Research Article
ORNAMENT AND DISTRACTION: PERIPHERAL AESTHETICS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
- Alison Georgina Chapman
-
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 May 2017, pp. 233-255
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
In the section devoted to “Attention” in The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James describes how the “‘adaptation of the attention’” can alter our perception of an image so as to permit multiple visual formulations (417). In his example of a two-dimensional drawing of a cube, we can see the three-dimensional body only once our attention has been primed by “preperception”: the image formed by the combination of lines has “no connection with what the picture ostensibly represents” (419, 418). In a footnote to this passage, however, James uses an example from Hermann Lotze's Medicinische Psychologie (1852), to show how a related phenomenon can occur involuntarily, and in states of distraction rather than attention:
James uses the formal illogicality of the wallpaper (its lack of compositional center prevents it from dictating the trajectory for our attention according to intrinsic aesthetic laws) to demonstrate the volatility of our ideational centers, particularly in moments of reverie or inattention. Without the intervention of the will, James says, our cognitive faculties are always in undirected motion, which occurs below the strata of our mental apprehension. Momentary instances of focus or attunement are generated only by the imperceptible and purely random “irradiations of brain-tracts” (420). Attention, for James, is the artistic power of the mind; it applies “emphasis,” “intelligible perspective,” and “clear and vivid form” to the objects apprehended by the faculties of perception, it “makes experience more than it is made by it” (381). Reverie, a moment when attention has been reduced to a minimum, thus demands an alternative aesthetic analog, where composition is reduced to a minimum too.In quietly lying and contemplating a wall-paper pattern, sometimes it is the ground, sometimes the design, which is clearer and consequently comes nearer. . .all without any intention on our part. . . .Often it happens in reverie that when we stare at a picture, suddenly some of its features will be lit up with especial clearness, although neither its optical character nor its meaning discloses any motive for such an arousal of the attention. (419)
THE VICTORIAN VERSE NOVEL AS BESTSELLER: OWEN MEREDITH'S LUCILE
- Catherine Addison
-
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 May 2017, pp. 257-274
-
- Article
-
- You have access Access
- HTML
- Export citation
-
By the 1860s, the verse novel had become a significant feature of the Victorian literary landscape. According to Dino Felluga, this hybrid was a “perverse” and even “subversive” genre, firstly, because it undermined the “‘high’ autotelic” status of poetry by mixing it with the “heteroglot, carnivalesque, and polyphonic novel” and, secondly, because its specific fictions tended to oppose or parody the “middle-class heterosexual, domestic ideology” upheld by the prose novel of the period. In support of his argument, Felluga discusses a handful of texts that are normally regarded as “high” literature: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage, George Meredith's Modern Love and Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (Felluga, “Verse Novel” 171–74; “Novel Poetry” 491–96).
SWINBURNE'S SEA-PROSE AND THE ANTI-NOVEL
- Irena Yamboliev
-
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 May 2017, pp. 275-291
-
- Article
-
- You have access Access
- HTML
- Export citation
-
Language can be made to revolt against its own instrumentality. That is the promise Algernon Charles Swinburne pursues in his unfinished novel Lesbia Brandon, composed in 1859–67 but not published until 1952. Early on in this work, we encounter a passage that perfectly showcases his peculiar and innovative prose style. It is a style that boldly invents its own mechanism of self-perpetuation, and, as it ramifies throughout the novel, turns the text into something other than a conventional narrative – a singular grammar of sensuous perception. The novel's young protagonist, Herbert Seyton, has rounded a corner of a coastal road and comes face to face with the sea. Lesbia Brandon is full of descriptions of the natural environment like this one. It is one of many moments in the novel in which characters encounter, experience, and merge with the seascape. These instances concatenate Swinburne's formal project throughout Lesbia Brandon, a project of translating forces that create patterns in the perceived world into models for prose. The resulting stylistic transformation extends not only to the figurative aspects of Swinburne's language but also to its grammatical and syntactic underpinnings, as peripheral, “accessory” elements become core shaping forces in the prose. This process is at work as Herbert rejoices in the sea-coast and all its enchantments:
