THINGS

Fall 2001
Volume 28, Number 1

To think of objectification as a form of power is a distinctively precapitalist way of thinking about the relations between person and thing. When we rewrite a precapitalist ideology of objectification in terms of the emergent subject, we get the past absolutely wrong. It is not the capitalist present that has suddenly started to obsess about the value of things. On the contrary, capitalist cultures are often squeamish about value, attempting to separate cultural value from economics, persons from things, subjects from objects, the priceless (us) from the valueless (the detachable world).

But detachable parts-- rings, jewels, gloves, for instance-- continued to trouble the conceptual opposition of person and thing, even as the concept of the fetish was forged to formalize such an opposition. Gloves, which we focus upon in this essay, not only materialized status, "gentling" the hand of the gentry, but also functioned as what Pietz calls "external organs of the body," organs that could be transferred from beloved to lover, from monarch to subject, from master to servant.4 They thus materialized the power of people to be condensed and absorbed into things and of things to become persons.

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See Also Elizabeth Abel: Bathroom Doors and Drinking Fountains: Jim Crow's Racial Symbolic (Spring 1998) Bill Brown: How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story) (Summer 1998) Angela Y. Davis: Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia (Autumn 1994)

The monarch's glove continued to be treated as a form of inscription as well as an extension of the monarch's hand throughout the seventeenth century. Indeed, new ritual aspects of monarchy were elaborated, particularly in response to the execution of Charles I, but they had to compete against the "demystifying" discourses of idolatry and the fetish. Fuller's records of Edward the Confessor's coronation regalia is in fact a nostalgic lament for what has been lost: "But now Edward's Staffeis broken, Chairoverturned, Cloathsrent, and Crown melted; our present Age esteeming them the reliques of Superstition."9 If the touch of the royal hand continued to be stored up in the material form of a glove, the glove was increasingly a museum piece that would no longer have the power to cure scrofula or to have other magical effects.10 A pair of Edward the Confessor's gloves (in this case, knitted gloves) found their way into the Tradescant cabinet of wonders in Oxford, along with the gloves of Henry VIII and the "silke knit-gloves" of Anne Boleyn.11 But as the cabinet of wonders was transformed into the Ashmolean Museum, such gloves were stripped of their ability to transform their recipient with the power of the absent hand.

Of course, gloves were not necessarily connected to specific bodies, nor did they necessarily become powerful material agents. In the Renaissance as today there were many practical functions for gloves, whether to protect hands from heat and cold or from the rigors of labor. Gloves were functional, a protection for servants' hands. As useful accessories, they were absorbed into the labor process. But the gloves of aristocrats and gentry--male and female alike--usually operated to display hands to which such labor was alien. The function of these gloves--for both men and women--was to occupy the hands in the manu-facture of the immaterial. They thus materialize a paradox: they draw attention to the hands while making the hands useless, or useful only for putting on or taking off a glove, or for holding gloves or handkerchiefs or fans or flowers. The play of hands and gloves, though, was an aspect of the ritual exchanges of social life by no means confined to the elite. Gloves, like hands, were given and taken as the embodied form of social acts-- the bonding of friend to friend, of lover to lover.12 In his "Guide to the Tongues" (1617), John Minsheu derives "glove" from "gift-love" and from the Low Dutch "gheloove," meaning faithfulness.13 Given to guests at weddings by anyone who could afford to give them, gloves extended the prosthetic hand of affection.14 They reached out to pair the guests to the gift-givers and to each other. In 1560, Henry Machyn recorded in his diary that a vintner "gayff a C payre of glovys" to the guests at his wedding.15It's perhaps worth noting that such mass gifts had their problems; how often did the gloves fit? In Thomas Dekker's Satiromastix (1602), a gentlewoman claims that "fiue or sixe payre of the white innocent wedding gloues, did in my sight choose rather to be torne in peeces than to be drawne on."16 The materialization of social connection through gloves was always threatened by the contingency of things: the gloves might not fit; they were easily lost (like handkerchiefs); they wore out and got stained.

But the glove--particularly, as we argue, the single glove--conjured up the hand as the corporeal site of agency for Aristotle, Galen, and their followers.17 Hand and glove are, as the proverb still suggests, intimately related, even inseparable. In such a conjoining, it no longer seems to matter which is the glove and which the hand. Each is embraced and animated by the other. On the other hand, gloves are dropped, lost, discarded. If a person could “be laid at one side like a paire of old shooes,” one could equally be thrown aside like a cast-off glove.18 And if the hand is the site of agency, the pairing of hands, as of gloves, is already problematic. The expression "on the one hand...on the other hand" unpairs the human body, setting the right hand against the left, the left against the right. This unpairing of the hands is staged again and again in Renaissance portraits where the sitter is posed with one glove on, one off. If one hand ("on the one hand") is inseparable from its glove, the other hand ("on the other hand") is naked, the glove absent, or resting on a table, or held loosely in the hand.

4. Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish, I," p. 10.

9. Fuller, The Church History of Britain,1:384.

10. On the power of the royal touch to cure scrofula, see Marc Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges (Strasbourg, 1924), and Keith Thomas,Religion and the Decline of Magic(Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 227-44.

11. John Tradescant, Musaeum Tradescantianum: Or, a Collection of Rarities (London, 1657), pp. 49.

12. On the handshake, see Herman Roodenburg, "The 'Hand of Friendship': Shaking Hands and Other Gestures in the Dutch Republic," in A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 152-89.

13. John Minsheu, "Guide to the Tongues," Ductor in Linguas (London, 1617), p. 216.

14. On gloves at weddings, see David R. Smith, Masks of Wedlock: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Marriage Portraiture (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1982), pp. 78-79, and M. Channing Linthicum, Costume in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Oxford, 1936), pp. 267-68.

15. Quoted in Linthicum, Costume in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, p. 268.

16. Thomas Dekker, Satiromastix, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1962), 1:1.1.31-33, p. 312.

17. See Katherine Rowe, "'God's handy worke': Divine Complicity and the Anatomist’s Touch," in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York, 1997), pp. 284-309.

18. Dekker, The Shoemakers' Holiday, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, 1:1.1.142-43, p. 27.

Peter Stallybrass teaches English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of, most recently, O Casaco de Marx (Marx's Coat)(1999) and Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory(2000), written with Ann Rosalind Jones. Ann Rosalind Jones is Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor of Comparative Literature at Smith College and author of Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620(1990) and coeditor and translator, with Margaret F. Rosenthal, of The Poems and Selected Letters of Veronica Franco (1998).