What Commodities Have to Say about Consumerism: The Eighteenth Century Novel the Adventures of a Black Coat

IntroductionSomewhat surprisingly, the eighteenth century witnessed the production and publication of numerous circulation novels that use objects as narrators. According to literary critic Mark Blackwell, the circulation novel is "an odd subgenre of the novel, a type of prose fiction in which inanimate objects (coins, waistcoats, pins, corkscrews, coaches) or animals (dogs, fleas, cats, cats, ponies) serve as the central characters" (Blackwell 2007, 10) These non human entities have various owners and thus travel through and "experience" different segments of society. Occasionally, a third person narrator speaks about what happens to these nonhuman entities (Bellamy 2007, 122 23) but in most cases, the animals or objects serve as first person narrators, and tell their own stories as they are passed on from one owner to the next in almost picaresque fashion. Object narrators are virtually unprecedented in the history of English literature, and speaking objects do not exactly proliferate in nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty first century types of fiction either 1 Circulation novels have to be seen in the context of an increasing interest in experimental fiction in the eighteenth century In this context, literary critic Robert Folkenflik writes that "an awareness of reigning conventions, and of their growing staleness, shaped the sometimes anxious and defensive experimentalism of novels" (2009, 53) at the timeThe following overview (Table 1) is designed to illustrate some of the many different kinds of object narrators that were used in eighteenth century circulation novels (see also the lists of examples provided by Bellamy 2007, 135 44; Link 1980, 223 429; and Meeker 1969, 52 57)This article discusses The Adventures of a Black Coat (1760) one of the most popular circulation novels This specific novel is a representative example which displays most (if not all) important features of the new genre; the narrative focuses on the "experiences" of a consumer good (a black coat) which travels through society together with a plethora of different owners Literary critic Christina Lupton argues that "objects circulate rapidly in these fictions either with the neutrality of money untainted by its exchange or in spirals of downward mobility that characterize the memoirs of clothing and equipment" (2006, 403) In the Black Coat, we learn what the inanimate object thinks about its owners as well as the materialist culture of eighteenth century England as a wholeEven though an anonymous reader in the ninth issue of the Critical Review (June 1760) argued that the novel uses "an ill designed personification" to string "a parcel of adventures together" and predicted that it "will naturally sink into oblivion" (1760, 499) the fact that it was actually reprinted in 1762, 1767, and 1780 verifies the novel's success among eighteenth century readers Literary critic Lorraine Daston writes that "things that talk are often chimeras, composite of different species The composites in question don't just weld together different elements of the same kind they straddle boundaries between kinds" (Daston 2004, 21) But what is the point of blending humans and non human objects by using a coat as the narrator of a tale? How can we make sense of this fusion of two different phenomena on an interpretive level? This essay tries to answer these questions by paying particular attention to the ideological and cultural framework within which the speaking coat is used (i e the world view that the novel as a whole tries to express) 2More specifically, this article seeks to investigate the narrative's attitude toward the commodity fetishism, which developed in eighteenth century England in the context of the rise of capitalism According to Karl Marx, the term "commodity fetishism" denotes the idea that commodities dominate consciousness Products "appear as independent beings endowed with life," and they enter into a relation "with