ance of objects in their own murder mystery stories. Most really good mysteries rely upon them.
Speaking of objects, I wrote a paper in college tracing the development of the novel by looking at how objects are treated in four specific works: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Gustave Flaubert’s novella A Simple Heart, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop.
The objects I consider in these works are, respectively: Mr. Darcy’s portrait, Felicite’s green parrot, the coffin and Our Lady’s tilma.
What’s interesting is how these four works suggest the increasing importance of objects in novels over time. Jane Austen (1775-1817) and other early novelists (Phillip Sidney, John Bunyan, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Anthony Trollope) almost never talk about objects because they are more interested in ideas, concepts, conversation, and character. This is why the scene where Elizabeth experiences a revelation about Mr. Darcy while looking at his painted portrait is so interesting; it is very unusual for Austen and most other early novelists. By the time we get to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, objects are everywhere.
The biggest exception I can think of to this rule about early novelists is in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), where one of the best scenes in this early novel is about the main character salvaging various objects from the wreck of his ship. But the story still centers around his inner thoughts and religious conversion. Moreover, in most of these early novels, the narrator (even if she is not directly involved in the action of the story) uses 1st person–giving a sense of subjectivity rather than objectivity.
By the time we reach Flaubert and his parrot, however, objects become a lot more prominent in novels—perhaps partially due to the increasing influence of the Industrial Revolution and advances in science and what is “objectively” real. Think of the significance of the scarlet letter in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous work (1850), or the whale (is it okay to say it functions as an object?) and Captain Ahab’s wooden leg in Moby Dick (1851). Even in very interior and psychologically-driven novels, like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), objects (and characters’ interpretations of them) feature very prominently.
By the time we get to Faulkner, the 18th and early 19th century subjectivity of the opinionated (and often 1st person narrator) begins to be fused with the objective mid-18th through late 20th century objective third person. Faulkner, Virgina Woolf and James Joyce and other adventurers into streams of consciousness and human interiority combine an emphasis on the external world with and its tenuous relationship to the internal world of the human mind.
I haven’t read as much post-modern fiction, but I would guess the relationship between character and object has already begun to change very significantly.
All of this is not to say that objects should “mean” something in a story– but rather that looking at the way an author presents objects tells us a lot about the his epistemology– what human beings can know about reality.
Obviously my above argument is fraught with holes and exceptions, but I think the general idea holds.
Speaking of ideas with a lot of holes and exceptions, this is a very interesting take on the popular Myers-Briggs Personality Test–a test which, by the way, has always fascinated me.
All tests of the Myers-Briggs ilk are tautologies. They are tautological because their results cannot exceed my input. If out of 100 questions, I 100 times affirm that I am likely to grow angry over criticism and confrontation, all my 100-question test-result really says is that “I am likely to grow angry over criticism and confrontation.” Sure, a test may express its tautological conclusions in words that sound like it has digested our answers and excreted some new diamond — as when we tell a test in 100 different ways that we are most likely to look outwardly than inwardly, and it tells us we are an “extrovert” — but closer inspection reveals tha