Victorian Feeling: Touch, Bodies, Emotions
9th Annual BAVS Conference
1-3 September 2008, University of Leicester
ABSTRACTS
Panel A) Staging Bodies and Emotions
The Sandow Girl: the construction and performance of the healthy female body in fin de siècle
musical comedy, Viv Gardner, University of Manchester
For improvement of the figure and deportment,
For conducing to the cult of force and vim,
There is nothing like an up-to-date assortment
Of exercises practiced in the Gym.
The Gibson Girl and the Bath Bun Girl
All the world has come to know.
We like them both and are rather loth (sic)
To see either of them go.
But there‘s a type than can crown them all;
You need not have looks or wealth,
For the girl I mean is the Sandow Queen,
The Queen of all English health.
(Thompson & Courtneidge, The Dairymaids, 1906]
Miss Carrie Moore…is a very pretty and ingratiating young lady with black hair, white teeth and
nimble feet. In the draperies of the Sandow Girl… she is quite a model of classic grace, and her
movements are absolutely beyond praise in their lissomness and their display of beautiful
feminine muscularity.
[Photobits, July 1906]
This paper will address the contradictory relationship between the vitality and constraint in the
performances, on and off stage, of the stars of musical comedy between 1894 and 1910 which
manifested itself most obviously in the emergence of the figure (in both a figurative and physical
sense) of the ‗Gaiety Girl‘. Len Platt has described ‗gaiety‘ and the musical comedy ‗girl‘ as the ‗key
challenge of musical comedy to the receding Victorian world … part of the wider ambition to secure
modernity as a familiar, safe and joyful, condition.‘ And in 1910, Lady Dorothy Nevill observed that
‗many an old family has gained fresh vigour from an infusion of fresh blood [through taking] wives
from the musical comedy stage.‘ This paper will argue that, at the same time as representing the
embodiment of a ‗new‘ female beauty and health, the musical comedy ‗girl‘, was playing into a
paternalistic and essentialist culture of femininity. Using the 1906 musical comedy, The Dairymaids¸
with its staging of a female gym and chorus of Sandow Girls, as exemplar, the paper will explore the
performance of ‗English[women‘s] health‘ as mediated by the components of the musical comedy
(spectacle, narrative, music and dance). It will further locate the performance in the wider context of
contemporary debates on female health (including the Sandow system for women and the Sandow
corset), and representations of the ideal female body through the dissemination of images of
Dairymaids stars, Phyllis Dare and Carrie Moore in picture postcards, magazines and advertising
materials.
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“O Death, Where is thy Sting?” Representations of Death on the Mid-Victorian Popular Stage,
Janice Norwood, University of Hertfordshire
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In 1841 the life expectancy of men living in London was just 35 years. Mortality rates were high, with
infectious diseases such as typhus, scarlet fever and tuberculosis accounting for one death in every
three. It is perhaps not surprising then that death is a common feature of the domestic melodramas and
sensation dramas that filled the London stage in the mid nineteenth century. In both these popular
genres murder is frequently used in the opening scenes as a trigger for the plot. Later in the plays the
threat of death, whether from malevolent agents, physical dangers or illness, is a potent force, driving
the action to a climax. This paper examines how these multifarious deaths were depicted, what kind of
audience response they generated and the status of death within the plays. It seeks to identify whether
there is a substantive difference between the treatment of death in melodrama as opposed to sensation
drama.
Attention is paid to both familiar plays, such as adaptations of Stowe‘s Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
Braddon‘s Lady Audley’s Secret and Reade‘s It’s Never Too Late to Mend, and to lesser-known
unpublished texts such as George Dibdin Pitt‘s The Will and the Way. The range of deaths considered
includes undeserved (often sentimentally treated) and untimely demises, fatalities as deserved
retributive justice for criminal or villainous behaviour, morally ambiguous deaths such as suicide, and
cheated or temporary death (by which I mean deaths witnessed by the audience, but which are
subsequently proved to be illusory). In some cases the stage depiction is affected by censorship from
the Lord Chamberlain‘s office. For example, theatrical representations of executions were forbidden.
Official sensitivity about this issue is linked to the public debate about state executions, which
ultimately led to the abolition of public hanging in 1868.
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The Sentimental Carnival: Emotional Experience in Late-Victorian Variety Theatre, Melissa
Bellanta, University of Queensland
As its name suggests, variety theatre was a form which thrived on eclecticism in the late-Victorian era.
It incorporated routines from American blackface minstrelsy, English music-hall, melodrama, opera,
the circus, and burlesque; it made use of a bewildering array of ethnic stereotypes; and it relied on a
trans-national clutch of performers who in many cases toured the Anglo world throughout their careers.
One of the more curious aspects of this eclecticism was the abrupt segues which took between ribald
comedy and extreme sentimentality in variety theatre. From at least the 1860s, variety theatre mixed
anti-authoritarian laughs with hear-‘em-and-weep songs about dead mothers, lost children and
unrequited love. In the course of a single evening, such tear-jerking ballads would be performed backto-back with romping farces – a sudden shift of emotional tempo indeed.
In this paper, I ask why wild swings in emotional register were so much a feature of variety theatre in
the last half of the nineteenth century. Most historians have explained this to date by reference to the
different audiences variety theatre was trying to attract at the time. Sentimental ballads were included
primarily to attract white middle-class families, we hear, while the farces and comic songs were for
popular theatre‘s traditional base: rowdy men belonging to the urban working-class. I am not
convinced by this explanation. Sentimentality was not just the preserve of a feminised middle-class
audience in the late-Victoria era – certainly not in Australia, in any case, where my material for this
paper is based. And variety theatre‘s key allure lay in its attempt to express modern experience as a
whole rather than just its canny provision of different styles for its different audience fractions.
Somewhat ironically, perhaps, the emotional disjunctions apparent in variety theatre served a holistic
purpose: that is, to reflect the keen ambivalence and incoherence of late-nineteenth century modernity.
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Melodrama and the Politics of Emotion, Kate Newey, University of Birmingham
How might the study of Victorian performance, and specifically of melodrama, contribute towards a
cultural history of emotion in the nineteenth century? This question is the starting point for my paper. I
will argue that through the dramaturgical structuring of melodrama around the hero or heroine as
‗feeling individual,‘ melodrama dramatises strong feelings in a public display, and disrupts order and
logic. Although these doses of strong feeling were measured and framed by the aesthetic and industrial
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practices of the Victorian theatre, nevertheless, they had the potential to politicise, convert, disturb,
upset, excite, enrage, and seduce spectators.
In this paper, I want to investigate the melodramatic politics of emotion, and its oppositional potentials
through the masculine body, and through John Ruskin‘s conception of theatre as rational recreation –
what he called ‗thoughtful rest.‘ My focus will be on the work of Wilson Barrett, an actor-manager in
the last decades of the nineteenth century, and in particular his use of religious feeling and belief in
plays such as The Sign of the Cross, and The Silver King. In these melodramas, Barrett placed the
feeling individual at the centre of the drama, the spectacle, and the publicity, and argued for a moral
and an aesthetic understanding of the world through the emotion as well as the intellect. However, this
was not primarily achieved in terms set out by the advocates of the literary drama, but through a
pursuit of the popular commercial mainstream.
The cultural work here for us to consider was a renewal of the importance of theatricality and theatrical
representation within the framework of conventional Victorian morality – an important point in a
period when performance, theatricality – what we might now call performativity – were contentious
and treacherous fractured ground. For us, Barrett‘s career, his ‗renovation‘ of the melodrama, his
connections with such canonical figures as John Ruskin, suggests we need to overhaul our narratives of
the Victorian culture, particularly as a national cultural institution which reflects, represents, and
constructs identity, to allow us to think through the implications of the endurance of a popular
mainstream and commercial theatre as a central aesthetic and pedagogical experience in British culture,
although such theatrical experience in the nineteenth century has been written out of the historical
narrative and our historiographical and literary critical practices.
In considering a range of responses to Barrett‘s melodramas, I‘m struck by the openness of
feeling, and the strength of emotion, particularly as it is expressed through religious feeling. In
responses to Barrett‘s melodramas there is a sense of the theatre as a space in which spectators can
experience something they do not or cannot experience elsewhere. The idea of the feeling individual
links politics to the personal and private emotions of the spectator, in the service of a traditional
morality, but through non-traditional means. Strong religious feeling allows the anti-theatricality of
Victorian ethics and morality to be set aside, and works as a conduit for other feelings to be expressed.
To observe this is not to note anything new, but it may be that further study of the politics and cultural
work of emotion in the theatre – both on stage and in the auditorium -- is another way in to our
continuing exploration of Victorian subjectivities and identities.
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B) Objects of Desire: Material Cultures
Phenomenological Resonance: Presence and Absence in Beloved Things, Aislinn Hunter,
University of Edinburgh
This paper examines beloved objects, specifically ‗hair‘ and locks of hair taken for commemorative or
mourning purposes in the Victorian era, as a conduit for magical thinking. This paper argues that the
felt power of the beloved‘s hair –– as touchstone, as embodied presence, as a locus for memory –– is
derived not only from the physical presence of the hair itself (its Heideggerean ‗thingness‘) but, to a
great extent, from the living‘s own sensory experience of the material fragment. While focusing on hair
as a particularly Victorian fetish, and on the fashion for ‗hair souvenirs‘ in relation to literary figures,
this paper will also briefly address hair as a more universal ‗thing‘ –– a thing (in Heidegger‘s terms)
that is not only met with certain concepts, but which resonates, through its material properties, specific
‗modes of giveness‘.
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“Fairy palaces” and “Wonderful Toys”: Machine Dreams in Household Words, Catherine Waters,
University of New England, Australia
In an article published in Victorian Literature and Culture in 2000, ‗Machine Dreams: The Culture of
Technology,‘ Herbert Sussman identified a prevailing ‗technophobic‘ impulse in contemporary
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Victorian Studies that prompted his call for a re-engagement with the Victorian mechanists, a
recuperation of the Victorian ‗technological imagination, the ―technological feeling‖ of the age‘ (198).
What he had in mind was a return to the writings of such early philosophers of manufacture as Charles
Babbage and Andrew Ure, armed with the analytical methods of cultural studies. But the
‗technological feeling‘ of the Victorian age can also be usefully gauged from that most ubiquitous
commodity of modern industrial capitalism, the periodical press.
Dickens‘s Household Words, like other cheap miscellanies published at mid-century, was fascinated by
machinery and the new industrial processes that were turning out a vast array of increasingly
affordable mass-produced goods. As he argues in the ‗Preliminary Word‘ that opens the first issue:
‗The traveller whom we accompany on his railroad or his steamboat journey, may gain, we hope, some
compensation for incidents which these later generations have outlived, in new associations with the
Power that bears him onward; with the habitations and the ways of life of crowds of his fellow
creatures among whom he passes like the wind; even with the towering chimneys he may see, spirting
[sic] out fire and smoke upon the prospect‘ (30 March 1850, 1).
Amongst the new genres which the literature of industrialisation inaugurated, Dickens evolved the
‗process article,‘ a form of industrial tourist tale which, while marvelling at the technological
imagination vested in factory machinery, also held the promise of demystifying the mass-produced
commodity and restoring awareness of the labour involved in its production. While some contributors
in this genre, like Harriet Martineau, extol the virtues of industrialism and political economy, others
like Dickens and Henry Morley, register unease about the material confusions of worker and machine
in factory production. This paper will examine several articles from Household Words to show how the
journal‘s representation of industrialism reveals an ambivalence in the technological feeling of the age,
as distinctions between human and machine, subject and object, were called into question by the
conditions of industrial modernity.
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“A long, sunny harvest of taste and curiosity”: Collecting, aesthetics and the female body in Henry
James‟s The Spoils of Poynton, Vicky Mills, Birkbeck
This paper explores the links between collecting and corporeality as depicted through the figure of the
female collector in Henry James‘s 1896 novel The Spoils of Poynton.
Drawing on theories of anthropomorphic aesthetics developed by Vernon Lee and Clementina
Anstruther-Thomson, it examines how James uses the theme of collecting to explore the contribution
of the female collector to the fields of cultural production and consumption and through this, to
discourses of late nineteenth-century aestheticism. Central to this is a consideration of how collecting
can be used as a representational strategy to explore aspects of gender identity and experience. What
emerges is a discourse on the gendered nature of collecting which locates female collecting and
aesthetic response within the body. In its various evocations of the female body (maternal, sexual,
anthropomorphous) James‘s text confronts the existence of pure masculine and feminine states and
suggests interesting possibilities for subject:object relations.
The body is invoked in James‘s Preface to the New York edition of the Spoils, which links a passion
for both collecting and writing through the language of disease. He describes how a story told at a
dinner party became the inspiration for his novel and that it acted like the ‗prick of inoculation; the
whole of the virus…being infused by that single touch‘. Both writing and collecting are, for James,
addictive pursuits and his treatment is part of a long trajectory in nineteenth-century literature that
views collecting as a diseased activity and suggests a link between collecting and fin-de-siecle medicoscientific discourses on degeneration and related debates on sexual inversion.
But the discourse of collecting as disease is not the only way in which acquisitiveness appears
grounded in embodied practices. In this paper, I explore three manifestations of the body of the female
collector. Firstly, I attempt to show how Adela Gereth (the chief female collector and central figure in
the Spoils) can be seen as the ‗Mother‘ of Poynton. As part of this, James frames his narrative of
collecting within the language of procreation and maternity, heralding the elision of collecting with
reproduction that occurs in the depiction of Mrs Gereth‘s maternal body. Secondly, I discuss how the
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theme of collecting opens up a discursive space for the exploration of aesthetic response linked to
female same-sex desire and lastly how the body of the subject seems to merge with the object in a
blurring of boundaries between collector and collected.
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Married Women‟s Property: Transgressive Affect and the Social Climber,Katherine Dunagan
Osborne, University of Kentucky
This paper combines two of the most exciting trends to emerge in recent nineteenth-century
studies – work on the emotions and material culture – to explore the intersections between nineteenthcentury psychical experiences and what Elaine Freedgood calls ―Victorian thing culture.‖1 This essay
investigates the mutual influence of people and things, that is, how the interaction between an
individual and an object changes both of these ―actors‖ permanently. Following thing theorists who
wish to initiate a new way of reading the objects of literature and culture, including Freedgood, Igor
Kopytoff, Bill Brown, and Mark Blackwell2, I ascribe active roles to things, suggesting that characters
interact with the many objects that proliferate the Victorian novel in order to experiment with
transgressive emotions from within the socially accepted and acceptable system of commodity culture.
Such experimentation allows these characters to practice their feelings on non-threatening material
possessions before a more social exhibition of these feelings. Combining Marxist and psychoanalytic
theories, I will explore the intersections of the external world of commodities and interiorized
psychological spaces in two novels, Lady Audley’s Secret and Dombey and Son, focusing specifically
on two female characters who marry for money and their contrasting treatment of the luxurious
possessions these marriages provide. Lucy Audley and Edith Dombey react differently to the
abundance ―good‖ marriages bring within and as part of commodity culture through their interactions
with expensive dresses, brilliant jewels, and costly decorations. In essence, they negotiate their
affective responses to both the marriage and commodity markets through the material objects that
surround them.
I take as my starting point the descriptions of Lady Audley and Edith Dombey positioned
centrally in their boudoirs. Each character seems to have a singular relationship to her room and the
intricately-detailed possessions it contains, even functioning herself as yet another decoration in this
hyperfeminized space. The characters‘ own ―thingness‖ is underscored by the perspectives of men
who venture into the ladies‘ rooms, Robert Audley and Paul Dombey, but each female character
responds differently to her role as a ―thing.‖ Whereas Lady Audley revels in her alignment with
objects, even having her own portrait hung upon her wall to attest to this conflation, Edith resents and
resists it. Though Lady Audley and Edith have utterly different relationships to their luxurious
possessions, both characters use these things to prepare psychically for acts of destruction. To preserve
her new, secure life as the wife of a baronet, Lady Audley gains encouragement for her attempted
murder of Robert Audley by sitting alone in the midst of her possessions, practicing the ―beautiful
misery‖ that will strengthen her murderous resolve and which will emerge again later during her
confession scene. In contrast, because she has sold herself in marriage, Edith sees her possessions as
symbols of her own commodification. Only by acting out her hatred and fear of the position in which
she finds herself, eventually ransacking her boudoir and fleeing her marriage, can she reverse this selfcommodification, even if that means publically ruining herself in the process. Both of these characters
worship or destroy their possessions because of their feelings of love, pride, anger, or hatred towards
commodity culture, illustrating how emotions often materialize themselves in the actual things of the
Victorian novel.
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C) Women‟s Writing, Faith and Feeling
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Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things, 2006.
Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things.” The Social Life of Things, Arjun Appadurai, ed., 1986; Bill
Brown, Things, 2004; Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Life of Things, 2007.
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Feeling, faith and reason in Anne Bronte‟s Poetry, Rebecca Styler, University of Lincoln
The recent rehabilitation of Anne Bronte as an author worthy of study has been entirely grounded in
her fictional writing. From this she has been reassessed as an enlightenment writer, more in the
tradition of rational moralists like Edgeworth and Austen than romanticists such as Emily and
Charlotte Bronte. But Anne Bronte‘s poetry tells a different story: faith and fulfilment are conceived in
terms of ecstatic emotion, and reason is adopted reluctantly as compensation when feeling fails.
Bronte‘s poetry embodies an understanding of religious experience which is structured by the
discourses of sensibility, in particular its expressions in evangelicalism and romanticism. Her religious
ideal is an epiphany of felt conviction, fusion of the subjective world with the divine other. The poems
are structured as quests, to depart from the lower world, associated with confinement and an isolated
sensibility, and to reach the upper world, figured as expansion and liberatory feeling. Yet these
attempts repeatedly fail, as numerous poems record. The poet‘s consequent sense of alienation in the
earth-bound life reaches existential proportions. In this, Bronte shares themes with her sister poet
Emily, and by using a Christian framework she becomes an early Victorian poet of doubt.
Bronte turns to reason-based, ethical religion to counter the absence of felt ecstasy. Critics
have often read this as a capitulation to orthodoxy, in contrast with Emily‘s heretical boldness. But
Anne Bronte offers an astute analysis of the quest for religious ecstasy, variously regarding it as
unattainable, undesirable, and unethical. She finds in the rational religious life, based on a humanist
understanding of God and a commitment to moral self-training, a pragmatic solution to the felt absence
of divinity. Yet in these later poems there is often a sense of inner battle, and self-persuasion. The old
longing for an epiphany haunts the poems, showing that Bronte has a more complex relationship with
feeling and reason, romance and reality, than her novels suggest.
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Unspeakable feelings: sensory experience and religious doubt in Augusta Webster‟s soliloquypoems, Gemma Palmer, De Montfort University
Best known today for her dramatic monologues with female speakers and her advocacy of women‘s
rights, the volumes of poet and critic Augusta Webster (1837-1894) also contain a number of neglected
poems which explore the experience of religious doubt, most often through male personae.
In these poems, familiar metaphors of religious emotion and illumination are modified in the context of
doubt, becoming tropes of the absence of sensation, particularly numbness and blindness. Speakers
experience perverse agonies, not only in their inability to feel, but also because social mores make their
pain inexpressible.
For instance, Webster‘s ‗Preacher‘ reproves his lack of religious feeling and finds his heart ‗asleep/As
he might feel his hand or foot‘. Wishing for the awakening ‗pain‘ of ‗sharp repentance‘, he
nevertheless scorns the excessive emotion and ecstasy of Methodists and ascetics. Similarly, the
doubter of ‗A Soul in Prison‘ laments his spiritual blindness after ‗too bold a glaring at the sun /
Thinking to apprehend His perfect light‘. Comparing his ‗roughened mind‘ calloused by worldly cares
to the coarse hand of the ploughman learning to write, the speaker says he lacks the touch for
overweening theology. Both yearn for a sympathetic listener in their unspoken anguish; a role which a
given reader may or may not fulfil.
In two less earthly poems, male speakers who reject spiritual love in the murderous intensity of sexual
jealousy are supernaturally condemned to Swedenborgian torments – benumbed and wandering frozen
wastelands or groping blindly in Rome‘s catacombs. Self-consciously gothic and with startling
depictions of female pain, ‗The Snow Waste‘ and ‗With the Dead‘ are usefully juxtaposed against
Webster‘s eloquent and sympathetic doubters, not least because their horror seems calculated to evoke
sensation in the reader.
By reading these poems, we might also reassess Webster‘s contribution to the development of the
poetic monologue. Because they lack auditors, Webster‘s monologues are almost invariably interior –
rather than dramatic – in nature, making them closer to the poetic soliloquy in J S Mill‘s definition of
overheard eloquence. The narrator of Webster‘s first novel meditated, ―how little we know what is
passing in our neighbour‘s mind…the real life of every human is so secret‖, and the impenetrability of
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inner life recurs in both poetry and prose throughout her career. As a philosophical and political
liberal, Webster‘s monologues are evidently adapted to express the individual‘s unspeakable feelings
and private pain, perhaps most tangibly in the ineffable experiences of doubt. As such, these neglected
soliloquies – and the period‘s notoriously protean dramatic monologues more generally – can helpfully
illuminate ways in which Victorian feelings were encoded, embodied and explored.
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“Gaze not upon her, lest thou be as she”: Sight and Vision in Christina Rossetti‟s Devotional Poetry,
Elizabeth Ludlow, University of Warwick
In her 2004 book, The Transmission of Affect, Teresa Brennan challenges the conception that, unlike
the other senses, sight leaves the boundaries of the individual relatively intact and voices the possibility
that our visual encounters cause changes in the pheromones that we emanate. My paper demonstrates
how Brennan‘s notions of individuality and transmitted pheromones can be used as a basis upon which
to interpret Christina Rossetti‘s explication of the physical and sensory experience of the believer as
she is transformed into a part of the Bride of Christ through reading the Scriptures and maintaining a
strict self-control over her gaze. As a result of her transformation, Rossetti suggests that the believer is
able to merge her identity with Christ‘s and emanate his virtues. In her sonnet, ‗Babylon the Great,‘ she
highlights the epistemological significance of controlling the gaze when she voices the frightening
possibility that the transfixed gazer can become ‗as she,‘ the foul creature of Revelation 17. The link
between the eyes of the body and the eye of the soul, and the idea that the physical and the spiritual are
merged as an individual allows herself to be transformed by God or by another, are notions that the
Ancient Fathers consistently battled with. In view of Rossetti‘s active engagement with the Tractarian
practice of looking to Patristic and Medieval writings for guidelines upon which to interpret and apply
the teachings of the Bible, I argue that her concern with interpreting both the corporeal and the divine
affects of the transformed individual reflects her commitment to ancient and early modern theology.
Ending with a close analysis of several of her devotional poems, I demonstrate how this commitment
offers a framework upon which her hermeneutical methodology can be understood.
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D) Marsh
Hiding physical and emotional differences: Secrecy, disguise and concealment in the fiction of
Richard Marsh, Sara Lenaghan, Lancaster University
In this paper I propose to use Richard Marsh‘s well-known novel The Beetle, in addition to some of his
recently republished but lesser-known fiction (Philip Bennion’s Death, The Joss: A Reversion and
Curios) to explore the portrayal of male characters. Marsh seems to choose to show his masculine
characters as inherently dual, or ‗other‘ – very rarely are they straightforward and honest in how they
act in the social world, and more often they are insecure, duplicitous or foreign (and therefore seeming
to embody a multitude of undesirable features, according to the suggested viewpoint). I will focus
particularly on the genre of mystery and the roles of artists and collectors, as these elicit overt
strategies of hiding and doubling.
Using a range of examples from these texts and briefly referencing other contemporary texts (Dracula,
short stories by Henry James) and theoretical underpinnings from John Tosh and Christopher Lane in
particular, I will argue how Marsh overtly demonstrates views explored more subtly in other texts of
the period – that masculinity at the fin-de-siecle is complex, requires men to seem to be other than they
actually are, that appearance is all and that the real feelings of men need to be concealed from society
in order to maintain the status quo. Being a man in Marsh‘s fiction necessitates a performance of
feeling and equanimity often at odds with the ‗true‘ character – Marsh shows that masculinity, at this
time, is a social construction.
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Bodies of Mystery: Hereditary Criminality and Degeneracy in the Fiction of Richard Marsh, Johan
Höglund, University of Kalmar, Sweden
While the body of the criminal is often described as deformed in early and high-Victorian literature,
medical science theorized this deformity into a form of biologically determined propensity for crime
during the late-Victorian period. According to Cesare Lombroso and Havelock Ellis, criminality was
written on the physical body. To Lombroso, inspired by and inspiring early Eugenics, moral
degeneracy manifested itself in the form of crooked nooses, large jaws, long arms and protruding ears.
As a result, it was now possible for the late-Victorian medical man/criminologist to read the Victorian
body as if it were a criminal record in the making.
As if to confirm Lombroso‘s and Ellis‘ thesis, the Victorian novel in general and the late Victorian
crime thriller and gothic novel in particular, are full of criminals whose moral degeneracy is physically
apparent. In some cases, as in Dracula or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this physical
deviance can be momentarily suspended, revealing itself only when the criminal is indulging his
criminal pathology. Most of the time, though, the disfigured body of the criminal remains static; his
moral decrepitude only too visible to the Victorian citizens that surround him.
One author both covertly and overtly concerned with physical disfiguration and transformation, as well
as with hereditary criminality, is the obscure and, until recently, sadly neglected Richard Marsh. While
his best-selling gothic novel The Beetle is firmly entrenched in the gothic canon by now, few of his
other novels have been in print since the 1920s and little is known about his person. Like many of his
fellow authors of gothic fiction and crime literature, Marsh appears to be eminently well informed
regarding Eugenic theory, and frequently represents a society where criminality and moral deviance is
precisely written on the body. At the same time, unlike many of his colleagues, Marsh seems reluctant
to finally confirm this Eugenic universe, and sometimes reverses appearance and criminal aptitude,
even making the moral deviant the anti-hero or heroine of the narrative while transforming the
hero/detective into the offender.
From this perspective, the proposed paper examines the relationship between physical deformity, moral
deterioration and criminal degeneracy in three late-Victorian novels by Richard Marsh: his little know
detective novel on hereditary criminality Mrs. Musgrave – and Her Husband (1895), the much
discussed The Beetle (1897) and the recently republished The Joss (1901). The focus of the paper is
both on how these early Marsh novels explore the notion of hereditary criminality, arguing that Marsh
tends to confirm the conservative values of late nineteenth century medical science while
simultaneously exploding the late-Victorian notion that physical deformity and criminal propensity go
hand in hand.
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“Some Ghoulish Example of her Sex”: The Foreign Female Monster in Richard Marsh‟s The
Beetle: A Mystery (1897) and The Goddess: A Demon (1900), Minna Vuohelainen, Edge Hill
University
This paper examines the metamorphic body of the female monster in Richard Marsh‘s urban gothic
novels The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) and The Goddess: A Demon (1900). Both novels contain monsters
of foreign origin (the eponymous ‗beetle‘ and ‗goddess‘) who introduce to London a set of sexual and
behavioural patterns alien to the moral sentiments of the novels‘ English protagonists. These include
lurid fantasies of human sacrifice and rape (both male and female); mesmeric control over the minds
and bodies of others; and dramatic reversals in gender roles (e.g. female crossdressing, male hysteria
and sexual passivity).
The paper explores the gothic rhetoric that establishes the two monsters‘ otherness. Following the
arguments of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, the paper seeks to establish to what extent the ‗monster‘s body is
culture‘,3 i.e. how current cultural and social debates inform a particular culture‘s definition of
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‗Monster Culture (Seven Theses)‘, in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. by Jeffrey
Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3-25 (p. 4).
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monstrosity. As Judith Halberstam argues, the monster represents ‗an aggregate of race, class and
gender‘ that ‗transform[s] the fragments of otherness into one body‘.4 The paper charts these cultural
echoes in the two monsters, analysing the process of othering that is used to classify, contain, and,
eventually, destroy the monsters in Marsh‘s novels.
The alien practices and morals of the monsters, the paper argues, are most clearly apparent in their
grotesque, metamorphic female bodies. While the beetle can metamorphose between an attractive
young female, an ugly old oriental man and a gigantic scarab, the goddess alters between an inanimate
oriental idol, a clockwork torture device, and a female equivalent of Jack the Ripper. The paper seeks
to establish the boundary between sensations of fear and desire the bodies of the two monsters
provoke. It examines the monsters‘ impact on the physical and psychical state of the novels‘ British
protagonists, noting differences between male and female responses to them. In the process, the paper
discusses the potential reaction of the novels‘ implied contemporary readership, offering insights into
the popularity of urban gothic fiction at the fin de siècle.
[email protected]
“Can‟t you hear her? She‟s laughing now!”: Laughter, contagion, and the horror of
disembodiment in Richard Marsh‟s The Goddess: A Demon, Mackenzie Bartlett, Birkbeck
My paper will begin by arguing that the conflation of laughter and humour that has
characterised many scholarly studies over the past three decades has tended to overlook laughter‘s
history as a biological phenomenon affiliated with degeneration, hysteria, and death. Drawing upon
the theories of Herbert Spencer, George Vasey, and James Sully, I will suggest that in order to
understand the many conflicting perceptions of laughter in the late nineteenth century we must move
beyond the paradigm that equates laughter with comedy. Although there can be no doubt that
laughter‘s ability to relieve stress and even pain was widely recognised at this time (after all, both
laughing gas and the ―relief theory‖ of laughter were nineteenth-century innovations), I want to draw
attention to laughter‘s dark side to better understand why so many medical studies and popular fiction
produced in this period are fascinated by laughter‘s function as an expression of fear, malevolence, and
insanity. Laughter’s highly observable physical manifestations made it an intriguing subject for
nineteenth-century physiologists and physiognomists, but my paper will focus on laughter’s less
tangible aural qualities in order to consider its links to spiritualism, psychology, and sound
technologies. Through a close reading of Richard Marsh‘s The Goddess: A Demon (1900) alongside
references to his other popular Gothic stories, I will explore the relationships between such
fictionalised accounts of “disembodied laughter” and what Steve Connor has called a ―phenomenology
of disembodiment‖ formed in the late nineteenth century.
Little is known about Marsh‘s biography, but his enormous body of work nevertheless offers a
valuable source of information about late Victorian culture not only because it comments on the
diverse and oft-debated ideas about gender, empire, psychology, and the occult, but also because it
reveals much about the period‘s comedic sensibilities. Laughter occurs as both a dramatic device and a
source of playfulness in much of Marsh‘s popular fiction, but nowhere does it resonate more than in
The Goddess: A Demon. As laughter echoes and reverberates throughout this novel, it takes on ghostly
qualities that link it to theories of spiritualism and the occult, yet its pathological potential is
simultaneously suggested by its ability to enter the bodies and minds of others through the passive
receptacle of the ear, much like an infectious disease transmitted through the air. Complicating these
ideas further is the fact that the goddess‘s laughter is ultimately attributed to a phonograph in a
conclusion that imaginatively interweaves the acoustic innovations of the late nineteenth century with
the discourses and practices of spiritualism. My paper will close with references to other examples of
late Victorian Gothic fiction in order to demonstrate that the variety of overlapping, fluctuating
meanings highlighted by moments of laughter in these texts suggest new ways of understanding the
interplay between late Victorian medical sciences and cultural conceptions of emotion.
4
Judith Halberstam, ‘Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Victorian Studies, 36.3 (Spring 1993),
333-52 (pp. 334, 337).
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[email protected]
E) Horror and the Supernatural
A Fragment of (Spiritual) Life: Arthur Machen, Awe, and Evil, Nick Freeman, Loughborough
University
After some years of unrewarding toil, Arthur Machen became, albeit briefly, a literary celebrity when
The Great God Pan appeared in John Lane‘s Keynotes series in 1894, followed by The Three
Impostors the year after. As the novels were undeniably Gothic in content and published by John Lane
either side of Wilde‘s downfall, they have typically been read either as horror fiction or, as has been
more recently the case, as another incarnation of English literary decadence. Little attention has
therefore been paid to Machen‘s own views of his work, particularly the ways in which he lamented
Pan‘s substitution of ‗evil‘ for the intended ‗awe‘. Machen‘s twin reputations as a decadent writer who
dabbled with forbidden knowledge, and a down-to earth Fleet Street journalist with a fondness for
porter and steak pie, have occluded another, very different author; one whose work was deeply
informed by Christian spirituality and mystical tradition.
This paper will consider some of Machen‘s less familiar fiction, chiefly the vignettes, Ornaments in
Jade, the novella, ‗A Fragment of Life‘ and his two stories about the Holy Grail, ‗The Great Return‘
and The Secret Glory in an exploration of notions of awe and awfulness in his work. It will examine
the ways in which Celtic Christianity merged with ideas from ritual magic and classical paganism as
Machen sought to devise a language able to bear the full weight of his spiritual vision.
[email protected]
Leaving Darwin Behind? Transcending Body, Mind and Soul through the Occult in Edward
Bulwer-Lytton‟s A Strange Story, Marta Miquel-Baldellou, University of Lleida
She turned away her face, and resigned to me in silence.
(Bulwer-Lytton, A Strange Story, Harper’s Weekly 5 (23
November 1861): 783). Wood engraving by John McLenan.
Scanned image by Phillip V. Allingham.
Courtesy of the Victorian Web.
