NINETEENTH CENTURY by AMBER NICOLE SHAW

281 Pages·2012·1.45 MB·English

by  Amber Shaw

FABRIC OF THE NATION: TEXTILES, NATIONHOOD, AND IDENTITY IN THE MID-
NINETEENTH CENTURY
by
AMBER NICOLE SHAW
(Under the Direction of Richard Menke)
ABSTRACT
This dissertation contends that references to textiles show how mid-nineteenth-century
literary texts took part in contemporaneous questions of nationality, commerce, and ethical labor.
By studying realist novels and short fiction published between 1850 and 1880, I emphasize how
the anxieties of the age are woven into the transatlantic significance of fabric—and I argue for a
reconsideration of Henry James’s and George Eliot’s “web” that moves beyond its use as a
metaphor or conceit. As I discuss canonical American and British texts, I draw connections
between realism’s focus on the development of an individual and its attention to how
consciousness reacts to and relies on a world of commodities. These goods not only go between
one nation and another, but they also tie international economics to industrial life and household
management.
Such intersections make cloth production and consumption into critical components of
what James termed the mid-nineteenth-century “atmosphere of mind.” Indeed, the textile “web”
not only informs individual mores but also shapes narrative techniques and structures on both
sides of the Atlantic. Extending the work of Bill Brown, Elaine Freedgood, and Talia Schaffer,
whose scholarship has renewed critical interest in nineteenth-century “things,” I explore how
ideas and material culture are inextricably linked and how the actual transatlantic circulation of
textiles helped writers articulate the often-vexed notions of citizenship and belonging in the
Atlantic world.
After my introduction, which traces what I term entangled consciousness in Middlemarch
and “The Art of Fiction,” my dissertation is organized in three sections: War; Nation; and
Factory and Home. The first section (chapters one and two) explores how British novels
obliquely respond to the American Civil War and the transatlantic cotton trade. Section two
(chapters three and four) locates a relationship between self-sufficient heroines and burgeoning
national allegiance. The final section (chapters five and six) focuses on how women’s industrial
and domestic needlework shapes their daily lives, fills their empty hours, and points to the
limitations placed on a mid-nineteenth-century woman’s life regardless of her class.

INDEX WORDS:
Textiles, Fabric, Sewing, Consciousness, Nineteenth-Century Novel, Realism, Transatlanticism,
Cotton Industry, Thing Theory, Narrative Theory, Marriage Plot, Single Women, Factory Labor,
Heirlooms, Fancy-Work, Handiwork, American Civil War, Henry James, George Eliot,
Elizabeth Gaskell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Seacole, Herman Melville, Margaret Oliphant,
North and South, Daniel Deronda, Middlemarch, The Scarlet Letter, Wonderful Adventures of
Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” Miss
Marjoribanks, Washington Square
FABRIC OF THE NATION: TEXTILES, NATIONHOOD, AND IDENTITY IN THE MID-
NINETEENTH CENTURY

by

AMBER NICOLE SHAW
B.A., Rhodes College, 2004
M.A., University of Georgia, 2006

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial
Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ATHENS, GEORGIA
2012
© 2012
Amber Nicole Shaw
All Rights Reserved
FABRIC OF THE NATION: TEXTILES, NATIONHOOD, AND IDENTITY IN THE MID-
NINETEENTH CENTURY

by

AMBER NICOLE SHAW

Major Professor: Richard Menke

Committee: Douglas Anderson
Tricia Lootens

Electronic Version Approved:

