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Novels Glass

Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative
Andrew Miller

Basic Thesis/Introduction

• Victorians worried that social life was becoming spectacle behind a shop-window for our consumption: all social and moral life is merely a grouping, a “warehouse” of commodities
  • Why worry? Social life is displayed so in order to appease the “economic appetites” of others
• Assumption: “Victorian novel provides us with the most graphic and enduring images of the power of commodities to affect the varied activities and attitudes of individual and social experience” 7
• Anxieties about commodities provides organizing principles for understanding other Victorian concerns
  • What kinds of worries? Death, gendering of subjectivity, nostalgia, desire, “the rationalization of social life”
• Great Exhibition of 1851, Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope, Gaskell
• Glass itself
  • 1830s: glass technology: large sheets of glass, mass production
  • Used for display windows and changed the appearance of London
  • Turns commodities into a kind of “show” with “fantasies of consumption”
  • Victorians are just as proud of the glass and lighting as they are of the commodities: shows how they are moving towards culture of spectacle
  • Lets you see things, but you can’t touch: they are inaccessible
    • Fiction lets you overcome inaccessibility (this is the function of fantasy: it jumps the glass)
• Spectacles behind glass associated with “increasing pretensions, impersonality, and mobility of social and commercial life” 5, mostly “distance between people”
• Topics
  • “Aesthetic development of the ‘exhibition value’ of goods”
  • Glass as “part of a complex of developments in museums, department stores, exhibitions, and galleries”
  • Effect of exhibition value on realist novel (novels too are behind the glass barrier)
    • Esp in novel’s attitude about ITSELF (oh God my novel is a commodity and I’m trying to critique them)
• “Dynamic of desire and disenchantment” 10
• Method: poststructural “openness” and refusing to “package” his topic; a “cultural matrix” of material, social, and subjective. ugh. cliche.

Thackeray’s Vanity Fair

• “More than any other Victorian novel, Thackeray’s book imagines the fetishistic reduction of the material environment to commodities, to a world simultaneously brilliant and tedious, in which value is produced without reference either to the needs or to the hopelessly utopian desires of characters.” 9
  • He desires them, so he’s implicated.
  • The book can’t “carry” the value he wants it to, so he is “alienated from the product of his own labor”
    • That sounds silly to me. That’s not what alienation means, or if it does, this example is trivial.
• Thackeray in the process of trying to describe the harsh process of capital, in the form of Becky who rationalizes the irrational, thus bringing capitalism into the drawing room, must throw up his hands in despair has he realizes that his book is also a commodity to be sold.
• Personally, he always has awareness of servants (thinking they’re making fun of him all the time: example, when Jos Sedley’s servant details what he would do with Jos’ goods and creating a fantasy around this usage; finishing up this description also when says that if we knew what others thought of us, it’d be like seeing restauranteur advertising the dinner of turtle the next day by marking the turtle itself in front of the window: “So Jos’s man was marking his victim down, as you see one of Mr. Paynter’s assistants in Leadenhall Street ornament an unconscious turtle with a placard on whcih is written, ‘Soup tomorrow’”) which reflects his bio: losing his inheritance at age 21 and taking the next thirty years to recover it via writing
  • It makes him a dual subject (“Self-0bjectified” making him understand the commodity form), moving about in the drawing room and an objective observer of people who do such things
  • This situation is supposed to make him an appropriate chronicler of capitalism: his estrangement from himself is that which the footman feels and which the commodity is