After publishing the Caxton series of domestic novels, Edward Bulwer-Lytton returned to the
supernatural genre, many years after Zanoni, envisioning the occult phantasy piece of A Strange Story
in his last artistic phase. Bulwer-Lytton expressed his doubts about the intelligibility of his novel in his
letters both to John Forster and Charles Dickens, claiming that the general public might not understand
the occult scenes contained in A Strange Story, mainly intended as metaphors underlining its core
philosophy. After its first publication in Dickens‘ All Year Around, early unfavourable reviews urged
Bulwer-Lytton to include a brief explanatory preface in the two-volume book edition. In this note,
Bulwer-Lytton argued that Pierre Maine de Biran‘s materialism (1766-1824) involved meaningful
changes in European thought at the end of the eighteenth-century. As a disciple of Etienne Bonnot de
Condillac‘s doctrine, Biran added the concept of free will and self-consciousness to Condillac‘s
materialism, thus uniting ―mind‖ with ―matter‖. Biran still felt some hidden, though, existing reality
lacked explanation within the realms of matter and mind, thus proposing a third sphere of human nature
which he identified as ―the soul‖. In this respect, he claimed there were three orders of faculties ideally
in accord and harmony with each other characterising human nature.
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In A Strange Story, envisioned as a romance in favour of the supernatural, Bulwer-Lytton aimed
at conducting his hero Allen Fenwick toward the belief in the soul. In clear paralellism with Biran‘s
intellectual growth, Fenwick must learn to transcend body and mind to reach the life of the spirit.
Through his novel, Bulwer-Lytton attempted to redeem Fenwick through spiritual reeducation thus
refuting Darwin‘s theory of evolution, published only two years before A Strange Story, in favour of
Christianity. Nevertheless, Bulwer-Lytton employs science - Maine de Biran, Bacon, Newton and Davy
are mentioned in footnotes - to analyse the human soul and ultimately reinforce Christianity‘s moral
authority. To that effect, Bulwer envisioned the main characters in A Strange Story as types. Margrave,
unscrupulous doctor and Fenwick‘s rival, represents the sensuous principle of physicality and
materialism. Fenwick, according to Bulwer-Lytton, arises as the type of the intellect divorced from the
spiritual, while Lilian, the novel‘s heroine, incarnates the soul deprived of the intellect. Margrave‘s
constant reliance on matter condemns him to stifle physicality, Fenwick‘s blind belief in reason leads
him to fall into visionary mistakes, and Lilian‘s spiritual nature urges her to indulge in mystic ecstasies,
thus implying each character is need of each other. Interaction among these tripartite realities through
the melting, although chaotic, power of the occult and the supernatural involves a process of
transcendence and ageing through the discovery of the tripartite inherent character of human nature into
body, mind and soul. The process of ageing and the interaction among these trinity of faculties is also
reflected in the love-triangle established in the novel. In Victorian times, the ever-present issue of the
evolution of the human body as a result of Darwin‘s natural selection, the prevalence of the mind as a
legacy of the Enlightenment period, and the troublesome position of the soul as a result of the
questioning of Christian precepts are also tackled and evaluated in Bulwer-Lytton‘s A Strange Story. It
is the aim of this paper to analyse the way Victorian ideals of mind, body and soul are reflected and
transcended by Bulwer-Lytton‘s vision through both his metaphorical use of the occult and the
archetypal characters‘ process of ageing.
[email protected]
Constance Naden, Hylo-Idealism, and the Supernatural, Nour Alarabi, University of Leicester
Constance Caroline Woodhill Naden was born at a time when the ferocity of the battle between science
and religion was reaching its peak with the publication of Darwin‘s The Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection in 1859. Despite her upbringing by devout Baptist grandparents, Naden was drawn to
science and philosophy over religion. Her early writings were mainly poetry; however, her later works
concentrated only on science and philosophy and she came up with her theory of Hylo-Idealism.
According to this theory, each human has a different perception of the world, depending on how each
individual mind understands the codes it receives from its surrounding environment. The human mind
is able to understand the world only through the senses and anything that the senses cannot perceive is
unknown to the human. For this reason, most Victorians regarded Naden as a scientist rather than a
poet. She herself decided to dedicate her life to the study of science and philosophy: ‗Her great aim
was to become, not a poet, but a student of philosophy and teacher of ethics. Poetry had gradually
become to her more or less a recreation‘, her former teacher Lapworth informs us5.
Despite this clear attraction to science, Naden was interested in mysticism and the supernatural,
especially in the writings of James Hinton and in Rev. R.A. Vaughan‘s ‗Hours with the Mystics‘ 6, a
fact that modern Naden scholars tend to ignore. This is reflected in the way in which Naden‘s early
poetry tries to reach equilibrium between the natural and the supernatural. It contains reminiscences of
past ages when science was united with spirituality. It brings the reader back to the times of Roman
sages and prudent druids as opposed to fanatical Christian priests. Naden found the supernatural in
nature itself, but it was not similar to Newton‘s theories or to ‗Natural Theology‘ of the NineteenthCentury. Her god had nothing in common with the Christian God; her god was living inside the mind
and he was her link with nature: ‗In these grey thought-cells lives the God who says, ―Let there be
5
Chas. Lapworth, ‘Introduction’, Constance Naden: A Memoir, ed. William R. Hughes, London: (Bickers & Son,
1890), p xviii
6
William R. Hughes, Constance Naden: A Memoir, p11
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light,‖ and there is light‘7. Using poems like ‗the Astronomer‘, ‗The Last Druid‘, and ‗The Carmelite
Nun‘, my proposed paper will prove that Naden, despite her claims of the unimportance of the
supernatural for the scientist, had actually sought, and was able to find the supernatural in the natural.
God dwelt in the mind, and the whole world outside was an extension of this mind. Her attack on
religion in her poetry was not out of her sheer materialism, or out of antagonism to the supernatural,
but rather out of her belief that the doctrines of Christianity, as she perceived them, were opposed to
this element of the supernatural in nature.
[email protected]
Psychic touches: physical manifestations of the supernatural in Algernon Blackwood and William
Hope Hodgson, Emily Alder, Napier University
The psychic detective, or doctor, stories of the late nineteenth century blended psychic and
supernatural mysteries with the systematic and empirical approach of the rational investigator. One of
the first was Sheridan Le Fanu's Dr Hesselius. Following in his footsteps, Algernon Blackwood's John
Silence and William Hope Hodgson's Thomas Carnacki appeared in the 1900s and were strongly
influenced by spiritualist and occult ideas circulating in the late nineteenth century.
This paper traces the relationship between the physical and the psychical touch in the supernatural
mysteries of Blackwood and Hodgson. Visually, supernatural occurrences are manifested as bodily
parts: a 'monstrous hand', a giant hoof, or a pair of 'gargantuan lips' in the Carnacki stories 'The
Gateway of the Monster', 'The Horse of the Invisible', and 'The Whistling Room'; in Blackwood, the
dark 'Countenance' of the first John Silence story, 'A Psychical Invasion', or the 'burning feet' of 'The
Wendigo' (in which the
psychic doctor part is loosely played by Dr Cathcart). The physical intrusion of the supernatural is an
act of touching between worlds, creating a rupture which requires a psychic detective, who can bridge
the gap, to seal it again. In these mysteries, evidence is liminal. The known worlds of these stories have
permeable boundaries across which unseen, supernatural evidence manifests itself, leaving behind
physical traces: footprints, injuries, noises, smells. Psychic detectives use their senses in detecting the
evidence needed to solve the mystery. This is evidence they can see and touch, but also evidence they
can only sense or feel. The value of the evidence provided by these psychic touches can only be
interpreted alongside physical evidence, so that the nature of reality or truth is always called into
question.
The ambivalence displayed over the interpretation of evidence suggests a reluctance to admit or accept
that scientific explanation can account for all experience. Sherlock Holmes 'brought detection as near
as an exact science as it ever will be' (A Study in Scarlet). By contrast, for the psychic detective the
discourses of materialism and supernaturalism can coexist safely. He is gifted with abilities that allow
him to negotiate both physical and supernatural evidence. The scientific approach allows the detective
to unravel the mystery of the haunting, but keeps intact the mystery of the thing that haunts. In this way
these stories attempt to steer a path between these two conflicting worldviews.
[email protected]
F) Victorian Aesthetes: Writing Feeling
Feeling in fiction: intellectualizing emotion in Amy Levy‟s formal aesthetic, Richa Dwor,
University of Nottingham
In 1884, the young poet and novelist Amy Levy wrote of Henry James: ‗Certainly he makes us see a
great many things, but we should see them better if we could feel them as well.‘ Levy spoke for a
certain kind of aesthetic that derided any perceived self-consciousness of form, and argued that in
7
Constance Naden, ‘Hylo-Idealism: The Creed of the Coming Day’, Humanism versus Theism ,or Solipsism
[Egoism] = Atheism, Robert Lewins, London :( Freethought Publishing Company, 1887), 7
12
drawing attention to this aspect of their work, authors neglected the more important tasks of ensuring
readers‘ enjoyment and their engagement through emotion that would result in moral instruction
alongside entertainment. Feeling, then, becomes central to a debate regarding the uses of fiction and
the nature of its readership. This apparent conflict between emotion and intellect invokes contemporary
debates in religion and psychology. In an 1876 article in the Fortnightly Review, GH Lewes writes that
the best means of reconciling ‗terrified repugnance‘ towards matter and ‗contemptuous rejection‘ of
spirit is to conceive of both as part of the same phenomenon – a phenomenon that is manifested
objectively in the physical world, and ‗subjectively in terms of feeling‘. Experiencing feeling or
affection in response to matter, then, is one way of restoring spirituality to the physical world, and
accounting for these instances of feeling becomes a way of learning about matter. The ethical
implication of this dualism is that sympathetic understanding is achieved by recognizing the limits of
one‘s own perspective and accepting that other modes of seeing may exist. This treatment of
perspective may be played out in fiction, except for a formal approach in which, as Levy notes, these
limitations in seeing are overruled in favour of analysis so detailed that no gap exists which may be
subject to interpretation via emotion.
Levy‘s response can be positioned in relation to contemporary debates, but it can also be
linked to her identity as a Jewish author; she invokes a particularly Jewish epistemology in which
intellect and exegesis open the way to emotional spiritualism. In linking feeling to a literary aesthetic,
Levy attempts to recuperate emotion as a response with intellectual value. In this way, she intervenes
in a secular debate in psychology in order to make claims about the role of fiction in generating
meaning through emotion. Levy‘s relationship with Judaism was largely ambivalent, but her approach
to novel-writing is firmly opposed to the innovations represented by Henry James. Her critique of
formalist fiction comes at an important moment in the transition to modernism, in which advocates of
classical realism made themselves heard, and in so doing articulated the characteristics of this style,
and identified formal strategies that might profoundly undermine the centrality of feeling to the
transmission of meaning and enjoyment. Levy‘s particular approach forces the inclusion of race and
nationalism into a discussion about tensions between feeling and form.
[email protected]
Walter Pater‟s aesthetic escape from “the tyranny of the senses”, Kate J. Hext, University of Exeter
Walter Pater carefully satiated his own desire for innocuous sensation with a bowl of rose petals on his
desk and a bowl of fresh orange peel on his window sill. Yet in his aesthetic philosophy sensation is
seldom this simple. It is hopelessly desired and evoked as a liberating experience, but it is also
censured because of its capacity to conquer and possess the individual, becoming a ‗tyranny‘ or ‗―a
band of madmen‖‘ to torture him. The subject of this paper is Pater‘s tussle with these conceptions of
sensation.
Perhaps one should stress at the outset that scant attention has been paid directly to Pater‘s troubled
evocations of sensation. Prominent critics, such as Dellamora and Leighton, have but noted Paterian
sensuality before passing onto other concerns, indicating a shared impression that we all understand its
nature and need not enquire further. This is just not so.
Pater is at odds with the implications of his own assertion that ‗[t]o burn always with this hard, gemlike flame and to maintain that ecstasy is success in life.‘ His impetuous provocation, in The
Renaissance, to ‗grasp,‘ ‗see and touch,‘ ‗that which we will hardly have time to make theories about‘
affirms a vision of intense, fleeting sensation liberated from the strictures of morality. However, in his
later works, ‗A Study of Dionysus‘ and Plato and Platonism, Pater returns to explore the destructive
excess of sensual ‗ecstasy‘ as it tortures the insatiable subject and obscures the distinction between
good and evil. The final image of Dionysus‘ body torn to pieces vividly symbolizes the selfannihilating effects of this. This paper argues that it is aesthetic experience that comes to assuage this
tyrannical dichotomy by sublimating sensation into the purely imaginative and ideal. Certainly, it is art
that offers Pater an escape: ‗the spectacle of supreme works of art,‘ he writes, ‗takes from the life of the
senses something of its turbid fever.‘ This becomes fundamental to the definition of later Paterian
sensation, as he revises his aesthetic in Marius the Epicurean and Plato and Platonism.
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As this paper explores and expands these points, it reaches beyond the now familiar parameters of
queer theory to situate Pater‘s evocation of homoerotic sensation within a philosophical context where
individualism and the limits of excess are central. It questions how Pater problematizes the empirical
imperatives of David Hume and Epicurus, how Pater conceives the epistemology of sensation, and it
discusses how we may understand Pater‘s relationship with sensation in terms of other aesthetes he
influenced, such as Wilde and Symons.
[email protected]
The Raiments of Pleasure: Pater Inside and Out, Laurel Brake, Birkbeck
This is a paper about one aspect of the configurations of pleasure in texts by Walter Pater -- how inner
feeling, corporeality, and emotion are elaborated in writerly attention to externalised appurtenances of
the body and character, such as dress and personal possessions. Like the flaneur‘s gaze, Pater‘s
authorial strategy claims to harvest pleasure promiscuously without personal perturbation,
involvement, implication, or judgment.
Plot in Pater‘s work often draws on classical or historical models for its implicit justification, and it has
been commonly recognised in Pater‘s lifetime and ours, as one of the principle tactics in his texts that
embeds the representation of feeling. Like plot, raiment – one of Pater‘s emotion-weighted words for
dress – appears ‗objective‘ and, like action, solid, but raiment is more recognisably freighted with
traces of authorial emotion, pleasure, and the writer‘s imagination. Pater‘s imaginative construction of
the dress of his fictional characters will be considered in the context of discourses about male fashion
in his day, verbal and visual, as well as in reference to literature of the recent past such as that by
Huysmans. The expression of pleasure in dress in works of Wilde, Beerbohm and Beardsley indicate
suggestive parallels.
[email protected]
Vernon Lee and the Search for Collaborative “Aesthetic Sociability”, Kirsty Bunting, University of
Birmingham
I propose a presentation on the incommunicability of individual aesthetic feeling and art-response. I
focus upon the strategies devised by Vernon Lee in order to share her art-gallery experiences with her
collaborator, Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, and with readers of their 1897 essay ―Beauty and
Ugliness‖, which expounded the theory that the viewer undergoes a series of involuntary physical and
emotional reactions when in the presence of affecting visual stimuli. Their embodied style of art
criticism results in a text which not only critiques the art object but also provides an intimate portrait of
the bodies and feelings of the critics during the ―aesthetic moment‖.
My paper will begin by (briefly) situating their work against the Paterian assertion that all emotional,
bodily or aesthetic experience is ultimately incommunicable, rendering the art critic an isolated,
―solitary prisoner [in his] own dream of a world‖ (The Renaissance). Having established this I will go
on to demonstrate the central argument of my paper: that Vernon Lee‘s career in aesthetics was
motivated by her desire to achieve shared ―aesthetic sociability‖, and thus overcome what she called
the ―perfect agony‖ of artistic isolation (Laurus Nobilis).
I will illustrate my paper with reference to critically overlooked passages from ―Beauty and
Ugliness‖ in which the collaborators describe achieving, if only fleetingly, one ecstatic moment of
aesthetic merger, both with the art work they gaze upon (Titian‘s ―Sacred and Profane Love‖) and,
crucially, with each other. My paper will draw out the significance of this moment and of this
particular painting to their aesthetic theories, collaborative life and private relationship.
This paper will be illustrated with images from ―Beauty and Ugliness‖ and is informed by my
research in the Vernon Lee archive held at Colby College, Maine, USA. This paper directly addresses
the conference‘s interest in collective, social experiences and the expression of personal and
intersubjective feeling in textual and visual culture, and explores the dynamics of touch, body and
emotion in the aesthetic experiments of Lee and her collaborator.
[email protected]
14
Tuesday 2nd September (Panels of 3 papers)
9-10.20 Panels 2
A) Race and the Representation of Othered Bodies
“Doll People”: Sensibility and Insensibility in Victorian Representations of the Japanese, Jenny
Holt, Meiji University, Tokyo
Of all the analogies used by Westerners through history to describe non-European peoples,
perhaps one of the most confusing is the representation of Japan and its inhabitants as a doll-land
inhabited by doll people which emerged in Victorian travel writing following the forcible opening up
of Japan in the 1850s. The doll analogy was inspired by the discovery that during the Edo period
(1603-1863) Japan had developed a sophisticated industry constructing dolls for ceremonial and
theatrical use, some of which were highly engineered and contained the elements of modern robotics.
This doll culture was not confined to little girls or fashion houses, but was embraced by young and old
of both genders. Westerners responded by stereotyping Japan as a nation of dolls living in ephemeral
dollhouses of wood and paper, a representation that differs strikingly from Victorian depictions of
other non-Europeans. Whereas colonized peoples, supposedly in a state of evolutionary backwardness,
were often represented as hyper-sensual, motivated by feelings not reason and enslaved to base
physical drives, the image of the doll-nation represents the Japanese as the opposite. Although
Japanese dolls, in a triumph of craftsmanship over raw materials, were lacquered to simulate warm
flesh, they were wooden, cold and hard to the touch; and of course, being dolls, they had no feelings.
Naturally, scholars have interpreted the representation of the Japanese as a nation of living
dolls as a typically Orientalist strategy to define non-Westerners on Western terms. In particular,
feminists have remarked on how the Japanese woman when represented as a doll becomes the ultimate
passive 'other', unable to answer back to the (usually male) Western observer, who may ascribe to her
any feelings he chooses. Using the Japanese doll-woman as representative of her nation also rendered
Japan less threatening, especially in the face of its rapid industrial and military development. The
implication was that although Japan might rival the west technologically, this was compensated for by
emotional deficiency. This stereotype of the Japanese as doll-like automata contrasted with other,
equally uncomfortable (and usually non-Victorian) images of Japan as a land of easy virtue and
physical gratification, and the two stereotypes persist today.
Although representing a nation in terms of its dolls is inherently derogatory, however, this
discourse also prompted more thoughtful considerations of cultural ideas of feeling. For example,
Lafcadio Hearn turned the analogy on its head, depicting the Japanese belief that dolls had souls and
feelings as evidence of an understanding of the material world that involved a more profound grasp of
human emotion than Christianity permitted. Similarly, when the Japanese doll industry entered
Western markets, consumers bought a representation of East Asian identity that was not produced by
Westerners, and writers, observing children interacting with these figures, began to rethink ideas of
race, emotion and interracial feeling. In this paper, I will discuss these various responses to the
Japanese doll analogy and the way Victorian writers tackled ideas about human feeling and the
question of how different cultures express and communicate these feelings.
[email protected]
Defining the Anglo-Indian body: consuming and being consumed in the political satire of British
India, Máire ní Fhlathúin, University of Nottingham
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a compelling, albeit contested, narrative of Britain‘s
exploitation of India emerged from the public debate surrounding the impeachment of Warren
Hastings, lately its Governor-General. Burke‘s and Sheridan‘s speeches on that occasion used
sentimental images of traumatized Indian bodies in order to provoke in their audience a pitying or
empathetic response, with the aim of mobilizing public opinion against Hastings and his associates.
The resulting depiction of colonizer / colonized interactions was centred on the familiar trope of the
‗Nabob‘, a figure both consuming and consumed by India, depleting the land of its wealth while his
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own British identity was simultaneously eroded and compromised by contact with it. A later generation
of colonial administrators adopted different policies, deploying the political and social rhetoric of
progress and civilization to legitimize the increasingly powerful British regime‘s expansion across the
sub-continent. Alongside this discourse, however, the older rhetoric of consumption persisted, chiefly
visible not in the public or political narratives of inter-cultural contact, but in the marginal, and often
overlooked, literary texts appearing in the periodicals and small-press publications of British India.
Within these texts, the imagery of predation and consumption inherited from Burke takes on new
significance against a background of recurring famine in India, and persistent concern about the extent
to which it was caused, and/or might be ameliorated, by British activity.
This paper examines a selection of poetry and prose from these publications, focusing primarily on
material published 1818-1857. This includes the political satire appearing in periodicals such as the
Calcutta Journal, and the works produced by a later generation of writers associated with the annuals
and literary periodicals of the 1830s and 1840s. It concentrates on those texts written in a comic or
satirical idiom, the prevalent mode of conscious self-representation employed at this time by the
writers of British India. It argues that these writers‘ main subject, whether overtly or by implication,
was the ‗three bodies‘ of Anglo-India: the body politic of the British state; the material bodies of its
subjects, both colonizing and colonized; and the social body of the Anglo-Indian community. The work
they produced was a literature of extremes, oscillating between an impulse towards desire and
possession of the other, and an abiding fear of the loss of self. This is a familiar dynamic in colonial
literature, often finding expression in narratives of sexual attraction between colonizer and colonized.
In the texts under scrutiny, sexuality is supplemented, if not replaced, as a topic by the motif of food
and its consumption. In Freudian terms, the comic depiction of eating and being eaten permits a
narcissistic assertion of invulnerability in response to the experience of a material and psychic threat to
the self.
[email protected]
Of Pigtails and Pain: Representations of Chinese Torture in Victorian Literature, Ross G. Forman,
National University of Singapore
This paper analyzes the discourses on torture present in Victorian popular fiction and drama about
China. This literature, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, picks up on both on the
association of torture with the notions of the barbarity of the ―semi-civilized‖ and on the titillating
spectacle of the body in pain. When the victims are British (generally tortured at the hands of
nefarious or mutinous ―Chinamen‖), these tales use torture as a way to embody British superiority in
terms of familiar tropes of endurance, pluck, and self-sacrifice. When the victims are Chinese, torture
becomes a signal of the mismanagement of the Chinese state, its callous attitude towards its citizens,
and its misunderstanding of the need for commensurability between crime and punishment.
In both cases, irrational and inhumane violence become the hallmarks of Chinese behavior in much the
same way that images of widow immolation and the juggernaut came to characterize the disturbing
brutality of the Indian populations that were just coming under direct British rule during this period.
As such, these narratives draw parallels between Britain‘s role as the formal colonial power in India
and its aspirations to be a colonizer in China. Although not necessarily foregrounding a ―civilizing
mission‖ as a justification for a programme of action against the local populations or espousing a
notion of equivalent human rights for Chinese and Britons, these narratives do use tropes of torture to
justify British intervention in various conflicts, such as the Boxer Rebellion (1900) and the Kuching
Massacre (1895) and the earlier Taiping Rebellion (1850-64). Moreover, this vision of torture and its
connection to the semi-barbaric nature both of the Chinese state and the Chinese people taps in to an
Orientalizing discourse of medievalism, which presented a society with forms of honor, morality, and
punishment that were no longer extant in Europe in the age of industrial capitalism.
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In reviewing the complex way in which these narratives establish the relationship between individual
bodies and state or (idolatrous) Buddhist control over them, the paper will examine the different kinds
of torture that crop up, including the infamous water torture. It will also cover the cangue, which was
worn around the neck of the victim and was seen as the most uniquely Chinese form of torture.
Finally, the paper will discuss several narratives in which Britons are imprisoned in cages and then
exhibited, a sub-genre of the Chinese torture tale which reverses the gaze of many metropolitan
anthropological exhibitions with human subjects and which predicts the myriad post-Vietnam War
films with their imprisoned soldier motifs.
Sources will include G.A. Henty‘s With the Allies to Pekin (1901), M. Bird‘s Lao-ti the Celestial,
James Cox‘s ―Caught and Caged,‖ which appeard in the Boy’s Own Paper in 1884, and the Fred
Edmonds and Edgar Turner‘s comic opera Yung-shai (1898).
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B) Wilde Emotions
Having a Heart of Stone: Wildean Parodies of Affect and Sentiment, Ruth Robbins, Leeds
Metropolitan University
Reviewing The Importance of Being Earnest shortly after its first performance in February 1895,
George Bernard Shaw described Wilde‘s play as ‗heartless‘. He was the one major dissenting voice in
a run of criticism which had largely surrendered to the play‘s display of verbal wit interlaced with more
physical farce. ‗Heartless‘ is, of course, an ambiguous judgement. Its primary connotation is of a
drama that demands no emotional response from its audience But it may also mean that it is a pointless
drama – it has no heart because it has no ‗matter‘, no significant issue, to be considered (or in Shaw‘s
terms, perhaps, raises no political point for consideration). And the latter meaning suggests the ways in
which Wilde was moving away from the conventions of the well-made play which he had exploited
with such aplomb in his earlier West End successes.
What I want to suggest in this paper is the question of influence alongside Wilde‘s subtle (and
not so subtle) parodies of his various sources. While Earnest appears to be a world away from the
aesthetic and aestheticist concerns of Walter Pater, with their seriousness (earnestness?) and emphasis
on affect (‗to know one‘s impression as in itself it really is‘, which is Pater‘s revision of Arnold‘s
famous dictum), the play in fact focuses on the subversion (inversion, and perhaps even perversion) of
the world of stereotyped emotions which Pater was also at pains to reject as inadequate in his famous
‗Conclusion‘ to Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Or, to put it another way, Wilde‘s play plays
on genre, which is all about expectations after all.
In the play, the codes of the genre of the well-made play are sent up. So are codes of propriety
in behaviour; and so, too are the codes of polite linguistic forms in epigrams, paradoxes and simply
devastating rudeness. It does not so much attempt to make an easily legible political case through
simple satire as to present a series of banana skins which trip the unwary audience, as they often trip
the audience‘s representative on the stage, Jack Worthing. The response provoked is laughter – this
feels funny. But the point is more serious: the codes are empty signifiers because they are stereotyped,
repeated, unfelt. It is not the drama itself that is heartless but the codes, the audience, the genres, the
truisms and platitudes it exposes.
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Oscar Wilde‟s Emotionalist Psychology, Nazia Parveen, University of Leicester
Oscar Wilde is one of the foremost emotionalist theorists of the Victorian period. Take for instance his
notion that ‗...emotional forces like the forces of the physical sphere, are limited in extent and energy.
One can feel so much, and no more.‘ Or his theory that ‗...faithfulness to the emotional life is what
consistency is to the life of the intellect- a confession of failure‘, and not forgetting one of his more
striking statements: ‗To have a capacity for a passion and not to realise it, is to make one self
incomplete and limited.‘ These quotations are a select few from Wilde whose aesthetic philosophy
rests on the principle that ‗...emotion is the aim of art...‘ Wilde had been ridiculed for his passionate
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moods in the pages of the Pall Mall Gazette, and was condemned by critics for the display of excessive
‗effeminate frivolity‘ in The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is not surprising that critics have failed to see
past the stereotyped image of the ‗dandy‘, or listen to Wildean wisdom with any sense of seriousness.
Nevertheless, as I will argue in this paper Wilde is no less than a psychologist of the emotions.
Whilst at Oxford, Wilde had studied a wide range of psychologists and philosophers such as Alexander
Bain, J. S Mill, and W. K Clifford. Perhaps, most significantly, Wilde had been taught by Walter Pater,
another connoisseur of feeling, whose injunction ‗to witness the spectacle of life with the appropriate
emotions‘ left an impression on Wilde evident throughout his oeuvre. In his Oxford notebooks, Wilde
maintained that all changes of matter are modes of motion. While physicists of the era explored matter
and force in empirical terms, Wilde was in the process of critiquing modern science because of its dire
inaptitude for investigating those modes of motion comprising the human disposition i.e. emotions. In
this paper, I re-position Wilde and place his oeuvre within the discourse of nineteenth century
psychology among the likes of psychologists Grant Allen and James Sully. The work of G. H Lewes
and John Tyndall also reverberates throughout Wilde‘s ideas. The eclectic nature of psychological
debate made it an area open to writers from divergent backgrounds. Moreover, the generalist
intellectual culture of the periodical press encouraged intellectual crossovers. Therefore, psychology
found an outlet in multiple magazines and periodicals like those to which Wilde contributed such as the
Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, and the Fortnightly Review.
Wilde‘s emotionalist psychology intricately binds together the aesthetic emotions evoked by the artobject with what Pater calls the individual ‗emotional metabolism‘. I will investigate Wildean
psychological concepts like ‗transference of emotion‘, faithlessness to the emotional life and the
incessant question asked by Wilde: ‗...what place has imagination and the emotions in science...‘? I
will demonstrate that Wilde‘s contribution to emotionalist psychology is no less important than that of
Allen‘s, Sully‘s or Bain‘s, the latter‘s theories were actually considered out of date by the end of the
century. Wilde however, continues to retain a stronghold on our feelings today.
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C) Sensational Bodies
“I hate him. No, I don‟t. . . I hate myself”: Wilkie Collins and the Anatomy of Hatred,
Mariaconcetta Costantini, G. d‟Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy
In the course of the nineteenth century, a constant negotiation of values became attached to
interpersonal relations. One main factor of change was social mobility. The rapid transformations of
class, gender, racial and economic roles brought about new social expectations, new psychical
experiences, and new modes of classifying the emotional impact that interpersonal exchanges had on
subjectivity.
The Victorians‘ redefinition of a culture of feeling is amply attested to in literature. In contrast
with their Romantic predecessors, nineteenth-century writers represented forms of ‗domesticated‘
emotionalism and explored the effects of antagonistic passions within a tightly-knit social structure.
Antisocial feelings were usually the consequence of the individual‘s failure to be incorporated into a
desired community. But the enmity generated by such failures rarely led to the questioning of
communal bonds. As proved by Victorian stories of fallen women, revengeful outcasts and demonic
lovers, rejected subjects were mostly described as unable to overcome their wish for belonging and
doomed to experience frustration and death.
A Victorian writer who consistently dramatised the clash between the individual and normative
society was Wilkie Collins. What marks the distinction of Collins‘s fiction is the challenge he posed to
deterministic social views. In some novels, he portrayed transgressive or resentful characters that
ultimately enjoy upward mobility, even though their integration is always dependent on their ability to
carry out self-revision. Any failure to gain mastery over their antagonistic feelings results in some kind
of self-inflicted death.
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My paper analyses Collins‘s fictionalisation of passional trajectories of anger-hatred-revenge.
Independent of the success or debacle of his characters‘ efforts to integrate, the epistemology of their
negative feelings is worth examining, since it reveals aspects of the age‘s sensibility and testifies to the
Victorians‘ ― and the author‘s ― growing curiosity about psychical life.
My intention is to examine Collinsian novels in which the anatomy of hatred configures the
inner social dynamic of the age. Although Collins‘s description of mental states and nervous
disabilities has been widely scrutinised, less attention has been paid to his representation of hatred and
of its correlated emotions (anger and revenge-wish). In particular, I will highlight the shift from the
simple passional trajectory outlined in Basil, in which Mannion‘s anger stems from a familial legacy of
marginalisation, to the complex crisis suffered by Lydia Gwilt, who is the textual pivot of multiple
contentious feelings. The plethora of contradictory meanings acquired by the word ―hatred‖ in
Armadale is not only an expression of Lydia‘s frustrated ambitions. It also points to experiences of
self-splitting and self-loathing that would become central in modern psychoanalysis. To detect the
functioning and the significance of such emotional schemes, I will use diverse theoretical approaches:
from the philosophical notions of old mystics (i.e. Thomas Aquinas, Al-Ghazzali) to Greimas‘s
taxonomies of passions, from Bakhtin‘s view of the pretender‘s impersonation to Kristeva‘s
conceptualisation of estrangement and abjection.
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“Seeing in this place”: Reading Blindness in Poor Miss Finch and Cassell‟s Magazine, Catherine
Delafield, University of Leicester
In 1869, Wilkie Collins began his three-year collaboration with the publishers Cassell, Petter and
Galpin who had courted him in the wake of the success of The Moonstone in All the Year Round.
Collins‘s next two novels, Man and Wife (1869-70) and Poor Miss Finch (1871-72) were serialized in
Cassell’s Magazine before it returned to the comparative safety of less controversial authors and
relaunched the title as Cassell’s Family Magazine. Both the novel and the magazine are concerned with
seeing. This paper examines ways in which the text of Poor Miss Finch in its original format presents
types of blindness and feeling in the novel, serial and domestic family magazine.
The interaction between serial and magazine, chapter and illustration is part of the original reading
experience of most of Collins‘s novels. In Poor Miss Finch, the representation of the characters is
heightened by the illustrations of a blind woman and of twin brothers one of whom, Miss Finch‘s
fiancé Oscar Dubourg, has a blue face. There are two interrelated narratives by Lucilla Finch‘s
companion Madame Pratolungo and by Lucilla herself. When her blindness is briefly cured, she
composes a diary. In presenting this independent narrative within her own, Madame Pratolungo insists
that ‗other eyes than hers ought to see it in its place‘.
