Neo-Victorian Things:

Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and The White

Abstract

In this paper I analyse Michel Faber’s neo-Victorian bestseller, The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), and its representation of objects. The first section provides a brief overview of the ongoing critical debate on consumption and the fraught question of the relationship between mind and matter. In the second section I argue that Faber’s novel rewrites the paradigm of symbolic consumption by challenging the reciprocity between subjects and objects that is still a fundamental assumption of the discourse on material culture. My contention is that fantasies of identity, which figure prominently as one of the main social purposes of consumption practices and motivate much of the contemporary commoditisation of the past, are both evoked and undermined in Faber’s novel. The Crimson Petal and The White thus stages symbolic – rather than economic – scarcity, one that emerges when economic capital fails to become symbolic prestige.