• Thackeray fetishizes commodities and has an appropriately love-hate, love-repulsion relationship with them
  • Plenitude/lack dialectic
  • Libidinal response: “repel and fascinate” 21
    • The great example is auction of John Sedley’s goods, which is an horrific spectacle
    • You thought the goods were lovely before, but now that they’re on the block ready to be revaluated, they seem gross
    • The problem is that the goods aren’t really the goods: their real meaning is the position they play within the system of exchange and system of social repute, not the actual objects they are. They are thus unstable.
  • It reproduces the relationship he has with his work (see the last lines of Vanity Fair, which bitterly tells the reader “no one can be happy” and tells the reader to put the puppets back in the box and end the tale)
    • You see, Thackeray’s tactic of “accumulating minutiae” is no different from the characters themselves, who want to do the same: here, narrative detail is a type of commodity fetishism that the author is guilty of
• Dialectic of commodities and death: they are assoc. with death, like Miss Crowley
• The safety of Thackeray’s possession: because he can never get the objects he desires, he can create a subjectivity of Deserving Subject. It is democratizing, apparently.
• Description of Capitalism
  • “larger circulatory process” “things are continuously handed round in Thackeray’s world” 31
  • Ultimate failure: even people who create identities from relationship to commodity, as well as people who have them, will eventually “suffer” from it. Commodities are really death for Thackeray.
    • Why? Ultimate fungibility means that it is all lost in the system and nothing can have transcendent meaning
    • Why? Objects that are hooked up allegorically to something significant are by that very same process seen as empty of meaning and not important
  • There is no utopian possibility for objects: Thackeray satirizes the belief that you can (ie satirizes people’s silly fantasies)
• What Is Becky Sharp?
  • Someone who takes advantage of the lapses of exchange system to get something for nothing
  • Someone who rationalizes the irrational sphere (of love, of gambling: where she prostitutes herself and where she has Rawdon pretend he’s not good at gambling but it’s really hustling)
• Reader/writer
  • Just as personal relationships are made impossible by the selfishness of Becky and the sentimentality of Amelia, we have a problem with the reader/writer relationship
  • The reader and writer should have a community, intersubjective, etc
  • But he says that after we read this, we will be “miserable in private”
  • Why? Because Thackeray knows that books are commodities and that writing is a trade that is done for money: the writer markets off his emotions, rather than giving them as a gift to the reader or for creating a relationship
    • Thackeray is doomed just like the capitalism he shows in Vanity Fair.
      • For example, his satire often turns against him, as he ends up loving the forms and characters he meant to judge. Loves and hates them, just like he does the commodity form.

Great Exhibition of 1851

• Benjamin: “The world exhibitions glorify the exchange value of commodities.” (Reflections)
• Explored utopian possibilities of commodities through production of a discursive world with implications for “class, gender, and nationality”
  • But it fails: look at the undesirable people around the spectacles, look at objectification of women under glass, look at the monster proletariat masses we’ve made
• Great Exhibition is both like a shop window/affected by sales ideology, and affected shopping forever
• It’s a “space of exchange” where objects neither produced nor consumed, an “intermediate” space
  • “Spectacular, depthless, abstract space”
  • Taken out of original context and given new ideological meanings: imperialist, nationalist, gendered
• “Solitary and passive observation,” “disengaged, solitary, and reflective practice,” “a private affair:” this is shopping for both department stores and exhibitions (“mental helplessness” a kind of shock in seer that exhausts, amazes them)
• Crystal Palace: “insubstantial unity,” “elision of boundaries,” compared to a Turner painting
  • Its construction involved w/”rationalization of parts” with identically sized glass and regularized girders and wood planks
• Originally the objects weren’t to have displayed prices, but they reconsider after complains
  • Charles Babbage said having a bunch of articles without the price is like portrait of man without his nose
  • Nonetheless, people experience Exhibition as shopping without having to pay, showing that the whole attraction to shopping in first place is the spectacle anyway rather than the purchase or need: “Colossal entertainment” “fantasy utopia” (you can’t buy the goods)
• Lots of social unrest around the Exhibition: people worried that working class would be disorderly, that Reds and Socialists would use it as opportunity to support anarchy or demonstrations
• Creation of Englishness: as orderly, disciplined, between the no-frills America and the silly-luxury France
• Working Class
  • Labor sometimes seen as dignified and celebrated by Exhibition while others see that Exhibition takes advantage of workers or even hides the bloodstains of capitalism
  • Punch asked if they would or wouldn’t be ashamed to show the workers rather than the product they produced
  • The whole Exhibition destroyed the process of labor, showing the objects as made already (reified, says critic Tony Bennett in “The Exhibitionary Complex” AND James Clifford “On Collecting Art and Culture” where the meaning given by classificatory scheme of display replaces origin as “adequate representation”)
    • Objects erase the labor.
• Display itself
  • The Exhibition said Eliza Cook’s Journal, was “to industry what galleries of painting and sculpture are to art – what a library is to literature….” etc
  • The Exhibition creates the system of evaluation: what is displayed, is what is valuable
  • “The arrangement of material culture in the abstract, chart-like space of exchange became an active agent in the production of value.” 89

