How can Things in literature reflect time? How are objects used in the texts we read to ostensibly impact time for the characters inside? Bill Brown’s Thing theory explores the traditional roles of subject and object, possessor and possessed, by asking us to consider “how and why we use objects to make meaning, to make or re-make ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fear and shape our fantasies” (A Sense of Things 4). I hypothesize that exploring the largely-overlooked element of time as it can intersect with Things grants us as readers a new, more-rigorous lens via which to analyze the characters we study and the texts they inhabit.
In this paper I explore several characters who long to arrest time in order to gain control over their lives or others’, or, who long to be held indefinitely in a moment of held-tim themselves. I theorize that in these instances, a highly-curated space, a Zeithalt (time-hold), can form via the specific Things these characters cling to; these spaces of arrested Zeit serve ultimately as a means of comfort, survival and as a source of protection, keeping the character at the center of it, not to mention the treasured objects that define it, safe from the outside world. Parsing Lucy Snowe, Jane Eyre, Miss Havisham, and Frederick Fairlie via the concept of Zeithalt reveals the ways they each use Things to seemingly impact time; I assert exploring these interactions, as well as exploring the potential of the time-hold in other texts, can provide a fresh, original means of analyzing characters’ psyches, emotions and agendas, and, as they sequester themselves with their Things, their relationship with the outside world. Open-ended and adaptable, Zeithalt theory aims to help us understand why characters cling so adamantly to their Things, why they long to connect them with time, and how they are often better off with objects, rather the human beings around them who so frequently let them down, abuse them, or abandon them entirely
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