Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel: Senses and Sensations 1032472901, 9781032472904

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Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel

Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel: Senses and Sensations establishes a new analytical method in the broader context of sensory studies in order to explain how the genre of the novel can impact on our perception of ourselves and our social contexts. Taking cultural literary studies ahead, the book re­ integrates aesthetics – a most fraught concept in cultural studies that long favoured ‘popular’ over ‘high culture’ – into cultural studies as aisthetics in the word’s root sense of ‘perception’. Zooming in on period shifts and changes in taste spanning realism, sensation fiction and aestheticism, ais­ thetics reveals how these shifts also pertain to new ways of perceiving in selected novels by George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Vernon Lee. Connecting Victorian and current literary theories, aisthetics helps explore how the novel can shape the way we perceive the world, what remains excluded from the realm of the perceivable and how our conduct is consequently always also influenced by the dominant genres of our time. Nadine Böhm-Schnitker (Ph.D.) works as a stand-in professor for English Studies: Literature at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg. She specializes in neo-Victorian and Victorian Studies and serves as associate editor of the online journal Neo-Victorian Studies. In her second book pro­ ject, she explored the cultural history of perception in nineteenth-century texts as well as the re-evaluation of aesthetics in terms of aisthetics within Cultural Studies. Her current projects deal with the cultural legacy of the Opium Wars, practices of comparing and ecocriticism.

Among the Victorians and Modernists Edited by Dennis Denisoff

This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature, art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social, technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the Victorians and Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited to, artistic and cultural debates and movements; influential figures and communities; and agitations and develop­ ments regarding subjects such as animals, commodification, decadence, degen­ eracy, democracy, desire, ecology, gender, nationalism, the paranormal, performance, public art, sex, socialism, spiritualities, transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that address continuities between the Victorians and Modernists are welcome. Work on recent responses to the periods such as Neo-Victorian novels, graphic novels, and film will also be considered. Titles include: Gender, Crime and Murder in Victorian England The ‘Black Ghost’ of Bermondsey Anna Kay The British and Anglo-Irish Thing-Essay from 1701 to 2021 Of Broomsticks and Doughnuts Daniel Schneider The Novelist in the Novel Gender and Genius in Fictional Representations of Authorship, 1850–1949 Elizabeth King Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel Senses and Sensations Nadine Böhm-Schnitker For a full list of titles and more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Among-the-Victorians-and-Modernists/book­ series/ASHSER4035

Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel Senses and Sensations

Nadine Böhm-Schnitker

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Nadine Böhm-Schnitker The right of Nadine Böhm-Schnitker to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-032-47290-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-48121-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-38751-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003387510 Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction: Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel

1

1

Aisthetics: Theory and Toolkit

14

2

Realisms: George Eliot

25

3

Sensationalisms: Wilkie Collins

92

4

Aestheticisms: Vernon Lee

157

Bibliography Index

189

215

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my mentors Doris Feldmann, Christine Lubkoll and Susanne Scholz for their advice and support for my project as well as the external reviewers of the manuscript, Silvia Mergenthal and Sabine Schült­ ing. I would also like to thank the first readers of my manuscript, first among them Stefanie Brusberg-Kiermeier and Rainer Emig. Furthermore, I would like to thank Barbara Beck and Jan Schnitker for their meticulous proofreading, and uniworks, in particular Sheila Regan, Leila Mukhida and Mark Taplin, for their native-speaker check of my manuscript. Finally, I would like to thank Lisa Schmuck for her support in helping to shorten the initial manuscript and make it suitable for publication, as well as Stephanie Champion, Veronika Vennemann and Lisa Cristea for helping to finalize the manuscript.

Introduction Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel

A vast proportion of the teaching of the day – greater probably than many of us have acknowledged to ourselves – comes from these books which are in the hands of all readers. It is from [novels] that girls learn what is expected from them, and what they are to expect, when lovers come; and also from them that young men unconsciously learn what are, or should be, or may be, the charms of love. (Trollope 1999: 136)

In his posthumously published Autobiography (1883), Anthony Trollope articulates his apology of the novel in a chapter entitled “On Novels and the Art of Writing Them”. A novel, he claims, “appeals especially to the ima­ gination”, and, due to its focus on marriage and the family, strongly shapes people’s imaginary outlook (Trollope 1999: 136), their personal conduct and their relations to other people. This evaluation not only entails a strong notion of the imitative reaction of a wide readership to literary representa­ tions and social ‘training’ through the (realist) novel, but also puts forward a view of the performative power of literature to inculcate that which it talks about. I take my cue from the Victorian conviction that the novel powerfully and effectively shapes people’s minds and explore the ways in which this genre fundamentally ‘calibrates’ perception as a particular medial apparatus in the Victorian age. The year 1837 was not only the year of Victoria’s accession to the throne, it was also a year characterized by several ground-breaking technological developments in the field of communication: Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype so decisive for the development of photography, Samuel F.B. Morse introduced an alphabet based on the alternation of the presence or absence of a signal and the patent for the electric telegraph was signed, turning language into impulses (see Kimminich 2002: 92). Drawing a con­ nection between these new means of communication and the body, Alex­ ander von Humboldt, in a fitting metaphor, understood “the cables of the 1840s as nerves transmitting the impulses of society” (Otis 2001: 1). Hum­ boldt is among the many who highlight close discursive interconnections between communication technology, physiology and society. Assuming that DOI: 10.4324/9781003387510-1

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Introduction: Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel

dominant media calibrate perception (see Berg 2014: 2–3), I will delve into how they impact on the ways in which we can perceive ourselves and the world around us – a process that I wish to capture with the term ‘ais­ thetics’,1 i.e. the study of the ways in which cultural forms shape perception. As Walter Benjamin has famously shown in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, perception is not a stable physiological process, but a historically variable one that is shaped, among other things, by mediality: During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organised, the medium in which it is accom­ plished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circum­ stances as well. (Benjamin 2000: 676) For literary and cultural studies, the insight that perception is modulated by historical contexts is a central one, because cultural artefacts may play a decisive role in this modulation. David Howes has termed the currently renewed interest in the senses the “sensual turn” (2004: xii). This ‘turn’ is further explored in the discipline of sensory studies that emerged around the new millennium (see Howes 2006: 115). Sensory studies understand the sensorium as “an ever-shifting social and historical construct. The percep­ tual is cultural and political, and not simply […] a matter of cognitive processes or neurological mechanisms located in the individual subject” (Bull et al. 2006: 5; emphasis in the original). In Ways of Sensing, David Howes and Constance Classen further corroborate this claim by stating that “To say that perception is shaped by culture and that society regulates how and what we sense is also to say that there is a politics of the senses” (Howes and Classen 2014: 5). Perception is calibrated in and through socio-cultural, political as well as media-technological contexts. Understanding media as “extensions of man”, Marshall McLuhan renders this interrelation particularly lucid: we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. […] Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social process. […] Every culture and every age has its favourite model of perception and knowledge that it is inclined to prescribe for everybody and everything. (McLuhan 1997: 4, 5) Marshall McLuhan is perhaps the most prominent proponent of the thesis that it is decidedly not content, but rather the very media technology that calibrates perception (see McLuhan 1997: 18). He highlights fundamental interconnections between media technology, the senses, our social ways of

Introduction: Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel

3

interaction and our psychologies. Perception, one can thus safely state, is decidedly enmeshed in culture, and consequently, any analysis of the senses must be situated in sensory history. For the two centuries preceding the nineteenth century, Mark Smith has shown that “the senses informed the emergence of social classes, race and gender conventions, industrialization, urbanization, colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, ideas concerning self­ hood and ‘other,’ to list the most obvious developments typically associated with the modern ‘era’” (Smith 2007: 1). In the nineteenth century, culture and the senses continue to intersect (see Coombs 2019: 6) and their interrelations, or rather “agential intra-actions” (Barad 2003: 815), calibrate perception and shed light on the way in which cultural difference emerges. André Lepecki and Sally Banes have highlighted the performative proces­ suality of perception as well as the multiple enmeshments between the body and culture in their introduction to The Senses in Performance: perception and the sensorium are to be understood as historically bound cultural agents, constantly being activated and repressed, reinvented and reproduced, rehearsed and improvised. In an intertwining process where the somatic, the physiological, and the neurological criss-cross the his­ torical, the sociological, the political and the imaginary, the profoundly performative interfaces occurring between history, corporeality, power, language, and the sensorial become apparent. (Banes and Lepecki 2007: 1; my emphases) Consequently, the calibration of perception can be conceived as the most fundamental cultural level at which cultural meaning constructions are dis­ cernible as a (bio-)politics of the senses (see Banes and Lepecki 2007: 1).2 More fundamentally, one might argue that it was the emergence of biopo­ litics that enabled an aisthetic approach to ‘art’ in the first place. As Michel Foucault claims: “[D]eployments of power are directly connected to the body – to bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures” (1990: 151–152). A biopolitical focus on bodies not only provides a strong motivation for the science of physiology to emerge; it also explains how pleasure and power are intertwined and why sciences are required to explain how bodies experience pleasure at this historical juncture. The corresponding demand for aesthetics to become a science – in Alexander Baumgarten’s founding texts or in the context of British psycho-physiological approaches, for example – can be seen as symptomatic: the demand is about the power to explain the body’s sensations, pleasures and pains translated into the physiological foundation of aesthetic feeling. The nineteenth-century novel, I suggest, is a place where such thresholds between the somatic and the socio-political become observable, because, as parts of the dominant print culture, they are central media that shape per­ ception, instil or at least popularize cultural scripts and convey dominant discourses. Aisthetics is an approach geared to analysing the performativity

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Introduction: Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel

of the senses in literature – a performativity that decidedly enmeshes matter and meaning (see Barad 2003: 801–811).3 Aisthetics thus marks a difference from the classical philosophical notion of aesthetics, frequently reduced to Kantian or Hegelian approaches, in order to describe inductively the emer­ gence of a Victorian literary criticism and aesthetic theory in and through the novel.4 Methodologically, aisthetics sets out to reconcile cultural prac­ tices of close reading with politicized contextualizations of culture. Aisthetics further ties in with a general shift of emphasis in philosophical aesthetics to an aisthetics; this shift, dating from the middle of the twentieth century, amounts to a renewed interest in the body and, correspondingly, to the ‘rehabilitation’ of the senses as well as to a rethinking and reconceptua­ lizing of phenomenological approaches (see Böhme 2001: 16).5 In Aisthesis, Jacques Rancière reveals the political impact of such a view arguing that “[a]rt is given to us through [the] transformations of the sensible fabric, at the cost of constantly merging its own reasons with those belonging to other spheres of experience” (2013: XI). He thus highlights the dependence of what is perceived as ‘art’ on “modes of perception and regimes of emotion, categories that identify them, thought patterns that categorize and interpret them” (X) – that is to say on “the ‘aesthetic regime of art’” (XII). I am interested in this interplay of the construction of perception in the novel genre and the regimes of perception that allow the inclusion of relatively new forms such as the novel into the corpus of ‘art’. The philosophical emphasis on aisthesis finds its counterpart in early twenty-first-century research in the humanities more generally, centring for example on forms of embodiment (see Cohen 2009), on strategies simulating the immediacy of perception in the sense of ‘presentifications’ (see Gum­ brecht 2004),6 as well as on the further elaboration of methods to explore the cultural relevance of the senses such as cultural phenomenology (see Armstrong 1999; 2008; Flint 2005: 208–211).7 Both conceptually and metho­ dologically, that is, a renewed interest in and re-evaluation of the senses can be determined in the field of aesthetics and the humanities more widely. The current vogue of the senses and aesthetics is situated in attempts to think beyond classical hermeneutics, but also deconstructive and discursive para­ digms by re-integrating the body and by reconceptualizing it as the phe­ nomenological centre of perception.8 There seem to be common denominators in current scholarship on percep­ tion, emotion (see Stedman 2002; Gohrisch 2005), affect (see Jaffe 2010: 4–5) or functional and processual reconceptualizations of cognition (see Ryan 2012; Auyoung 2018), and Victorian explorations of the senses that draw on the insights from physiological psychology, which can be considered “most cul­ turally pervasive as a language for aesthetic assessment” in Britain (Dames 2011: 225, emphasis in the original). The method of a cultural phenomenology as established by Steve Connor and Isobel Armstrong is particularly suited to reconcile the concerns of cultural and Victorian studies (see Armstrong 1999 and 2008). For Armstrong, this method entails a combination of “historical

Introduction: Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel

5

poetics, phenomenology, and textual analysis” (1999: 516) with the aim of exploring the ways in which “different cultural meanings accrue to sense experience at different times, and the interaction of sense experience with environment” (515). Apart from reading “with an awareness of sensoria”, a cultural phenomenology also heeds central hermeneutic insights such as reflection on the critic’s “own intervention in the material of study” (515) as well as “the researcher’s permeability to material and the material’s or his­ tory’s permeability to the inquirer” (516). The suggested methodological combination comprising textual analysis, phenomenology and a focus on sense perception, as well as historical contextualizations of sensoria, ties in with my own methodological and thematic interests in aisthetics, that is, to “take into consideration the historical dimensions not just of what is per­ ceived by the senses, but of how that perception was theorized and under­ stood” (Flint 2005: 211; emphasis in the original). I will take this approach as a cue to explore the conditions of the possibility of perceptions as constructed in predominant novel genres of mid- to late Victorianism.9 Aisthetics is geared to exploring and analysing the strategies by which novels create sensescapes and calibrate perception to allow the reader to partake in “structures of feeling” and to partake in an imaginary but vicar­ iously perceptible relation to social change (Williams 1977: 132). As Jenny Bourne Taylor highlights, structures of feeling also describe “a common set of perceptions and values” that are “articulated in particular and artistic forms and conventions” (22010: 670, my emphasis), so that calibrations of perception are closely knit to and expressed in their specific medial repre­ sentations. I understand the novel as one of the mediators of perception representing as well as shaping the structures of feeling of a culturally specific period. Frequently emergent phenomena, structures of feeling serve as indicators of cultural change on a level that defines the way that people experience themselves in a particular social situation. As such, these structures of feeling interconnect calibrations of perception and subject formation. Sensation fiction is a pertinent example, as the genre’s “preaching to the nerves” (Mansel 1863: 495) can be understood as being indicative of chan­ ging structures of feeling (see Amigoni 2011: 56).10 Raymond Williams puts forth the “hypothesis of a mode of social formation, explicit and recogniz­ able in specific kinds of art, which is distinguishable from other social and semantic formations by its articulation of presence” (1977: 135, original emphasis). In times of accelerated processes of social differentiation, pro­ blems regarding the inclusion of subjects into emerging social subsystems are likely to occur and are often negotiated by notions of presence.11 Conse­ quently, social cohesion and experiences of individual agency can be cultu­ rally induced by way of the construction of presence effects and this is where the aisthetics of novels plays a crucial role. Transitions between genres and the ways in which criticism contributes to the formalization of these transi­ tions by providing operative terms to describe them can be explained using

