Transgressive Tunes and the Gendered Music of Victorian Poetry

Transgressive Tunes and the Gendered Music of Victorian Poetry Joanna Elizabeth Swafford Charlottesville VA M.A., University of Virginia, 2011 B.A., Wellesley College, 2006 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia May, 2014 ii Dissertation Abstract The gendering of music in Victorian poetry often remains inaudible in contemporary criticism because of the radical differences between modern and Victorian understandings of music. “Transgressive Tunes and the Gendered Music of Victorian Poetry” makes the gendered intermediations of music and poetry newly resonant. It argues that poets from Felicia Hemans to Thomas Hardy wrote poems about music that critiqued the larger literary, legal, and social restrictions women faced. The project traces an arc of increasing musical agency for women: from poems on instruments forbidden to women (violin and flute), to poems on acceptable instruments (piano and voice), to poems that present themselves for women to sing, to song settings of Victorian poems that women actually sang in the parlor. By juxtaposing poems about the gendering of music with evidence from a rich cultural archive including periodicals, musical treatises, concert reviews, and satirical illustrations, “Transgressive Tunes” makes audible the lost music of Victorian poetry and its connections with women’s voices. The final chapter, analyzing musical settings of Victorian poems, uses a digital framework that lets scholars who cannot read music follow its arguments. This project, in attending to the gendered music of Victorian poetry, exposes the sociopolitical implications of these musical poems, their subversive critiques, and the power and voice they gave to Victorian women poets. iii Table of Contents Introduction: Lost Chords Audible (and Digitized) ..............................................................1 Chapter 1: Victorian Women and Forbidden Instruments: Poetic Portrayals of the Violin and Flute ...............................................................................10 Chapter 2: Lost Voices and Vanished Hands: Missing Musicians and their Allowed Instruments ...............................................................71 Chapter 3: Gendered Genres and the Music of Lyric: Victorian Women’s Literary Songs ......................................................................................124 Chapter 4: Songs of the Victorians: Parlor and Art Song Settings of Victorian Poetry ..................................................................179 iv Acknowledgments This project was made possible by the generous assistance of many people and organizations. I am extremely grateful to my committee—Professors Herbert Tucker, Andrew Stauffer, Bruce Holsinger, and Fred Maus—for their unwavering encouragement of my research, detailed comments on my writing, and support of the digital component of my dissertation. The Buckner W. Clay Endowment, which granted me a fellowship to research at the British Library for a summer, also has my thanks, as it enabled me to delve into the cultural history of nineteenth-century music. Thanks also to the Wellesley Horton-Hallowell graduate fellowship that allowed me the time to finish this project. I am also incredibly grateful to NINES for introducing me to the possibilities of digital humanities and to the Scholars’ Lab for providing me with the funding, training, and advice I needed to build the digital component of my final dissertation chapter. I further thank the other professors and scholars, at the University of Virginia and beyond, who advised me as I strove to bring together music, poetry, and digital humanities: in particular, Jerome McGann, Alison Booth, Phyllis Weliver, Derek Scott, Judith Barger, and Yopie Prins. Finally, my family, especially my husband Daniel Lepage, has my profoundest thanks for always supporting me, from looking over my code, acting as sounding boards and reading whole chapters as I refined my ideas, to always believing in the worth of my project. 1 Introduction Lost Chords Audible (and Digitized) This dissertation presents new perspectives in interdisciplinary Victorian studies by tracing the gendered intermediations of poetry and music. It chronicles a trajectory of increasing musical agency for women: from poems that discuss instruments forbidden to women (such as the violin and flute), to poems on acceptable instruments (such as the piano and voice), to poems that present themselves as musical works for w omen to sing, to settings of Victorian poems that women actually sang in the parlor. While these poems allude to the restrictive gendering of instruments, they critique rather than endorse it: they acknowledge existing realities in order to object to the larger literary, legal, and social restrictions women faced. The dissertation uses historically and culturally grounded scholarship influenced by feminist theory and queer studies to examine the sociopolitical implications of poems and the voice they gave to Victorian women poets. Music permeated every aspect of life in the Victorian period: with the rise of industrialization, the Victorian period experienced an increase in not only literacy and literary productions, but also musical knowledge, production, and performance: sheet music of the latest hits sung by star performers at inexpensive concerts became readily available for eager pupils to perform in the parlor on their newly affordable pianos, and an ever increasing number of professional musicians rose to meet the demand to teach them. Broadside ballads became available for even the lower classes to purchase on their way to work (where they might be entertained by street performers), and the music hall awaited them that evening. That music permeated everyday existence in an unprecedented fashion during the Victorian period is a fact that the literature of the period illustrates. 2 Although domestic music was considered the domain of women, this designation did not grant them free rein to play any instrument they desired: the violin and the flute in particular were considered unfeminine instruments until the fin de siècle. The violin was thought to represent a woman’s body, and therefore music periodicals like The Musical Times and comedic illustrations in Punch insisted that only men should play on those strings. The flute was also considered an unladylike instrument because of its phallic associations. Conversely, the piano and voice were considered acceptable instruments for young ladies as a result of their connections to religious music and domesticity. Singing and piano playing in particular were deemed essential skills for finding a husband, as articles in Victoria Magazine and The Girl’s Own Paper make plain. These gendered musical conventions appear throughout Victorian poetry from the works of Felicia Hemans to those of Thomas Hardy. While John Picker, Yopie Prins, Phyllis Weliver, and Emma Sutton have helpfully detailed the connections between music and Victorian literature, the gendering of music in Victorian poetry often remains inaudible in contemporary criticism because of the radical differences between modern and Victorian understandings of music. On the rare occasions in which the gendering of music is discussed, critics examine novels that endorse the idea that women should play piano and sing in the parlor as a part of a courtship ritual to attract a husband. Yet music plays a much richer part in Victorian literature than such criticism might suggest, as many poems challenge or question such gendered tropes, often doing so while seeming to endorse them. While music has been the center of the narratives of many Victorian novels, it is equally essential to the sound of Victorian poetry: as this dissertation shows, many poets incorporated musical meters, allusions to famous operas, and even printed musical notes into their poems to more closely connect the two arts. In focusing on the connections between 3 music and nineteenth-century literature, this study also helps correct a common trend in sound studies criticism: most musico-literary criticism that explains the history of the connections between the sister arts omits the Victorian period entirely, including James Winn’s Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music and Henry Thompson Kirby- Smith’s The Celestial Twins: Poetry and Music through the Ages. Lawrence Kramer’s influential study Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After, while providing the exception to this trend, only examines art songs and continental music, and primarily focuses on the Romantic poets before turning to the Modernists. Much of the commentary on the connections between music and poetry in the fin-de- siècle, by focusing on the influence of Wagner and other continental composers, implicitly confirms the adage that England was “Das Land ohne Musik” (“the land without music”) (Temperley, “Introduction” 5). Such a focus overlooks the vibrant musical scene of nineteenth- century England, which boasted a wealth of English composers and a plethora of concerts and musical activities. My project builds on contemporary trends in musicological criticism, by such figures as Derek Scott, Michael Allis, and Paula Gillett, delving into musical archives to articulate the cultural realities of music in the Victorian period. My project puts a rich cultural archive including periodicals, musical treatises, concert reviews, and

Load more