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Victorian Studies, Volume 52, Number 2, Winter 2010, pp. 282-284 (Review)

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282

“time’s story” from a Biblical to a geological one in sweeping narratives of “the Earth’s
agents of change” (28, 27). From geological writing, we turn to a long chapter on Tenny-
son’s The Princess: A Medley (1847). This epic poem, she argues, reflects a narrative
strategy self-consciously modeled on that of the geological narratives: Tennyson’s
subtitle “references the temporal medley associated with a collection of traces, each
excavated from its own historical moment and then brought together and displayed in
the present, whether in a museum or a poem” (71). Although the parallels she draws
between geological and poetic narrative are debatable, the exploration of geological
themes in Tennyson’s work is detailed and convincing.
The final two chapters examine the Victorian use of archaeological narrative
and the endurance of the human past, as well as the “broad use of archeology and exca-
vation” in two of Dickens’s novels, Little Dorrit (1855–57) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–
65) (24). In “Accidental Archeology in London and Pompeii,” Zimmerman offers a
meandering yet stimulating meditation on the decay of civilizations and the efforts of a
variety of Victorian antiquarians, archeologists, and fiction writers to revitalize them.
In these efforts, too, she finds an “emphasis on the individual and his or her struggle
against time’s destruction” (98). Victorians found in ancient Londinium itself an
example not only of their surprising past, but also a likely anticipation of their eventual
future. Concluding with a chapter titled “Dickens Among the Ruins,” the volume
continues the exploration of decay and revival in Victorian London. Dickens,
Zimmerman argues, “offers excavation and complementary images from archeology
and geology as narrative tools: recovering fragments from the past and crafting from
them a story in the present asserts the value of the individual in an indifferent world”
(144). These last two chapters complement each other well.
This is an ambitious and worthwhile study that sometimes loses its way in the
vast scope of its subject matter. For Zimmerman, the strategies of geological narrative
enabled Victorians to preserve their dignity as individuals as they confronted an incom-
prehensible scale of time. The volume as a whole, a study of fragments and their inter-
pretations, is itself somewhat fragmented, with a theoretical opening chapter followed
by a series of linked chapters exploring the various effects on narrative exerted by the
expanding time scale of nineteenth-century geology. Still, there is a richness of detail
in Excavating Victorians, and a sustained and valuable insight throughout that the
powers of human interpretation, as exercised upon a residue of simple material arti-
facts, led to a new Victorian sense of the self in the flux of deep time.
James Paradis
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives, by Peter Melville Logan; pp. xi +

206. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009, $55.00, £39.25.

In his stimulating new book, Peter Melville Logan (author of Nerves and Narratives: A
Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose [1997]) explores two nineteenth-
century ways of thinking about the fetish, ways of thinking that the immense impact of
Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud has for too long shielded from view. The book covers

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considerable ground, beginning with “Primitive Fetishism from Antiquity to 1860” and
ending with a chapter on Freud and Freudianism, “Sexology’s Perversion.” Logan’s central
focus, though, is on how three mid-Victorians—Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and
Edward Tylor—came to understand “culture” by way of the fetish.
The book insightfully explores the very strange material and ideational status
that the fetish had for a wide range of nineteenth-century thinkers. In brief, the fetish as
many Victorians understood it was both a purely “material” object and the site of purely
subjective projection (10). On the one hand fetishes are self-substantial: the true fetish is
not a tree-divinity, but a particular cedar in a particular forest, standing for nothing
beyond itself. There is no exemplarity about a fetish; if it pointed beyond itself it would be
an idol, which is a figure for a larger force (and hence belongs to a sort of primitive religion
far advanced from the simple object-worship implied by fetishism). Yet on the other hand
many Victorians simultaneously understood fetishes as purely subjective. The worshipper
projected into an object something that lay entirely in his or her own mind.
Victorian Fetishism deserves great respect for the way it explores the wide spread
of Comtean notions about the fetish. By Logan’s reading, Auguste Comte is responsible for
introducing a teleology, taken up by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and others, in
which the most primitive forms of human thought are marked by an unavoidable materi-
ality, a resistance to abstraction, as well as a projective psychology that placed human anxi-
eties inside material objects without acknowledging the process. One of the delights of the
book is that there are nuances within that Comtean canon that will clearly reward further
study. We might note, for example, that Comte’s stages of mankind shade toward the
subjectivist, not the materialist, because he sees culture beginning with primitive man
“explaining phenomena by some fanciful conception suggested by the analogies of his
own consciousness” (that’s Logan quoting G. H. Lewes’s account of Comte) before
attaining greater abstraction (qtd. in Logan 32). And it might be worth looking back along
the historical line Logan charts to figure out exactly how well Giambattista Vico’s notion
that “when mankind is sunk in ignorance he makes himself the master of the universe” fits
with the notion that fetishes were so powerful because their “supernatural quality coin-
cided with their material quality” (26, 28). The crucial point for the book, in any case, is
that Logan’s account of fetishism as the ur-materialism has fascinating implications for the
challenge that both Arnold and Tylor faced in the 1860s when they began devising their
(very different) notions of the culture concept.
There are, though, two troubling turns in Logan’s argument. First, Logan uses
modern-day notions of the fetish to evaluate—and more, to censure—Victorian thinkers.
Beneath Arnold’s aspirations for a higher form of culture, for example, Logan discerns a
“fetishistic quality” such that “the Arnoldian culture idea was a compelling expression of
Victorian cultural values, rather than an escape from them” (60, 61). And it seems that
some latter-day definition of fetishism underlies Logan’s claim that “while Arnold repre-
sents free play as a means of combating the fetishism of his society, it was also a product of
his age, a particularly Victorian idea, even in its fetishism” (61). To find Arnold guilty of
“fetishism” in this way requires Logan to move away from his careful excavations of the
various meanings of “fetish” throughout the Victorian era, and to hypostatize a single
notion of what it means (to a twenty-first-century reader, presumably) to fetishize.
Second, Logan has an odd and, I think, ungrounded argument about the
relationship between fetish and culture. There is a revealing passage early in the book