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Introduction: Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel

their particular negotiations of presence effects, and through an aisthetic analysis of the concrete literary strategies employed to convey them. In the Victorian age, perception is a major concern, particularly after the middle of the nineteenth century (see Kimminich 2002: 85–87; Cohen 2009). The later part of the Victorian age can be characterized by the notion of a “crisis of perception” (Crary 2001: 2) with a concomitant crisis of sub­ jectivity (Williams 1970; Scholz 2010: 146; Shuttleworth 1998).12 In that context, there is a clear turn to subjecting the senses to scientific scrutiny. Nineteenth-century media culture emphasizes the graphing of perception and thus situates perception within the dominant paradigm of writing. Aurality and visuality, for instance, are widely shaped by the onset of the phono­ graph and the cinematograph – media that, in their very names, highlight the fact that sights and sounds are medially transcoded via graphing or writing. Apart from this metaphor of graphing, the nineteenth century widely resorts to techniques of measuring to approach the senses in general: the senses were subjected to quantifying and qualifying empirical methods. Joseph Jastrow’s aesthesiometre and Ernst Heinrich Weber’s beam compass are key examples here (see Parisi 2011: 190; Howes and Classen 2014: 171–172). There were also olfactometres, saporimetres and gustometres (see Kimminich 2002: 91) so that the senses came to be measurable and quantifiable phenomena. This quantify­ ing approach inevitably has a levelling effect on the long-standing hierarchy of the senses, as these are suddenly all subject to the same scientific methods. Pleasure and pain as aesthetic qualities are thus turned into data in the midVictorian physiological school of aesthetics. The novel is a form of graphing perception in its own right13 and I argue that it has a decisive impact on Victorian sensoria. I am interested in the literary strategies by which the senses are shaped and calibrated so as to ascertain which perceptions are coded as either acceptable and publicly expressible or the reverse; furthermore, I am interested in the strategies by which sensations are prevented from being ‘perceived’ at all in the novel genre. As John Frow elucidates, genre is a set of conventional and highly organised constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning. [… Its] structuring effects are productive of meaning; they shape and guide, in the way that a builder’s form gives shape to a pour of concrete, or a sculptor’s mould shapes and gives structure to its materials. Generic structure both enables and restricts meaning, and is a basic condition for meaning to take place. (Frow 2006: 10) Far from being stable forms, genres must be analysed through particular texts and contexts (see Nünning and Neumann 2007: 6), and the Victorian novel with its subgenres – my focus here will be on realism, sensationalism14 and aestheticism, in particular – must hence be considered as a special case of the calibration of perception in the nineteenth century. Indeed, genres

Introduction: Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel

7

may be envisaged as “discursive practices”, as Jason Mittell argues (2004: 12; emphasis in the original). Genre, that is, calibrates meaning in historically specific ways and is calibrated in turn. It makes us see things in particular ways at particular times. In addition to generic modulations of meaning, I suggest that genre thus also partakes in calibrations of perception because genre channels what can be expressed, and how it can be expressed in a par­ ticular formal structure (see also Nünning and Neumann 2007: 14). If per­ ception makes us see something as something, the interpretive process of sense data encoded in the ‘as’ is calibrated by cultural frames such as genres. In other words, the material that genre shapes through processes of cultural encodings is sense data; which of them end up in a novel is regulated, among other things, by its generic structures. Hence, genre regulates which percep­ tions become culturally legible and which remain outside of the boundaries of the representable. If, as Nicholas Dames suggests, one of the predominant interests of criti­ cism is to explore “what kind of subject [the novel] was creating”, genre is one of the central, heuristically relevant literary categories with which to explore how novels can be considered to “condition the physiological appa­ ratus of the reader” (Dames 2007: 10), along with constructions of char­ acter, perspective and the general rhetoric of the texts.15 Correspondingly, I conceive of the novel as a social practice that provides imaginary realms for vicarious experiences; the implied phantasmatic role-taking may potentially influence processes of subject constitution by offering models for empathy and identification (see Wünsch 2014: 223–241), for which fictional characters may provide behavioural cues, ways of speaking, bodily attitudes and gestures, particular stances, opinions and perspectives etc. The Victorian discourse of literary criticism professes to the fact that the impact of reading and its power to shape subjectivities were hotly contested and central concerns of the practice of literary theory. Rachel Ablow eluci­ dates this point with reference to the cultural shaping of emotional attitudes; she argues that the way novels train the emotions and sensations […] was not just wellknown to the novel’s first readers; it was the explicit goal of much novel reading. What is useful about novel reading, Victorian critics and novelists claimed, is that it makes us think and feel differently. (Ablow 2012: 201) In a similar vein, Jonathan Culler remarks that “La Rochefoucauld claims that no one would ever have thought of being in love if they hadn’t read about it in books” (Culler 2011: 233), a view that, in Victorian Britain, ties in seamlessly with Anthony Trollope’s notion of novel effects quoted above.16 I suggest that an aisthetic approach is necessary to analyse the ways in which subjects are enabled to experience themselves in relation to socio­

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Introduction: Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel

historical developments. This study explores the ways in which the novel as one dominant genre among the wider scope of media modulates and med­ iates this process. The corpus I have chosen for analysis comprises midVictorian texts for two reasons. Firstly, my selection of mid-Victorian novels allows me to establish whether cultural calibrations of the senses change with new subgenres of the novel (see Mittell 2004: 11); here, I con­ centrate on the genre boundaries between realisms, sensationalisms, and aestheticisms. For these different movements, I have selected the following exemplary texts: George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) and Middlemarch (1871), Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868), and Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown (1884). Whereas George Eliot’s ethical rea­ lism, with its discursive enmeshment in liberalism and utilitarianism, still attempts to provide an authoritative framework for the plethora of char­ acters’ perceptions by way of authorial narrators, Wilkie Collins’s sensation fiction negotiates the epistemological problems triggered by an increasing social fragmentation by way of a more complex perspective structure to suture his characters’ different perceptions; finally, I argue that Vernon Lee’s aestheticism exposes the politics of calibrations of perception through a reflection on the cultural, social and political impacts on and modulations of perception. My chosen time frame also covers the emergence of literary cri­ ticism, a discourse that reacts to novelistic changes in the calibrations of the senses. Criticism attempts to regulate such calibrations by its more and more powerful evaluative interventions and ascriptions of literary value, which, in turn, reveals which literary innovations strike a chord in their particular socio-historical situations. Nineteenth-century literary theory documents the novel’s development from its aesthetic marginality to its social and moral functionalization in realism and its sensationalist short-circuiting with pain and pleasure in a quasi-physical sense, to its aestheticist incorporation into the art-for-art’s­ sake movement. The development of criticism as an increasingly professio­ nalized practice is generally seen to begin from the 1850s onwards,17 which largely coincides with an unprecedented increase in the publication and reception of fiction: Mudie’s Select Library, established in 1842, opened new premises in New Oxford Street in 1854 to be able to cater for a steadily growing reading public which for a guinea a year gained access to, among other books, the latest three-volume novels: in ten years (1853–62) Mudie added nearly 960,000 volumes to his stock, half of which were fiction. Railway bookstalls, initiated by W.H. Smith in 1846, part issue pub­ lication, serialisation in periodicals and cheap reprints brought novels within the reach of new layers of society avid for light reading. Without exaggeration, one might claim also that the period 1850–1870 was the time when a theory of fiction began to emerge […]. (Fryckstedt 1986: 14)

Introduction: Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel

9

As the most dominant genre of the nineteenth century (see Trollope 1938 [1870]: 108; Williams 1970: 9; Dames 2013: 506), the novel is the object of some heated critical debate of its aesthetic merits and its cultural status; consequently, the critical discourse on the novel, particularly regarding the differentiation of subgenres, proves telling as to the range of aesthetic effects that are ascribed to it. As James Eli Adams argues: “With the increased affordability of print, reading became politically charged as never before” (2009: 12). Among its many other functions, criticism is the discourse that observes, evaluates and, to some extent, regulates processes of production and consumption and thus intervenes in this politicized context. Corre­ spondingly, many Victorian literary theories reflect on “the power literature has to shape subjects, and, by extension, society” (Jones 2010: 241). The novel in particular can be considered crucial regarding calibrations of per­ ception (see Hartley 2012: 340; Watt 2000: 12) as well as the formation of subjects. Literary theories on what the novel should be and do thus yield insights into normative interventions of calibrations of perception; criticism can be seen as a discourse revealing what is at stake in such calibrations. Taking seriously the Victorians’ belief that the novel wields power to shape readers’ behaviour and perception through its distinctive discourse, I introduce aisthetics as an approach to elucidate how this is achieved on a textual level. Aisthetics is thus akin to what Caroline Levine has called “strategic formalism”, an approach with a particular focus on “shaping patterns”, “interlacings of repetitions and differences” and “dense networks of structuring principles and categories” (2006: 632). Strategic formalism posits that “literary forms are socially and politically forceful” (626) and understands “the cultural-political field as shaped by a web of competing attempts to impose order” in which politics “emerges as a set of jumbled and overlapping ways of organizing bodies, words, and objects” (630). It is such structuring principles in which aisthetics intervenes by analysing the poetics and politics of literary forms and patterns, or the way they can shape and delimit perception. In order to show aisthetics at work, I employ a performative approach to literature (see Rudrum 2008: 270–271).18 Assuming that the very performa­ tivity of text constitution determines the conditions of the possibility of perception and determines the range of possible perceptions in a novel, I claim that novels translate social norms in the very process of text con­ stitution and always already incorporate a system of norms that determine to a large degree how ‘character’ can be conceived and represented in a narrative; the options for resistance are simultaneously circumscribed and delimited. The novel as a medium contributes to graphing sensoria. Generic conventions – represented here by the focus on realisms, sensationalisms and aestheticisms – modulate particular character constructions and impact on the range of perceptions that are possible or impossible, illuminating the norms at work in constituting the range and limits of perception in mid- to late Victorianism. Key items of analysis include the performative inculcation

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Introduction: Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel

of a text; the narrative mediation through a narrator with a special focus on the provision of information and, if applicable, an implied author; the story level of settings and characters in their particular constellations; and the level of language and rhetoric. Aisthetics thus contributes to theorizing and exploring the ways in which perception is culturally coded or calibrated and tied to the constructions of subject positions in novelistic subgenres; the novel is shown to be a key cultural force that translates viability and resis­ tance into patterns of perception. After introducing a theoretical and methodological foundation for ais­ thetics, I will consider the following guiding questions in my analyses: Which role does perception play in theories of the novel?19 How does tex­ tual rhetoric indicate transpositions of perception? What is perceived in lit­ erature by the narrator on the one hand, and the characters on the other? What can characters perceive within nineteenth-century narrative discourse, how are their perceptions processed and channelled, which perceptions have to be censured and why, which perceptions are culturally sanctioned and easily representable and which have to be repressed or transferred to other levels, which perceptions transgress socially accepted boundaries, and how can these be represented in the novel? How are calibrations of perception dependent on the structure of perspective (open/closed), and on which nar­ rative levels do these calibrations occur? Are different narrative levels set against one another so that some calibrations of perception are decon­ structed or criticized? How are sensoria represented in order to render ima­ ginary worlds vicariously perceivable in novels? I assume that the respective subgenres’ perceptive programmes will become conspicuous at moments of rupture, i.e. that critical negotiations of genre transitions or transformations illuminate the implicit premises of the established genres in the face of the emerging ones. Ultimately, calibrations of perception can help us to identify the points at which conceptual differences originate. Consequently, aisthetics has much to contribute to current issues regarding constructions of cultural identity and difference as well as intercultural debates in a globalized world. This study suggests an aisthetic approach to the Victorian novel that is to pave the way for aisthetic cultural studies.