This description consists of just one sentence, containing 209 words and eleven semicolon-separated fragments. With its great length and accumulation of clauses alone, this passage announces that Swinburne's narrative practice will warp the dimensions of prose, stretching its habitual units, the sentence and the paragraph, beyond their usual span. This sentence is remarkable for its almost complete absence of verbs. Almost every one of its verbs (“rang,” “flashed,” “fed,” “saved,” “go,” “shiver,” “shift”) appears in a subordinate, defining clause that elaborates on the seascape's features. These verbs, for example, add specificity to the “long reefs” “that rang with returning waves and flashed with ebbing ripples,” point to the small lakes “that fed and saved from sunburning,” define the immeasurable beauties “that go with [the sea's] sacred strength,” and name the lusters “that shiver and shift.” At the sentence's conclusion, two predicates finally reveal its raison d’être in terms of plot: the wonders of the sea “drew his heart back day after day and satisfied it.” These are the events that motivate the description of the sea, but for most of the sentence's unfolding they are eclipsed, bowled over by the shimmering grammatical elaboration. Swinburne insistently adds adjectives to his nouns, singly and in multiples: “long reefs,” “returning waves,” “sharp slopes,” “small brilliant lakes,” “blue and golden bloom,” “sharp delicate air,” “dry and luminous brine,” “faint and fierce lustres.” Sometimes the adjectives are comparatives (“yellower lilies and redder roses”), and at others Swinburne piles adjectives all around a noun, surrounding it in a halo of modifiers, as in “the sharp and fine sea-mosses, fruitful,” “the hard sand inlaid,” and “sudden colour woven.” The adjectival imperative is so strong that it infiltrates and dilutes the verbs’ efficacy to signal action. In addition to the defining verbs (“that rang,” “that fed,” “that go,” “that shiver and shift”), two more verbs appear near the end of the passage in the form of the participles “girdling” and “reaching.” These do not name events but rather describe an enduring arrangement of “broad bands of metallic light” and a recurrent effect of water and light “reaching from dusk to dusk.” They, too, contribute to the adjectival mode that dominates this prose.The long reefs that rang with returning waves and flashed with ebbing ripples; the smooth slopes of coloured rock full of small brilliant lakes that fed and saved from sunburning their anchored fleets of flowers, yellower lilies and redder roses of the sea; the sharp and fine sea-mosses, fruitful of grey blossom, fervent with blue and golden bloom, with soft spear-heads and blades brighter than fire; the lovely heavy motion of the stronger rock-rooted weeds, with all their weight afloat in languid water, splendid and supine; the broad bands of metallic light girdling the greyer flats and swaying levels of sea without a wave; all the enormous graces and immeasurable beauties that go with its sacred strength; the sharp delicate air about it, like breath from the nostrils and lips of its especial and gracious god; the hard sand inlaid with dry and luminous brine; the shuddering shades of sudden colour woven by the light with the water for some remote golden mile or two reaching from dusk to dusk under the sun; shot through with faint and fierce lustres that shiver and shift; and over all a fresher and sweeter heaven than is seen inland by any weather; drew his heart back day after day and satisfied it. (196-97; ch. 2)
“THE DEAD MAN COME TO LIFE AGAIN”: EDWARD ALBERT AND THE STRATEGIES OF BLACK ENDURANCE
- Natalie Prizel
-
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 May 2017, pp. 293-320
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
This essay tells a story of endurance: the endurance of a person and the endurance of an object in an archive, both of which have survived despite their apparent fungibility and ephemerality. It focuses on a Jamaican veteran of the navy and merchant marine – one Edward Albert – who lost his legs while at sea and therefore took to working at various intervals as a crossing sweeper, beggar, shop-owner, and author in London and Glasgow. Albert should have been lost. His shipmates burnt his legs to the point of bursting, and his doctors presumed him to be dead following their amputation. I located Edward Albert initially in the pages of Henry Mayhew's massive, unwieldy, almost unnavigable archive, the four volumes of London Labour and the London Poor. Mayhew interviews Albert in his home and then refers to a small chapbook Albert sells to accompany his begging. A simple WorldCat search led me to a copy of the book, housed at the University of Washington in Seattle. It had endured.
