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Small, Douglas Robert John (2013) Dementia's Jester: the Phantasmagoria in Metaphor and Aesthetics from 1700-1900

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Small, Douglas Robert John (2013) Dementia's Jester: the Phantasmagoria in Metaphor and Aesthetics from 1700-1900 Small, Douglas Robert John (2013) Dementia's jester: the Phantasmagoria in metaphor and aesthetics from 1700-1900. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4212/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Dementia’s Jester: The Phantasmagoria in Metaphor and Aesthetics from 1700 – 1900. Douglas Robert John Small PhD in English Literature University of Glasgow Department of English Literature – School of Critical Studies September 2012 © Douglas Robert John Small, September 2012 This work is dedicated, with deepest love and gratitude, to my mother and father, Elizabeth and Drummond Small, and to my sister Lynsay. I cannot thank you enough for everything you’ve done for me. I would like to thank Gillian McCay and Tom Russon for being wonderful people who looked after me and took me to see art, and the fabulous Miss Maryann Cowie, for always being there and always being the best of friends. Special mentions go to Felicity Maxwell (for being a Scholar and a Gentleman of the Old School), Daria Izdebska (for many fun conversations and much good advice), and Tania Scott (for numerous lunches, cups of tea and generally being a sweetheart). Finally, and most emphatically, I would like to thank my supervisors Robert Maslen and Nigel Leask, without whose guidance, unfaltering wisdom, and patience, this would be a far inferior piece of work. Thank-you all. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 Incessant Observation: The Birth of the Culture of Curiosity. 6 CHAPTER 2 A Sublime Transgression: The Romantic Reinvention of the Curious. 40 CHAPTER 3 In Utter Darkness: The Emergence of the Phantasmagoria. 98 The Formula of Dreams: Victorian Decadence, the Phantasmagoria and the CHAPTER 4 156 Collected Self. CONCLUSION 246 Bibliography 265 INTRODUCTION In 1792, the last of the winter sun would have left Paris at about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, so that the group of spectators who arrived at the Hôtel de Chartres one evening shortly after Christmas would have done so in the dark. This was by design, because they had come for death. The year already had a strong claim to be regarded as a particularly cadaverous one. The guillotine had been employed for the first time in April to put an end to the life of the robber Nicholas Jacques Pelletier and shortly thereafter to effect the first of the political executions ordered by the Revolutionary Tribunal. What these men and women had come for, though, was a more complex, flamboyant and technologically advanced spectacle of death; it was the invention of the illusionist Paul Philidor and was called ‘the phantasmagoria’. Coined by combining the Greek words ‘phantasma’ (appearance, vision, ghost) and ‘agora’ (assembly), Philidor had intended the name to suggest a vast crowd of the undead, a riotous carnival of phantoms. He promised his audience that, using the projections of a magic lantern and other ingenious mechanical devices, he would show them the illusory shapes of ghosts and monsters, reunite lovers separated by death, and call fiends out of hell. Philidor’s show was an immediate success. He and other canny entertainers (such as the Belgian, Etienne Gaspard Robertson) spread the format across the continent; Philidor himself brought it to London in 1801. However, this exhibition of spectres was to become something far more than a mere footnote in the history of Romantic popular entertainment. With the phantasmagoria, Philidor had dropped a seed of post- enlightenment paranoia into the already sepulchral soil of The Terror. Over the following years, the phantasmagoria came to serve as a symbol for a set of new ideas about thought and imagination. The historian Terry Castle describes how, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a sense of the vulnerability and malleability of the mind had been gradually overtaking the notion of it as a strictly rational, empirical engine. A new and disturbing theory was emerging: that the mind might be at the mercy both of its own imagination and of subtle 1 influences that could transform the action of the senses.1 The mind, that is, could produce hallucinations within itself that had the appearance of reality, fantasy might overtake thought, and the mind might undermine its own rationality. The ghastly but insubstantial and hypnotic forms summoned up by Philidor’s performances seemed to embody this growing anxiety concerning the mind’s own febrile imaginative activity. In the collective imagination of the period, therefore, the phantasmagoria rapidly evolves from being just one of a number of amusements to having a much broader symbolic function. In the course of this evolution, while some understood the image of the phantasmagoria as representing the imagination fearfully out of control, others saw in it the imagination marvellously freed from restraints. One of the first spectators of Etienne Robertson’s phantasmagoria, Sébastian Mercier, rapturously declared that it had ‘excavated the dream’2. For him the spectacle was a symbol of the unfettered potency of the imaginative faculty; used in this way, the term ‘phantasmagorical’ was not terrifying but celebratory. This duality is at the heart of the nineteenth-century deployment of the phantasmagoria as metaphor; it could represent both the wonders of dream and the horrors of nightmare. In effect, the phantasmagoria was a suitably delirious symbol for the delirium of creativity itself. With this in mind, from now on – unless explicitly noted otherwise – whenever I refer to the phantasmagoria or the phantasmagorical, it will be to one or other of its metaphorical or symbolic roles rather than the original magic lantern show pioneered by Philidor. In addition to this metaphorical function, though, the phantasmagoria also came to act as a new figure for a particular aesthetic. Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, the fashionability of collections of odd, exotic or ‘curious’ objects had produced a ‘culture of curiosity’. As Barbara Benedict and Nigel Leask have shown us, during this period there emerged in novels, newspapers and magazines a debate about the morality and social legitimacy of acquiring curiosities and of living as a curious person.3 Intimately associated with this culture of curiosity was an aesthetic of spectacle, and in particular of the collection. Both those who supported 1 Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 140-168. 2 Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkley: University of California Press, 1993), 244. 3 Barbara Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 1-25. 2 this fashionable curiosity and those who satirised it did so by depicting collections of things that were exaggeratedly bizarre or unfamiliar. This emphasis on collecting also meant that the culture of curiosity was frequently also a culture of exhibition and display: the collector’s identity was effectively defined by the quality of his collection and his ability to show it off. The collection became an externalised version of its owner’s selfhood, its exotic and fabulous elements suggesting the exoticism of the owner’s own personality. These fantasies of materialism and collecting were intimately connected with eighteenth-century fashionable curiosity. As the nineteenth century approached, the fashionable appeal of the culture of curiosity and the collections that characterised it began to decline. The phantasmagoria as metaphor or symbol, however, picked up on the residue of the eighteenth-century culture of curiosities and partially reinvented it, combining it with its own imaginative and illusionistic associations. This reinvention can be seen in the works of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, where phantasmagorical collections of marvellous objects merge with the imaginative and psychological aberrations of their owners. In nineteenth-century literature, the phantasmagorical aesthetic becomes a strange intersection of materialism and imagination: the products of the imagination are given material form as lists and collections of exotic objects, these objects take on suggestively magical properties, and collections of material finery begin to be seen as a kind of fantastic narcotic, allowing access to a phantasmagorical dream world. The objective of this thesis is to explore the interplay between these different metaphorical, material and aesthetic elements and their roles in the evolution of the idea of the phantasmagorical. Since the phantasmagorical is in part a continuation of the ideas and preoccupations of the culture of curiosity, I will begin by examining that culture and the questions it provoked among its contemporaries about (among other things) the attribution of wonder and amazement to collections of objects, the creation of a ‘collected self’ through owning such objects, and the morality of spending sometimes vast amounts of capital
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