The original reader of Poor Miss Finch in serial in the 1870s would ‗see in this place‘ a range of other
printed material which interacted with the narrative unfolding over 26 episodes. The instalments of the
novel occupy various stations within the magazine which influence the consumption and placement of
Collins‘s text. Where Miss Finch herself relies on others to do her reading of print for her, the reader of
her story has opportunities to contextualize the events of the novel through the poems, articles and
illustrations in which it is embedded. Poems called ‗A Veil‘ and ‗The Blind Sleeper‘ are published in
the issues containing episodes two and four of the novel. Later on in the serialization, when the cure of
Lucilla‘s blindness is attempted, the women of the poems - illustrated by a female artist - look directly
out from the cover of the magazine issues and their gaze is a counterpoint to the events within the
novel.
Lucilla also constructs her own serial by influencing others to see for her but she can escape their
interpretations through touch and emotion and through her engagement of the German oculist, Herr
Grosse who bears an uncanny resemblance - in Edward Hughes‘s illustrations - to Wilkie Collins
himself. Lucilla‘s method of seeing is to some extent replicated by the ways in which other women are
presented both in the serialization and in the illustrations which accompany the poems.
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This paper attempts to reconstruct the gaze of the novel‘s first readers, the domestic family recipients
of Cassell’s Magazine. The original text of Poor Miss Finch addresses an embodied experience of
seeing in the context of a reading of blindness.
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The Loss of Sense in Sensation Fiction: Delirium Tremens, Helen Forster, University of Glasgow
The representation of the human senses is central to sensation fiction. This paper examines
what happens when a human being in sensation fiction loses their sense, focussing in particular upon
the condition of delirium tremens and its impact upon the human body.
Alcohol featured heavily in the life of a Victorian British citizen: water was discovered to carry
the threat of cholera whereas ale did not. Randolph Churchill considered beer to be the ‗great national
drink, which sustains the powers, and invigorates, in times of exhaustion, our labouring population‘.
The benefit of drinking spirits was advocated by most medical practitioners, even in the treatment of
delirium tremens. The political agenda also involved alcohol. I shall examine contemporary Victorian
thought about alcohol, including political activity, the growing number of temperance writers,
Dickens‘ journalism and medical texts including those of Thomas Laycock, Thomas Sutton and
Alexander Peddie.
Characters in fiction who cannot control their feelings or senses often suffer from delirium
tremens: a fictional alternative to the Victorian asylum, frequently resulting in death. I shall consider
how alcohol and alcoholics are featured in Victorian sensation fiction: the characters it concerns, its
fictional representation, the language with which it is discussed and how it is often used as a
punishment. Texts I shall study include Ellen Wood‘s first novel, written for the temperance
movement, Danesbury House (1860), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon‘s lesser known novels, Eleanor’s
Victory (1863), Run to Earth (1867), The Cloven Foot (1879), The Golden Calf (1883) and Cut by the
County (1885).
Sensation fiction and the topic of alcohol in fiction have both received some critical
investigation over recent years. However, sensation fiction is not discussed in detail by critics with
reference to alcohol. Among the contributions I hope my research makes, is the examination of
sensation fiction‘s embodiment of delirium tremens in a historical context, alongside the contemporary
temperance debate and medical discussion.
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D) Urban Vibes
The Chromolithographers of Modern Life, Nicholas Daly, University College Dublin
In the 1860s there flourished a number of (somewhat) neglected popular artists, who brought
kaleidoscopically colourful images into shop-windows and domestic parlours through their illustrated
sheet music covers. The best-known of these lithographic artists is Alfred Concanen, but the work of
Spalding, Maguire, and Packer, among others, also stands out. Dynamic and witty, these images, like
the popular songs and tunes they accompany, are directly linked to the structures of feeling of midVictorian life, and connect the working-class world of the music-hall ―lion comique‖ to the bourgeois
home of the amateur pianist. In this paper I want to focus on the images of the modern city that
circulate in this form, and I want to argue that the ―feel‖ of urban life they convey through their
brightly coloured street scenes is quite different to the more sombre one that emerges in other media in
this period.
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Embodying the City in the Victorian Novel, Charlotte Mathieson, University of Warwick
―I got into the heart of city life. I saw and felt London at last […] To do this, and to do it utterly alone,
gave me, perhaps an irrational, but a real pleasure.‖ (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, Chapter VI).
The experience of spatiality and interpretations of the built environment were issues of growing
significance throughout the Victorian period; whilst the development of railways effected a shift in
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conceptual experiences of space and time, as well as facilitating movement from the country to the
city, the problems that resulted from growing levels of urban populations prompted widespread debate
about city spaces, bringing spatial awareness to the forefront of public concern. Although the city is not
an entirely new subject of the novel, it is frequently portrayed as a new phenomenon throughout the
period: novels such as Brontë‘s Villette, or Dickens‘ David Copperfield and Great Expectations, depict
protagonists coming into the city of London for the first time, and these literary representations of the
new spatial experience of the city frequently negotiate city spaces through the body. This paper will
explore how the city is interpreted through spatially embodied subjects, with particular interest in the
change effected by movement from the country to the city: how does the body adapt to a new spatial
experience and mediate the built environment? Elizabeth Grosz‘s essay ―Bodies-Cities‖ will provide a
starting point for this discussion, whilst work by Judith Walkowitz, Deborah Epstein Nord, and
Deborah L. Parsons will contribute to thinking about the positioning of bodies within gendered city
spaces. The paper will propose ways in which reading the interaction between the body and city spaces
offers new approaches to reading embodiment in the Victorian novel, emphasising the significance of
theorising embodiment within a spatial context.
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Passion and Compassion in the City Slums: Interchanging Feeling, Christina Murdoch, Glasgow
University
Focusing on Marcella (1895) by Mrs Humphry Ward, and Children of Circumstance (1894) by
Kathleen Mannington Caffyn (pseudonym Iota) my paper will explore, in the context of the late
nineteenth century phenomenon of ‗slumming‘, the connection between romantic love and sympathy
for the poor, and will demonstrate how these seemingly diverse emotions help strengthen one another.
Marcella and Children of Circumstance both have as their heroine a young beautiful woman who goes
to live in the London slums in the aftermath of problematic love affairs. Attempting to divert
themselves from their misery, they escape their homes, throw themselves into improving the lives of
the urban poor, and thus begin a new stage in their emotional development. Through their exposure to
the hardships of others, they undergo an emotional awakening and youthful selfishness is replaced by a
self-less desire to serve others.
These novels are products of the late nineteenth century belief
in the deepening of emotion that was considered by some to be taking place throughout modern
western civilisation, which resulted in greater sympathy and a surge in altruism, and was seen as the
cause in the great rise of charitable institutions and political organisation devoted to helping the poor.
Hence my paper will examine these novels in conjunction with texts by the leading authorities on the
evolution of feeling and its connection to the problem of poverty.
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E) Presenting the Male Body
Fine Physiques: The Strand Magazine and the Male Body c. 1891-1913, Jonathan Cranfield,
University of Kent
The Strand Magazine, throughout its time in print, maintained an extraordinary level of consistency in
both the form and the thematics of its articles. One of the key ideological supports to its writing was
the maintenance of a strongly bonded relationship between the individual body and the national body
which it re-enforced in several ways. Firstly it asserted a measure of control over individual body of
the reader by frequently publishing exercise and sporting regimens to which readers were encouraged
to conform. On a more serious level the magazine sought to preserve an image of society as a series of
processing systems that ―drew in‖ aberrant bodies (the poor, the sick, the criminal) and neutralised the
various threats posed by their aberrance. Official bodies (the police force, the army, the fire service) are
represented in the form of a fetishised male body: the embodiment of the reader‘s physical aspirations
which also becomes a coded object of physical desire.
The Strand‘s fundamentally middle-class ideology achieved its functionality through a complicated
network of occlusions and emphases that served to delimit and devalue expressions of intra-cultural
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specificity such as political dissidence, working-class culture and deviation from conservative
morality. The constant dismissal of the validity of cultural pluralism was based upon the establishment
of protection of unilateral models for being. So, for example, The Strand‘s fiction constantly negates
the role of sexual desire in forming marriages and asserts a model based upon financial and emotional
stability. In physical terms, though, the model ―body‖ is unerringly male; the model female body is
rarely discussed beyond the non-specific, un-embodied idea of beauty.
A 1902 article ―The Making of a Police-Man‖ typifies this valorisation of the male form.
The man who would be a constable in the Metropolitan Police must possess the following
qualifications […] he must stand 5ft. 9in. clear[…] be able to read and write legibly […] be
free from any bodily complaint whatsoever, of a strong constitution […] and particular as to
personal cleanliness.
(The Strand xxiii 387)
Prospective candidates for the force are depicted as above, naked but for their cloaks as they prepare
for their medicals. The article attempts to reinforce the bodily integrity of the candidates and also assert
their physical aptness for becoming part of the ‘official body‘ that forms a crucial link in the chain
between the individual, ―every-day‖ body of the reader and the ‗national body‘ in aggregate.
My research is geared towards engaging with the intricacies of the ideological concord that George
Newnes (the publisher of The Strand) forged with his readership and the ways in which this
contributed to Victorian middle-England‘s idea of itself. The role of the male body within this idea
allows for an examination both of the layout of The Strand (the deployment of photographs and
illustrations, for example) as well as close analysis of the writing itself (something which much of the
work on Victorian periodicals eschews in favour of broader thematic observations).
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Corporeal experience and the male adolescent body in W. M. Thackeray‟s Pendennis, Alice
Crossley, University of Leeds
Drawing on the newly-established traditions of the Bildungsroman form, W. M. Thackeray‘s
novel Pendennis delineates the youthful protagonist‘s struggle towards, and the supposed achievement
of, an adult identity. The realisation of this development is recognisable in other fiction of the period,
and is frequently founded on some acceptance of ideologies of social respectability, from ideas about
marriage to the codification and exercise of ―manliness‖ in social behaviour. Victorian writers can
sometimes tend toward a sublimation of attempted deviancy from these culturally-determined practices
in a display of mental exertion that must discipline the disobedient body.
In this paper I would like to examine the significance of the male body in Pendennis in relation
to adolescence. This will take into account the unusual emphasis placed on an appreciation of the
physical form in the medical treatise Elements of Science by George Drysdale, in comparison with
other physicians writing at the time and similarly engaging in a debate over the mind-body dialectic,
such as William Acton and William Pratt. I would also like to raise some aspects of corporeal
experience in Pendennis, which contribute to Thackeray‘s creation of a character concerned with the
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visual impact of his own body and its physiological sensations that donate to his sense of growth and
developing self-knowledge, such as an emphasis on fashion, performance and dandyism; physiological
responses to emotional attachments with other characters; and the literal figuring of the adolescent
body in relation to both private and social environments. The purpose of this study would be to identify
and interrogate the implications of Thackeray‘s treatment of male adolescence in this novel as a
movement towards an acceptance of the male body at its most obviously sexually-fraught period of
development.
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“The coat…fitted him easily and loosely like the character of an old crony; it was as if it had grown
up with him, and had expanded with his girth” (Arnold Bennett, Clayhanger): Dress and the Male
Body in the novels of Arnold Bennett, Rosy Aindow, University of Nottingham
Writing at the very end of the Victorian period, Arnold Bennett‘s novels are firmly rooted in
nineteenth-century aesthetics. Bennett‘s faithful adherence to the dictates of realism will be reexamined in this paper, with particular reference to his conception of male dress and the body. In
novels such as A Man from the North (1898) and Anna of the Five Towns (1902), the way in which
garments touch and cover these bodies plays an important role in formulating the emotional and
physical development of his male characters. A concern with dress is traditionally evoked in Victorian
culture as a distinctly feminine characteristic (a theme reflected in its fiction) and as a result, male
dress is often overlooked. Building on the work of John Harvey (Men in Black, Reaktion, 1995) and
cultural historians such as Christopher Breward (The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and
City Life 1860-1914, Manchester University Press, 1999) this paper will develop new readings of male
dress in light of a shift in location from the city to the provinces. Whilst Bennett‘s garments serve to
highlight familiar concerns such as class hierarchies, they also draw attention to the much more
personal role played by dress in shaping contemporary notions of masculinity. In Bennett‘s work, the
interaction between skin and cloth is troped as an important episode in the journey to adulthood. As
this paper will explore, this has significant implications for Victorian literature more generally, where
the relationship between male dress and the body often embodies broader concerns with generational
ties.
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F) Touch and Knowledge: Object Lessons and Physical Records
“The Ruling Passion”: Fossil Bodies and the Tactile Imagination, Adelene Buckland, University of
Cambridge
When Mrs. Badger in Bleak House (1853) remembers her late husband‘s passion for geology, her
characterisation of both her husband and his science is one of tactile encounter with the scientific
object: ‗People objected to Professor Dingo when we were staying in the north of Devon after our
marriage‘, she tells Esther Summerson, ‗that he disfigured some of the houses and other buildings by
chipping off fragments of those edifices with his little geological hammer. But the professor replied
that he knew of no building save the Temple of Science.‘ Even in his last illness, we are told, ‗(his
mind wandering) he insisted on keeping his little hammer under the pillow and chipping at the
countenances of the attendants. The ruling passion!‘
The image of a man so dedicated to the pursuit of science that he transforms buildings and the
bodies of his servants into geological objects comically captures the viscerally tactile, embodied nature
of the new science of geology in the Victorian period. Unlike evolutionary biology, for example,
geology‘s rocks, fossils, and strata –dug up, exchanged, traded and displayed – meant that it was a
science as much experienced as seen. But it was also a science whose objects were radically displaced
from the pasts they represented: not only was the fossil record notoriously incomplete, but the layers of
rock beneath the earth‘s surface were faulted, fractured and dislocated almost beyond comprehension.
Furthermore, though a fossil usually records the skeletal composition of a plant or animal, it rarely
preserves information about the colour, external appearance, and or soft matter such as skin and
organs. Interpreting the earth‘s past through the objects which had survived deep time was to be a
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strong test not only of the Victorian capacity to imagine, but also of its ability – quite literally - to flesh
out its interpretations of the surviving records of the earth‘s past. Literary writers, drawing on the
essentially tactile experience of reading a book, on fictional forms which could give shape to the
imagination of a long-dead history, and on the affective resources of literary prose – its ability to
produce physical responses in the body of the reader – played a crucial role in this process. As such,
though we customarily think of both novelists and scientists in the nineteenth century emphasising
vision as the most reliable route to discovery, this paper will explore the ways in which newlydiscovered rocks and fossils, and the shockingly violent pasts they only partly embodied, were not only
visually interpreted and imagined but could also be physically felt by the Victorian public through the
concerted efforts not only of museum-builders or the authors of geological textbooks, but also of
journalists, novelists, and poets.
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"The bare fingers": Hands-on education in Victorian Britain, Melanie Keene, University of
Cambridge
Many Victorian educators opened their writings by describing an object held in the hand: a feather,
pebble, seed, or piece of chalk was demonstrably grasped, sensed, and manipulated, as its properties
and history were discovered and described to beginning audiences. These 'object lessons' formed a key
genre of nineteenth-century elementary education, appearing in print in periodicals and playbooks, and
in practice in classrooms and kitchens throughout Britain. Handling common things as diverse as
water, wool, wax, and whalebone introduced children to a deeper understanding of the world in which
they lived, and trained them in how to interrogate everyday artefacts.
The importance of these primarily tangible encounters was more than a rhetorical device: they elevated
hands-on education, placing tactile and practical learning as a necessary counterpart to textual, visual,
or conversational instruction. As James Nasmyth wryly commented, 'sound practical instruction'
entered through 'the bare fingers': 'gloves, especially kid gloves, are perfect non-conductors of
technical knowledge'.
The reality of the chosen objects was paramount, and authors went to great lengths to use readilyavailable things, to give directives for their collection, or to detail common, familiar processes. It was
only by using real objects that the educational processes underpinning the tradition could be effected
and effective, leading from sense-impressions to enhanced understanding, skills, and powers of
reasoning.
This paper will focus on the practice of object lesson teaching in Victorian Britain to explore how
elementary education was achieved through touching, holding and manipulating objects, as mental and
physical apprehension went hand in hand. Moreover, since my educators were not only teaching their
pupils how to learn through objects but also articulating the very process of engaging with objects
itself, it will suggest some ways in which we can rethink ways of approaching Victorian material
culture today by conducting our own object lessons.
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Zoological Passions: Narratives of Delight and Pleasure in the Writings of The Rev. Thomas
Stebbing (1835-1926), Alison Wood, King‟s College London
In this paper I examine the textual evidence for narratives of pleasure, delight and passion in the
zoological writings of The Rev Thomas Stebbing. Stebbing was an Oxford educated priest turned
naturalist who over a fifty year career became a Fellow of the Royal Society (1896), was awarded the
Linnean Society‘s Gold Medal (1908) and published more than one hundred essays, monographs and
articles on zoology, Darwinism and religion. Stebbing substantially advanced British oceanography
with his systematic analyses of crustacea (his History of Crustacea (1893) was commissioned for the
International Scientific Series and his Amphipoda (1906) is still consulted by contemporary marine
biologists). His many publications also encouraged a new, broad readership to discover the delights of
zoology for themselves, best seen in a six part series on the secret lives of spider crabs, ‗The
Nobodies‘, written for Knowledge in 1902.
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What makes Stebbing‘s work so interesting is his vocation as priest and literary scholar before his turn
to science (one of his earliest published works is a translation of Longinus‘ On the Sublime, 1867). His
work crosses the religious, scientific and what might now be termed popular. Many of his papers rely
on literary metaphor to explain scientific theory. They are often conversational in tone and on occasion
virtually shimmer with his delight in the subject. Expressions of excitement, satiation, and the tactile
pleasures to be found in collection and classification are also recurring themes, often crossing private
and public spheres of passion.
What then, does this suggest about the expression of emotion in a context that both celebrates an
objective perspective but also relies so heavily on interior motivations? Drawing on Stebbing‘s
substantial archive (a collection of 2500 items held in the Foyle Special Collections Library at King‘s
College, London) I aim to build a picture of his scientific and literary sensibility, a sensibility that
straddled the then emerging distinctions between literary and scientific, technical and popular, religious
and secular. To do this I will draw together the major strands of feeling in Stebbing‘s work: his delight
in the discipline of zoology; the many expressions of pleasure in discovery; and the recurring
narratives of visceral and cerebral pleasures framed by his scientific pursuits. What I hope will emerge
is a greater understanding of the literary imagination that underpinned Stebbing‘s science, and the
aesthetics that governed its expression.
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11.45-1 Panels 3
A) Writing Violence
“Nerve and Bone”:The Damaged Body and Metaphors of Artistic Creation in Swinburne‟s
Verse (1865-1889), Sara-Patricia Wasson, Napier University
When one considers artistic and poetic representations of passive, dead, and damaged female
bodies in the last half of the nineteenth century, one cannot help but join critics such as Bram
Dijkstra who conclude they represent a culture‘s widespread misogyny. However, sexist
hostility is only part of the tale: this paper suggests that such images of bodily damage may
also reveal changing conceptions of the way poetry is created. In the poetry of Algernon
Charles Swinburne, such images of violent injury convey a new understanding of artistic
process: in this verse, metaphors of artistic creation rely less on sexual difference than on
body shattering.
This paper is partially grounded on the work of Kathy Psomiades, who contends that late
Victorian constructions of femininity did not so much ensue from aestheticist attitudes as
enable those attitudes. However, while Psomiades focuses on artists' deflection of economic
anxieties through splitting woman into object/facade, I focus on the artists' engaging with
psychological and environmental anxieties through the shattering of human flesh - and even
the flesh of both genders. My discussion of a physically broken, dismembered Muse draws on
Elisabeth Bronfen‘s discussion of the changing conception of the Muse in the nineteenth
century, which offers a frame for my exploration of metaphors of poetic process as bodily
violation. To invoke an image from Swinburne‘s "A Ballad of Life," I examine how Victorian
poets could string their citherns with the hair of the dead.
[email protected]
The uses and abuses of the body in Christina Rossetti‟s short fiction, Anna Despotopoulou,
University of Athens
Christina Rossetti‘s story Speaking Likenesses (1874), ―a peculiarly revolting‖ text for
children, according to the Times Literary Supplement (1959), has been deemed heavily
didactic by critics who have observed its framing device of the instructive story-telling aunt
as well as the horrific and sexually charged images of violent child-like creatures, who are
meant to illustrate to children, through exaggeration, the error of their ways. Nevertheless,
Rossetti‘s emphasis on the violation of the female child‘s or adolescent‘s body in this and
other prose texts invites a feminist as well as a historicist reading which may expose a more
subversive effect than has previously been acknowledged. This paper will first explore the
affinities between Rossetti‘s text and children‘s literature preceding it, excluding Lewis
Carroll‘s Alice books, whose influence on Rossetti‘s story has already been noted. In
particular, the plot of the three tales that make up Speaking Likenesses bears an uncanny
resemblance to that of Mary Martha Sherwood‘s 1818 bestselling The History of the Fairchild
Family. Both stories, in their effort to warn children against sin, feature grotesque images of
bodies and narration of similar violent acts suffered by youngsters. Both use the framing
device of the storyteller who unfolds these narratives. But while the earlier text constructs
violence as a means of punishment which, even when vicariously experienced, chastises the
child listener, Rossetti‘s story reconstructs it as a subconscious physical desire (mostly
sexual) within the child. Moreover, the absence of the mother figure in the latter text and her
replacement with the aunt further problematizes the depiction of emerging sexuality, as if
Rossetti needs to foreground alternate versions of femininity other than the maternal, which is
heavily loaded with the ideology of a woman‘s ―angelic‖ role in the private sphere. As a
matter of fact, many of her stories featuring young girls lack mother figures, a surprising
element, taking into consideration that, according to her biographer, Jan Marsh, she
worshiped her own mother. Such a reading may also corroborate Marsh‘s speculation
concerning suspected father-daughter incest in the Rossetti family. Finally, the paper will
investigate the role of the games played by the young girls in performatively constituting
engendered subjects and emulating Victorian power relations.
[email protected]
26
“The measured music of our meeting swords”: Morris‟s early romances and the
transformative touch of violence, Ingrid Hanson, University of Sheffield
In 1856, as the Crimean War came to an end, William Morris published his first short stories
in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. They are stories in which the violent touch of
weapon against weapon or flesh on flesh defines the characters and interrogates reality. This
paper will consider the ways in which Morris uses the many variations of the brutal touch of
violent combat as both the focus of storytelling and the medium of interpretation. Visceral,
tactile violence binds people to one another as much as the tenderness of kisses or caresses, or
the kindness of a loving hand. At the same time the intimate, transgressive touch of violence
opens the way to new worlds or new awareness.
Morris demonstrates a vision of violence and its effects on the body that goes beyond the
displays of knightly prowess seen in the medieval tales of chivalry on which the stories draw,
or the pageantry of Victorian re-enactment. His stories combine instead a Nordic emphasis
on cycles of revenge and bloodshed with a pre-Raphaelite emphasis on the sensuous, feeling
body. The rupturing of the skin by swords, maces, daggers and hands leads to a rupturing of
other kinds of membranes and boundaries: moral, physical and spiritual. Life and afterlife,
body and spirit, past and present are connected in new configurations through the ripping,
skewering, tearing touch of combat.
I will argue that in these stories violence underlies all that is known, and indeed provides a
new way of knowing reality. I will suggest that violence is the primary form of touch in the
stories, and that Morris invests it with moral nuances that shift the focus of meaning and
morality from the supernatural or spiritual to the corporeal and textural. The body of Christ
recurs in the stories, evoked by the acts of touch and violence that drive the narratives. Body
and blood, death and rebirth, heaven and earth are reframed as the Eucharist is imitated or
mocked. While the female body is significant as the cause of war or as an object of longing
and desire, it is the palpable, active male body that is central, as Morris establishes an
understanding of human relationships, both individual and corporate, that is no longer rooted
in the sacred body of Christ, but instead in the demands and possibilities of the human body.
Morris uses the body to explore the invasive touch of violence as a means of healing the land,
restoring relationships, and possibly even tasting paradise. I will argue that while the stories
themselves draw on many genres and indeed on other tales and poems of the time, their
particular power lies in their extraordinary understanding of the transformative touch of
violence on the human body.
[email protected]
B) Dickens and the Communication of Emotion
“The laughing, crying child inside”: Dickens and Emotions, Shu-Fang Lai, National Sun
Yat-Sen University, Taiwan
Dickens is one of the Victorian writers considered most emotionally involved. The proposed
talk is on Dickens‘s presentation of emotions-- including those of the ―basic emotions‖ and
―higher cognitive emotions‖--in his most autobiographical novels, David Copperfield and
Great Expectations. The attempt is to investigate into his unique usages of emotional
vocabularies, especially that of ―mixed emotions,‖ metaphors and similes, and emotional
physical responses. The approach is one of emotionology, focusing on Dickens‘s textual
representations of emotions. How does he ―fictionalize‖ or ―transfigure‖ emotions? What
kinds of emotions and what roles do they play in his character-drawing and word-painting?
Among the many studies of emotions in the field of philosophy, anthropology, science, art,
sociology, psychology and literary theory, which could Dickens know of, might have
influenced his creativity, or could help our understanding emotions in Dickens‘s fictional
world? This study of Dickens‘s artistic and fictional transformation of emotions is an attempt
to discover new ways of interpreting and understanding Dickens‘s own and his characters‘
emotional response or utterance.
[email protected]
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“What Is Natural in Me”: David Copperfield, Materialist Psychology, and the Association
of Ideas, Tyson Stolte, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
David Copperfield offers a curious explanation for Mr. Dick‘s recognition of the
domestic strife troubling Dr. and Annie Strong: ―[T]here is a subtlety of perception in real
attachment,‖ he writes, ―even when it is borne towards man by one of the lower animals,
which leaves the highest intellect behind. To this mind of the heart, if I may call it so, in Mr.
Dick, some bright ray of the truth shot straight.‖ David‘s slight embarrassment at this
formulation is warranted, for by the time Dickens began to publish David Copperfield in
1849, physiology had firmly established the brain as the organ of the mind. Yet David‘s
refusal to reduce mind to nothing more than brain is in keeping with the novel‘s persistently
conservative psychology, itself an expression of Dickens‘s anxieties about the implications
for the soul of such physiological discovery. In this paper I shall explore the novel‘s attempts
to disavow the new physiological psychology, attempts which I argue are ultimately
undermined by this new psychology‘s redefinition of the terms of its predecessor.
Against the accepted view, that Dickens here echoes the tenets of associationism,
I shall begin by arguing that the novel puts forward what is essentially a form of the more
religiously-oriented Scottish faculty psychology, drawn from Dickens‘s copy of Dugald
Stewart‘s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792). Dickens‘s psychology in
David Copperfield is, like Agnes Wickfield, ever pointing upward, focused on the immortal
and immaterial aspects of identity that were the object of the psychologies of a previous
generation. The body in this text is but the vessel (David at one point calls it the soul‘s
―prison‖) through which the soul has commerce with the world, not the constitutive basis and
sum of selfhood that physiology would make it. More materialist psychology, when it appears
in the novel, is pushed to the margins and made the target of derision. Note, for example,
David‘s mocking reference to phrenology, a pseudo-science widely charged with materialism
(and thus an easy and insulting metonym for the more respected physiological psychology):
―The pigeon pie was not bad, but it was a delusive pie: the crust being like a disappointing
head, phrenologically speaking: full of lumps and bumps, with nothing particular
underneath.‖ Similarly, the concerns expressed about David‘s brain by the medical
community—in the person of Mr. Chillip—are shown to be comically misguided; as many
critics have demonstrated, it is David‘s heart that is at issue here.
But as I have suggested, the faculty psychology on which Dickens draws can be
misinterpreted (as it has been by Michael Kearns and Nicholas Dames) as associationism,
which was by 1849 incorporating the discoveries of physiology and becoming grounded in a
physicalist model of the self. This confusion is telling: because these psychologies largely
shared a terminology, and because their terms were thus not immediately identifiable as
belonging to one psychology or the other (especially for those not familiar with the fine
distinctions between these psychologies), associationism‘s materialism—its physiological
redefinition of this shared vocabulary—inevitably inflected readers‘ understanding of the
terms of faculty psychology as well. By exploring both Dickens‘s use of these shared terms
and the materialist meanings they had newly acquired, I shall argue in the final section of my
paper that, by drawing on these terms, Dickens only perpetuates the new psychology that he
seeks to disavow.
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Cryptic Bodies: Dickens‟s Reading Tours, Our Mutual Friend, and the Work of
Mourning, Ryan Barnett, Birmingham City University
This paper explores different types of embodiment in late Dickens by juxtaposing Dickens‘s
performances of his earlier texts, during his public reading tours, and the encrypting of the
body represented in his characterisation of John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend. What links
the reading tours and Our Mutual Friend, I argue, is the spectacle of three bodies: Dickens‘s
performing body, his corpus of work, and the ‗dead‘ body of Harmon. Moreover, I claim,
what these three bodies attest to is the work of art as a work of mourning; but, a mourning as
impossible as it is necessary.
In his reading tours and his characterisation of Harmon Dickens can be seen to anticipate
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Nicholas Abraham‘s and Maria Torok‘s re-evaluation of Freud‘s work on mourning. For
Abraham and Torok, when the act of mourning ‗fails‘ the dead object is ‗incorporated‘ within
the mourner‘s ego, as if it were contained within a crypt; but a crypt in which the body housed
therein is simultaneously dead and alive. Significantly, in Our Mutual Friend, when disguised
as Julius Handford, Harmon views what is believed to be his own corpse at the police station.
Unable to ‗successfully‘ mourn his own death – indeed, to do so would be impossible –
Harmon carries his former self within him as if it were housed in a crypt.
Our Mutual Friend was published when Dickens had been performing his public reading
tours for over ten years. In the public readings, Dickens would not only read extracts from his
earlier fiction, but also act out and embody the characters from his texts. Essentially, by
performing the public readings, Dickens can be seen as embodying his corpus of work; but in
such a way that he is also mourning the loss of his earlier fiction and his younger self.
Additionally, by returning to his earlier fiction in the reading tours, Dickens is not only
offering a slice of nostalgia to his audience, but also allowing them, as a collective body, to
share in this feeling of loss, this sense of mourning. Indeed, more than anything else, it was
the audience‘s emotional response to his readings, the outpouring and sharing of their private
feelings in public, which Dickens valued the most when performing.
Like Harmon‘s inability to mourn his own passing, after observing what is believed to be his
corpse, the spectacle of Dickens‘s body in the public readings exists upon the very threshold
of life and death. Containing his earlier fiction and younger self within each performance, like
a crypt, they live on inside Dickens in a type of mourning which is also an act of
survival.What Dickens presents on stage during the reading tours is a work of mourning: for
the past, for himself, and for his texts. This act of mourning, at once public and private, would
continue when Dickens passed away soon after the 1870 farewell tour of his public readings,
and still lives on today.
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C) Victorians to Moderns?: Late Victorian Writings of Sociality
Conrad, Wells and Modernism: “to make you feel”, Linda Dryden, Napier University
My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear,
to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.‘
Joseph Conrad, Preface, ‗The Nigger of the Narcissus‘
Modernism is commonly seen as a radical reaction against paradigms that characterise much
of the Victorian age: scepticism and doubt, experiment in form and narrative structure,
privileging the individual over the many. It is commonly seen also as a reaction to the awful
disillusionment of the early years of the twentieth century. Joyce, Woolf, Yeats, Eliot, Stein:
these are regarded as the great modernists. Yet modernism is nowhere near so simple, nor so
artistically or historically confined. It emerges out of earlier genres and sensibilities.
One of modernism‘s earliest exponents, Joseph Conrad, was a product of the
European nineteenth century who neither rejected this inheritance nor embraced it
unequivocally. His Preface to ‗The Nigger of the Narcissus‘ (1897) exemplifies his purpose
to define a new aesthetic for fiction while never denying human sensations, a purpose rooted
in part in his nineteenth-century sensibilities: ‗All art … appeals primarily to the senses, and
the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the
senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions‘ (Preface NN). If
the Victorians‘ purpose was to explore, understand, and expose the complex and competing
emotions in the human breast, Conrad emerges as a post-Victorian who pushes this project to
the modernist frontiers of art and form.
Conrad‘s experimental narrative techniques helped cement his friendship with H. G.
Wells, but his determination to privilege humanity over political and social change eventually
lead to the sundering of that friendship. At their last meeting he detailed the schism: ―The
difference between us, Wells, is fundamental. You don‘t care for humanity but think they are
to be improved. I love humanity but know they are not.‖ The Preface to his first novel,
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Almayer’s Folly, provides evidence of the truth of Conrad‘s self-assessment: he is ‗content to
sympathize with common mortals, no matter where they live‘ because they must endure the
same ‗curse of facts and the blessings of illusions, the bitterness of our wisdom and the
deceptive consolation of our folly.‘ In other words, the lot of the Malay peasant is much the
same as that of Emma Bovary. It was a vision that Wells could never share: he mercilessly,
gleefully, saw to the annihilation of Woking and half of London in The War of the Worlds,
and imagined the destruction of humanity and the entire planet in his first novel, The Time
Machine. No sentimentality sullies Wells‘s apocalyptic futures or his response to his fellow
human beings.
