as signifying the Futile” (The Order of Mimesis [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986], 64). Anna McCarthy has pointed out to me that the barometer as an instrument is a Peircean index rather than a Saussurean sign: that is, it registers symbolically a physical event. 27. It is of course impossible to describe a trope as capable of materializing its objects. The point of this paradox is that metonymy is the figure that constantly threatens to abandon its figural status: its connection to realism and referentiality has reinforced this sense of metonymy as a figure that tends to wander out into the world. 28. I am borrowing the idea of the social lives of things from Arjun Appadurai’s introduction to The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986). 29. Hugh Bredin, “Metonymy,” Poetics Today 5, no. 1 (1984): 57 (emphasis mine). 30. Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985). 31. Schor, Reading in Detail, 20. 32. Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 9. 33. Alan Liu, “Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail,” Representations 32 (1990): 77 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). 34. Liu lists cultural anthropology, new cultural history, new historicism, new pragmatism, new Marxism, and French postMarxism/pragmatism—see “Local Transcendence,” 79–80, for specific examples from each kind of criticism. 35. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), 14

Notes to Pages 15–20

(hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). De Man is of course critical of these definitions. See Fredric Jameson’s searching discussion of de Man’s relationship to these aspects of the rhetorical tradition in Postmodernism; or, The Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1991), 219–259. 36. I am following Roman Jakobson and Alex Preminger, in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), among others, in subsuming synecdoche under metonymy. 37. I owe this insight to G. Gabrielle Starr. 38. I would argue that many new historicist readings do connect extratextual dots in a metaphorical or allegorical mode: a novel is often read as resolving, at the level of its plot, the plot of a historical conflict which that plot allegorizes. See the readings in, for example, Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985); and Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988). 39. J. Hillis Miller, “The Fiction of Realism: Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, and Cruikshank’s Illustrations,” in Dickens Centennial Essays, ed. Ada Nisbet and Blake Nevius (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), 121 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). 40. See Roger Burt, “Lead Production in England and Wales, 1700– 1770,” Economic History Review 22, no. 2 (1969): 249–268; and Donald Woodward, “‘Swords into Ploughshares’: Recycling in Pre-industrial England,” Economic History Review 38, no. 2 (1985): 175–191. 41. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1974), 105. 42. Dickens, Great Expectations, 35. 43. Thanks to Alyson Kiesel for pointing out to me the significance of this soap. 44. Miguel Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001), 1–3. 45. Of course I am setting aside the literalisms of both Lacan and Derrida: the readings of the letter in the work of both of these theorists have been profoundly influential on my thinking, but necessarily somewhat beside the point in this argument because my investigations are not primarily linguistic.

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Notes to Pages 20–23

46. Poovey, Uneven Developments, 126–163. 47. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), 164. 48. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 80–97. 49. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), esp. 45. 50. Jacques Derrida, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” in The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001), 59, 61. 51. “Irrelevant Associations and Stock Responses” is the title of chap. 5 of I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism, in which Richards argues, “[E]ven the best poetry, if we read into it just what we happen to have already in our minds, and do not use it as a means for reorganizing ourselves, does less good than harm” (Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment, ed. John Constable [1929; reprint, London: Routledge, 2001], 247). 52. Barthes, S/Z, 11. 53. Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003), 83–84. 54. On the cotton industry alone see Edward Baines, Jr., History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1832); James Butterworth, A Complete History of the Cotton Trade (London: C. W. Leake, printer, 1823); Richard Guest, A Compendious History of the Cotton-Manufacture (Manchester: J. Pratt, 1823); and Richard Burn, Statistics of the Cotton Trade (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1847), for example. 55. See, for example, Thomas Fowell Buxton, The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy (1838); as well as works by Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce listed in C. Hogg, The African Slave Trade and Its Suppression: A Classified and Annotated Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets and Periodical Articles (1973). 56. The word “calico” derives from the southern Indian village, Calicut, where the fabric was originally produced. 57. See Douglas Anthony Farnie, The English Cotton Industry and the World Market, 1815–1896 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); and B. M. Bhatia, Famines in India: A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India, 1860–1965, 2nd ed. (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1967).

Notes to Pages 24–33

58. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, ed. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, 3rd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984), 193. 59. Mark Lilla, G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), 127. 60. Walter Johnson, Folk-Memory; or, The Continuity of British Archaeology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 11 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). 61. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 74. 62. John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980), 61. 63. Auguste Mariette-Bey, The Monuments of Upper Egypt, trans. Alphonse Mariette (London: Trubner and Co., 1877), 32–33 (hereafter quoted parenthetically in the text). 64. Apter, Feminizing the Fetish, 14. 65. Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1996), 5. 66. See Michel de Certeau, “Reading as Poaching,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 165–176. chapter one

1. Mahogany was exported to Europe from Jamaica in the form of logs; Madeira, on the other hand, had a furniture trade: “Furniture shops are plentiful, and in some of these excellent wardrobes, chairs, and tables may be found of . . . Vinhatico [Persea indica, the Madeiran mahogany], walnut or plane. . . . The manufacture of many articles in wickerwork has increased enormously within the last ten years. Sofas, tables, chairs, and baskets of all shapes are made, and shipped by thousands every year” (Ellen M. Taylor, Madeira: Its Scenery, and How to See It [London: Edward Stanford, 1889], 77–78). 2. Charlotte Bront¨e, Jane Eyre (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 451. All references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text hereafter. 3. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 97.

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4. G. S. Boulger, Wood: A Manual of the Natural History and Industrial Applications of the Timbers of Commerce (London: Edward Arnold, 1902). 5. R. W. Symonds, English Furniture from Charles II to George II (New York: International Studio, 1929), 167. 6. Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender and British Slavery, 1713–1833 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2000), 13–14. 7. Susan Meyer comes close to breaking out of this pattern and actually reading things near the end of her essay on Jane Eyre when she notes that “St. John announces Jane’s accession to fortune by pulling the letter out of a ‘morocco pocket-book’ and he is able to identify Jane as the heiress because she has written her name, on a white sheet of paper, in ‘Indian ink’” (“Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre,” in The Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism, ed. Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1991], 180). 8. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1999), 211. 9. Ibid., 207. 10. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), 51. 11. Quoted in Harrison, Forests, 71. 12. N. D. G. James, A History of English Forestry (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), 161. 13. J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 12. 14. Ibid., 12. 15. Susan Stewart has pointed out to me that the gardening nationalism of the English centered on the idea that their gardens were more “natural” than those of the French. Lancelot “Capability” Brown pioneered designs that famously made use of “wildness”; this ideology obscures the fact that landscaping did cause deforestation, albeit selectively (personal communication). 16. For the history of Madeira, see T. Bentley Duncan, The Atlantic Islands: Madeira, the Azores, and the Cape Verdes in Seventeenth-Century

Notes to Pages 40–42

Commerce and Navigation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972); Desmond Gregory, The Beneficent Usurpers: A History of the British in Madeira (London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1988); and also the Victorian memoirs of Madeira, including Anothony J. Drexel Biddle, The Madeira Islands (London: Hurst and Blackout, 1900); Charles ThomasStanford, Leaves from a Madeira Garden, 2nd ed. (London: John Lane, 1910); and Ellen Taylor, Madeira. 17. Sugar was also grown in Sicily, North Africa, and the southern Mediterranean. 18. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 70–103. 19. Sidney Greenfield, “Madeira and the Beginnings of New World Sugar Cane Cultivation and Plantation Slavery: A Study in Institution Building,” in Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, ed. Vera Rubin and Arthur Tuden (New York: New York Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1977), 537. Slavery was abolished in Madeira quite early—1755—and replaced by a sharecropping system. 20. Thomas-Stanford, Leaves from a Madeira Garden, vii. A nice Lamarckian joke reveals more than it means to, I think, in this description of the effect of madeira wine on Britons: once it enters the nation’s bloodstream it seems also to alter it genetically, attributing a power to tropical colonies and their products that also manifests itself in fears about racial change, including the apparent racial contamination or transformation of Bertha Mason and her sickly brother. 21. Fanny Anne Burney, A Great-Niece’s Journals, ed. Margaret S. Rolt (London: Constable and Company, 1926), 209. 22. Ibid., 189, 193. 23. Leslie R. Holdridge, “Middle America,” in A World Geography of Forest Resources, ed. Stephen Haden-Guest, John K. Wright, and Eileen M. Teclaff (New York: Ronald Press), 189. See also G. F. Asprey and R. G. Robbins, “The Vegetation of Jamaica,” Ecological Monographs 23, no. 4 (Oct. 1953): 359–412. 24. My discussion of Madeira and Jamaica admittedly ranges across not only long geographical distances but also across several hundred years: this is a self-conscious attempt to meet the challenges set out in the recent work of the medievalist David Wallace, who has charged that literary historicism has been too cramped both in its temporal and spatial

