A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (review)

A Sense of Things is an imaginative and theoretically sophisticated study of how American literary figures at the turn of the twentieth century attempted to grapple with the meaning of things and our problematic relation to them. Do we possess things and infuse them with meaning, writers asked, or do things possess us? It is not surprising that man-made objects became a focal point of literary exploration in an era when mass production, mass consumption, and technological innovation facilitated their proliferation.

For this very reason, historians of consumer culture in particular have been drawn to the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. But Bill Brown's interest in objects is less an effort to engage the historiography of consumer culture than to move beyond it. Brown's close textual analyses of literary works by Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry James seek to illuminate "the indeterminate ontology where things seem slightly human and humans seem slightly thing-like" (p. 17). Part cultural history, part philosophical inquiry, Brown's book demonstrates how cultural explorations of the idea of things as well as the ideas in things were part of a broader American quest to define the meaning of modernity.

Brown begins with an intriguing analysis of Mark Twain's ambivalence toward things. Twain, like many Americans, loved to accumulate things but also felt tyrannized by the conceptual demands of arranging and displaying them, not to mention the financial demands of acquiring them. The plot of The Prince and the Pauper, reflecting Twain's own obsession with how objects confer and maintain identity, turns on whether Edward, the prince in pauper's clothing, can identify the location of the monarch's great seal to prove his real identity and thereby inherit the throne. That so much hinges on "so trivial a thing," as Lord Protector calls the seal, illustrates the power of material objects to identify subjects—a power, Brown argues, that "commodification both banalizes and universalizes" and that democracy itself subverts (p. 45). For many Americans, including Twain, the accumulation of things was a "futile effort to certify distinction" in a democratic society that lacked stable class markers. As Brown explains: "If everyone has the right (though not the means) to possess the things I possess—if my things are not inherited and exclusively heritable rather than exchangeable—then how can my possessions genuinely distinguish me?" (p. 48).

Brown's analysis of Norris's fiction also yields rich insights into the nature of possessions and possession. He interprets Norris's work as an exploration of how humans animate inanimate objects by granting them personalities and how humans, as creatures of habit, can themselves become thing-like—so driven by habit that they seem more like unchangeable machines.

Brown most effectively situates his analysis historically in his chapter on Jewett, showing how developments in cultural anthropology and museology paralleled and informed her interest in using objects to think about regional culture. Museums abandoned curiosities in favor of mundane objects that illuminated everyday life. Anthropologist Franz Boas "challenged the ground rules for making sense of human technology" by seeking to locate artifacts within cultural frameworks rather than within taxonomic and evolutionary schemes (p. 89). Brown likens Jewett's sketches of everyday life to the increasingly popular life-group exhibits that re-created the cultural ambience of a thing by showing how it functioned in a particular environment and time.

Brown reads James's fiction partly as a meditation on how things acquire value beyond their use or exchange value as commodities. In The Spoils of Poynton, the carefully selected and situated objects that adorn Mrs. Gereth's home represent not an accumulation of mere things but rather an aesthetic vision—"a single work of art she has produced" (p. 146). Lamentably for James, modernity's persistent quest for novelty prohibited objects from becoming things with a history, things that might "re-enchant modernity's disenchanted world of objects...