Victorian American womanhood speaks to a more specific set of issues directly connected , the handkerchief. This "menial" object played an important role in women's self-presentation in the first half of the nineteenth century. The refined woman used this sign of genteel sensibility to artfully highlight a blush or tear. The prop used to dramatize sensitive feeling was—inexplicably —also the recipient of considerable feeling itself. Like Desdemona, who "so loves" Othello's handkerchief that "she reserves it evermore about her/ To kiss and talk to," American women "caressed . . . fondled . . . [and] praised" their pocket handkerchiefs overmuch.  Women's impulse to invest everyday objects with sentimental meaning dangerously inflames consumer desire and, in the case of the handkerchief, encourages the abuse and misuse of what had once been justly regarded as an "aristocratic" artifact.

James Fennemore Cooper wrote "The Autobiography of The Pocket Handkerchief" and within its pages we find the first owner of Cooper's handkerchief, the impoverished French aristocrat Adrienne, purchases it at a Parisian market and spends two months embroidering it. She intends to give the finished work as a gift to her patron, the Dauphine, but when the Dauphine looses her own fortune during the 1830 revolution, Adrienne is forced to sell the "worked" handkerchief to a French merchant for a paltry ten dollars. The merchant, in turn, sells it to an American middleman, Colonel Silky, for twenty dollars; Colonel Silky brings it to his Broadway agent, Mr. Bobbinet. Mr. Bobbinet first offers the handkerchief for sixty dollars but, in a farcical bargaining scene with a wealthy real-estate heiress, Eudosia Halfacre, finally parts with it for one hundred dollars, forty dollars over his asking price. When Eudosia's father goes bust, she is forced to return the handkerchief to Bobbinet's shop. Mr. Bobbinet shortly thereafter sells it again, for one hundred and twenty-five dollars, to Julia Monson, another young woman of fashion whose family happens to employ Adrienne, the handkerchief's first owner, as a French governess. While the handkerchief has come full circle, it sees that its reunion with Adrienne is only temporary. For experience has taught that a consumer object of its kind is always a slave to fortune.

As Cooper follows his object-narrator on its journeys into Victorian womanhood and consumerism, he illuminates a nettlesome fact about his chosen thing: nobody quite knows what to make of it. Various characters ask: What are "these things?" Is the fancy or dress handkerchief a "bijou" or "frippery"—curious feminine ornaments, tied to things foreign? Does it have more social significance, used by women as a "lure" or a "sign" of wealth and understood by male fortune hunters? Is the pocket handkerchief a physical "appendage" or a useful "appliance"—an indispensable part of the body or a disposable tool? A necessary or a "vulgar" thing? In sum, where does such a thing fit in the arsenal of gentility? Where, Cooper asks, does one place a precious object into which the nose is blown? The question was by no means a new one. For centuries, students of manners have been debating the precise social function of the handkerchief and the one thing that they all agree upon is this: Use a handkerchief when necessary, but without glancing at it afterwards. Also be as quiet and unobtrusive in the action as possible