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in which Logan describes this study as an admiring response to Christopher Herbert’s

Culture and Anomie (1991). Logan’s response consists, he suggests, of the notion that for
the Victorians the secret antitype of Culture is not Anomie but Fetish. Logan seemingly
sets the stage for an argument that would make fetish serve something like the role that
incest plays for Claude Levi-Strauss, the spoiler of the division between culture and
nature. But that argument is not compellingly developed, and remains unproven by the
book’s end. For too many of the people he analyzes—even for Arnold and for Tylor, his
two central examples—it is the logic of graduated thinking or stadial succession that
determines the role that fetish has to play. That role is not without but within the history
of culture’s growth. Fetish in Tylor, for example, is not the antithesis of culture but its
baseline, a relic in the modern world, perhaps, but a recognizably affiliated one rather
than a mirror-image. Tylor’s famous definition of culture—“that complex whole which
includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and
habit acquired by man as a member of society” (qtd. in Logan 89)—makes no sharp
distinction between materialist and abstract thought, no distinction between subjective
projection and empirical capacity to distinguish inside and outside. This failure to
discriminate is central to Tylor’s thought: for him the bright lines we draw between
schools of thought pale in comparison to the commonality of custom itself (custom that
includes worship and atheism, superstition and rationalism) that serves as the glue of
all human communities.
These two caveats aside, though, Victorian Fetishism succeeds in its major work
of exploring various iterations of the dueling but oddly complementary ways of concep-
tualizing the fetish: on the one hand its ultimate irreducible materiality, such that the
fetish does not even belong to a class; on the other, its ultra-spiritual nature, its being
made up of nothing but its worshipper’s prejudices projected upon it. That duality is
both eye-opening and productive of further thought. I certainly will never look at my
daughter’s fetish—“Kitty,” a gray blob of fur denuded of all recognizable features but
still the beloved center of her universe—the same way again.
John Plotz
Brandeis University

The Bourgeois Interior: How the Middle Class Imagines Itself in Literature and Film,
by Julia Prewitt Brown; pp. xiv + 188. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia
Press, 2008, $30.00, £26.95.

Julia Prewitt Brown’s The Bourgeois Interior shares many of the traits of the middle-class
domestic spaces she describes: it is rich, evocative, full, yet implicitly cognizant of the
foundations upholding it and the boundaries imposed upon it. But unlike those inte-
riors, Brown’s argument refuses to be pinioned in space or time. Instead, Brown conducts
readers through room after room—Daniel Defoe’s island sanctuaries, Jane Austen’s
country homes and rented quarters, the clinging mid-Victorian households in Charles
Dickens and Henry James, Virginia Woolf’s and Ingmar Bergman’s more modern refrac-
tions of domestic living—in order to examine the story of spaces, the fabric of “the mask
itself, . . . the protective material expressions of bourgeois life” (xii). Thus, rather than

victorian studies / Volume 52, no. 2