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PARTISAN REVIEW
the length or shortness of gloves . Minute differences between objects speak
of vast differences in feeling between those who wear them.
In the sections of the first volume of
Das Capital
where Marx takes up
the subject of fetishized objects, he explains them as a veil modern capital–
ism draws over production relations, so that the inequities of production,
which might be visible if goods were conceived of simply in terms of use ,
are obscured; these objects seem instead to contain mysterious and enticing
psychological qualities. Missing in his analysis , however, is a consideration
of the psychological consequences of becoming mystified, of believing in
the minutiae of man-made things as personality omens, for the person so
mystified . The Victorian bourgeoisie was more than a class laboring under
an illusion; it was also a class trying to make sense of its daily experience on
the basis of this illusion. People scanned the public world for signs of the
private life of others at the same time that each attempted to shield himself
from being so read. This double process of searching and shielding was
hardly a simple state of equilibrium or a matter of balance between public
and private .
Sexual relations in a world conceived in such terms had of necessity
to
be social relations . Today, having an affair with another person would not
be likely to cause someone to call into question his or her capacities as a
parent, or-if it were someone sufficiently " liberated"-his or her capac–
ities as husband or wife . For the Victorian bourgeoisie, those connections
had to be made . If every act , every feeling, counts in terms of defining the
whole person, then emotional experience in one domain carries unavoidable
implications about the character of the person acting in another. A violation
of morality in one sphere signifies a moral violation in every other; an adul–
teress cannot be a loving mother, she has betrayed her children in taking a
lover, and so on. Ag.ain, I wish to call attention not so much to how brutal
this repressive code gould be as to the premise which produced the repres–
sion . The immanence of character in all appearances forced the Victorian
to weigh each experience in relation to other experiences to us seemingly
quite dissociated . For all the desire to flee the world at large and hide in
privatized, isolated places, the Victorians had to measure the acts of the
private sphere on the basis of their public implications. This is how a system
of social relations was produced .
People so concerned with the involuntary expression of feelings, with
fetishized objects, each of which contains clues to the personality of its
wearer or owner, people who conceived of their sexual relations as having
repercussions beyond the bedroom door; these people inhabited an erotic
world.
It
was a sensual world, but overwhelmingly, uncontrollably so, and
