Negotiating Femininity As Spectacle Within the Victorian Cultural Sphere
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CRACKED MIRRORS AND PETRIFYING VISION: NEGOTIATING FEMININITY AS SPECTACLE WITHIN THE VICTORIAN CULTURAL SPHERE by LUCINDA IRESON A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham November 2013 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT Taking as it basis the longstanding alignment of men with an active, eroticised gaze and women with visual spectacle within Western culture, this thesis demonstrates the prevalence of this model during the Victorian era, adopting an interdisciplinary approach so as to convey the varied means by which the gendering of vision was propagated and encouraged. Chapter One provides an overview of gender and visual politics in the Victorian age, subsequently analysing a selection of texts that highlight this gendered dichotomy of vision. Chapter Two focuses on the theoretical and developmental underpinnings of this dichotomy, drawing upon both Freudian and object relations theory. Chapters Three and Four centre on women’s poetic responses to this imbalance, beginning by discussing texts that convey awareness and discontent before moving on to examine more complex portrayals of psychological trauma. Chapter Five unites these interdisciplinary threads to explore women’s attempts to break away from their status as objects of vision, referring to poetic and artistic texts as well as women’s real life experiences. The thesis concludes that, though women were not wholly oppressed, they were subject to significant strictures; principally, the enduring, pervasive presence of an objectifying mode of vision aligned with the male. ‘Eyes’ (1896) EYES, what are they? Coloured glass, Where reflections come and pass. Open windows – by them sit. Beauty, Learning, Love, and Wit. Searching cross-examiners; Comfort’s holy ministers. Starry silences of soul, Music past the lips’ control. Fountains of unearthly light; Prisons of the infinite. (Coleridge, 1954, ll. 1-10) ‘Doubt’ (1896) The Sun’s rays smote me till they masked the Sun; The Light itself was by the light undone; The day was filled with terrors and affright. (Coleridge, 1954, ll. 6-8) CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1-9 LITERATURE REVIEW 10-59 CHAPTER 1: GENDER AND VISUALITY WITHIN 60-102 VICTORIAN CULTURE CHAPTER 2: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DIVISION: 103-128 BINARIES OF GENDER AND VISION CHAPTER 3: FEAST OR FAMINE: WOMEN’S POETRY 129-154 AND THE ILLS OF GENDERED SPECTATORSHIP CHAPTER 4: ‘SHADE OF A SHADOW’: MIRRORING 155-208 AND IDENTITY IN THE POEMS OF MARY COLERIDGE AND AUGUSTA WEBSTER CHAPTER 5: FROM SHALOTT TO SHOP FLOOR: 209-271 THE PROBLEMATICS OF LOOKING CONCLUSION 272-272 APPENDIX 277-288 BIBLIOGRAPHY 289-314 LIST OF FIGURES 1.1 William Etty, Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, 277 One of his Ministers, as She Goes to Bed, 1830. Oil on canvas. 1.2 James Collier, Lady Godiva, c. 1898. Oil on canvas. 278 2.1 Edward Burne-Jones, The Mirror of Venus, 1877. Oil on canvas. 279 2.2 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith, 1868. Oil on canvas. 280 5.1 John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, 1888. Oil on canvas. 281 5.2 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Lady of Shalott, 1857. Wood engraving on paper. 282 5.3 John Everett Millais, The Lady of Shalott, 1854. Pen, brown ink and wash 283 on paper. 5.4 Arthur Hughes, The Lady of Shalott, 1873. Oil on canvas. 284 5.5 Arthur Hughes, The Lady of Shalott (study), c. 1860. Oil on board. 284 5.6 John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott [looking at Lancelot], 1894. 285 Oil on canvas. 5.7 William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott, c. 1886-1905. Oil on canvas. 286 5.8 Elizabeth Siddal, The Lady of Shalott at her Loom, 1853. Pen, black ink, sepia 287 ink and pencil on paper. 5.9 Emily Mary Osborn, Nameless and Friendless, 1857. Oil on canvas. 288 INTRODUCTION What a terrifying reflection it is, by the way, that nearly all our deep love for women who are not our kindred depends – at any rate, in the first instance – upon their personal appearance. If we lost them, and found them again dreadful to look on, though otherwise they were the very same, should we still love them? (Haggard, [1887] 1991, 261 n1) Though relegated to a footnote in H. Rider Haggard’s She (1877), the above quote effectively strips back the veils – and flowery description – often applied to women in artistic and literary texts to reveal the stark reality that can underlie such lyricising. This is by no means a sporadic mindset but has permeated Western culture to the extent that judging women upon qualities of youth and beauty (rather than ‘masculine’ traits such as wisdom and intellect) has become naturalised. As the above quote also indicates, this