From 1851 to 1853, Gaskell's Cranford was serialized in Charles Dickens's Household Words, which, together with Orientalist essays like “Society in India”, contributes to the development of imperial discourse for domestic consumption. Drawing on this literature, much of the previous research on Cranford has paid attention to how the Amazon community faced the problems of British imperialism and Orientalism (i.e., Karsten Piep and Jean Fernandez). In this paper, however, I will consider something else: the sea-green turban that Miss Matty Jenkyns longed for but could not get. In a letter to the narrator Mary Smith at the beginning of Chapter 4, Miss Matty asked for a turban brought from Drumble (modern-day Manchester) in order to demonstrate her fashionable taste at the coming performance of magician Signor Brunoni. Yet Mary bought her a hat of another style. I would like to point out the implications of this sequence of events: on the one hand, the female writer might indicate the distressing realities of British imperialism in the Victorian era in a similar way to Lady Bertram's shawl in Austen’s Mansfield Park— ‘demonstrating the careless, everyday use of colonial materials’ (Fraiman 820). On the other hand, Gaskell was also likely presaging the tragic end of British colonialization in the East through this metaphor of the turban. Just like Miss Matty’s stock money, which could not get her the exotic headdress she desired, the Victorian Tory free trade policy- to import and export goods without any tariff barriers had been threatened. Specifically, this emerged as a result of violence and economic fluctuations in France (Napoleon’s campaign in the Ottoman territories) and, in later stages, the United States (American Civil War), when increasing tariffs on imported cotton were levied. In what follows, I will consider the metaphor of the turban in Cranford through the frame of material culture studies, and in doing so, aim to reveal the “social work” of the material in Gaskell’s novel.

The Turban and Commodity Fetishism

The ‘social work’ of the turban starts from the domestic function of a cap: while it protects one’s head in drafty rooms and avoids the rubbing of delicate skin by the hair, it also shelters the skin from the sun. In English Women's Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, Cecil Willett Cunnington writes that ‘turbans were worn with evening wear’, proving their ‘practical utility’ during the nineteenth century (Cunnington 120). The ‘practical utility’ of turbans, Rom Harré asserts, along with ‘their role in helping to create social hierarchies of honor and status’, constitutes the material and expressive orders that all objects belonged to (32). One ubiquitous instance of this relation is the symbolization of caps in religions. As early as the Middle Ages, since the church decreed that women’s hair must be covered, women began to wear headwear as religious custom, after which the cap remained a widely popular ornament. Gradually, it became a representation of class and economic status, as well as a signifier of both fashion status and marital state. 

In Cranford, where ‘elegant economy’ was the prevalent practice, getting a new cap in Miss Barkers’ milliner shop was more common than purchasing an outfit. Upon the arrival of the magician Signor Brunoni, Matty asked Mary to bring a sea-green turban for her when she comes to Cranford, eager to appear fashionable at the magician’s performance, writing that she ‘should have liked something newer’ to wear (Gaskell 236). This instinct marks the imitation of the upper-class–an aspirational form of in Marxist commodity fetishism. Eugenia Zuroski’s work on oriental material culture is relevant here, as it emphasizes how oriental culture helped forge and express British identity and cosmopolitan sensibility (268). The word ‘commodity’, Woodard claims, as with its neighboring categories of ‘thing’, ‘objects’, ‘artefacts’ and ‘goods’, is related to the central term material culture, to be picked in the mutual relation between people and objects (15). He argues, ‘studies of material culture are concerned with what uses people put objects to and what objects do for, and to, people’, and that ‘objects have the ability to signify things – or establish social meanings – on behalf of people or do ‘social work’ (13). As Woodard illustrates, this is why wearing certain clothing may make a person feel empowered by altering their self-perception: acquiring a ‘fashionable’ cap, in Miss Matty’s case, is associated with self-identity and can establish her social image by presenting her class and economic status through taste as a fashionable consumer. 