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parameters (see Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy [Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997] and Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn [Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2004]). It is only through taking a very long historical view, by engaging in what Wallace calls “diachronic historicism,” that we can begin to adequately appreciate the ways in which mahogany furniture haunts this novel. 25. See Gregory, The Beneficent Usurpers, for a description of the British economic domination of Madeira. 26. See John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 6, no. 1 (1953): 1–15. See also Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy, the Empire of Free Trade and Imperialism, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970). 27. Graciela Chichilnisky, “North-South Trade and the Global Environment.” American Economic Review 84, no. 4 (Sept. 1994): 851, 852. 28. Adam Thorpe, letter to the editor, London Review of Books, 25 Jan. 2001. 29. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 84. 30. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1991), 897. 31. Judith Butler describes this narrative in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997. 32. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 7:157, 14:137–139. 33. See Gauri Viswanathan, “Raymond Williams and Colonialism,” in Cultural Materialism: On Raymond Williams, ed. Christopher Prendergast (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1995): 188–210. 34. See for example, Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1986). 35. Bette London reads Jane Eyre not as a “manifesto of self-creation but as [a] textbook of self-discipline” (“The Pleasures of Submission: Jane Eyre and the Production of the Text,” ELH 58 [1991]: 209). 36. In addition to the texts by Meyer, Sharpe, and Spivak cited in this chapter (see nn. 7, 30, and 37), see Mary Poovey, “The Anathematized

Notes to Pages 47–52

Race: The Governess and Jane Eyre,” in Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988); Sue Thomas, “The Tropical Extravagance of Bertha Mason,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27, no. 1 (1999): 1–17; and Joyce Zonana, “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structures of Jane Eyre,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 592–617. 37. See the chapters on Jane Eyre in Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996); and Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993). 38. Woodville K. Marshall, “‘Vox Populi’: The St. Vincent Riots and Disturbances of 1862,” in Trade, Government and Society in Caribbean History, 1700–1920, ed. B. W. Higman (Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann Education Books Caribbean, 1983), 85. 39. Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, 40. 40. See Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), esp. 113–186. 41. See Poovey, Uneven Developments, esp. 164–201. 42. Duncan, The Atlantic Islands, 38. 43. The wood has stood for dark skin from W. M. Thackeray’s frequent description of the “mahogany” faces of the Schwartz family in Vanity Fair (1848) to Diana Ross’s 1975 film Mahogany. 44. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, and the Collection (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1993), 26. 45. Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), xi. 46. Cited in Apter, Feminizing the Fetish, 1. 47. Thanks to Mary Poovey for this phrase. 48. See the first chapter, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” in Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), for an extraordinary deconstruction of metaphor’s aesthetic and epistemological precedence over metonymy in Proust’s descriptions of summer. From his bedroom, Marcel hears flies buzzing and describes this “chamber music” of summer as linked to the essence of that season. De Man points out that

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Notes to Pages 52–60

the buzzing flies are a synecdoche of summer that Proust renders as a metaphor. Metaphor is thereby constructed out of metonymy, and metonymy wins a kind of grammatical and semiotic precedence in de Man’s argument, but it remains a figure of chance for de Man as for Proust and therefore is always subject to meaninglessness or a random and nonessential particularity. 49. Frank F. Taylor, “From Hellshire to Healthshire: The Genesis of the Tourist Industry in Jamaica,” in Higman, Trade, Government and Society, 139. 50. Quoted in Frank F. Taylor, “From Hellshire to Healthshire,” 142. chapter two

1. The fabric, however, originated in Egypt: Fustyan was the name of a Cairene ghetto in which it was produced. 2. O’Connor’s friend William O’Neill Daunt gave the following opinion in 1845: “It is true that he dealt largely in bombast, broken metaphor and inflated language” (quoted in Paul A. Pickering, “Class without Words: Symbolic Communication in the Chartist Movement,” Past and Present, no. 112 [Aug. 1986]: 152). 3. Quoted in Pickering, “Class without Words,” 157. 4. D. A. Farnie, The English Cotton Industry and the World Market, 1815–1896 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 51. 5. C. Knick Harley, “Cotton Textile Prices and the Industrial Revolution,” Economic History Review, n.s., 51, no. 1 (Feb. 1998): 58. 6. See Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s illuminating discussion of the use of the pastoral in the “social problem novel” as “withdrawals from social consequentiality cloaked in green” (The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988), 118, and chap. 3, “The Pastoral Argument,” more generally. 7. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 51 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number). 8. See P. J. Keating’s reading in The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction: “For Gaskell the division of society into classes of men hostile to each other has got nothing to do with the pressures of industrialism or the struggle for power in a rapidly changing society, but rather results from the indifference and ignorance of employers” (New York:

Notes to Pages 60–64

Barnes and Noble, 1971), 234. Cf. Patrick Brantlinger: “Class reconciliation through brotherly love” is ”the answer even to murder and the laws that punish murder” (The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832–1867 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977), 141– 142. 9. See Annette B. Hopkins, “‘Mary Barton’: A Victorian Best Seller,” Trollopian 3, no. 1 (June 1948): 1–2. Gaskell took this name for the stories and poems she published in Howitt’s Journal, prior to the writing of Mary Barton, her first novel. 10. Michael Valdez Moses sees regionalism as a late nineteenthcentury phenomenon—an invention of identity created to oppose the homogenization produced by urbanization. He explores the consolations provided by the local detail of regionalism vis-`a-vis Hardy’s Wessex; what is particularly interesting about Mary Barton is that the only specific regional detail we get is ham, suggesting that a full consciousness and rhetoric of regionalism does not yet exist (Michael Valdez Moses, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995], 29–66). 11. James Phillips Kay, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes (London: J. Ridgway, 1832), 16. 12. In 1842, “[o]ne thousand families comprising 5,300 in Great Bolton had between them a mere 1,553 beds” (Melanie Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet: Pawnbroking and Working-Class Credit [Leicester: Leister Univ. Press, 1983, 27). 13. Farnie, The English Cotton Industry, 81. 14. See David Ricardo, “On Machinery,” in Principles of Political Economy, 2nd ed. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1903). He argues that although Britain must use machinery to remain competitive in world markets, the use of machinery is indeed injurious to the laboring classes in the short run. 15. Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 87. 16. Ibid., 86–87. 17. Victorian histories of the cotton manufacture in Britain typically include chapters on the cotton manufacture in India. 18. Joseph E. Inikori, “Slavery and the Revolution in Cotton Textile Production in England,” in The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas and Europe, ed.

