ABSTRACT
This chapter opens the book by turning to the most commonly explored intersections of modernism and materiality, namely magical animism and fetishism. However, it also produces a new interpretation of them as phenomena that rest on the materiality and “thing-power” of the fetishized things and bodies, and thereby introduces the way I read materiality in fiction. I discuss Jean Rhys’s uses of material things and devices of focalization to complicate the tacit meanings attached to the animation of things in magical thinking and practices, fantastic motifs, as well as the surrealist employment of mannequin dolls. In the second section, I study how Djuna Barnes turns Freudian fetishism around by descriptions that ask us to pay attention to the materiality and independent power of fetish objects and the women employing them. Through the encounter and contrast between a feminist, anti-anthropocentric reading of narrative devices such as description and focalization and a more traditional interpretation of magic and fetishism, the chapter provides a first example of how an anti-anthropocentric and embodied approach to reading can bring to light so far undervalued meanings of familiar modernist topoi.
