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Redefining British Aestheticism: Elitism, Readerships and the Social Utility of Art

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Redefining British Aestheticism: Elitism, Readerships and the Social Utility of Art Redefining British Aestheticism: Elitism, Readerships and the Social Utility of Art Sarah Ruth Townley , MRes Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy July 2012 ii —COTETS— Abstract .............................................................................................................. iv Acknowledgements ............................................................................................. vi List of Illustrations ............................................................................................ vii Introduction Aestheticism’s Membership, Literary Criticism and the Social Utility of Art .................................................................... 1 Overview ...................................................................................... 2 i. Aestheticism and the Marketplace ..................................... 13 ii. Aestheticism, Gender and Sexuality .................................. 25 iii. Aestheticism and the ‘Return to Form’ .............................. 38 iv. New Formalism and Redefining Aestheticism ................... 49 Chapter One 'Admitted to the concert of literature': Aestheticism and Readerships .............................................................................. 54 1.1 ‘The central need of a select few’: Elite Readers, Style and Paterian Individualism ..................... 60 1.2 A ‘human complication and a social stumbling-block’: Henry James, Literary Value and the ‘Democratization’ of Aestheticism .......................................................................... 85 1.3 The ‘right kind of reader’: Vernon Lee’s Didactic Aestheticism ....................................... 106 Conclusion: The Evolution of Aestheticism’s Readerships .... 122 Chapter Two 'To see the object as it really is': Aestheticism and Disinterestedness ................................................................... 124 2.1 ‘[T]he best that is known and thought in the world’: Matthew Arnold, Normativity and Disinterestedness ............. 126 iii 2.2 To ‘know one’s own impression as it really is’: Walter Pater, Impressionistic Disinterestedness and Sympathy .......................................................................... 138 2.3 An ‘impression distinct from every other’: Jamesian Impressionism, Detachment and the Idiosyncratic ............................................................................ 159 2.4 ‘Something outside ourselves’: Vernon Lee’s Elusive Aesthetics and Eliminating Detachment .......................................................... 180 Conclusion: Aestheticism and the Ethics of Detachment ....... 205 Chapter Three 'Mind in Style': Aestheticism and Psychology ................... 208 3.1 ‘Brain-Building’ and ‘Sympathetic Link[s]’: Pater’s Muscular Aestheticism, Physiological Psychology and the Formation of an Ethical Consciousness ...................... 212 3.2 ‘I seemed to float into clearness, but into a darker obscure’: Jamesian Psychological Realism, Attention and Idiosyncratic Relations ..................................................... 245 3.3 ‘[A]bsorbed into the form we perceive’: Vernon Lee, Active Attention and Empathy ........................... 274 Conclusion: Negotiating Physiological Limits ....................... 291 Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 295 Bibliography ................................................................................................... 299 iv —ABSTRACT — British Aestheticism’s demand for an elite audience has been conceived as emblematizing its reputation as a socially-disengaged movement. This thesis revises literary historical accounts of the movement by challenging such long- held assumptions. It aims to develop a more complex understanding of Aestheticism’s theorized reading practices in order to examine how the movement’s elitism evolves out of a concern for specialized methods of critical engagement with form, which are conceived as having ethical consequences. For authors and critics associated with British Aestheticism, a specialist appreciation of form, far from being a retreat from ethics, represents a refined mode of social engagement. In short, this study considers how the movement’s theories of art’s social utility are held to depend upon its elitism. Scholarship has tended to utilize recuperations of Aestheticism to suit certain theoretical agendas and in the process has revised our understanding of the movement’s elitism. Feminist scholarship, for example, has defined a broader, more inclusive and capacious movement in which the link between art’s social utility and aesthetic value is redefined so that Aestheticism is open in principle to anyone, including the public at large. Nicholas Shrimpton has pointed out that the use of the term Aestheticism in recent scholarship ‘as a chronological catch-all [means] the term “Aesthetic” has been stretched so thin that it is [in] danger of collapsing.’ This thesis aims to recuperate the elitism of British Aestheticism, arguing that we should not allow modern values and priorities to reconstruct our understanding of Aestheticism’s critical terms and concepts. In doing so, it aims to re-historicize the Aesthetic Movement. More precisely, it shows how Walter Pater, Henry James and Vernon Lee (pseud. Violet Paget) formulate frameworks of ‘ideal’ aesthetic response against the backdrop of their engagements with intellectual and literary culture. Each chapter traces a number of connecting threads concerning stylistic supremacy, readerly ethics and artistic responsibility that run between the works of these three figures. The first chapter reassesses Aestheticism’s elitist v critical practices in relation to its readerships. This chapter pays close attention to the relationship between Pater, James and Lee’s aesthetic theories and authorial strategies expanding our traditional picture of the evolution of Aestheticism to encompass a more complex understanding of its theorization of its readerships. The second chapter traces the influence of the philosophical concept of Arnoldian disinterestedness as a negotiated framework of ‘ideal’ aesthetic response. It considers how a tension between elitism and ethics underlies this critical practice. Whilst this activity preconditions its practitioners for social interaction, it requires a specialist critic to undertake it. The third chapter examines how late-19 th century psychological discourse informs our understanding of the tension between elitism and ethics which inhabits Aestheticism’s appropriations of disinterestedness. Overall, the argument of this thesis aims to reassess to the movement’s traditional emphasis on artistic integrity, readerly ethics and stylistic supremacy, but, at the same time, to rethink the periodicity and capaciousness of Aestheticism itself. vi —ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS — I am indebted to those who have supported me over the past few years, and I am grateful for the opportunity to extend my appreciation to them here. I would like to thank the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham for funding this PhD and for providing a stimulating environment to undertake my research. My particular thanks go to my supervisors, Professor Josephine Guy and Dr David James for their rigorous criticism, expert guidance and encouragement throughout. In addition, I am grateful for the thoughtful reflections of those who conducted my annual review meetings: Dr Matt Green, Dr Sarah Davison and Dr Andrew Harrison. For being a supportive Director of Postgraduate Research, I would like to extend my gratitude to Professor Lynda Pratt. Also, for being a very collegial Paterian scholar, I’d like to thank Dr Kate Hext. Various discussions and coffee breaks with fellow postgraduate research students have been useful and pleasurable. In particular, I’d like to thank Klaudia Lee, Jemima Matthews, Chloe Harrison, Laura Nixon, Elizabeth Adams and Jude Roberts. An essay entitled ‘Vernon Lee and Elitism: Redefining British Aestheticism’ (English Literature in Transition , 1880-1920 , July, 2011) rehearses sections of the argument presented in this thesis. This essay reformulates ideas I presented at a timely conference called ‘British Aestheticisms: Sources, Genres, Definitions, Evolutions’ at the Université Paul Valéry in 2009. I should like to thank the Graduate School at the University of Nottingham for funding this visit. A special thank you is reserved for my parents who have offered generous encouragement, friendship and guidance at every stage. I am grateful for the kindness of my whole family. And finally, my deep gratitude goes to Richard for his unconditional support, advice and empathy. vii —ILLUSTRATIONS — Fig. 1. Max Beerbohm. Detail from Beerbohm’s privately embellished edition of Oscar Wilde’s Intentions (1891); facing page of ‘The Critic as Artist,’ Part I. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles. Fig. 2. Edward Linley Sambourne. ‘Punch's Fancy Portraits No 37: Oscar Wilde.’ Punch. 25 June, 1881. —ITRODUCTIO — AESTHETICISM’S MEMBERSHIPS, LITERARY CRITICISM AD THE SOCIAL UTILITY OF ART A suspicion has come to me, in moments of weariness and depression (as such suspicions always do come), that I might be getting entangled in exaggerated, unjust notions; that I might, so to speak, be selling my soul to the most cunning of all fiends, the Demon of Theory. This demon is much more subtle and dangerous than those of his brethren
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