UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Solid Air: Victorian Atmosphere and Female Character in British Fiction 1847-1891 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6qv3n571 Author Pizzo, Justine Fontana Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Solid Air: Victorian Atmosphere and Female Character in British Fiction 1847-1891 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Justine Fontana Pizzo 2014 Copyright by Justine Fontana Pizzo 2014 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Solid Air: Victorian Atmosphere and Female Character in British Fiction 1847-1891 by Justine Fontana Pizzo Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2014 Professor Joseph E. Bristow, Co-chair Professor Jonathan H. Grossman, Co-chair “Solid Air” argues that representations of the atmosphere in novels by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Thomas Hardy transform the physical and psychological stability of female protagonists. My examination of Bleak House , Jane Eyre , Villette , The Return of the Native , and Tess of the D’Urbervilles participates in a recent turn in literary scholarship that focuses on physical atmospheres in British poetry and prose of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whereas many of these studies adopt an ecocritical approach by looking back to literary engagements with what we now term the Anthropocene (the geological period defined by human influence), “Solid Air” examines the indelible imprint atmosphere leaves on literary representations of the human. My historical research on Victorian science—including physiological psychology, meteorology, and molecular physics— demonstrates that women in the mid-to-late nineteenth century were often understood in relation to the weather. ii Current narrative theory tends to understand characters as physically delineated subjects. By contrast, I argue that the hazy environments in Victorian fiction emphasize the dissoluble coherence of the female body and its surprisingly omniscient knowledge. My examination of theories of hysteria, “periodicity” (the biological fluctuations thought to govern female subjectivity from puberty to childbirth and beyond), and women’s limited energy reserves demonstrates that the close relationship between gender and climate science forms the basis of innovative—and often empowered—representations of the female self. The forms of solid air this project examines dissolve the distinction between in-here (character interiority) and out-there (atmosphere). This elusive, often opaque, characterization urges us to reconsider the transparent consciousness and embodied subjectivity critics often associate with the “round” or fully developed Victorian protagonist. Paradoxically, seemingly restrictive categories of scientific study allowed novelists to imagine a new diegetic subjectivity: one as diffuse as the air itself. iii The dissertation of Justine Fontana Pizzo is approved. Jayne Lewis Joseph E. Bristow, Committee Co-chair Jonathan H. Grossman, Committee Co-chair University of California, Los Angeles 2014 iv To Travis Oliver Miles, partner in all v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 1. Literature, Science, and the New Atmospherics 3 2. Atmospheric Characterization 10 3. Disembodied Selves: Women and the Weather 15 4. Solid Air: Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Thomas Hardy 19 Chapter One Atmospheric Dissolution and the Ethereal Consciousness of Female Character in Bleak House 23 1. Esther vs. Krook: The Gendered Discourse of Atmospheric Dissolution 26 2. Into the Fog: Esther’s Narrative Dilemma 30 3. Esther’s Ether: Narration, Nineteenth-Century Science, and the Study of Vapor 42 4. Esther and Lady Dedlock: The Affective Precipitation of Female Character 53 5. “Something Different from What I Then Was”: The Anodyne of Omniscience 58 Chapter Two Atmospheric Exceptionalism and Meteorological Narration in Jane Eyre and Villette 66 1. Depathologizing Brontë’s Prophetic Narrators 74 2. Atmospheric Exceptionalism and Lunar Influence in Jane Eyre 82 3. Atmospheric Electricity and the Meteorological Nervous System in Villette 114 Chapter Three Molecular Narration and the Condensation of Character in The Return of the Native and Tess of the D’Urbervilles 133 1. Molecular Narration and the Atmospheric Aggregates of Egdon Heath 143 2. The “Illimitable Inane” and Nineteenth-Century Molecular Physics 151 3. The Condensation of Female Character in The Return of the Native 169 4. Dew and Mist in Tess of the D’Urbervilles 178 5. Generative Character Climates and the “Infinite Azure of the Past” 188 Coda 203 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. “The Little Old Lady” Etching by Halbot K. Browne 38 Figure 