The threatening object in late nineteenth-century American and British fiction.

Abstract

This study examines the ways in which material objects subvert their anticipated roles as status markers in American and British fiction from 1880 to 1920. Focusing on works by Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Oscar Wilde, as well as popular magazine literature, I show how material objects repeatedly scandalize, incriminate, blackmail, and haunt the consumer. Objects do not behave as docile commodities that enable the individual to construct his or her class position, but assume lives of their own that compromise this position. Most studies of material culture at the turn of the twentieth century focus either on the object's status as a commodity or its role as a sentimental keepsake. I focus on how the conflicting values of the object---financial, sentimental, and aesthetic---turn objects into active antagonists that subvert an owner's intentions. Chapter One discusses portraits that fail to commemorate bonds between the portrait's commissioner and the sitter, and instead reveal illicit desire between artist and sitter. As a doubled, surrogate image of the self, portraits also expose the sitter in the public gallery space. Chapter Two shows how the sentimental exchange of gifts and letters incriminates individuals as adulterers and allows for the possibility of blackmail. The blackmailer uses incriminating objects to orchestrate his social rise at the expense of his victim's class position. Chapter Three examines the role of the newspaper as a site of social mobility. The newspaper enables the nouveaux riches to fashion themselves according to its society columns, but threatens the upper classes with scandal. Chapter Four examines the haunted object. When individuals ignore objects' histories and treat them as new acquisitions, objects retaliate by haunting the individual. As dishes, gloves, portraits, newspapers and other objects expose the individual publicly and privately, the fiction I survey depicts the failure of conspicuous consumption as defined by Thorstein Veblen. Objects are not commodities that reflect favorably on their consumers, but rather agents that reveal negative information about them. Turn-of-the-century authors describe threatening, autonomous objects to critique the rise of a mass consumer society and to explore its ramifications for class mobility and class legibility.