According to Jonathan Walford and his ‘History of hats for women’, turbans were introduced into English fashion in the 1790s and remained fashionable until the 1820s. The style came from England’s increased trade with India for cotton. Yet before that, this cap was brought to Europe by a famous English woman traveler and writer-- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Ayres 21). As wife to the British ambassador to Turkey, Mary Montagu was famous for bringing back the smallpox inoculation to British people. In addition to her letters during her visit to the Orient and Turkey, another major contribution she made is inciting the trend of the turban. As Woodard reveals, objects might signify ‘sub-cultural affinity’--curiosity about foreign things that relegates those things to leisure and social activities (Woodward 4) --and this is precisely what the turban was for Montagu. By the end of the century, the style was established, and subsisted as the perfect accessory alongside ongoing affinities for Turkish dress (a pairing observable in the style of the French queen Marie Antoinette). Even after the queen's fall and subsequent death, turbans became increasingly popular, especially in France. There, they evolved into a fabric that would wrap around women's curly, loose hair so that it would show through the cloth. Eventually, this style became absorbed into the Classical trend–a mix of the Turkish, ancient Roman and Greek styles. By the 1790s and into the early 19th century, no woman of fashion was complete without a turban, Turk, or chiffonet–a trend promoted two historical figures particularly: Madame de Staël and Napoleon. 

Gaskell writes of Madame de Staël several times, once in Cranford and also in her letters. In Letter 141 (22 November 1852) she informed her daughter Marianne about a Mrs. Rich who had ‘never-ending accounts of her life’. Part of the accounts included ‘when Napoleon reviewed his troops before going out to Waterloo’ in 1815, and ‘her intimacy with Mme de Staël, her riding across Asia Minor as a Turkish horseman, turban pistols & all’ (Gaskell 1997, 213). Mme de Staël (1766 - 1817) was well-known for her turbans, and moreover, and witnessed first-hand the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era up to the French Restoration (1789–1815) in her lifetime. In ‘French Life’ (published in Fraser’s Magazine between April and June 1864) Gaskell recorded the reminiscences of several French ladies who have experienced the Reign of Terror (1793- 1794). Mme de Staël, alternatively, was a progressive supporter of revolutionary activities in France. Despite this, being in conflict with the tyrannical Napoleon, she went on to live as an exile. Her letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1812, begging for American intervention in the cause of the free nations on the European continent, was well- known (Kimball 66). In 1814 one of her contemporaries, Mme de Chastenay, observed and recorded that ‘there are three great powers struggling against Napoleon for the soul of Europe: England, Russia, and Madame de Staël’ (Katherine). So influential was Mme de Staël that in Cranford Mrs. Forrester tried to prove that Signor Brunoni was a Frenchman by ‘his broken English like a Frenchman’ and a print of Mme de Staël with a turban on. The likeliness of the scene is affirmed in Herbert Norris’ affirmation that after 1792, the turban’s popularity England was ‘inspired by the military operations then being carried out in India’, and later becoming ‘fashionable in France as the result of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign in 1798’ (Norris 16). With Napoleon’s own endorsement of turbans, it is hard to figure Queen Adelaide’s choice as one purely rooted in fashion (despite the fact that she did not wear a turban until the 1830s, long after Napoleon’s impoverished cotton ambition). 

In his paper ‘Possessions and the Extended Self’, Russell Belk emphasizes that ‘possessions are central to our sense of self’ and material possession ‘connect us to, remind us of, and announce[s] something about us to various other people in our lives’ (Belk 1988, 155). In short, we are what we own. It is inferable that Queen Adelaide was utilizing the turban to indicate her source of power and wealth-- notably, Britain's strong textile industry in the international trade chain–at a time when the empire’s overseas free trade volume was about to reach its peak. As for Miss Matty, we can read her imitation of Queen Adelaide as a fashion pursuit, but the behavior of pursuing fashion itself, according to Bourdieu’s writing on taste, is a power-laden pursuit of establishing selfhood. Taste, as presented in material objects, is one of the ‘social markers’ through which the subject gains currency through cultural and aesthetic value. And since ‘class markers are expressed in the body, self-presentation and performance’ (6), taste becomes a highly visible marker of difference in consumer societies. Miss Matty did occupy a superior position in Cranford society; such is suggested in Miss Barker’s invitation order to a tea party. As the daughter of rector Jenkyns, whose situation was above Miss Barker’s father, surely Matty was asked before Miss Pole. Therefore, a fashionable turban, from Miss Matty’s point of view, would mediate her self-esteem and add to the prestige of her identity as a rector’s family member. Moreover, as objects can also ‘facilitate interpersonal interactions and assist a person to act upon him or herself’, a fancier accessory might help Matty become more ‘incorporated into norms and values enshrined’ (Woodward 15) in her social institution.

The Turban and Earlier Moments of Orientalism 

Mary was convinced the turban was not a good match for Miss Matty’s face, hence suggesting Matty’s lack of acquaintance with her own appearance. Indeed, Mary was ‘most particularly anxious to prevent’ her dear Miss Matty ‘from disfiguring her small, gentle, mousey face with a great Saracen's head turban’ (Gaskell 235). Instead, Mary bought her a replacement more suitable for Matty’s social situation— ‘a pretty, neat, middle-aged cap’. This headdress afforded Miss Matty the opportunity to better articulate aspects of herself through rightful material engagements and aesthetic currency. 

