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  • The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel
  • Jordanna Bailkin (bio)
The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel, by Elaine Freedgood; pp. x + 196. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, $29.00, £18.50.

This engaging and provocative study seeks to take seriously the things of the Victorian novel: specifically, mahogany furniture in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), calico curtains in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848), and "Negro head" tobacco in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1861). Elaine Freedgood suggests that these objects are united by their imperial and industrial histories and by both their repetition and their apparent inconsequentiality within the rhetorical hierarchy of the texts. The knowledge "stockpiled" in these things, Freedgood argues, "bears on the grisly specifics of conflicts and conquests that a culture can neither regularly acknowledge nor permanently destroy if it is going to be able to count on its own history to know itself and realize a future" (2).

Along with these case studies of individual objects in our most beloved Victorian novels, Freedgood offers a bold new agenda for "thing studies" more generally. We have, she claims, learned to understand the objects in Victorian literature as largely meaningless; we read these things (if we bother to read them at all) symbolically, rather than literally. The allegorical mode of criticism has blocked any reading of the material properties and relations of objects, obscuring the social relations that hide in things (54). What Freedgood proposes is no less than a rejoining of the literal and the literary (29), a project of recovering the meanings that these objects might have evoked in the original readers of the text. The extent to which Freedgood's readers are troubled by the degree of speculation entailed in imagining how "hypothetical" Victorians (23) understood the world of things will likely depend on their disciplinary loyalties. But if Freedgood's evidence for precisely what readers knew about contemporary objects (and when they knew it) is not always as copious as one might like, then her broader arguments are both stimulating and bracing.

After a heady introduction, Freedgood explores the relationship in Jane Eyre between Jane's purchase of old mahogany and the histories of deforestation, slavery, and cultivation of cash crops in Madeira and Jamaica. She briefly, and not entirely satisfyingly, addresses the important question of what Victorian readers understood about Jamaica, about Madeira, about mahogany itself. Freedgood concludes that British readers did indeed know from whence their wood came and would have recognized that mahogany in Jane Eyre functions as a "souvenir of sadism" (51).

In chapter 2, Freedgood examines the history of checked curtains and global cotton markets in Mary Barton. This chapter especially highlights the distinction between the "weak" metonymic reading that Freedgood works against (in which the curtains' "meaning" is to illustrate that the Bartons are properly domestic) and the [End Page 507] literal reading she offers, which takes us through the association of checked fabric with the African-Caribbean slave trade and, in turn, the association of the slave trade with Indian calico. Less convincingly, chapter 3 reads the use of "Negro head" tobacco in Great Expectations as a literal evocation of the genocide of the Aborigines in Australia, focusing on Charles Dickens's "strange and circuitous" attempt to memorialize the Aborigines through this object.

Chapter 4 is not focused on a particular thing but rather on the standardization of meaning in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72). The connection to the other chapters is well sustained, however, in that Freedgood focuses on Eliot's anxiety about constraining the meaning of things. As she says, Eliot was one of the first novelists to decide that the things of everyday life "could have meanings for readers that narrators ought to restrict by way of interpretation" (117). Freedgood astutely analyzes the characters' varied relationships to things, insightfully detailing the ways in which this novel is about elaborating appropriate procedures for determining value.

In the book's coda, Freedgood outlines an intensifying alienation between people and their belongings in the fiction of the last quarter of the nineteenth century (154). Citing Virginia Woolf's dismissal of the...

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