Notes 1 The semantic scope of the ancient Greek word aisthe-sis comprises ‘sense per­ ception’, ‘sensation’, ‘intuition’ (Anschauung) and ‘sense’ as outlined in Wilhelm Gemoll’s Griechisch-Deutsches Schul- und Handwörterbuch (1991). The term aisthetics not only plays at the etymological root of aesthetics – the ancient Greek word for perception – but also leads back to the work of one of the first philosophers dealing with aesthetics in mid-eighteenth-century Germany, Alex­ ander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Baumgarten is instrumental in re-evaluating the senses as a first level of cognition and establishes an academic approach to art by drawing on emerging sciences such as psychology (see 2007: section 10); thus, he

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attempts to stave off the rationalist notion that the senses are ‘the mother of error’ (see section 7). Gernot Böhme, in turn, defines ‘aisthesis’ as the study of sensual cognition and claims that there was a renaissance of Baumgarten’s phi­ losophy after the mid-twentieth century in philosophy (see Böhme 2001: 16). As Isobel Armstrong shows with reference to George Eliot’s novels, Spinoza had formulated an approach akin to sensual cognition; Spinoza is a major influence on Eliot’s notion of sympathy and her emphasis on embodiment and thus also a reference point pertaining to her aisthetics. Armstrong outlines that, in Spinoza’s Ethics: The arousal of imagination is continuous with the body, and reacts with it. It is a bodily form of knowledge, the consequence, though Spinoza does not say so, of the passing into consciousness of sense stimuli. […] And yet pre­ cisely because it is an image and not a wholly physiological impulse an affect image is a primitive form of knowing, the first epistemological moment, and initiates that process by which we know what we feel and feel what we know. (Armstrong 2013: 300; emphasis in the original)

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This might even be considered a proto-aisthetics mediated by way of the imagination, which George Eliot spells out within her ethical realism. See also Catherine Gallagher’s insightful study on “bioeconomics” and “somae­ conomics” in The Body Economic (2006: 3–4). In Ways of Sensing, Constance Classen and David Howes have also targeted a “biopolitics of the senses” (Howes and Classen 2014: 68). I deliberately leave the boundaries of the semantic field centring around ‘percep­ tion’ fuzzy. Drawing on Rei Terada, sensation and affect can be considered aspects comprised in ‘feeling’, as the latter represents “a capacious term that connotes both physiological sensations (affects) and psychological states (emo­ tions)” (2001: 4). This is also compatible with Victorian definitions, e.g. that of G.H. Lewes, who claims in The Physiology of Common Life that “[e]very exci­ tement of a nerve-centre produces a sensation; the sum total of such excitements forms the general Consciousness, or sense of existence” (Lewes 1860: 2: 65 in Dames 2011: 221). The heuristic value of this semantic imprecision lies in the possibility of establishing the ways of calibrating the senses inductively in specific novels, which, I think, yields more insights than a deductive approach that defines perception narrowly from the start. However, as a rule of thumb, sensa­ tions tend to be those physiological processes by which the senses respond directly to external or internal (e.g. biochemical) stimuli without, at first, cogni­ tively processing them (hence the connection to affect), whereas perceptions are responses to stimuli which are followed by cognitive processing, and hence the first cognitive step of interpretation in the sense of perceiving something as something. In the British discourse of aesthetics, Kant and Hegel are frequently invoked to immediately reject their idealist philosophy as irreconcilable with empiricist and pragmatic British approaches. One of the major differences between the two German philosophers concerns the point that Hegel believed that, within a his­ torical process of the spirit’s self-realization, the aesthetic ideal could finally manifest itself on an object-level, whereas Kant’s formalist approach denies pre­ cisely this (see Iser 2003: 11–13). There is a wide range of publications tending in this direction. In addition to Böhme’s Aisthetik, Barck’s edition on Aisthesis (1990) as well as Erika Fischer­ Lichte’s Ästhetik des Performativen (2004) deserve mention. In a British context, Clare Pettitt argued in her 2005 article on “The Law and Victorian Fiction” that:

12

Introduction: Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel the discipline’s [literary criticism’s] return to history over the last 20 years or so may now be – perhaps predictably – leading to the re-galvanizing of a debate about the status of the aesthetic. What demands more scrupulous attention than it has hitherto been given by literary scholars is the process by which the aesthetic has been historically – and indeed legally – constructed. (76)

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Further examples of the historical interest in aesthetics would be Timothy Costelloe’s The British Aesthetic Tradition (2013) and the plethora of articles on Victorian aesthetics in handbooks and guides, see for example Hartley (2012: 322–340), Helsinger (2012: 444–465) and Levinson (2003). See also further elaborations of the concept and concrete applications in the field of English literature in Sonja Fielitz’s edition of Präsenz Interdisziplinär (2012). See also, for example, approaches to the cultural relevance of emotions as envi­ saged by Sara Ahmed: in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), she closely connects textual strategies to achieve emotional effects with the body, arguing that emotions cannot be understood “as being ‘in’ texts, but as effects of the very naming of emotions, which often works through attributions of causality. The different words for emotions do different things precisely because they involve particular orientations towards the objects that are identified as their cause” (13). See for example: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004; the references in the research account regarding the heightened interest in the senses; as well as the plethora of publications on aesthetics such as Timothy Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Wittgenstein to Shaftesbury, Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2013 or M.A.R. Habib, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 6, The Nineteenth Century, c. 1830–1914, Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2013. The conceptual transfer of ‘aesthetic’ can be considered complete after the middle of the century (see Heininger 2000: 356), which is another reason to focus on mid- to late-Victorian texts for negotiations of the term in a British context. As Jenny Bourne Taylor highlights, the debate on the effects of sensation fiction on its readers is led within the paradigm of physiological psychology, connecting the genre with “longer-term evolutionary anxieties about cultural crisis and col­ lective nervous decline” (1988: 20). This argument is derived from an unpublished manuscript by the DFG-graduate school 1718 Präsenz und implizites Wissen, also entitled (Extra-)Ordinary Pre­ sence, founded in 2012 (see https://www.theater-medien.phil.fau.de/forschung/ forschungsverbuende-und-kooperationen/graduiertenkolleg-praesenz-und-impli­ zites-wissen/). For an exploration of presence effects induced by literary struc­ tures see Bilandzic 2014: 281–284. Ernst Cassirer claims that the crisis of perception is also the starting point of “empirical and conceptual knowledge” (1955b: 35), so that one can establish a close connection between the Victorian “cult, or worship, of science” (Lightman 2010: 17) and a cultural exploration of processes of perception. Regarding nar­ rative strategies, Caroline Levine has shown that fiction may serve “as a parti­ cularly effective way to introduce readers to the activity of hypothesizing and testing in order to come to knowledge” (2003: 8). The shuttling between deduc­ tive hypotheses and inductive experiments was consequently a way of grappling with the crisis of perception and responding to this insecurity by experimenting, measuring, testing what may be revealed as true in the future. My approach can build on a variety of studies on the senses. What have hitherto been widely undertaken regarding explorations related to the aisthetic are, to a large extent, historical studies and discourse analyses of different senses –

Introduction: Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel

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Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception (2001), John M. Picker’s Victorian Soundscapes (2003), Janice Carlisle’s Common Scents (2004), Constance Classen’s The Book of Touch (2005), Chris Otter’s The Victorian Eye (2008), William A. Cohen’s Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (2009) are key examples here. Interestingly, whilst taste is predominantly explored as a metaphorical notion in the sense of refinement, and good taste regarding cultural goods, very few studies deal with actual gustatory experience. Exceptions include R.G. Wilson’s and T.R. Gourvish’s “The Changing Taste for Beer in Victorian Britain”, Routledge Interna­ tional Studies in Business History: The Dynamics of the International Brewing His­ tory since 1800, London: Routledge, 1998, 93–104 or Margaret Beetham’s “Good Taste and Sweet Ordering: Dining with Mrs. Beeton”, Victorian Literature and Culture 36, 2 (2008), 391–406. See for a more general discussion of realism and sensationalism Boehm-Schnitker 2022 and 2014. My methodological decision to include rhetorical strategies and to rely on the method of close reading perhaps requires a short remark on my stance towards New Criticism in relation to aisthetics: I agree with George Levine in that “cultural study requires the sort of literary and analytical skills that have been associated” (1994: 14) with a movement that is widely held responsible for the construction of the aesthetic as the self-reflexive and disinterested realm firmly bolstering the interest of an academicized bourgeoisie. With the introduction of an aisthetic approach, I would like to show, contrary to this view, the ways in which rhetoric is culturally operative much more pervasively and should therefore be considered fundamental for cultural studies as a means of analysing political interventions. Of course, this quickly turns into a trope in itself, and is widely mocked, e.g. in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817), which parodies the Gothic, as well as in the parodied genre’s successors in sensation fiction, in which reading is often described as calibrating the senses and expectations of characters. See also Peter Garratt, who shows that George Henry Lewes already spoke of a professionalization of literature in the late 1840s (Garratt 2017: 121). Drawing on J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory as introduced in his How to Do Things with Words (21976), performativity has been widely explored in the field of narra­ tology (see Pratt 1977; Petrey 1990; Rudrum 2008; Berns 2009b). What has long remained a desideratum in this field, however, is the inclusion of deconstructionist notions of performativity, including gender theory (see Berns 2009a: 380). See e.g. Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction, Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press, 2007; Victor Nell, Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988.

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I base aisthetic literary studies on the function of constitutional performatives, as these fundamentally establish the rules by which both texts and characters come into being and by which norms they must abide to be viable in a given cultural context. By the same token, such constitutional processes determine what is sayable or not sayable (see Eagleton 1990: 11), what can be perceived and what is excluded from the realm of the perceivable, so that calibrations of the senses cannot be addressed without the concrete constitutional processes that give rise to them. Regarding subject formation, Mario Ortiz Robles lucidly summarizes the fact that, within a Foucauldian context, subjectification “operates under a discursive regime that puts into place limits on what can and cannot be said and that this form of censorship becomes a condition of possibility of subject for­ mation” (2010a: 845). Correspondingly, in a Victorian context, performatives may “mobilize the logic of social structuration that creates the official form of the class structure of industrial societies, the separation of public and private spheres, the subordination and silencing of women, the subjugation and colonization of territories” (Ortiz Robles 2010b: 28), to name but a few. Mario Ortiz Robles provides major insights into the performativity within narrative texts and addresses a crucial conundrum. Since “performa­ tive forces are unreadable” in themselves, he argues that the isolation of the performative force of language in the novel must therefore proceed along oblique means; that is, through an account of its effects. From among the protocols of a performative reading of the novel, then, referentiality will not disappear: the effects of the performative force of language in the novel are distributed along a number of representational and rhetorical axes whose referentiality is at once articulated and under­ mined by reference to performative speech acts. In this context, both a “literal” and a “literary” reading of the traces left upon the novel by the performative force of language are required in order to measure its effects. (Ortiz Robles 2010b: 19; emphasis in the original) With this, Ortiz Robles provides a way of addressing particular textual strategies that reveal material traces of language’s performative force, and he DOI: 10.4324/9781003387510-2

Aisthetics: Theory and Toolkit

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thus helps conceptualize the effects of the novel on the implied reader (see Iser 1974) that are relevant for aisthetics – such as generating affect, calibrating perception and shaping subjectivities. Jonathan Culler’s succinct definition of performativity illustrates the simi­ larity between the performative power of discourses – inculcating that which they talk about – and the ways in which novels create fictional worlds: Like the performative, the literary utterance does not refer to a prior state of affairs and is not true or false. The literary utterance too creates the state of affairs to which it refers, in several respects. First and most simply, it brings into being characters and their actions […]. Second, literary works bring into being ideas, concepts, which they deploy. [… Literature] takes its place among the acts of language that transform the world, bringing into being the things that they name. (Culler 2011: 232; 233; 234; emphasis in the original) This basic insight into the performativity of literature has far-reaching con­ sequences for the analysis of literature, and I suggest that aisthetics is one way of exploring the ways in which a novel’s performativity shapes sen­ soria. Culler’s summary comprises two fundamental aspects of performa­ tivity: firstly, the foundational constitution of a fictional world, which implies that a novel always also posits the rules and norms by which its characters need to abide or, alternatively, to face the consequences of non­ compliance; secondly, the particular kind of referentiality characteristic of a fictional text (see Joseph Hillis Miller 2005: 50), for it is not ‘mirroring’ a prior ‘reality’ but brings into being a diegetic world that can only refer to itself by placing its – culturally specific – signifieds as catachrestic referents (see Auyoung 2018: 12). This kind of referentiality then also enables the linguistic performatives uttered by characters or the narrative instance to function quasifelicitously in a given novel; they are felicitous in the diegetic world that the novel posits. As Jacques Derrida argues in Acts of Literature, literature is an institution that consists in transgressing and transforming, thus in producing its constitutional law; [… W]hile literature shares a certain power and a certain destiny with “jurisdiction,” with the juridico-poli­ tical production of institutional foundation, the constitutions of states, fundamental legislation, and even the theological-juridico performatives which occur at the beginning of a law, at a certain point it can only exceed them, interrogate them, “fictionalize” them.1 (Derrida 1992: 73) Consequently, novels, like other genres, can be seen as texts performing their own foundational constitution, a process that in itself constitutes the law by which the text must largely abide; additionally, the text performs

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Aisthetics: Theory and Toolkit

crucial foundational exclusions and cannot help but reiterate some of the social norms which regulate publishable texts in the first place. A novel may therefore be considered as a kind of mimicry of other constitutional pro­ cesses, which is why the novel can be analysed parallel to legal discourses (see Pettitt 2005: 71–90). This structural analogy may further corroborate the view – both Victorian and current – that the novel has a high impact on subject formation and forms of conduct. Correspondingly, Victorian and current theories of the novel focus respectively on habitualization through reiteration and on receptive mimicry. The narrator of George Eliot’s Adam Bede, for instance, invokes legal discourses to legitimize his narrative – “as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath” (Eliot 1897a, I: 266) – while Wilkie Collins’s novels frequently deal with legal discourses, most conspicuously in his The Law and the Lady (1875), but also in The Woman in White. These novels testify to both thematic and fundamental analogies between constitutional inaugurations, for example of the law, and the novel. The foundational constitution of the text needs to establish the realm of norms from which it takes its cue, thus rendering, if not accessible, then at least fathomable, the structural place of constitution – providing at once access points for deconstruction as well as for critique by repeating with a difference. Last but not least, constitutional processes of text pro­ duction determine the scope of the sensorium to be described as well as the limits of sayability in a given novel. Such limits are indicated by way of what Jean-François Lyotard terms a differend: The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. This state includes silence, which is a negative phrase, but it also calls upon phrases which are in principle possible. This state is signaled by what one ordinarily calls a feeling: “One cannot find the words,” etc. A lot of searching must be done to find new rules for forming and linking phrases that are able to express the differend disclosed by the feeling, unless one wants this differend to be smothered right away in a litiga­ tion and for the alarm sounded by the feeling to have been useless. What is at stake in literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them. (Lyotard 2011: 13) Novels can negotiate such differends, for example by representing the search for new idioms, by providing set-ups in which the ineffable is rendered accessible, or at least becomes fathomable; novels can provide a space where its occurrence can be felt and perceived even without a fully fledged language to ‘express’ it. Aisthetics must thus pay particular attention to the threshold between the sayable and the unsayable in processes of the emergence of new articulations of meaning (see Barad 2003: 815).

