Theorizing Surfaces and Depths: Gaskell's Cranford

Cultural and literary critics have long been occupied with deciphering the meaning of things. For Karl Marx, for instance, things are disguised social relations, "hieroglyphics" that appear to have a language of their own only because they disguise the secret of their production.¹ For poststructuralists, things are signs, sharing with language all the ambiguity and slippage that writing brings to signification, and available metaphorically in fiction as indexes of the real world from which they are drawn. In a New Historicist lexicon, they exist alongside texts as part of a cultural context to be reconstructed. More recently, however, new developments in "thing theory" and the study of materiality have suggested that things may be most important because they occasion different forms of reading from texts or signs. In his 1986 introduction to the Social Life of Things, Arjun Appadurai broke conceptual ground by suggesting that things are freer to move between categories of meaning (of the gift, of the commodity) than Marx had imagined. This analysis helped to introduce a contemporary perspective in which things themselves seem to talk above or below the language of their social situation.

Thus, for Bill Brown, Susan Stewart, John Plotz, Elaine Freedgood, and others speaking up for the realm of material studies within the discipline of literature, ways of what Freedgood terms "readings things" in texts, and of reading texts as things, are still to be developed.² The value of retraining ourselves as readers is advanced by all of these critics, who pick up on Appadurai's general point that history, subjectivity, and consciousness happen in contact with surfaces and textures, even when these surfaces and textures are the products of social context in the first place. "The story of the thing," argues Brown, "is the story of a changed relation to the human subject."³ As Brown's use of the word "story" suggests, there is a strategic aspect to such an approach, a provisional willingness to use what Freedgood describes as "a strong literalizing metonymy [to] 'start' fictional objects into historical life . . . against the grain of the kinds of allegorical meaning we already know how to find, read, and create."⁴ More definitively, though, thing theory suggests that if we overhaul our whole way of reading both texts and objects, we might get beyond the dichotomies of sign and essence; depth and surface; metaphor and metonym, which are distinctions that things by definition refuse to uphold.⁵ The best engagements with materiality, argues Plotz, look beyond the realm of symbolic circulation to the "limit cases" where an object's "meaning" ends and its "materiality" begins.⁶ In the realm of texts this involves the opportunity to approach texts (as words and paper and print) as part of the ungovernably real, practical relations of the subject with the material world.

This essay is something of a thought experiment in seeing where such a corrective might lead in terms of one work, Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1851–1853). Cranford was first published as a series of stories under Charles Dickens's editorship in Household Words before being brought out as the single volume of what can now be described loosely as a novel lacking conventional plot or character development. Cranford lends itself to an investigation of materiality partly because of this structure, and its appearance in Household Words, a journal in which many pieces draw their readers' attention to everyday surfaces, and partly because it is a text in which the objects of Victorian village life—candle lighters, rubber bands, decorative garters, apples studded with cloves, lavender bags, red and green silk, Italian lace collars, butterfly brooches—seem to come to life in place of the characters who would normally drive such a plot. The current upturn of interest in Cranford, long Gaskell's most popular work, but much less a focus of twentieth-century appreciation than her probing novels of social realism, reflects a new sense of it being possible to read literature through such objects. Talia Schaffer, for instance, suggests that "following the paper-trail," looking at the places where paper passes in its most papery form through...