Through Miss Matty’s character, therefore, we can recognize the cap’s association with one’s self-identity. Yet, this was not the first time turbans entered the plot. In Chapter 3, a special white turban was central to the ethnic group identity construction. When Major Jenkyns and his wife came to visit Miss Matty, they brought two East Indian servants: ‘a Hindoo body-servant for the Major, and a steady elderly maid for his wife’ (Gaskell 188). Even though the servants would sleep at the inn, the male servant, it is noted, ‘clearly provided an object of interest and of fear to the women’ (188). Not only could Martha, Miss Matty’s maid, not stop staring at him when he waited at dinner, but Miss Matty was notably afraid of his ‘white turban and brown complexion’ (188), going so far as to relate his appearance to Bluebeard. The scene reveals Miss Matty’s simultaneous affinity for the turban and ignorance of the East; indeed, her source of knowledge is an oriental tale. The scene recalls earlier moments of orientalism, such as her sister Deborah praising Orientalist writings such as Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas and Mrs. Forrester’s instinctive association with Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh.

Such orientalizing affinities were dramatically utilized by the magician Signor Brunoni, during his magic show in the Cranford Assembly Rooms. As revealed in Chapter 11, Brunoni’s real name is Samuel Brown, and he is Englishman, or Anglo-Indian, who served as an army sergeant in India before choosing magicianship as a livelihood back in Britain. Brunoni dressed in the Turkish costume as a disguise, so those attending his shows would believe him to be foreigner—a ‘Mussulman’, and thus, a true master of the art. This misunderstanding, Gaskell’s work reveals, made both of the parties ‘comfortable’: the Cranfordians were enthralled by the novelty of a Turk and a non- Christian, and hence, Brunoni would ensure a successful performance. The wave of robberies sweeping Cranford, however, would throw this relation into disarray, as xenaphobia quickly made Brunoni the primary suspect. This sequence compelled Mrs. Forrester to try to prove Signor Brunoni a Frenchman, invoking ‘his broken English like a Frenchman’ and circulating the print of Mme de Staël with a turban on, to invoke cultural similarities in dress (Gaskell 243). As Catherine Hart argues, the sequence demonstrates how, that ‘convinced of their own superiority and sense of decorum, these ladies refuse to suspect someone of their own class and of their own community’ (Hart 83). The turban, hence, proves a central symbolic of these power-relations, moving from a domesticated, orientalist fetish to provoking fatuous fear and benighted repulse.

The Suspense of the Turban and Empire’s Economic Entanglements

The revelation of Signor Brunoni’s real identity, however, has a much larger impact on the outcome of the novel: in speaking with Brunoni’s wife, Mrs. Brown, Brunoni’s wife, Mary learns about the difficulties English women experience in India and, most importantly, receives a clue about Matty’s brother, Peter, who has been in India for several decades, yet his depiction of the orient was not honest. While it is true that Peter did not possess any turban, his presentation is the key to the discussion following.

