©2019 Pritika Pradhan ALL RIGHTS RESERVED “NOT SIMPLE TRUTH BUT COMPLEX BEAUTY”: DETAILS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND AESTHETICS by PRITIKA PRADHAN A dissertation submitted to the School of Graduate Studies Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English Written under the direction of Jonah Siegel And approved by _________________________ _________________________ _________________________ _________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey OCTOBER 2019 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “Not simple truth but complex beauty”: Details in Victorian Literature and Aesthetics By PRITIKA PRADHAN Dissertation Director: Jonah Siegel This dissertation argues that the perception and representation of the seemingly objective details that proliferate in Victorian literature and aesthetics are modes for the constitution of subjectivity, in the work of four Victorian writers: John Ruskin, Robert Browning, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde. Traditionally, literary details, as parts that resist containment within larger narrative structures and formal imperatives, have been viewed as empty, superfluous entities, synonymous with minuteness and marginality, the supposedly manifest visual nature of which translates into unproblematic and objective verbal representation. However, Victorian writers were keenly aware – and apprehensive – that details (derived from the French détailler: to carve), far from being given entities, are created by subjects through processes of selection and analysis, so that the appearance of objectivity they present is generated by, and can reveal, perceiving subjects. Victorian writers employed the perception and (mis)interpretation of details by characters as a plot device to represent and interrogate subjectivities. Simultaneously, they identified the selection of details as a means of generating the writer’s personal style, precisely because details resist attempts at containment. Thus, the Victorians reconceptualized the aesthetic imperfection of details into an enabling condition for the generation of subjectivity. ii I trace the representation of details through two seemingly opposed, major nineteenth-century movements: realism and Aestheticism. My first chapter examines how John Ruskin audaciously champions the irregular ornamental details of Gothic architecture as expressive of the artisan’s free subjectivity – while still seeking to contain them within larger aesthetic frameworks, in The Stones of Venice (1851-3). My second chapter explores how Robert Browning emancipates details and subjectivity from containment in The Ring and the Book (1868-9), which proliferates in details seemingly unrelated to the plot. My third chapter examines how George Eliot represents the serious epistemic imperative to “dwell on every detail and its possible meaning” in Middlemarch (1871-2) as leading to powerful, but objectively misguided, subjective awakenings. My final chapter traces how Oscar Wilde ironically consummates details’ subjective tendencies identified by Ruskin, by representing attention to the details of artworks as a pleasurable mode of self-constitution and self-dissolution in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). iii Acknowledgements How to fix a measure upon inspiration and influence? For it can only be known in its effects; the stimulation and support of those who inspired me in this project are incalculably diffused1 in the result they helped bring about. A strand of influence might surface for a moment in the arc of an argument, in a catenary phrase linking two thoughts together. Nevertheless, I shall attempt to gather them here: I owe a debt of gratitude to my dissertation director, Professor Jonah Siegel, who has inspired me to think harder and to write better from my first year at Rutgers. With infinite patience and wit, he helped me understand that the richly sensuous details of nineteenth-century literature and art that I loved had a history that was considerably more contradictory than I was comfortable with acknowledging. His guidance and support enabled me to appreciate the disquieting, generative beauty of irreconciled forms that I explore in this work, and the pursuit of which lies at the heart of our critical vocation. I also owe great thanks to Professor John Kucich and Professor Dianne Sadoff, members of my committee, who have been kind, reassuring, and endlessly supportive from my first year onwards. I came here intent on studying Victorian literature, and it is to their unstinting generosity, calm guidance, and inestimable wealth of knowledge that I owe the strength to hold steadfast in my resolution. I am also grateful for Professor Pearl S. Brilmyer for being on my committee and for her support. My Victorianist aspirations and endeavors also benefited greatly from the support and advice I received from Professor David Kurnick, Professor Carolyn Williams, and from Professor Colm Toibin (English Department, Columbia University), whose seminar 1 I borrow this phrase from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. iv I was fortunate to attend. I benefited from several dissertation and article writing seminars by Professor Lynn Festa, Professor Emily Bartels, Professor John Kucich, and Professor William Galperin. To them I owe my great delight at watching a thought take form in words. Last but not least, I was part of a warm and stimulating community of fellow Victorianists who were generous with advice, tips, and encouragement: Naomi Levine and John MacNeill Miller (both now professors), Patrick Chappell, Mimi Winick, Kyle McAuley, Alicia Williams, Matthew John Phillips, Kevin Sigerman, and Christina Jen. Beyond the Victorianist community, I owe a great deal to Phedra Deonarine and Emily Coyle for reaching out to me, offering companionship and warmth when I needed them the most. Cheryl Robinson and Courtney Borack at the Graduate Office have guided me patiently through the pitfalls of paperwork. I have been extremely fortunate to have them watching out for me at every step of these last seven years, as are generations of graduate students at the Rutgers English Department. This project benefited from funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, and the Rutgers English Department. I am also indebted to the Directors, librarians, archivists, and scholars at the Ruskin Library and Research Center at Lancaster University, UK, the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, UK, the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University, Texas, and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Loving me patiently from across three continents are my family – my parents and my brother Abhishek – who have consistently supported my pursuit of strange fancies in strange lands. My father taught me to love that which was different from me, and to find v beauty in the fact of difference. My mother lent her strength to me to pursue the beauty I did not understand. Even more so, she presented me with a vision of that beauty, though neither of us realized it at the time. When I was a child, she brought me a copy of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. As a girl of nine, I first encountered in The Picture of Dorian Gray the richly sensuous, detailed descriptions of material details that struck me for the vivid sense of life flickering beneath the surfaces of words. I remember thinking it would be nice to find out what made those descriptions feel so alive. I have been fortunate to pursue the liveliness of those descriptions in my dissertation, and my attempt to decipher their mystery forms the final sections of this dissertation’s concluding chapter. Last but not least, I owe thanks to Professor Stephen Heath, at the University of Cambridge. It was in his undergraduate seminar that I first encountered Ruskin, in a single slip of paper, a handout with a few paragraphs from “The Nature of Gothic.” Though I was only dimly aware of Ruskin’s work at the time, I was enraptured by what seemed to me a boldly counterintuitive argument: that the Gothic was beautiful precisely in its ugliness, that its asymmetries and imperfections made it a more vital and richly expressive mode of architecture – and of aesthetics in general – than the perfect classical forms that dominated contemporary aesthetic hierarchies. I found the architecture itself to be singularly unprepossessing, but I found the argument beautiful, a richly digressive line of thought that branched into live digressions and debates, and knotted itself into intricate webs in which one could get lost. I have been unraveling that tangled skein of beauty ever since. vi Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgments iv Introduction. .1 1. Details in John Ruskin’s Gothic Aesthetics . 28 The Specific Details of Modern Painters. ..33 Details: Masters of the Gothic. .. 53 The Founding Stones of Venice. .66 The Nature of “Gothicness”. 95 2. Stopped Leaks and Littlenesses: Details in the Poetry of Robert Browning . 106 Subjective details, objectified selves. 114 Poetic Hegel, Prose Browning. .121 Browning’s anti-virtuosity. .139 The Carvers and the Carved: Details and Selves. .154 Art’s Oblique Truths. 170 3. “Dwell on every detail and its possible meaning”: The Subjective Details of Middlemarch. .176 Idealism and Things; or, The Theory of Detail . .185 Details, What Details? . 195 vii “Dwell on every detail and its possible meaning” . 205 4. The Dissolute Details of Aestheticism. 212 Pater’s Stylistic Details: The Self as World as Representation.