Cranford

• “perhaps the period’s most detailed and sympathetic novel of domestic material culture” 11
• Says that it’s an example of “domestic enclave” against commodities
  • Maybe they try to, but I’d say the more interesting stuff happens when commodities get through (for example, when they imbibe cherry brandy, you expect a hilarious scene of drunk old biddies, but sigh! it doesn’t occur)
• HIS READING IS DEAD WRONG
  • “does not see objects as instigators of unsettling appetites”
    • I’d say she’s struggling not to, that she’s paranoid and at every moment has to shut down the openings that her book allows
  • “resists notions of subjectivity defined as insular, fungible, and threatened”
    • Then why are the ladies seen as intolerant (ie Dickens reactions)? Why are the ladies constantly worried about “vulgarity” coming in?
    • “instead she attempts to represent goods in her novel as the occasion for communal understanding”
      • Um, but that’s only because the commodities were threatening in the first place. Now, do the women succeed in their resistance? NO: Miss Matty’s giving up to curiosity is what gives her the news about the bank failure. Yes, they band together to save Miss Matty, but notice how MELODRAMA must come in (the long-lost brother) to save the situation.)
• Gaskell demonstrates rational exchange; economy of the gift
  • Okay, sure.
• Problem: private rooms are now seen in light of public spectacle, a place to display commodities
  • Answer: Gaskell’s domestic economy
• His hobby-horse
  • Notes that people complain that Cranford has “no narrative propulsion”
  • However, he just says it’s a form that we’re not used to
  • Kristeva’s two types of time
    • Obsessional time: “representational mode of history, time as project;” linear time with sentences (noun + verb; topic-comment)
    • Hysteric time: repetitive; “cyclical or monumental;” “recuperate or repeat”
• Notes Gaskell’s explanation of her writing it: “even if small towns, scarcely removed from villages, the phases of society are rapidly changes” and she wants to document them before they disappear (energized by Southey’s desire to document domestic life)
• Gaskell’s Style: “heterogeneity” “unsystematic specificity”
  • She even said that her style was to think about all the details she heard from all her friends and residents of small towns, esp one Knutsford
  • She will show domestic time, which is hysteric, not obsessional; which is not linear but is cyclical; it isn’t developmental or narrative
    • I DO NOT AGREE: See my explanation in the Cran Ford page, where I say that the narrative propulsion does kick in.
    • Until the failure of Town and Country Bank, I believe along with him that the novel is not linear or really narrative.
• Says that the characters successfully use material culture for their own ends and resist reification
  • “collective attention to dress furniture provides ground for communal understanding” 99
  • They “use the received fashion of the day to form their own society”
• My Critique
  • But we should note that their doing so doesn’t HURT capitalism but works within it quite well: note how Matty is turned into a capitalist herself! and turns her servant’s relationship, an old chivalry fall-back, into a modern lodger relation: Martha is Matty’s new landlord.
  • Matty in spite of herself becomes a good capitalist b/c her customers won’t in the end let her give them too much stuff (they give her gifts, which make up the loss she makes while being too generous to customers)
  • Her friends and advisors don’t let her know about her true monetary status, which would have made her give more money to the stockholders (they prevent her from being nice and personal; they push her into being more of a regular capitalist)
  • She warns the kids that the almond confits are not good for them, and she warns young folks not to drink the unhealthy green tea, but she still ends up selling them anyway.
  • She does take away business from Mr. Johnson, the dry goods seller
  • She is a lodger in her capitalist-servant’s home
  • The only way you can’t see Matty as embroiled within capitalism is the reason why she doesn’t see herself that way: ideology. The truth is covered up, and that truth is perhaps a De Certeau-ian move to negotiate daily life, but he is wrong to say that this negotiation materially changes the relationship to capitalism, nor does it represent a domestic interior impenetrable to capitalism.
• The fact that Miller doesn’t see this makes him see the bank failure and the return of Peter as two different threads: he persists in thinking that Gaskell creates a fragmented narrative
  • But in fact the narrative is changed by the violent intrusion of capitalism to make changes that show that the community is not inviolable to capitalism. Even while Miller thinks the community resists it, they’re already victims to it.
  • Note for example that the scene where Matty learns of the bank failure is structured so that she learns it due to her curiosity to see the new fashions in dress and her desire to have a new dress. And from then on, the narrative is not fragmentary but completely coherent and driving towards the melodramatic recovery of Matty’s long-lost brother (with, of course, a financial competency)
  • I’ve noticed that it’s a habit for Gaskell to use melodrama to get out of problems she doesn’t know how to solve: everything is excessive, sentimental, etc (same thing happens in Mary Barton; by the time she gets to N and S, she has found a main character who can realistically take her everywhere she needs her narrative to go)
• Miller says that there’s a detective novel in here, which would help him save his idea of the fragmentary narrative: the fact that the last third of the book has a periodic intrusion of a foreign genre in it, would allow him to say it’s still fragmentary
  • But it’s not true: Peter’s disappearance is in the gentle-fun comic mode that penetrates the entire novel; and even the narrator’s hunt for Peter is satirized by Gaskell as an uncharacteristic and silly attempt, not her transformation into a detective; and his attempt to see the dilatory narrative technique Mary uses as the “suspense” used in a detective novel masks the fact that the whole novel has been dilatory and digressive!
  • Saying so lets him ignore the fact that Peter’s return is the biggest proof of the coherent plot Gaskell now pursues
• Me: what really happens, what’s really seen in the language of gifts, is fair trade. What we see at Cranford is good not because it’s not capitalist, but because they find fairness within capitalism.
  • Gaskell must descend to melodrama (the kindness of her friends, one by one showing courageous acts of kindness, until even the narrator’s heretofore invisible father makes an appearance to shed a few tears; reappearance of Peter) because she’s trying to mask the fact that Matty is fully in capitalism.
  • When her brother “saves” her from being a merchant and lodger by supporting her, it doesn’t mean she’s genteel: he has profits from running an indigo plantation. The only thing that’s happened is what David Harvey calls “spatial displacement:” the fact that the capitalism happened in INDIA doesn’t mean it’s not capitalism
  • What Gaskell ends up showing is that the shift towards capitalism can be made deceptively sugary by ideology.
  • For me, Matty is in the same position as any person not acknowledging their inculcation into capitalism. The separation of spheres that allows this community of Amazons to exist is what also allows people to ignore their involvement in it.

Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

• Writing and the domestic front are safe enclaves from the threats of commercializing public sphere, but they are not in the end impenetrable and do collapse.

Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds

• Goods are “invisible” not “fetishistic”
  • Instead, property and material ownership are invisibly saturating
• Subjectivity as a type of property that can be lost, sold, etc
  • Self-possession is the topic that’s most key here
  • Dangerous b/c then you are ruled by the language of commodities (this is what Miller says about Thackeray’s work and life, not what he thinks Thackeray tries to say in his novel)
• What it shows is how slippery commodities are: the huge legal apparatus let free to get the diamonds back takes too long, doesn’t manage to get them back no matter what they do.

Eliot, Middlemarch

• “Means to embue goods with enduring significance”
• Doesn’t believe novel is “inevitably defined by commodification” 12
• The main topic of commodity: female dress (Dorothea Brooke), saying that “women should attend to it enough to effectively limit its importance,” which is what she also decides about all in the aesthetic realm, incl. her own novel
• HE IGNORES THE CORN LAWS. In this entire book, he does the error of forgetting political history. HE himself REIFIES the commodity, even while recognizing in his book that the characters get in trouble for doing so.
• Eliot shows that you can control commodities: recognize them just enough to keep them under control.
• Hierarchy of characters: Rosamond Vincey cares too much about clothes and thus becomes a commodity and ruins the men around her, while Dorothea never shows off and only lets her natural beauty shine through by her clothing.