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Here, narrative mediation represents a key factor. With regard to the narra­ tological view of mood and voice, Nicholas Dames has shown that the pre­ dominance of heterodiegetic narrators with zero focalization in Victorian novels is rooted in a particular character construction, on the basis of which characters realize only ex post what has affected them or how to interpret what they have felt. Concerning the question as to how “a thoroughly embodied, material, nervous self” can be narrated (Dames 2011: 226), Dames registers an “emphasis on unknowability”, which results in frequent recourse to “discursive narrative voices” (227), as “the narrator needs to elaborate upon a character’s deep, and wordless, impulses” (229). In the British school of aesthetics, with its particular “concern with conscious and unconscious mental processes” (Matus 2009: 232), this argument points to the crisis of perception, the opacity of external reality and internal psychology, and consequently to the requirement of a literary language able to represent such negotiations of the unfathomable, ineffable as well as the different layers of consciousness in fiction. A (more or less) de-psychologized narrative voice is the instance that wields the capacity to bundle, grant access to and reflect on those experiences which, on the level of characters, remain repressed, inexplicable or unsayable. Furthermore, Dames’s argument helps explain why free indirect discourse, so famously applied in Jane Austen’s novels and generally associated with psychological insight into focalizers, gives way to omniscient narrators after the mid-century. A model “of the pre-physiological mode of fictional con­ sciousness”, Austen’s novels testify to characters’ capacity for introspection, portraying “fully alert minds, in solitary conditions, engaged in a virtually forensic examination of their own motives, particularly by reassessing the data of memory” (Dames 2011: 226). In contrast, [t]he Victorian fictional narrator has ever more work to do given the necessary self-ignorance of even the most emotionally acute characters. Much of the tone and the leisurely length of Victorian narrative is owed to this new epistemological split between a knowing narrator and characters who are constitutively, perhaps even ontologically, unaware of the basis of their motives. […] The result is the talky, garrulous texture of Victorian fiction: the sign of an ontological split between the knowing voice of narration, which cannot properly possess a psychol­ ogy at all, and the psychologies of characters, which are continually belied by their words. (Dames 2011: 227; 229) Within an episteme characterized by physiological psychology, political economy, evolutionary theory, anthropology and sociology and the emer­ gence of the subject in the place of a representative discourse, the Victorian novel provides a “garrulous” (229) answer to the question raised by this context. With representation turned into an epistemological problem after the loss of its ontological security, narrators in novels attempt to keep pace

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with the elusive correspondence between signifier and signified through verbosity and the make-belief of omniscience, which, however, is already waning in the multi-perspectivity of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Gillian Beer therefore observes that “[f]iction in the second half of the nineteenth century was particularly seeking sources of authoritative organi­ sation which could substitute for the god-like omnipotence and omniscience open to the theistic narrator” (22000: 149). After the mid-century, that is, omniscience can already be seen as an attempt to cope with the loss of epistemological certainty, as a means by which the unfathomable uncon­ scious can be kept in public discourse and, as such, accessible at least to retrospective understanding, while new forms of narrative transmission are explored. This may also entail qualitative aspects of voice in an aisthetic sense. Voice may evoke presence effects of imaginative sound impressions on the basis of textual cues. Richard Aczel has explored possibilities of “a qualitative, as opposed to a merely functional, concept of voice” which “emphasizes the centrality of stylistic expressivity – features of style which evoke a deictic center or subjectivity – in the identification of voice effects and their agents” (1998: 467). With this concept, he not only lays the groundwork for an analysis of literary strategies that establish voice effects, but also provides a new perspective on free indirect discourse. Regarding the qualitative aspects of voice, Aczel intends “to restore the realm of ‘how’ – tone, idiom, diction, speech-style – to a central position” (469) and to emphasize “the expressive potential of style itself; that is to say, the relation of certain pronounced or characteristic stylistic features to a deictic center” (472; emphasis in the original).2 As such a qualitative and pragmatic notion of voice is part and parcel “of subjectivity effects” (Aczel 1998: 490), it con­ tributes to an analysis of aisthetic subject constitution and the aisthetic effects of voice. Subjectivity effects are generally achieved on the literary level of char­ acters, and here, too, I follow a notion of performativity that understands subject constitution and character construction as culturally interrelated. Character constitutions in narrative texts depend on the repeated citations of marks on the page, which coagulate over the time of narration into illu­ sions of ‘persons’ with a particular ‘character’, which, in turn, are relevant for the particular structural function such a character can fulfil;3 character is processual, much like the narrator in Middlemarch comments: “for char­ acter too is a process and an unfolding” (Eliot 2000: 96). Furthermore, character is the effect of “a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 1988: 519; my emphasis). Aisthetic character thus provides an attempt to recombine struc­ turalist approaches that understand characters to fulfil a textual function as actants, thus emphasizing their literary constructedness, and more psycho­ logically oriented mimetic approaches that understand characters to be representations of persons. The aisthetic experiences of characters comple­ ment or ‘flesh out’ their literary functions – they are ‘filters’ for perception and, as such, comment on social conventions. If indeed “performance

Aisthetics: Theory and Toolkit

19

renders social laws explicit” (526), as Butler suggests, then the novel is the main playground from which it is possible to infer the validity of such fic­ tionalized ‘laws’ as well as the strategies for negotiating and contesting them.4 I agree with Mario Ortiz Robles’s argument that “the process of subject materialization [Butler] describes is no different in kind than the textual practice whereby the individual is novelized” (2010b: 29), with materialization denoting the “citationality of regulatory norms that, in complicity with power, forms the ‘I’ through the constitutive force of exclu­ sion, erasure, violent foreclosure, and abjection” (28). The ‘I’ thus brought about is hence from its very inception one that is based on structural exclu­ sions, or, conversely, on the creation of definitive boundaries, which foreclose particular ways of experience, and which register on the level of novelistic creations of sensoria. Judith Butler’s notion of implicit censorship helps to elucidate those aspects of conduct that are not restricted to language but which are more widely direc­ ted at bodily behaviour; as such, they comprise the level of perception and con­ stitute ways of perceiving. Butler initially defines this form of censorship as “implicit operations of power that rule out in unspoken ways what will remain unspeakable” (1997: 130), but goes on to extend this process to bodily forms of comportment. Thus, she highlights the continuing effect of constitutional per­ formatives and, equally, the possibilities for contesting them. An aisthetics informed by this kind of performative approach therefore allows me to conceptualize novelistic calibrations of perception as basic components of subject constitution, and as effects and reiterations of con­ stitutional performatives. These can be understood, quite simply, as speech acts inaugurating the fictional realm of a novel, generally coinciding with its first sentences or opening framework. This way, an aisthetic approach ana­ lyses sensoria constructed in the novel as articulations and possibly con­ testations of the norms regulating subject formation generally. More specifically, this approach considers the exclusion, or (implicit) censorship, of particular ways of perceiving which simultaneously guarantees the stabi­ lity of subjects and reveals the ways in which concrete performances may exceed and challenge these norms.5 Butler’s approach is particularly relevant here because she illustrates that performatives need not rely on social norms that are already established or institutionalized, but allow concrete performers to appropriate authoritative speech acts to constitute such norms: Performatives do not merely reflect prior social conditions, but produce a set of social effects, and though they are not always the effects of ‘official’ discourse, they nevertheless work their social power not only to regulate bodies, but to form them as well. (Butler 1997: 158–159) As such, the approach may be extended to novelistic ways of meaning construction.

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From a performative point of view, the rules by which characters have to abide, what they can perceive and what remains foreclosed, provide an insight into concrete structures of feeling as established and negotiated by different subgenres of the novel. Both subjectification and meaning con­ struction depend on a foundational constitution, inculcating the ‘laws’ established by the “constitutive ‘no’ [which] gives values to terms” (Ionescu 2013: 148), analogous to the constitutive social norms which performatives may reiterate in order to render bodies culturally viable and intelligible – both in society and in fiction. As constitutional performatives install norms for the viability of subjects and for texts, this focus is the central turnstile that allows me to connect subjectification, text production, processes of normative regulation such as criticism or social conventions of conduct, and, by extension, socio-cultural contexts of text production and subject formation. One field where such norms are inscribed in the body, where society is embodied, as it were, is tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge as largely proce­ dural knowledge also provides a connection between presence effects and the past. As Paul Connerton argues: Many forms of habitual skilled remembering illustrate a keeping of the past in mind that, without ever adverting to its historical origin, never­ theless re-enacts the past in our present conduct. In habitual memory the past is, as it were, sedimented in the body. (Connerton 2003 [1989: 72]) While the embodiment of particular behavioural structures hence encapsu­ lates culture and renders conduct understandable and reliable, any dis­ turbances of such embodiments hint at their cultural constructedness and draw attention to their tacit socio-cultural meanings. Linked with approa­ ches to presence effects, Alexis Shotwell underscores the importance of such ruptures, provides a helpful typology of different forms of tacit knowledge and therewith some important clues as to the concrete notion of a politics of aisthetics. Creating a “palimpsest” of approaches to tacit knowledge, she argues that the implicit may be visible primarily at sites of a certain rupture in habitual activity, or points of breakdown in our conception of our selves. When our own self-conception reveals itself as contradictory or – as in some moments of strong emotion or unpremeditated reaction – as simply unexpected, there is the possibility of “seeing” our implicit understanding. (Shotwell 2011: xvi; my emphasis) That is, the implicit can be grasped in moments of rupture or surprise, when its taken-for-granted background functions are challenged or shaken; in other words, when performatives cannot be seamlessly reiterated. This is

Aisthetics: Theory and Toolkit

21

due to the fact that the implicit ‘goes without saying’ and provides auto­ matized scripts enmeshed in and enmeshing one in culture. In novels such moments are created by a particular provision of infor­ mation and order of events, for instance by creating and releasing suspense, by providing a sudden insight within or into a character, or by constructing sensational effects. Hence, aisthetic analyses of the selected Victorian novels are intended to give an insight into the ‘points’ (see Oliphant 1862: 571) at which a narrative comes undone and reveals the particular cultural calibra­ tions and functions of the implicit in a novel. Aisthetic narratives can be understood as mediators of presence effects and tacit knowledge in a context of historical rupture, as, for instance, triggered by the functional differ­ entiation of society often claimed to define the Victorian age, in particular regarding the unprecedented velocity of industrialization, urbanization and technological progress, and thus reflect on the interconnection between sub­ jects and their social context. My analysis of calibrations of perception helps to identify how cultures work, reveals where ideological battles on ‘how the world should be seen, heard etc.’ are fought, and the ways in which human perception is culturally coded and calibrated. I would like to coin the term ‘channelling’ for literary calibrations of perception, both on the level of characters and of readers.6 Such channellings may be conducive to establishing and habitualizing that which solidifies as a form of tacit knowledge, and I would like to sub­ stantiate this by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s insightful description of the close interconnection between a ‘training’ of the senses and social behaviour patterns in The Logic of Practice. He claims that “an implicit pedagogy” can instill a whole cosmology, through injunctions as insignificant as ‘sit up straight’ or ‘don’t hold your knife in your left hand’, and inscribe the most fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of a culture in seemingly innocuous details of bearing or physical and verbal manners, so putting them beyond the reach of consciousness and explicit statement. (Bourdieu 1990: 69) Such an inclusion of social norms in bodily habitus is achieved, Bourdieu argues, as [b]ody hexis speaks directly to the motor function, in the form of a pattern of postures that is both individual and systemic, being bound up with a whole system of objects, and charged with a host of special meanings and values. (Bourdieu 1990: 74) In a literary context, Bourdieu’s insights can be used to reveal, in an analysis of character construction, the ways in which normative values are

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represented using character behaviour, interaction with and proximity to particular objects, customs of social interaction that turn out to be ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ in terms of a character’s social capital etc., in order to stress the norms adhered to and those held up for critique by way of rupture, surprise effects, disturbances to a character’s sense of self, and so on. What is more, the approach can be transferred to the formation of perception through habitualizations within the text and with regard to the training of the readers’ senses. Textual strategies to bolster characters’ performativity belong pre­ dominantly to the mode of showing in the sense of a quasi-dramatic selffashioning of a character and a character’s attempts to appear in a certain light. Established contextual settings may curtail particular behaviours and only allow for particular means of transgressing such options of conduct. Lisa Zunshine draws attention to the historical specificity of character per­ formances, arguing that what may count as “bodily displays” of authentic feeling in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1739) is already considered “con­ sciously faked for the benefit of naïve observers” in his Clarissa (1747–8) (Zunshine 2011: 76). This reveals that the ways in which characters perform their bodies are doubly dependent on contexts – one textual, one historical – which both influence the hermeneutic stance towards such performances. Regarding the literary calibration of a novel’s effects, Zunshine provides important clues as to the distribution of information. Investigating “the moments when bodies reveal minds” (80), she shows that novels or other media grant such insights by constructing “hierarchies of transparency to charge their tableaux with inner dynamism” and by temporally limiting a character’s transparency to “transient” insights (81). I argue that such mod­ ulations of insights into the mental phenomena of characters – which alleg­ edly provide the ‘real’ behind the performance – are represented and functionalized differently depending on whether the character is realist, sen­ sational or aestheticist. The kinds of insights granted, in turn, reveal more about particular character constructions, how they perceive and evaluate their environment, and whether their ‘inner core’ corresponds to their con­ duct or which tensions exist between the two. Based on performativity, aisthetics explores strategies of calibrating the senses and, simultaneously, calibrating the viability of subjects. Processes of subject constitution always also have an effect on the limits of what can be said and what can be perceived to retain a viable subject position. The par­ ticular ways in which subjects are constituted inculcate norms defining the realm of that which is perceivable and that which the senses will not trans­ mit to conscious perception and further processing. Such limitations become discernible by way of transferrals, transpositions or foreclosures which are reflected in a text’s rhetoric, in particular in metonymies, metaphors, synaesthesia7 – which entails the “transfer of terms from one sense sphere to another” (Black 1962: 327) – and tropes and figures of the unsayable such as aposiopeses, ellipses and what I term cultural anaesthesia.8

