Fits Like a Glove: Neo-Victorian Metonyms of Fingers, Hands, and Gloves

Throughout Victorian and even more so in neo-Victorian fiction, fingers, hands, and gloves are significant metonyms. For the Victorians, clothes—especially gloves—signified one’s position in the hierarchy of social order including gender and class. In the latter, the symbolism is even more precise as to one’s place within specific strata such as lower v. upper-class prostitution or one’s financial worth among the well-to-do. In recognition of these emblematic coding and decoding, such neo-Victorian works are rife with references to these appendages and clothing. This chapter examines these metonyms in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and White (2002), Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002), and the film The Handmaiden (2016), identifying how these metonyms are used to reference behaviour and attitudes never articulated in Victorian novels although they did exist but concealed like fingers inside a glove. Ayres notes that hands are also a metonym for writing, that many of the neo-Victorian novels are metafiction that include characters who are writers whose creators use them to write about the novels’ writing for the purpose of philosophical inquiry and political activism. Neo-Victorian writers select historical detail to suit their modern sensibilities and agenda, to generate narrative that will affect the reader’s perspective in order to, in turn, like the sets of female hands in these novels, alter the world for good in ways they could not when their hands were restricted by gloves in the age of Victoria.