Durham E-Theses Sight and Knowledge Disconnected: The Epistemology of the Visual and the Ideological Gaze in the Novels of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf URANO, KAORU How to cite: URANO, KAORU (2010) Sight and Knowledge Disconnected: The Epistemology of the Visual and the Ideological Gaze in the Novels of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf , Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/373/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 Sight and Knowledge Disconnected: The Epistemology of the Visual and the Ideological Gaze in the Novels of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf by Kaoru Urano A thesis submitted to Durham University for a PhD in English Studies § Abstract § One of the ways to understand literary modernism is to see it as a response to the crisis of Western ocularcentrism. First taking up E. M. Forster as a main figure and later shifting its point of focus to Virginia Woolf and finally to a contemporary author Zadie Smith, this dissertation examines how literature can respond when our long-standing belief in the sight‟s ability to reach knowledge is challenged. Forster‟s novels, written at the dawn of the twentieth century, can be read as a remarkably honest record of the age‟s epistemological anxiety and puzzlement at the recognition that the equation of seeing and knowing in its familiar Cartesian guise was hardly possible any more. The dim feeling of unfitness that Forster felt about realism at the beginning of his career seemed to accompany him to the end, until he felt that he 1 could not produce any more novels after A Passage to India (1924). For Woolf, on the other hand, whose prime as a novelist came later than that of Forster, this condition appeared not so much as a “crisis” of ocularcentrism but rather as a stimulus to invent her new feminist aesthetics of the visual, which is positively assisted by the concept of sight as physical. It culminates with Lily Briscoe the painter‟s effort to seize her vision in To the Lighthouse (1927), onto which Woolf may have projected her own venture, which was to grow out of the realist method of writing. The last chapter casts light on a moment that could be called an emergence of a new ocularcentrism by exploring Smith‟s latest novel On Beauty (2005), which is based on Forster‟s Howards End (1910) and prominently focuses on the meaning that the act of seeing can have in our postmodern world. 2 § Contents § List of Illustrations 5 List of Abbreviations 6 Statement of Copyright 7 Acknowledgement 8 INTRODUCTION 9 CHAPTER 1. “Lenses Procured from a Rather Too First-class Oculist”?: The Jamesian Aesthete Observer in Where Angels Fear to Tread 31 1.1. Blindness or Innocence: Sight and Knowledge Disconnected 37 1.2. The Vision Concealing and Revealing: Man at the Margin and Woman as the Work of Art 55 2. From the Tourist Gaze to Formalism: Travelling Italy in A Room with a View and Arctic Summer 74 2.1. The Eye‟s Thirst for Authenticity: The Structure of the Tourist Gaze 75 2.2. Florence with No Baedeker: How Lucy Shakes Off the Tourist Gaze in A Room with a View 80 2.3. Arctic Summer: Italy, a Shrine of Form? 101 3. Adela Quested‟s Traumatic Experience in the Cave: The Collapse of Ocularcentrism in A Passage to India 122 3.1. The Failed Witness in the Eyeless Cave 127 3.2. What Lies Beyond the Horizon?: The Modernist Epistemic Trauma 143 3.3. The Absent God and the Impartial Sky 156 4. “The Mind‟s Eye Is Only By Courtesy an Eye”: Virginia Woolf‟s Feminist Refutation of the Cartesian Eye 171 4.1. “The Enormous Eye”: Roger Fry‟s Influence 176 4.2. Cutting through the Mind-Eye Connection: A Feminist Strategy 190 4.3. The Mind‟s Eye in the Modernist Epiphany 198 3 5. “The Dancing, Rhythmical Movement of Her Brush”: The Phenomenology of Sight in To the Lighthouse 208 5.1. “The Window”: Mrs. Ramsay in the Painting 211 5.2. “Time Passes”: An Allegory of the Narrator 226 5.3. “The Lighthouse”: The Phenomenology of Sight 229 6. From the Country House to the Painting: The Postmodern Aesthetic Turn in Zadie Smith‟s On Beauty 255 6.1. Far from the Flux of a Modern Metropolis: Howards End 256 6.2. Seeing the Surface in the Postmodern World: On Beauty 269 CONCLUSION 293 Bibliography 305 4 § Illustrations § 1. René Descartes. Figure inserted to explain the work of sight. page Descartes, Optics. 