MADEIRA AND JANE EYRE’S COLONIAL INHERITANCE
- Alexandra Valint
-
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 May 2017, pp. 321-339
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
The denouement of Charlotte Brontë’sJane Eyre contains multiple happy rewards for its heroine: a fortune, strangers turned friends turned cousins, the self-elimination of Bertha, and a Rochester still alive, still in England, and now free to marry. The hefty twenty-thousand-pound legacy (of which Jane only keeps one-fourth) bequeathed to her by her late uncle John Eyre allows Jane to return to the maimed Rochester and gleefully proclaim, “I am an independent woman now” (Brontë 501; ch. 37). Citing such financial independence, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar briefly mention Jane's inheritance as the event that allows Jane to “follow her own will” and marry Rochester on terms of equality (367). Similarly, Nancy Armstrong writes that “[m]ore so perhaps than her virtue or passion, it is an endowment from Jane's wealthy uncle that makes her happiness possible” (47). Other critics, such as Elaine Freedgood and Susan Meyer, focus on the origin of the fortune – Madeira – and suggest that such a colonially associated locale implicates Jane in the finances of colonialism and even of slavery. Unlike those critics, however, I will claim that Jane's complicated relationship to the inheritance distances her from the problematic taint of the money's colonial associations and marks her non-conformity with and resistance to the economic practices of the British Empire.
MISTRESS AND MAID: HOMOEROTICISM, CROSS-CLASS DESIRE, AND DISGUISE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
- Kirsti Bohata
-
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 May 2017, pp. 341-359
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
The relationship between mistress and maid is curiously intimate yet bounded by class. Employers and their servants are caught in a dynamic of dominance and submission, in which they practice mutual surveillance. Yet the relationship may also evoke models of loyalty, devotion, and the possibility, in fiction at least, of female alliance. On the comparatively rare occasions that servants feature at all in Victorian fiction, these dynamics lend a homoerotic dimension to the cross-class relationship between mistress and maid. The positions of mistress and maid bring two women together under the same roof while separating them by class, thus providing a framework for a fictional exploration for yearning, desire, unrequited love, or sometimes union. Alternatively, a queer relationship may be obscured by the guise of employer and servant. Indeed, the mistress-maid stories discussed here often involve masquerade in some form, including cross-class and cross-gender disguises.
HIS AND HERS: GENDERED OWNERSHIP AND MARRIAGE IN DOMBEY AND SON AND LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET
- Katherine Dunagan Osborne
-
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 May 2017, pp. 361-379
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
In the nineteenth century, middle-class marriage was built on women's unique relationship with and authority over the domestic space, including its pin cushions, diaries, tea sets, mirrors, and boudoir furniture. What would a husband do with his wife's hair brushes? What claim could he have to her workbasket? Though the common law of coverture gave nearly all legal rights of ownership to husbands, leaving married women a mere smattering of ambiguous claims to pin money and paraphernalia, married women were nonetheless encouraged to cultivate ownership of objects through access, proximity, use, and emotional connection. Such unofficial ownership of household objects did not pose a threat to men's legal ownership or economic power, but was instead a necessary component of marriage since it allowed women to participate properly – according to domestic ideology – in the union of “one flesh.” Historians and literary critics of the last twenty-five years have explored the power Victorian middle-class women gain from their gendered relationship to the domestic space. My interest in this topic, however, is less about the agency women gain from their unique ownership of domestic things and more about what this mechanism of heteronormativity reveals about Victorian culture when it breaks down.
GIVING BIRTH TO A NEW NATION: FEMALE MEDIATION AND THE SPREAD OF TEXTUAL KNOWLEDGE IN DRACULA
- Alyssa Straight
-
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 May 2017, pp. 381-394
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
After his harrowing escape from Castle Dracula, Jonathan Harker entrusts his journal, and the secret of his traumatic experiences with the vampire Count contained therein, to his new wife, Mina Harker (née Murray). “Here is the book,” he urges; “Take it and keep it, read it if you will, but never let me know; unless, indeed, some solemn duty should come upon me to go back to the bitter hours, asleep or awake, sane or mad, recorded here” (Stoker 100; ch. 9). Mina clasps the book, sealing it with a kiss, as she replies, “it would be an outward and visible sign for us all our lives that we trusted each other.” This scene from Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) catalyzes the novel's concern with how knowledge transfer and technology intersect with women's bodies and labor. Not only is Mina the one trusted with the diary, but she is also the only person within the novel who has the required skills to translate its shorthand into a typed and readable document. In this solemn scene, which precedes and resembles their marriage vows, Mina both gains access to private information and is charged with deciding who else should have access to that knowledge and under what circumstances. This “trust” secures Mina as the mediator of knowledge and the curator of what will become an increasingly expansive imperial archive within the novel.
