Sensoriality and Hair Jewellery in Neo-Victorian Fiction and Culture

Abstract

In this essay I will focus on the role played by hair jewellery, a widespread craft in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American context, in neo-Victorian literature and culture. I will consider hair jewels as objects that are remnants of the Victorian past, but also as personal items that evoke affective responses through the senses. In this take on (neo-)Victorian literature and culture, I will consider the entanglement of subjects and objects, human remains (hair) and jewels, past and present, death and life in contemporary renditions of the Victorian craftwork of hair jewellery. Finally, I will argue that this fictionalisation of Victorian material traces allows us to mediate on the links and associations between the Victorian past and our (sensorial) responses to them, and that it opens up the ways to interrogate the affective relations between subjects and objects, the past and the present, then and now, as well as their impact upon our future.

Keywords

• hair jewellery
• material culture
• Victorian period
• neo-Victorianism