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Fruit, Water, Ice, Glass, Gold: Images of Human Beauty in Post-1980 Anglophone Fiction Carina Hart Submitted for the qualification of Doctor of Philosophy to the University of East Anglia Department of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing September 2012 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. Abstract The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a critique of the concept of beauty in art and philosophy (McGann 190), with Christopher Janaway characterising aesthetics as the Cinderella of philosophy who “doesn’t make it to the ball” (vii). However, since around 1980 an increasing number of artistic and critical voices have begun to speak about beauty once again. Anglophone novels of this period, from 1980 to 2012, show a particular engagement with the subject through their exploration of human beauty. By figuring the beauty of characters in metaphorical terms, they demonstrate that conceptions of human beauty as either a sinful, fleshly temptation or an abstract ideal can be transformed. Five specific metaphors through which this is achieved form the subject of analysis for this thesis: fruit, water, ice, glass and gold. Ten post-1980 novels are examined in their use of these metaphors to reformulate human beauty. ! The preoccupation with the transformation and rewriting of beauty will be shown to indicate a distinct trend in post-1980 fiction, one which enacts a notable move away from fiction regarded as postmodernist. It will be demonstrated that the present concern with beauty emerges from the emphasis on surfaces in postmodernist fiction (Waugh, Practising Postmodernism 4), but that contemporary novels are characterised by a reconstructive and transformative approach which is less evident in earlier fiction. This transformative approach is directed to the division of beauty into concrete and abstract by philosophers such as Plato, Augustine, Kant and Adorno. In post-1980 fiction and the critical work of Wendy Steiner, Denis Donoghue, James Kirwan and others, this dichotomy is profoundly challenged. This thesis engages with these aesthetic philosophies in close readings of the ten chosen novels, to expound how the relationship between concrete and abstract human beauty is represented and rewritten in post-1980 fiction. 2 Contents Acknowledgements........................................................................................4 Introduction: Reintroducing Beauty............................................................5 Chapter 1: Fruit...........................................................................................58 - Green and Golden Apples..............................................................65 - “White with Rosy Cheeks”............................................................72 - “Comfort me with apples, for I am sick with love”.......................83 - Decline and Fall.............................................................................87 Chapter 2: Water.........................................................................................96 - Joanna and the Violent Waters......................................................97 - Soup, Ink, River: Dirty Water......................................................109 - Siren on the Rocks.......................................................................120 Chapter 3: Ice............................................................................................131 - Courting Death............................................................................134 - Tales of Ice and Terrible Beauty..................................................140 - Ice Boxes: Construction and Containment..................................149 - The Thaw.....................................................................................155 Chapter 4: Glass........................................................................................166 - Chaste Transformations...............................................................170 - Lovely Corpses............................................................................176 - The Eye of the Beholder..............................................................183 - The Tyranny of Metaphor............................................................187 Chapter 5: Gold.........................................................................................201 - The Golden Mirror.......................................................................207 - The Kantian Separation...............................................................211 - Natural Gold, Golden Nature......................................................217 - “It Shows Itself and Beckons”: Golden Girls..............................223 - A Solid Gold Metaphor................................................................232 Conclusion.................................................................................................236 Works Cited...............................................................................................242 3 Acknowledgements Thanks are due to everyone who has patiently listened to me talking about beauty, fiction and the (not always beautiful) process of writing a PhD. But certain people are owed especial gratitude: My parents, of course, for going far beyond the call of duty and helping me out of every scrape, as well as for their unfailing enthusiasm and interest in my project. Thank you for everything, and I promise that I am now out of your hair. Sheila Hart, for such substantial encouragement of my literary obsessions, giving me books, ideas and provocative questions. Here’s hoping for many more discussions of literature — I’m sure there will be after you have read this! Stephen Benson, for allowing me to make my idiosyncratic way through this project, and steering me back to the path when I have strayed. Thanks for all your help. Rebecca Harris, Tim Jones and all my friends at UEA and elsewhere for three years of coffee and sympathy. Now for the champagne... And Joe Jackson, for everything. For unquestionably being there regardless of distance, and showing just how the impossible can be achieved. To quote one of the novels studied here, “everything has changed a thousand times over”. 4 Introduction Reintroducing Beauty By drawing on a syntax of enchantment that conjures fluidity, ethereality, flimsiness, and transparency, writers turn solidity into resplendent airy lightness to produce miracles of linguistic transubstantiation. Maria Tatar, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood Jerome McGann writes in The Scholar’s Art that for “about a hundred years there has been something called ‘the death of beauty.’ Recently people have been telling us that it’s time for beauty to come back into the eye of the beholder. But how does one make that happen?” (190). This thesis presents one way in which the revival of beauty is already happening: in anglophone fiction published since 1980, which recuperates and reforms ideas of human beauty through the workings of metaphor, the “linguistic transubstantiations” from solid to ethereal described by Maria Tatar in the epigraph to this work. In asserting that post-1980 fiction demonstrates a notable concern with human beauty, and exploring the manifestation of this in a number of novels, this thesis makes a claim that spans the fields of contemporary literature and aesthetic philosophy. The analysis presented in this work knits the two fields closely together, as mutually illuminating ways of examining the artistic representation of human beauty. The four fundamental arguments posited by this thesis are as follows, and this introduction will explore each point in detail: • Post-1980 fiction is deeply concerned with the aestheticisation of the world, and particularly of the human body. • This concern grows out of the postmodernist emphasis on surface (Waugh, Practising Postmodernism 4), and its challenge to the idea of producing meaning through ‘grand narratives’: without these structuring 5 systems to govern the production of meaning, the aesthetic becomes a central driving force for fiction, and “rather than disappearing, has actually incorporated everything else into itself” (ibid. 5-6). • The inheritance from postmodernist writing of a deconstructive attitude towards history has led post-1980 fiction to unravel the history of human beauty and its artistic representation, and to remake it in alternative ways. • This reconstructive and transformative approach is characteristic of post-1980 fiction. Post-1980 fiction is deeply concerned with the aestheticisation of the world, and particularly of the human body. This thesis takes a selection of post-1980 novels that demonstrate a clear concern with human beauty. There are many more that lie beyond the scope of this project, so ten key novels have been chosen, spanning from the 1980s to 2012, which together indicate a particular trend in contemporary fiction. This trend comprises an exploration of the conflict between the abstract and concrete aspects of human beauty — the idea and the body — and this conflict is investigated through metaphor. This conflict is part of the “sea change” observed by Jago Morrison in “understandings of the body and its relation to identity” in the last thirty years (40). Since the establishment