Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel (review)

Ownership, rather than personal property, comprises the heart of Deborah Wynne’s most recent book. She suggests that in discussions of property in literature, Marxists treat all things as commodities, while more recently thing theorists have explored the peculiar qualities that make objects autonomous, expressive of realities beyond the marketplace. But neither approach, Wynne contends, has much to say about the relationship that constitutes the ownership of objects: the ties between owner and thing owned.

In making ownership and not property the basis of her approach to the novels of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Wynne produces a textured analysis of a truth all readers of Victorian novels know, but too often ignore: the laws that through most of the nineteenth century prevented married women from owning the property in and with which they lived did not prevent them from exerting control over it. Mrs. Weller in The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) makes a will despite her married status. In The Mill on the Floss (1860) Aunt Glegg similarly anticipates controlling the posthumous disposition of what she considers her property. For Wynne, what these women teach us about all ownership is its performative, almost self-constituting nature: “Victorian novels . . . abound with representations of women who, believing themselves to be property owners, act as property owners by writing wills and appropriating the things they desire regardless of the fact that they had no legal rights to property. These characters forcefully demonstrate that property exists most powerfully in the imagination” (25).

Holding their property first and foremost in their own minds, such women expand our understanding of what sorts of relationships people might have with property. The wills of real women in the nineteenth century, Wynne argues, show them disposing of personal property which they did not legally own in a way that marked out networks of friendship and kinship. They willed specific objects to people based on those objects’ personal and emotional associations, not their intended uses. Victorian novels, too, she points out, portray women as imbuing their property with intimate meanings rather than capitulating to the meanings assigned to objects by market value or mass production. For Wynne, Victorian heroines commonly experience the personal objects of their daily life as one of two types of property: biographical property, the meaning of which bears witness to the life of the owner (for instance, monogrammed linens or miniature portraits), and reciprocal property that acts as an audience before which an owner performs her identity. Dolls and pets might be the most common of women’s reciprocal property, but such reciprocity is not precisely determined by the form of the object, as is proven by the reciprocal property Isabel Archer claims in “an old haircloth sofa” in her grandmother’s spare room, “to which she had confided a hundred childish sorrows” (qtd. in Wynne 134).

Victorian society trivialized women’s relationships with personal property as the love of trinkets characteristic of childish minds. Wynne responds to this charge by arguing that women’s highly intimate communing with personal objects actually offered a more clear-eyed understanding of the social relationships behind property than did the market-driven commodity fetishism Karl Marx diagnosed in early capitalism. Such a personalized relationship to property has utopian potential, one that Wynne illustrates in her reading of the community of women that forms around the non-market circulation of Esther Summerson’s monogrammed handkerchief in Bleak House (1852–53). And while Wynne’s literary readings tend to celebrate the productive potential contained in women’s ways of owning, she also acknowledges that they have darker possibilities. She points out that Great Expectations’s (1860–61) Miss Havisham and Little Dorrit’s (1855–57) Mrs. Clennam both manipulate their household objects to make a dystopian theater of personal meaning that both estranges objects from their socially determined uses and values and disrupts any possibility for community.

Wynne’s book is invigorating in the way it breaks with...