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From Cabinets of Curiosities to Exhibitions: Victorian Curiosity, Curiousness, and Curious Things in Charlotte Brontë

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From Cabinets of Curiosities to Exhibitions: Victorian Curiosity, Curiousness, and Curious Things in Charlotte Brontë From Cabinets of Curiosities to Exhibitions: Victorian Curiosity, Curiousness, and Curious Things in Charlotte Brontë Supervisor: Dr. Sophie Gilmartin Han-ying Liu A Thesis Presented to the Graduate Institute of English Royal Holloway, University of London In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for The Degree of Doctor of Philosophy April 2012 1 Dedication This thesis would never have come into being without the thorough and thoughtful supervision of Dr. Sophie Gilmartin. She has witnessed and helped cultivate the arduous developments of both this thesis and my yet wanting academic aptitude. To her support, both academic and moral, I will always bear immense gratitude. I am equally grateful for my parents. Their own academic expertise in the field of history has greatly influenced my interest in literature; their invariable and perpetual support for my choices in life has freed me of any concerns about walking such a lonely and strenuous path. My examiners have also helped bring this thesis to completion by providing many inspiring suggestions. Their feedbacks will indeed serve as a valuable guidance for me while I revise this thesis for publication. This thesis is to a great extent indebted to my dear friend Alfie, who, as I gingerly embarked upon an academic life in a country quite foreign to me, showered me with affection and encouragement from the other end of the earth.Our relationship had suffered from the distance, yet the friendship thus reborn from mutual support is strong and lasting. Finally, special thanks to my love, Pan, who had patiently accompanied me through the last, most psychologically and emotionally trying stages of the writing-up. 2 Declaration of Authorship I, Han-ying Liu, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. 3 Abstract From Cabinets of Curiosity to Exhibitions: Victorian Curiosity, Curiousness, and Curious Things in Charlotte Brontë Han-ying Liu This thesis intends to answers these questions: What did “curiosity” mean in the nineteenth century, and how do Charlotte Brontë’s four major works represent such curiosity? How were women looked at, formulated, and situated under the nineteenth-century curious gaze? In order to answer these questions, this thesis examines Brontë’s works by juxtaposing them with nineteenth-century exhibitions. Four chapters are thus dedicated to this study: in each a type of exhibition is contemplated, and in each the definition of “curiosity” is defined through the discussions of boundary-breaking. The first chapter discusses the metaphors of “cabinets of curiosities” throughout Brontë’s texts. The most intimate and enclosed spaces occupied by women and / or their objects—attics, desks, drawers, lockets—are searched in order to reveal the secret relationship between Brontë’s heroines and the objects they have hidden away, especially the souvenirs. From cabinets of curiosities the thesis moves to another space in which the mechanism of curiosity and display takes place—the garden. The second chapter thus discusses the supposed antithesis between the innocent and the experienced, between the Power of Nature and the Power of Man, by reading the garden imagery in Brontë’s works along with nineteenth-century pleasure gardens and the Wardian case. The imagery of Eve is also taken into consideration to discuss the concept of innocence. In the third chapter, metaphors of waxworks and the Pygmalion myth are applied to discuss the image of women’s bodies in Brontë’s texts, and the boundary between the living body and the non-living statue is seen as blurred. In the final chapter, dolls’ houses and their metaphors in Brontë’s works are examined in order to explicate Brontë’s concept of “home,” and the dolls’ house thus poses a question on the relationships between the interior and the exterior, the gigantic and the miniature, and the domestic and the public spaces. 4 Table of Contents Title Page........................................................................................................................1 Dedication......................................................................................................................2 Declaration of Work.......................................................................................................3 Abstract………………………………………………………………………………..4 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………7 Chapter One: Cabinet of Curiosity…………………………………………………...24 I. The Victorian Interior as Reflection of Women……………………………...26 II. Private Spaces: The Model of Intimacy and the Sense of Control.…….…….28 III. Souvenirs Kept in Enclosed Spaces.