Quotes, Miscellany, Critique

• He says he’s “following Marx” (7) b/c he uses commodities as his take-off point, but I’d say he’s in danger of reifying commodities and giving them the fetish value, then afterwards assigning them value (see Lukacs critique of reification)
• For “fetish,” he must be using Freud, not Marx
  • cf 26 quote from “Fetishism” about the fetish that is about conflicting poles (here Miller says both plenitude and lack) will be “of great tenacity”
• He uses Modernist thinkers for Victorian books: that is suspicious to me.
• Page four for a quote about catalogues (endless catalog of a ship window)
  • page 24 (Thackeray’s catalogue from his Sketches and Travels, says Miller; then Orwell quote from his “Oysters and Brown South” about grotesque, cloying “atmosphere of surfeit”)
  • page 32: Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor catalog
• Page fifteen for Benjamin: instead of asking “What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time,” you should ask “What is its position in them?” (from Benjamin Reflections) (it’s about the work’s relationship to literary relations of its time: “literary technique”
  • See 61 for catalogs involved w/Great Exhibition
  • Karen Newman: “City Talk: Women and Commodification in Jonsons Epicoene” ELH having discussion about catalogue (excessive but produces lack)
• Boudieu “distinction:” conspicuous consumption will create it
• See
  • Nunokowa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel 1994
  • Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels 1986 (commodity-text of serial publication versus commodity-book of triple-decker) (new class of isolated professional authors who retain control over copyright and incur risk as well as profits)
• The Age of Triumphing Free Market Capitalism
  • Repeal of glass tax 1845
  • of Corn Laws 1846
  • of Navigation Acts 1849, 1854
  • of sugar duties 1854
  • of soap tax 1853
  • of paper tax 1861
  • Limited Liability Corp 1855-6
• Fungible
  • Interchangeable, ie, one five dollar bill can be exchanged for another; one barrel of oil for another; but diamonds aren’t fungible b/c each one is unique
  • More commonly understood as situation where any object can be exchanged for any other
  • Adorno Minima Moralia: “Amid universal fungibility, happiness attaches itself without exception to the non-fungible.” qtd 23 (in Adorno 120)
    • Another Minima moralia quote: about gifts: “Real giving means choosing, expending time, going out of one’s way, thinking of the other as a subject” 42 in MM; 40 in NBG)
• Two Different Economies, from Marx in Capital (250)
  • M-C-M’
    • Money exchanged for commodities which are exchanged for a profit (surplus). The point is capital.
    • Limitles circulation of capital: “constantly renewed movement” says Marx
    • The point is money: it’s the “central element” 34, so that goods matter as parts of the system
  • C-M-C
    • Money is instrumental, while commodities are the true source of meaning (consumption, use-value is what matters)
    • This is the simpler economy: “sell in order to buy” so you have “satisfaction of needs”
• Jameson, Political Unconscious
  • ”’textual determinant:’ a form and style that supports the mode of subjectivity appropriate to the objective forces that encircle and permeate it”
• Poovey, Uneven Developments
  • “In the late 1840s, Mary Poovey argues, social practice ideologically constructed authors and readers as autonomous members of a relationship free from both traditional associations of patronage or inherited wealth and the mechanized exchange of commodities.”
• Benjamin on Baudelaire
  • “Baudelaire knew how it stood with the poet: as a flaneur he went to the market; to look it over, as he thought, but in reality to find a buyer.”
• E P Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” in Past and Present 38
• David Harvey’s “The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation” in Urbanization of Capital
• Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development: “utopia of form” begins in 1840s: “Architectural, artistic, and urban ideology was left with the utopia of form as a way of recovering the human totality through an ideal synthesis, as a way of embracing disorder through order.”
• Freud, “The Uncanny”
• Benjamin Reflections
  • 1850s-60s furnishings: “The aunt cannot but die” in the heavy, ornate furniture
• De Certeau
  • “Way of operating” manipulated by the “weak,” “the art of the weak” who have no other power
  • “Unrecognized producers, poets of their own affairs”
  • “Minor subversions” “not radical reorganizations” or utopian or extensive (that’s Millers words)
  • Instead, it’s about “making do,” “adjusting circumstances to make them more habitable” 99
  • “De Certeau has suggested that everyday life is one realm of ‘enunciation,’” where the person who uses the existing system is also “an operation performed on it”
    • Then, De C calls that consumption:” says that all of these strategies “concern consumption”
• Elizabeth Abel
  • “fluid, open, and nonhierarchical characters”