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Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1992), 155. 19. Ibid., 157, 158. 20. Mary Poovey argues that Gaskell’s “emphasis on the narratives of individual lives thus dovetails with her use of mundane details to engage the reader imaginatively in a quest for what all people (theoretically) want: domestic security. So prominent is domesticity in Gaskell’s novel that her representation of political events, like the workers’ presentation of the People’s Charter to Parliament, stresses only the domestic repercussions of the petition’s failure, not its political significance” (Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995], 146). 21. Ibid., 147. 22. The Irish constituted 15 percent of Manchester’s population by 1851 (Alan Kidd, Manchester [Keele: Keele Univ. Press, 1993], 123). 23. Edward Baines, Jr., History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1832), 81. 24. For additional examples see Andrew Ure, The Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain, 2 vols. (London: C. Knight, 1836); and George Dodd, The Textile Manufactures of Great Britain (London: C. Knight and Co., 1844). 25. Quoted in Farnie, The English Cotton Industry, 99. 26. “The alarm created by the war in America provided the occasion for a sustained effort by the Lancashire cotton interests to force the Government to adopt policies which would turn India into the desired new source [of raw cotton]. The exponents of laissez faire thereby became proponents of state intervention. To the hardheaded men of Lancashire it did not seem inconsistent to cut the cloth of economic theory to suit their practical interests” (Peter Harnetty, “The Imperialism of Free Trade: Lancashire, India, and the Cotton Supply Question, 1861–1865,” Journal of British Studies 6, no. 1 [Nov. 1966]: 96). 27. B. M. Bhatia, Famines in India: A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India (1860–1965), 2nd ed. (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1967), 22. 28. Manu Goswami gives a detailed catalog of the ways in which Britain charged its South Asian colony for the expenses of the India Office, the imperial army, salaries and pensions of colonial officials, and so on, creating what came to be called “the national drain” by early

Notes to Pages 67–75

Indian nationalists (Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004], 70. ˜ Famines and the 29. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), 26. 30. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, cites Alexander de Waal (“Who defines an event as a ‘famine’ is a question of power relations within and between societies” [21]), as well as two early works: R. C. Dutt, Famines in India (1900), and Dadabai Naoriji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901). 31. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 27 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). 32. See Rosalind Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002), 84–85; and Jennifer Cole, Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2001), 133. 33. Hilary Mantel, “Giving Up the Ghost,” London Review of Books, 2 Jan. 2003, 8. 34. See Gandhi’s essays on hand spinning collected in Swaraj in One Year (Madras: Ganesh and Co., 1921). 35. See the introduction for a large list of such works. 36. See the texts collected in Elaine Freedgood, ed., Factory Production in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003). 37. Marc Angenot, “Social Discourse Analysis: Outlines of a Research Project,” Yale Journal of Criticism 17, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 212. 38. David Alexander, Retailing during the Industrial Revolution (London: Athlone Press, 1970). 39. Christoph Lindner, Fictions of Commodity Culture: From the Victorian to the Postmodern (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2003), 21. 40. J. R. McCulloch, Dictionary of Commerce (Philadelphia: Thomas Wardle, 1843), 2:583, s.v. “tally trade.” 41. Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet, chap. 1. 42. Ibid., 117. 43. Kenneth Hudson, Pawnbroking: An Aspect of British Social History (London: Bodley Head, 1972), 44. 44. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843), ed. Richard Altick (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1965), 193. ˇ zek on the paradox of the “making of” film: “[F]ar 45. See Slavoj Ziˇ from destroying the ‘fetishist’ illusion, the insight into the production

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174 Notes to Pages 75–85

mechanism in fact even strengthens it, in so far as it renders palpable the gap between the bodily cause and their surface-effect. . . . In short, the paradox of ‘the making of . . .’ is the same as that of a magician who discloses the trick without dissolving the mystery of the magical effect” (The Plague of Fantasies [London: Verso, 1997], 102). One argument of this book is that this level of hyperreflexive fetishization is not a postmodern development. 46. Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), chap. 3. 47. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958; reprint, New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), 91. 48. Diana C. Archibald, Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2002), 58. 49. Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation, 78. 50. Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992), 29. 51. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, 1915–1919 (New York: Harcourt, 1977), 4–5. The entry is from 2 Jan. 1915. Many thanks to Martin Harries for bringing this quotation to my attention. chapter three

1. Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), vol. 6. 2. Diana C. Archibald, Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2002), 69. The completeness of this list is in good part thanks to Archibald. 3. These references occur once in chap. 40 and twice in chap. 41. 4. Peter Conrad, “New New World,” in “Australia: A New, New World,” special issue, Granta, vol. 70 (Summer 2000), a special issue devoted to new Australian writing. 5. Quoted in William Pietz, “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), 125. 6. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 278. 7. Blackwoods, Sept. 1852.

Notes to Pages 85–89

8. The word “genocide” does not come into use until 1943, according to the OED. 9. Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2003), 4. 10. Aborigines Protection Society, Extracts and Proceedings of the Aborigines Protection Society (London: William Ball, 1840), iv. 11. Quoted in Aborigines Protection Society, Extracts and Proceedings, 136. 12. Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, 118. Quote from Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land, 2nd ed. (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Australia, 1992), 12. But see Ian S. McIntosh, “Reconciling Personal and Impersonal Worlds: Aboriginal Struggles for Self-Determination,” in At the Risk of Being Heard: Identity, Indigenous Rights, and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Bartholomew Dean and Jerome M. Levi (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2003), for an account of Australian Aboriginal struggles against the legacy of terra nullius through 2001. 13. Aborigines Protection Society, Extracts and Proceedings, 141. 14. George Stocking has argued that Britain favored “modes of political economy” as a critical standard for the level of civilization attained by a given people (Victorian Anthropology [New York: Free Press, 1987], 30, 16). 15. See letter to Chamerovzow, dated 4 Nov. 1850, in Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House et. al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), vol. 6. 16. Marc Angenot, “Social Discourse Analysis: Outlines of a Research Project,” Yale Journal of Criticism 17, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 211–212. 17. Charles Dickens, “An Enlightened Clergyman,” All the Year Round 8 Mar. 1862, quoted in Richard Lettis, Dickens on Literature: A Continuing Study of His Aesthetic (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 156. 18. R. H. W. Reece, Aborigines and Colonists: Aborigines and Colonial Society in New South Wales in the 1830s and 40s (Sydney: Sydney Univ. Press, 1974), 5. 19. Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians: Black Responses to White Dominance, 1788–2001, 3rd ed. (London: Allen and Unwin, 2002), 65. 20. “Razzia” means a raid, a foray, an act of plunder. (Thanks to Ernest Gilman for this translation.) 21. “In 1825 his majesty issued instructions to the effect that they [Aborigines] should be protected in the enjoyment of their possessions,

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preserved from violence and injustice, and that measures should be taken for their conversion to the Christian faith, and their advancement in civilization” (“Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes,” in Aborigines Protection Society, Extracts and Proceedings, 11). 22. Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, 34–42. 23. “Alexander Harris,” Settlers and Convicts: or, Recollections of Sixteen Years’ Labour in the Australian Backwoods (1847; reprint, Melbourne: Melbourne Univ. Press, 1969), 220. 24. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). 25. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 213. 26. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 52. 27. See in particular Said’s discussion of “the relatively attenuated presence of Australia in nineteenth-century British writing” in the introduction to Culture and Imperialism (xvi). “Writing” here noticeably, and problematically, stands for literature: there is no lack of the presence of Australia in other kinds of nineteenth-century discourse. 28. This is the title of the third chapter of Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). 29. Robin Walker, Under Fire: A History of Tobacco Smoking in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne Univ. Press, 1984), 25. 30. See arguments by Henry James and Edmond de Goncourt about the way a crudely overt symbolic system mars the naturalism of Zola, collected in Documents of Modern Literary Realism, ed. George J. Becker (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963). 31. Quoted in Walker, Under Fire, 11. 32. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 346 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). ˇ zek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 102. 33. Slavoj Ziˇ 34. For a bibliography of the contents of this collection see Jerome E. Brooks, Tobacco: Its History Illustrated by the Books, Mss, and Engravings in the Library of George Arents, Jr., 10 vols. (New York: Rosenbach. Press, 1952). 35. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 173.

