Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel

Prisms of Culture

Jean Arnold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317002192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

In this study of Victorian jewels and their representation, Jean Arnold explores the role material objects play in the cultural cohesion of the West. Diamonds and other gems, Arnold argues, symbolized the most closely held beliefs of the Victorians and thus can be considered "prisms of culture." Mined in the far reaches of the empire, they traversed geographical space and cultural boundaries, representing monetary value and evoking empire, class lineage, class membership, gender relations, and aesthetics. Arnold analyzes the many roles material objects fill in Western culture and surveys the cross-cultural history of the Victorian diamond, uncovering how this object became both preeminent and representative of Victorian values. Her close readings of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, George Eliot's Middlemarch, William Makepeace Thackeray's The Great Hoggarty Diamond, and Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds show gendered, aesthetic, economic, fetishistic, colonial, legal, and culturally symbolic interpretations of jewelry as they are enacted through narrative. Taken together, these divergent interpretations offer a holistic view of a material culture's affective attachment to objects. As the assigned meanings of jewels turn them into symbols of power, personal relationships, and valued ideas, human interactions with gems elicit emotional responses that bind the materialist culture together.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Jewels and the Formation of Identity in Victorian Literature and Culture

In Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, Mrs. Merdle’s jewels enable her to “represent and express Society so well” (I.33). What sustains this portrayal of Mrs. Merdle is her husband’s exalted position within a materialist culture based on free-wheeling capitalism. Mr. Merdle is variously hailed “the mastermind of the age,” “an illustrious man and great national ornament,” “Gigantic Enterprise,” “The Wealth of England,” “Credit,” “Capital,” and “Prosperity”: in short, the very personification of prodigious capital accumulation (II.24). In the London high society depicted in the novel, Mrs. Merdle’s role as wife of the prestigious and wealthy Mr. Merdle is to display her valuable jewels as class markers. With revealing, typical hyperbole, Dickens informs his readers that Mrs. Merdle possesses “a capital bosom to hang jewels upon,” so that “the Bosom moving in Society with the jewels displayed upon it, attracts … general admiration” (I.21).

As Dickens portrays the power of a woman’s bejeweled image to signify class rank in the socioeconomic hierarchy, his commentary on jewels also marks the Merdles’s narrowly rigid gender roles in their marriage as situated within a capitalist value system: “Mr. Merdle wanted something to hang jewels upon, and he bought it for that purpose” (I.21). As gender roles developed in response to industrial capitalism of the Victorian age, men had renounced the wearing of conspicuous jewels; by contrast, women continued and developed the practice. Writers on fashion and clothing of the period alternatively note that the early British nineteenth century featured a “great masculine renunciation” or “fashion’s new gender disjunction,” in which men wore business suits, while women wore colorful jewels and changing fashions.1 Because cultural practices of Dickens’s reading audience did not allow Mr. Merdle to display his wealth by wearing jewels, the narrator had needed to supply Mr. Merdle with a wife who would fill this class-marking function for him; her expensive jewels could reveal, in Veblen’s words, “pecuniary strength.”2

The circulation of jewels in Victorian culture assured some very specific visual messages so that Dickens and other writers of his time could depend upon their readers to recognize meanings about class and gender in anecdotes such as this one referencing Mrs. Merdle. His sketch is one of many examples in which jewels contribute to identity formation of characters in Victorian novels. This role for jewels in fiction points toward a whole range of private and social behaviors that could be classified as Victorian object relations.

In the Victorian era, women’s practices of wearing jewelry became so widespread that jewels served as a focal point in novelistic narratives; recall, for instance, titles such as The Moonstone and The Eustace Diamonds, among others.3 We can trace the very raison d’être of these works to the pervasive signifying power of jewels in the culture, and to the resulting insights that authors were prompted to communicate about the jewels’ established meanings. This focus in Victorian novels also reflects—and in fact is an instance of—an increasing cultural fascination with objects of all kinds in the British nineteenth century, and in recent times, critics have taken note. Catherine Waters points out that “Dickens’s peculiar treatment of subject-object relations in his fiction has fed into a growing interest in Victorian material culture over the last decade or so.”4 Furthermore, in Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in Victorian Novels, Elaine Freedgood investigates the extratextual history of material goods found in Victorian fiction:

While recognizing that the Victorian historical context of jewels plays a necessary role in their appearance in the literature, I will also investigate the meanings of jewels inside the text, where both personal and public object relations become manifest, and I will argue that novelistic characters interact with their jewels with creative emotion in the process of building their identities.5

I. Jewels Interpreting Culture

Many cultures throughout history have assigned unusually high value to jewels, and it could be argued that the Victorians are no different in this regard. However, this premise, which posits a kind of stability of value through time, bypasses the idea that the accepted meaning of jewelry and gems changes from one culture to the next. A single type of gem may surface in a succession of cultures through history, and consistently remain highly valued, while content or meaning of the gem’s high value varies emotionally, materially, economically, and politically from one culture to another.

