Novel Things: Material Narratives of Eighteenth-Century France

Humans have always loved things, from designer clothes and luxury furniture to sentimental trinkets. Even early modern protagonists were susceptible to the emotions of owning and having things. In British literature, “It-Narrative” was coined for stories narrated by things themselves. French novels also exhibited symptoms of rising consumerism but manifested this material obsession in different forms. This dissertation explores the confluence of early modern consumerism and the French novel by retracing representations of objects in works from Alain-René Lesage, Pierre de Marivaux, and Françoise de Graffigny. These authors often represent the world through tangible and sensual descriptions of material things, conveying an increasingly consumerist everyday world through the eyes of their protagonists. Examining how material things and their representation in the text participate in shaping these narratives, I illuminate how commerce informed subjectivity and sentiment in early modern France. “Novel Things” is one of the first projects to examine how the historical shifts in consumer culture influenced the depiction of subjectivity and social relationships in eighteenth-century French novels. Analyzing how things influence these novels and how the novel itself becomes a thing—a commodity one can purchase—this project explores how narrative form reflects on the commercial relationships developing between personhood and objecthood at a particular moment when the consumer economy was rapidly expanding.