Notes to Pages 93–109

36. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, ed. Ernest Mandel, trans. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 517. 37. Ian Tyrell, Deadly Enemies: Tobacco and Its Opponents in Australia (Sydney: Univ. of New South Wales Press, 1999), 11–12. 38. For an encyclopedic account of cannibalism throughout the works of Dickens, see Harry Stone, The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity (Columbus: Ohio Univ. Press, 1994). 39. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), 185. 40. Freud, “Fetishism,” 156. 41. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989), 141–148. 42. Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), 16. 43. Hugh Bredin, “Metonymy,” Poetics Today 5, no. 1 (1984): 57 (emphasis added). 44. I will argue in the following chapter that although we have long understood realism tout court as having dictated a certain limited reading of its own objects, a practice of underdetermined reading—with formal and critical dictates inside and outside the novel—actually begins in the last quarter of the nineteenth century: I discuss Middlemarch as the most canonical instantiation of this process, one that finds its ultimate realization in the restricted symbolics of modernism. 45. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), 63. 46. Ibid., 67. 47. Hippolyte Taine, The History of English Literature, vol. 4 (1883; reprint, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1965), 123– 124. 48. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 117. 49. Ibid., 123. 50. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 256 (emphasis mine).

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178 Notes to Pages 111-113 chapter four

1. See George Eliot, Middlemarch Notebooks: A Transcription, ed. John Clark Pratt and Victor A. Neufeldt (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979); George Eliot, A Writer’s Notebook, 1854–1879, and Uncollected Writings, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1981); and George Eliot, Quarry for Middlemarch, ed. Anna Theresa Kitchel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1950). 2. Eliot, A Writer’s Notebook, 30–34, 164–166. 3. See George Levine’s “Daniel Deronda: A New Epistemology” for a wide-ranging discussion of the philosophical “crisis” at the heart of Eliot’s epistemological anxieties (in Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002]). 4. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 47 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). 5. Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 3. 6. Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988). 7. See Ian Hunter, Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); and Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994). 8. Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1998), 19. 9. In addition to Hunter and Richardson, see Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900, 2nd ed. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1998); D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965); and Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001), for accounts of the increase in readership over the course of the nineteenth century, and for the establishment of English as a discipline in institutions as various as Oxford, state grammar schools, public libraries, miner’s lending societies, university extension programs, and mechanic’s institutes. For the moral, hygienic, and psychological virtues associated with novel reading see Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse; and Siskin,

Notes to Pages 113–114 179

The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998); and Ian Hunter, Culture and Government. For the uses of “English” as a form of cultural and therefore political discipline for the British middle and laboring classes, see Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988); and Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1937 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). For the use of English literature to turn the colonized people of the Asian subcontinent into what Macaulay called “brown Britons,” see Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989). 10. Hunter, Culture and Government, 123, 147. 11. Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism, 188. 12. Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverly Novels (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 23. 13. J¨urgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into A Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 159. 14. Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority, 24. 15. T. W. Heyck, “From Men of Letters to Intellectuals: The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Nineteenth-Century England,” Journal of British Studies 20, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 183. See also John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intellegentsia, 1880–1939 (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2002). Carey recounts the more familiar chronology of this new elite, beginning with George Gissing’s fiction and criticism in the 1880s. 16. “In the crucial period from 1860 to 1900 the gain in real wages for the average urban wage-earner was probably of the order of 60%” (Peter Matthias, Retailing Revolution: A History of Multiple Retailing in the Food Trades based upon the Allied Suppliers group of Companies [London: Longman’s, 1967], 14–15). See also the essays collected in The Lower Middle Class in Britain: 1870–1914, ed. Geoffrey Crossick (London: Croom Helm, 1977). 17. Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957), 82–83.

180

Notes to Pages 114–118

18. Frederick R. Karl describes Eliot’s early education at Miss Franklin’s School, “a combination finishing school and educational establishment. A good deal of the instruction was cosmetic, particularly the emphasis on pronunciation. Girls like Mary Anne, with a rustic Midlands accent, were transformed into speakers of upper-class English. . . . Mary Anne was the beneficiary of [the] effort to raise the students socially”(George Eliot: Voice of a Century [New York: W. W. Norton, 1995], 25). 19. The OED dates use of the term “highbrow “from the 1880s; “middlebrow” does not come into use until the 1920s. It is worth noting that both terms can carry a significant load of contempt: they are more likely to be used as epithets than as self-descriptions. 20. George Eliot, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” in The Writings of George Eliot: Essays and Uncollected Papers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1970), 22:189. 21. Thomas Arnold, “Recent Novel Writing,” in A Victorian Art of Fiction: Essays on the Novel in British Periodicals, 1851–1869, vol. 2, ed. John Charles Olmsted (New York: Garland Publishing, 1979), 543. 22. It is important to note that where early literary pedagogy was centered on moral hygiene; Eliot is concerned with both the moral and intellectual effects of novel reading. 23. Thus the title of Homer Obed Brown’s study of the retroactive construction of the genre: Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). 24. J. Hillis Miller, “Narrative and History,” ELH 41, no. 3 (Autumn 1974): 462. 25. J. Hillis Miller, “Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch,” in The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, ed. Jerome Buckley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), 125. 26. Daniel Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History and Literary Representation (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987), 19. 27. Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), 222. 28. Henry James, Essays on Literature: American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1983), 1003. 29. Leslie Stephen, George Eliot (London: The MacMillan Company, 1906), 184.

Notes to Pages 118–128

30. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1964), 28. 31. George Eliot, “Ruskin’s Lectures,” in Eliot, A Writer’s Notebook, 240 (emphasis in the original). 32. James, Essays on Literature, 963. 33. In an early discussion of the twentieth-century novel, Joseph Warren Beach distinguishes modernist fiction from its predecessors in terms of such narrators: “In Fielding and Scott, in Thackeray and George Eliot, the author is everywhere present in person to see that you are properly informed on all the circumstances of the action, to explain the characters to you and to insure your forming the right opinion of them . . . and to point out, how from the failures and successes of the characters, you may form a sane and right philosophy of conduct” (The Twentieth Century Novel [1932], quoted in Richard Stang, The Theory of the Novel in England, 1850–1870 [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959], 91). 34. For a very different analysis of this scene, see Andrew H. Miller’s wonderful discussion of Dorothea’s plain dress in chap. 6 of Novels behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 189–206. 35. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 12. 36. Susan Stewart, “The Pickpocket: A Study in Tradition and Allusion,” MLN 95, no. 5 (Dec. 1980): 1136 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). 37. Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 219. 38. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), 327. 39. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 171. 40. Thanks to Lindsay Reckson for pointing out to me some of the great possibilities of this scene. 41. Joseph Wiesenfarth, “Middlemarch: The Language of Art,” PMLA 97, no. 3 (May 1982): 364. 42. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby from a first draft by Kaethe Mengelberg (London: Routledge, 2001), 291. See also Paul Kamolnick,

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Notes to Pages 128–131

“Simmel’s Legacy for Contemporary Value Theory: A Critical Assessment,” Sociological Theory 19, no. 1 (Mar. 2001): 65–85, for an analysis of Simmel’s “Kantian-derived conception of free agency” and the ultimate tragedy Simmel sees produced by social forms as an “essential medium and outcome of human agency [which] nevertheless subvert human agency” (66). 43. See Margaret Jane Radin, Contested Commodities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), for a discussion of the liberal theory of commodification and alienation. 44. For largely minor adumbrations of Jefferys’s periodizing, see Nicholas Alexander and Gary Akenhurst, eds., The Emergence of Modern Retailing, 1750–1950 (London: Frank Cass, 1999); and John Benson and Laura Ugolini, eds., A Nation of Shopkeepers: Five Centuries of British Retailing (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003). 45. James B. Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain, 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1954), 5. 46. Ibid., 1–27. 47. By the turn of the century, white bread was standardized into two-pound loaves; sugar was factory cut into cubes; tea was blended and prepacked in “handy pound, half-pound, and quarter-pound packets” (Hamish W. Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850–1914 [Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1981], 170–171). 48. Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), 152. 49. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, eds. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 498. 50. Charlotte Eaton, Rome in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: A. Constable, 1822), 69 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). Henry James adds Middlemarch to the list of overwhelming experiences by which one can be assailed in Rome: “To dwell in a city which, much as you grumble at it, is after all very fairly a modern city, with crowds and shops and theatres and cafes and balls and receptions and dinnerparties, and all the modern confusion of social pleasures and pains; to have at your door the good and evil of it all; and yet to be able in half an hour to gallop away and leave it a hundred miles, a hundred years, behind, and to look at the tufted broom glowing on a lonely tower-top in the still blue and air, and the pale pink asphodels trembling none the less for the stillness, and the shaggy-legged shepherds leaning on their