VALENTINES AND THE VICTORIAN IMAGINATION: MARY BARTON AND FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
- Karin Koehler
-
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 May 2017, pp. 395-412
-
- Article
-
- You have access Access
- HTML
- Export citation
-
The custom of celebrating Valentine's Day dates back to the Middle Ages. The emergence of Valentine's Day as a commercial holiday, exploited above all by the greeting card industry, is more recent. In Britain, Valentine's Day cards emerged in the eighteenth century. As David Vincent writes,
Early examples of pre-printed Valentine's Day stationery and manuals for the composition of the perfect valentine reveal that existing folk customs were swiftly adapted by modern print culture and an increasingly literate population. However, it was the 1840 introduction of Rowland Hill's penny post in Britain, alongside concomitant advances in American and European postal infrastructure, which led to a veritable explosion in the exchange of valentines, moulding the practice into a shape still recognisable today (see Golden 222). Hill not only democratised access to written communication by lowering prices, he also anonymised epistolary exchange. Prepaid stamps and pillar post boxes made it possible to correspond with anyone, anywhere, without giving away one's identity. And while sending an anonymous letter would have been perceived as a violation of epistolary decorum during the remainder of the year, on Valentine's Day it was not only acceptable but, as Farmer Boldwood hints in Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), expected. The opportunity for anonymous correspondence generated an enthusiastic response.The observance of 14 February underwent a metamorphosis during the eighteenth century which was later to befall many other customs. What had begun as an exchange of gifts, with many local variations of obscure origin, was gradually transformed into an exchange of tokens and letters, which in turn began to be replaced by printed messages from the end of the century. (44)
WHOSE FAULT? THE SPECULATOR'S GUILT IN LITTLE DORRIT
- Colleen Lannon
-
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 May 2017, pp. 413-432
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
In May 1855, Charles Dickens confided to a friend that he had found a “capital name” for his new work, Nobody's Fault, a title that remained until he completed the first three numbers and renamed it Little Dorrit (Letters 7.703). The original title has generally been assumed to refer to Dickens's broad attack on the lack of accountability in government, particularly in relation to the Crimean War. However, the phrase also evokes the issues of financial impropriety that permeate the novel. In particular, Arthur's obsessive concern that through his parents’ grasping at money “some one may have been grievously deceived, injured, ruined” (39; bk. 1, ch. 5) links his personal sense of guilt to the more public instance of financial “ruin” in the book – the collapse of Mr. Merdle's fraudulent schemes. In both cases, the question of agency remains ambiguous. Who is at fault for the bankruptcy of Clennam & Doyce: Arthur, who invested the firm's money in Merdle's ventures; Pancks, who convinced him of their soundness; or Merdle, who perpetrated the fraud? And who bears responsibility for the financial deceit that deprived Amy Dorrit of her rightful inheritance from Arthur's grandfather: Mrs. Clennam, who hid the codicil; Arthur's father, who colluded in the concealment; or Arthur, who, along with his parents, benefited financially from the transaction? Out of these ambiguities emerges one figure that becomes the locus of responsibility and blame for both transgressions – Arthur Clennam. Against the express wishes of his solicitor, Arthur steps forward to become the “solitary target” for the “thousands of people. . . wildly staring about for somebody alive to heap reproaches on” in the aftermath of Merdle's downfall and suicide (599; bk. 2, ch. 26). His actions give public expression to his private sense of familial guilt, allowing him to declare openly, “I am at fault.”
FREEDOM OR CONSTRAINT: THE SPEEDING BICYCLE AND THE INDUSTRIAL SUBJECT IN H. G. WELLS'S THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
- Eva Chen
-
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 May 2017, pp. 433-447
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
In this passage, quoted from Grant Allen's 1897 bestseller The Type-writer Girl, the New-Woman-turned-typist Juliet Appleton decides to quit typing in a London law office where she is forced to “click, click, click all day like a machine.” As an alternative and a release, she jumps on her bicycle and rides for an “idyllic” anarchic farm in the countryside (11). There across the Weald of Sussex and Surrey, the bicycling Juliet encounters two other forms of mobility, that of the train and the horse-driven carriage. The train, an icon of industrial modernity that “annihilated time and space” (Schivelbusch 36), rumbles brutally over the green fields and terrifies the horses, which are symbols of a natural, organic, preindustrial world. But Juliet's bicycle seems to create a balance between the two worlds. The bicycle as the never-failing steel horse enables her to utilize the achievements of industrial mechanization and also allows for a degree of freedom and human agency. Juliet is portrayed as a true modern heroine and an “unabashed” daughter of the industrial age, because she seems to possess a new subjectivity bred and made possible by the partnership between machine and nature, mechanical power and organic energy.
