Fetishized Materialism: Reanimating Material Things in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Abstract

Fetishized Materialism: Reanimating Material Things in the Early Modern Atlantic World challenges traditional accounts of English literature and Enlightenment discourse by paying attention to material things, not as passive and inert objects but as active actors with their own agency. The early modern English world, especially the eighteenth-century British novel, has been seen to herald the rise of the “modern” self, subject, or individual (and worldviews defined against non-Western, savage, or superstitious figures). This dissertation, by employing the theoretical model of so-called new materialisms that questions the dualistic opposition between the subject and the object or the self and the other, reexamines the conventional narrative of the rise of the modern individual and its analogues in Enlightenment philosophy and colonial discourses. These kinds of free, autonomous, and individualistic selfhood and rationalizing gaze were constructed, critics of the modern novel and the Enlightenment have argued, at the cost of physical and discursive exploitation of the “other,” such as non-European people, women, madness, or animals. By highlighting the agency of material things that actively affects human thinking and behavior, I reconsider this progressive and dualistic narrative, questioning if the “enlightened” subject actually existed in the early modern period. Instead, I suggest that, rather than privileging theoretical models and “modern” literary forms in which humans unidirectionally dominate objects, we find a more appropriate model for analyzing early modern texts in the subgenre of the it-narrative, in which half-thing humans and half-human things interact dynamically with each other. Rather than seeing the animated objects as strange or exotic and marginalizing them into the colonial frontier and the minor subgenre, I suggest that the it-narrative-like situation was usual and ubiquitous in the early modern Atlantic world, including the novel and Enlightenment philosophy. By specifically analyzing Locke’s discourses on money, the role of non-human agencies in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, colonial literature depicting indigenous people’s reactions to Western books, and the issues of property and creation in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, each chapter of the dissertation demonstrates that these texts can be read as a kind of it-narrative, in which material things actively move, make a difference, or even speak, while humans, far from being an autonomous individual who controls the passive object, remain entangled with material things.