It is thus the purpose of this paper to explore how Conrad fused his Victorian
emotional sensibilities with his post-Victorian urgency to experiment with form without
losing the humane imperative of his fiction, his need ‗to reach the secret spring of responsive
emotions.‘ The paper will compare Conrad‘s need to keep this at the centre of his
experimental vision with Wells‘s scientific determination to privilege social and political
change over human nature. It will thus be argued that modernism did not emerge at a single
moment around 1915 as a radical rejection of Victorian values and sentimentality, but rather
as a fluid process of artistic evolution and philosophical debate. Conrad‘s imperative to ‗make
you hear, to make you feel … to make you see‘ is not the impassioned appeal of a frustrated
modernist. Nor is it the emotional agonising of a sentimental Victorian. The Preface to ‗The
Nigger of the Narcissus‘ is the artistic manifesto of a writer whose work, more than any other
at the fin de siècle, succeeded in fusing the more humane concerns of the Victorian era with
the pressing demands of a new and more cynical twentieth century.
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The Reverse of the Medal: The (Anti)Sociability of Homosexual Feelings in the Victorian
Period. An Analysis of Love as a Psychical and Physical Experience in Edward Carpenter,
John Addington Symonds and Teleny, Antonio Sanna, University of Westminster
In my paper I shall argue that the discourses and representations of same-sex feeling made by
Victorian homosexual men were contrastingly based upon both physical and spiritual love. I
shall initially refer to the late-Victorian historical and legal context as well as to Michel
Foucault‘s studies on the figure and definition of the ―sexual invert‖. Secondly, my argument
shall focus on the theories propounded by the homosexual apologists Edward Carpenter and
John Addington Symonds. By analysing these thinkers‘ advocation of love as a spiritual
feeling which would have brought the amelioration of the single individual as much as the
betterment of the entire society, I shall demonstrate that Victorian homosexual love was part
of an ethical argument addressed to the good of society in its entirety—an argument which
has not been analysed in detail by previous critics in the field. Such an argument as based on
love was specifically intended to counteract the patriarchal and bourgeois morality of the
period as well as the discourses sustained by the medical and scientific establishments which
linked homosexuality with antisociability, criminality, insanity and perversion. By means of
their denial of the body and sensuality, Carpenter and Symonds attempted therefore to reinscribe and re-categorize ―sexual inverts‖ (and particularly their expression of love as a both
noble and ennobling form of spiritual and aesthetic feeling transcending physicality) into a
new form of sociality. However, by specifically studying the 1893 erotic anonymous novel
Teleny (presumably authored by a queer group and partly attributed to Oscar Wilde) and its
recurrent passages describing in detail the male body, I shall explore the physical side of love
as experienced by Victorian homosexual men, the overtly sensual and aesthetic nature of such
a verbal expression of love and same-sex physical contact. This shall be read as describing
and exemplarily epitomizing the homosexual underground culture of the last decades of the
nineteenth century. Love as advocated and experienced by nineteenth-century homosexuals
shall therefore be interpreted as a supreme form of aesthetic, emotional and spiritual feeling
and as the very motor of society‘s moral and practical renovation. On the other hand, I shall
simultaneously point out how such a feeling was definitely also experienced and represented
in physical and sensual terms in the final decades of the nineteenth century, thus almost
30
confirming the pathologization of the homosexual body and the morbidity of its emotions
sustained in the arguments of the scientific and medical practitioners of the period.
[email protected]
Towards Democracy: The Evolution of Self and Society, Kirsten Harris, University of Sheffield
In this paper I will examine the poetic project of Edward Carpenter; specifically, his stated
aim to establish an ‗intimate personal relation‘ between himself and his reader, his evolving
concept of the self, and his questioning of the boundaries of personality. Carpenter explains
that his ‗quest‘ to write a book that will forge this kind of ‗personal relation‘ can only be
fulfilled if the text is able to transcend the idiosyncratic personalities of those ‗into whose
hands it should happen to come‘. That is, if the poet is able to access an ‗absolutely common
ground to all individuals‘ from which s/he can write on and from. For Carpenter, this
‗common ground‘ was eventually found in the belief of a region of the self ‗transcending in
some sense the ordinary bounds of personality‘, in which all people can interact in a free and
equal way, stripped of their inconsequential differences. Carpenter asks:
Are we really separate individuals, or is individuality an illusion, or again is it
only a part of the ego or soul that is individual, and not the whole? Is the ego
absolutely one with the body, or is it only a small part of the body, or again is the
body but a part of the self – one of its organs so to speak, and not the whole
man? Or lastly is it perhaps not possible to express the truth by any direct use of
these or other terms of ordinary language?8
I will take this questioning of the relationship between body, soul and self as my starting
point, and explore how Carpenter's expansive construct of self impacted his radical social
vision; that is, his understanding of the social body. For Carpenter, evolution of
consciousness was necessarily a collective experience. In this, I will discuss how Carpenter
draws upon the discourse of social Darwinism to promote and explain his socio-spiritual
ideal. Evolution provided not only a model for the perfection of humankind, but a language
in which the biological, mystical and political could be combined.
[email protected]
D) Literary Feminisms
Does Good Sisterhood mean Failed New Womanhood?:The Sibling Relations in New
Woman Fiction, Mei-Fang Chang, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan
In Literary Women (1978), Ellen Moers pertinently remarks that the paradigm of contrasting
sisters, or ―the sisters-in-opposition theme,‖ is pervasive in Western culture, contributing to a
recurrent pattern especially in women‘s literature of the nineteenth century (104). Despite the
fact that scholarly studies on the Victorian sibling pairs have been increasing since the 1990s,
scant attention has been paid to the New Woman sorority at the fin de siècle. Such a finding
is, however, not surprising as New Woman fiction is characterized, more often than not, by a
sketch of the vertical axis of the parent-child relationship, in which the daughter revolts
against parental, particularly maternal, oppression in order to develop her
personal/professional pursuit. This said, New Woman fiction nonetheless calls attention to,
albeit peripherally, the compatibility between sisterhood and New Womanhood. For, it is
often the case that, in pursuing her dream, the New Woman heroine is also on the horns of a
dilemma as to whether she shall abandon or betray her sister, normally a dramatic foil to
throw into relief the sibling contrast. Seeking to explore the horizontal axis of the peer bond,
this paper will concentrate exclusively on the sisterhood of blood kinship along the sororal
polarization in some key New Woman texts: Mona Caird‘s The Daughters of Danaus (1894)
and The Stones of Sacrifice (1915), and Olive Schreiner‘s The Story of an African Farm
(1883) and From Man to Man (1926). An examination of these four novels shows an
insufficient sorority if New Womanhood is something to be striven for. While New Woman
8
All quotations from ‘A Note on “Towards Democracy”’, The Labour Prophet, May 1894.
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fiction caught the sensation of its time, appealing to an unprecedented female readership by
presenting women‘s collective experiences of subjection and self-sacrifice, such a sensation, I
would argue, also calls into question the sisterly solidarity within the Victorian family, the
traditional sexual/spatial boundary/ideology of which serves no longer as an intensification of
but as an obstacle to female relational/relative ties and to the formation of the New Woman.
[email protected]; [email protected]
A Privileged Pain: Physical Injury and Mental Anguish in New Woman Fiction, Galia
Ofek, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
In several New Woman novels the representation of painful physical injuries is bound up
with the generation of narratives that describe communal experiences of misery which women in
general, and writers in particular, have to endure. The process which confers facticity or
palpability on otherwise invisible sufferings and meshes together the psychic, somatic and
perceptual aspects of pain was not alien to contemporary scientific thought. G. H. Lewes, for
example, argued in 1877 that the physiological and the psychological aspects of pain should be
studied in relation to each other, as ―the characteristics of pain are coextensive with those of
consciousness itself‖.9 In many New Woman novels, however, this consciousness is not only of
one‘s own body and subjectivity but rather a political and social consciousness of other women‘s
pain. The aching hands of poor working women in the East End become more visible as readers
witness the burns on Hester‘s hands, the hands that attempt to record life in the East End.
Similarly, Olive Schreiner, Ella Hepworth Dixon and Sarah Grand raise awareness of the Chinese
custom to bind girls‘ feet while establishing an analogy between the physical maiming of
women‘s feet in China and more covert practices which stunt women‘s growth and limit their
independence in England. Grand has articulated the importance of feeling pain for others by
quoting Luke 12:48 (―For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required; and to
whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more‖), and urging women to become
more aware of ―the awful needless suffering which is going on everywhere around them‖ through
―the great joy of relieving pain‖ and ―knowing what others suffer‖.10
In presenting heroines who, through physical suffering, can make other women‘s pain
and anguish more visible and therefore more ―sharable‖ and accessible to all readers, New
Woman writers both turn anguish into a feminist critique of socio-political, cultural and
ecclesiastical structures, and introduce a religious dimension to their quest for equality and
justice. Hester‘s wounded and bleeding hands in Red Pottage (1899), Alison‘s swollen and
disfigured feet in Story of a Modern Woman (1894), and Lyndall‘s aching body in Story of an
African Farm (1883) are described in religious terms which align the heroines with biblical
figures such as Moses, Job and Jesus, who endure both mental agony and physical affliction.
Further, following the tradition of female saints whose pain – both physical and mental – is
presented as an offering of love for the redemption of their neighbours, New Woman writers
endow female wounds with religious significance. Affected body parts are imagined as stigmata,
displaying the price that the heroines pay for their calling as pathfinders, freethinkers and writers
who devote themselves to expressing and alleviating the sufferings of other women. That a
greater sensitivity to pain at once testifies and provides access to a sacred and superior life both
builds on and subverts Victorian scientific observations about the ―tyrannic influence‖ of
corporeality on ―the gentler sex‖, whose ―exalted spiritualism‖ brings them more ―forcibly under
the control of matter‖.11
My discussion of pain in these novels will be informed by Elaine Scarry‘s The Body in
Pain, Helene Cixous‘s Stigmata and Caroline Walker Bynum‘s study of the role of women‘s
bodies in their religious experiences and claims to authority.
[email protected]; [email protected]
9
Qtd. by Richard Menke, “Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot”, ELH 67.2 (2000) 622.
Sarah Grand, “What to Aim at”, The New Party (1894): 355-6.
11
John Gideon Millingen, The Passions; or Minds and Matter (London, 1848) 157.
10
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George Eliot, the „woman of true culture‟ and the Music of Sympathy
Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi
Prosody comes from the Greek words προς and ωδία, and means a song sung to music.
Rethinking the prosodic elements in George Eliot‘s late writing, especially her poem ‗Erinna‘
(1873-76), can help to examine how sympathy, in the sense of the ability to suffer with or for
the other, developed into a feminine and feminist discourse in her work. In this poem, Eliot
tries to create a space within which female artists like Erinna can turn their suffering into
singing through their elegies as well as sound into image through their creative labour – their
art of weaving. This paper argues that this double transformation – which results from her
experimentation with genre and artistry – testifies to the extent to which Eliot‘s concerns of
domesticity, voice and artistic labour permeated her self-perceived role as a ‗woman of true
culture‘. The elitist figure of the ‗cultured‘ woman that ‗George Eliot‘, like other sympathetic
women of the past (e.g. Mary Wollstonecraft, Madame de Sablé) whose heritage she
reclaimed in her reviews, embodied is inscribed anew within a poetic narrative that makes
loneliness an essential quality of female authorship. The inward voice of all the Erinnas of
this world, which is another name for ‗feminine‘ imagination, is born out of their
contemplation of their feelings of suffering that they bear unheard because of men‘s lack of
sympathetic understanding. This suffering, though, is not in vain because, as Eliot put it in her
poem ‗O May I Join the Choir Invisible‘, it enables ‗undying music in the world‘ – the music
of sympathy – that helps create an imaginative space which is not fully defined by the
separateness of the spheres.
[email protected]
E) Responding to Slavery
Sight, sound and silence: the slave body in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ann Hawkshaw,
and Frederick Douglass,
Debbie Bark, University of Reading
The question of the body in the Victorian period calls to mind enslaved bodies, and in
particular how the slave body as a trope is used in writing about plantation slavery. This paper
takes two distinct poetic representations of the slave body, Elizabeth Barrett Browning‘s ‗The
Runaway Slave at Pilgrim‘s Point‘ (1848), and Ann Hawkshaw‘s ‗Why am I a Slave?‘
(1842), and considers each alongside ‗My Bondage and My Freedom‘ (1855), the
autobiographical slave narrative of American abolitionist and former plantation slave,
Frederick Douglass (1818-1895).
Barrett Browning‗s ‗The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim‘s Point‘ is representative of literary
constructions of the enslaved body through colour, as the Afro-Indian slave body is signified
through visual difference. The refrain ‗I am black‘, which punctuates the slave‘s narrative in
Barrett Browning‘s poem not only stresses the visual opposition of black slave and white
slave-owner, but implicates the physicality of the slave body in its enslavement - it is the
slave‘s ‗blackness‘ that ‗shuts like prison-bars‘ through which the slave can never reach. The
prominence of blackness in the poem‘s early stanzas foreshadows the infanticide of the ‗too
white‘ slave-baby, born of rape. Only once the slave has obliterated the whiteness of her dead
baby‘s body with the blackness of the earth can the ‗dark child in the dark‘ bring comfort and
fulfil her youthful dreams of motherhood.
The conflation of black slave and white master in the ‗far too white‘ baby of Barrett
Browning‘s poem prefigures Frederick Douglass‘s observation in ‗My Bondage and My
Freedom‘ that ‗Color was a very unsatisfactory basis for slavery‘. The instability of reading
enslaved bodies through colour explored by Barrett Browning is upheld by the life experience
of Douglass, who observed blacks who were not slaves, whites who were not slaveholders,
and ‗persons who were nearly white, who were slaves‘. As such, poetic representations of the
slave body which are not written through colour provide a useful comparison to Barrett
Browning‘s poem, and present an opportunity to explore Frederick Douglass‘s construction of
the slave body.
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Douglass writes ‗from sound‘. From the terrifying audibility of violated slave bodies through
to the sound of the hammer and whip, Douglass uses what is heard to define the enslaved
body. Similarly, the distinctive but less well-known poet Ann Hawkshaw configures the slave
body through aural rather than visual signifiers. In ‗Why am I a Slave?‘ the slave‘s awareness
of subjugation is based on oppositions of sounds. In focussing on the sound of the plantation,
and in defining the slave body through what can be heard, Hawkshaw invokes the aurality of
slave narratives that have been absorbed and embodied through the sensory experience of
generations of slave bodies such as Douglass‘s.
What is striking in both Hawkshaw‘s and Douglass‘s work is a tension between sound and
silence that remains unresolved. The ambiguous status of silence in these slave narratives
opens out a new means by which to read the complexity of the enslaved body.
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Abolition at sea: Emotional responses to the navy's suppression of the slave trade, Robert
Burroughs, Nottingham Trent University
The world can present no more shocking spectacle of human wretchedness than is contained
in this vessel. It seems that a scene so harrowing can hardly be witnessed without an injurious
effect on the beholder; its tendency being, first to overwhelm, afterwards, by familiarising, in
some degree to deaden, the feelings. Perhaps it but reveals that apathy to the sufferings of
others which the heart would be unwilling to acknowledge of itself.
So writes the naval chaplain P.G. Hill in his account of a journey on a slave ship captured by
the British navy in 1843. Internalising the horrors of the slave trade, Hill admits that his own
sympathies have been 'deadened' by his experiences in his service in the navy's anti-slavetrade squadron in East Africa. The passage thus conveys the disillusionment that leads Hill to
his perhaps shocking judgement in Fifty Days on Board a Slave-Vessel in the Mozambique
Channel (1844) that naval abolitionism causes more misery than it alleviates, and that the
Africans on board were better off in the hands of their Portuguese purchasers than they were
in those of their so-called liberators.
It might be expected that Victorian writing about the naval suppression of the slave trade is
characterised by patriotic announcements of British atonement for past involvement in slavery
and the slave trade. Using Hill's book as a case study, this paper will argue that, far from
offering a neat historical transition from participation in the slave trade to abolitionist
atonement, some contemporary eyewitness accounts of the navy's abolition of the slave trade
emphasise the continuation and indeed increase of suffering on the middle passage. Hill's
eyewitness account of the voyage on a slave ship is exemplary in seeking not only to
reproduce but also to share in the discourse of suffering on the middle passage. Hill inscribes
his own journey with the pain and anguish of witnessing the miseries of others.
Travellers' accounts of abolition at sea highlight the often-overlooked complexity of
responses to the slave trade in the Victorian era, in which anti-abolitionist views were
commonplace. The proposed paper will explore how this political complexity is translated
into the emotional experience of witnessing 'the sufferings of others'.
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"Fast and Rank": Landscape, the Body, and the Jamaican Gothic, Rebecca Wigginton,
University of Pittsburgh
Victorian literary and periodical discourse was fraught with anxiety over the British
metropole‘s relationship with the West Indian colonies, an anxiety which took the form of
novel and article alike, including such infamous examples as Thomas Carlyle‘s 1849 ―An
Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question.‖ Of special concern was the island of Jamaica,
whose geography was consistently descrived as monstrously fertile and disturbingly hellish,
with language drawn from a rich British gothic tradition. In the nineteenth century
Anglophone Caribbean, Jamaica was arguably the most turbulent site of political and social
change and upheaval; the largest and at one time most productive of the British West Indian
islands, the early and mid-nineteenth century saw Jamaica‘s sugar production drastically
reduced and the planter economy replaced by one of small farmers. My argument sees the
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gothic depiction of Jamaica as the result of the fears and tension produced by these changes,
and particularly tied to the land itself, the particularly commodity so often the basis for
Jamaican conflict and/or despair. I address nonfiction depictions of the Jamaican landscape
as gothic, culminating in a reading of Charlotte Bronte‘s 1848 Jane Eyre and a discussion of
metropolitan reactions to the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. My interest, however, is in Bronte‘s
brief portrayal of the Jamaican landscape, and how the Jamaican body of Bertha Mason
Rochester imports that gothic landscape into the interior of the English Thornfield Hall.
Bronte‘s domestication of the Jamaican gothic landscape is successful for the conclusion of
Jane Eyre, but limited regarding the Victorian cultural imagination. As shown in later
narratives (such as Anthony Trollope‘s The West Indies and the Spanish Main), and English
accounts of the Morant Bay rebellion, the spectre of demonic and threatening Jamaica
continued to haunt the nineteenth century. This threat is best illustrated when physically
embodied, demonstrated in the spectacle of a ―creeping, and climbing, and clawing‖
landscape or contained and mobilized in the body of a displaced Creole woman. How is it,
though, that topographical depictions of an island halfway across the world occupy such a
resilient image in the nineteenth century British imaginary? Doris Y. Kadish suggests that
part of the resonance of a ―narrative landscape‖ is found in its superior ability to embody
―individual and collective psychological forces‖ and express attitudes connected to the point
of view of a text‘s speaker. Thus, Jane Eyre‘s tendency to consciously express her mind as a
mental landscape reflective of the physical landscape around her, and the travel writer‘s use
of geographical description to demonstrate indirect (or direct) indications of discomfort with
the colonial enterprise assume a continually surfacing significance for the imperial observer.
The threat of the invasive landscape of the Other best illustrates the idea of the uncanny at the
heart of Gothic fears: just as Rochester‘s failed attempt to convince Jane to believe that it is
her mind that produces the nocturnal vision of Bertha allows the demented spectre to occupy
a space both within and without Jane, the Gothic colonial landscape reflects threats both
inside and outside of the metropole.
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F) Touching the Past: Time, History and the Question of Origins
Discovering Sodom, 1851, Harry Cocks, University of Notttingham
When the French orientalist Louis Felicien de Saulcy claimed to have discovered the sites of
Sodom and Gomorrah in 1851, the news was received in Britain with excitement. It seemed
that the boundaries of biblical knowledge were to be further extended following the stunning
success of A. H. Layard's excavation of Nineveh in 1849. De Saulcy's alleged discoveries
rested on much flimsier evidence, however, and beg the question of why his work was lent
such credit and enthusiasm. The answer lies in the way in which De Saulcy provided further
evidence not for a rationalist reading of scripture, but for a renewed Biblical literalism based
on the authority of ancient sites and relics. In addition, there had been a long standing
fascination among travellers for the question of Sodom, and a barely suppressed interest in the
crimes of the sodomites.
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Touching the Void: History, Archaeology and the Novel, Vybarr Cregan-Reid, University
of Kent
The innovations of the post-1870s novel (most notably that of the open-ended narrative)
materialize after a new model of history emerged in the nineteenth century. Instead of the
Garden of Eden, the new model of history was that of a vast, dark void of epistemologically
unmappable time. This paper will look at the literary and cultural productivity of the
Victorian's resulting sense of temporal vertigo: of the sense of fundamental disconnection
from their past and their origins.
Whilst outlining the context of this paradigm shift this paper will posit that the new form of
the novel that emerges in this period acknowledges, celebrates even, the epistemological
incompleteness of modernity rather than the fantastically certain world of the mid-Victorian,
Dickensian 'romance'. The new structures and themes of the late-Victorian novel explore
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ethical dilemmas rather than the ontological mysteries of other earlier Victorian fiction (like
bildungsromane). In the world of the late-Victorian novel, a politics of process is mobilised
along with a focus on the materiality of everyday life; no longer having faith in either the
importance or the existence of the final cause, true lineage, or precise point of origination,
late-Victorian uncertainty about the future gave shape to a kind of democratised
bildungsroman that did not believe in the ending as a point of destination, but instead
inscribed it as a new kind of beginning.
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The Objects of Archaeology, Alex Warwick, University of Westminster
In his Arcades Project Walter Benjamin writes: ‗Cultural treasures have an origin he cannot
contemplate without horror.‘ The Victorian period saw an enormous number and range of
treasures arriving in Britain as the result of archaeological digs abroad, as well as the representation of those discovered in domestic sites. The effect of these artefacts and the
dramatic accounts of their discovery and transportation on Victorian culture was profound,
structuring a kind of archaeological imagination that can be traced in many forms of written
and visual material.
This paper considers the question of the origin of the objects, and what might be the nature of
the ‗horror‘ that they evoke. It argues that particular processes of forgetting or erasing the
origins of artefacts are at least as powerful as the efforts to establish them that drive the
emergence of the professional discipline of archaeology in the nineteenth century.
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G) Animal Affects
“The Highest End of Any Animal”: Tortured Bodies, and George MacDonald‟s Path to
Social Unity, Jenny Neophytou, Brunel University
For many years, George MacDonald has been primarily studied for the sake of his theology,
dismissing his close affiliations to prominent social thinkers such as Josephine Butler, F.D
Maurice and John Ruskin. MacDonald‘s frequent employment within the Working Men‘s
and Women‘s Colleges has enticed not a few critics to laud him for his social vision as
regards class and gender relations, however the purpose of this paper is to examine
MacDonald‘s use of pain as a means to establish social control, rather than to promote social
liberty. Through the metaphor of the tortured body – both animal and human – MacDonald
draws disconcerting parallels between the themes of vivisection, dissection, animal cruelty
and domestic violence, describing a divine sanction of passively-accepted suffering, while
simultaneously inscribing all forms of rebellion with the dialogue of self-abuse. The
insinuation that pain is only evil when it is self-administered allows MacDonald to trace the
image of the tortured body over a discourse that mediates tensions within class and gender,
with the result that, either through self-sacrifice or purgatorial torture, characters are moulded
into a form that reinforces a stable, unified (although middle-class inspired) social hierarchy.
[email protected]
Dog Love and the Subject of the Animal: Elizabeth Barrett, Jane Carlyle and Mary Russell
Mitford, Jennifer McDonell, University of New England, Australia
This paper is concerned with what Marjorie Garber calls ‗dog love‘ and Donna Haraway calls
the ‗significant otherness‘ that distinguishes the co-habitation of human and non–human
(companion) animals. My paper will address the theme of the conference -‗Victorian Feeling:
Touch, Emotions, Bodies‘ - by using the insights of animal cultural studies as an explanatory
frame for asking some important ethical, emotional, and representational questions about
human sympathy with non-human animals in the mid-Victorian period. The focus will be on
the correspondence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Jane Carlyle and Mary Russell Mitford on
the subject of their canine companions. While the story here is about dogs and women,
arguably they are players in a larger game, one that raises questions about how we might read
the registers of power in the natureculture borderlands of the intimate domestic sphere. Can
their strong feeling for their pets be written off as stereotypically gender specific – affective,
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sentimental and therefore feminine? Do their attitudes towards their companions simply
furnish further evidence of the increasing commodification of affection associated with
bourgeois pet-keeping practices in Victorian England? Or, as Derrida compellingly asks, is
the definition of the beloved pet, treated as human-like, to be considered in tandem with the
ways the nation may have repudiated what he calls ‗carnivorous virility‘? I will argue that the
narratives of social and self identity which Barrett, Carlyle and Mitford spin around their
canine friends goes beyond ‗sentiment‘, commodified feeling, or compensatory substitution
for the trauma of personal loss and the pervasive cruelty towards animals against which the
reforms of the period were pitched, and can be more properly read as foregrounding an ethics
of care-giving. Furthermore, in relation to the Barrett-Flush and Carlyle-Nero relationships,
affect is used to effect, to exert influence, in the literal sense of the word, to touch or stir the
feelings; and as such is a form of power that carries with it the possibility of resistance.
Finally, I will suggest that the correspondence of all three women on the subject of the animal
both disrupts and reinforces the species hierarchy: that is to say, the schema of subjects and
values defining the discourse of humanism, in which ‗authority and autonomy are attributed
to the man (homo and vir) rather than the woman, and to the woman rather than to the
animal‘. (Derrida, ‗Eating Well‘ in Who Comes After the Subject?).
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“Has a Frog a Soul?”: Shaping Evolution in the Gothic Fiction of Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Claire Charlotte McKechnie, University of Edinburgh
This paper explores the ways in which Edward Bulwer-Lytton made use of
amphibiousness in his gothic fantasy narrative, The Coming Race. T. H. Huxley‘s essay ‗Has
a Frog a Soul, and of What Nature is that Soul, Supposing it to Exist?‘ read at the meeting of
the Metaphysical Society in November 1870, revived the experiments of Robert Whytt and
Albrecht von Haller, who, more than a hundred years earlier, had investigated the locus of the
soul in animals. Using the scientific work of Richard Owen, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley,
and St. George Mivart (Huxley‘s former pupil and a leading nineteenth-century biologist), I
will explore the role of the frog within the socio-historical context of nineteenth-century
culture. The frog, as Huxley and Mivart articulate convincingly, conflates accepted
physiological traits of life and death and blurs species boundaries to such a large extent that it
becomes a biological chimera, something in-between, a creature that is not complete; indeed,
not intact, seemingly subject to endless evolutionary change. Yet despite the
anthropomorphism of animals through the anti-vivisection debate, no Victorian scientist
working in the fields of palaeontology or biology could deny that amphibians constituted an
important part of the evolutionary scale, as Owen had noted in the early 1850s. The frog
occupied a liminal sphere in scientific practice partly because it was the most popular animal
for the purposes of vivisection, but why did the frog fascinate physiologists to such a large
extent? When Mivart suggested in his study The Common Frog in 1874 that batrachians may
hold the key to the origin of humankind, he raised a new question about man‘s place in the
evolutionary scale. In his 1871 science-fiction novel, The Coming Race, Bulwer-Lytton
anticipates Mivart‘s evolutionary theory in a rather uncanny way, and these two instances,
amongst others, demonstrate the prevalence of the frog in Victorian popular culture and
evolutionary theory. Between science and science fiction, how did the body of the frog evolve
into the human body and how did this question impact upon nineteenth-century evolutionary
theory?
Palaeontological findings of ancient batrachian species spurred evolutionists on; they
were the ‗missing link‘ between water and land creatures – hybrids between fish and reptiles.
By the 1870s, the image of the frog permeated a society obsessed with fashionable pets on the
one hand and scientific experimentation on the other. The suggestion that humans were linked
biologically to frogs added weight to the vivisectionists‘ argument; it was becoming
increasingly clear that man belonged to, indeed was immersed in, the animal world. This
paper will examine the amphibious ‗other‘ in gothic narratives; like the tadpole‘s
metamorphosis to the frog, the Victorians were gradually transforming themselves into
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modern scientific thinkers, and it was the animals which man loved, hated and violently
exploited that paid the price for their new-found knowledge.
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2-3.20 Panels 4
A) Affective Spaces and Architectures
Feeling at Home: Affective Hospitality at Red House, Wendy Parkins,
University of Otago, New Zealand
This paper will examine Red House, the home of Jane and William Morris between 1859 and
1865, as a site of affective hospitality. Much has been written about Red House as an example
of architectural innovation and a place of artistic fellowship. I am interested, however, in the
affective investment in domestic spaces and objects by both residents and guests of Red
House. Red House was in many ways a typical Victorian residence in which the presence and
arrangement of beautiful objects were considered crucial to the construction of a tasteful and
welcoming space for domestic social life but it was also envisaged as a unique, utopian space
with an 'open house' atmosphere (Mackail I: 159). At Red House, guests were collaborators in
the design of domestic space, and a different sense of hospitality began to emerge in which
more customary Victorian demarcations between work/leisure space, masculine/feminine
space, and family/visitor space were reconfigured. In contrast to previous work on the utopian
dimension of Red House (e.g. Waithe 2006), this paper will examine the gendering of feelings
in accounts of hospitality there. In the writings of Morris's contemporaries, Red House figures
as both a site of conviviality and a space of refuge and I will pay attention to the differing
emotional responses to the house recorded by women and men. Who felt most at home there?
And who was most responsible for the practices and provision of hospitality? Lauren Berlant
has argued that feeling 'at home' in a situation may produce 'a general sense of
unconflictedness in the social world, despite the structural fractures that shape the ordinary as
a deeply anxious and fragile phenomenal and mental space' (2005). I will consider whether
the 'affective community' (Gandhi 2006) briefly established at Red House was the kind of
quietest retreat from a threatening world that Berlant describes or a more radical example of
the politics of friendship at home.
References:
Berlant, Lauren (2005), 'Unfeeling Kerry,' Theory & Event 8 (2).
Gandhi, Leela (2006), Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle
Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, Durham: Duke University Press.
Mackail, J. W. (1899), The Life of William Morris, Volume I, London: Longmans, Green &
Co.
Waithe, Marcus (2006), William Morris's Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the
Ideal of Hospitality, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.
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Matthew Arnold‟s Beatitude, Kevin A. Morrison, Rice University
Standing on the balcony of his home in Belgravia in the summer of 1866, Matthew
Arnold watched in horror as the tranquility of Chester Square was disrupted by a group of
men who began pelting the windows of his neighbor, the commissioner of police. The
outward challenge to authority by the Hyde Park rioters, he believed, was symptomatic of a
moral illness; the ―assertion of personal liberty,‖ which had become the bedrock of English
life and politics, had led society to the brink of anarchy (Culture 83). It is no wonder, then,
that Arnold experienced ―something resembling beatitude‖ whenever he passed through the
Athenaeum Club‘s imposingly palatial Roman-Doric entrance portico (Letters 1:59). In
contrast to the clamor associated with Hyde Park, just a short distance away, where rioters
had demanded suffrage, the Athenaeum facilitated the ―perfect quiet and comfort‖ necessary
for thoughtful reflection (Letters 1:58).
According to recent reappraisals of Victorian liberalism, Arnoldian disinterestedness
bears further reconsideration today. Arnold elevates critical thinking, detachment, and
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objectivity, these studies have argued, to temperamental and characterological ideals. Shorn
from the material contexts of writing and theorizing, however, Arnold and the other Victorian
liberal writers on whom these studies dwell are frequently presented as occupying a
transcendental realm of contemplative detachment. But, although critical reflection takes
place within certain spatial coordinates and material arrangements that determine one‘s
patterns of thought, the debate among critics about the merits of Arnoldian ideality has yet to
consider the significance of a key spatial site in which Arnold elaborated his vision. This
paper is concerned with the interplay between the architectures of liberalism as a lived
political project and with the architectonics of the Arnoldian subject.
Perhaps no Victorian writer disavowed with greater frequency than Arnold the role of
place and objects in the cultivation of the self. Yet, through a reading of Arnold‘s poetry and
letters, as well as of the Athenaeum itself, I explore in this paper how the club is inscribed at
the very heart of Arnold‘s moral vision. His understanding of disinterested objectivity, an
aspect of Greek brilliance that he sees as the necessary element of self and social governance
within a liberal order, is, I contend, as much a spatial construct as it is a characterological and
temperamental ideal. The emphasis Arnold places on mental self-cultivation as the means of
achieving individual improvement and social betterment is thus an ideological feint that
distracts us from the material social and cultural processes that give these concepts their form.
Indeed, the spatialization of Arnoldian thought has important implications for his notion of
agency. In contrast to what Arnold saw as the animalistic clamor typified by the rioters at
Hyde Park, the Athenaeum both reflects and calls into being the fantasy of a world filled with
beauty, sweetness, and light, where intentionality and authenticity remain inviolable.
Works Cited
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings. Ed. Stefan Collini.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
- - -. Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848-1888. Ed. George E. Russell. 2 vols. New York:
Macmillan, 1896.
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Perceptions and Possessions in the Middle-Class Victorian Drawing Room, Alice Barnaby,
University of Exeter
Veneered and polished furniture, sparkling glass, gleaming ornaments and the sheen of silken
textiles: such was the equipment used in the middle class, mid-Victorian drawing room. Clean
lines of earlier neo-classical styling gave way to a complex profusion of ornamentation made
possible by the commodification of interior design. The drawing room now functioned as a
domestic exhibition space in which worldly materiality and constructions of gender and class
identities intermingled. At the heart of this dynamic was the role of perception.