is a matter informed by visual relations: a woman’s value has conventionally depended upon the visual pleasure that she provides to male onlookers, regardless of whether she herself wishes to be judged on these grounds. This association of women with visual spectacle and men with visual agency is not limited to a particular historical setting. However, exploring this model within the context of the Victorian era is fruitful given that this age entailed a strong interest in vision and prevalence of visual material in numerous areas, along with a reliance upon either / or binaries that often operated along gendered lines. As Shires (2009, 26) summarises, the nineteenth century saw ‘a dramatic change from a pre- Revolutionary, eighteenth-century mindset to Victorian sensibilities, a change that is psychological, cultural, social, scientific, and aesthetic.’ Accordingly, vision came to the forefront of multiple cultural avenues, with scientists expressing considerable interest in the ocular faculty. Darwin’s treatise on sexual selection, in particular, exerted considerable influence in and beyond the scientific community, endorsing a model wherein women were 1 assessed on the basis of their decorative attributes while men were positioned as spectators and subjected to no such stipulations. That the nineteenth century was a time of numerous advancements in photography and printing also helped enable the proliferation of visual imagery, while the rise of consumerism and mass production in the latter half of the century amplified the conception of women as objects. This was not, however, solely a time of technological progress and consumerism, for artistic and poetic texts continued to possess an eminent cultural status and were, in fact, liable to benefit from increased standing in contrast to the mass produced material from which they seemingly offered respite. While seeming to constitute discrete cultural spheres or to exist in a competing relationship, consumer culture and ‘loftier’ artistic and literary texts often shared a reliance upon the association of women with eroticised visual spectacle. One objective of this study is therefore to demonstrate that Victorian art and poetry did not exist in a vacuum discrete from mass production and consumer culture: though there were attempts to keep such arenas separate (chiefly, to preserve the status of classical art), critics have discussed Victorian poets’ engagement with post-industrialism (Armstrong, 1993, 3-4) and observed that ‘bourgeois capitalism restructures social and political life in such a manner that art and society appear related and yet somehow unrelated’ (Psomiades, 2000, 29). This thesis will consequently underscore the presence of similar modes of viewing within these cultural realms, noting also the ways in which mythological and historical themes could intersect with contemporary modes of representation.1 The interdisciplinarity of this thesis naturally means that not every topic of relevance can be discussed in detail, yet many of these topics (optical technology, for example) have been 1 Of the characteristics of Pre-Raphaelitism, for example, William Bell Scott (1892, cited by Smith, 1992, 39) remarked, ‘[h]istory, genre, medievalism...were allowable as subject, but the execution was to be like the binocular representations of leaves that the stereoscope was beginning to show.’ 2 examined by numerous scholars. This thesis instead seeks to convey the prevalence of the model that it describes, and, on this note, scholars have emphasised that Victorian visual culture consisted of a web of ‘complex inter-relationships’ (Smith, 1992, 42), with Shires (2009, 17) citing the nineteenth century as a time of ‘well-documented interchanges among the sister arts and new technologies.’2 The following chapters will consequently detail the manifestation of this gendered mode of viewing within Victorian culture and explore its psychological effects, also reflecting on women’s attempts to forsake their status as visual objects and potentially exercise their own visual faculty: a desire that has often proven difficult to realise. As Gilbert and Gubar (2000, 17) state, one cannot explore the impact that cultural imagery has had upon women without first understanding such imagery; in other words, one must ‘dissect in order to murder.’ That women have been regarded as objects of visual pleasure while men have been aligned with spectatorship is a longstanding norm within Western culture, and the first chapter of thesis will illustrate the various arenas within which this dichotomy found expression in the Victorian era, referring to scientific theory, consumer culture and advances in visual technology. Given that this dichotomy was so prevalent, attempting to document the multitude of texts in which it is evidenced would be redundant and beyond the scope of this thesis.