Reading Narratives of Specular Mourning in Victorian Fiction

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Sydney eScholarship ‘Distempered Visions’: Reading Narratives of Specular Mourning in Victorian Fiction A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY SOPHIE FRAZER MARCH 2018 For the award of a PhD Department of English The University of Sydney 1 Abstract This thesis questions the phenomenological force and function of mourning in the fiction of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, bringing together models of contemporary visuality with modalities of loss, to emphasise a dialectic of affective pain as intimate vision. While Victorian visual culture has been substantially addressed by recent scholarship, there remains a paucity of investigation into what I read as an optic chiasmus of altered modes of seeing and modes of feeling. With a focus on two of the key novelists of the period, I have selected four novels that are fascinated by the nature of warped vision and blindness, questioning how literature might depict mourning in a world newly crowded by the visual. From this starting point, I examine the ways in which both novelists appropriated optical tropes to articulate the lived experience of a traumatised consciousness. The mourning subject becomes the site of specular, phantasmal inquiry in their works, and thus my own method follows the conditions of this connection. This particularised account of the themes of loss and mourning has not been significantly addressed in the scholarship, despite the fact that all four texts explicitly emphasise subjective trauma. How is the private and intimate altered by the fluid specularity of the new optics of the period? Weaving together nineteenth-century physics, optics, and visual technologies with changing notions of subjectivity and the experience of consciousness, my work foregrounds the phenomenological depictions of visualised suffering in the novels. Exploring the intersection of the technologized Victorian eye and the feeling, grieving subject, I draw out the transitivity of optical fragmentation that Brontë and Eliot manipulate to extend the textual scope of elegiac representation. By looking closely at the slippage of socio-cultural modes of vision and inner life, I argue that the precarious nature of the visual became a space in which both writers could articulate a phenomenology of loss. Taking Brontë’s fears for her father’s encroaching blindness as a point of departure, I begin with Jane Eyre (1847), conventionally read as a narrative of resolute visual authority. Through a series of close readings, I draw out the anxiety that shadows the novel’s depiction of the eye. I am interested in the ways the biographical meets the socio-cultural in Brontë’s discourse of vision, and Jane Eyre’s theme of blindness is a fruitful place of entry into that query. 2 Villette (1853) was written after Brontë’s visits to London’s Great Exhibition and offers a distinct engagement with the Victorian visual culture, employing a more sophisticated and complex imbrication of the private and the social modes of visualised loss. This chapter explores how Brontë’s most devastating and final work accommodates the problem of the mourning subject in a hyper-visual sphere. In the second half of the thesis, I turn to Eliot’s The Lifted Veil (1859) and Romola (1862- 3), two works which have traditionally garnered the least amount of critical attention, often described as misplaced in the author’s oeuvre. In The Lifted Veil the various epistemological crises of the mid-century moment find expression in Eliot’s horrifying first-person account of delimited, inescapable sensory experience. Contravening the established critical view of the tale, with an emphasis on the protagonist’s preternatural visionary capacities, I focus on Eliot’s use of the terms of Victorian lens culture to elucidate the blind spots of this first- person narrative. In Romola, Eliot depicts a heroine who imagines more profoundly than her counterparts what it might mean to live with the endlessness of mourning. Taking up Eliot’s exploration of phenomenal embodiment, which contrasts with the empirical, observational aesthetic of traditional realism, I point to the tension that defines the sensory life in the novel. Through being attentive to the correspondences of mourning and decentralized perspectival geographies, I argue for a closer look at the phenomenally descriptive in its own right as performing a different ontology of radical loss. Keywords: Mourning, loss, vision, blindness, phenomenology. 