Aisthetics: Theory and Toolkit

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Anaesthesia has not gained a comparable aesthetic relevance as synaes­ thesia, but Victorian novels do negotiate the use of anaesthetics as relating to aisthetics more widely. The OED lists a figurative meaning as exemplified by Adeline Whitney’s novel The Gayworthys – “In that mysterious anæ­ sthesia, he had left sense and certainty behind him” (1865: xliii) – and it is a major topic in “medical fiction” (Cleere 2014: 91), but the concept does not travel across into literary rhetoric as a denominator for tropes or figures representing insensibility.9 However, as Eileen Cleere has shown, anaesthesia “helped to reorganize the moral understanding of pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, purity and pollution, sympathy and apathy that had authorized and underwritten so much of the traditional aesthetic philosophy” ranging from Shaftesbury to Kant and mid-Victorian aesthetics as proposed by Ruskin (Cleere 2014: 90). By co-reading sanitary reform and aesthetics, she underscores that Victorian aesthetics translates a disinterested Kantian notion of pleasure and unpleasure into a highly bodily and physiological notion. Hence, I intro­ duce cultural anaesthesia as a trope that indicates the transferral of meaning to the realm of that which may not (yet) be perceived by paralysing, suppressing or deadening the senses of a literary character – for example when characters faint, are in stupor or under the influence of drugs. The ineffable as a code for cultural anaesthesia may function as a literary sleight-of-hand to produce affect precisely by circumventing explicit expres­ sion; it deliberately provides textual lacunae to be filled by readers. In a very concrete, typographical sense, Wilkie Collins attempted to achieve sensa­ tional effects through preteritions and aposiopesis and correspondingly instructed “the printer precisely where to use […] ‘white lines’ (the breath­ less gaps that punctuate the narrative)” (Sutherland 2008a: xiii), that is, he left things unsaid for greater effect. Such textual gaps can be filled in similar ways by interpretive communities, so that social cohesion can be produced by shaping cultural preferences. Moreover, a comparable readerly response to textual lacunae that leave space for affects such as shock, outrage, disgust etc. helps secure an impression of social similarity and thus cohesion, so that culturally mediated perceptive realms may be functionalized to create an impression of cultural consent within a social group (see Ahmed 2004: 88). Thus, the ineffable is a crucial cultural strategy for shaping social commu­ nities by way of enabling similar affective responses to that which remains unsaid. Such strategies for establishing culturally stratified models of social cohesion can be understood as a response to the increased processes of social differentiation and specialization that gather momentum in the second half of the nineteenth century. Regarding the sensoria of literary characters, such tropes and figures can help elucidate which sensations can be willingly admitted into consciousness and which need to be suppressed, transcoded or translated due to a personal or socially coded set of norms. Thus, an analysis of calibrations of percep­ tions will not only yield insights into concrete textual strategies, but will also allow inferences about concrete socio-cultural situations.

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Aisthetics: Theory and Toolkit

Notes 1 While ‘Literature’ as such can be understood as an institution, I will not apply the term to the constitution of individual novels. I will rather use the phrase ‘foun­ dational constitution’ to describe the initial performative coming about of a novel, which resembles institutional foundations in that the terms of existence, binding rules, inclusions and exclusions are instantiated for the novel as a whole. 2 In novels, fictional protagonists frequently serve as deictic centres (see Levinson 1983: 64), whose embodiment is conveyed by spatial and temporal markers that situate them in the diegetic world and hence also have a bearing on what they can perceive. Affirming the “egocentric” character of deixis, in the sense that “[t]he deictic context […] is centred upon the speaker’s here-and-now” (Lyons 1995: 305; emphasis in the original), thus relying on a character’s embodiedness, Ineke Bockting draws on a psychoanalytical context to reveal the fact that a person’s “deictic center – that is, the encoding of his or her personal position as language user – starts to fall into place” during the Lacanian mirror stage (2011: 177); thus, she connects a subject’s entry into language with the capacity of positioning oneself in a social as well as lin­ guistic framework, and distinguishes between, as Émile Benveniste calls it, the subject of the enounced and the subject of enunciation. 3 Regarding the function of repetition in character construction, see Grabes (1978: 421; 428). See also Palmer (2004: 14–15). 4 See also Zunshine (2011: 67). 5 The rules and regulations of the Victorian literary market are certainly also part of these sets of norms. Considering the restrictions to which Victorian authors were subject, particularly with regard to depicting life-styles that did not mirror that which was posited as ‘the norm’ – for example, the pressures exerted by Mudie’s Circulating Library (see Law 2013: 175) or the review system (see Fryck­ stedt 1986: 12–14) – it becomes clear that many transgressive depictions are for­ mulated in a context which cannot help but consider these norms, and hence introduce resistance by quoting the norms differently. 6 The term ‘channelling’ has already been used in similar ways, most notably by James Sully, who already employs the verb to describe particular formations of emotions in his psychological aesthetics, for example in his Outlines of Psychology (see 71891: 316). In addition, he uses the term in The Human Mind, where he argues that, depending on the art contemplated, we have “our minds stimulated through one of these higher sense-channels”, that is, through the eye or the ear (1892: 134). 7 Synaesthesia first becomes an important scientific and particularly medical concern during Queen Victoria’s reign and is envisioned either as a parapraxis of percep­ tion in the sense of a confusion of physiologically distinct perceptions, or as a literary craft and trope; alongside the decidedly scientific approach, the nineteenth century can be defined by a socialization of the senses (see Kimminich 2002: 71; 76; and 91). For the word’s etymology, see also Warren 1847: 84–85. 8 In Suspensions of Perception, Jonathan Crary has highlighted the fact that the cultural construction of fields of anaesthesia is complementary to the formation of attention in late-nineteenth-century scientific discourse, arguing that “the idea of inhibition and anesthesia as constitutive parts of perception” must be understood as “an indication of a dramatic reordering of visuality, implying the new impor­ tance of models based on an economy of forces rather than an optics of repre­ sentation” (2001: 38–39). See Sedgwick (2002: 157–161) for an analysis of sexual anaesthesia in the context of Queer Studies. See also Sedgwick 1990, esp. 3. 9 See also the notion of an ‘anaesthetic field’ as coined by Joseph Vogl (2001: 118, my translation [“die Erzeugung eines anästhetischen Felds”; emphasis in the original]).

2

Realisms George Eliot

2.1 Aisth-Ethics in Adam Bede As I have argued elsewhere, “[i]t has become customary to say that ‘realism’ as such does not exist. ‘Realism’ has been dissolved into plural realisms” (Boehm-Schnitker 2022: 41). By now, there is a wide range of terms trying to capture George Eliot’s particular form of realism, running the gamut from ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ realism to ‘organic’ and ‘agential’ realism among many others (see Boehm-Schnitker 2022: 41–43). Despite the plethora of terms, George Eliot was arguably the first to use the term ‘realism’ (see Berns 2020: 403), and Adam Bede’s metanarrative chapter 17 is considered “a nineteenthcentury British realist manifesto” (Dames 2012: 299). I draw on Eliot’s œuvre as an exemplary paragon of realist writing, whose aisthetic qualities deserve further scrutiny. Adam Bede “posits the diegetic world as a virtual sensorium” and the novel’s self-reflexive chapter 17 interrupts the plot to reflect on this kind of realism (Boehm-Schnitker 2022: 45). The novel’s sensorium that seems to be experienceable as if it was real was already commented upon by con­ temporary critics and closely relayed to realism. Contemporary critics fre­ quently note the novel’s lifelike qualities, characters (see Dallas 1859: 5)1 and quotidian plots (see Greiner 2013: 106). Anne Mozley, for instance, highlights the relevance of the ordinary and identifies some aisthetic features of Adam Bede that establish virtual spaces for readers’ vicarious experience: they “form the habits, mould the mind, satisfy the unconscious desires and needs of our nature, raise that structure of thoughts, fancies, habits, and ways, which make up ourself” ([Mozley] 1859: 436). Mozley’s review con­ ceives of realism as representing a quasi-immediately perceptible realm that provides ample opportunities for vicarious moral experience and sympa­ thetic extensions of the self. Thus, she spells out the novel’s strategy of evoking an aisthetic appeal to the senses by medial immediacy, characteristic of realism’s self-justification (see Auyoung 2018: 81). Such immediacy-effects are also emphasized by Geraldine Jewsbury, whose reviews are said to have served “as a guardian of morality and con­ vention” (Fryckstedt 1986: 12). Her review of Adam Bede demonstrates the DOI: 10.4324/9781003387510-3

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Realisms: George Eliot

evaluative connection between literature and ethics, highlighting both the strategies employed in the novel to create an impression of immediacy and the work’s concrete ethical function. In her argument concerning the apparent immediacy of perception that is constructed in Adam Bede, Jewsbury anticipates James Sully’s later evaluation of the novel’s long-term mental effects (Sully 1881: 393).2 In both critics’ evaluations, the novel is charged with value as a decidedly temporal art that unfolds its ethical power both during and after reading and instils its meaning in the minds of readers over long periods of time: Full of quiet power, without exaggeration and without any strain after effect, it produces a deep impression on the reader, which remains long after the book is closed. It is as though he had made acquaintance with real human beings: the story is not a story, but a true account of a place and people who have really lived; indeed, some of them may even be living yet, though they will be rather old, but that everything happened as here set down we have no doubt in the world. The duty of a critic is in the present instance almost superseded by the reader. (Jewsbury 1859: 284; my emphases) To both Sully and Jewsbury, Eliot’s fiction seems so lifelike that literary representational strategies no longer appear as such, but transmit an image as if directly communicating ‘real life’ to its recipients. Eliot’s novels wield aisthetic power to make their reality effects appeal directly to the readers’ senses as quasi-direct percepts.3 Aisthetics comes into play in Eliot’s realism as a major strategy to allow readers to relate to, to be immersed in and to cathect the diegetic world. Besides, such an aisthetic experience of a literary sensorium is interrelated with Eliot’s emphasis on literature’s ethical func­ tion to the extent that “Eliot was using aesthetics and realism to redefine each other” (Star 2013: 840). Hence, I define her aisthetic approach as an ‘aisth-ethics’, closely enmeshing ethical and aisthetic concerns. Adam Bede’s narratological set-up establishes an ethics of literature based on narratological strategies that allow for an oscillation between immersive and self-reflexive reading practices. The ethics of the novel thus emerges via a double strategy of affecting readers, to ‘implicate’ them in the diegetic world,4 and providing them with the opportunity to ‘observe’ the diegetic world from a perspective of greater distance, so that they may reflect on the characters’ morals – and reflection on morals and norms may serve as a basic definition of ethics. Furthermore, I draw on James Eli Adams’s insight that “for Eliot, it is the novelist who must take up the burden of represent­ ing the ineffable” (1991: 227), which is an ethical endeavour in its own right. Eliot’s novels frequently attempt to mediate the ineffable – for instance, unconscious processes, as yet unformed thoughts, or unrecognized emotions. As such, they articulate a differend between silence and representation, meaning that they can offer only translations of that which cannot be said

Realisms: George Eliot

27

within the parameters of a semiotic system: “Like all realist novelists, George Eliot’s fictions are subject to the boundaries of what was and was not narratable in her time” (Warhol 2013: 49). I argue that the novel’s ais­ thetics is used both to offset the differend between the unsayable and nove­ listic representation and to provide access to that which cannot be said through an appeal to feeling and affect. As James Eli Adams observes, “Sympathy […] can only be understood as one of those intricate complexes of thought and emotion that must remain, in Eliot’s resonant adjective, ‘unspeakable’” (1991: 235). The unspeakable, in turn, is frequently conceived of as embodied in Eliot’s novels (see Star 2013: 842), and thus has a further aisthetic dimension. The aisthetics of Eliot’s realism is conveyed by the novel’s foundational constitution, metalepses between narratological levels, experientiality, embodied sensescapes, the representation of space, character construction and the novel’s perspective structure. Adam Bede introduces a series of displacements at its very beginning, creating an aisthetic realm that allows readers imaginatively to participate in the diegetic world, while also providing variable perspectives and general­ izations to frame these immersive passages. J. Hillis Miller sums this up by arguing that “[a] novel is in various ways a chain of displacements”, among them the displacement of the ‘origin’ of the story (in historical events or in the life experience of the author) into the fictitious events of the narrative. […] A novel must pretend to be some kind of language validated by its one-to-one correspondence to psychological or historical reality. (Miller 1974: 456) Adam Bede vacillates between catering to an immersive kind of realism, evoking authenticity effects, and self-reflexivity. Before the novel introduces the reader to its sensescape (see Wolf 2011: 14), the narrator comments on its textual constitution, thereby providing some metafictional and meta­ narrative reflections that introduce the (hi)story that is about to unfold. Regarding the performative constitution of texts, J. Hillis Miller argues that the realist novel is particularly defined by “four registers” of performa­ tive speech acts. These consist: “(1) In the positing of the story by the author in the act of writing it”; “(2) In the testimony of the imagined narrator”; “(3) In performative utterances or writings by characters within the story”; and “(4) In the response of any reader” (2005: 50). In establishing a prag­ matic approach to literature, Miller shows that novel writing entails, first of all, the positing of a story: the inculcation or foundational constitution of a possible diegetic world construed by the text as a precondition for all other textual constructs such as the narrator, the characters and – apart from the responses of real, empirically definable readers – the implied reader. The performative constitution of the text sets the framework for what comes into the frame of tellability, the range of behaviours possible for characters,

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Realisms: George Eliot

the corresponding calibration of perception etc. The foundational constitu­ tion of the text should, therefore, also provide insights into the possibilities for the text’s aisthetics. Adam Bede’s first chapter, entitled “The Workshop”, performs such a constitution in its very first lines, providing the setting for the exemplary construction of the character Adam Bede, who is represented as an indus­ trious worker and shown to develop into a model gentleman in the work­ shop and beyond. The constitutional performatives that bring the novel into being incorporate the novel’s ‘other’, illustrating that there is no pure origin and no option for self-instantiation but relationality, which suits Eliot’s project of ethical realism: a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.5 (Eliot 1897a, I: 3; my emphases)