Given that we rarely just see or hear without engaging any of our other senses it seems
appropriate to consider how the wider human sensorium is shaped by specific environments.
Simply following the Aristotelian hierarchical classification of a discrete five sense system is
not adequate. To work within the boundaries of visual culture, art historical or literary
disciplines would offer only a partial view of sensory experience. Instead I argue that a multidisciplinary and multi-sensory approach would provide a broader interpretation of the
perceptual culture of the Victorian drawing room.
In addition to the five senses, Aristotle also proposed the overarching theory of sensus
communis, a unifying faculty which intelligently binds the individual senses together. Certain
subsequent theorists have focused on this aspect of sensory unification rather than separation.
From Thomas Aquinas‘s emphasis upon touch in the functioning of the sensus communis,
through to Marshall McLuhan‘s concept of sense-ratio and Lawrence Marks‘s theories of
sensory unity and synesthesia, we find that perception is a culturally specific, interactive
process rather than an a priori principle.
Bringing together these perspectives, I will argue that the fluctuating quality of perception is
clearly demonstrated in the development of the Victorian drawing room. By the 1850s it was
targeted by cultural critics as a potential site of immorality and vulgarity. Holman Hunt‘s The
Awakening Conscience (1853) combined with John Ruskin‘s interpretation of that painting‘s
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‗terrible lustre‘ and Charles Eastlake‘s Hints on Household Taste (1869) all expressed an
anxiety concerned with the possible corruption of the subject through the perceptual
experience of possessions.
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B) Braddon
From Geology to Genealogy: Abduction and Detection in M. E. Braddon‟s Eleanor‟s
Victory, Saverio Tomaiuolo, Cassino University, Italy
Mary Elizabeth Braddon‘s Eleanor’s Victory (1863) was one of the first Victorian
novels to feature a female detective as its main character. As far as gender roles are
concerned, Eleanor Vane‘s detection is of a peculiar nature because of her ability to move
from the private sphere (traditionally considered of female pertinence) to the public one (of
male pertinence) with much ease. Moreover, since Eleanor is endowed with a visual ability
which helps her to solve the mystery surrounding her father‘s death, minute observation
represents the prevailing paradigm in Braddon‘s novel. Eleanor‘s methods of investigation,
the language she uses and her attitudes suggest the epistemological and textual influence of
Victorian geological studies. One of the culminating moments is represented by Eleanor‘s
―Lyellian‖ assertion that ―[it] can only be from the discoveries I make in the present that I
shall be able to trace my way back to the history of the past‖ (Ch. XXIII). Given the lack of a
complete and thoroughly documentation of her father‘s death – the only real clue being
represented by the fragment of a letter written by him before his suicide – Eleanor appeals to
her perceptive abilities to fill in the empty spaces of this ―retroactive story‖ through her
imagination and creativity. In fact, while in his Principles of Geology Charles Lyell had
admitted that the ―natural registers‖ were lacunous and that the geologist‘s task consisted first
in collecting as many proofs as possible and then in ―fictionally‖ reconstructing the past, on
his turn Charles Darwin, at the end of the chapter titled ―On the Imperfection of the
Geological Record‖ in The Origin of Species, compared geological records to imperfect
documents, and scientists to creative readers of their blank spaces. As a consequence,
imagination represents for Eleanor a further investigating strategy of detection, through which
she traces back her own father‘s moral decay. Eleanor makes use of an what can be defined
―abductive‖ method, borrowing this term from the mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce‘s
definition. Abduction, also described as ―presuntive inference‖, ―retoduction‖ or the ―instinct
to guess well‖ allows the scientist (and in this case the detective) to collect intuitively all the
clues available and to convalidate them through the discovery of real ―proofs‖ which would
be successively approached with the help of imagination. To conclude, Eleanor‘s ―abductive‖
and geological reconstruction of her familial records will lead her to a new (and tragic)
understanding of her own genealogy as a representative of a world where crime, corruption
and decay prospered beneath the placid and reassuring surface of Victorian respectability.
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Dangerous Desires: The Female „Other‟ in Mary Elizabeth Braddon‟s Lady Audley‟s
Secret (1862) and Bram Stoker‟s Dracula (1897), Jessica Cox, University of Wales
Lampeter
This paper explores representations of desire in two seminal Victorian popular novels: Mary
Elizabeth Braddon‘s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Bram Stoker‘s Dracula (1897),
focusing on the process through which the desiring woman is figured as the unnatural ‗other‘.
In both texts, the central female protagonist (both, significantly, named Lucy – probably
derived from the Latin ‗lux‘, meaning light, but also reminiscent of the martyred St Lucia) is
initially portrayed as an object of (male) desire, but as the narrative progresses, she becomes a
desiring subject (Braddon‘s Lucy is driven by her desire for wealth and status, Stoker‘s Lucy
by a seemingly unhealthy sexual desire, symbolised by her transformation into a vampire). In
both narratives, female desire is figured as unnatural, and the narratives are deeply concerned
with re-establishing the patriarchal order that is threatened by the desiring woman.
Patriarchal authority is symbolised by the characters of Robert Audley and Van Helsing
respectively, both of whom become almost obsessed with finding evidence to prove the
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deviance and guilt of the female protagonist. In both narratives, the desiring woman is hunted
down and ultimately destroyed by the patriarchal male, thus the threat she poses is removed,
and the conventional, ‗natural‘ order restored.
If the narratives are concerned with re-establishing normative desire through the suppression
of unnatural female desire, both are also concerned with homoerotic desire and its
implications. Robert Audley‘s feelings for George Talboys are ultimately displaced onto
Talboys‘ sister Clara, who bears a striking resemblance to her brother. In Dracula,
homosocial bonding between the novel‘s male characters ostensibly enables the removal of
the vampiric threat and the restoration of the domestic order. Indeed, both narratives
conclude with tranquil domestic scenes, with Clara Talboys and Mina Harker replacing the
dangerous feminine and fulfilling the role of idealised wife and mother. However, while
Clara and Mina may ostensibly represent the ideal, passive female, they too can be read as
symbolising ‗unnatural‘ desires – Clara, the homoerotic desire Robert feels for George, and
Mina, the sexual desire that led to Lucy‘s destruction (like Lucy, she is threatened with
vampirism). Furthermore, the narratives raise the possibility that Lady Audley and Lucy
Westenra represent ‗everywoman‘, and thus imply that the suppression of female desire can
only ever be temporary. In doing so, the novels articulate a significant Victorian anxiety
about the role, function and feelings of women. This paper seeks to explore the significance
of the texts‘ engagement with this issue.
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Treacherous Bodies: The Displacement of Incestuous Desire in M. E. Braddon‟s Fiction,
Anne-Marie Beller, Loughborough University
While a number of critics have noted the centrality of the father-daughter relationship in Mary
Elizabeth Braddon‘s fiction, there has been limited sustained examination of this thematic
concern against the wider contexts of Victorian anxieties about incest and contemporary
transitions in family dynamics. Moreover, existing assessments of Braddon‘s literary
treatment of the father-daughter bond have tended to focus on the daughter‘s psychosexual
attachment to the father, and given relatively little consideration to the extensive abuse of
power by treacherous father-figures in these texts.
Braddon‘s heroines are often placed in the position of daughter to a ‗false‘ father, whose
criminal actions threaten to destroy the family unit. Frequently these ‗counterfeit‘ paternal
figures are stepfathers or impostors, who have usurped the legitimate authority of the beloved
‗true‘ father, as in for example Charlotte’s Inheritance, Henry Dunbar, and Vixen. The
proposed paper intends to explore the ways in which the illegitimate nature of these spurious
father-child bonds becomes most apparent to the heroine during moments of physical contact.
Through the experience of touch these psychosexual desires abruptly surface into materiality,
producing revulsion, anxiety, and confusion. Even when the spectre of incest is allayed, for
instance through the detection of the ‗father‘s‘ imposture, the physical nature of the
relationship remains problematic (even transgressive) in view of the strict social codes
governing appropriate forms of physical contact between men and women whose relationship
is not legitimised by a socio-legal / familial bond.
Through the discussion of such examples in a number of Braddon‘s novels, I will suggest
that these relationships can be read as displacements of incestuous desire, which point to an
underlying cultural preoccupation with the instability of familial intimacy and to a
convergence of anxieties about touch, desire, and the vulnerability of women to corrupt
authority.
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C) Darwinian Feeling and Literature
Darwinian Bodies: Meredith‟s „Ode‟ and Tennyson‟s „Lucretius‟, John Holmes,
University of Reading
Charles Darwin‘s theory of descent with modification or branching evolution as outlined in
The Origin of Species has a profound bearing on how we understand the human body.
Although Darwin would not draw these conclusions publicly himself until The Descent of
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Man, his evolutionary theory identified human beings as animals, not merely by kind, but by
nature. Within his materialist biology, even morality was a refinement of animal social
instincts. After Darwin, psychology too would be intimately dependent on physiology, the
study not of a Cartesian soul, isolated from its animal body, but of a function of that body
itself.
George Meredith and Alfred Tennyson both realised these implications of Darwin‘s theory,
encapsulating them in two of the earliest and most comprehensive responses to Darwin‘s
ideas in English poetry: Meredith‘s ‗Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn‘ (1862) and
Tennyson‘s ‗Lucretius‘ (1868). Both poets find an analogue for Darwinism in classical
paganism, with its eclectic mix of materialist philosophies and animalistic myths. Their
judgements on this Darwinian/pagan worldview are markedly different, however. Where
Meredith embraces it in his own voice and in the present moment, Tennyson distances
himself from it by crafting his poem as a dramatic monologue spoken by the Roman poet and
philosopher Lucretius and embedded in a brief narrative account of his supposed suicide. Yet
for all that their reactions to the implications of Darwinism diverge widely, their sense of
those implications themselves remains remarkably similar. Above all, both poems are
concerned with humanity‘s animal bodies.
My paper has three main sections. I begin by making the case for reading these two poems as
parallel responses to Darwinism, drawing out the similarities between them as well as the
ways in which each poet revises his source (Lucretius‘s De Rerum Natura in Tennyson‘s
case, his own unfinished poem ‗Wandering Willie‘ in Meredith‘s) to ground his poem in
Darwinian evolutionary theory.
Next I focus on the sexual body within each poem. Both poems are haunted by satyrs and
nymphs. These external projections of the speaker‘s erotic imaginations associate sexual
desire with nature and the animal impulses within human beings. In Meredith‘s ‗Ode‘, these
figures are celebrated for living in the present and joyously following their instincts. In
‗Lucretius‘, they are exposed as the product of Lucretius‘s poisoned imagination, as the love
filter prepared for him by his jealous wife tickles ‗the brute brain within the man‘s‘.
Lucretius‘s erotic nightmares embody Tennyson‘s sense that materialist readings of evolution
leave us vulnerable to our bodies most obscene urges.
Lastly I look at the death of the Darwinian body in both poems. For Meredith, Darwinism
teaches that death is final, but also helps us to accept that finality by teaching us too to
identify ourselves with the wider tree of life of which we are a part. For Tennyson,
Darwinism likewise implies the finality of death, but with no consolation, only a warrant for
suicide in such hopelessness.
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On Suffering and Sympathy: Hardy‟s Jude and the Evolution and Ethics Debate, Caroline
Sumpter, Queen‟s University Belfast
In the late 1880s and early 1890s, when Hardy was planning and writing Jude the Obscure,
the relationship between evolution and ethics was a heated topic of periodical debate. In 1890,
Herbert Spencer published articles on animal and human ethics in the Nineteenth Century. T.
H. Huxley‘s articles in the same magazine, along with his well-known Romanes Lecture
Evolution and Ethics (1893), inspired responses from writers including Kropotkin in the
Nineteenth Century and Leslie Stephen in the Contemporary Review. Contextualising Hardy‘s
engagement with this wider controversy, this paper will explore the ways that Hardy
explored the evolution and ethics debate in Jude. Tracing a neglected link between Stephen‘s
writings on sympathy and Hardy‘s novel, it will reveal that Jude the Obscure offers a critical
reflection on the ethical position of Hardy‘s friend, mentor and former editor.
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Performing Emotion: Masculine Subjectivity in Charles Darwin and George Eliot, Sara
Silva, Keele
Victorian interpretations of gender are often oversimplified, and fail to take issue not only
with what James Eli Adams identifies as generalisations of patriarchy, but also, I would add,
42
with generalisations of emotional behaviour.12 Indeed, the rigidity that characterises the
Victorian constructions of sexuality usually applies also to their understanding of displays of
emotion. In ‗Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History‘ (2005), Michael Roper attests to
the contested nature of subjectivity itself by arguing that ‗this bias towards external
understandings‘ means that ‗any sense of subjectivity as pertaining to the individual psychic
make-up is lost‘.13
The excessive stereotyping of manhood and the anxieties and expectations that accompany
Victorian masculinity also ensure a degree of theatricality by undermining the spontaneity
and freedom of masculine displays. In Stemming the Torrent Expression and Control in the
Victorian Discourses on Emotion, 1830–1872 2002, Gesa Stedman reinforces this particular
acknowledgment by pointing out that the repression of feelings does not prevent their
expression. On the contrary, it only accentuates it:
The central paradox between emotional expression and control of feelings can
thus be found on two levels: the individual simultaneously laments the inability to
express his or her feelings, and by thus lamenting, gives expression to just these
allegedly inexpressible emotions — once again the performative role of language
can be observed.14
This paper explores the performativity in Eliot‘s and Darwin‘s language by focusing on the
contradictions arising from their ambiguous representations of masculinity. Traditional
interpretations of the Origin or the Descent fail to realise the ambiguity of Darwin‘s writings
by highlighting his concern with exteriority and appearance. In fact, in the Origin, Darwin‘s
recognition of the importance of ‗individual differences‘ in domestic varieties can be
compared to the centrality of the expression of these individual differences in the construction
of a masculine subjectivity (Origin, p. 39). I am by no means implying that Darwin
recognised the force of my comparison. Nevertheless, I am suggesting that these individual
differences are not only important when studying domestic varieties, and therefore that this
realisation can be projected onto a larger social framework.
In Eliot, the ritualisation of performance is normally a female predicament whereas
males are often more prone to impulsiveness. Furthermore, female display seems more
inclined to plotting, and thus over-exaggerated and over-performed.15 However,
generalisations such as Kucich‘s, who contrasts ‗feminine concealment or deceit‘ with
excessive ‗male impulsiveness‘, might be misleading and reductive.16 On the one hand,
neither is every female concealment, in Eliot at least, deceitful, nor does every impulsive act
bring positive consequences. On the other hand, neither are females the only ones capable of
concealing, nor men the only ones acting impulsively.
All in all, masculine studies are still very much a ‗dark continent‘ with many missing links,
such as the emotional. In this paper, whenever I refer to masculine subjectivity, I mean the
representation of men‘s own interior dilemmas and emotions, which can also be represented
as exteriorised inwardness, and whose inherent complexities and contradictions continue to
attract growing, often interdisciplinary, attention from a wide range of disciplines, including
science, medicine, literature, sociology and psychology.
12
James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca and New York:
Cornell University Press, 1995).
13
Michael Roper, ‗Slipping out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History‘, History
Workshop Journal, 59 (2005), 57–92 (p. 60).
14
Gesa Stedman, Stemming the Torrent Expression and Control in the Victorian Discourses on
Emotion, 1830–1872 Aldershot Ashgate, 2002, p. 54.
15
I deliberately chose the word plotting and not plot, in agreement with Peter Brooks‘s belief that it
implies a more dynamic aspect of the narrative. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and
Intention in Narrative New York: A. A. Knopf, 1984, p. 7.
16
John Kucich, Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (New York and London: Cornell
University Press, 1994), p. 130, 139. See also René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and
Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1976).
43
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D) Charlotte and Emily Bronte
“A subject too painful to be dwelt on”: Emily Brontë, Victorian Feeling and Embodied
Memory, Alexandra Lewis, Trinity College, University of Cambridge
Emily Brontë‘s foray into painful Victorian feeling in Wuthering Heights centres
around loss and bereavement as subjects ‗too painful to be dwelt on‘,17 and which are yet
capable of insistently intruding upon the unquiet mind: functioning, in extreme instances, as
forms of psychic wounding which manifest in bodily pain and disintegration. Taking up and
moving beyond prevailing early- to mid-nineteenth-century conceptions of the workings of
remembrance and recollection (including those of Dugald Stewart, John Reid, John Conolly,
John Barlow and Thomas De Quincey),18 Brontë‘s text imaginatively explores nascent
psychological understandings – and modes of narrative representation – of embodied memory
in the context of arrested emotion and mourning, taking a central place in what I identify as a
developing discourse of psychic trauma in nineteenth-century British literature.
Published in 1847, Wuthering Heights appeared some years before the concept of
trauma as a psychic wound had begun to permeate the Victorian medical mindset, a
movement occurring largely in response to the high incidence of psychic injuries stemming
from accidents on the burgeoning railway system in the 1850s and 60s. Through an
engagement with Brontë‘s representations of suspended affect and embodied memory in
Wuthering Heights, this paper seeks to historicise interpretations of trauma, by tracing the
earlier development of related and constituent concepts in nineteenth-century medical,
cultural and literary discourse: in this instance, Victorian theories of the unconscious mind,
memory, dream, hallucination and monomania, subjects known to have been well represented
among the reading materials available to and philosophical discussions within the Brontë
household, and with which Emily Brontë may be seen to engage in her portrayal of
characters‘ altered states of consciousness. On the periphery of this analysis is the sense that
current trauma theory provides twenty-first-century readers with insights which might focus
and heighten our encounter with Victorian literature, and with characters and texts seen to be
living on the edge both of their own psychic spaces and of scientific discourses
contemporaneous with their composition. Although, as Jenny Bourne Taylor has aptly
remarked of the sciences of the mind in general, it is important to ‗be aware of the dangers of
[…] reading one paradigm in light of a later, dominant one‘,19 Rick Rylance‘s study of
Victorian Psychology and British Culture: 1850-1880 reinforces the notion that, in a very
‗real way, for all their difference, we are still in active conversation with Victorian ideas‘
regarding ‗certain deep conceptual problems in psychology‘.20 The work of Gillian Beer,
Sally Shuttleworth and others has shown that literature, rather than merely reflecting
prevailing scientific discourse, may often anticipate future developments,21 and I suggest that
17
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847), ed. Pauline Nestor (London: Penguin, 2003), 166.
Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792), 6th edn, 2 vols (London: T.
Cadell & W. Davies, 1818); John Reid, Essays on Hypochondriasis, and Other Nervous Affections
(1816), 3rd edn, revised (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823); John Conolly, An
Inquiry Concerning the Indications of Insanity: With Suggestions for the Better Protection and Care of
the Insane (London: John Taylor, 1830; repr. London: Dawsons, 1964); John Barlow, On Man’s Power
Over Himself to Prevent or Control Insanity (London: William Pickering, 1843); Thomas De Quincey,
Suspiria de Profundis, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 57-58 (March, April, June, July 1845), vol. 57
(269-285, 489-502, 739-751); vol. 58 (43-55).
19
Jenny Bourne Taylor, ‘Obscure recesses: locating the Victorian unconscious’, in Writing and
Victorianism, ed. J.B. Bullen (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 137-179, 141.
20
Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture: 1850-1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), 2.
21
See, for example, Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and
Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. First published
1983), and Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a
18
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Brontë‘s imaginative incursions into a number of disturbed and fragmented inner worlds may
be viewed as an important precursor of theories of the traumatised mind which emerged later
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In his influential late-eighteenth-century work, Elements of the Philosophy of the
Human Mind, Dugald Stewart defined memory as ‗that faculty, which enables us to treasure
up, and preserve for future use, the knowledge we acquire‘:22 an inherently positive and
enabling function, particularly when viewed in light of Victorian notions of indomitable selfwill. Exploring the interplay between Emily Brontë‘s frames of narrative testimony and early
Victorian ideas of memory as a palimpsest, daguerreotype or storehouse of images, I contend
that Brontë complicates prevailing theories regarding the amount of agency or conscious
control involved in the process of recollection, bringing to a wide Victorian readership the
concept of preserved memory as unmanageable pathology. Not only are there subjects ‗too
painful to be dwelt on‘, giving rise to willed avoidance of the past; some overwhelming
events, Brontë‘s text reveals, might stun the mental processes, resulting in arrested feeling
and a form of intrusive memory which plays upon the suffering body as well as upon the
unquiet mind.
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The inside and “outside of things”: Charlotte Brontë, materiality and the weather, Jo
Waugh, University of York
This paper explores Charlotte Brontë‘s close and hitherto largely unremarked engagement
with contemporary medical discourses on the weather‘s influence on both body and mind.
Throughout Victorian literature, characters are made ill or psychically disturbed by climatic
phenomena, but this trope is especially interesting in Brontë‘s novels since, as this paper will
show, she was consistently concerned about the weather and its effects, in ways which
demonstrate a direct legacy from medical treatises and theories in currency during her
lifetime. Though the cold and forbidding weather depicted in Jane Eyre (1847) and
Wuthering Heights (1847) has come to represent a typical ‗Brontë climate‘ in readings of both
Charlotte Brontë‘s life and her novels, I argue that Charlotte Brontë‘s experience of and
response to weather was also closely implicated in her vision of the interdependence between
what Sally Shuttleworth has termed in her essay ‗Medical Discourse and Popular Advertising
in the Mid-Victorian Era‘ (1990) ‗the physiological, mental and emotional economies of
womanhood‘.
William Buchan‘s Domestic Medicine (1772) in particular emphasized the continuum
between mind and body, and the effects of the atmosphere on both. This treatise was widely
read in the Victorian period, and was owned by the Brontë family. Though Janis McLaren
Caldwell has argued in Literature and Medicine (2004) that Buchan‘s work was an important
source for Emily Brontë‘s vision of health and resilience in Wuthering Heights, this paper
argues that Charlotte Brontë was also heavily influenced by Buchan‘s text. For Buchan, the
correct response to the changeable British climate was to expose oneself to the weather as
often as possible, and develop a robust frame which could withstand change. For Brontë,
however, the question of wresting control of the weather was far more vexed. Though in
Jane Eyre, Brontë created a heroine with a ‗constitution both sound and elastic‘, whose mind
and body remain defiantly immune to the extremes of climate to which she is exposed, her
correspondence demonstrates extreme anxiety over and monitoring of the weather, which
intensified markedly when she or a family member was unwell. During Anne Brontë‘s
terminal illness from tuberculosis, for example, almost every letter Brontë wrote described the
state of the weather, its possible impact on her sister, as well as its effects on her own mental
Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) and Charlotte Brontë and Victorian
Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
22
Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, I: 403. According to Clifford Whone,
Stewart’s work was available at the Keighley Mechanics’ Institute Library in 1841: ‘Where the Brontës
Borrowed Books: The Keighley Mechanics’ Institute’, Brontë Society Transactions, 11 (1951), 344-358,
347.
45
state. In this paper, I also relate such connections to Brontë‘s dislike of doctors, who
appeared to her to deal only with ‗the outside of things‘, and ignore what Brontë perceived as
an interconnected bodily economy. ‗Feeling‘, it appeared, could not be contained within one
area of mind or body, but was always implicated in both, and could be caused by the same
external influences wherever it occurred. The paper explores weather and ‗feeling‘ in
Brontë‘s correspondence, and then discusses Villette (1853), arguing that Brontë‘s concerns
about the female body and its responsiveness to the weather formed an important part of her
narrative construction of the individual and materiality.
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Tasting as knowing: feeling sweetness in Charlotte Brontë‟s Villette, Rosemary Dunleavy,
University of Oxford
Bodies, and especially female bodies, are subject to excessive surveillance in Charlotte
Brontë‘s Villette: a novel in which everybody watches, and likewise everybody is watched.
Seeing appears to be the best way of knowing in the text and traditional readings of the novel
have focussed on the role of vision as a privileged quality. I will suggest that Charlotte Brontë
develops a discourse of nutrition in Villette in which taste also seems be a reliable indicator of
morality. In particular, the taste of sweetness seems to have a distinctive resonance for female
characters. While praised for the sweetness of their virtue, eating sweet food is problematic
for women in the novel, who in order to become ‗sweet‘ are expected to reject bodily feelings
such as taste. But while Villette appears to conform to conventional notions of femininity an
alternative discourse also seems to be taking place in the novel in which physical appetite is
symptomatic of emotional health. This discourse is supported by contemporary medical
theories which emphasised the importance of the well-developed female body to
reproduction, and at the same time pointed out the role of sugar as nutrition. To figure sugar
as nutritious repositions the body as the site of moral knowledge in the novel and feeling as
the locus of both physical and emotional health. Drawing on contemporary medical evidence
and within a context of eighteenth-century aesthetic philosophy (in which taste becomes,
according to Kant, its own way of knowing) this paper will explore the ways in which
physicality anticipates aesthetic and moral feeling in the novel.
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E) Frontier Masculinities
Touching Art: Painting and the Feeling Body during the Crimean War, Nathaniel M.
Stein, Brown University
In March of 1855, Queen Victoria traveled to Brompton Barracks military hospital to visit
convalescing veterans of the ongoing Crimean War (1854-56). The soldiers she would
encounter there had been grievously wounded. Many had lost limbs, some were horrendously
scarred; all bodied forth evidence of the suffering about which the British public read — with
a mixture of avidity and horror — in the Times and other organs of the press. Victoria‘s
retinue, on the other hand, included several representatives of the aristocratic upper-echelon
of the military which was widely blamed for the disastrous conduct of the war. In this sense,
the visit dealt as much with the threat of social dismemberment as it did with the damaged
bodies of the soldiers themselves. In the midst of the hand-wringing and political upheaval
that followed the infamous Crimean winter of 1854-55, the visit was a highly symbolic and
very delicate embodied encounter. Its representation was critically important and no less
delicate — indeed to represent such an event challenged available artistic conventions in ways
both provocative and productive.
The focus of this paper is a painting of the visit, produced based on eyewitness observation,
by London-based artist Jerry Barrett (1824-1906). Queen Victoria’s First Visit to Her
Wounded Soldiers (oil on canvas, 55⅞ x 84 inches) is dated 1856 and now hangs in the
National Portrait Gallery, London. It was commissioned as a ―truly national‖ image, replete
with portraits, to form the basis for an edition of fine reproductive prints. Its success
demanded a complex alchemy of aesthetic refinement, soft propaganda, and documentation.
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The significance of the visit as a performance of unity in a time of crisis was critical. But so
too was the promise of eyewitness fidelity, which, given the subject, would involve the
depiction of disturbing physical injuries and a charged meeting that risked instantiating the
very anxieties the image was supposed to elide. My analysis of the painting will explore how,
even within these manifold constraints, subtleties of composition, iconography, and especially
the bold manipulation of paint itself opened the public meaning of the image to critical private
meanings. These meanings and the painterly techniques used to elicit them reached the
viewer at the level of bodily sensation experienced through vision, drawing their effectiveness
from an often troubling contemporary discourse on sense perception. Thus, the analysis
traces a circuit of meaning which speaks about and through feeling bodies in a moment of
cultural trauma.
This paper is drawn from a doctoral dissertation being prepared under the direction of Prof. K.
Dian Kriz, in which I make broader arguments about mid-ninteenth-century British
masculinity, the modernity of British visual culture, and the relation of these to emergent
visual technologies and imperialism. More specifically, for the BAVS 2008 conference I
propose to explore the creative relation of trauma and tactility as it is articulated over a
complex terrain of public and private address in Barrett‘s painting. The intersection of
corporeality and vision in the nineteenth century has often been understood in terms of
foreclosure. My analysis considers how this intersection could also provoke and enable new
forms of creative response to cultural dilemmas within the arena of visual art.
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Travellers‟ Minds and Soldiers‟ Bodies: Inscribing Feeling in the Work of Alexander
Kinglake, Muireann O‟Cinneide, St Peter‟s College, Oxford
My proposed paper centres on the work of the travel writer and historian Alexander Kinglake,
and the way in which his experiences in the East and his history of the Crimean War invoke
physical and emotional feeling as a language through which to explore the psychic
implications of disruption and suffering. Kinglake‘s best-selling travelolgue, Eothen (1844),
has a distinctively impressionistic style which privileges his personal responses over more
direct description and recording, turning the landscape of the East into a spectrum of
individual feelings. Disease in Eothen marks out his body as a self-contained site of
resistance, a male English body that can fend off the physical experience of infection even as
his mind can fend off the fear it produces. In his The Invasion of the Crimea (1863-1887), the
bodies of the English soldiers are differently positioned, receptacles of disease and pain rather
than privileged sites of resistance.
Feeling also plays a crucial role in determining readership of and responses to texts, but this
role is meditated through generic expectations. Travel writing emphasises the supremacy of
individual feeling, for it is the experience of the traveller that is unique and distinctive, and
that vindicates the existence of the work itself. Body and text become aligned as palimpests
upon which the experience of travel is recorded. Physical sensations – sometimes pleasurable,
but usually painful – generated by travel become markers of authenticity, guarantees of the
validity the traveller‘s journeying. This emphasis on physical sensation is then linked to the
traveller‘s emotional experiences of journeying, with the body sometimes reflecting and
sometimes contradicting the emotional responses generated. In contrast, the writing of history
privileges a language of detachment. The primary role of the historian is not as the direct
recipient of experience (even when, as in Kinglake‘s case, some personal experience is being
drawn upon for the account), but as the recipient and evaluator of information. Victorian
historiography also, however, gave a value to feeling: the historian‘s emotional responses to
the information being recorded could serve as a guide to the reader and a guarantor of the
historian‘s individual emphatic capacity, even as such responses had to be kept carefully
controlled in case they invalidated the analytical assessment of events being offered.
Although Kinglake‘s Crimean history was enthusiastically received by readers, reviewers
criticised it for excessive bias: the emphasis on individual experience which had made his
travel writing so successful was considered disadvantageous to his task as a historian. Feeling,
47
I argue, serves for Kinglake as a powerful but also a suspect trope through which to portray
English bodies and English minds in collision with travel and war.
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“Well-Nigh Unmanned”: The Sentimental Journeys of Henry Morton Stanley, Brian Hugh
Murray, King‟s College London
The Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley is best known today for his laconic four
word greeting ―Dr Livingstone, I presume‖, spoken to the eponymous Scottish missionary at
Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in 1871. The catchphrase has survived as the
epitome of Victorian manly reserve. Contemporary British readers, however, saw Stanley‘s
behaviour as hilarious rather than dignified. His performance of the Anglo-Saxon stiff-upper
lip was seen as an absurd parody British restraint; The Pall Mall Gazette describing Stanley‘s
report of the meeting as ―one of the most comical things of its kind ever penned‖.
In reality, however, there was nothing standoffish about the short but intense
relationship fostered by these men over a few brief weeks in the inhospitable wilds of central
Africa. In How I Found Livingstone (1872), Stanley dramatically describes his true feelings
on locating the missionary, explaining his fear of betraying his emotions in front of Africans
least he should ―detract from the dignity of a white man‖. This fear prevents him from
yielding to his secret desire to ―vent my joy in some mad freak, such as idiotically biting my
hand; turning a somersault, or slashing at trees, in order to allay those exciting feelings that
were well-nigh uncontrollable. My heart beats fast, but I must not let my face betray my
emotions‖. Stanley‘s writings are not only full of emotion. They are also full of tears. When
the time comes to part with Livingstone, Stanley describes himself ―as sensitive as a child of
eight or so‖ who ―yielded to such bursts of tears that only such a scene as this could have
forced‖. The effort to maintain ―dry eyes, and outward calm ‖well-nigh unmanned‖ him.
Stanley‘s battle to resist the ‗unmanning‘ powers of sentiment is, I will argue, too self
aware to be regarded simply repression provoked by masculine insecurity. The dramatisation
of the act of repression (which is constantly emphasised in Stanley‘s writing) is, I believe, a
sentimental technique exploited by the author. In the play between the two Stanleys - the
expressive author and the repressed protagonist - Stanley is attempting to invent a language of
‗manly‘ sentimentality. We are paradoxically presented with the act of repression, as an act,
and so this repression becomes a way of heightening the emotional impact of the narrative.
However, this emphasis on emotional reserve as an act problematically highlights the
performativity of manliness. The portrayal of repression of sentiment as a mode of manliness
raises other important concerns. Emotional expression and repression were, for Stanley and
his readers, vital in defining the superiority of the civilised over the savage, the moral over the
corrupt, and the human over the bestial. Stanley‘s use of sentiment, I will suggest, ultimately
signals the unease with which the explorer is forced to navigate between these polarities.
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F) Medicine and Contested Access to the Body
Combining "delicacy and firmness of touch": Victorian Women Surgeons and the Politics
of the Knife, Claire Brock, University of Leicester
If the question of women entering the medical profession provoked fascination and
repugnance in equal measures in the second half of the nineteenth century, the possibility of
female surgeons created even greater controversy. As one writer put it, in a suitably horrified
pronouncement: 'It is impossible that a woman whose hands reek with gore can be possessed
of the same nature or feelings as the generality of women'. A large part of the concern about
women doctors was encapsulated by the prospect of ladies studying anatomy. Discovering the
secrets of the inner workings of the human body was not only considered unfeminine, but an
active desire to acquire physiological knowledge hidden from the eyes of ordinary people and
attainable only through dissection or surgery by qualified men. Coupled with this, surgery as
a profession was still trying to shrug off accusations of coarseness and butchery throughout
the nineteenth century and replace them with skilful delicacy and lightness of touch. Although
developments in anaesthesia dulled the pain of defending the surgeon against brutality, new
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and risky gynaecological procedures such as ovariotomy prompted a backlash from
campaigners against vivisection and those in favour of women's rights.
