Nancy Armstrong. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. ISBN 9780231130592. Price: US$25.50. Elaine Freedgood. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2006. ISBN 9780226261553. Price: US$29.00.

Both Nancy Armstrong and Elaine Freedgood are interested in the novel as an agent: a thing, to use Freedgood’s term of choice, which does something to subjects. In Armstrong’s all-encompassing formulation, the novel creates them, literally forming the modern subject; in Freedgood’s study, the novel—specifically, the Victorian realist novel—mystifies the subject’s relation to the world by restricting the range of meanings readers attribute to the “things” it represents. The goal of The Ideas in Things is to redress this situation, restoring to objects in Victorian fiction some of the semiotic richness that, Freedgood claims, their novelistic context obscures. This is a context in which, she argues, both a narrow range of critical concerns and the mystifying effects of the novels themselves render “things” of interest chiefly—or only—to the extent that they function as metonyms for character. Realism, says Freedgood, teaches readers that some details signify and others do not; thus the well-known example of Balzac’s barometer signifies the real for Roland Barthes precisely because it cannot be said to signify anything more. As Freedgood points out, the challenge of the barometer’s meaning has been taken up by Bill Brown, who, “reading it beyond the covers of the text” (12), discusses its “evocative meaning in the Aubain parlor, in the ambient culture in which the story was written, and in our critical reading of it” (11). Less an improvement on Brown’s reading than an extended, theoretically rich justification for it, Freedgood’s project is also an exercise in demonstrating its practical results. The book thus speaks to the continued pull of the realist impulse in criticism, in the guise of a promise to reveal the truth behind appearances. Freedgood takes on four “things,” or more precisely three things and one kind of thing: the mahogany furnishings of Jane Eyre’s red room; Negro Head tobacco in Great Expectations; cotton curtains in Mary Barton; and a variety of objects in Middlemarch, including Dorothea’s plain dress and the emeralds she can’t bring herself to wear. The argument also enlists in its service several non-literary texts, such as English Furniture from Charles II to George III and discussions of Australia in the Victorian periodical press, with an eye toward restoring details that would have informed the cultural climate of the novels’ composition. Following the example of Edward Said’s restoration of Mansfield Park’s colonial context, Freedgood places special emphasis on the violence involved in the production and circulation of these objects: violence obscured, in a distribution of blame whose ratios never become entirely clear, by the things themselves; the novels in which they appear; the readers of these novels, and the realist project itself. Thus the mahogany furnishings Jane Eyre uses to furnish Moor House are said to conceal the colonial history that brought the wood itself to England; mahogany in this reading refers both to the sadism in Jane’s own history and an unacknowledged history of deforestation, colonization, and slavery. Similarly, the sadly-named Negro head tobacco smoked by Magwitch in Great Expectations “encrypts” the story of the destruction of Aboriginal peoples in Australia, the site to which the tobacco may be traced. These meanings are “stored” in the representations themselves, writes Freedgood, and non-literary texts enable her to uncover the meanings “latent” in them (103). The goal of her readings is to transform customary objects of what she calls “weak metonymy”(2-3), or reading-for-character, into occasions for “strong metonymy” (15-17), restoring a host of historical, cultural, and social associations. Freedgood suggests that our emphasis on commodity culture suppresses awareness of a historical moment preceding fetishization and commodification, in which the histories …