WITH

The institution of the text relies on its ‘other’ in several guises: Firstly, the novel can perform its very institution only by incorporating what is not yet its text body, but a metanarrative paratext in the form of the narrator’s commentary comparing text creation with Egyptian sorcery. In this paratext, the extradiegetic narrative level of the heterodiegetic narrator, who comments on the story that is about to unfold and has direct access to its diegetic level, is established before the actual scenes portraying the diegetic world of Adam Bede are introduced. Secondly, there is the rhetorical inclusion of the materiality of text pro­ duction, illustrating that the construction of textual meaning is dependent on the very materiality of ink. The ink drop of the sorcerer serves as a looking glass granting direct access to the past, initially still unformed by any code or language or by the author’s ability to form letters.6 Thirdly, the text includes its national other, and its ideological other, in that Egyptian magic is likened to British realism, converting the magical looking glass into a concrete place and time. The novel comments on text construction as the equivalent of miraculous creation, illustrating realism’s attempt to disavow its very mediality and materiality by applying strategies to represent a scene before the reader’s mind’s eye as directly and immediately as possible (see Adams 1991: 227). The narrator-cum-implied-author self-reflexively appro­ priates Egyptian sorcery for the practice of novel writing and allegorizes Eliot’s notion of the “picture-writing of the mind” (Eliot 1856: 28) or, rather, “word-painting” (Witemeyer 1979: 2). Thus, text constitution is performed through a conjuring trick, which meta­ leptically integrates the authorial positing of the text with its narratorial

Realisms: George Eliot

29

constitution and metonymically connects writing to magic, in the sense of creating an impression of the immediate sensorial experienceability of a scene. This is evoked in the very place of the means of production, the materiality of writing,7 the material aspect of the sign, the “drop of ink” (Eliot 1897a, I: 3). As the implied reader, due to the theme-rheme structure and the primacy effect achieved by the distribution of information, is still conjuring up the drop of ink in their imagination, “Adam Bede opens into the past” (Greiner 2013: 105) and shifts the focus towards the signified. In line with Roland Barthes’s reality effect, this is elided in favour of the referent, so that immersive reading is enabled and the workshop ‘appears’ as a perceptible environment and sensescape for the reader. The novel’s initial narratological manoeuvre performs a very cunning conflation of the text’s foundational constitution, the constitution of the diegetic world and the position of the implied reader. It follows so quickly upon the scene of writing that it almost seems to be of the same origin and order. As one imagines oneself looking at the drop of ink, one seems sud­ denly no longer to be ‘outside’ the scene of writing, picturing how the author/ narrator holds his pen, but ‘inside’ the diegetic world conjured up by the letters on the page, in the sense that one can vicariously explore the scene as if in a virtual reality (see Adams 1991: 238) – an impression corroborated by the introduction of settings as virtually inhabitable places. However, this is an ideal that is challenged both in Eliot’s novels and in her literary theory. Aisthetic forms of representation, I argue, are a means by which the framing of perspective and the calibrations of perception are rendered con­ spicuous, in that the novel presents and reflects on variable embodied perspec­ tives. This strategy allows for the novelistic appeal of a quasi-direct access to the diegetic world evoked by the written word, but simultaneously leaves room for reflection on differently calibrated embodied stances.8 As the scene in the work­ shop unfolds so that readers may imaginatively partake in and explore it with their own senses, the narrator aims at “the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier” (Barthes 1968: 147; emphasis in the original). What is performed in these initial lines is not solely an optical illusion, but an illusion of the senses more generally, in that the setting of the scene from 1799, with all the impres­ sions highlighted by the narrator, replaces the scene of writing; the emphasis is correspondingly shifted to the mental image created by the marks on the page. In addition, this passage provides an introduction to the novel’s hermeneutics and aisth-ethics, as it offers a story revealing the dependency of current readers on the past and, consequently, the need to know this past to deepen understanding. These insights are tied to the strategy of representing participatory sensescapes as prerequisites for the “extension of our sympathies” (Eliot 1856: 30). Monika Fludernik has succinctly analysed Adam Bede’s opening passage from a narratological point of view, highlighting Eliot’s “intertwining of irony and sympathetic appeal” (Fludernik 2013: 22): In this passage the blend of dissonance and consonance (Cohn) arises from a conjunction of two textual strategies that narrative theorists usually

30

Realisms: George Eliot believe to be incompatible – (a) metafiction, with a hint at metalepsis, the transgression of ontological boundaries; and (b) the establishment of aes­ thetic illusion (Wolf) by means of the reader’s immersion (Ryan) in the fictional world. […] The passage therefore prepares the ground for a metaphorical metalepsis that the narrator’s “drop of ink” is able to achieve by means of direct address (“you, reader”) and deictic positioning: the shift into the present tense and the references to vision require a transgressive location of the reader within the fictional world. (22)

This conflation of different ontological levels in the foundational constitu­ tion of the text allows for an aisthetics of the novel that constructs a diegetic space that can be vicariously inhabited by the reader. The novel’s narrato­ logical strategies, which effortlessly shuttle to and fro between extradiegetic, heterodiegetic and diegetic levels by means of variable focalization, suture the reader to the text and turn them into an ‘interested’ party, in the sense that readers are aisthetically so enmeshed in the diegetic world that, in much of the novel, the vantage points created for observation are not voyeuristic but participatory, because the reader is posited as if they partook of the diegetic world. The literary construction of this participatory stance for the novel’s recipients helps to elicit a sympathetic reaction from readers and determines the aisthetics of Eliot’s ethical realism. The strategy of suturing readers to the text also involves the reader in the novel’s ideological thrust, in that Adam Bede’s simultaneously mythic and realist opening, as well as the novel’s generic hybridity, is gradually chan­ nelled into a solely realist frame. As Sarah Gates emphasizes: We are conscientiously pointed away from the mythic and into the rea­ listic by the opening paragraph, whose purpose is to focus our attention from the widest possible extent into a pinpoint of specificity, […] enact [ing] the shift from the world of visionary mythical past to the ‘real’ world of material history. (Gates 1998: 21) With this channelling, the options for character development become restricted and highly gendered, as “characters must be rendered ‘marriage­ able’; the alternative genre and the possibility for female activity it offered must be expelled or contained by a process of disillusionment or demystifi­ cation, so that the ‘female hero’ can become ‘a wife’” (21). The novel thus enacts a process that leads from a hybrid opening to a clearly circumscribed ending. One means of introducing these further restrictions is to deploy the rhetorical and decidedly liberal strategy of including the opinions of oppo­ nents, which also features in chapter 17. In his reading of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Homi Bhabha argues that “dissensus, alterity and otherness are the discursive conditions for the circulation and recognition of a politicized

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subject and a public ‘truth’” (1994: 34). He goes on to quote from Mill’s text to reveal the need to include opposing views in order to be able to speak for the ‘truth’, which Eliot also aspires to do: Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, […] and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess. (Mill 2000: 39; see Bhabha 1994: 34–35) The concept of ethical realism can be seen as the introduction of a new genre, a new ‘truth’, that requires the inclusion of its other to be posited as ‘truth’. In its hybrid opening, Adam Bede is thus gradually shown to be an ethical realist novel, after its inception in myth and subsequent negotiation of the pastoral, the romance, the sensational and the gothic.9 It is part of the foundational constitution of the novel to enable such an interplay by per­ forming the incorporation of alterity that is then successively marginalized, but fundamentally enclosed.10 A similar strategy can be found in chapter 17, which complements the novel’s constitution. This chapter, “In Which the Story Pauses a Little”, serves as “the locus classicus of Victorian realism” (C. Levine 2003: 104). As a metanarrative and metafictional pause, the chapter also includes a reflec­ tion on the literary rules determining the narrative. It grants time to con­ sciously process perception and thus marks a realist aisthetics that derives its structure from the Romanticist ideal of an “emotion recollected in tranquil­ lity” (Wordsworth 1992: 82). In the nineteenth-century critical context, James Sully speculates that chapter 17 might well “have been headed apol­ ogia pro mea arte” (1881: 379), singling it out as justification for realism (see G. Levine 2001b: 7). As the narrator, and, by extension, the implied author, specifies (see Boehm-Schnitker 2022: 46–48): [M]y strongest effort is to give […] a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed; the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath.11 (Eliot 1897a, I: 265–266, my emphases) The ‘truth’ that Eliot’s realism aspires to is authenticity (see G. Levine 2001b: 7), an authenticity that, as J. Hillis Miller has shown (see 1987: 63), “must be trebly secured, by ethical, religious and juridical discourses” (Boehm-Schnitker 2022: 46), which “implies that ethical relationships become possible only through aesthetic and aisthetic mediation” (47; emphasis in the original).

32

Realisms: George Eliot

Symptomatically, the chapter opens with a response to a possible objec­ tion: “‘This Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan!’ I hear one of my readers claim. ‘How much more edifying it would have been if you had made him give Arthur some truly spiritual advice!’” (Eliot 1897a, I: 265). The narrator, in the guise of the implied author, offers a reply to this ima­ gined interjection that renders the aesthetic and ethical parameters of ethical realism explicit: These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people — amongst whom your life is passed — that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people, whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire — for whom you should cherish all pos­ sible hopes, all possible patience. (Eliot 1897a, I: 267) The strategy for introducing ethical realism is thus based on a liberal argu­ mentative structure. This helps to explain why the Methodist preacher Dinah Morris and Adam Bede succeed as a married couple, whereas some characters who do not live up to the middle-class family ideal, such as Hetty Sorrel and Arthur Donnithorne, can be marginalized by the plot.12 The chapter also complements the novel’s foundational constitution, as it defines more clearly what is to be seen, how one is to look at ‘art’ and people, how one should experience and feel and which character ideals can thrive within the parameters of ethical realism. Amalgamating ethics and aesthetics, Adam Bede successively calibrates perception through sympathy, which yokes together pain and pleasure. It does so, first, because sympathy is extended after suffering, thus “passing from pain into sympathy” (Eliot 1897a, II: 302), and secondly, because, according to the logic of chapter 17, this insight requires aesthetic representation: therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things – men who see beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them. (Eliot 1897a, I: 270; my emphasis) The commonplace is thus appropriated as an aesthetic ideal and then sanc­ tioned by reference to religious discourse (“light of heaven”, Eliot 1897a, I: 270). Moreover, the labour of representation is described as “pains” (270), so that suffering is constituted as a common human experience that guides both the represented and the representers. Pain and pleasure, the basic binary of aesthetics, become the central ingredients of ethical realism when representing ‘ordinary’ subjects. Pain and pleasure as plot aspects achieve an

Realisms: George Eliot

33

emotional appeal, while the novel’s aisthetic strategies complement the aes­ thetic reflections by allowing readers a participatory stance and hence the opportunity to experience themselves what the novel considers to be “need­ ful” (267). Part and parcel of Adam Bede’s aisthetics is the sensual representation of settings as well as characters. The Egyptian sorcerer’s ink drop appropriated for the writer/narrator’s pen at the very beginning of the novel is used to appeal to more senses than one (see Uglow 1987: 102). It is able to evoke a sensorium of 1799, describing the warmth of the afternoon sun in Hayslope, the “scent of pine-wood” (Eliot 1897a, I: 3), and the baritone voice of the novel’s main character.13 Characters are situated in an environment that not only serves as a setting, and thus as a ground where characters appear and metonymically interact, but as a context in which the reader may vicariously partake. As readers establish the imaginative realm of Hayslope, they are ideally affected by the ‘perception’ of a scene established by the ‘magic’ of ink in a chapter symptomatically entitled “The Workshop”. The character Adam is the effect and one of the first embodiments of the ink drop in the novel’s genesis and functions as the first instance to convey textual effects to the reader. Created by the flux of well-guided ink, Adam is the product of a phallic piercing of the drop of ink by the pen – an image of artistic creation that plays at gender difference, considering that it is a female pen creating a male Adam, in an appropriation of Michelangelo’s depiction of The Creation of Adam.14 Fittingly, in these opening sentences, Adam Bede sings the morning hymn by Thomas Ken (1637–1711), the first line of which reads, “Awake, my soul, and with the sun/Thy daily stage of duty run” (Eliot 1897a, I: 4). Creation is thus closely connected to a life of work and to the course of the sun, as a metaphorical representation not only of a single day, but of a single life. Adam Bede’s telling name, bringing together the first man in Eden and the writer of Anglo-Saxon history (see Bowlby 2011: 434), positions him as the paradigm of Judaeo-Christian masculinity and of Christian historiography; he is a suitable character to run a course of literary evolution within a concrete historical context. In Adam Bede, text constitution is thus closely followed by character constitution, which foregrounds the gendering and national affiliation of character. Both are phenomena of a temporal art that promises to unfold as a Bildungsroman, documenting the ‘making of’ Adam Bede as a model middle-class man whose moral development throughout his fictional life can be vicariously experienced by “any chance comer” (Eliot 1897a, I: 3) – any reader who chimes in sympathetically with what is evoked by the text. Such sympathy is constructed through an appeal to sight, feeling, smell and sound, so a common environment is central to enabling the sort of sympa­ thetic experience that defines Eliot’s ethical realism. The novel’s aisthetics is a means by which ethical realism is made to function as a decidedly ‘common’ experience, as an imagined community (see Anderson 1996: 6) that can be experienced vicariously by the reader. The text thus balances the

