9 - Shirley: bodies and markets

Summary

The gentlemen turn them into ridicule: they t'don want them; they hold them very cheap: they say – I have heard them say it with sneering laughs many a time – the matrimonial market is overstocked.

In Shirley, Brontë's most overtly political work, the circulating economies of psychological and social life are directly interwoven. Shirley is a novel about overstocked markets, surplus commodities and blocked circulation. Brontë brings to the fore in this work the parallels between women and workers which had remained largely implicit in Jane Eyre. Critics have always been puzzled by the structure of this work and have generally tried to down-play the industrial side. Catherine Gallagher, for example, chose not to include Shirley in her excellent Industrial Reformation of English Fiction on the grounds that ‘industrial conflict in Shirley is little more than a historical setting and does not exert any strong pressure on the form’. In contrast to Gallagher, I will argue that the analogy between the situation of the ‘surplus’ middle-class woman and that of the unemployed worker is central to the structural organization of the novel.

In one of her first references to her new work of fiction, Charlotte Brontë suggests that it will touch, however tentatively, on the ‘“condition of women” question … It is quite true enough that the present market for female labour is quite overstocked, but where or how could another be opened? …