Maureen Grasso
Dean of the Graduate School
The University of Georgia
May 2012
iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’m grateful for all of my teachers and professors who have taught me and encouraged
me along the way. In particular, I’d like to thank my major professor Richard Menke. Not only is
this dissertation a better project because of his enthusiasm, guidance, and suggestions, but I am
also a better teacher and scholar because of his mentorship. I’m also grateful for the guidance of
my other committee members Tricia Lootens and Doug Anderson. Their insightful comments
have also shaped this project in innumerable ways. Thanks, too, to Chloe Wigston Smith, who
was willing to chat about nineteenth-century dress history on more than one occasion and
helpfully read early versions of at least one chapter. Finally, I couldn’t have succeeded in this
program without the continuing mentorship of Roxanne Eberle or Kris Boudreau. I can only
hope to model their gracefulness as scholars, teachers, mentors, and women one day.
Completing this dissertation also wouldn’t have been possible without my friends and
family who have been my unfailing cheerleaders. For the past year, writing and revising
alongside Mollie Barnes has been my saving grace, and our Saturday visits to the Athens
Farmers Market and Ike & Jane with Nicole Camastra were often the highlight of the week. I’m
also grateful for the companionship and humor of Archer Shaw and Ruby Barnes, whose antics
were always sure to provide a moment of levity in a long day of work. And last—but not least—I
am forever indebted to my parents Dewey and Virginia Shaw, who not only taught me to read
but also taught me to love learning.
v

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...........................................................................................................iv
INTRODUCTION
“Fresh Threads of Connection”: Eliot’s and James’s Entangled Webs and Mid-
Nineteenth-Century Textiles................................................................................................1
CHAPTER
1 “Ladies’ Business” in North and South.......................................................................26
2 Beyond Patterns, Remnants, and Garments: Anglo-Jewish Identities in Daniel
Deronda.......................................................................................................................55
3 The “Two Profiles” of Revolutionary Materiality in The Scarlet Letter.....................89
4 The Imperial Domesticities of Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands 126
5 Transatlantic Crossings between Paper and Cotton in “The Paradise of Bachelors and
the Tartarus of Maids”...............................................................................................169
6 Fancy-work, Expectation, and the Un-Marriage Plot in Miss Marjoribanks and
Washington Square....................................................................................................201
CODA
The Un-“Symbolical” “Work” of the Mid-Nineteenth Century Novel...........................242
BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................257
1

INTRODUCTION
“Fresh Threads of Connections”: Eliot’s and James’s Entangled Webs and Mid-Nineteenth-
Century Textiles

“Municipal town and rural parish gradually made fresh threads of connection—gradually, as the old stocking gave
way to the savings-bank, and the worship of the solar guinea became extinct; while squires and baronets, and even
lords who had once lived blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the faultiness of closer acquaintanceship.
Settlers, too, came from distant counties, some with an alarming novelty of skill, others with an offensive advantage
in cunning. In fact, much of the same sort of movement and mixture went on in old England as we find in older
Herodotus, who also in telling what had been, thought it well to take a woman’s lot for his starting point; though lo,
as a maiden apparently beguiled by attractive merchandise, was the reverse of Miss Brooke, and in this respect
perhaps bore more resemblance to Rosamond Vincy, who had excellent taste in costume, with that nymph-like
figure and pure blondeness, which give the largest range to choice in the flow and colour of drapery. But these
things made only part of her charm.”

“And he counted on quiet intervals to be watchfully seized, for taking up the threads of investigation—on many
hints to be won from diligent application, not only of the scalpel, but of the microscope, which research had begun
to use again with new enthusiasm of reliance. Such was Lydgate’s plan for his future: to do good small work for
Middlemarch, and great work for the world.”

