Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel
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A01=Jean Arnold
andrew
Andrew Miller
Author_Jean Arnold
aveling
British Crown Jewels
British Domestic Culture
Category=DS
Category=DSBF
Category=NHTB
Category=NHTQ
Commodity Fetish
daniel
deronda
diamond
Diamond Necklace
edward
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Eustace Diamonds
Female Bildung
Female Bildungsroman
Frank Greystock
Gabriel Betteredge
Great Hoggarty Diamond
Jeff Nunokawa
Lord Fawn
Lord Steyne
Lydia Glasher
Married Women
Married Women's Property Law
Married Women’s Property Law
miller
necklace
Samuel Titmarsh
Timeless
Turquoise Necklace
urn
Vanity Fair
Victorian Culture
Vinegar Hill
wrought
Wrought Urn
Young Men
Product details
- ISBN 9781409421276
- Weight: 408g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jun 2011
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Jean Arnold is a Lecturer in the Department of English at California State University, San Bernardino, California, USA.