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Realisms: George Eliot

personal individuality necessary for ethical realism with national identity, so that national discourse comes to figure as a substitute for a direct commu­ nity. Nostalgia for the past is thus oblated and mapped onto nationality by the adherence to a particular morality – a strategy that renders this natio­ nalized community accessible to people irrespective of time, place or any identity markers other than moral behaviour (see Loesberg 2013: 491). The aisthetic construction of Adam’s environment and his interactions with it also extends to the character himself, who is depicted as appealing to the senses. Embodying an ideal of Victorian middle-class masculinity (see Schneider 2011: 148), Adam is offered up for a fetishizing gaze, as the nar­ rator reveals his outward appearance by describing bodily fragments piece by piece. After having been entranced aurally by his baritone voice, the reader is directed to the source of this voice, which could only come from a broad chest, and the broad chest belonged to a large-boned muscular man nearly six feet high, with a back so flat and a head so well poised that when he drew himself up to take a more dis­ tant survey of his work, he had the air of a soldier standing at ease. The sleeve rolled up above the elbow showed an arm that was likely to win the prize for feats of strength; yet the long supple hand, with its broad finger-tips, looked ready for works of skill. (Eliot 1897a, I: 4) While this passage constructs both Adam’s masculinity and the pliability of his social classification – he is a carpenter, but one “ready for works of skill” (4) – soon afterwards he is offered up for a male gaze: that of the “elderly horseman” (15) who is later revealed to be Colonel Townley, the magistrate at Stoniton where Hetty is imprisoned (see Eliot 1897a, II: 239). Hugh Witemeyer highlights the fact that characters such as this stranger serve as “guides and tutors, demonstrating the quality of perception that the reader must learn to apply to the world within the novel” (1979: 130). Moreover, the reader is aligned with the stranger’s perspective, surveying both the countryside and the characters as a kind of participant observer (see Kreisel 2003: 555). Importantly, the horseman first pauses to gaze at Adam and then observes Dinah preaching, from the very outset connecting the couple whose marriage provides closure for the novel by his gaze. He thus plays a vital part in calibrating perception and in highlighting scenes that will turn out to be decisive in the plot. However, his gaze also “defa­ miliarizes Adam and eroticizes him as passive aesthetic object” (Kreisel 2003: 551), a reification that is generally subject to critique in Eliot’s ethical realism: Adam hastened with long strides, Gyp close to his heels, out of the work-yard, and along the high road leading away from the village and down to the valley. As he reached the foot of the slope, an elderly

Realisms: George Eliot

35

horseman, with his portmanteau strapped behind him, stopped his horse when Adam had passed him, and turned round to have another long look at the stalwart workman in paper cap, leather breeches, and dark-blue worsted stockings. Adam, unconscious of the admiration he was exciting, presently struck across the fields, and now broke out into the tune which had all day long been running in his head: – “Let all thy converse be sincere,/ Thy conscience as the noonday clear;/ For God’s all-seeing eye surveys/ Thy secret thoughts, thy works and ways.” (Eliot 1897a, I: 14–15) This passage helps to define the novel’s aisthetics further, as it draws atten­ tion to the importance of multiple perspectives. After the narratorial description of Adam, he is further focalized by a diegetic figure whose sole purpose in this initial scene is to perform a particular kind of observation. Since the man is mounted on a horse and merely travelling through, his gaze is like the reader’s, in that both are entirely new to the scene and the read­ er’s attention is focused by the stranger’s riveted gaze. The traveller contributes a kinaesthetic quality to the scene as he is moves through it and then focuses on particularly important items with an aesthe­ tically mediated gaze that allows him “to frame, judge, and appreciate” (Kreisel 2003: 552). The perspective of this “rural flanêur” (553) serves as a first derivative from the narrator’s perspective, and one that is calibrated slightly differently. The novel thus provides a training in changing perspec­ tives that not only enables the reader to recognize several aspects of the same object of perception, but introduces the perspective required for both novel reading and the sympathetic concern for others – characters and real individuals alike – that ethical realism seeks to evoke. The hymn that Adam sings also suggests that the stranger’s observation – and, by extension, the narrator’s – is a form of surveillance from a more or less omniscient, god­ like point of view (see Kreisel 2003: 555). Importantly, Adam remains entirely unconscious of the interest that he inspires; this seems to justify the stranger’s observation, because it does not interfere in the character’s life.15 The passage thus highlights the importance of multiperspectivity for char­ acter construction and the dependence of any perspective on embodied standpoints. 2.1.1 Sensescapes and Metonymies of Characters and Settings Eliot’s ‘picture-writing’ to evoke the novel’s setting amounts to an intermedial undertaking.16 As numerous critics have pointed out, the creation of diegetic space in Adam Bede is frequently akin to Dutch genre painting;17 however, it can be argued that the novel aspires to evoke a whole sensescape by appealing to all of the senses.18 The opening chapter on “The Workshop” is a good example of the imitation of genre painting, in the sense that it is less an endeavour “to tell what happened ‘on the eighteenth of June, in the

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year of our Lord 1799,’” than “to ‘show … the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder in the village of Hayslope,’ as it then ‘appeared’” (Yeazell 2008: 103; see also Goode 1970: 22). The novel’s inter­ mediality – achieved by the ekphrastic description of a scene, mimicking genre painting, and by emphasizing the appeal to the senses of the scenes described – “intensifies the impression that the story is being suspended for picture” (Yeazell 2008: 103). Such tendencies towards literary intermediality can therefore be understood as part of Eliot’s aisthetics. The appropriation of visual art for the novel also entails an emphasis on framing that indicates which scenes are of particular importance and reflects on the restrictions of perspective. The workshop opens with the creation of “doors and windowframes” (Eliot 1897a, I: 3), which symbolize a framed outlook – a restriction of views and options for access (see Yeazell 2008: 112) – and illustrate the highly mediated access that the novel provides to the diegetic world. These framing strategies simultaneously serve to render particular scenes visible as such and to limit the perspective on those scenes. The immersive access qualifying the introduction of new settings is fre­ quently conceived of not only as visual, but as spatial. In visualizing repre­ sentations of new settings (see Yeazell 2008: 103–106), the novel creates a quasi-visual, sometimes voyeuristic access to scenes. A narrative space evoking sensescapes strengthens the effect of a participatory diegetic world. The literary strategies to achieve such spatial immersion comprise an appeal to the reader’s sense of orientation by enabling a “vicarious kinaesthesia” (Darley 2000: 152), and provision of orientation by means of deictic mar­ kers. In the chapter on “The Hall Farm”, for example, the reader is afforded virtual access to the scene depicted, with the narrator becoming a tour guide for the diegesis and directing the reader’s “tourist gaze” (Urry 1998: 1): Yes, the house must be inhabited, and we will see by whom; for ima­ gination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity. Put your face to one of the glass panes in the right-hand window: what do you see? A large open fireplace, with rusty dogs in it, and a bare boarded-floor; at the far end, fleeces of wool stacked up; in the middle of the floor, some empty corn-bags. That is the furniture of the dining-room. And what through the left-hand window? […] There is quite a concert of noises; […] under all, a fine ear discerns the continuous hum of human voices. (Eliot 1897a, I: 103–105) The narrator grants readers access to the diegetic world by means of a rhetorical metalepsis, enabling them to partake in the novel’s diegetic space and thus to empathize with the characters inhabiting that space. This representation of settings provides the reader with a simulation of spatial presence – an imaginary and embodied participation in the scene – and some partial interaction, in that readers are invited to ‘look around’ and to situate

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themselves in the diegetic space, becoming, as it were, temporarily deictic centres vectored into the diegetic space. The opportunity to be virtually part of the diegesis may cause readers to reflect on how they would have behaved in some characters’ place, and how they would evaluate the interplay between characters in order to come to an ethical conclusion concerning the action and the plot. The enmeshment in scenes and corresponding proximity to characters can be illustrated further by the introduction of the dairy, which is also char­ acterized by an appeal to the senses: THE dairy was certainly worth looking at: it was a scene to sicken for with a sort of calenture in hot and dusty streets — such coolness, such purity, such fresh fragrance of new-pressed cheese, of firm butter, of wooden vessels perpetually bathed in pure water; such soft colouring of red earthenware and creamy surfaces, brown wood and polished tin, grey limestone and rich orange-red rust on the iron weights and hooks and hinges. But one gets only a confused notion of these details when they surround a distractingly pretty girl of seventeen, standing on little pattens and rounding her dimpled arm to lift a pound of butter out of the scale.19 (Eliot 1897a, I: 120)

Again, the first impression of the scene is a visual one, now presented as a bucolic sight for the sore eyes of the average urbanite nostalgically yearning for the alleged purity of country life; the dairy is very much a mythical place to be desired by the reader and is created entirely for the reader’s ‘tourist gaze’. While the colours described provide a visual contrast to the impres­ sion of the innocent whiteness of “creamy surfaces”20 (120) and highlight details to be found in the dairy, there is also an appeal to feeling (“cool­ ness”, 120) and smell (“fresh fragrance”, 120). The reference to Hetty sud­ denly introduces action, turning the stillness of the percept into an exemplary scene performed. Foreshadowing filmic strategies, this scene unfolds after an ‘establishing shot’, achieved by the novel’s paratext pro­ viding the chapter heading “The Dairy” and by the general description of the setting (120). This is quickly followed by a short ‘pan’, interspersed with some ‘close-ups’ of details and colours, until the action sets in and the viewer focuses on the character. Once Hetty is introduced, the details of the setting seem to recede and are charged with a new quality. Hetty is meto­ nymically associated with the setting and becomes the centre of attention. The creamy surfaces foreclose access to the actual work in the dairy other than in the form of some references to Mrs Poyser’s competent management (e.g. Eliot 1897a, I: 326–327) and some of Hetty’s motions, which are highly aestheticized (see Eliot 1897a, I: 120–123). It is the skill, even art, of making butter and cheese, rather than ‘work’, that is associated with the dairy – the “perfect analogue for Hetty’s sensuality” (Mitchell 1994: 98). Hetty’s “depicted

38

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self-awareness when she makes butter, for instance, has a tactile, kinaesthetic feel to it – habitual motions, contours of clothing and body, a feeling of eyes upon her” (Shaw 1999: 226). Shaw’s observation highlights the aisthetic quality of the scene and corroborates my argument that Hetty is represented in a way that invites readers to be entranced by partaking in the presence effects evoked by a competent performance of implied knowledge, the habitualized making of butter. Hetty’s tragic fate is totally absorbed by the whiteness and purity of her creamy environment. The purity of the dairy, of which her own beauty seems to partake, is soon to be marred due to its vulnerability (see Eliot 1897a, I: 121) and its strange perfection. However, the very construction of this perspective in the novel contributes to her downfall. She is always only consumed as a surface through other characters’ desiring eyes; this per­ spectivization delimits the ways in which she can see herself as it delimits her development as a character in the novel. Hetty’s beauty affects and mystifies ‘viewers’ so that a reality effect can be achieved through conflation of real-world experiences and the character’s appeal by way of paralipsis (see Gallagher 2005: 63; Auyoung 2018: 84): It is of little use for me to tell you that Hetty’s cheek was like a rosepetal, that dimples played about her pouting lips, that her large dark eyes hid a soft roguishness under their long lashes, and that her curly hair, though all pushed back under her round cap while she was at work, stole back in dark delicate rings on her forehead, and about her white shell-like ears; […] of little use, unless you have seen a woman who affected you as Hetty affected her beholders, for otherwise, though you might conjure up the image of a lovely woman, she would not in the least resemble that distracting kitten-like maiden.21 (Eliot 1897a, I: 122) Ideally, readers would be able to relate to Hetty as to a real-world acquaintance. This strong affect is a means by which the novel tries to elicit an affective cathexis of Hetty that will allow for sympathy despite the fact that she will later be convicted of infanticide and readers are hardly granted any access to her mind until it is too late.22 As the heroine of the novel’s melodramatic plot strand, Hetty’s body is turned into a sign system characteristic of the genre (see Brooks 1994: 53). The signifiers of her seeming innocence, however, do not refer to her actual inno­ cence, but merely signify it. Hetty is ‘queered’ in the sense that she is set off from her environment and social context.23 She is turned into a myth of beauty and purity that is soon marred by the intrusion of history, in the form of Arthur Donnithorne’s vacillating decision to seduce her and its unavoidable consequences in the novel’s social context; cause and effect dismantle the see­ mingly timeless myth. Hetty’s sensual appeal to other characters and readers alike is a symptom of her social detachment. Her stunning beauty foregrounds the impossibility of the pastoral idyll within the realist frame.