Gems thus carry designated meanings assimilated from their particular cultural contexts: “Each society classifies objects in its own way,” Roland Barthes writes, “and this way constitutes the very intelligibility it grants itself.”6 Therefore an understanding of the meanings that a gem absorbs and projects must arise from an understanding of its specific historical and cultural context. As a Victorian object, a valuable gem was charged with meaning in a strikingly unique way, a way that can only be fully understood by grasping key features of the Victorian cultural scene and psyche.

Not surprisingly, then, exploring why certain Victorians commonly wore jewels yields insights into values, attitudes, and beliefs circulating in the culture. Socio-archaeologist Grahame Clark offers his approach to examining jewels as a form of cultural critique:

the prime purpose of wearing [jewelry is] … to symbolize status. It follows that the nature of jewellery is bound to reflect in some measure the structure and activities of the society in which it [is] … current. In other words the history of jewellery and of the precious substances incorporated in it needs to be studied in the context of social history and vice versa.7

Because the practice of wearing jewelry indicates underlying values that grant status, Clark argues not only for the study of jewelry in the context of its culture, but for a critique of culture that arises from an interpretation of its jewelry.

My inquiry adopts this method of cultural analysis with a careful caveat concerning class: although precious, expensive jewels were worn only by Victorian upper class women, these gems represented the values of class differentiation deployed throughout the entire culture. As late Victorian writer Georg Simmel puts it, fashion, including jewelry, “unites … those of a social class and segregates them from others”; furthermore, contemporary writer Guy Debord notes that the appearance of objects as possessions “conceals their true character as relationships … between classes.”8 The lack of significant jewelry among economically disadvantaged people in this era would thus reveal immense cross-class disjunctions. At the same time, the lack of significant jewelry worn among men argues an immense disjunction in gender roles; however, while working class women’s lack of jewelry may have evinced their disadvantage, men’s lack of jewelry evinced their privilege. Some ownership changes of jewelry in novels thus follow this pattern: we find servants stealing jewelry in order to elevate their class standing, whereas men give jewelry as gifts to women in a show of privilege and prerogative. For working class women and for men, even a lack of jewelry projected meaning, for jewelry had become ubiquitous as an object of desire.

Given the possibility according to their socioeconomic circumstances, Victorians wished to own jewelry or to wear it. With the rise in manufacturing in the nineteenth century, more affordable forms of secondary jewelry proliferated so that a transfer of markers of wealth trickled down to the middle classes.9 Through emulation, fashion became an increasingly democratic phenomenon, and manufactured or secondary jewels were now within reach of a rising middle class, who purchased them with enthusiasm. Gilles Lipovetsky notes that, even though fashion was

an instrument of social discrimination and a manifest mark of social superiority, fashion was … also a special agent of the democratic revolution. On the one hand, it blurred the established distinctions and made it possible to confront and confuse social strata. On the other hand, it reintroduced—although in a new way—the timeless logic of signs of power, brilliant symbols of domination and social difference. Here is the paradox of fashion: its flashy displays of the emblems of hierarchy played a role in the movement toward the equalization of appearances.10

In a convergence of circumstances, Victorian jewelry thus circulated as a sign of wealth at the same time capitalism’s newly rich urban business people wished to visually verify their status through the wearing of jewels.11 While the older aristocracy owned inherited land and titles that signified its ascendant position, newly rich upper classes without these historically significant markers to announce their social position moved around the city with the visual marker of jewels to signify rank.12 In this way, jewelry’s significance was shaped by a consumer culture, which, while showing its democratic values through the constant redistribution of money that could buy expensive gems, also refashioned class stratification through the display of jewels that only money could buy.