2. Illustration of John Snow’s Ether Apparatus 46 Figure 3. American Imprint of British Playbill from 1845 48 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A truism about academic writing is that it is easier to write the Introduction last. Surely, the same cannot be said of Acknowledgements. I find it difficult to express adequately my thanks to the Committee that has made this dissertation possible. Joseph Bristow has contributed immeasurably to my growth as a teacher, writer, and student. His dedication to collaborative thinking and learning has been a touchstone and his generosity, insight, and expertise will always inspire my research. Jonathan Grossman has contributed his amazing ability to get inside the head of other writers. He has helped see me through more critical and creative quandaries than I can list and offered his exacting enthusiasm for getting things right. I am incredibly grateful to Jayne Lewis for sharing her knowledge and scholarship and for asking the conceptual questions so crucial to the development of this project. Louise Hornby’s work on climate, and response to my own, has been both helpful and exciting. Thank you to Rebecca Mitchell for professional support, to Caroline Streeter for writing companionship, and to my undergraduate advisor Frank Bergon for his intellectual investment and friendship. I also wish to acknowledge the History & Special Collections for the Sciences, Library Special Collections, UCLA for their permission to reproduce the figure from John Snow’s On the Inhalation of the Vapour of Ether and the Getty Research Institute. I could not have completed this project without the continued support of family and friends. Kate Bergren and Katherine Isokawa have been loyal friends and colleagues and will always be family. The Mitchells devotedly made time exist when there was none, Anne and Paul Miles offered indispensible support and encouragement. My parents, Laura and Tony Pizzo, always put education first, as did their parents before them. I am fortunate to be part of that lineage and pleased that my parents’ love of 1970s British folk and my love of 1870s British fiction converge in the title of this dissertation. Finally, thank you to Travis and Esme for their patience, their humor, and most of all, themselves. viii VITA Education M.A., English, University of California, Los Angeles, 2009 B.A., English, Vassar College (departmental honors), 2000 Publications “Atmospheric Exceptionalism in Jane Eyre : Charlotte Brontë’s Weather Wisdom.” PMLA (forthcoming). “Esther’s Ether: Atmospheric Character in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House ,” Victorian Literature and Culture 42.1 (2014): 81-98. Selected Conference Papers “Charlotte Brontë’s Weather Wisdom and the Atmospherics of Omniscience in Jane Eyre ,” International Conference on Narrative, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 2014. “Some long-trembling sob of the wind”: Atmospheric Communication and Literary Expression in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette ,” North American Victorian Studies Association, University of Wisconsin—Madison, September 2012. “‘Do I embrace a cloud of common fog?’: Literary Atmosphere and the Effacement of Character in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native ,” Twentieth International Thomas Hardy Conference, Dorchester, England, August 2012. Selected Awards and Fellowships Graduate Division Dissertation Year Fellowship, UCLA, 2013—2014 Mellon Foundation Graduate Fellowship for the Teaching of Literatures in English, 2012—2013 English Department Dissertation Research Fellowship, UCLA, 2012—2013 English Department Quarterly teaching award, UCLA, Fall 2008 Dean’s Pauley Fellowship for graduate study, UCLA, 2006—2007, 2009—2010 ix Introduction Climates differ and cause differences in character; the greater the variations in climate, so much the greater will be differences in character. —Hippocrates, On Airs, Waters, and Places (400 BCE) Production of woman comes from a defect in the active power or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence, such as that of a south wind, which is moist. —St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica (c. 1225-1274) “Solid Air” focuses on the diffuse and changeable states of weather that epitomize female characterization in Victorian fiction. Dramatic displays of vapor, mist, and dew suffuse many of the most famous scenes in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853) as well as Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Readers of these novels will immediately recall, for instance, Dickens’s protagonist and first- person narrator Esther Summerson standing amid the obfuscating smog known as a “London particular” in