Women surgeons, therefore, had a number of issues with which to contend when deciding
to wield the knife. This paper will explore the problems faced by women who, as well as
countering suggestions that they were behaving immorally by investigating the body, had to
face dilemmas over whether or not to perform controversial operations on women which sat
uneasily with their feminist politics. Although female surgeons, according to a statement by
Professor Hughes Bennett in an issue of the Lancet from 1870, 'combined delicacy and
firmness of [. . .] touch [which] rendered them much more desirable performers than men' in a
number of procedures, even supposedly light 'touches' could lead to professional and personal
schisms.
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The Medical Man and the Pathologised Female Body in Florence Marryat‟s Petronel,
Greta Depledge, Birkbeck
This paper will consider the cultural relevance of the work of nineteenth-century sensation
writer Florence Marryat. In her 1870 novel Petronel, Marryat‘s central character is Ulick
Ford a successful medical practitioner working in a provincial English town. In the novel
there are a wealth of female patients suffering from hysteria and other neuroses whom Ford
regularly treats. By considering Marryat‘s depiction of Ford the rational scientist, and her
challenging presentation of this character this paper will raise questions about the figure of
the Victorian medical man. The man of science was regularly depicted as a cold and
potentially sinister figure in many nineteenth-century texts. Through our examination of Ford
we see how the rational scientist explores and questions his beliefs and training when
challenged by the conflicting emotions of love. The rational scientific barrier he constructs
around himself is threatened and the attempt Ford makes to desexualise and, indeed,
infantalise the woman who captures his heart raises interesting questions about the conflicting
view of women that the medical man has, and how he might separate the woman he loves
from the pathologised woman and potential patient. This paper will question Marryat‘s
response to contemporary concerns which surrounded the figure of the doctor and his ability
to empathise with human emotion and suffering as Ford himself expresses concern over his
ability to respond to basic human emotions, believing himself emotionally stunted by his
medical practice.
This paper will also consider Marryat‘s depiction of female hysterics and neurotics. By
detailing the symptoms suffered by Ford‘s patients and by making the reader aware of Ford‘s
professional opinion of his patients we are able to study how Marryat provides the reader with
an insight into this complex world. The text makes oblique references to the treatment
offered to women with these diagnoses. Hints about speculum examinations and habitual
masturbation show that Marryat was familiar with contemporary issues surrounding the
physical and mental health and treatment of women in the nineteenth century, their
pathologisation and contemporary scientific thought behind such diagnoses. Marryat‘s
delineation of these women and the treatment offered them by Ford helps us to further
question the medical treatment of women at that time and further explore how the female
body was pathologised by medicine and science. This paper will argue that Marryat‘s
popularity as a female novelist, like so many of her fellow popular writers of the day, did not
negate an ability to examine sensitive issues relevant to contemporary women.
By taking an interdisciplinary approach to this work this paper will use contemporaneous
medical and psychological journals and treatises to further discussions on how Marryat
responded to and questioned many aspects of nineteenth century thought surrounding the
male medical practitioner, the position of women as patients in the medical arena and the
complex relationship between them.
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A Licence to Touch? Embodiment and the Medical Practitioner in Late Victorian England,
Victoria Blake, University of Durham
The ‗medical gaze‘ has been subjected to a great deal of historical analysis and criticism since
Foucault coined the phrase in 1963. It is usually understood to mean a detached, rational
mode of seeing which depersonalises and objectifies the patient, designed to enable the
medical practitioner to make a scientific examination and diagnosis. This dualistic approach
of scientific medicine came to the fore during the nineteenth century, alongside the significant
transformations in practice arising from developments in medical and biological knowledge,
which accompanied organisational and legal changes within the profession. Understanding
the patient-practitioner relationship in this way, or purporting to do so, seemed to release
practitioners from issues of propriety when it came to ‗gazing‘ upon bodies with their
(detached, objective) eyes. Medical touch, similarly, was ‗justified‘ if it formed a necessary
part of a professional examination; patients were, as today, encouraged to trust practitioners
by virtue of their professional reputations and the standards thus implied. However, there was
serious potential for power abuse in this situation, many of which have been revealed since
medical history turned its attentions to a more patient-centred approach towards the end of the
1980s.
Though the nineteenth century saw the emergence of clinical science and increasingly rapid
specialisation within medicine towards the end of the century, most practitioners held onto the
idea that there was no replacement for ‗clinical experience‘ as the basis of medical expertise.
This emphasis also applied to those who embraced and engaged with the new methods and
technologies. Drawing upon the records of the Northumberland and Durham Medical Society
(NDMS, 1848-1914), this paper illustrates how, in order to become proficient at the ‗art‘ of
medicine, practitioners needed to combine development of their scientific knowledge base
with mastering what Lawrence has termed ‗incommunicable knowledge‘, obtainable only
through experience (1985). Thus, to fulfil the criteria of ‗professionalism‘, practitioners were
in the paradoxical position of engaging in embodied knowledge-making practices, the results
of which had to be understood and discussed as disembodied scientific knowledge. This
leaves us with a ‗mysterious link‘ between the knowledge and how it was acquired (Shapin
and Lawrence, 1998).
In light of this problem, I argue that a fuller account of embodiment and perception is needed
from both sides of the medical relationship. As useful as expositions of patients‘ medical
experiences have been in moving away from a limiting, positivist understanding of medical
history, very few studies have focused on the practitioners’ experiences of touching their
patients. Using examples from the NDMS records, I seek to redress this balance through a
careful examination of practitioners‘ own accounts of medical encounters. I will highlight the
importance the Society attached to enabling its members to share their empirical experience
with one another. By focusing on their embodied knowledge-making practices, I further argue
that medical touch should not be seen merely as an extension of the ‗medical gaze‘ as usually
understood, but instead we need to re-examine medical perception as a pre-reflective
embodied engagement with the medical environment.
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3.25-3.45 Tea
3.50-5.10 Panels 5
A) Faith, Feeling and Masculinity
Devotional Feeling: High Anglican ritual and the management of emotion, Kirstie Blair,
University of Glasgow
This paper considers the complex attitudes towards the expression and concealment of
emotion evident in the theological writings of the Oxford Movement, and how these attitudes
were reflected in changing conceptions of the church service. From the 1830s onwards, the
restoration of traditional forms, ceremonies and rituals within the Anglican service was
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widespread. As I will argue, these shifts in the method of worship – with the increasing
incorporation of elements such as sung psalms, choral responses, recitation, hymn-singing –
were intimately related to Tractarian views on participation in church services as
simultaneously a vital source of communal religious feeling and a restraint upon individual
emotion. Writers who argued for the importance of these formal elements in worship tended
to stress the way in which they acted as a healthy expression of feeling, as it was contained by
the structures and rituals of the church. Those in opposition to High Anglican views, in
contrast, suggested that the increasingly formalized nature of worship might serve to chill and
deaden religious emotion. By tracing this debate through tracts, periodical articles, sermons,
fiction and poetry and the published writings of leading Anglican figures, I will show the
centrality of emotion to Victorian concepts of faith, and how the ritualist controversy, which
was to become a leading area of debate in the mid-century, fed into questions of the proper
role of feeling in faith.
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Affective Encounters in Borrow‟s Bible in Spain and Wild Wales, Hilary Weeks,
University of Gloucestershire
George Borrow‘s travel narratives The Bible in Spain (1843) and Wild Wales (1862; 1865) are
structured as episodic encounters, amusing, dramatic, and sometimes bizarre. Borrow
travelled to Spain in an official capacity, distributing copies of the New Testament on behalf
of the British and Foreign Bible Society; his journey through Wales, conversely, was a private
undertaking. Although Borrow spoke enough Spanish, Welsh and Caló (Spanish Gypsy) to
make himself understood, his encounters, as I shall argue, are most powerful where unspoken
communication replaces language; both narratives stage affective, nonverbal moments of
recognition. Sometimes he meets former acquaintances, but more often, others recognise him
by reputation and by his aura of authority. Often Borrow and his interlocutor ‗recognise‘ each
other through a bond of sympathy that transcends their shared language. Borrow‘s discourse
of affect and unspoken connections is especially interesting where it meets his descriptions of
missionary work in The Bible in Spain. Though he endures official hostility and amused
indifference from townspeople, Borrow is sometimes mobbed for his texts by the rural poor.
Such is the thirst for the Word, ‗the poor creatures‘ offer to pay with food where they have no
money, get into a scuffle over the last copy, and weep when supplies run out. Emotional
scenes over the distribution of Bibles were familiar to readers of nineteenth-century
missionary literature: in The History of the Origin and First Ten Years of the British and
Foreign Bible Society (1816), John Owen describes one such episode in Wales, noting the
‗exultation‘ of those who received copies and the ‗truly affecting‘ spectacle of the unlucky
ones. Borrow draws on this discursive commonplace, although for artistic ends, not didactic.
In Wild Wales Borrow tries to recover the affective encounters of the past. An ageing and
crabby figure, he makes his way through a land that resembles Spain in its linguistic and
social divisions and rural poverty, looking for the moments of sympathetic recognition and
clashes with authority that had underpinned his earlier narrative. In a sad reversal, it is not
now the local people who recognise Borrow and beseech him for the Word, but Borrow who
searches for the vanishing remnants of bardic literary culture. He roams Anglesey in hopes of
finding genuine Welsh bards, makes pilgrimages to the graves of Dafydd ApGwilym, Huw
Morris and Goronwy Owen, and laments the suppression of ancient British language and
religion by an alien, authoritarian Methodism.
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Bi-polar Narratives: Charles Kingsley, “twenty- parson power” and sick-notes, Louise Lee,
Roehampton University
Literature‘s unhealthy men and women cough and splutter in the doctor‘s waiting room of art:
fiction-writing is, by and large, not a well profession. Yet even by these sickly standards,
Charles Kingsley‘s collapses - mental and physical - are notably numerous. Indeed, there can
be few writers whose domestic existence so markedly diverged from their public image.
Kingsley was famed as workaholic, a writer and lecturer on health and sanitation, a
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prodigious producer of novels, poetry and sermons in addition to his strenuous parish life, but
his private existence also tells another far more complex and uneven story.
For, while Kingsley‘s life was characterised by Herculean bouts of exertion, these were also
followed by long periods of nullity and self-obliteration. Kingsley lived a double ontology.
He was a dweller of two domains; what Susan Sontag calls ‗the kingdom of the well and the
kingdom of the sick.‘ Against a textually triumphalised life of action, there are frequent and
sustained periods of inertia; instead of hale and hearty, there is often physical ‗prostration‘;
and instead of a divinely ordered Christian universe, there is a stark abyss and nothingness.
As such, Kingsley‘s own body is far removed from the publicly legible body of muscular
Christianity; it is the spectral corpus that inheres a whole hidden configuration of banished
referents: from collapse and bleakness to introspection and self-retreat.
But how far is the body of the author implicated in the fiction that he writes? And perhaps
more importantly, should we care if the real world of his flesh and bone tells a different story
to the symbolic realm he imagines? Or do we, as Jacques Derrida famously asserts in Of
Grammatology, run the risk of reading naively - purely for the literary symptom? This paper
will discuss the function of illness in Kingsley‘s life - as a source of what Athena Vrettos calls
‗emotional ventriloquism‘ - and will question the extent to which the discursive embodiment
of the Kingsley‘s public textual world challenged and undermined his lived private bodily
experience
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B) Yonge and the Body
Physical and Literary (Dis)ability and the Woman Writer in The Clever Woman of the
Family, Gina O Brien, University of Chester
For this paper, I consider the link between the physical and literary (dis)ability of the
woman writer through the example of Charlotte M. Yonge‘s novel The Clever Woman of the
Family (1865). Female authors who continued to work through serious illness were a
common feature in Victorian publishing; the sensation novelist Ellen Wood, for example,
supported her entire family by writing and editing from her ‗invalid‘s sofa,‘ and of course
George Eliot‘s letters reveal that she was continually hampered by debilitating headaches and
bouts of depression. In Eliot‘s case in particular, the link between physical disability and
literary ability exposes a discourse of feminine fragility surrounding the Victorian woman
writer who physically suffered for the sake of her art; to put it another way, the woman
writer‘s body in pain was often a very productive one.
Yonge‘s novel provides an important insight into the link between physical suffering
and literary production; the dual-heroines, Rachel Curtis and Ermine Keith, mirror each other
throughout the novel as both are ‗clever women,‘ both are writers and both are physically
disabled at some point in the narrative. Ermine, like the novelist Ellen Wood, manages the
impressive literary achievement of editing a periodical and producing a steady stream of
fiction from her ‗invalid‘s sofa.‘ Rachel, ambitious for a literary career, tries her hand at
authorship only to find her articles rejected, after which a life threatening illness quickly
follows.
In this paper I argue that Yonge‘s representation of the feminine, physically disabled
and highly productive professional woman writer exposes a common masking strategy for
female ambition. Just as George Eliot might be read as having hidden her ambition behind
constant reports of headaches and depression that served to stress not only her high levels of
suffering for her art but also to deflect attention away from any potential pleasure gained from
her success, so Ermine‘s ambition is made acceptable to the reader as it is mediated through
the site of the fragile, suffering female body. Thus by the end of Yonge‘s novel, Rachel must
learn from Ermine‘s example to mask her own ambition behind the discourse of feminine
fragility, thus ensuring the woman writer‘s fierce ambition is represented through the
acceptable and familiar medium of the suffering female body.
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52
Sermons on Salutary Suffering or Critical Exposure of Clinical Concepts?
Emotional Distress in Mid-Victorian Religious Fiction, Tamara S Wagner, NTU,
Singapore
While much has been written on Victorian sensation fiction‘s ambiguous investment
in insanity and its changing conceptualisation in clinical discourses, their impact on the
representation of emotional states in mid-century domestic fiction is only beginning to attract
more attention. In what ways did especially the otherwise markedly anti-sensational subgenre
of the religious novel engage with the potential of literary sensationalism for a dissection of
emotional experience? So far from simply adopting its narrative strategies to direct new
attention to concepts of salutary suffering, I wish to argue, the most intriguing Victorian
religious novels offered insightful renegotiations of the emergent medical and psychological
as well as social and literary approaches to emotional distress. Their central interest in the
embodiment as well as the visionary potential of pain therein engendered a pointedly critical
engagement with the emergent discipline of psychology. Thus, in deliberate disruptions of
clinical conceptualisations of ―low spirits,‖ ―shattered nerves,‖ and the ―depressed spirits‖
that came to be diagnosed as neurasthenia later in the century, religious fiction proposed not
only different ways of dealing with the causes and symptoms of both mental and physical
―affliction,‖ but at the same time offered alternative interpretations of normalcy. The
proposed paper will draw specifically on the interplay of domestic realism, sensationalism,
and evocations of spiritual, including visionary, experience in fiction by the popular
Tractarian novelist Charlotte Yonge. While emphasising the significance of her detailed
representations of various forms of ―invalidism‖ for disability studies in general, I shall focus
on her critical engagement with prevalent approaches to – and specifically medical
simplifications of – emotional distress. Illustrating Yonge‘s intertextual references to literary
as well as clinical discourses on feeling and its embodiment, I further seek to highlight the
significance of her ambiguous critique of Tennyson‘s aestheticisation of world-weariness in
―Mariana‖ in The Castle-Builders; Or, The Deferred Confirmation (1851-52; 1854) and her
rewriting of the popular sensational plot of wrongful incarceration in The Trial (1864). A
reassessment of her self-conscious invocation of intense emotional experience promises to
cast new light not only on the vexed role of such antifeminist women writers for Victorian
culture, but also on the diversity of the responses to psychological discourses at the time.
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Pregnant Silences; or “When do you expect your mother?”, Susan Walton, University of
Hull
Just as some musicologists have wanted to recreate performances which approximate to the
experience of audiences at the first hearings of musical compositions, so do some cultural
historians read Victorian fiction trying to recapture the sensation of its first readers, to share
in their first-footing of the text. Although fundamentally unachievable in any real sense, it
can nevertheless move us nearer to an empathetic understanding of the feelings and attitudes
of those Victorian readers.
Such an approach can illuminate a key area of physical experience: how to recognize
the devices whereby readers were alerted to possible pregnancies and births; how a subtle use
of language provides inconspicuous signals recognised by contemporaries, but often
overlooked by modern readers accustomed to more explicit expressions. The result of this
present blindness can be that the birth of baby can startle - an unexpected development at that
moment in the plot, because we have failed to decode the carefully placed signposts.
Discretion and decorum rather than prudishness dictated this veiled language; when we learn
how to decipher it, the text reveals an embodied awareness in tune with the rhythms of
procreation.
While recent scholarship has vanquished most post-Victorian stereotypes of their
predecessors as strait-laced prudes, it has been slower to extend such understanding to some
women writers. Charlotte Yonge was a conservative writer whose piety and unmarried state
can still suggest an obsolete notion of a Victorian who might be uncomfortable dealing with
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any aspect of sexual behaviour in her characters. Certainly, for the unwary modern reader,
some babies are born unexpectedly in her stories: the arrival of Bessie‘s child after she has
tripped over a croquet hoop in Clever Woman of the Family comes as a shock to some. But a
greater understanding of the significance of particular phrases, regularly employed as
shorthand to indicate imminent confinements, shows that even a respectable spinster such as
Yonge was attentive to the physical bodies of her characters. This ties in with Barbara
Dunlap‘s recent article on ‗Charlotte Yonge: Embodying the Domestic Fiction‘ where she
declares that, ‗in her presentation of the sexual body, coded though it is, [Yonge] is
sometimes capable of more directness than a self-conscious writer such as Thackeray would
allow himself‘. Reserve, not ignorance, determined the language which she and other
Victorians could employ to forewarn readers of the bodily experiences of pregnant women.
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C) Lyrical Feelings: Browning, Eliot, and the Expression of Emotion
“I touched a thought”: embodying cognition in Robert Browning‟s Men and Women
(1855), Rhian Williams, De Montfort University
Using Browning‘s ‗Two in the Campagna‘ as its focus, this paper will first trace shifts
between the immediacy of bodily sensation and the elusiveness of a captured sense of touch
in the Victorian love lyric. It will then propose that Browning specifically evokes the body
and bodily sensation (‗hand in hand‘; ‗touch you close‘;) in love lyrics to interrogate the
possibility of mobilising the body as a route to understanding, with the desire for the lover to
‗know‘ the beloved acting as an allegory for the desire to ground knowledge in sensation.
Allowing that such moments imply both bodies outside the poem and the body of the poem,
the paper proposes that Browning‘s poems fix on the lyric as a genre specifically charged
with the task of mediating between the individual body and the social body. This discussion
of lyrics from Browning‘s Men and Women will be situated within consideration of
reciprocated love (in particular marriage) as a problem for the Victorian love lyric (seen in
contemporary account and in critical commentary); theories of touch as a route to knowledge;
and, more locally, situated in comparison to Elizabeth Barrett Browning‘s Sonnets from the
Portuguese (1850), which are evoked and yet reconditioned by Browning. Whereas in Barrett
Browning‘s love lyrics the conundrum of expressing the experience of reciprocated love is
resolved through the motif of silence, Browning‘s treatment – which evokes a sense of eluded
pastoral rather than utilising the love-sonnet tradition – suggests that love is characterised by
a desire for bodily interaction that risks incompatibility with the integrity of a poetic corpus.
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“I am what I feel”: The Psychology of Affect in Robert Browning‟s Sordello, Gregory
Tate, Linacre College, University of Oxford
The idea that Robert Browning is a poet of the head rather than of the heart, of thought rather
than of feeling, has a long critical history. Victorian critics persistently censured what they
saw as the excessively intellectual quality of his writing, while more recent assessments of the
poet have typically placed his work in opposition to the affect-centred poetics that dominated
Victorian conceptions of poetry. With its obscure historical plot and virtually impenetrable
style, Browning‘s infamous long poem Sordello (1840) would seem to be the most
aggressively cerebral of his works. However, while Browning separates thought from feeling
in Sordello, he does not privilege the former over the latter. On the contrary, the poem
dismisses thought as a painful and even uncontrollable process that rarely succeeds in fully
grasping its objects, while presenting feeling, in the form of both emotional affect and
physical sensation, as the foundation of the human mind and as a metaphysical power that
enables the mind to communicate with God. This account of feeling reworks the affective
poetics of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who argued that poetry works through the stimulation
of organic feeling, feeling that can help the mind to transcend its earthly existence and to
approach divinity. It also engages with new theories of physiological psychology, which
Browning learned about through his involvement with the radical periodical the Monthly
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Repository in the 1830s, and which stressed the unwilled nature of thought and the primacy of
physical sensation and physiological processes in the operation of the mind. In the model of
psychology that Browning develops in Sordello, affect, which underpins all other mental
processes, is rooted in the body, but it is also the key to unlocking the transcendent potential
of the mind. Sordello claims that language, as the product of chaotic thought, is incapable of
adequately representing this potential, a claim that is reflected in the tortuous and convoluted
syntax that is used throughout the poem. Instead, Browning seeks to convey his approach to
affect through the poem‘s form: its forced rhymes and strenuous metrical complexity
illustrate his interest in the bodily force of feeling and his conception of the difficulty inherent
in attempting to transmit the metaphysical power of affect in writing. The account of affect
put forward in Sordello represents an attempt on Browning‘s part to re-imagine Romantic
poetics in the light of new psychological theories of thought and feeling, and to champion the
central role of feeling, both in poetry and in the workings of the mind.
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Using Music to Represent Emotion in George Eliot‟s Romola, Jennifer Diann Jones
University of California, Davis
In my paper I will explore why George Eliot turns to musical metaphor to realistically
represent her characters‘ emotions and motivations, focusing on Romola as it offers her most
extended exploration of the power of musical language. For Eliot, there is no language that
can accurately and directly represent the inner consciousness and feelings of her characters.
She can directly describe what they experience, but must rely on figurative language to
describe how they experience things. Therefore, she cannot rely on the matter-of-fact, nonfigurative language that we might expect from an author who compares her artistic project to
that of the Dutch Realist painters23; non-figurative language simply cannot do what Eliot‘s
realism requires of it, because language itself is inadequate for her purposes. Eliot‘s
perceptions of what the various media can and cannot accomplish is heavily influenced by her
understanding of Hegel and Feuerbach. Of all the arts, music is the best fitted to
communicating emotion; for Hegel, it is the language of the spirit, for Feuerbach the language
of the soul. Musical scenes and musical language, for Eliot, can most directly and
realistically communicate emotion to her readers.
Throughout her career, Eliot learns to exploit this power of music in her novels.
Romola has very few scenes of performed music and even fewer instances of direct
discussion of music; yet, in the novel Eliot relies heavily on the power of music to show her
readers why the characters behave as they do. Savonarola never performs music in the novel,
though he is by far one of George Eliot‘s most musical characters. He orchestrates his
sermons as carefully as an accomplished composer to maximize the emotional impact he has
on his audience. The narrator describes his speech and his audience‘s response to his sermons
in musical terms; he uses crescendos and silences to heighten tension and plaintive tones to
play on his listeners‘ more tender feelings. Most of his listeners respond as he calculates they
will. While he is speaking, Savonarola fully exploits music‘s ability to penetrate the soul and
bind one soul to another (when he is silenced he loses his hold over his Florentine followers).
He uses his musical oratory style to act on the emotions of his audience more so than on their
reason or intellect. It is because he appeals to their emotions that Savonarola gets so many
Florentines who would otherwise dislike him and disagree with him to follow him for as long
as he does. The power of his voice is also responsible for his downfall; the Pope feels
threatened by it. In this novel Eliot explores the limits of the power of music; without
musicality Savonarola would never have gained as much power as he does, and were it not for
the limitations of music as an ephemeral art, he might not have lost it.
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D) Touching Art
23
Famously, in chapter seventeen of Adam Bede Eliot uses Dutch realism as an example of the kind of
realism she hopes to achieve as a novelist.
55
Ruskin, John Stuart Mill and „The Aesthetic Emotion‟, Brian Ingram, Ruskin Centre,
University of Lancaster
In 1859 JS Mill published an extended review of what was then a significant contribution to
the developing discipline of psychology – Alexander Bain‘s theory of mind as found in his
two books, The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and The Emotions and the Will(1859). Bain‘s
work was firmly in the tradition of Scottish empiricism and was built on the theories of Locke
and James Mill. He sought to explain mind and mental states by the theory of Association of
Ideas. Mill‘s ideas as put forward in his review are broadly in agreement with Bain‘s. With
respect to the emotions however, Mill believed that Bain had not ‗entered, with the fullness
which belongs to his plan....into the important inquiry, how some emotions are compounded
out of others,‘ and he proceeds to develop the issue himself, particularly with regard to ‗the
aesthetic group of emotions‘. In the course of his application of the Theory of Association to
the idea of the aesthetic he claims that the student will find in Ruskin‘s Modern Painters II
remarkable examples and evidence of the validity of the Association Philosophy of Art.
Ruskin, of course, held strongly opposing views of the nature and source of the aesthetic, and
the perception and representation of Beauty, as Mill well knew. In ch. XI of Modern Painters
II he writes that he desires ‗only to assert and prove some certain principles, and by means of
these to show something of the relations which the material works of God bear to the human
mind.‘ This paper examines the consequences and validity of Mill‘s claim with respect to
Ruskin‘s version of emotions and the aesthetic, and their consequences for subsequent
debates about the connection between emotion and the aesthetic.
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Touch and Sculpted Bodies in Victorian Representations of Pygmalion, Amelia Yeates,
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
The earliest existing account of Pygmalion – the artist who falls in love with his own creation
– is found in Ovid‘s Metamorphoses (AD1-AD8). The first British literary version of
Pygmalion appeared in the fourteenth century but it was in the nineteenth century that the
story became particularly popular, with several drawings, paintings, poems and plays
produced. In Ovid‘s verse Pygmalion frequently touches his sculpture, in fact so hard that he
leaves an impression on the statue. Nineteenth-century poems about Pygmalion continue this
theme with touch playing a central role: whilst the artist is creating his sculpture he feels his
way around the marble, waiting for the envisaged form to emerge; once he has created
Galatea, as she would become known, Pygmalion touches the statue, admiring her perfection;
and, as the sculpture transforms, Pygmalion thrills at the sensation of marble becoming flesh
under his exploratory fingers. Touch, therefore, plays an important role in creating the erotic
tenor of many Pygmalion narratives. In visual versions, touch is represented less explicitly but
is instead inferred through a variety of tropes. Indeed, those versions that seem notably less
erotic feature very little touch, for example Burne-Jones‘s Pygmalion and the Image (187578).
One of the reasons Galatea might invite touch is her physicality; a sculpted body,
especially in the Pygmalion story where the mimetic powers of the artist‘s talent are stressed,
resembles a real body, occupying real space and, as Alex Potts has noted, creating a
heightened sense of the viewer‘s physical presence,24 a phenomenology which is undoubtedly
erotic. In my paper I will examine both literary and visual representations of Pygmalion
produced during the nineteenth century, exploring the issue of touch and its representation
and the accompanying themes of the body, eroticism and phenomenological viewing. I will
examine the various ways in which Pygmalion engages, physically, with Galatea, both before
and after she is transformed and consider what the various treatments of the story suggest
about how Victorian writers and artists imagined the relationship between sculpture and the
viewer.
24
Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination. New Haven; London: Yale University
Press, p. 35.
56
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Who is Ilaria?, Cristina Pascu-Tulbure, University of Liverpool
The paper explores Ruskin‘s fascination with the tomb of Ilaria di Caretto in Lucca, where a
sculpture by Jacopo della Quercia (1374-1438) shows Ilaria‘s body ‗lying dead, and lying
dead in dignity‘. ‗The tomb altered the course of my life‘, he recalls in Fors Clavigera, and
‗from that day […] have guided my work […] by the sacred laws of truth and devotion.‘
Ruskin was so profoundly moved by ‗the sweet and arched eyes […] closed‘ and ‗the
tenderness of loving lips […] set and quiet‘ that he placed both the subsequent development
of his career and the ministrations to his dead body under her sign. Shortly after Ruskin‘s
death W G Collingwood explained why ‗the great heart‘ refused to have casts of the face and
hand taken. Years before, at Lucca, an Italian who wanted to please Ruskin made a cast of
Ilaria‘s face. Ruskin was distraught that someone would have touched her and felt the act to
be a profanation of – not a statue – but ‗the dead lady.‘
Ruskin‘s references to Ilaria include Praeterita, where she is ‗the purest standard of breathing
womanhood‘ and ‗The Storm-Cloud‘, where she is seen as ‗the sculpture of a dream.‘ ‗She
never lay so on her pillow, nor so in her grave. […] That [gravity] law prevailed on her
shroud, and prevails on her dust, but not on herself.‘ Ilaria is at once dead and breathing, a
dream, formalised flesh and embodiment of typical beauty. But what exactly is herself and
why is her hold on Ruskin so strong?
I will argue that the idea of Ilaria, desirable and untouchable, has much to do with Ruskin‘s
deeply seated fear of the living female body. It is easy to see that, constrained by his
Evangelical upbringing, the expression of Ruskin‘s desire had to take a spiritual veil. He uses
the excuse of Ilaria‘s outstretched body to elicit ‗the feelings that change material things into
spiritual.‘: ‗there is no desire more intense or more exalted than that which exists in all rightly
disciplined minds for the evidence of repose.‘ Ilaria‘s inaccessibility, his fear of and
fascination with her are dramatised through embodiment in several female figures who
haunted Ruskin to the end of his days. Rose La Touche, Ariadne, Proserpine and St Ursula are
all manifestations of Ilaria, hovering, tantalisingly, between life and death. But in deferring
engagement, and finally possession, Ruskin is playing out not merely his fear of the opposite
sex. His deepest fear is of understanding – the divine message, the laws of beauty, the
impossibility of attaining ‗the life where hope and memory are as one.‘ In holding on to an
Ilaria not subject to earthly laws and wishing ‗my last end be like this‘, Ruskin is trying to
avoid the ‗cold feeling of dread‘ – the line of the skull ‗consummating‘ the beauty of St
Ursula in her sleep just as he is completing his copy of her lovely head. Ilaria‘s untouched
body is Ruskin‘s guarantee of immortality.
[email protected] or [email protected]
E) Politic Emotion? Feeling and Sincerity
Sincerity and the English National Character Revisited, James Jaffe, University of
Wisconsin-Whitewater
In The Rise of English Nationalism, Gerald Newman identified the spread of sincerity
as a ―momentous work‖ that helped to create a unique English national character.25 While
there is a great deal to be learned from Newman‘s cultural history of this aspect of
nationalism it nonetheless exhibits a number of significant omissions. Most importantly, his
primarily literary analysis omits analysis of the significant political and religious debates that
surrounded the problem of sincerity during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
By no means is it clear, as Newman suggested, that sincerity was uncritically adopted as a
unique badge of Englishness. Instead, the rise of sincerity suggested and implied a range of
social and political ramifications, many of which had demotic implications.
Sincerity never has been far from the heart of democratic politics. One of the most
common complaints among voters in democratic societies today is that their leaders lack
25
Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740-1830, rev. ed. (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), pp. 127-39.
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sincerity, a failure that undermines the trust upon which their delegated authority rests.
Historically, however, sincerity‘s connection to democratic politics was even more robust and
extensive. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, both contemporary
observers and political theorists stressed the interconnection between emotional sincerity and
the founding of democratic states. In France, this connection arose in part from the late
Enlightenment‘s new emphasis upon the value of political and personal transparency and
authenticity. In Britain, however, there were two distinguishing features of this new
connection between democracy and sincerity.
In the first instance, sincerity had long been an important element of the British
evangelical tradition. The Puritan divine Richard Baxter had preached that sincerity in selfexamination was essential to salvation; Henry Venn argued that sincerity was one of the three
―active graces‖ of a Christian; and, William Wilberforce, following Venn, clearly
distinguished between a true and false sincerity. The moral value placed upon sincerity could
have an unintended leveling effect. Rank and status could become less important than a
sincere heart. By 1810, for example, Margaret Hoare Wood was able to write in her diary that
―sincerity is the foundation of every virtue‖ without reference to God, salvation, or sin. The
leveling potential of evangelical sincerity necessarily elicited strong response from with the
religious community.
In the second instance, the promotion of sincerity was seen to act as an antidote to the
corruption, venality, and artifice that was characteristic of a ―polite and commercial people.‖
In ways similar to the French problem of transparency, British democratic politics therefore
arose in opposition to the culture of politeness that, it was argued, promoted the projection of
false feelings and the corruption of the soul. Social and political leveling thus became
inextricably connected to the reform of society through the spread of sincerity. Godwin was
only the most prominent and vociferous person who argued that ―sincerity is not less essential
than equality to the well-being of mankind.‖
[email protected]
Performing Emotions: Christmas Communitas and Ritual Time in Nineteenth Century
England, Neil Armstrong, University of Gloucestershire
The paper will draw upon research I have been undertaking on the emotional
dimensions of the middle- and upper-class family Christmas in nineteenth-century
England. I argue that this period sees the emergence and development of modern
concepts of Christmas family time or 'communitas', an experience distinguished by
heightened emotions. A study of Christmas allows a range of emotions to be
considered in relation to one another, including familial love, domestic felicity,
religious joy, excitement, anticipation, disappointment, bereavement and consumer
desire. A happy and harmonious Christmas came to represent an ideal version of the
family, but the practice of Christmas celebration was potentially problematic.
