Rearranging Furniture in Jane Eyre and Villette

Abstract

Where did you get your copies? Out of my head:' That head that I see now on your shoulders? Yes, sir. Has it other of same kind within? Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre To dwell means to leave traces. In these are accentuated. Coverlets and antimacassars, cases and containers are devised in abundance; in these, traces of most ordinary objects of use are imprinted. In just same way, traces of inhabitant are imprinted in interior. Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project THE EXAMPLES ARE NUMEROUS. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot silently inventories Captain Harville's so small; in Our Mutual Friend, narrator anatomizes Mr and Mrs Boffin's divided parlour (which is queerest of rooms); in Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke endures her dreary oppression amongst shrunken furniture of her boudoir; and in Spoils of Poynton, tell-tale make their way into Fleda Vetch's heart. Why do nineteenth-century novels place such emphasis on furnishing of rooms? standard starting point for a consideration of objects in realist novel is Ian Watt, who has suggested that solidity of setting is achieved by description of moveable objects in physical world (17, 26). In a similar vein, Martin Price writes of unmotivated physical detail as one of hallmarks of realism, asserting that the triumph of particular is 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 nineteenth century attentive description of objects does more than establish concreteness of fictional world. narrator of Old Curiosity Shop remarks that We are so much in 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 of fantastic I had seen huddled together in curiosity dealer's warehouse. These, on my mind ... as it were, brought [Nell's] condition palpably before me (13). Yet in spite of this telling image--the heaps of ... literally crowding narrator's mind--critical considerations of Victorian novel have nearly dismissed importance of things: What I want to suggest about Jane Eyre and Villette is related to way that descriptive detail bound up with narration in examples I have provided above, but reading I have in mind is somewhat more specific: it is grounded in work on cultural significance of cluttered domestic rooms of Victorian period and in theoretical writing on interior. In Victorian Parlour, Thad Logan analyzes Victorian drawing room both as a cultural artifact delimiting horizons of character, and constituting particular visual, spatial, and sensory embodiments of human culture at a particular historical moment, and as a subject of mimetic representation in literature of period (1, 202). To view 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, that are not primarily functional, that do not have obvious use-value, but rather participate in a decorative, economy. This eruption of objects in home was, of course, part of larger-scale evolution of Victorian panoply of (26). For Logan, Victorians' object-strewn rooms reflect an unspoken domestic rhetoric expressed in a semiotic economy that can be parsed and comprehended as a language. …