Rearranging Furniture in Jane Eyre and Villette

Rearranging Furniture in Jane Eyre and Villette Michael Klotz "Where did you get your copies?" "Out of my head." "That head that I see now on your shoulders?" "Yes, sir." "Has it other furniture of the same kind within?" Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre To dwell means to leave traces. In the interior, these are accentuated. Coverlets and antimacassars, cases and containers are devised in abundance; in these, the traces of the most ordinary objects of use are imprinted. In just the same way, the traces of the inhabitant are imprinted in the interior. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project The examples are numerous. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot silently inventories Captain Harville's "rooms so small"; in Our Mutual Friend, the narrator anatomizes Mr and Mrs Boffin's divided parlour (which is the "queerest of rooms"); in Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke endures her "dreary oppression" amongst the "shrunken furniture" of her boudoir; and in The Spoils of Poynton, the "tell-tale things" make their way into Fleda Vetch's heart. Why do nineteenth-century novels place such emphasis on the furnishing of rooms? The standard starting point for a consideration of objects in the realist novel is Ian Watt, who has suggested that "solidity of [End Page 10] setting" is achieved by the description of "moveable objects in the physical world" (17, 26). In a similar vein, Martin Price writes of the unmotivated physical detail as one of the hallmarks of realism, asserting that "the triumph of the particular is the triumph of formal realism" (262). And in his essay "The Reality Effect," Roland Barthes argues that superfluity of detail is an inextricable feature of literary realism. But throughout novels of the nineteenth century the attentive description of objects does more than establish the concreteness of the fictional world. The narrator of The Old Curiosity Shop remarks that "We are so much in the habit of allowing impressions to be made upon us by external objects … that I am not sure I should have been so thoroughly possessed by this one subject, but for the heaps of fantastic things I had seen huddled together in the curiosity dealer's warehouse. These, crowding on my mind … as it were, brought [Nell's] condition palpably before me" (13). Yet in spite of this telling image—the "heaps of … things" literally "crowding" the narrator's mind—critical considerations of the Victorian novel have nearly dismissed the importance of "things." What I want to suggest about Jane Eyre and Villette is related to the way that descriptive detail becomes bound up with narration in the examples I have provided above, but the reading I have in mind is somewhat more specific: it is grounded in work on the cultural significance of the cluttered domestic rooms of the Victorian period and in theoretical writing on the interior. In The Victorian Parlour, Thad Logan analyzes the Victorian drawing room both as a cultural artifact "delimiting the horizons of character, and constituting the particular visual, spatial, and sensory embodiments of human culture at a particular historical moment," and as a "subject of mimetic representation" in the literature of the period (1, 202). To view the Victorian drawing-room from her perspective is to see a space (both actual and "virtual"/literary) abounding with "things" to be read both as a part of nineteenth-century consumer culture and as they reflect a specific aesthetic and ideological outlook. "The characteristic bourgeois interior," she says, "becomes increasingly full of objects, cluttered—to modern eyes, at least—with a profusion of things, things that are not primarily functional, that do not have obvious use-value, but rather participate in a decorative, semiotic economy. This eruption of objects in the home was, of course, part of the larger-scale evolution of the Victorian panoply of things" (26). For Logan, the Victorians' object-strewn rooms reflect an unspoken domestic rhetoric expressed in a "semiotic economy" that can be parsed and comprehended as a language. She proposes a "grammar of the parlour" [End Page 11] to classify the ways that particular objects can and are combined in a specific domestic space: "segments of domestic space perceived as distinct and unified areas (parlour, bedroom, library, etc.) are comparable...

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