Notes to Pages 131–135 183

sticks in motionless brotherhood with heaps of ruin, and the scrambling goats and staggering little kids treading out wild desert smells from the top of hollow-sounding mounds; and then to come back through one of the great gates a couple of hours later and find yourself in the ‘world,’ dressed, introduced, entertained, inquiring, talking about Middlemarch to a young English lady . . . all this is to lead in a manner a double life and gather from the hurrying hours more impressions than a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to dispose of” (Italian Hours [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992], 140–141). 51. Emil Braun, The Ruins and Museums of Rome: A Guide Book for Travelers, Artists, and Lovers of Antiquity (Brunswick: Frederick Vieweg and Son, 1854), 74 (emphasis mine). 52. Norman Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (London: Blackwell, 1991), 197. 53. Ibid., 198. 54. George Eliot, “Recollections of Italy,” in The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 344. 55. Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 150. 56. Ibid., 7. 57. Radin, Contested Commodities, 17. 58. See Phillipa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians, and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), for the history of this split. 59. Bourdieu, Distinction, 43. 60. See, for example, Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe (1871). James Buzard has captured this distinction brilliantly in the world of nineteenth-century tourism. See The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to “Culture”, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 61. Eliot referred to Ruskin as “the great Protestant of Modern Art; he first exhorted us to think for ourselves, to examine the worth of the old traditional opinions whereby our minds were fettered, and to adopt no creed till we have submitted it to the test of private judgment” (“Ruskin’s Lectures,” 238). 62. Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation, 266. 63. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 143.

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Notes to Pages 135–141

64. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1998), 36. 65. J. Hillis Miller, “Narrative and History,” 473. 66. Cottom, Social Figures, 25. 67. U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s Early Novels: The Limits of Realism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968), 22. 68. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1978), 120. 69. Note that this is nearly exactly the definition of realism given by Ermarth in Realism and Consensus in the English Novel. 70. Andrew H. Miller, Novels behind Glass, 53. 71. See, for example, Wanda Neff, Victorian Working Women: An Historical and Literary Study of Women in British Industries and Professions, 1832–1850 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1929). coda

1. Thanks to an anonymous reader at University of Chicago Press for this felicitous phrase. 2. Rey Chow, “Fateful Attachments: On Collecting, Fidelity, and Lao She,” in “Things,” ed. Bill Brown, special issue, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 288, 289. 3. Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994), 4. 4. Hippolyte A. Taine, History of English Literature, vol. 4 (1883; reprint, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co, 1965), 129–130. 5. Literary Criticism of George Henry Lewes, ed. Alice R. Kaminsky (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1964), 101. 6. Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Rinehart, 1953), 129. 7. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), 189. 8. See the introduction by Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass to Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996): “[I]t is not only the subject that is lost in commodification: the object too is lost. . . . [C]ommodification depletes the object of its qualities” (4). 9. Carolyn Lesjak, for example, has argued that in Middlemarch, Dorothea’s ability to see Casaubon as having “the solidity of things”

Notes to Pages 141–151

allows for a liberating view of both subjects and objects (“Victorian Things and Acts of Dispossession,” paper presented at the meeting of the North American Victoria Studies Association, University of Virginia, 2005). 10. Elaine Freedgood, ed. Factory Production in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003). 11. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 3. 12. Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Bury St. Edmunds: Folio Society, 1996), 36. 13. Andrew H. Miller, Novels behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 53 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). 14. This is in distinct and paradoxical opposition to the modern museum, in which you can always find a gift shop in which to buy some kind of replica of the priceless things you’ve just seen (Maeve Adams, personal communication). 15. Richards, The Commodity Culture, 35. 16. “Industry” derives from the Latin industria—diligence—and comes to mean productive labor of any kind in the early nineteenth century (OED online). 17. Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851, 2nd ed. (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851), 131. 18. Talia Schaffer, “The Imitative Arts: The Victorian Domestic Handicraft and the Realist Novel,” paper presented at the sixth annual CUNY Victorian Conference, May 2002; and Talia Schaffer, “Craft, Authorial Anxiety, and the Cranford Papers,” Victorian Periodical Review (forthcoming). 19. See for example, Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), chap. 5, for a discussion of the extraordinary detail of the African landscape and material culture offered in the memoirs of David Livingstone and Mary Kingsley. 20. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” in Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories (New York: Bantam Dell, 2003), 1:378–379 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). 21. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 10–11.

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Notes to Pages 151–157

22. Thanks to Johanna Holzman for the idea that the clue in the Holmes story is nonfigural. 23. In Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (London: Ward, Lockland, Co., 1887). 24. V. S. Pritchett, The Living Novel and Later Appreciations (New York: Random House, 1964), 82. He argues that this modern “tradition” begins with The Moonstone and Edwin Drood. 25. Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 39 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). 26. For an especially brilliant analysis of this kind, with which I have finally come to disagree but to which I am deeply indebted, see chap. 1, “Longing for Sleeve Buttons,” in Andrew H. Miller, Novels behind Glass. 27. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in The Common Reader: First Series (New York: Harvest Books, 1953), 152. 28. See Douglas Mao’s luminous introduction to Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998).

Index abjection, 47–48 Aborigines Protection Society, 175n10, 175n11 Adams, Maeve, 185n14 Adorno, Theodor, 81, 21, 182n49; Aesthetic Theory, 81 Africa, 40, 43; West Africa, 63 African Americans, 93 Africans, 50, 93 Alexander, David, 70, 173n38 allegory, 4, 124; allegorical modes of reading, 36; Benjamin’s idea of the allegorist, 2, 3 All the Year Round, 88 allusion, 122–126 Altick, Richard, 114, 178n9, 179n17 American Hieroglyphics (Irwin), 27 Angenot, Marc, 87, 173n37, 175n16 Appadurai, Arjun, 162n28 Apter, Emily, 51, 159n2, 165n64, 169n45 Arawak Indians, 40 Arcades Project, The (Benjamin), 2 Archibald, Diana C., 78, 174n48, 174n2

Arents, George, Jr., Collection, New York Public Library, 93, 176n34 Arnold, Thomas, 115, 180n21 Atlantic trade, 35, 40–44 Austen, Jane, 124–125, 176n25 Australia, 24, 81–110; genocide of Aborigines in, 81–110; as geographical unconscious, 91; transportation of convicts to, 84, 97 Australian Broadcasting Company, 98 Azores, 40 Baines, Edward, Jr., 22, 65, 69, 164n54, 172n23 Baird, Robert, 53 Bamford, Samuel, 77 Barthes, Roland, 4, 9–11, 17, 21, 68, 100, 117, 161n17, 162n24, 163n41, 164n52, 173n31, 177n41 Beach, Joseph Warren, 181n33 Beckett, Samuel, 139, 156 Benjamin, Walter, 2–3, 5, 25, 36, 108, 160n6, 165n8, 177n50; Theses on History, 108

