Abstract
This paper confronts many years of displacement-based readings of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley
(1849) with a historicized “surface reading” that connects the manual
labor of two very distinct constituencies in the novel: hardened Luddite
machine breakers and dispossessed middle-class women. A surface-level
line of inquiry into manufactured objects reveals an inverted network
from the mill to the parlor; the redundancy of human hands caused by
mechanization in the mill is concurrent with a surplus of female
handiwork in the novel’s middle-class homes. I argue that this inversion
makes sense if we situate the novel in its 1811–12 setting—the unique
historical moment when the term “manufacture” began to accrue
paradoxically opposed meanings. Brontë’s oscillation between mechanized
and manual forms of manufacture in Shirley marks the early boundaries of what would eventually become the rigidly defined separate spheres of mid-century Victorian life.
Abstract:
