Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives (review)

In his stimulating new book, Peter Melville Logan (author of Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose [1997]) explores two nineteenth-century ways of thinking about the fetish, ways of thinking that the immense impact of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud has for too long shielded from view. The book covers considerable ground, beginning with "Primitive Fetishism from Antiquity to 1860" and ending with a chapter on Freud and Freudianism, "Sexology's Perversion." Logan's central focus, though, is on how three mid-Victorians—Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Edward Tylor—came to understand "culture" by way of the fetish.

The book insightfully explores the very strange material and ideational status that the fetish had for a wide range of nineteenth-century thinkers. In brief, the fetish as many Victorians understood it was both a purely "material" object and the site of purely subjective projection (10). On the one hand fetishes are self-substantial: the true fetish is not a tree-divinity, but a particular cedar in a particular forest, standing for nothing beyond itself. There is no exemplarity about a fetish; if it pointed beyond itself it would be an idol, which is a figure for a larger force (and hence belongs to a sort of primitive religion far advanced from the simple object-worship implied by fetishism). Yet on the other hand many Victorians simultaneously understood fetishes as purely subjective. The worshipper projected into an object something that lay entirely in his or her own mind.

Victorian Fetishism deserves great respect for the way it explores the wide spread of Comtean notions about the fetish. By Logan's reading, Auguste Comte is responsible for introducing a teleology, taken up by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and others, in which the most primitive forms of human thought are marked by an unavoidable materiality, a resistance to abstraction, as well as a projective psychology that placed human anxieties inside material objects without acknowledging the process. One of the delights of the book is that there are nuances within that Comtean canon that will clearly reward further study. We might note, for example, that Comte's stages of mankind shade toward the subjectivist, not the materialist, because he sees culture beginning with primitive man "explaining phenomena by some fanciful conception suggested by the analogies of his own consciousness" (that's Logan quoting G. H. Lewes's account of Comte) before attaining greater abstraction (qtd. in Logan 32). And it might be worth looking back along the historical line Logan charts to figure out exactly how well Giambattista Vico's notion that "when mankind is sunk in ignorance he makes himself the master of the universe" fits with the notion that fetishes were so powerful because their "supernatural quality coincided with their material quality" (26, 28). The crucial point for the book, in any case, is that Logan's account of fetishism as the ur-materialism has fascinating implications for the challenge that both Arnold and Tylor faced in the 1860s when they began devising their (very different) notions of the culture concept.

There are, though, two troubling turns in Logan's argument. First, Logan uses modern-day notions of the fetish to evaluate—and more, to censure—Victorian thinkers. Beneath Arnold's aspirations for a higher form of culture, for example, Logan discerns a "fetishistic quality" such that "the Arnoldian culture idea was a compelling expression of Victorian cultural values, rather than an escape from them" (60, 61). And it seems that some latter-day definition of fetishism underlies Logan's claim that "while Arnold represents free play as a means of combating the fetishism of his society, it was also a product of his age, a particularly Victorian idea, even in its fetishism" (61). To find Arnold guilty of "fetishism" in this way requires Logan to move away from his careful excavations of the various meanings of "fetish" throughout the Victorian era, and to hypostatize a single...