188

Index Bentley’s Miscellany, 85 Bezeczky, G´abor, 161n12 Bhatia, B. M., 66, 164n57, 172n27 Bizup, Joseph, 161n16 Blackwood’s, 85, 89, 174n7 Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, 170n6 bombast, 55, 56 Book of English Trades, A, 33 Boulger, G. S., 166n4 Bourdieu, Pierre, 125, 134, 181n37, 183n59 Brantlinger, Patrick, 85, 170–171n8, 175n9, 175n12, 178n8 Braun, Emil, 132, 183n51 Brazil, nineteenth-century novel in, 78 Bredin, Hugh, 12, 101, 106, 162n29, 177n43 Briggs, Asa, 159n1, 185n12 Bront¨e, Charlotte, 30–54; on the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, 143. See also Jane Eyre Brooks, Peter, 106, 177n48, 177n49 Broome, Richard, 88, 175n19 Brown, Bill, 11, 12, 100, 159n2, 162n26, 177n42 Brown, Homer Obed, 180n23 Burdett-Coutts, Angela, 82 Burney, Fanny Anne, 41, 167n21 Butler, Judith, 5, 168n31 calico, 57; calico curtains, 2, 15, 55–80 Calicut, 64 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 68 Canada, 77, 78 Canadian timber trophy from London Illustrated News, 144 fig. 9 Canary Islands, 40 cannibalism, 82, 87, 98 Capital (Marx), 30, 93 Caribbean, 32, 83, 108, 142 Carlyle, Thomas, 74, 173n44

cash crops, 40, 41 Chadwick, Edwin, 61 Chamerovzow, L. A., 87, 175n15 Champollion, Jean-Franc¸ois, 27 Charles Dicken’s [sic] Great Expectations: The Untold Story, 97 Chartism, 56 Chichilnisky, Graciela, 168n27 Chow, Rey, 140, 184n2 Civil War (U.S.), 23, 65, 66 coffee, 63 collector, Benjamin’s idea of, 2, 3, 36 commodification, 5 commodity, 4, 26; and abstraction, alienation, and spectacularization, 8, 142; as social hieroglyphic, 30, 51, 65, 131, 139–158 commodity culture, 8, 65, 76, 139–158 commodity exchange, 119 commodity fetish, 10, 20, 25–29, 35, 75, 93, 124, 136, 142; impure, 93, 96; pure, 93, 96 “commoning economy,” 38 Congo Basin Rainforest, 43 Conrad, Joseph, 116 Conrad, Peter, 83, 174n4 Corn Laws, 42 Cottom, Daniel, 117, 136, 180n26, 184n66 crafts, handmade by women, 148 Crosby, Alfred, 40 Crystal Palace exhibition, 23, 137, 143; illustration of catalog pages for, 145 fig. 10, 146 fig. 11; illustration of exhibit at, 144 fig. 9 Culture and Imperialism (Said), 90, 176n27 Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 90, 176n26 Davis, Mike, 67, 173n29, 173n30

Index Debord, Guy, 143 de Certeau, Michel, 125, 165n66, 181n39 deforestation, 3, 30–52; of Britain, 37–38; of Jamaica, 41; of Madeira, 40 de Grazia, Margreta, 184n8 deindustrialization of India, 57, 66, 69 de Man, Paul, 14, 102, 162n35, 169n48, 177n45, 177n46 Derrida, Jacques, 21, 84, 109, 164n50 description, 4, 17 detail, 1, 50–51, 84, 101 detective fiction, 150–153 Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, 82 Dickens, Charles, 17–19, 81–110, 160n4; and the Aborigines Protection Society, 87, 88, 175n15, 175n17; and the metonymic sublime, 105; and metonymy, 17–19, 103–104, 140–141; projected travel to Australia, 81–82; and social discourse, 87; works: Dombey and Son, 90, 103–105; Nicholas Nickleby, 82; Our Mutual Friend, 20; Sketches by Boz, 16. See also Great Expectations Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton, 82 Dictionary of Australian Slang, 83 Dictionary of Commerce (McCulloch), 71 Dodd, George, 149; Days at the Factories, 149 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 185n20, 186n23 Du cˆot´e du chez Swan (Proust), 14 Duncan, T. Bentley, 169n42 Eagleton, Terry, 136, 184n68 East India Company, 23 Eaton, Charlotte, 131, 182n50; Rome in the Nineteenth Century, 131 Ecological Imperialism (Crosby), 40

ecology, 36–37 Edelman, Lee, 13, 162n32 Egypt, 26, 27, 142, 170n1 Egyptology, 27–28 Egyptomania, 26 Eliot, George, 6, 111–138, 139, 154, 180n20, 181n31; and class mobility, 126; fear of readers, 112–113; and the formation of the highbrow or literary novel, 111–138; and the limitation meaning in the novel, 138; and the literary marketplace, 125; reading and research of, 111, 178n1, 178n2; and the reading of allusion, 122–124; and realism, 117– 120; and Ruskin, 183n61; works: Adam Bede, 111; Daniel Deronda, 90, 176n26; Middlemarch, 6, 7, 111– 138, 153; “Recollections of Italy,” 132, 183n54; “Ruskin’s Lectures,” 118, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” 114–115; A Writer’s Notebook, 111. See also Middlemarch emeralds, 126–131 empire, Roman, 133, 137; British, 24 enclosure, in Britain, 38–39, 46–47; in India, 68 “English,” emergence of, as a discipline, 113 English Furniture from Charles II to George II (Symonds), 33 Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds, 184n64, 184n69 famine, 23, 65–68; “cotton” famine, 23, 65 Fanon, Frantz, 5 Farnie, Douglas Anthony, 164n57, 170n4, 171n13, 172n25 feminism, 44–48, 49 Ferris, Ina, 113, 179n12, 179n14

189

190

Index fetish, 1, 5, 25–29, 35, 50, 73, 84, 100– 101, 102, 104, 107, 108, 126–131; and allusion, 123–126; commodity fetish, 10, 20, 25–29, 35, 75, 93, 124, 136, 142; fetishism and value, 108, 126–131; fetishistic forms of remembering, 83, 93, 96, 108–110; fetishistic metonymy, fetishistic representation, 100–101; fetishizing the content of the novel, 117; fetishizing things rather than commodities, 5, 107; Freudian, 96, 124. See also commodity Flaubert, Gustave, 11, 100 forensic meaning, 151–153 forests, 36–39 Foucault, Michel, 5, 91 Fraser, Hamish, 182n47 free trade, 42–44, 168n26; and subjectivity, 44–48 Freud, Sigmund, 45, 84, 96, 100, 106, 124, 168n32, 174n6, 177n40. See also fetish; repression; unconscious fustian (fustyan), 55, 56, 57, 170n1 Gallagher, Catherine, 76, 78, 99, 117, 141, 163n38, 174n46, 174n49, 177n39, 180n27, 183n62, 184n7 Gallop, Jane, 13, 162n30 Gandhi, Mohandas, 69, 173n34 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 55–80; and the crisis of genre in Mary Barton, 76–77; and disavowal of interest in politics, 55, 60; and the invention of a psychological domain, 65; and political economy, 58–59; and the realist tradition, 75; and the representation of pawned goods in Mary Barton, 72–73; on the volatility of the laboring class, 69. See also Mary Barton Gaskell, Peter, 61

G´enette, Gerard, 9, 161n19 genocide, 78 Gilman, Ernest, 175n20 Gilroy, Paul, 20, 164n49 Ghaley, Adrienne, 160n8 Glasgow, 73 Goodman, Nelson, 10, 161n21, 162n22 Goswami, Manu, 172n28 Great Expectations (Dickens), 2, 17–19, 81–110, 141, 152; and Australia, 81– 82; and cannibalism, 82, 98–100; and convict transportation, 82, 84; and fetishistic remembering and representation, 83–84, 100; and the globalization of culture, 98–99; and historicist criticism, 84, 108–110; and the metonymic imagination, 104–105; and the metonymic sublime, 105; and the relationship between fetishism and realism, 100–108; and repression, 106–107; and slavery, 82, 92–98 Greenfield, Sidney, 167n19 Grundrisse (Marx), 44, 135, 183n63 Guanches, 40 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 37 Habermas, J¨urgen, 113, 179n13 Haiti, 47 Hardy, Thomas, 116, 153–157, 186n25; The Woodlanders, 153–157 Harley, C. Knick, 170n5 Harnetty, Peter, 172n26 Harries, Martin, 174n51 “Harris, Alexander” (pseud.), 89, 176n23 Harrison, Robert Pogue, 22, 37, 164n53, 166n10 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 86 Hegel, G. W. F., 20; master/slave dialectic, 48