14 2. Diego Velázquez. Las Meninas. The National Prado Museum, Prado. 228 3. Vincent van Gogh. A Pair of Shoes. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. 234 4. Hector Hyppolite. Maitresse Erzulie. Centre d‟Art, Haiti. 282 5. Rembrandt van Rijn. A Woman Bathing in a Stream (Hendrickje Stoffels?). National Gallery, London. 292 5 § List of Abbreviations § A Henry James. The Ambassadors. AN E. M. Forster. Aspects of the Novel. AS E. M. Forster. Arctic Summer. HE E. M. Forster. Howards End. JR Virginia Woolf. Jacob‟s Room. LJ E. M. Forster. The Longest Journey. OB Zadie Smith. On Beauty. PI E. M. Forster. A Passage to India. PL Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady. RV E. M. Forster. A Room with a View. TL Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse. WAFT E. M. Forster. Where Angels Fear to Tread. 6 § Statement of Copyright § The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. 7 § Acknowledgements § Here ends my own longest journey. First of all, I should like to thank my parents, Toshiyuki and Kazuko Jinnai, and my husband Atsushi Urano, who have helped and encouraged me all through these years. Special thanks to the Rotary Foundation: it is their ambassadorial scholarship that enabled me to start my study abroad in 2004. Thank you to those at the University of Tokyo who first advised me to go to England. Thank you to all of my friends in both Japan and England for their warm friendship. Lastly, my sincere gratitude to Professor Patricia Waugh for her never-failing kindness. Without her constant support and encouragement, this dissertation could not have been written. 8 Introduction “The cow is there,” said Ansell, lighting a match and holding it out over the carpet. No one spoke. He waited till the end of the match fell off. Then he said again, “She is there, the cow. There, now.” “You have not proved it,” said a voice. “I have proved it to myself.” “I have proved to myself that she isn‟t,” said the voice. “The cow is not there.” Ansell frowned and lit another match. “She is there for me,” he declared. “I don‟t care whether she‟s there for you or not. Whether I‟m in Cambridge or Iceland or dead, the cow will be there.” It was philosophy. They were discussing the existence of objects. Do they exist only when there is someone to look at them? or have they a real existence of their own? It is all very interesting, but at the same time it is difficult. Hence the cow. She seemed to make things easier. She was so familiar, so solid, that surely the truths that she illustrated would in time become familiar and solid also. Is the cow there or not? This was better than deciding between objectivity and subjectivity. So at Oxford, just at the same time, one was asking, “What do our rooms look like in the vac?” (LJ 3) The opening scene of E. M. Forster‟s most autobiographical novel, The Longest Journey (1907), describes the Cambridge students discussing a philosophical problem at the outset of the twentieth century. Holding up the light, the longstanding metaphor of truth and intellect in philosophy,1 Stewart Ansell is refuting the empirical idea that everything exists only when perceived by somebody. Latent in this situation one might find a curious paradox: while the light of the match is supposed to guarantee that vision (which is traditionally thought to be the “noblest” of senses) leads one to certain knowledge of the world,2 Ansell, holding it up, is claiming 1 See Hans Blumenburg, “Light as a Metaphor of Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,” Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993) 30-62. 2 Hans Jonas, “The Nobility of Sight,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 14:4 (1964) 507-19. 9 that things also exist when there is no perceiving human eye. The sense of disconnection vaguely felt here is, then, met by the unconvinced response from the audience: they wait till the match is exhausted, but in their eyes, the young would-be philosopher has not proved anything, while Ansell himself insists that it is proven to himself.