George Eliot, Middlemarch

In chapter thirty-six of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72), Rosamond Vincy claims
that Mary Garth’s sewing “‘is the nicest thing [she] know[s] about Mary’” (329). Rosamond
acknowledges that Mary’s “‘sewing is exquisite,’” and in admiring Mary’s ability to craft
cambric double-hemmed ruffles, Rosamond conflates Mary’s skillful work with her character
(329). The two young women are former schoolmates, and Rosamond’s brother Fred loves Mary.
Rosamond, however, only thinks about Mary in terms of her fine needlework, not relationally or
in terms of her connections to their mutual pasts. This condescending, so-called compliment
subtly highlights Rosamond’s self-centered naïveté. Doesn’t Rosamond measure Mary’s
character beyond her talent for “nice” sewing?
2
Rosamond’s off-hand comment about Mary may seem insignificant. After all, we see
Rosamond’s foolishness so very clearly as the narrative unfolds. While she’s more interested in
thinking about Rosamond’s role as “the novel’s most notorious clothes-horse,” Kate Flint, in her
recent article “The Materiality of Middlemarch,” briefly mentions this scene and Rosamond’s
“extreme condescension” toward Mary (69). Rosamond’s faulty logic—that Mary is only “nice”
because she does good “work”—epitomizes not only her limited world view but also her
snobbery. Despite the fact that this off-hand comment doesn’t make Rosamond a particularly
trustworthy judge of character, Rosamond’s opinion of Mary echoes stereotypes about the
material expressions of character ingrained in countless other characters in mid-nineteenth-
century novels.
With this cavalier, if pointed, remark, Eliot, then, suggests the vexed relationships—not
only between classes but also between employee and employer—that often wordlessly haunt
mid-nineteenth-century texts. These tacit connections form the underpinnings of daily Victorian
life, yet their quotidian nature often renders them too muted to become the stuff of fiction. Of
course, other mid-nineteenth-century novelists do examine the intersecting lives of the working
and middle classes. Margaret Hale, for example, forges meaningful human connections with mill
workers in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854-55) and Aurora Leigh reaches out to the
destitute distressed needlewoman Marian Erle in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh
(1856). On the other side of the Atlantic at the very same time, Herman Melville critiques the
exploitation of New-England factory workers through the perspective of a mill tourist in his
diptych “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855). Still, these texts—novel,
verse novel, and short story—are the exception rather than the rule. Rosamond’s back-handed
compliment may not be particularly striking on first glance, in part because she fulfills our
3
expectation for the anti-heroine (who may or may not produce good needlework but who’s
always self-absorbed) in a novel that’s not quite a “condition of England” novel and not quite a
novel of manners. Indeed, needlewomen (poor, rich, and middle-class alike) and their critics
populate almost every mid-nineteenth-century novel; however, it’s easy to dismiss Rosamond-
esque character appraisals as part of a grand narrative for the period: the troubled relationships
among workers and the well to do.1 As we’ll see, though, the relationships among needlewomen
and their critics are much more complicated. Middlemarch shows how seemingly off-hand
references to textiles, fabrics, and sewing are central to the finer negotiations between the well to
do and the working class.2
For Rosamond’s flippant remark isn’t just provocative on its own. Eliot comments on
it—and Rosamond—a few chapters later, intimating the ramifications of such a limited or
condescending world-view. While Rosamond may think of Mary Garth as the girl who can sew
her beloved double-hemmed frills, in chapter forty the narrator dwells on Mary joking about
Rosamond’s sewing requests. Sitting at the cozy Garth family breakfast table, Mary jests with
her brother Ben, “prick[ing] his hand lightly with her needle” and refusing to make “a peacock
with this bread-crumb” because she “must get this sewing done” (381). “This sewing” is
Rosamond’s trousseau, and Mary subtly passes judgment on Rosamond’s ridiculous desires.
Rosamond “is to be married next week,” Mary notes, “and she can’t be married without this
handkerchief” (381). “With a grave air of explanation,” Mary says the handkerchief “is one of a

1 For this reason, my dissertation isn’t a study of a character type we often associate with the mid-nineteenth
century: the distressed needlewoman. In fact, there’s a rich body of criticism about the distressed needlewoman
type. In particular, Lynn Alexander’s Women, Work & Representation: Needlewomen in Victorian Art and
Literature (2003) and Beth Harris’s Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century (2005) both
trace distressed needlewomen in Victorian art and literature. While their monographs each only focus on British
industrial novels, Alexander and Harris do argue for the centrality of working-class seamstresses in Victorian
literature. For a fuller discussion of these two books, see Talia Schaffer’s “Women and Domestic Culture.”
2 Moreover, as Kate Flint argues, Middlemarch extends mid-nineteenth century social patterns we might see
materialized most clearly through the textile trade: how people in rural England and rural New England produced
the very threads that bound people to one another (69).