Christmas emotions were enacted through traditional greetings and platitudes but also
gift exchange. Yet the ritualised and formulaic nature of these exchanges raised the
possibility that some of them may have been less than sincere. Furthermore, the need
to avoid conflict and sustain the mutual experience of feeling 'Christmassy' required
that Christmas ritual time be heavily structured, including forms of play and
storytelling. The latter feature is especially resonant in relation to children, as the
Christmas festival increasingly converged with an ideology of childhood with
privileged notions of childhood innocence, which offered a potential antidote to the
problem of insincerity. Consequently, the emotions of children, and their observance
by adults, became central to the family Christmas. Children were increasingly
encouraged to perform what was perceived to be the essential nature of childhood at
Christmas, but the notion of performance, in the context of Victorian attitudes towards
the theatre, an association made clear through the popularity of Christmas theatricals,
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meant that the problem of sincerity was left unresolved.
[email protected]
“The Image of Grief”: Incarceration and the Language and Symbolics of Feeling, Helen
Rogers, Liverpool John Moores University
Is it possible to identify and interpret the feelings and emotions of Victorian prisoners? This
was as much a practical problem for prison ministers and Christian visitors as it is a
methodological problem for historians. Guiding inmates to right feeling was their principle
aim but it also presented one of their biggest difficulties: how could genuine emotion and
contrition be distinguished from hypocritical professions of sorrow and penitence? Moreover,
while grief was a necessary part of the process of atonement, an excess of anguish could
produce despair rather than reform. Feeling, therefore, had to be managed and monitored.
This paper analyses how these challenges were handled by the evangelical prison visitor
Sarah Martin (1791-1843), exploring how she sought to interpret inmates‘ displays of
sentiment and how she endeavoured to channel their feelings towards a proper Christian
sensibility. Martin‘s responses to prisoners are examined in terms of her intense sense of
vocation and terror of her own feelings and propensity to despair. Beyond Martin‘s personal
sensibility and perceptions, it considers whether her records can illuminate the ways in which
prisoners expressed emotion, whether heartfelt or strategic.
[email protected]
F) Experimentation and Emotion
Emotion and Self-control in the Mid-Victorian Period: Alexander Bain and Lady Elizabeth
Eastlake, Anne-Marie Millim, University of Glasgow
Alexander Bain, in his The Emotions and the Will of 1859, repeatedly encourages his
readers to exercise ―control of the volitions of Sense and Appetite,‖ and thus to ―improve
their character,‖ which he deems to be the most ―vital‖ task to be undertaken by the
individual. Like Sigmund Freud in Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), Bain bases his
argument on the premise of the individual being driven by his or her instincts in the pursuit of
pleasure. For Bain, the human being is born as an inchoate mess, unable at first to contain and
channel emotional impulses. In order to be inserted into the collective, the individual‘s
―passionate outbursts‖ have to be controlled by ―unavoidabl[y] severe‖ lessons, thus
fashioning a being that is perfectly able to ―overcome grief, anger [and] incontinent animal
spirits.‖ Bain‘s techniques for the successful management of the emotions not only shed light
on the Victorian physicalist, anti-religious conception of the emotional framework of the
human being, but they also elucidate the necessity for self-restraint in Victorian society.
This paper will argue that the Victorian individual feels compelled to avoid any sign
of self-indulgence in order to be respectable. This social requirement of self-restraint is a key
element in a very wide range of writings: in this paper I will focus on the diaries of the
Victorian art critic Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (1842-47) who in the words of her nephew and
editor Charles Eastlake Smith had ―perfect self-possession.‖ Although her diaries date from
ten years before Bain‘s The Emotions and the Will, her strong opinions on the crucial
importance of self-restraint in all human endeavours reflect the emotional climate of the
second half of the nineteenth century. Lady Eastlake holds that ―self-forgetfulness and selfpossession […] are essential to all excellence.‖ She condemns overtly displayed emotions and
consistently stresses the significance of self-effacement: ―There is no simplicity so simple as
that which is refined, no sorrow so touching as that which is subdued, no art so beautiful as
that which is concealed.‖ Like Bain, she advises her reader and herself to acknowledge grief
and ―make wretchedness the subject of our examination‖ in a rational fashion in order to
reduce the sting of ―heavy affliction,‖ thus transforming an emotion into an idea that is devoid
of despicable instinctual urgency.
The views of Lady Eastlake and Alexander Bain communicate the undesirability of
strong emotion. Both recognise it as an aspect of the human being that needs to be culturally
contained, repressed and civilised. In this paper I propose to show that the personal records of
Lady Eastlake, as much as Bain‘s theories, advocate unswerving discipline for human
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conduct and consequently portray repression as a necessary practice, indispensible to
respectable behaviour.
[email protected]
Caught on a silver plate: Emotions and their representation in Victorian science, Monika
Pietrzak-Franger, University of Siegen, Germany
It is interesting that in the culture which is today associated with stiff-necked-ness and
distance, philosophies of emotion constituted such an integral part of scientific and artistic
discourses (Bell, de Boulogne, Darwin, Rejlander). The developments of stereoscope,
daguerreotype and heliotype also afforded a possibility of ―instantaneous‖ and more
―truthful‖ capturing and presentation of fleeting muscular and corporeal changes. In this paper
I am looking at the intersection of science and the new medium of photography and at the
discourse around human emotion which this intersection initiated.
In the examination I compare the place of photography as an illustrative medium in scientific
and medical works of Charles Darwin, James Crichton-Browne and Jean-Martin Charcot.
However different their scientific objectives, all three based their work (if only partly) on the
observation of the insane. According to Darwin, the ephemeral character of emotions as well
as human empathy were major obstacles in a study of the manifestation of emotions. To
objectify his work, he decided to observe children ―for they exhibit many emotions […] ‗with
extraordinary force‘‖ (Darwin 14) and ―the insane […] as they are liable to the strongest
passions and give uncontrolled vent to them‖ (Darwin 14). Although he decided against the
incorporation of Crichton-Browne‘s photographs of mentally ill in The Expression of the
Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), he commissioned Gustav O. Rejlander to provide him
with ―on-cue‖ photos which would add vivacity and expression to his work.
Crichton-Browne, in contrast, relied only on his own eye and on the acting abilities of his
wife in the production of photographic ―documents‖ of the emotion of the insane. In this he
followed the advice of Duchenne de Boulogne according to whom: ―No artist however skilful
can render exactly the phenomena illustrated nor can an ordinary photographer produce
satisfactory results for only if he were a physiologist and pathologist would he be able to pose
the patient in such a way as to make the deformity clear‖ (Stannard 39). The ―deformity‖ in
Crichton-Browne‘s case was no other but the deformity of muscles in the manifestation of
feelings. Charcot‘s close collaboration with Jean-Albert Pitres and the resulting instantaneous
(though staged) photographs of hysteria sufferers are another instance of this intermingling of
mimicry, photography and medicine.
It is this intertwining which is most striking and most interesting today. It shows that, rather
than documenting the ―real‖ human emotion, all three scientists participated in the Victorian
myth making. Their photographs galvanized not only the corporeal manifestation of human
emotion but also its perception and enactment as characteristic for the time. Additionally, they
also caught the complexities of the iconography of disease and its paradigmatic vision.
[email protected]
“Our „doubts‟ in fact appear to me as sacred”: William Froude, Test Tanks and Victorian
Doubt, Don Leggett, University of Kent
Our ―doubts‖ in fact appear to me as sacred, and I think deserve to be cherished as sacredly as
our beliefs; and our ―will‖ has no function in reference to the formation or maintenance of our
―belief,‖ but that of insisting that all probabilities on either side shall be honestly regarded,
and weighed and borne in mind.‘ These measured words might be expected from a
theologian, a historian or a philosopher, not a mathematician and engineer. Historians have
explored the influence of science, particularly geology, on Victorian doubt, but have
neglected to explore how the culture of doubt and its constituent feelings of uncertainty and
anxiety fed back into the conceptualisation of science and knowledge. William Froude, the
brother of the Tractarian Richard Hurrell Froude and the historian James Anthony Froude,
experienced these doubts both as a student at Oriel College, Oxford and later as a Victorian
gentleman of science. His understanding and response to doubt shaped much of his scientific
method and the technologies which he used to study hydrodynamics (the behaviour of fluids).
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Through a series of correspondence with John Newman it is possible to explore how Froude‘s
very personal response to doubt shaped his outlook on science, religion and ‗truth‘.
I locate Froude, an ‗experimental mathematician‘, in a social network of Victorian
intellectuals with James Anthony Froude, Charles Kingsley and Newman, and with the
scientists William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), W.J. Macquorn Rankine and Charles Lyell. In
1871 Froude built an experimental test tank: a laboratory for the study of hydrodynamics. It
was paid for by the British Admiralty, and shaped the ships of the empire and the study of
hydrodynamics for the remainder of the nineteenth-century. Utilising recent scholarship on
‗object histories‘ I explore the culture and concerns embodied in this technological system of
modelling machinery and precision measuring instruments. I then use Froude‘s
correspondence to explore his test tank technology as a response to the intellectual and
spiritual crises of faith suffered broadly by Victorians and specifically by his social network
of intellectuals and engineers. This approach to naval architecture challenges the
predominantly deterministic framework through which the subject has traditionally been
viewed.
I investigate how Froude‘s ‗mechanical‘ treatment of hydrodynamics resonated with
the work of physicists and engineers on thermodynamics, and the broader Victorian
vocabulary of mechanical study – that credible knowledge was only obtainable through visual
and mechanical testing. I use Froude‘s correspondence with Newman, the leader of the
Oxford Movement and later a convert to Roman Catholicism, to compare how theologians
and scientists responded to doubt, dogma, knowledge and religion. By locating naval
architecture in a host of scientific and cultural contexts it is possible to contextualise the
production of ‗trustworthy‘ scientific knowledge as a very personal response to the feelings of
doubt and anxiety which wrecked havoc on Victorian intellectual society.
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5.15-6.15 Plenary Lecture 3
Rebecca Stott (University of East Anglia), 'Fiction, Feeling and the Writing of Victorian
History ...'
6.20-7.30 Postgraduate Forum (Gilbert Murray, Main Hall) with talks from Joanne
Shattock (University of Leicester), Andrew Mangham (University of Reading) and Ken
Emond (British Academy).
Also
6.20-7.30 New Resources for Research in the Nineteenth Century (Gilbert Murray,
Livingstone Room). Workshop featuring NCSE; the Gladstone Catalogue project and St
Deiniol's Library; Browning‟s Correspondence project.
8 Dinner
9.30 Michael Eaton after dinner talk.
John Foster Hall
***
Wednesday 3rd September
9 BAVS Committee Meeting
Gilbert Murray, Main Hall
10-10.30 Coffee
10.30-12.10 Panels 6 (6 strands of 4 papers)
A) Writing History, Politics and Emotion
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“Manly tears?” emotion, masculinity, punishment and imperialism in the work of James
Fitzjames Stephen, Gary K. Peatling, University of Plymouth
‗Feeling‘ was central to the writings of the Victorian legal historian, administrator, and
cultural critic James Fitzjames Stephen. Stephen is frequently depicted even by critics as
head-nosed or touch-minded, qualities supposedly evident in his famous criticism of the
sentimentalism of Dickens‘ novels, and in his rejection of popular ideas of democracy as
blind to the realities of power and the difficulties of those in government. Stephen‘s contempt
for what he called the 'gushing part of liberalism' marked his late-century orientation towards
political conservatism. His ideas of judicial reform and its limits were in part conditioned by
a fear that a misguided and soft-hearted popular sense of mercy might have the effect of
reducing the sanguine incidence of capital punishment.
Stephen‘s tendency to view political ideas he did not like as manifestations of unmanly
sentimentalism is notably evident in his rejection of Millite liberalism. He depicted the
concepts used by defenders of women's rights as unmanly in refusing to face the reality that
physical weakness and biological differences meant that any attempt to have women play the
same role in society as men would expose them to danger. People were obviously unequal, so
that certain groups, defined by sex, race, class, or political inclination, could not safely be
assigned political rights or powers over others. Stephen is thus credited by some
commentators with an ability squarely to face facts, as represented in the authoritative (in
both a political and intellectual sense) nature of his voice, an authority that was by
definition masculine. Indeed, despite widespread assertions that his ideas are unfashionable,
strikingly few detailed critical perspectives on Stephen, or of this interpretation of his
work, have been offered by scholars.
This paper will however demonstrate that Stephen and other proponents of a gendered
distribution of political and social power were not hard-headed, clear-sighted or unemotional
in the way they themselves, and their admirers (and some critics), have liked to suggest.
Instead, Stephen‘s political language obtained legitimation by its implicit and explicit
depiction of certain forms of emotion as politically appropriate precisely because they were
defined as masculine. Opposed political formations, including women who challenged
gender bars on political activity, were in fact as much of a threat to Stephen on account of
cold-heartedness as of excessive emotion.
This paper in other words suggests the need for a rethinking of representations of feeling in
Victorian and post-Victorian societies. A gendered division of emotion matched the gendered
divisions of power and of labour, with women and effeminate races and classes assigned the
least responsible role. The supposed links between masculinity, authority and independence
assumed by Stephen are challenged by his cognate and extreme intellectual dependence on
myths, silences, and incapacities closely connected to his conceptions of gender. That this is
revealed in moments of emotion and difficulty in Stephen's writing suggests that his
schematic distinction between normal, manly and unbalanced, feminine emotions is far from
as rational, normal or functional as Stephen enthusiasts have supposed.
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Inventing the Discipline of "English": feeling and realist aesthetics in the Victorian period,
Gavin Budge, University of Hertfordshire
Numerous commentators have drawn attention to the way in which Matthew Arnold‘s wellknown appeal to ―touchstones‖ in his essay ―The Study of Poetry‖sets up an inarticulable
criterion of feeling as the test of poetic value, an emphasis which was continued in the work
of founders of ―English‖ as a discipline such as I A Richards and the Leavises. In this paper, I
will suggest that this critical appeal to feeling, far from being the theoretically trivial thing it
has often been taken to be, reflects key developments in Victorian epistemological thought in
a way which sheds light on the intellectual genealogy of ―English‖ as a discipline. In
particular, it reflects the move away from appeals to a priori intuitions and towards an
emphasis on induction promoted by J S Mill in his System of Logic and Examination of the
Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton. Mill‘s close relationship with the project of elaborating a
―physiology of mind‖ undertaken by associationist thinkers such as Alexander Bain created a
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intellectual context in which the attempt to articulate unconscious feeling came to represent
the most authentic guide to reality, and it was this assumption, I will argue, which in the early
twentieth century guaranteed the legitimacy of ―English‖ as a university discipline.
My argument will focus on the important role played by G H Lewes and George Eliot in this
transition. In an early review in the Westminster Review, Lewes characterizes the vividness of
Dickens‘s novels as that of a hallucination, in a way which invokes widely held Victorian
ideas about the relationship between ill-health, nervous overstimulation (―brain fever‖) and
hallucination. Lewes interprets the popularity of Dickens‘s novels as a symptom of cultural
ill-health, an application of medical ideas to cultural analysis which also underlies Ruskin‘s
writing on the grotesque. For Lewes, as for Ruskin, realism is healthy, a claim which is
echoed in Q D Leavis‘s Fiction and the Reading Public and which reveals the kinship
between the disciplinary programme of ―English‖, conceived as a training in discriminating
wholesome ―Literature‖ from morbid mass culture, and early twentieth-century calls for
―national efficiency‖.
[email protected]
Le Peuple Enragé: Radical Emotion in Carlyle‟s The French Revolution, David R.
Sorensen, Saint Joseph‟s University, Philadelphia
In The French Revolution (1837) Carlyle blasted open a new dimension of radicalism
that was rooted in the expression of naked feelings. His desire to get away from
historiography as party-propaganda was linked to a deeper psychological purpose: to
highlight the central role of emotion in the creation of a revolutionary sensibility. Whereas
Edmund Burke in his Reflections (1790) had ruled out ―passion‖ as a proper means of
thinking about political change—the French Revolutionaries suffered from ―distempered
passions‖ which ―disturbed their reason‖—Carlyle recognized the primacy of emotions in
vision of a new republican society. The appeal to ―reason‖ was outmoded because it denied
the reality of life that lay beyond the carefully manicured boundaries of ancien regime
existence. Carlyle was the first English historian to understand that feelings of injustice were
more important to the momentum of the revolution than any specific cause or grievance. The
attempt by Tory and Liberal commentators to minimize the part played by ―rage‖ was
peculiarly self-reflexive. If the narrative of the French Revolution could be represented as a
struggle between rational progress and irrational expectation, then emotion itself could be
kept on the periphery of political argument. With ironic delight, Carlyle responded to the
almost universal praise that greeted his book on publication: ―Instead of all parties joining to
condemn me, most parties find something to praise in me, and conclude that at the bottom I
partly belong to their side.‖ Yet what he had disclosed belonged to no party or platform
exclusively. On the contrary, he had shown that the foundation of political life rested on
common ground that was less secure than the English political debate pretended. In the depths
of French emotional life lay the tinderbox of the revolutionary fire-storm.
[email protected]
Feeling Marx: Socialism, Emotionalism and Periodical Fiction at the fin de siècle,
Deborah Mutch, De Montfort University
The necessity of importing emotions into British fin de siècle socialism arose through the
limited availability of Marx‘s works during this period. Marx‘s publications were almost
wholly unavailable in English translation – only the Communist Manifesto had been translated
by Helen Macfarlane for the Chartist periodical, the Red Republican in 1850 - which meant
that British readership was restricted to those who could grasp abstract concepts in French. In
an attempt to bring Marx‘s theory to a wider audience Henry Hyndman, founder of the Social
Democratic Federation, published/plagiarised sections of Das Kapital in his book England for
All (1881) and in his periodical To-Day (1886-1889), ahead of Samuel Moore and Edward
Aveling‘s 1887 translation. This meant that for many Hyndman‘s interpretation of the theory
of capital was the only accessible version, and therefore Marxism was understood through
this limitation to a single work and Hyndman‘s focus on the abstract theories of value and
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commodity. The focus created an emotional void which needed to be filled to appeal to what
some critics recognised as the British worker‘s ‗instinctive sense of unfairness and gut
reactions‘; to balance the emotional experience under capitalism with the detached
consciousness of the structures of capitalism.
The inclusion of literature and literary genres in socialist periodicals created space to give that
necessary balance of emotion and function, and this paper will focus on the theoretical and
literary work of Hyndman and Robert Blatchford. Blatchford and the Clarion group made a
virtue of never having read Marx and placed the human at the centre of their socialism,
speaking directly to the implied reader embodied in the character of ‗John Smith‘ in the
Clarion‘s ‗Merrie England‘ serialisation (1893). Hyndman, on the other hand, took a more
theoretical view of the necessity for change. The basis of this paper will be the theoretical
explanations of socialism and value expounded in both Hyndman‘s understanding of Capital
and in Blatchford‘s ‗Merrie England‘, and the fiction of both – Hyndman‘s ‗A Working Class
Tragedy‘ (1888-89) and Blatchford‘s ‗The Sorcery Shop‘ (1906-1907). Through this
juxtaposition of theoretical and emotional approaches to socialism this paper will argue that
fiction was the space the periodicals used to emotionalise the abstract, and in order to
integrate emotion into Marx‘s theory socialists needed to draw on earlier British thinkers.
[email protected]
B) New Optical Technologies, Photography and the Mass Reproduction of Images
Touching Sight, Feeling Seeing: the Stereoscope and the History of the Senses 1830-1870,
John Plunkett, University of Exeter
This paper will explore the way that the stereoscope became a focal point for nineteenthcentury scientific debates about the relationship between the senses, particularly sight and
touch. The stereoscope was first described by Charles Wheatstone, Professor of Experimental
Physics at Kings College, in a paper given to the Royal Society in June 1838. The reaction to
Wheatstone‘s paper reflects its intervention in larger philosophical debates concerning the
disposition of the senses, and the relationship between the perceiving self and the external
world. Scientific interpretation of the stereoscope - as conducted through the pages of the
Edinburgh Review, North British Review, and a host of other journals and books - was
fissured between two contrasting approaches. The question was whether the device
demonstrated that, following Locke and Berkeley, spatial perception was learnt by
experience, principally through touch, or whether, following Descartes and Newton, the eye
perceived distance and depth directly. The conflicting arguments contributed to the
descriptions of the stereoscope in popular culture, and were part of a broader debate over the
nature of perception and subjectivity itself. For example, the stereoscope was often celebrated
for its haptic mode of viewing, whereby the eye was seen as almost literally touching the faroff scenes in the stereographs. As Oliver Wendell-Holmes noted, ―The mind feels its way into
the very depths of the picture.‖ David Brewster, too, in the first description of his lenticular
stereoscope in 1849, proudly declared that ―The sense of sight, therefore, instead of being the
pupil of the sense of touch, as Berkeley and others have believed is, in this case, its teacher
and its guide.‖ For Holmes and Brewster, the stereoscope demonstrated that sight had a
sensuous aspect that had previously been assigned to touch. This paper will explore the how
and why the stereoscope impacted upon the relationship between vision and touch.
[email protected]
Queen Victoria‟s Auto-Icons, Helen Hauser, UC Santa Cruz
Queen Victoria was the first monarch, according to John Plunkett, to take advantage
of and benefit from the new technologies of mass media. Upon her ascension, her face and
other body parts were immediately and uninterruptedly reproduced in all media. Victoria‘s
representations drew upon the power of the body in parts, which has a very long history going
back to religious relics. It also has a much shorter history, going back to Jeremy Bentham‘s
auto-iconic dissection and reconstruction in 1832. This talk will look at Queen Victoria‘s
metaphorical, and Jeremy Bentham‘s corporeal, dissection and reassembly as parallel
phenomena of power construction based on the actual body.
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Bentham‘s auto-icon claimed its iconic power based on the actual skeleton within the
waxwork ―reliquary.‖ Betham‘s term of the ―auto-icon‖ invoked both his individuality and
the old concept of the religious icon as a piece of a saint‘s body. In the same way, Victoria‘s
media representations took their emotionally evocative power from the ―skeleton‖ of the
actual queen‘s body. Though always at one remove, the flesh of the Queen lay behind each
representation, thus making each representation a kind of secular reliquary. Such
representations invoked the power of the real body without an actual display of mortal flesh,
and used individuals‘ own absorption of visual imagery to solidify hierarchies.
Both Bentham‘s auto-icon and Queen Victoria‘s media constructions created ―reverse
Panopticons‖ in which the focus of social power and surveillance was seen rather than saw.
Bentham was dead and could not look back, and Queen Victoria‘s reproduced eyes were blind
ones, but those who saw these representations were nevertheless made aware of their inferior
status. Their bodies were mere flesh, whereas the bodies of Bentham and Queen Victoria
transcended the medium of flesh and appropriated other, less mortal media.
By dismembering saints and creating reliquaries for each piece, religious
organizations could ―explode‖ the evocative power of each saint by sending pieces to each
corner of the Earth. Queen Victoria‘s innovation was to dissect and explode herself while
still alive –because media made her so reproducible, the power of vision she claimed towards
herself could be disseminated to every part of Great Britain. She became pan-optic by being
always and everywhere available for vision. But unlike the carceral Panopticon, in which the
seen person is the subjected one, Victoria‘s representations reinforced her position as
monarch. Her omnipresence meant she impinged upon her subjects‘ consciousness at every
moment, and could use the psychology of panopticism to her advantage.
Taking the 1832 Anatomy Act and Jeremy Bentham‘s auto-icon as flashpoints, this
talk will argue that Queen Victoria‘s media representations drew on ancient and
contemporary obsessions with dissection. By fusing religious concepts of the icon with
secular ones of ―emblazonment,‖ Queen Victoria was uniquely able to invent herself as both
human and iconic.
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Sculpture and Photography: A „Light‟ Touch, Patrizia Di Bello, Birkbeck
New technologies for the mass production and reproduction of images are a key aspect of
nineteenth-century culture. An often mentioned but little analysed effect of these technologies
is the impact they had on the tactile relations embedded in and engendered by objects such as
sculptures and photographs. The market for casts and statuettes boomed in the nineteenth
century, and they were also the subject matter of several now canonical early photographic
images. This paper analyses some of these images to explore the dynamics between sculpture
and photography; vision and touch; the artist and the viewer; and the relations, conceptual and
sensual, between originals and copies. Conceptualised as the most tactile of the fine arts (and
at times downgraded for this) sculptures are not supposed to be experienced primarily by
touch. In photographs, we are allowed to look and touch – but the two senses are dislocated as
we look at the subject of the photograph but we touch the print medium. These are the two
media that best problematise the role of the touch of the artist in relation to the status of an
object as 'original' – retaining an indexical relationship to the touch of the artist – or as a
'copy' privileging the touch of the collector. In exploring these issues, this paper is concerned
with the conceptual similarities and resonances between sculpture and photography, rather
than simply a history of how and why sculptures were photographed.
[email protected]
Raising a Modern Ghost: the Magic Lantern, and the Persistence of Wonder in the
Victorian Education of the Senses, Verity Hunt, University of Reading
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In the opening of his work, Letters On Natural Magic, Addressed to Sir Walter Scott (1832),
the eminent Victorian inventor and scientist of optics, Sir David Brewster (1781-1868),
declares his intention to dispel ancient fears and superstitions of natural phenomena, namely
illusions of sense, via scientific description and explanation. A new nineteenth-century science
of sensory perception promises to replace an old order of mystical magic (founded in
ignorance) with a rational appreciation of the ‗millions of wonders‘ that surround us in the
natural world. A ‗wonder‘ in Brewster‘s text, is at the outer limits of everyday understanding, it
inspires curiosity and awe, a feeling or passion of wonder, but nevertheless it is an object of
scientific enquiry.
Superstition, for science, marks a sort of stasis, or passivity of reason; it flounders in
ignorance, astonished, fearful and fanciful. Brewster‘s deployment of the term ‗wonder‘,
however, concedes that a moment of passivity – of gazing in awe at a mystery – may not be
entirely antithetical to reason, once it is recast as a stage preparatory to scientific action, a
spur toward knowledge. ‗Wonder‘ thus has a place in science, and in Letters on Natural
Magic it particularly concerns those superstitions that may be reclaimed for reason because
they are based in accidents of perception, which may be given rational explanations.
This paper is interested in the particular visuality of wonder as sensory experience and the part
played by discourses of magical wonder in Victorian educations of the eye. It will address the
conference theme of ‗feeling‘ by asserting the importance of an emotion long excluded from a
picture of the nineteenth-century characterised by rationalization and intellectualisation. Optical
technologies and the visions they offered, were instrumental in the evolution of an emerging
nexus of Victorian wonders. Through a case study of a popular nineteenth-century optical
device, the magic lantern, I will show how multiple, diverse ‗wondering‘ perspectives gathered
around a single longstanding visual machine.
[email protected]
C) Women‟s Life Writing and the Recoverability of Victorian Feeling
Reading the Taits: Then and Now, Valerie Sanders, University of Hull
One of the most difficult narratives of childhood and death for the Victorians was Catharine
Tait‘s account of how her five daughters all died, one after the other, of scarlet fever in one
month of 1856, while their father Archibald Tair (a future Archbishop of Canterbury) was
Dean of Carlisle. While Catharine Tait‘s narrative was published and circulated, her
husband‘s account of the same tragedy remains an unpublished manuscript in Lambeth Palace
Library. Historians of Victorian family life, death and illness, such as Pat Jalland have
commented on this tragedy, which was shocking even in an age of widespread childhood
mortality. More recently, Laurence Lerner and other critics interested in sentimentality have
concerned themselves with the kind of morbid pleasure Victorian readers derived from such
narratives: a view also explored in a hybrid form of autobiographical writing by David
Hughes in The Lent Jewels (2002). This work is partly an imaginative reconstruction of the
Taits as a couple living at the Carlisle Deanery and watching each of their five children sicken
and die, but Hughes seems to envy the family their united belief in ‗the blessedness of having
our sweet little one in heaven.‘ There is a kind of ‗bereavement envy‘ here which had also
occurred among Dr Arnold‘s former pupils and surrogate sons for Arnold‘s real biological
children, sharing not only their mourning as a family, but also their exclusive right to mourn.
Margaret Oliphant, another fascinated reader of the Tait narrative, marvelled at the Dean‘s
religious stoicism and faith, which she felt (given the loss of all her own children) was beyond
her. Their story makes an important contribution to Victorian cultures of feeling (it was partly
on the strength of the Queen‘s sympathy for him that Tait eventually became Archbishop of
Canterbury), but while characteristically ‗Victorian‘ it also crosses cultures with its
compelling, but disturbing emotional intensity.
This paper will explore the paradoxical appeal of the Tait narratives and the difficulties they
pose for modern readers in knowing how to respond to them, largely because they demand
both religious faith and a sentimental enjoyment of deathbed details. Some of Archibald
Tait‘s own comments on his daughters‘ bodily beauty in illness also touch on forbidden
emotions for today‘s readers. Can the Taits‘ narratives now only function for us as recalcitrant
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historical documents, which attract continued interest largely because of their estrangement
from modern thinking? (Gladstone‘s anger and rebellion when two of his own daughters were
in mortal danger, and one died, provide a sharp contrast with the Taits‘ resignation). My
paper will examine the recent revival of interest in their narratives and consider whether this
is in effect a ‗test case‘ of the irrecoverable nature of some Victorian emotional experiences.
[email protected]
Altogether Elsewhere: Anna Jameson's Sentimental Journey, Judith Johnston, The
University of Western Australia
In the Winter of 1836-7 the writer and critic, Anna Jameson, found herself in
Toronto, Canada where she had travelled to reunite with her uncongenial husband, a reunion
based on the practical needs of both, his to demonstrate, for the purposes of promotion, a
functional marriage, hers to obtain a formal separation and some financial maintenance. She
expresses her feelings of desolation and loneliness in her published travels, Winter Studies
and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) abandoning the generally bold, brisk tone of the
British lady traveller in the first part of the narrative at least.
In this paper I argue that while her references in her travelogue to 'home' are often to
England, it is not to this 'home' that Jameson journeys constantly in her mind during the long
Canadian winter, of which the first third of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada is
comprised. 'Home' is somewhere altogether elsewhere and unexpected, not Canada, not
England, but Germany. John Leonard writes of 'the exasperations and romance of Elsewhere'
and captures Jameson's situation nicely with these precise terms. 26 Elsewhere, which is
Germany, is not unproblematic for Jameson but nevertheless is the site of a deeply-seated
romance with that country on a number of grounds. First, her feelings for Ottilie von Goethe,
daughter-in-law of Germany's supreme man of letters, as expressed in a letter dated 30
November 1833: 'Leaving Germany was leaving you, you, round whom some of the deepest
feelings of which my nature is capable, had imperceptibly twined themselves'. 27 Second is her
cordial reception and ready entree into the highest literary circles in Germany. Third, is her
sense of independence, generated by the ease with which travelling in Germany could be
accomplished.
The exasperations consist in her struggles to learn the language, and to make herself
au fait with the writings of the most noted of the German literary intelligentsia, and the
demands and recriminations generated by Ottilie von Goethe who, as Needler perhaps
unkindly puts it, inflicted 'the recurrent whims of her naïvely emotional temperament' on the
long-suffering Jameson (vii). In this regard, however, I have always felt in my extensive
reading of the extant correspondence between them that Jameson was, for the most part,
enjoying herself. Nevertheless Anna Jameson's sentimental journey to Elsewhere extends the
travel writing genre to accord with Rita Monticelli's description that it is constructed 'through
a process of translations and intertextual movements'.28
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“Unspeakably filthy curiosities”: the diaries of Mrs. Ann Robinson, Janice M. Allan,
University of Salford
Throughout the early summer of 1858 readers of The Times were both tantalised and
scandalised by the full and detailed reporting of the Robinson v. Robinson and Lane divorce
26
John Leonard, Lonesome Rangers. Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures (New York:
New Press, 2002), xv.
27
Anna Jameson, Letters of Anna Jameson to Ottilie von Goethe, ed. G. H. Needler (London; Oxford
University Press, 1939), 17.
28
Rita Monticelli, 'In Praise of Art and Literature. Intertextuality, Translations and Migrations of
Knowledge in Anna Jameson's Travel Writings', Prose Studies. History, Theory, Criticism
27.3(2005):300; 299-312.
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case. Looking back on the proceedings 150 years later, the peculiar circumstances of the case
are scarcely less striking. After more than a dozen years of what had appeared to be a
reasonably happy marriage, Mr. Robinson happened upon the three-volume journal of his
wife. Within its pages he was horrified to discover not only a narrative of his wife‘s
adulterous affair with Lane, a most respectable young physician and family friend, but also a
frank and voluptuous account of her bodily feelings and desires. Based solely on the entries
recorded within this journal and with no corroborating evidence, Robinson obtained a divorce
a mensâ et thoro from the Ecclesiastical Court before petitioning for a complete dissolution of
the marriage from the Court of Divorce. Before the close of the case, the Court reached the
extraordinary decision that ‗these diaries may be good evidence to prove [Mrs. Robinson‘s]
adultery, but they are not admissible to fix Dr. Lane with anything‘.29 An Act of Parliament
was subsequently passed to dismiss Lane from the case and allow him to act as a competent
witness for the defence.