Review Essays
VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND FILM ADAPTATION
- Antonija Primorac
-
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 May 2017, pp. 451-459
-
- Article
-
- You have access Access
- HTML
- Export citation
-
“The book was nothing like the film,” complained one of my students about a week or so after the premiere of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010). Barely able to contain his disgust, he added: “I expected it to be as exciting as the film, but it turned out to be dull – and it appeared to be written for children!” Stunned with the virulence of his reaction, I thought how much his response to the book mirrored – as if through a looking glass – that most common of complaints voiced by many reviewers and overheard in book lovers’ discussions of film adaptations: “not as good as the book.” Both views reflect the hierarchical approach to adaptations traditionally employed by film studies and literature studies respectively. While adaptations of Victorian literature have been used – with more or less enthusiasm – as teaching aides as long as user-friendly video formats were made widely available, it is only recently that film adaptation started to be considered as an object of academic study in its own right and on an equal footing with works of literature (or, for that matter, films based on original screenplays). Adaptation studies came into its own in early twenty-first century on the heels of valuable work done by scholars such as Brian McFarlane (1996), Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (1999), James Naremore (2000), Robert Stam (2000), Sarah Cardwell (2002), and Kamilla Elliott (2003) which paved the way for a consideration of film adaptations beyond the fidelity debate. The field was solidified with the establishment in 2006 of the UK-based Association of Literature on Screen Association (called Association of Adaptation Studies from 2008) and the inception of its journal Adaptation, published by Oxford University Press, in 2008. Interdisciplinary in nature, the field primarily brought together literature and film scholars who insisted that adaptations were more than lamentably unfaithful or vulgar versions of literature mired in popular culture and market issues on the one hand, or merely derivative, impure cinema on the other. The foundational tenets of adaptation studies therefore included a non-judgemental and non-hierarchical approach to the relationship between the text and its adaptation, and a keen awareness of film production contexts. These vividly illustrate the field's move away from discussing fidelity to the “original” which, thanks to the work of Linda Hutcheon (2006), started to be increasingly referred to simply as “adapted text.” Hutcheon's book came out at the same time as another foundational monograph on the subject, Julie Sanders's Adaptation and Appropriation (2005) which contributed to the debate through its focus on intertextual links and the palimpsestuous nature of adaptations, in which debate on fidelity was substituted with the analysis of the distance between the text and its adaptation(s).
“THE FASHIONS OF THE CURRENT SEASON”: RECENT CRITICAL WORK ON VICTORIAN SENSATION FICTION
- Anne-Marie Beller
-
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 May 2017, pp. 461-473
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
Henry Mansel, writing in 1863, was confident in his prediction that the current popular vogue for sensation novels was an ephemeral phase, soon to pass into a deserved oblivion. Yet by the end of a decade marked by extensive and frequently hysterical debates over the genre, the future Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, was still bemoaning the ubiquity of sensation fiction: “the world may congratulate itself when the last sensational novel has been written and forgotten” (424). Mansel and Austin would doubtless have been astounded (and appalled) at the current status of mid-Victorian sensation fiction in the realm of academic scholarship. Far from being a long-forgotten, inconsequential moment in literary history, the sensation novels of authors such as Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Ouida have prompted a plethora of critical studies, which have impacted on our wider understanding of the dynamics and influences of mid-Victorian literary and publishing practices.
Front Cover (OFC, IFC) and matter
VLC volume 45 issue 2 Cover and Front matter
-
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 May 2017, pp. f1-f10
-
- Article
-
- You have access Access
- Export citation
Back Cover (IBC, OBC) and matter
VLC volume 45 issue 2 Cover and Back matter
-
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 May 2017, pp. b1-b3
-
- Article
-
- You have access Access
- Export citation