Chapter 4 - Public/Private

Summary

This chapter examines what are arguably the two most jarring moments in the relationship between the history of technology and that of the English novel by way of two novels that refigure imaginary space first for a national and then for an international readership. Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) demonstrates how the intervention of the power loom spelled the doom of the working household by moving productive labor from the home to the mechanized factory, thereby transforming domestic life into a space reserved for that highly cathected version of social reproduction: the romantic couple and nuclear family. A century and a half later, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005) spells out how the spatial transformation of Victorian realism as communication technology progressively subsumed the trappings and function of both the home and communal spaces reserved for the attitudes, behaviors, and events composing everyday life and spat them out in a continuous flow of information. Where realism divides literary space into reproduction and production, love and labor, respectively, the contemporary novel collapses these categories as the former becomes a repository of information to be algorithmically guided toward a new class of consumers who desire nothing more than to become the very objects they consume.