In the Victorian period, “edginess” referred to “hardness of outline”: fringe softened, I argue here, the literal and figurative hard edges of that historical moment. In the 20th century, edginess moves inside the subject: it connotes irritability. This etymological journey from the literal to the figurative, and from the outside to the inside, traces a larger cultural trend I wish to resist. The prescribed reliance on metaphor and irony in modernist and postmodernist interpretive schemes means that we have lost the ability to understand other modes of representation, including the literal—a mode that was still available in the 19th century. By performing the forbidden maneuver of taking fringe literally and interpreting it, I argue for the importance of reconsidering representational strategies we have stopped valuing, as if their obviousness makes them too clear to harbor significant meaning or to do critical psychic and cultural work.