‘THE NAKED EYE’: VISION AND RISK IN THE WORK OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS HANNAH VICTORIA DUNLEAVY PHD THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE DECEMBER 2009 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations ii Acknowledgements iii Declaration iv Abstract v Abbreviations vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE : LOOKING AT PAINTINGS 18 i … The irises of the present writer’s eyes … 23 ii … the bewildering wealth of beautiful things … ...................................................... 28 iii … Bows of the eyelids. Pencil of eyelashes … ....................................................... 34 iv … it is worth your while to see … ........................................................................... 44 v … branchy between towers … .................................................................................. 52 CHAPTER TWO : LOOKING AT PEOPLE 67 i … treasury of explored beauty … ............................................................................. 68 ii … To what serves Mortal Beauty? ... ....................................................................... 77 iii … The making and the melting crowds … .............................................................. 88 iv … a stirring scene … ............................................................................................. 102 v … my dúty all énded ... ........................................................................................... 110 CHAPTER THREE : PEOPLE LOOKING 122 i… more than one observer, in the sky … ................................................................ 123 ii … bellbright bodies … ............................................................................................ 126 iii … unseen / See[r]s … ............................................................................................ 142 iv … one’s views of everything … .............................................................................. 148 v … Man lovely and loveable …............................................................................... 155 CHAPTER FOUR : LOOKING AT GOD 160 i … a deep impression … .......................................................................................... 163 ii … But who looks east at sunset? ... ........................................................................ 179 iii … My eyes hold yet the rinds ... ............................................................................ 195 iv … There was single eye! … .................................................................................... 202 Figures 213 Bibliography 220 i LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1: ‘Man lying down’. G. M. Hopkins. From a notebook inscribed ‘Gerard Hopkins. 1863’. Balliol College, Oxford. Reproduced in Notebooks , 257. 214 Figure 2: Lawrence Alma-Tadema, ‘The Picture Gallery’. 1874. Oil on canvas. Towneley Hall, Burnley Borough Council. 215 Figure 3: ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’ (Christmas, 1862). Pen and ink sketch by G. M. Hopkins, in a six-inch circle. Balliol College, Oxford. Reproduced in Journals , Plate 3. 216 Figure 4: ‘Wreck of the Deutschland as it appeared on the Morning of Thursday Week’. Illustrated London News , Dec. 18, 1875. 217 Figure 5: ‘Wreckers at work in the saloon. The tall nun stood on this table to cry out through the broken skylight.’ Illustrated London News , Dec. 18, 1875. 218 Figure 6: ‘Rescue of the Survivors of the Deutschland by Harwich steam-tug Liverpool ’. Illustrated London News , Dec. 18, 1875. 219 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have been lucky enough during the course of this endeavour to work with two inspirational academics who have encouraged and guided me: Jack Donovan, during the first stumbling years, and Hugh Haughton, who had the unenviable task of dragging me towards completion. To both I owe an enormous debt of gratitude for their unending patience and dedication, and I have certainly tested both. In addition I must thank Matthew Bevis, Laura Chrisman and Emma Major for their invaluable ideas and suggestions as TAP members and supervisors, John Bowen for permitting me to shadow, and eventually teach, his Victorian classes, and my examiners, Jane Moody and Francis O’Gorman. Most special thanks are given to Wendy Williamson, without whose calm continuity and practical guidance this project would certainly have fallen by the wayside long ago. I was grateful to receive travel grants from both the Roberts and the Leavis Funds in the Department of English and Related Literature at York, and also a scholarship from the Hopkins Society, enabling me to attend the Gerard Manley Hopkins International Summer School at Monasterevin, Co. Kildare, where I was immensely privileged to meet so many scholars whose work on Hopkins continues to inspire, inform and guide me. I am very obliged to Burnley Borough Council (Ms. Bourne), Balliol College, Oxford (Dr Bulloch), Oxford University Press, and the Society of Jesus (Fr. Endean) for permission to reproduce images within this thesis. Rarely can one person have come to depend on so many and I owe a special debt of gratitude to the vast number of friends who have been so generous with their time, ideas, hospitality, companionship and humour along the way, particularly Heather Bentley, Ronald Fairfax, Paul and Sarah Gameson, Siobhán Holland, Keith and Viola Jones, Richard and Debbie Smith, Peter and Helen Warry, and Glyn Webster. Finally, my thanks to my family, and in particular my brother, Ollie Loach, who at times has waded through both my thesis chapters and my despair, neither of which have been pretty. I could never have come this far without the unconditional love and tireless support of Lee Dunleavy, who has guided, encouraged, cajoled, nagged and even married me along the way. This thesis is for him, and in loving memory of my beautiful mother, Dr Jennifer Loach. iii DECLARATION The thesis which follows is entirely my own research and writing, notwithstanding the assistance acknowledged above. The total word count does not exceed 80,000 words. iv ABSTRACT This thesis takes as its subject vision and risk in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889. Because Hopkins’s poetry displays so evident a fascination with the particulars of language, it is unsurprising that the critical tradition on his work has thus far been heavily dominated by matters of sound: by the verbal, the rhythmic, the musical, and the aural. However, in this thesis I move from the sounded to the seen, identifying in Hopkins’s work a central preoccupation with the visual, with looking and seeing, and the possibilities and dangers inherent in each. Here was a man driven to look for beauty, yet this compulsion to look was matched only by a desperate desire to look away. I shall argue that it is this dichotomy, and the excitement of the many and various possibilities it engenders, that so characterises Hopkins’s engagement with the visual world. Born into a rapidly-changing late Victorian world, Hopkins was fascinated by sight and by the increasingly problematic act of seeing. He frequently characterises himself in explicitly visual terms, and his poetry is littered with numerous references to eyes, eyeballs, eyelashes, eyelids, and eyesight, in addition to many metaphors of sight in its various forms. He demonstrates a recurring notably obsessive anxiety over the health of his eyes and the acuity of his sight, yet repeated medical reassurance does nothing to quell his fears over his perceived loss of vision. Counter to, but inextricably linked with, this fear for the loss of sight is an intense awareness of the danger of sight. This paradox is central to Hopkins’s conception of himself and of his roles as both poet and priest. Chapter One considers Hopkins’s engagement with the intensely visual Victorian cultural environment. Hopkins was a keen draughtsman and painter in his youth and for a while considered becoming a professional poet-painter like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with whose family he was well acquainted. Although he decided to relinquish his artistic ambitions in favour of the priesthood, he remained a keen critic of art and architecture throughout his life. His diaries and journals, littered with sketches and accounts of visits to galleries and exhibitions, are fascinating for what they reveal of this intensely eye/I-driven individual, and the acute anxieties he experienced when confronted by beauty, in whatever form. Chapter Two continues this concern with beauty and its inherent dangers, but now moves to consider Hopkins’s often anxious visual encounters with other people. As a vigilant social observer, his writing ranges from delightedly detailed depictions of other individuals, particularly young men, to deeply uneasy descriptions of massed crowds and formless groups of people. This chapter shows a particular concern, as Hopkins did, with the purpose of mortal beauty, and the dangers and challenges it could pose. Chapter Three develops the concerns of the previous chapter, by pursuing the additional dimension of people looking. In this chapter I consider a group of Hopkins’s strangest and yet most celebratory poems, united by a concern with people looking at others who are themselves looking. With the uneasy concept of the voyeur never far away, this chapter raises questions about the moral, psychological and social dimensions of seeing within Hopkins’s work, and thus I assess the meaning of licit and illicit sight, v whether on the part of the benevolent or neutral observer, the systematic enquirer, the voyeur or the enlightened seer. This chapter argues