3 Contents Acknowledgments 4 Introduction: The Eye/I of Mourning 7 1. “My inward dimness of vision”: Jane Eyre and the phenomenology of loss 57 2. “I sealed my eyes”: Visions of loss in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette 104 3. ‘A painful want of light’: The uncanniness of darkness in George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil 158 4. ‘Speaking Brokenly’: George Eliot’s Romola 214 Conclusion: Hypnogogia 272 Bibliography 281 4 Acknowledgments The idea for this thesis began in discussions with Professor Vanessa Smith some time before beginning the doctorate, and her enthusiasm for the project gave me the confidence to pursue it. Vanessa’s affinity for and deep knowledge of the Brontës has been a significant source of pleasure for me, and it is to her that this work is indebted. I am certain that without her tireless support, her patience with my (sometimes eccentric) ways of thinking and commitment to phenomenology, this thesis would never have materialised. She has been to me much more than an intellectual counsel, offering professional guidance, most certainly, but also the much trickier giving of compassionate understanding during my long period of illness. I regard it as a privilege to have had the benefit of her insights. Although he has now retired from active academic life, conversations with Associate Professor David Brooks some years ago taught me to understand literature from the bones first. David knows the rich poetry of words and, what is rarer still, can communicate his depth of practice to undergraduates in a way that is inspiring to witness. Dr Bruce Isaacs provided on several occasions a much-needed morale boost, reorienting my thinking along lines that might balance creativity with sound argument. A few comments he made on the emotional and intellectual value of writing a doctorate were invaluable, and I drew sustenance from his advice when doubts loomed. I have been incredibly fortunate during my time at university to have found an intellectual home amongst brilliant young scholars, some of whom have become very dear to 5 me, and it is to this group of people that I now turn. To Gabriella Edelstein, whose emotional wisdom and illimitable friendship are soul-enriching. To Dan Dixon, for the way your mind works; to Kimberley Dimitriades; Russell Coldicutt; Rachel Kennedy; to Sam Matthews, and to Niklas Fischer: for your friendship, your intellectual badinage, your patient submission to my offerings of home-made cakes, and much more - I cannot adequately express my gratitude. To my father, Peter: you have been the less visible, but no less prominent force behind whatever success I have found. Thank you, thank you, thank you. The writing of a thesis is a many-sided thing. It is demanding, yes, exhausting, most definitely, but the world has been utterly un-made and re-structured through the ideas to which I have been exposed as a result. It has been the most formative experience of this writer’s life, and a matter of survival in the deepest sense of that word. For, without books …. 6 7 Introduction The Eye / I of Mourning “The eye made the Victorians particularly verbose.”1 In his Lectures on Light, a series of talks delivered in 1872-3, physicist and philosopher John Tyndall – who delivered popular and highly fashionable lectures during his tenure at London’s Royal Institution – described the new theories of light exciting natural philosophers and non-specialists alike. The real subject of these lectures is the eye, and Tyndall takes a romantic view of what he regards as the most intriguing of human organs. ‘A long list of indictments might indeed be brought against the eye,’ he observes, ‘its opacity, its want of symmetry, its lack of achromatism, its absolute blindness’; indeed, he goes on, the eye was once described by ‘an eminent German philosopher’ as ‘an instrument so full of defects’ that one ‘should send it back with the severest censure’. Tyndall concludes, however, by investing the act of seeing with an enigmatic allure, for ‘the eye is not to be judged from the standpoint of theory. As a practical instrument, and taking the adjustments by which its defects are neutralised into account, it must ever remain a marvel to the reflecting mind.’2 Tyndall’s rich verb ‘reflecting’ here captures the transitive power of consciousness, at once mirroring the seen world, and reckoning with the images of everyday encounter. Tyndall’s larger body of work is an indexing of ocular reflections and the interceptions of the eye, and, despite his epistemological rigour, exudes a fascination with the experiential poetics of the act of seeing. He encourages his audience to experiment with their own ocular abilities by manufacturing rudimentary camera obscura models out of domestic materials. Pleasure could be found in 1 Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain 1800-1910 (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2008), 22. 2 John Tyndall, Lectures on Light (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 17. 8 creating superimposed images of bent light-waves and the reflections of ‘angular velocity.’3 Implicit in his descriptions is an acknowledgement of the analogue of subjective experience and embodiment that any such home-made device could represent – the capacity for illusion, specular enchantment, and the deceptions that inhere in what appear to be objective properties of space.

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