Abstract
I begin with a moment from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) describing an encounter with things, where bodily, sensory, and imaginative life are fused.
Even for our grand-parents … almost everything [was] a vessel in which they found and stored humanity. Now there come crowding over from America, empty, indifferent things, pseudo-things, a dummy life … The animated, experienced things that share our lives are coming to an end and cannot be replaced.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies1
But how can you look at something and set your own ego aside? Whose eyes are doing the looking? As a rule, you think of the ego as one who is peering out of your own eyes as if leaning on a windowsill, looking at the world stretching out before him in all its immensity. So then: there is a window that looks out on the world. The world is out there; and in here, what is there? The world still — what else could there be? With a little effort of concentration Palomar manages to shift the world from in front of him and set it on the sill, looking out. The world is also there, and for the occasion has been split into a looking world and a world looked at … perhaps the I, the ego, is simply the window through which the world looks at the world.
— Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar2
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Notes
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (London: Hogarth Press, 1952), Appendix IV, p. 158.
Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar, trans. William Weaver (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985), p. 102.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Stevie Davies (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 25. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.
Wilfred R. Bion, Second Thoughts (London: Karnac Books, 1967). See ‘Attacks on Linking’, pp. 106–7; ‘A Theory of Thinking’, pp. 116–19.
Stephen Jay Gould and Rosamond Wolff Purcell, Crossing Over: Where Art and Science Meet (New York: Three Rivers Press, Random House, 2000), p. 97.
Samuel T. Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’, in Samuel T. Coleridge: Poems, ed. John Beer (London: Dent 1993), pp. 204–7, 11. 46–54.
Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), see especially pp. 2–6. Freedgood’s impressive book begins ‘with objects’ (p. 4), rather than remaining with the hierarchy of subjects or plots. She reads across the novel through both textual and historical connections, distinguishing between ‘weak’ metonymic connections in the text, which are local and associative, and strong metonymic connections, where the object’s place in culture and ideology and in histories of subjugation can be traced.
Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 126–53.
‘A photgraph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).’ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 27.
Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 141–8. Barthes writes of detail or ‘notation with no function’ (p. 141) that does not belong to the semiotics of the text.
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. John Richetti (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 55.
Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, ed. Sophie Gilmartin (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 811. About such interiors Jeff Nunokawa has argued that ‘[t]he nineteenth-century novel never ceases remarking the reach of market forces into the parlors, bedrooms, and closets of a domestic realm that thus never ceases to fail in its mission to shelter its inhabitants from the clash of these armies’.
Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 4.
From innumerable examples one could instance George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), where Mr Brook’s dinner table brings together Dorothea and Casaubon (Chapter 2), and where the committee table occasions Lydgate’s fatally compromising vote in support of Bulstrode (Chapter 71), not to speak of the ever-present billiard table.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974), p. 76.
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977), p. 177.
Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 31–5.
By the 1860s the fetish was a familiar anthropological concept, explored in John Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times (1865),
and in Edward B. Tylor’s Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1868). Auguste Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830–42) connected primitivism and fetishism, following the work of Charles de Brosses in the eighteenth century.
Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Things, Special Issue of Critical Inquiry, 28 (2001), 1–16.
Steven Connor, ‘Thinking Things’, Textual Practice, 24 (2010), 1–20.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, ed. Margaret Canovan (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 52.
It was in the debates of Chartism that claims about ownership of labour and therefore of the body are particularly prominent in working-class discourse. Gareth Stedman Jones notes that ‘Chartists did not regard the working classes as propertyless’, because ‘the only legitimate source of property was labour’. Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The Language of Chartism’, in The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–1860, ed. James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 17.
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, ed. Millicent Bell (London: Penguin Books, 2008), p. 23;
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Angus Calder (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 54;
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed. Dennis Taylor (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 94.
Shelagh Wilson, ‘Monsters and Monstrosities: Grotesque Taste and Victorian Design’, in Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque, ed. David Amigoni, Colin Trodd, and Paula Barlow (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 143–73.
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 217.
The knight in armour that is a stove is illustrated in Briggs, Victorian Things, p. 67. The canoe raincoat is described in ZZ Anon., ‘A Journey Round the World in the Crystal Palace’, Sharpe’s London Magazine, 14 (1851), 317.
Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. Tony Tanner (London: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 232.
William Makepeace Thackeray, The Newcomes, ed. D. J. Taylor (London: Dent, 1994), p. 325.
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady, ed. Geoffrey Moore (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 253, emphasis in original.
Barbara Hardy, ‘Objects in Novels’, in Narrators and Novelists (= Collected Essays, vol. 1) (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1987), pp. 14–31.
Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 8–19. See also her reading of Marx, pp. 22–3.
Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Howard Eland (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 98, my emphasis.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Doctrine of the Similar’, in Selected Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), II, 694–8, 695.
Charles Manby Smith, ‘Romance of a Shop-Window’, in The Little World of London; or, Pictures in Little of London Life (London: Hall and Virtue, 1857), p. 334.
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. Andrew Sanders (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 898.
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, ed. J. I. M. Stewart (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 77.
Henry James, The Golden Bowl, ed. Gore Vidal (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 518.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 127.
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Armstrong, I. (2012). Bodily Things and Thingly Bodies: Circumventing the Subject-Object Binary. In: Boehm, K. (eds) Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283658_2
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