Unhappy Consciousness

Unhappy Consciousness is a study of recognition scenes in the Victorian novel and their relation to Marx's concept of commodity fetishism. Victorian recognition scenes often show a hero's self-discovery as a retrospective identification with things. When, for example, in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer learns the truth about her marriage: "She saw, in the crude light of that revelation... the dry staring fact that she had been an applied handled hung-up tool, as senseless and convenient as mere shaped wood and iron." The retrospective discovery of identity in Victorian novels is often figured as a catastrophic falling-apart of a stable self that is also an economic object or instrument: a bank check, a debt, a forgery, an inheritance, or an accumulated principal. Recognition scenes cannot be considered in the light of a timeless "master plot" or the classical poetics of Aristotelian anagnorisis, but need to be interpreted in terms of historical forms of social misrecognition (such as Marx's analysis of fetishism). Unhappy Consciousness contends that, if we are going to talk about nineteenth century things, we will have to take into account the novelistic misreco