Index Heidegger, Martin, 30 Heyck, T. W., 113, 179n15 hieroglyphics, 24, 25–27; commodity fetish as social hieroglyphic, 30, 51, 65, 131, 139–158 highbrow culture, 126, 134; definition of, 180n19 highbrow novel, 114–115 History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (Baines), 22, 65. See also Baines, Edward, Jr. Holdridge, Leslie R., 167n23 Holmes, Sherlock, 150–153 Holzman, Johanna, 186n22 Hudson, Kenneth, 173n43 Hughes, Robert, 91, 176n28 Hunter, Ian, 113, 178n7, 178n9, 179n10 Illustrated London News, 147 Imagism, 157 imperialism, 2, 3, 44, 157. See also empire Impressions and Experiences of the West Indies and North America in 1849 (Baird), 53 inalienable possessions, 132–133 India, 57, 64, 66–68, 69; deindustrialization of cotton industry in, 57, 66, 69; and famine, 66–68; textile manufacture in, 57, 64, 66–68, 142 individualism, 44–48, 50 industrialization, 2, 56, 79, 157. See also deindustrialization of India; India industrial machinery, 23, 55, 64; machinery department of the Crystal Palace from the Illustrated London News, 23 fig. 1 industrial production, literature of, 148 Information Respecting the Aborigines in the British Colonies, 86 Inikori, Joseph E., 171n18

intellectuals, formation as a “class,” 113 Irwin, John T., 27, 165n62 Jakobson, Roman, 11, 163n36 James, Henry, 116, 118, 180n28, 181n32 James, N. D. G., 166n12 Jameson, Fredric, 106 Jane Eyre (Bront¨e), 2, 3, 20, 30–54; and abjection, 42–49; and Atlantic trade, 40–44; and cash crops, 40–44; and consumer consciousness of the social relations of production, 35–36; and deforestation of Britain, 36–37, 38; and deforestation of Jamaica, 41–42; and deforestation of Madeira, 40; and enclosure, 38–39; and feminism, 42–29; free trade and protectionism as historical issues and metaphors, 42–48; and the history of furniture, 31–32; individualism, 43–47; and interior decoration, 31–33; and the pastoral, 52–54; and sadism, 44–47; and slavery, 40–44, 47–49; and wealth from Madeira, 34–35 Jefferson, Thomas, 93, 176n35 Jefferys, James B., 129, 182n45, 182n46 John Barton (Gaskell), 76 Johnson, Walter, 25, 165n60; FolkMemory, 25 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 159n2, 160n5 Kamolnick, Paul, 181n42 Karl, Frederick R., 180n18 Kay, James Phillips, 61, 73, 171n11 Keating, P. J., 170n8 Keynes, J. M., 44 Kiesel, Alyson, 163n43 Kingsley, Mary, 149, 185n19 Klancher, Jon, 112, 178n5, 181n35 Klein, Herbert S., 171n15

191

192

Index Knoepflmacher, U. C., 136, 184n67 knowledge, cultural retention of, 21–29, 36, 80, 84, 106, 134–138, 151, 154 Lancashire, 23, 56 Laplanche, Jean, 6, 161n13 Late Victorian Holocausts (Davis), 67 Leaves from a Madeira Garden (Thomas-Stanford), 41 Leavis, F. R., 118, 181n30 Leclaire, Serge, 6, 161n13 Lefebvre, Henri, 165n3 Lesjak, Carolyn, 184n9 Levine, George, 178n3 Lewes, G. H., 140, 141 Lilla, Mark, 24, 165n59 Lindner, Christoph, 70, 173n39 literal, the (taking things literally), 5, 11, 20, 24, 27–29, 36, 154 literary criticism, 6; ecocriticism, 36; feminist, 35; historicist, 84, 108; humanist, 20; New Criticism, 20; postcolonial, 35; Practical Criticism, 21 literary pedagogy, 105, 112; industrialization of, 116 Liu, Alan, 14, 162n33, 162n34 Liverpool, 64 Livingstone, David, 149, 185n19 London, 102, 150 London, Bette, 168n35 lower middle class, 114, 121–126. See also middle class Luk´acs, Georg, 160n5 Lynch, Deidre, 124, 181n37 Macherey, Pierre, 3, 160n7 Madeira (islands), 3, 32, 34–35, 36, 40– 42, 49–50, 53; history of, 166n16; Victorian memoirs of, 166n16 madeira (wine), 49–50, 142

mahogany, 3, 15, 30–52, 142; furniture, 2, 31–36 mahogany settee, 33 fig. 2 Manchester, 22, 23, 55, 56, 58–62, 64, 65, 70–75, 76, 79 Mansfield Park (Austen), 20, 90, 176n25 Mantel, Hilary, 69, 173n33 Manwood, John, 37 Mao, Douglas, 161n15, 186n28 Marcus, Sharon, 162n25 Mariette-Bey, Auguste, 27, 165n63 Maroons, 50 Marshall, Woodville K., 47, 169n38 Mary Barton (Gaskell), 2, 22, 55–80; and commodity fetishism, 75–76; and the deindustrialization of India, 57; and the development of a protopsychological realm, 65; and domesticity, 57, 61, 74–75; and famine, 65–68; and genre, 77–80; and global cotton markets, 62–65; and laissez-faire, 75; and pawnbroking, 71–73; and the preindustrial past of Lancashire, 56–57; and the protocols of legitimate interpretation, 80; and rural migration to towns, 58–59; and the slave trade, 63–64; and the social destruction of meaning, 68–70; and the tally trade, 71; and threat of violence from laboring class, 60; and urbanization, 58 Marx, Karl, 7, 10, 25–29, 30, 35, 44, 51, 59, 60, 68–69, 93, 96, 135, 146, 160n5, 165n61, 168n29, 177n36, 183n63 masochism, 45 material culture, 1, 30. See also calico; commodity; fetish; fustian; mahogany; metonymy; Negro head tobacco; wood

Index Material Unconscious, The (Brown), 11, 100 Matthias, Peter, 179n16 McCarthy, Anna, 162n26 McCulloch, J. R., 71, 173n40 memory, 21–29, 138; cultural, and the punctum of Barthes, 68–69, fetishistic remembering, 83, 93, 96, 108–110; of imperial mastery, 51, “incidental,” 69; novelistic construction of historical memory, 136–138; and the social destruction of meaning, 51. See also knowledge, cultural retention of; Johnson, Walter; Vico, Giambattista metaphor, 2, 7, 56, 68, 96, 116, 139, 154; and allusion, 122–126; and literary pedagogy, 116; and truth, 15; and value, 126–131; and Vico, 24, 28, 102. See also de Man, Paul; fetish; Goodman, Nelson; metonymy; Ricoeur, Paul metonymy, 2, 11, 12, 13, 36, 55–56, 61, 63, 68, 96, 100, 101, 102, 106, 115, 122–126, 154, 162n27; and anachronism, 24; and contingency, 16, 52, 116; degradation of, 52; and memory, 69; metonymic imagination, 21–25, 105; strong metonymic reading, 12, 142; and value, 126–131; weak metonymy, 2, 11, 12, 36, 61, 96, 100, 101, 102, 106 Meyer, Susan, 47, 168n36, 169n37; and reading things, 166n7 middlebrow culture, 7, 134; definition of, 180n19 middlebrow novel, 114, 115 middle class, 114, 119–120, 120–126, 153. See also lower middle class Middlemarch (Eliot), 6, 7, 111–138, 153; and allusion, 122–126; and anxiety about readers in the nineteenth

