The Tables Turned: Curious Commodities in Victorian Children’s Literature
2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jvc/vcx007
ISSN1750-0133
Autores Tópico(s)Literature: history, themes, analysis
ResumoThis essay argues that children’s literature and political economy developed a common language to articulate the bewildering world of consumer culture, which took shape following the 1851 Great Exhibition and flourished in the 1860s and 70s. At the centre of consumer culture was the mysterious and mystifying commodity, an object that took on subjective traits when it entered the marketplace and earned exchange value. Karl Marx famously attempted to illustrate the commodity through a metaphor of a wooden table. As a material object, the table is only wood, but it comes to life during the process of exchange, a phenomenon later termed reification. During the same process that animates objects, labourers become objectified. Social relations are filtered through things rather than subjects. Mid-Victorian children’s literature simultaneously began to explore the wonders and dangers of the marketplace by placing young protagonists in worlds where objects come to life. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), the intrepid Alice enters upside-down and inside-out worlds where commodities become subjects. Alice ultimately learns that the real world that she inhabits resembles nonsense. Capitalism is based on rules that are just as arbitrary as the games she plays in wonderland. Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses (1874) develops similar themes and environments, but takes a decidedly darker approach to illustrating the danger of the marketplace. In her imaginative worlds, children become commodities – objectified, replicated, and consumed.
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