The ending to Cranford has been conceptualized by some scholars like Eileen Gillooly (151) as a deus ex machina for Miss Matty’s apparently insoluble difficulty in livelihood was unexpectedly and abruptly resolved. Indeed, as the novel reveals, Peter Jenkyns suddenly came back to Cranford and resolved his sister’s dilemma after the bankruptcy of the Town and County Bank where Miss Matty had retained her shares. After this unexpected plot reversal, peace returned to Cranford–a trajectory, hence, very much in accord with Edward Said’s judgment that ‘the regeneration of Europe by Asia was a very influential Romantic idea’ (115). Peter Jenkyns, whose Indian name was Aga, was recognized as an Orientalist by the Amazon community. Having lived in the eastern country for decades and undergone switches in position from a sailor in the navy to an indigo planter, Peter likely had a deep understanding of what authentic Asia was like. However, he nonetheless refused to tell the truth, safeguarding the ladies in their comfortable fantasy about the East. Such fantasy, I would suggest, is also symbolized as the turban in the story. Miss Matty appreciated and longed for a sea-green turban as a token of a foreign culture, even if it was a style that had already been domesticated in Europe. Simultaneously, she participated in the Cranfordians’ collective misreading of the Signor, assuming him to be one of the robbers, due to his Turkish turban. Her attitude towards the turban implies the British conception of the distant Orient world: many Victorians enjoyed imagining the East as some mysterious exotic setting, yet did not acknowledge the truth of imperialism and the economies of othering and xenophobia that drove it. As Karsten Piep argues in ‘The Nature of Compassion Orientalism in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford’ that Peter’s failure to reveal his understanding and appreciation of the Indian natives, and choice to mislead the ladies of Crawford with tales about his travels is ‘to shield the Cranford community from the distressing realities of imperialism.’ Moreover, and importantly, it was to represent Aga Jenkyns’ ‘will or intention to understand’ and even ‘ultimately control India’ through ‘a more benign, less disquieting variety of imperialism that maintains Western authority through sympathetic identification rather than the colonizer’s whip’ (Piep 246). This seems to be the real reason for Gaskell to create Signora Brunoni, who exclaimed the natives ‘wanted me to stay with them—I could tell that’ (260) to the narrator while recalling her grueling journey from Chunderabaddad to Calcutta. Piep believes through this female character the book reveals the inconvenient, hypocritical notion that ‘once the Orient has been thus conceived and constructed through Occidental eyes, its people seem not just to tolerate but to invite, request, and welcome Western intrusion’ (246). Peter Jenkyns’ nostalgic yearning for a return to an age when Cranford was an isolated village, however, might imply Gaskell’s compassion for the empire itself. Jenkyns’ desire to delimit global circulation and cosmopolitanism suggests a conservative British sentiment of desiring the exploits of colonization, and yet, denying its socio-cultural influence on the domestic.

In the novel after Signora Brunoni turned out to be an English man and the town got rid of the panic, Miss Matty’s investment in buying the beloved sea-green turban was restored. Yet, she became impotent due to her sister Deborah’s mistaken investment in the share market and joint-stock banks. As Borislav Knezevic points out, ‘capital previously accumulated and converted into stock is the basis of the Cranford way of life’. ‘Cranford, in short, is at the mercy of a global economy’ (Knezevic 410). With the industrial revolution entering an accelerated phase in the second half of the 18th century, Britain's textile and other industries played a key role in the international trade chain, pushing forward the empire’s overseas trade and colonization. After the term of the Tory prime minister Robert Peel in 1846, free trade had become the established national policy of empire: the following government continued the laissez-faire policy and the country’s overseas free trade volume reached its peak in the following decades. However, as German economist Friedrich List points out, disaster lurked within this good fortune. Being a theorist of ‘moderate or regulated capitalism’ (Wendler 220), he declared the inevitable demise of overall free trade and only supported the policy over domestic goods; by contrast, tariffs were levied on imported goods and were regarded as an investment in the nation's future productivity. Only by these means could a nation achieve true wealth with the all-round and comprehensive development of its productive power, beyond dependency on its products’ global exchange value. In this context, the turban epitomizes the increasingly competitive cotton market which became inaccessible since the French campaign in the Ottoman territories of Egypt and Syria, manifesting Napoleon’s ambition (as warned by Mme de Staël) in the textile industry and global trade. This lasted until the American Civil War when more tariff on cotton was imposed by the North Abolitionist movement. During this prolonged war, Gaskell felt more anxious for commoners, such as mill workers in Mary Barton and North and South, who fell into extreme poverty once the trade among cotton slave plantations, mill owners, and international buyers came to a halt. People like the Cranford ladies, who were delighted by magician Signor Brunoni’s Grand Turkish turban and broken English, were likely unable to survive when their shares in the bank turned useless when influenced by these market shifts. Many economists like List were considering how to damage Britain’s industry with limited resources and tariffs, while its people were still celebrating the final days of their ignorant bliss, or as with Miss Matty, obsessed with turbans that were antiquated. The object of the turban, therefore, offers symbolization of a kind of colonial Other, seductively and lethally confronted with England’s all too fragile hegemony and imperial dominance.

In conclusion, the ‘a la turque’ style of headdress, influenced and inspired by the popular interest in Eastern cultures and prevalent in English fashion from the 1770s through to the 1830s, presents a microcosm of colonization. Miss Matty’s desire for a sea-green turban and incapacity to get one, constituted a literary symbolism for Britain’s colonial action in the East. In Cranford, the cap shows readers how the story, its conversation and interactions, cannot be separated from the materials within it. The social life of the turban changes over time and space along with the relatively flexible and fluid interpretations towards it. This makes the cap’s seeming outward frivolity meaningful. In combining thing theory with traditional literary analysis, the small unnoticed object of the turban comes to life in the Victorian context, and reveals its inner-workings.