century, 112–115; and the commodity fetish, 124, 126–129, 135–136; and empire, 133; and the foreclosure of metonymic plenitude, 120–126; and the formation of the highbrow or literary novel, 114; and fugitive meaning, 138; and highbrow culture, 125, 134; and history, 136–138; and inalienable possessions, 130–132; and the institution of the novel as a literary form, 116; and literary pedagogy, 112, 116; and the lower middle class, 125; and metaphor, 122–126; and metonymy, 120–126; and middlebrow culture, 134; and the middle class, 119, 120–126; and modernism, 116; and realism, 117–120, 135; and retailing in the nineteenth century, 129–130; and Rome, 130–136; and tourism, 134; and value, 118–120, 126–131 Midlands, 112 Miller, Andrew H., 137, 143–144, 159n1, 181n34, 184n70, 185n13, 186n26 Miller, D. A., 185n21 Miller, J. Hillis, 16–17, 117, 136, 163n39, 180n24, 180n25, 184n65 Miller, Shawn William, 31; Fruitless Trees, 31 modernism, 6, 7, 79–80, 106, 116, 156–158 Molloy (Beckett), 139, 156–157 Monthly Review, 85, 88 Monuments of Upper Egypt, The (Mariette-Bey), 27 Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, The (Kay), 61 Moses, Michael Valdez, 171n10 Mulvey, Laura, 165n65

193

194 Index Mundy, Godfrey Charles, 89 Myall Creek Massacre, 89 Neeson, J. M., 38, 166n13 Neff, Wanda, 184n71 Negro head tobacco, 2, 15, 19, 24, 81–110 New South Wales, 82, 87, 98 New Zealand Question and the Rights of Aborigines, The (Chamerovzow), 87 Nigeria, 43 Nunokawa, Jeff, 140, 142, 184n3 objective correlative, 157 O’Connor, Feargus, 56 Our Antipodes; or, Residence and Rambles in Australia (Mundy), 89 Past and Present (Carlyle), 74 pastoral, 52–53, 58 pawnbroking, 71–73 People’s Charter, 62 pewter, 16–17 philology, 133, 137 Philosophy of Money, The (Simmel), 128 Pietz, William, 159n2, 174n5 Poovey, Mary, 20, 65, 163n38, 164n46, 168n36, 169n41, 169n47, 172n20 Portugal, 42 postmodernism, 7 Preminger, Alex, 163n36 Prendergast, Christopher, 162n26 Price, Leah, 9, 17, 161n18 Pritchett, V. S., 153, 186n24 protectionism, 42–44, 64 Proust, Marcel, 14, 102 punctum of R. Barthes, 68 Quilligan, Maureen, 184n8

Radin, Margaret Jane, 182n43, 183n57 “readerly” text, 6, 17, 84. See also Barthes, Roland reading public, nineteenth-century fears of, 112–113, 114, 115 realism, 4, 12, 50–52, 79, 84, 100, 101, 104, 106, 107, 108, 135, 158, 177n44; and George Eliot, 117–120 reality effect, 9–12, 35, 68, 100, 101 Reckson, Lindsay, 181n40 “red room” at Gateshead, in Jane Eyre, 32 Reece, R. H. W., 175n18, 176n22 Reform Bill of 1832, 117, 137 repression, 84, 106–107 Ricardo, David, 63, 171n14 Richards, I. A., 21, 164n51 Richards, Thomas, 143, 144–146, 185n11, 185n15 Richardson, Alan, 178n9, 179n11 Ricoeur, Paul, 10, 161n20 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 78, 88 Romantics, 112; and invention of “Literature,” 112; and reading public, 112 Rome, 37, 38, 119, 130, 131–138 Rosetta Stone, 26–27 Royal Navy, 38 Ruskin, John, 134 sadism, 30–54; and mastery, 49–52; and selfhood, 32–34, 44–48 Said, Edward W., 20, 90, 164n48, 176n24, 176n27 Schaffer, Talia, 148, 185n18 Schor, Naomi, 13, 159n2, 162n31 Schwarz, Roberto, 78, 174n50 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 20, 164n47 Self-Help (Smiles), 49 Settlers and Convicts (“Harris,” pseud.), 89

Index Sharpe, Jenny, 47, 168n36, 169n37, 169n39 Shell, Marc, 130–131, 182n48 Sherlock Holmes. See Holmes, Sherlock Simmel, Georg, 128, 146, 181n42 Siskin, Clifford, 112, 178n6, 178n9 slavery, 3, 20, 23, 30–54, 82, 97–98; “governessing slavery,” 48; and the plantation system, 41; slave rebellions, 47 slave trade, British, 63, 69; American, 69, 93–96 Smiles, Samuel, 49 Smithfield, 102–103 social hieroglyphic. See hieroglyphics Society for the Prevention of Premature Burial, 99 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 69–70 Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge, 69–70 Society for the Protection of Aborigines, 87, 88 Society of the Spectacle (Debord), 143 South Australian, 86 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 44, 49, 66, 168n30 Spyer, Patricia, 159n2 Stallybrass, Peter, 159n2, 160n4, 184n8 Starr, G. Gabrielle, 163n37 Stephen, Leslie, 118, 180n29 Stewart, Garrett, 161n14 Stewart, Susan, 50, 123–124, 166n15, 169n44, 181n36 Stocking, George, 175n14 structuralism, 7 sugar, 40, 41, 167n17 Sussman, Charlotte, 35, 166n6 swaraj, 69 Symonds, R. W., 33, 166n5

Taine, Hippolyte, 105, 140, 141, 177n47, 184n4; History of English Literature, 140 tally trade, 71–72 Tamen, Miguel, 19, 163n44 Taussig, Michael, 5, 160n10, 161n11 Taylor, Ellen M., 165n1; Madeira: Its Scenery, and How to See It, 165n1 Taylor, Frank, 53, 170n49, 170n50 Taylor, W. C., 149; Factories and the Factory System, 149 tea, 35, 63 Tebbutt, Melanie, 173n41, 173n42 terra nullius, doctrine of, 86, 175n12 “thing culture,” 8, 76, 139–158 Thomas-Stanford, Charles, 41, 167n20 Thorpe, Adam, 43, 168n28 Three Expeditions into the Interior of Australia (Mitchell), 88 tobacco, 63; adulterate, 91, 142. See also Negro head tobacco tobacco cards, 93–94; illustrations of tobacco cards, 94–95 figs. 5–8 Toronto, 77, 78 tourism, 52–53, 134 Treatise on the Laws of the Forest, A, (Manwood), 37 Tyrell, Ian, 177n37 unconscious, 3, 102, 103, 106 underdetermination, 101, 111–138, 154, 177n44 Urania Cottage, 82 value, 26–29, 59; exchange value, 10, 128; use value, 10, 59, 118–120, 126– 131, 148, 151 Vance, Norman, 183n52, 183n53 Van Ghent, Dorothy, 140, 141, 184n6 Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 90

195

196

Index Vatican Museum, 119, 132, 133 Vico, Giambattista, 22–26, 68–69, 165n58 Virginia, 83, 93, 108 Viswanathan, Gauri, 168n33, 178n9 Walker, Robin, 176n31 Wall, Cynthia, 4, 160n8 Wallace, David, 167n24 Weber, Max, 146 Weiner, Annette, 132–133, 183n55, 183n56 Westminster Review, 85

“What Is Called Thinking?” (Heidegger), 30 Wiesenfarth, Joseph, 127, 181n41 Williams, Raymond, 77, 174n47 wood, 30–35. See also mahogany Woodlanders, The (Hardy), 153– 157 Woolf, Virginia, 79–80, 156, 186n27 World Geography of Forest Resources, A (Haden-Guest et al.), 41 “writerly” text, 6, 116 ˇ zek, Slavoj, 160n9, 173n45, 176n33 Ziˇ