Subversive Beauty - Victorian Bodies of Expression Lisa Michelle Hoffman-Reyes University of South Florida, [email protected]
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University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 4-8-2014 Subversive Beauty - Victorian Bodies of Expression Lisa Michelle Hoffman-Reyes University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Scholar Commons Citation Hoffman-Reyes, Lisa Michelle, "Subversive Beauty - Victorian Bodies of Expression" (2014). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5042 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Subversive Beauty: Victorian Bodies of Expression by Lisa Hoffman-Reyes A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy with a concentration in Literature Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Co-Major Professor: Marty Gould, Ph.D. Co-Major Professor: Pat Rogers, Ph.D. Maria Cizmic, Ph.D. Annette Cozzi, Ph.D. Date of Approval: April 8, 2014 Keywords: aesthetics, femininity, gender-fluidity, inversion, detail Copyright © 2014, Lisa Hoffman-Reyes DEDICATION For Betty Eason and Susan Hoffman, two subversive beauties. TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................ ii ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... iii INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE: VICTORIAN BEAUTY ...................................................................................22 CHAPTER TWO: TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES ...................................................................43 CHAPTER THREE: TELENY .......................................................................................................71 CHAPTER FOUR: THE RING AND THE BOOK ......................................................................102 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................133 WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................142 i LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: “Lady Hume Campbell,” Heath’s Book of Beauty for 1840 .......................................30 Figure 1.2: “Dinah Consoling Hetty in Prison,” http://www.britishmuseum.org ..........................32 Figure 1.3: “Oscar Wilde Begins Lecture Tour of the United States and Canada,” worldhistoryproject.org ......................................................................................................38 Figure 1.4: “The Lady Worsley” and “The Lady Gardner,” Heath’s Book of Beauty for 1840....................................................................................................................................40 ii ABSTRACT My dissertation seeks to bring aesthetics into conversation with the epistemological concerns of three Victorian texts, in response to the prevalence of beautiful feminine faces and bodies in Victorian texts, their presence amplified through the use of copious description. I examine the ways that Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and Robert Browning complicate traditional contemporary assumptions regarding behaviors and moralities through their constructions of feminine beauty. These writers challenge and dispute a variety of Victorian social norms imposed upon both men and women, most notably the mandate to adhere to prescribed behaviors that codify in order to regulate gender normativity. My project begins with a historical review cataloging beauty’s constructions and uses. Then, in Chapter two, I argue that Thomas Hardy elevates imperfect women through descriptions of their natural beauty in order to question and reject popular constructions of proper femininity. Chapter Three transitions from presentations of subversive feminine beauty offering a fairly straightforward disputation of contemporary values in Hardy, to shedding gender constraints in Oscar Wilde, as the author disputes gender rigidity by crafting beautiful men with “feminine” desires and by reassessing the desirability of women. Finally, Chapter Four notes the ways that Robert Browning artistically subverts Victorian literary conventions by rejecting the typical practice of objectifying women by his near-total absence of descriptions of female features, and by placing his emphasis on the spiritual life of his heroines. My dissertation observes that given that beautiful images are so powerful, they could and did (as they still can and do) serve as a means of social control, and never more so than in iii Victorian England, when details use, particularly in the construction of feminine bodies, so consistently and pervasively worked to exclude healthy female sexuality, to scorn and shame deviant masculinities, and to annihilate the feminine body. Ultimately, though, the crux of my project is to detour away from traditional observations regarding the potential for objectification beauty allows, and to engage with Foucault’s idea of a “reverse-discourse” which employs “the same vocabulary, using the same categories” as the dominant discourse. The central argument of my dissertation is that certain Victorian writers produced subversive texts which appropriated recognizable constructions of physical beauty in order to transform their societies toward a more just, more liberal, more compassionate morality. With each of the three texts I examine, I work toward establishing that claim by situating the text within its historical and cultural context within the long nineteenth century. I also pay attention to how these writers engage and instruct the reader. This is integral to my central argument because if literary narratives offer the mode of transformation aimed at improving societies, then the act of reading, and the actor, the reader, must be the primary recipient of the message that the constructed beautiful body holds. I have worked to illustrate the ways that by constructing characters possessing great physical beauty, and displaying or withholding descriptions of the crafted body, Victorian writers challenged, disputed, and supplanted a variety of nineteenth-century social norms. I claim and then support that beautiful characters functioned within literature as persuasive agents of change, subverting social norms by arousing and then inverting conventional associations between beauty and goodness. iv INTRODUCTION Aesthetics is “not in the first place about art” but about the body and its “whole region of human perception and sensation” (Eagleton 13). Because beautiful objects powerfully affect the sensate body, Terry Eagleton discerns beauty’s use as a tool of political hegemony. With the power of beauty’s influence in mind, “The construction of the modern notion of the aesthetic artifact is thus inseparable from the construction of the dominant ideological forms of modern class-society, and indeed from a whole new form of human subjectivity appropriate to that social order” (Eagleton 3). Because the body is so compelling, the human form pervades the cultural sphere, selling lifestyles, actions, and values. Human beauty, in particular, operates ubiquitously. Images of the beautiful body are both persistent and pliant; they defy attempts to malign them. When one formulation of beauty is rejected, another fills its place. An analysis of feminized beauty as depicted in Victorian literature reinforces the influence of this type of “aesthetic artifact,” wherein texts in various forms, from the visual to the literary, craft a new dominant ideology through the use of the beautiful body. Across genres, through the strategic implementation of feminine beauty, Victorian authors gave material form to their impressions regarding their society’s values, in adherence or at variance with contemporary culture. Of the matter of beauty and its claim to power, it is no wonder that writers employ physical loveliness as that “recognizable appeal,” the “technique of expression… accessible in the highest possible degree” through which Wayne Booth argues an object gains significance (99). I argue that in many nineteenth-century literary works, including Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Teleny, attributed to Oscar Wilde and others, and Robert Browning’s The Ring 1 and the Book, the feminized beautiful body draws the reader away from conventional conceptions of gender difference – figurations that serve a conservative, patriarchal, hetero- normative ideology – and toward a more compassionate, more inclusive value system. Along with the role of what Terry Eagleton terms “the sensate life,” aesthetic feeling is commensurably a cerebral process propelled by psychological needs deeper than those driven by the pleasure of the senses.1 Beauty accommodates the power that it does in part because the fulfillment of these needs is such an intensely moving experience. Indeed, our subjective desires, rendering us susceptible to the forces of the beautiful, are life-sustaining in nature. In the first volume of Modern Painters, John Ruskin affirms the influence