This paper considers the role and significance of Ann Robinson‘s diary as both a
body of evidence and evidence of a woman‘s bodily sensations. Indeed, it was its emphasis on
the latter that led The Saturday Review to condemn the volumes as ‗unspeakably filthy
curiosities‘.30 More specifically, the paper explores how the diary became a site of complex
interaction between somatic, literary, legal and medical discourses. Throughout this
discussion, attention will be drawn to the problematic status of a woman‘s testimony about
her own bodily experience; exploring, for example, how Mrs. Robinson‘s defence, in
constructing the journal as ‗the insane delusions of a diseased mind…labouring under uterine
disease‘, effectively re-wrote a woman‘s testimony of desire into evidence of ‗a disease
peculiar to women‘.31
Dr Janice M. Allan, University of Salford
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Faith, Frugality and Feelings: elite women‟s responses to grief and melancholia in the
early nineteenth century, Ruth M Larsen, University of Derby
This paper explores the different responses to melancholia and grief of elite women in the
early nineteenth century. It focuses on the experiences of Georgiana Howard, sixth Countess
of Carlisle (1783-1858) and on how she coped with her melancholia. The eldest daughter of
Georgiana, fifth duchess of Devonshire, ‗Little G‘ appears to have suffered from feelings of
sadness from her mid teens and through her adult life. In the collection of her papers at her
marital home, Castle Howard, are manuscripts that document her various coping strategies;
these included living a (comparatively) frugal lifestyle, with regular exercise and a plain diet.
This regime was based on the work of William Cadogan especially his Dissertation on Gout,
which the countess appears to have adapted for her own needs. Her approach, though, was
not simply based on medical advice; she also used her Anglican religion to help her.
Georgiana wrote a number of prayers which appear to ask God for assistance in her struggle
against her ‗low feelings‘. These highlight her desire for an ‗easy mind‘ to enable her to fulfil
her domestic duties and be a good wife and mother to her twelve children, demonstrating how
early Victorian Evangelical rhetoric was shaping her own assessments of her condition.
This paper introduces and analyses this archival collection and places it into context of other
elite women‘s responses to grief and melancholia. It argues that many used both prayers and
pragmatism when faced with emotional difficulties, and that, for elite women, emotions were
something to be recognised, but controlled. It also highlights the importance of using letters,
diaries and other personal papers in order to gain an insight into the management and
expression of feelings in the Victorian age.
29
M.C. Merttins Swabey and Thomas Hutchinson Tristram. Reports of Cases Decided in the Court of
Probate and in The Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes. Vol. 1 (London: Butterworths, 1860):
365.
30
Anon. ‘The Purity of the Press’. The Saturday Review (June 26, 1858): 656.
31
Swabey and Tristram, op. cit., 397; Anon. ‘Robinson v. Robinson and Lane’. The Times (15 June
1858): 11.
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[email protected]
D) Bodies of Evidence and Fear
“Like an ox felled by the butcher”: Apoplexy, Medicine, and the Un-dead Body, Andrew
Mangham, University of Reading
In 1847, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine featured a series of articles entitled ‗Letters on
the Truths Contained in Popular Superstitions‘. Addressed to a fictional ‗Archie‘ and signed
‗MacDavus‘, these letters contributed to an emerging canon of non-fictional works which, in
the mid-nineteenth century, aimed to provide ‗rational‘ and scientific explanations for widelybelieved supernatural events. MacDavus aimed to account for vampirism by claiming that the
unfortunate individuals involved had been buried alive during a fit – when there had been an
‗arrest of activity in [their] nervous system‘. Although these ‗letters‘ had much to learn from
the lurid fictions they were printed alongside, they also owed a great deal to the period‘s
understanding of ‗apoplexy‘ as an effusion of blood in the brain (and, incidentally, the cause
of Dickens‘s death). In the 1850s, Armand Trousseau, professor of medicine at the HôtelDieu, asked ‗what is meant by aploplexy? According to its etymology, it means an affection
in which […] an individual falls, and is struck down suddenly, like an ox felled by the
butcher‘.
For many Victorians, the prospect of being buried alive while in this condition was a
cause for great concern. In ‗The Premature Burial‘ (1850), for instance, Edgar Allan Poe
claimed that he was a sufferer of ‗catalepsy‘, a condition similar to apoplexy, which caused
him to lose consciousness. The ‗closest scrutiny‘, he adds, ‗and the most rigorous medical
tests, [will] fail to establish any material distinction between the state of the sufferer and what
we conceive of absolute death‘. It is for this reason, he adds, that ‗I was lost in reveries of
death, and the idea of premature burial held continual possession of my brain‘. Such concerns
crystallise a fascinating shift in the kinds of things that were considered to have frightening
value in the nineteenth century. The fear of live burial, in particular, was driven by the
possibility of being failed by medical practitioners; the terrible factors involved here were not
related to coming back from the dead (like a vampire), but linked instead to the possibilities of
being un-dead when those around one assumed otherwise. Victims of live interment
seemingly paid a ghastly price for the bad practice of doctors who had mispronounced them
as dead: dying slowly in their dark and claustrophobic coffins, they wavered - like vampires between states of life and death. It is the aim of my paper to argue that certain episodes in
nineteenth-century fiction – particularly those involving the ‗un-dead‘ and representations of
apoplectic ‗fits‘ – owed much more than is usually recognised to the ‗new‘ advances in
medical science which had aimed to understand and map the pathological conditions of the
human brain.
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“A severe operation, but a beautiful one”: the reinvented body in Sheridan Le Fanu‟s
Checkmate, Robert Maidens, Birkbeck
Even for a genre in which substitutions and alterations of identity are commonplace, Sheridan
Le Fanu‘s 1871 sensation novel Checkmate offers an extreme (and probably unique) twist to
the theme of transformed identity. The villainous protagonist Walter Longcluse, who attempts
to woo the beautiful Alice Arden, was once Yelland Mace, the murderer of her elder brother.
He passes freely as a visitor in the Arden household because he has undergone extreme
reconstructive surgery, creating a new but entirely viable face that fools everyone but the
housekeeper Martha.
The truth about Longcluse‘s identity, and the fact that a rogue, deliberately deceptive body
has been moving unknown through the narrative, offers the surprise element of the novel‘s
denouement. At first glance, this ending seems to stress the hyper-modern nature of
Longcluse‘s transformation. Mace‘s reinvention of himself depends upon science, and indeed
the narrative enters into gleefully gruesome details of facial reconstructive surgery complete
with pseudo-scientific terminology. And while readerly credibility might be strained by the
viability of these procedures, the ending would nevertheless have been completely
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unimaginable prior to the development of anaesthesia in the 1840s. The modernity of the
ending is further emphasized simply by the sheer inventiveness of this solution to the wellworn problem of disguising the villain‘s identity.
Yet even as the text stresses the possibilities offered by modernity in the form of science to
reshape the body, it simultaneously reaches for non-rational, spectral terms with which to
make sense of the change, with the chapters revealing Longcluses‘s secret given such titles as
―Resurrections‖ and ―Doppelgangers.‖ Furthermore, the housekeeper Martha‘s uncanny
unease around the reinvented Mace glances towards traditions of folk wisdom that run
counter to modern rationality, and compromise the ultra-modern villain‘s desire to gain
mastery over his own body. What effect does this co-existence of different ways of imagining
the body transformed have on the meaning of the bodies in question, and what can it reveal
about the seemingly obsessive concern of the sensation novel with the malleability of
identity?
Drawing also from Le Fanu‘s near-contemporary Christmas story, ―Dickon the Devil‖ (in
which a revenant ghost has altered in personality from his earthly character) and other novels
of transformed identity from the 1860s and 1870s, I argue that this subgenre exists at the
intersection of traditional ways of understanding the transformations of the body, both
religious and folkloric, with emergent ideologies in which the subject is deemed to be in
control of their own bodily destiny. Neither fully modern nor wholly traditional, the novel of
transformed identity cautiously embraces modernity, which it requires for its formal
inventiveness, while interrogating the desires of its subjects to escape the heritage of
traditional narratives.
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Victorian Skin: Representing Interiority, Pamela Gilbert. University of Florida
―And, truly, of all the good things that will happen with the full revival of cosmetics, one of
the best is that surface will finally be severed from soul. Too long has the face been degraded
from its rank as a thing of beauty to a mere vulgar index of character or emotion. And the use
of cosmetics, the masking of the face, will change this. We shall gaze at a woman merely
because she is beautiful, not stare into her face anxiously, as into the face of a barometer.‖
Max Beerbohm
The body brings together a number of vexing questions: it is a material object that has an
ambiguous relation to the self (do bodies contain us, or do we inhabit them; do we own them,
control them, or do they, in sickness or in their needs, control or enable us?). The body is
animal, yet human; natural, yet the ultimate object of cultural inscription. The part of the
body that most represents us is its surface: for Victorians, skin was an important medium
through which to read character and selfhood, a membrane that both divided the inner and
outer worlds and served as a medium for the projection and interpretation of interiority. This
function of the skin predates modernity considerably, of course, but the nineteenth century
contributed a scientific and medical perspective that refigured the role of the skin as simply
responding to the emotions of its owner. The 1840s through the 1870s saw a flurry of
publications on the skin. Most marveled at the quantity of skin, its complexity and the extent
of its pores. Sanitary writings and other popularizations of medical models in this period
tended to focus on the surface of the body as a dangerous point of contact between self and
not-self, connecting inside and outside, in mediated communication. A mid-century reprinted
lecture aimed at a general reader, states flatly, ―The skin is what you live in; it is your
habitation‖. It is also that by which you live. (229). Blushing, blanching, and sweating all
gave notice of inner states that sometimes even the person in that skin was not consciously
aware of; more surprisingly, however, outside elements could also affect the skin
physiologically and transform the person within. MaryAnn O.Farrell analyzes the blush in
several canonical novels of the period in her fine book, Telling Complexions: The
Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush. But she is less concerned with the
Victorian medical understanding of the blush, simply noting that Victorian‘s seem to be
concerned with the blush as an expression of self-consciousness. But self-consciousness here
is not merely a phrase expressing embarrassment. In fact, there was an ongoing discussion of
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blushing and flushing as indicative of a combination of physical malfunction (a ―nerve
storm,‖ As Campbell puts it) and concomitant problems in the nervous system‘s interior
narrative; the mind and brain‘s representation of the self to the self. The narratives of
interiority were written on the skin. This paper will depart from where O.Farrell leaves off,
and will continue my earlier investigation (in what some may remember as my ‗sweat‘ paper
of last year‘s NAVSA) of the skin‘s central role in Victorian perceptions of mediations
between inside and outside the body and its environment, and of the self and its awareness. I
will be dealing with Thomas Burgess, Darwin, and Harold Campbell, who together represent
a broad swath of thinking about the skin from both evolutionary and medical perspectives.
This will then enable me to briefly survey a few examples from both literary and visual
culture, (most likely Eliot and D. G. Rossetti) to show how this understanding of Victorian
perspectives on the skin contributes to our understanding of representations of the relation
between selfhood, the material body and the emotions.
An exclamatory “O”: Bodies of Fear on the Victorian London Underground, Christopher
Pittard, University of Exeter
In Felix Holt (1866), George Eliot argued that ―The tube-journey can never lend much to
picture and narrative; it is as barren as an exclamatory O!‖ Although Eliot referred to a
proposal for a nationwide atmospheric tube railway, her doubts about the aesthetic qualities of
such travel are equally applicable to the London Underground, opened four years beforehand.
Despite Eliot‘s comments, the London Underground became a consistently attractive setting
for fiction, particularly popular fiction. This paper considers Victorian representations of the
London Underground in popular culture, arguing that the network is consistently represented
not as an extension of the urban environment or utopia of mobility, but as a different order of
space characterised by danger, dirt and pathology. Drawing on geographical theories of
cognitive mapping (how individuals locate themselves in urban space), and Foucault‘s model
of the heterotopia, I examine how the Victorians saw the underground as a place of fear, dirt,
and pathology.
The notion of the railway was already pathological for the mid-Victorians, who regarded the
vicious speed of the train as physiologically dangerous. But being underground was doubly
pathological: mythologically as the chthonic space of the dead; literally, in the Victorian
fascination with the cemetery. From the 1860s onwards, the popular press was fascinated by
both the engineering achievements of the Underground and its promise of a dangerous new
urban mobility, characterising the network as a mobile mass of bodies (memorably depicted
by Gustav Dore) and subsequently as a new arena for crime and unease. Although considering
a wide range of Victorian representations of the Underground (from social purity writings to
William Morris‘ News from Nowhere, which contrasts the network to a utopian space), the
paper focuses on John Oxenham‘s crime serial A Mystery of the Underground (1897). First
published in Jerome K. Jerome‘s weekly To-Day, the serial tells the story of a serial killer
striking on the District Line. Having roots in a sensationalist form of crime fiction which
relied on inciting bodily thrills, the serial‘s journalistic realism caused genuine panic among
passengers and prompted Underground management to complain. This episode is read
theoretically in the context of critical work on literature, terror and terrorism (including that
by Margaret Scanlan) and sensationalist fiction, and historically in terms of widely reported
crimes and acts of terrorism on the network which took place during the later nineteenth
century.
[email protected]
E) Women, Body Politics and Outlawed Desires
Body Politics of Their Own: The Crusade of Josephine Butler, Chieko Ichikawa, Kushiro
Public University of Economics, Japan
The body of a woman in mid-Victorian England was represented as a vessel which contained
the threat of disorder and disease. Nationalistic discourses on the health of the nation in the
late 1850s reinforced the legitimacy of public surveillance and control over the ‗filthy‘ and
‗degenerate‘ bodies of the lower classes. Feminist articles published in the English Woman‘s
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Journal rhetorically upheld the moral and physical superiority of the British in order to
facilitate women‘s engagement in the formation of the national character. Considering
women‘s bodies to be a crucial element in nurturing a healthy nation, the middle-class
feminist activists fashioned themselves as leaders of the social reform and supervised the
moral and sanitary aspects of the life of working-class women. However, these feminist
discussions revealed the complex power relationships between the women by categorising
and dividing their bodies into ‗pure‘ and ‗dangerous‘ or ‗respectable‘ and ‗fallen‘ .
The Contagious Disease Acts of 1866 and 1869, which manifested the social acceptance of
the ‗reprobate‘ sexuality of upper-class men, became a political battleground where feminist
middle-class women resisted the double standard of sexual morality and protested against the
male tyranny over women‘s bodies. Regulationists justified the supervision and medical
inspection of prostitutes as vectors for the spread of disease, while syphilis among male
clients was seen as the result of an excess of lust which was considered to be a normal part of
masculine sexuality. Josephine Butler (1828-1906), the central figure of the repeal
movement, organised female networks to rescue ‗fallen‘ sisters and more effectively involved
working-class male supporters, through which she intended to bring about a moral reform in
the promiscuous aspects of all classes from the lower social order.
Speaking publicly throughout this crusade, Butler recognised the importance of writing as a
political device for promoting the public perception of her appeal against the lawful injustice
to the dignity of women. Her writing, at the same time, displays female rage as a primary
source of creative power as well as the motivation behind the campaign and implies her
aspiration to subvert the patriarchal authority over women‘s bodies. Butler insisted on the
necessity of female moral power to ‗purify‘ the moral contamination of male-centred politics,
stating that ‗[t]he crudeness of intellect of some of our young male legislators needs to be
corrected by the wisdom of the thoughtful matrons of England.‘ (1871) This paper will
explore how Butler‘s writings on the repeal campaign reveal the resistance to the masculine
elite culture and politics, in short, the desire to ‗castrate‘ male authority in order to assert the
women‘s right to (re)possess their own bodies and their responsibility in the moral
regeneration of British society.
[email protected]
Infant corpses in the Victorian imagination, Meg Arnot, University of Roehampton
In this paper I will explore the relationship between ‗fallenness‘ in Victorian culture
(Anderson, 1993) and infanticide, particularly through visual representations. The murdered
child was the poignant, repressed other in a sentimental iconography of childhood, the forever
silenced child being elided as the direct subject of the moral commentary beloved of some
Victorian artists. Yet through direct cultural resonance (Hogarth being the cultural father of
Victorian visual social criticism) the child‘s possible fate was implied as powerfully as in
Hogarth‘s ‗Gin Lane‘ (1750) by social realist engagement with child poverty and neglect. The
unwanted illegitimate infant was also only implicitly present in paintings of the ‗fallen
woman‘ (although sometimes in quite confronting ways). It can be argued that the
squemishness referred to by Gatrell (1994) as a ‗polite‘ response to the hanged body in the
nineteenth century can be seen at work here in relation to visually acknowledging infant
corpses, but it did create a haunting absence. The dead infant appeared more literally in rough
engravings and illustrations for broadsides and the press, very often related to particular trials.
The class implications of this distinction will be explored in the paper, as will some
relationships between these visual representations, other social and cultural responses to
infanticide and the criminal justice process. While the power of the association between sex
and death (Dollimore, 1998) has been recognized by Victorian scholars especially through the
figure of the drowned fallen woman (Nead, 1988), this paper will put the unwanted dead
offspring from sexual union into the picture.
[email protected]
Feeling her Age: Jane Porter Reflects on a Long Life, Peta Beasley, University of
Western Australia
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In this paper I wish to look at a little known narrative by Jane Porter, author of the nineteenthcentury best selling novels, Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and The Scottish Chiefs (1810),
which touches poignantly on the physical and emotional journey of a woman into old age.
Published in 1839, when Porter was 63 years of age, ―The Old Lady‖ is the closing piece in a
collection of prose, verse and engravings, compiled by Frederic Montagu, titled The Ages of
Female Beauty.32 Redolent of Shakespeare‘s ―The Seven Ages of Man‖, in which the
malcontent Jacques outlines the seven stages that man passes through from entrance to exit,
Montagu‘s collection traces the seven ages of woman, defined in his introduction as
representing the ―the innocence, the excellence, the affection and beauty, exhibited in the
successive stages of woman‘s life‖.(i) Reading the montage of Montagu‘s seven ages of a
woman‘s life it is easy to conclude that indeed Jacques is correct in saying that "[a]ll the
world's a stage, [a]nd all the …women merely players‖.33 While Jacques satirises the physical
decline of a man from his infancy to old age, Montagu compartmentalises a woman‘s life in
gendered terms. From Maiden to Old Lady a woman‘s identity as Bride, Mother and Widow
is dependent on her relationship with a man. Montagu further marginalises a woman by
referring to the collective roles of a woman as the ages of female beauty rather than the stages
of her life. While man passes unconditionally from Lover, to Soldier, to Gentleman, for a
woman the ages between Maiden and Old Lady are dependent on her marrying.
Despite being a highly successful author, who continued having an impact in the Victorian
age, for Porter, Montagu‘s progression from entrance to exit is interrupted. By never
marrying she catapults from the third age of Maiden directly to the seventh age of Old Lady.
Similarly, the old lady of Porter‘s narrative also reaches old age without passing through the
stages of Bride, Mother and Widow. However, far from being a ―disagreeable memorialist –
a forget-me-not‖ (58), whose beauty has long since departed, Porter reveals to her readers, not
an old lady ―[s]ans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything‖,34 but a woman who touches
the heart of her young visitor with her personal life story, revealing slowly her grief and need
for ―care and consolation‖. (62)
Written fifteen years after the publication of her fourth and final novel, ―The Old Lady‖, I
argue, reveals much about Porter as a woman and the challenges she faces physically,
emotionally and financially approaching this final stage of her life. While on the surface
Montagu‘s The Ages of Female Beauty may appear to be merely a collection of delightful
pastiches on a woman‘s life, I will demonstrate that there is another side to each story, none
more so than that of the Old Lady.
Cousinship and Race in The History of Henry Esmond (1852), Ceri Ann Hunter,
Brasenose College, Oxford
The paper is centred on a close reading of the relationship between two fictional cousins,
Henry and Beatrix Esmond, from Thackeray‘s The History of Henry Esmond (1852). The
paper will argue that the intricacies and ambiguities of Henry and Beatrix‘s affective
cousinship, which resists conversion to passion, are integral to the novel‘s exploration of the
relationship between family and nation-state. It will make the wider case that nineteenthcentury fictional representations of sexual love between cousins, all too often underexamined, or over-simplified as sublimations of family affection, are central to the formation,
contestation and interrelation of Victorian ideologies, both domestic and imperial.
Cousin marriage was a relatively common practice in nineteenth-century Britain, and stories
of love between cousins were correspondingly, even disproportionately, popular in
nineteenth-century fiction. The paper will suggest that the popularity of the cousin love plot
may be accounted for by its apparent ability to reconcile past, present and future, biologically
and symbolically. Yet this same ability produced fear as much as reassurance, as the
32
Introduction to Frederic Montagu (ed), The Ages of Female Beauty. Illustrated in a series of
engravings from drawings by the most eminent artists. (London: Charles Tilt, 1838). Page numbers
will be noted in the body of the text for all future references to this publication.
33
34
(As You Like It, 2. 7. 139-140)
(As You Like It, 2. 7. 167)
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Victorians came to understand that the human species was capable of both evolution and
degeneration. However, it is overly reductive to argue that the publication of The Origin of
Species (1859) interrupted a consensus of opinion in acceptance of sexual relationships
between cousins. On the contrary, the practice of cousin marriage was subject historically to
pressure from scriptural, legal, and scientific discourse. The paper will argue accordingly that
fictions of cousin love, both pre- and post-Darwin, are inherently dialogical.
The arguments will be grounded in a reading that situates Henry and Beatrix‘s cousinship
within the development of scientifically determinist attitudes towards race during the first half
of the century. Henry‘s illegitimacy focuses attention on the meaning of consanguinity in
kinship. While Henry and Beatrix‘s relationship is governed primarily by the differences
between the cousins‘ economic and social circumstances, the narration of these differences is
inflected by scientific ideas about race. Reading the novel alongside Robert Knox‘s The
Races of Men (1850), the paper will ask how far the biological discourse about race offered
new language to reinvigorate old debates about cousinly love, and explore the contribution
that fictional representations of cousinship made to the debate about racial identity in their
turn. It aims to show that Henry and Beatrix‘s relationship produces important questions
about similarity and difference, about discreteness and interconnectedness, and about the
difficulties of defining Britishness in an age of empires.
[email protected]
F) Dickensian Bodies
“Why with a blush?”: Blushing Between Women in Dickens‟s Novels, Kim Edwards,
University of Liverpool
In the first detailed exploration of blushing during the nineteenth-century, Thomas Henry
Burgess states in The Physiology or Mechanics of Blushing (1839) that the blush ‗invariably
heightens the charms of beauty‘ in ladies and is a sign of irrepressible feeling or emotion.35 In
this paper I will argue that the repeated use of the ‗feminine‘ blush in canonical Victorian
literature, and Charles Dickens‘s novels in particular, was not only intimately connected to
the nineteenth-century‘s cultural construction of the attractive female body, but was also a
bodily indicator of erotic desire. I suggest that this desire operated to enhance the
attractiveness of the desiring body; was often provoked by looking, frequently occurred
within intercourse between women in Dickens‘s novels, and is indicative of female
homoerotic desire. By focussing on the inter-female relationships within Dickens‘s novels,
especially Bleak House and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, as well as the connection between
looking and feeling, I will show how female characters often objectified the female body,
which in turn agitated a blush.
Mary Ann O‘Farrell‘s seminal work Telling Complexions (1997)36 identifies the
nineteenth-century blush as a somatic confession, and argues that the blush has been
undermined as a stable indicator of character, provoking Dickens to turn to the scar as an
indicator of mortification within David Copperfield; Katie Halsey (2006)37 has briefly
examined the ways in which blushing has been deconstructed for patriarchal purposes within
Jane Austen‘s novels, while Kate Flint (1986)38 has accused Dickens of being an ‗assiduous
collector of dimples and ringlets and blushes, of quivering young bodies‘. 39 To date, however,
there has been no critical examination or discussion of how Dickens utilises ‗the blush‘ as an
intercourse of bodies between women, the ways in which this may eroticise them, and why
this occurs between women. Moreover, there has not yet been any extensive literary criticism
35
Thomas Henry Burgess, The Physiology or Mechanics of Blushing, (London: John Scott, 1839), p. 55.
Mary Ann O’ Farrell, Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush
(London: Duke University Press, 1997)
37
Katie Halsey, ‘The Blush of Modesty or the Blush of Shame? Reading Jane Austen’s Blushes’,
Modern Language Studies, 42:3 (2006), 226-238.
38
Kate Flint, Dickens (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1986)
39
Ibid., p. 129.
36
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dedicated to the analysis of silenced lesbian or female homoerotic desire within Dickens‘s
novels.
Through a careful examination of moral and medical debates surrounding blushing,
and a discussion of how the female was visually objectified by Victorian culture, I aim to
expose the ways in which Dickens eroticises relationships between women through the use of
‗the blush‘. Additionally, I will consider how these representations of the desiring body, and
the desired ‗other‘ may impact upon our understanding of Victorian inter-female
relationships. I consequently seek to open up a new dialogue that will explore how far
Dickens‘s novels can be considered a polite form of ‗erotic art‘40 in which the reader is
witness to the visual admiration and arousal of female companions. It is my hope, therefore,
to point to a new way of considering inter-female physical responsiveness that directs
attention away from a ‗heterocentric‘ reading, and instead allows space for the consideration
of homosexual desire, not only within Dickens‘s novels, but within Victorian literature and
cultural studies.
[email protected]
“Heart, Nature, Feeling”: The Disintegration of the Maternal Ideal in Dombey and Son,
Madeleine Wood, University of Warwick
Dombey and Son represents a key moment in the development of Charles Dickens‘ novels;
whilst the problematisation of familial relations had been explored previously in The Old
Curiosity Shop and Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son traces and retraces the influence of parent
upon child with an almost obsessive compulsion. This paper will explore the symbolic and
material dissolution of the maternal ideal in the novel. Following Fanny Dombey‘s death in
the first chapter, the absent maternal body becomes the site of anxiety amongst both the
characters and Dickens‘ own patterns of imagery. Fanny‘s absence is figured in the Dombey
mansion through gothic details: her portrait is muffled in ‗bandages‘ as if she were an
Egyptian mummy waiting for her chance to wreak vengeance upon the family. The body may
be absent, but the mother is endowed with a potent voice, encrypted in the sound of the sea‘s
waves. Her waning son, Paul, hears a call in its murmurs, and imagines a white arm
beckoning him in the moonlight. A summoning spell is woven about Paul, and his premature
death is figured as a response to the insistent whispering of his dead mother.
The ambivalent nature of the maternal is reified through the introduction of Mrs.
Skewton (Edith Granger‘s mother and pimp), the maternal revenant, who every night returns
to a state of semi-death when her maid removes her clothes, wig and make-up. The
dissolution of Mrs. Skewton‘s bodily identity illustrates the fragmentary nature of
motherhood in Dombey and Son: her sick-bed operates as a counter-point to Paul‘s, and is
depicted with equal care by Dickens. The uncanny, which characterises the novel‘s
representation of motherhood, is physically transferred onto the grotesquery of Mrs.
Skewton‘s bodily pretensions: she is truly ‗askew‘ – her romantic posturing, and ironic call
for ‗heart, nature and feeling‘, render motherhood itself monstrous. Edith, Dombey‘s reluctant
second wife, is characterised in opposition to her mother; Mrs. Skewton clings onto a beauty
she no longer has, displaying her non-existent charms for an unappreciative audience,
whereas Edith cannot help but display her beauty, against her will. The question of female
moral integrity is transferred onto the woman‘s body and affectation is ridiculed and vilified.
While Paul‘s death-bed testified to the irresistible call of a beautiful mother, Mrs. Skewton‘s
bears witness to its destruction. Dickens employs the image of the beckoning arm as he did in
the build-up to Paul‘s death. But, instead of seeing a goddess of the moon with ‗white arms
that are beckoning‘, Mrs. Skewton sees ‗a stone arm raised to strike‘, ‗part of a figure off
some tomb‘. Significantly, however, both of these fragmentary images are correlated with the
‗mother‘.
[email protected]
40
O’ Farrell notes that the blush combines ‘its (on-again/off-again) commitment to legibility with the
flirtatious intermittences characteristic of an erotic art’, p. 7.
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Seizing Bodies, Jessica Groper, Claremont Graduate University, California
In Charles Dickens‘ Bleak House the delicate hold on physical control is tested
regularly in the bodies of several female characters. The seizure disorder plainly exhibited by
one character, Guster, serves multiple purposes throughout the novel. Guster demonstrates
many of the behaviors and characteristics that represent what Victorians most feared and
disliked. Her seizures not only frighten other characters, but they also prove hysterically
contagious. Finally, she manages to hijack the plot and prevent its progression until she
regains self-control. In her complete lack of physical control, she – a poor, uneducated,
unattractive, female character – manages to control the emotions, bodies, and fates of the
characters around her, without even trying.
It is fascinating to note, however, that the reader is never in the room when a seizure
occurs. Presumably the rhythmic gyrations of the body, secretion of bodily fluids, and
animalistic noises associated with grand mal seizures were still too graphic and primal to
expose the reading audience to. In spite of any sympathy the reader, the author, or the other
characters might feel for the character in seizure, she is still subversive and threatening. And,
in this way, she stops being simply a character, and she becomes a representation of the
unstable and fluctuating world the Victorians wished to control. This paper will explore the
representations of the pre-seizure and seizing body, the effects on the bodies of others, and the
role of the seizing body as social metaphor.
With so much written about hysteria and fainting in Victorian literature, it is
interesting to consider another example of physical rule breaking. As a female character falls
into a seizure she is falling out of proper behavior norms and becoming a fallen woman.
While the definition of ―fallen woman‖ in this case is more literal than the traditional usage,
the results are the same. She has relinquished control of her body and therefore rendered it
impure. She is physically unattractive to respectable men and repulsive or pitiable to women.
While Guster is in fact moral, naïve, and chaste, her status among women is only slightly
higher than a prostitute. The body she inhabits and its uncontrollable seizures negate her
respectability.
Charles Dickens was able to observe doctors working with epileptic patients on
several occasions, and was aware of experimental treatments for the disorder. His portrayal of
a seizing character serves to render the reader sympathetic with the unfortunate character.
This is not the first time Dickens humanizes disability in his writing. His decision to take
what was grotesque to the Victorians and reinterpret it as worthy of notice or even noble
should be acknowledged in the field of disability studies where it is more than obvious how
powerful fictional representations of disabilities can be over the public imagination and
understanding.
[email protected]
Striking Abjection, Evacuating Horror, James Arnett, CUNY
In this paper, I will be examining the internal logic of Dickens's novel Dombey and Son by
focusing on the central, and centripetally abyssal, scene wherein Dombey strikes his daughter
Florence across the chest-- casting her out of his family purview and the family's home in the
wake of the collapse of his marriage. This scene collapses into itself a number of the novel's
thematics: the alliance between capital and kinship, the primacy of sexual reproduction, the
repression of feminine sexuality-- and in so doing, chiastically undoes the very logics that
drive them. Locating this physical contact as the crux of the novel's logic, I will explore how
Kristeva's theory of abjection, Scarry's reflections on pain, and Teresa Brennan's more recent
theories of affective transfer come to be located on the site of the body, and that this
emptying, earth-shaking blow resonates tremendously. In spite of the ferocity of the event,
however, the blow permits an alternative logic of kinship and desire in resistance to capital to
emerge from the text.
[email protected]
12.15-1.30 Closing plenary panel
Roundtable on Victorian Sentimentality
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Participants: Nicola Bown (Birkbeck), Carolyn Burdett (Liverpool), Sally Ledger
(Birkbeck), Heather Tilley (Birkbeck) and Paul White (Cambridge)
The centrality of sentimentality to Victorian culture has never been in doubt. The emotional
convulsions of Dickens‘s readers in response to the death of Little Nell; the representation of
childhood in John Everett Millais's Bubbles and its appropriation as an advertising icon; the
excess of feeling associated with Victorian melodrama; these and other cultural phenomena of
the period have led to an almost automatic correlation between sentimentality and
Victorianism. It is through the category of the sentimental that Victorian culture has most
often been popularly understood and misunderstood.
What has been – and remains – in doubt is what, precisely, sentimentality is. Debased
by a twentieth-century critical narrative of decline, Victorian sentimentality has most often
been regarded as a mawkish, seedy poor relation to eighteenth-century sentimentalism and to
earlier philosophical accounts of the moral sentiments. The generally dim view taken of
Victorian sentimentality has led to critical neglect of a category essential to an understanding
of this crucial period of modern history. Central to the Victorian Sentimentality project is a
determination to revise the dominant critical narrative of decay and fundamentally to
reappraise the role and meaning of sentimentality across diverse fields: the novel, visual
culture, material culture and science.
The group of scholars on the Victorian Sentimentality panel have together been
exploring a number of related intellectual trajectories. The first of these explores the
continuities and distinctions between eighteenth-century sentimentalism and Victorian
sentimentality as it was manifested across philosophy, science, literature, visual and material
culture. The second examines the way in which sentimentality was mediated through the
fields of scientific thought and practice, and the ways in which those, in their turn, intersected
with literary culture. The third major focus of the project investigates the part sentimentality
played in shaping communal feeling and identity in the Victorian period. In a series of
‗snapshot‘ talks this panel aims to give a sense of the range of questions that we are asking in
relation to Victorian sentimentality.
1.30 Close.
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