………………………………………....37 A. Hair as Souvenir: the Brontëan Heroine as Idolater…………………………….39 B. Flowers as Souvenirs: Sense of Secrecy………………………………………..55 IV. Hidden Fire: the Power in Disguise…………………………………….……59 Illustrations……………………………………………………………..…………….73 Chapter Two: Garden…………...……………………………………………………74 I. Nineteenth-Century Gardens and the Changing Concept of Eden.…...….......75 II. Gardens, Innocence, and Brontë’s Eves.……………………………………..97 III. The Wardian Case and Perpetual Babyism.…...………………………..…..104 Illustrations………………………………………………………………………….131 Chapter Three: Waxwork………………………...………………………………....133 I. Bodies of Brontëan Heroines…...…………………………..………………135 II. Pygmalion Myth…………...…………………………………………..……142 III. Statuesque Men and Waxwork-like Women…...…………………......…….156 Illustrations……………………………………………..…………………………...180 Chapter Four: Dolls’ House……...……..…………………………………………..182 I. The Curiosity of Dolls’ House: History and Popularity…………………….184 II. Brontë and Dolls’ House………………….………………………………...192 III. Two Types of Dolls’ Houses…………………………………….……...…..195 IV. The Haunted Dolls’ House……………………………………...…………..209 V. The Dolls’ House Doll: The Sense of Impotence in Brontë’s Texts………..216 Illustrations……………………….………………………………………………....222 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..223 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………231 5 List of Illustrations Hunt, William Holman. Lady of Shalott. 1905……………………...……………….72 Angelico, Fra. The Annunciation. 1430……………….…………………………....130 da Vinci, Leonardo. The Annunciation. 1472……………………….……………...130 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Ecce Ancilla Domini. 1849-50…………………………....131 Ebenstein, Joanna. “Gallery.”Anatomical Theatre. 2008. 13 May 2008 <http://www.astropop.com/anatomical/anatomicalgallery/index.htm.....…….....179-80 Hunt, William Holman. The Awakening Conscience. 1853……….………………..221 6 Introduction “Mama, I believe that creature is a changeling: she is a perfect cabinet of oddities; but I should be dull without her: she amuses me a great deal more than you or Lucy Snowe”(Villette 32, my italics).1 So comments Graham of little Polly in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the cabinet of curiosity, part of the prevalent mania for collecting, became a phenomenal vogue among the European affluent.Amid the many vicissitudes of this fashion, an inclination shared by the cabinet proprietors as to what was to be collected, encased, and displayed became quite clear. William Mueller points out that, at the turn of the seventeenth century, “[t]he wealthy and the well-connected were hoarding things—strange things—into obsessive personal collections”(785, original italics). Bettina Dietz and Thomas Nutz also notice that “eighteenth-century curiosité took the greatest pleasure in possessing and looking at objects that were rare, refined, and visually appealing” (54). The strange assortments exhibited—sensational, grotesque and aesthetically provocative—were an intersection of art and nature. The objects contained in the “cabinets of curiosity”were thus those able to arouse in the spectator a sense of curiosity and awe. Even such scientific institutions as the Royal Society became obsessed with reports and exhibitions of novelties such as unusual surgical occurrences and monstrous births. Fellows and correspondents of the society often recorded these abnormalities, and their specimens were brought into the Society for demonstration and display, as P. Fontes Da Costa points out in “The Culture of Curiosity at The Royal Society in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century.” For example, Revd. Charles Ellis mentions in a letter, which was read at the Society, an “[a]ccount of a young Lady, born Deaf and Dumb, taught to speak,” and “the Physick Garden at Amsterdam, the Chamber of Rarities at Bohn, a Monstrous Birth, the Quarry at Maestricht, Fr. Linus’Dyals at Liege, the Cachot or Rooms cut in the Rock of the Castle in Namur, Sir Jo. Mandevil's Tomb at Leige [and] the Frieland Boy with Letters in his Eye” (qtd. in Da Costa 148). The surgeon Claude Amyand once presented the account of a female monkey with unusual generative parts, and he also illustrated the dissection of the specimen (R. Society Journal Nov. 23, 1738). At 1 Charlotte Brontë, Villette (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), ed. Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten. All further references are to this edition. 7 another meeting, the Revd. William Derham showed a specimen of “the monstrous face of a Child” (R. Society Journal Mar. 20, 1712). Nonetheless, by the end of the eighteenth century, these privately owned cabinets of curiosity had given way to commercialized exhibitions, and the collected specimens, exotic objects, and bizarre rarities had evolved into forms of public performance, or “theatrum”(Stafford 238). Towards the turn of the eighteenth century, the unorganized, often serendipitous
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