Lipovetsky’s integrated vision of democracy and hierarchy thus centers on the access of the nouveau riche to symbols of royal power. His account actually has roots that extend to sumptuary laws that became so prevalent in fourteenth-century Europe, when medieval values and practices were giving way to more active economic exchanges in the early modern period.13 In medieval times, sumptuous attire had been generally rejected because it was viewed as an embodiment of the deadly sin of pride, according to the powerful Catholic Church. As a result,

from the end of the Carolingian empire until mid-twelfth century, no secular European governments passed sumptuary laws … Yet as the economy began to develop, and the consumption of luxuries and public displays of social standing became increasingly common, there was a growing perception that these were social problems that needed to be addressed through new laws.14

Although a person’s choice of clothing had previously been self-regulated according to religious and moral pressures, now, as commoners acquired the capital needed for discretionary expenditures on fine cloth and jewels, the kings of England, France, Germany, and Italy passed laws that forbade the middle classes to display these visible symbols of power, reserving for royalty and its entourage the right to dress in sumptuous clothes, such as ermine and jeweled crowns.15 Sumptuary law and its negotiations affirmed the symbolic importance of cloth and jewels to represent social and political power in European culture, and, as early modern cities grew more populous, visual representations of power in the form of dress and jewels became more widespread among the city’s upper classes and the newly rich who resided there. Yet Alan Hunt makes an important observation: while sumptuary laws had been a direct and important result of changing economic conditions, the very existence of these laws can be perceived as evidence of anxiety over social change and the signifying power of these conspicuous symbols.16

II. “Sermons in Stones”

By the nineteenth century sumptuary laws had disappeared and the display of jewels practiced by Victorians lavishly exceeded previous centuries, when such displays had been reserved for kings and queens to symbolize political power.17 Converging historical conditions—importation of new materials, the manufacture of secondary jewelry, increased income from expanding economic activity and trade, and expanding city populations—yielded a remarkable array of jewels in all price ranges, and because manufacturers produced less expensive jewelry for the first time ever, “the quantity … of jewelry produced in the nineteenth century probably exceeded the output of all previous ages together.”18

Now jewels became widely owned as commodities, mined and traded around the globe, and valued as signs of wealth, class, empire, gender roles and relations, and aesthetic refinement.19 A newly creative selection of materials was used to fashion the less expensive jewelry: metals included gold, steel, iron, aluminum, wire, and gunmetal; other materials included tortoise shell, bird feathers, papier mâché, and gutta percha.20 Ladies in the home even learned the art of weaving hair into bracelets and brooches.21

Not only was jewelry made from an abundance of materials, but it was made to replicate many forms. For example, the entire collection of jewels at the 1867 Exhibition in Paris presented “imitations of nature” that included a variety of animal species. One account reports:

a diamond spotted salamander, a pearl butterfly, ear-rings or brooches, which are golden webs with emerald or opal spiders at their centers and sapphire flies entering them; a little peacock with spread tail made into a pin; a lyrebird breast pin; a jeweled serpent for a bracelet, with a tiny watch devised in its head.22

A British journal (1876) describes earrings in such whimsical shapes as “monkeys, acorns, saucepans, birdcages, candelabra, cockroaches, tortoises, tongs, and [even] shovels.”23 The level of experimentation in materials and forms—what Lipovetsky terms “the headlong quest for novelty as such”—was beyond any previous creative attempts to fashion jewels into exquisite, unusual ornaments (41).

Exploring the cultural context still further, one finds that, not only did Victorian jewelry circulate extensively in urban social circles, it became the focus of books and periodicals that extolled the glories of gemstones as well. For example, in his 1886 comprehensive descriptive work, Precious Stones, S. M. Burnham describes gemstones as “the crowning glory of nature’s handiwork, the rarest of all her material production, and those invested with the greatest fascination, either as objects of careful study or a treasure to be won at great sacrifice” (6). A poem from a monthly periodical asked, “What are Jewels but flowers that never decay/With a glow and a glory unfading as fair/And … should they ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Jewels and the Formation of Identity in Victorian Literature and Culture
• 2 Perceiving Objects
• 3 The Commodity Fetish in Thackeray’s The Great Hoggarty Diamond
• 4 Gift, Theft, and Exchange in The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
• 5 Cameo Appearances: Aesthetics and Gender in Middlemarch
• 6 Tactics and “Strate-Gems”: Jewelry, Gender, and the Law in Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index