Not So "Solid Objects": Monuments and Character in Jacob's Room.

Analysis of Jacob's relationship to the monuments of the past in the context of turn-of-the-century museum discourse implicates the British Museum in Jacob's patriotic death on the battlefield. The museum subordinates material and textual artifacts within metanarratives of nationhood, empire, progress, patriarchy, humanity, civilization, and tradition. It motivates young men like Jacob to uphold "the standards of their loyal service" to the myths embodied in the monuments. The state institution functions as an instrument of social reproduction in displaying the "record of the past" as a model for conduct in the present. Yet, for the monuments of the past to carry out the interpellation of individuals into "solid objects"--Woolf's preferred term for men whose fixed roles express an unchanging social order and whose self-possession is embodied in their material possessions--requires that the monuments be capable of objectifying a stable order of meaning. But the tension between the stability and permanence of the Victorian world and the incoherence and ephemerality of modern London poses a challenge to the power of objects both to constitute and express character, history, and reality. In consequence, the identity of individuals, along with the intelligibility of fictional characters, begins to crumble. In the novel's final tableau, Jacob's room suggests a counter-museum in its exhibition of a pair of shoes that, in refusing to have anything done with them, serve as a sign of the times, when the demands of empire to substantiate metanarratives of history are already on the wane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]