Abstract

Scholars of early modern literature and culture have become increasingly aware of the usefulness of the object for reconstructing the past. As the recent new historicism focused attention on the self as a product of social phenomena, "objects" acquired crucial importance in the drive to understand historical "subjects." We have since learned that objects ranging from the private bric-a-brac items of the aristocratic home to the public costumes of theater are significant for considering how real people lived. But the critical trend encourages us to question the object's necessary attachment to the subject. What happens when we view the object by itself? More importantly, how may we glimpse the object's meaning when the semiotic material that constitutes its objectness vanishes?

This project explores three object vanishings that take place when we search for historical meaning in early modern literary narratives. In Thomas Lodge's 1596 A Margarite of America, a box opens, effecting a chaotic scene of character dismemberment then, just as swiftly, disappears, leaving us grasping for meaningful connections. In Thomas Nashe's 1594 Unfortunate Traveller, a strange “cranny" gains control of the narrative and allows us to view a terrible rape. Yet when we seek to evaluate its relationship to our readerly vision, the cranny recedes into nothingness on the space of Nashe's page. In Faversham in 1552 and in Edmund Spenser's 1596 The Faerie Queene, the print or impression of a body upon the grass remains long after the body has gone, briefly harnessing time and asserting a communicative power that persists against our interpretive faculties. To best trace their vertiginous effects and demonstrate how they reshape our understanding of the object, I embrace a critical methodology that encounters the box, cranny, and grass from the vantage points of phenomenology and narrative theory. I argue that the vanishings of the box, cranny, and grass destabilize our perception of a past discrete from the present and explode our belief in a distance separating us from our objects of study.