ABSTRACT
The typical Victorian novel, with its length, breadth, and commitment to representing a detailed world, teems with stray stuff—some of it significant and much of it miscellaneous clutter. How do we read this tangible plenitude? This chapter traces many ways, developed from Freud, Marx, gender studies, book history, and other lines of thought, largely through attention to specific artifacts, such as Catherine’s bed in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). The theorists discussed here all take up Marx’s project: “to discover the various uses of things is the work of history.” Yet, at the same time, what they most care about is how objects, usually personal possessions, relate to the human subject: how she used, made, or loved them and, ultimately, how they come to represent her.
