Capuano 2013

Capuano, Peter J. “Networked Manufacture in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley.” Victorian Studies 55.2 (2013): 231–242. Web.

• Shirley (Charlotte Brontë, 1849)
• 231: [Responding to Eagleton, “Chartism is the unspoken subject of Shirley”] The staying power of these displacement-based interpretations no doubt owes much to Catherine Gallagher’s pioneering book The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, which asserts that the “industrial conflict in Shirley is little more than a historical setting and does not exert any strong pressure on the form.”

• 232: But I want to make a more direct and more historicized claim [than Shuttleworth] about how Brontë’s treatment of manufacturing in the novel connects or networks two very different constituencies: hardened Luddite machine breakers and dispossessed middle-class women for whom professional opportunities outside the home were extremely limited.

In the case of S, a surface-level line of inquiry into manufactured objects reveals an inverted network from the mill to the parlor; that is, 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.

• 233: [Background to frame-breaking] By eliminating the labor required to raise the nap of the wool by hand with the spiky bracts of the teasel plant and crop it with manual shears, the process of finishing cloth was reduced from over a week to less than a single day.

• 234: …the ways in which handicrafts provided domestic compensation for the loss of manual authenticity in the industrial realm… While pro-industrialists like [James] Ure were promoting self-acting machines that manufactured with “mechanical fingers and arms,” middle-class magazines such as Jane Louden’s Ladies’ Companion were celebrating the fact that “never were fingers more actively engaged [in handicraft] than those of the rising female generation.

• [From 235: Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have shown that during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries middle-class women were socially and spatially separated from the site of work for the first time in history…. Malthus became one of the earliest articulations of separate-sphere ideology by emphasizing woman’s biological rather than her economic functions.]

• Talia Schaffer [claims in Novel Craft] that “the craft paradigm” represents an “ideal solution,” “a creative outlet that allowed middle-class women to articulate their relation to the industrial economy in a satisfyingly complex way.”

• 235: In S, needlework appears as a bitter, dispiriting, and deeply depressing activity that is representative of a more generalized feminine futility because it occurs alongside the robust middle-class male enterprise of industrial manufacture.

• S chronicles the ways in which new modes of production influence new modes of relation withint he middle-class household.

• 237: During one of her most tedious sewing sessions Caroline recognizes the artificiality of the separation between the public and private spheres. Brontë highlights this artificiality by introducing Solomon’s “virtuous woman” from Proverbs. Caroline recounts chapter 31 of Proverbs nearly word for word as she ponders the woman who participated in both public and private spheres, who “had something more to do than spin and give out portions: she was a manufacturer – she made fine linen and sold it: she was an agriculturalist—she bought estates and planted vineyards. That woman was a manager” (378). In the character of Shirley Keeldar, owner of the land upon which Moore’s mill sits, Brontë updates Caroline’s model woman from the distant biblical past to the immediate present of 1812. [HISTORICAL ANALOGY] We learn that Shirley “is lax of her needle” and that “she never sews” because she must tend to the daily operations of her estate.

• 238: Eventually, Brontë establishes a thematic relationship between the powerlessness of the croppers in an unbridled capitalist economy and the powerlessness of middle-class women in a patriarchal hierarchy. [Again a potential analogy between middle-class female futile overemployment and Luddite underemployment: representing part of the equation to represent both but why?]

• Brontë solidifies this connection between Luddite men and middle-class women [first articulated between Barraclough and Caroline’s hand-labour/hands busy] by tracing the suffering caused by mechanization in the industrial sphere to a particular form of suffering in the domestic sphere. Smarting from her rejection by Robert Moore and without recourse to the kind of productive work from which Shirley benefits, Caroline doubles down on her sewing. [Sewing away through the “solitude, the sadness, the nightmare of her life”]

• 240: From her vantage point in 1849, Charlotte Brontë recognized the causal relationship between mechanized manufacture and the hardening of the boundaries between the separate spheres of Victorian social life, yet she offers no moral for the “judicious reader putting on his spectacles to look for [one]” (599). S simply recounts a fictional history of how it came to be this way.