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Narratologically, Hetty is described mainly through external focalizations (see Fludernik 2013: 29), “though often through the internal focalization of other characters’ thoughts about her” (29). This corresponds to the melo­ dramatic strategies of character construction and the fact that Hetty serves as a screen for the projections of others, triggered by their respective inter­ pretations of her as body-signifier. Hetty is fetishized (see Homans 1993: 168) and desired as a fetish24 – or, as Monika Fludernik puts it: The problematic positioning of Hetty as the focalized object of other people’s vision is therefore a persistent feature of the novel and suggests that she is the object of desire in Lacanian terms as well as, more lit­ erally, for the men in the fictional world. (Fludernik 2013: 29) This is clearly illustrated by Adam’s investment in his love for Hetty: The dear, young, round, soft, flexible thing! Her heart must be just as soft, her temper just as free from angles, her character just as pliant. If anything ever goes wrong, it must be the husband’s fault there: he can make her what he likes – that is plain. And the lover himself thinks so too: the little darling is so fond of him, her little vanities are so bewitching, he wouldn’t consent to her being a bit wiser; those kittenlike glances and movements are just what one wants to make one’s hearth a paradise. Every man under such circumstances is conscious of being a great physiognomist. Nature, he knows, has a language of her own, which she uses with strict veracity, and he considers himself an adept in the language. Nature has written out his bride’s character for him in those exquisite lines of cheek and lip and chin, in those eyelids delicate as petals, in those long lashes curled like the stamen of a flower, in the dark liquid depths of those wonderful eyes. How she will doat on her children! (Eliot 1897a, I: 227–228) In this passage, Hetty is clearly used as a screen for subjective projections and desires and subjected to some epistemic violence, in the sense that she is entirely appropriated by the desires of a lover who is unable to take her perspective into account (see Singleton 2011: 247). The narrator also reflects on the particular kind of beauty Hetty embodies: There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles, from the desperate to the sheepish; but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle

40

Realisms: George Eliot and to engage in conscious mischief — a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to com­ prehend the state of mind into which it throws you. Hetty Sorrel’s was that sort of beauty.25 (Eliot 1897a, I: 121)

Hetty’s beauty seems to meet universal standards, appealing to a biologically circumscribed class of beings: “all intelligent mammals” (121). As such, Hetty is defined by the alluring and overwhelming impression she makes on beholders, seemingly by virtue of a biological instinct.26 Interestingly, the passage draws attention to the ethical impact of an encounter with a beauty like Hetty, as the hermeneutic failure to understand Hetty’s stunning effect may result in a wish to “crush” (121) and destroy it; a lack of comprehen­ sion may lead to violence, and this is exactly what the novel represents and performs, but also reflects on. Hetty remains unintelligible for other characters and Adam’s physiog­ nomic reading of Hetty’s beauty is shown to be wrong on the heterodiegetic level of the narrator: “Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don’t know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning” (Eliot 1897a, I: 229), he comments. A physiognomy that assumes a direct relationship between outward appearance and inner convictions is clearly discarded; the novel serves to expose such misreadings in order to elicit a more complex hermeneutics, rendering conspicuous the subjective invest­ ments and received notions present in every interpretation (see Singleton 2011: 246). Adam Bede’s aisth-ethics thus clearly entails the duty of some hermeneutic reflection on perceptions of beauty. Hetty’s character also serves as a central turnstile for the novel’s plot motivation: without its “germ” (Haight 1954, III: 176),27 the story could not be told. Crucially, Hetty’s exclusion from the realist plot through her asso­ ciation with melodrama – after her rescue from the gallows she is banished and dies soon after her return to her home – reveals the boundaries set by the novel’s foundational constitution: Hetty is the character who renders transgressions of the instituted norms conspicuous. Besides negotiating who is to survive, who is to die and which social structures are to prevail over others, the novel achieves an emotional cathexis of that which it excludes by way of describing Hetty’s particular beauty and her melodramatic fate that exerts emotional effects even though it is subjugated to the realist plot.28 A different kind of aisthetic representation of characters is employed to undergird this difference, which, in turn, involves a negotiation of wider biopolitical concerns and their impact on the novel.29 Hetty is the trace of the foreclosure that establishes ethical realism and, consequently, a highly ambiguous character. Whereas at the start of the novel the very writing process relies on the inclusion of the other, likening the literary creation of the scene set in 1799 to the Egyptian sorcerer’s use of

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ink as a mirror showing “visions of the past” (Eliot 1897a, I: 3), the novel’s ending uses the metaphor not of an ink drop, as an image of versatile, hardly formed material allowing for unlimited visions, but of a framed scene. Dinah, “just come out of the house, and shading her eyes with her hands as she looks for something in the distance” (Eliot 1897a, II: 374), tries to spot Adam returning from his meeting with Arthur. Her straining figure is framed by the door frame of their new abode, encapsulating the domestic ideal (see Armitt 2000: 41). Whereas the novel starts with a potential for creation and change, it ends with a clearly framed tableau – a veritable motif for Dutch genre painting, representing the ordinary life of a married couple.30 The initial hybridity is reduced: the frame can hold only the ideal of the middle-class family.31 Ethical realism is established as a new aesthetic rule with particular foreclosures, exemplified by Hetty and Arthur. The novel’s foundational constitution, allowing for a wide array of visions, is further defined and delimited by chapter 17 and thus channelled into a strictly defined frame of the representable. From this retrospect, the aisthetic representation of Hetty’s body, her power to affect people, remains the trace of an exclusion based on both biopolitical and aesthetic rules.32 However, one might argue that, by using the melodramatic strategy of the tableau to provide closure, Eliot ends on a note of generic hybridity, trans­ forming the melodramatic tableau into the framework for Dutch genre painting and the representation of ‘the ordinary’.33 This supports my argu­ ment that the novel tends to reveal that all strategies of framing are ulti­ mately contingent. There may always be other frames, changing the perspective; consequently, readers are trained to reflect on the epistemologi­ cal effect of such framing devices. Adam Bede reveals the subtle but sub­ stantial politics of aisthetics. 2.1.2 A Hermeneutics of Framing and Schemata Using door- and window-frames as guiding metaphors, the novel draws attention to various ways in which perspectives are framed, filtered and tinged by contexts, attitudes, feelings, desires, fears, habitualized thoughts and so on. The novel’s aisth-ethics is intricately tied to embodied perspec­ tives. As Caroline Levine observes: Eliot constantly affirms that it matters who is looking, and from what standpoint. The real is not grasped by a detached, objective conscious­ ness; it is in the domain of seeing persons, of embodied subjects whose vision is both partial and limited. (Levine 2003: 123) The combination of ethics and aisthetics in Adam Bede is forged by such strategies of embodiment: attitudes to both beautiful objects and other per­ sons depend on an embodied perspective whose limitations characters and

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readers are asked to reflect on in order to pave the way for “a love of dif­ ference and a balanced, mutual recognition of self and other” (122).34 The novel gestures towards a cultural hermeneutics that reflects on its own cog­ nitive categories to understand the other and takes into account the other’s point of view, thus negotiating the hermeneutic process between self and other, rather than imposing cognitive categories on the other to dominate and assimilate it. The novel tries to “render an otherness that comes into being only in relation to the perceiving self” (124) and to suspend judge­ ment, fostering a processual hermeneutics. Jon Singleton has applied the concept of the schema to describe the ways in which perception is shaped and understanding modulated in Adam Bede. A “perceptual schema” com­ prises “the individualized structures of thought and feeling that lie before perception, that filter what is perceived, and that are then responsible for interpreting and acting on those perceptions” (Singleton 2011: 244; emphasis in the original). It is further defined as a “holistic system of unconscious and conscious cognitive processes and interrelated physiological structures through which one interprets (read: pre-cognitively filters, perceives, inter­ prets, and then reacts to) one’s world” (256, fn. 11). Although schemata are more comprehensive than framing, the two concepts are complementary. Whereas framing refers to generic or conceptual frames that are used to interpret situations, schemata refer to the dispositions of characters, whose thoughts, feelings, previous experiences and future expectations calibrate their outlook. In its emphasis on the ways in which perception is tinged, the concept of the schema is tied in with aisthetic concerns. Schemata also reflect the fact that characters’ perspectives are calibrated by both physiolo­ gical and psychological and both conscious and unconscious processes, as well as the general argument that aisthetics provides embodied perspectives. In Adam Bede’s penultimate chapter, the narrator articulates such a pro­ cessual hermeneutics on the basis of historical difference that results in altered attitudes. This is the case, for example, when Adam returns to Snowfield to meet Dinah and experiences the landscape in a different light: “But no story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather, we who read it are no longer the same interpreters” (Eliot 1897a, II: 364). Thus, ethical realism must represent a story from the point of view of the various deictic centres for which the narrative voice functions as mediator, thereby aiding reflection on the relativity of perspectives. Pre-empting reader response theory, this passage reflects on perspectival limitations and qualifications of perception and interpretation. In the case of interpersonal relationships, this amounts to a suspension of understanding in the sense of an appropriation: “Otherness and desire must persist, in conjunction, never to be resolved into knowledge” (C. Levine 2003: 125). Despite the fact that the novel supplies a concluding frame, a domestic tableau of heteronormativity, this frame can be understood as a partial way of seeing that can be challenged so that, ideally, the novel is further reflected on by readers (see McLaughlin 1994: 71). As Adam is led to a “higher feeling” (Eliot 1897a, II: 365), the reader is

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led to ‘greater’ insights; the end of the novel thus completes the apology for the novel form: The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength: we can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy, than a painter or a musician can wish to return to his cruder manner, or a philosopher to his less complete formula. (365) Ethical development is intertwined with physical, aesthetic and intellectual development, which, according to progressive evolutionary logic, cannot fall behind their respective achievements. The novel as a whole functions as a guide to how to read, and how to respond to paintings and music. It calibrates per­ ception to attune readers to the higher art of ethical realism and both appeals to and extends people’s susceptibilities in the service of a cultural form of evolution. Dutch genre painting is instrumental in this progress, and the novel pro­ vides guidance on how to respond to it: with a love for difference, rather than a verdict on its allegedly unsuitable content. Perception requires cali­ bration. Truth is not directly revealed, but always mediated by ‘defective mirrors’ (see Eliot 1897a, I: 265) or minds: one has to learn to ‘see’. As Caroline Levine maintains, “since the static frames of realist art are them­ selves visual objects, perhaps we must learn to see them too, and they cannot by themselves teach us a new relationship to the real” (2003: 106). Thus, the novel performs a constant reframing to grant characters and readers alike new insights, new angles on phenomena and the certainty that a new frame will provide another perspective, involving more or fewer distortions than those already offered. The narrator himself becomes just another entity within a complex narrative framework, providing one of many possible perspectives (see Singleton 2011: 253). Framing strategies also apply to the representation of character. The ways in which readers can get access to characters are modulated by frames, and their own diegetic perspectives are calibrated by their respective schemata. For the characterization of Hetty Sorrel, these schemata are particularly conspicuous, because she is subject to different kinds of projections by other characters for which no unifying frame is provided. The strategy that counteracts Hetty’s objectification in the novel as a whole is the fact that such projections are laid open and reflected on. The narrator himself hardly ever provides internal focalizations representing Hetty’s own thoughts, thus partaking of the projec­ tions provided by other diegetic characters. After Hetty’s meeting with Arthur Donnithorne “Evening in the Wood” (Ch. 13), the narrator provides the fol­ lowing commentary: Hetty had never read a novel; if she had ever seen one, I think the words would have been too hard for her; how then could she find a

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Realisms: George Eliot shape for her expectations? They were as formless as the sweet languid odours of the garden at the Chase, which had floated past her as she walked by the gate.35 (Eliot 1897a, I: 202)

What this passage insinuates is that Hetty lacks “genre ‘literacy’”; conse­ quently, she has “no means by which to frame or ‘shape’ her expectations or to ‘understand’ Arthur’s” (Gates 1998: 25), no frames and schemata that help her to anticipate the possible outcome of her relationship to him. However, the passage is highly ironic. Alluding to the view that novels affect people’s outlook on life, the narrator ironizes this assumed influence, which, particularly in sensation fiction such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret or The Doctor’s Wife and parodic novels such as Jane Aus­ ten’s Northanger Abbey, is an established shorthand for romantic delusions and misguided expectations. The argument here is therefore double-edged: Hetty’s lack of education is said to foreclose deeper insights and realistic expectations that might have been possible had she been forewarned by corresponding plot lines, but this point cannot be made without at least evoking the alternative reading of the influence of novels, especially of the romantic kind, which would have kindled exactly what Hetty dreams of (see Bowlby 2011: 423): a marriage with Arthur Donnithorne and a life of luxury. Without the guidance of realist novels, the narrator seems to imply, Hetty’s expectations are like odours, transient and vague, providing no guiding principles for her conduct. Commenting on the power of culture to shape thoughts, feelings and model life courses, the narrator synaesthetically compares visions of Hetty’s personal future with evanescent smells, reveal­ ing the cultural calibration of perception. Novels, the narrator insinuates, may have a bearing on how perceptions are interpreted, evaluated and turned into experiences, and may thus influence life styles and structures of feeling (see McLaughlin 1994: 56). However, this shaping power is conceived of not as direct and monodirectional, but as requiring (genre) literacy and interpretation; consequently, every reading may turn out to be a misreading or may be challenged by other readings. Rachel Bowlby, who has high­ lighted Adam Bede’s complicated intertextuality, argues with regard to Hetty that the many references to tragedies do not allow for a simple ana­ logy between the respective plot lines: Rather like the casual placement of the volume of Aeschylus on Mr Irwine’s side-table, the role of these passing tragic references, perhaps not even meant to be noticed as such, is not clearly that of a definite code for interpreting – or anticipating – the story of Hetty. They func­ tion as strangely enigmatic under-stories from another literary world, and they further trouble a would-be ‘likely’ story of the sources of Hetty’s destiny. (Bowlby 2011: 433)

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These undercurrents can actually be said to deconstruct the novel’s other strategies to depict Hetty’s seduction, such as the pastoral for instance. The effect of them is to show that the tragic culmination need not be destiny, but is one consequent outcome of particular framings that can be read as his­ torically contingent (see Dalley 2008: 559; 561; 563) and tragically limited, excluding an archive of other possible options. Correspondingly, the novel’s aisthetic strategy is based on the insight that human perspective is always framed or calibrated, be it by cultural contexts such as pre-existent plot lines or by internalized dispositions, habitualized notions of self and other, emo­ tions etc. The limited perspectives that the novel provides are rooted in embodied historical subjects. What is more, the novel reveals that what it can represent depends on its foundational constitution that it reiterates by making these framings or these repetitions of norms obvious and thus at least exceeding them by the very process of showing them in action. The novel associates characters with more or less beneficial reading capacities to indicate the scope of their perspective. Arthur’s outlook, for example, is shaped by the wrong references: “Talking of eyes,” said Captain Donnithorne, “that reminds me that I’ve got a book I meant to bring you, godmamma. It came down in a parcel from London the other day. I know you are fond of queer, wizard-like stories. It’s a volume of poems, ‘Lyrical Ballads:’ most of them seem to be twaddling stuff; but the first is in a different style — ‘The Ancient Mariner’ is the title. I can hardly make head or tail of it as a story, but it’s a strange, striking thing. I’ll send it over to you;” (Eliot 1897a, I: 94) It is implied that, had Arthur opted for the Wordsworthian parts of the Lyrical Ballads – for example, “The Thorn” – he might have been able to foresee the outcome of his intervention in Hetty’s life (see McLaughlin 1994: 66). The novel thus tries to establish a literary literacy that helps both characters and readers ‘to see realistically’. In doing so, it seeks to calibrate perception and to train readers’ hermeneutic capacities as a prerequisite for its aisth-ethics. Ethical realism affirms the shaping power of novels because it promotes the novel as a means by which readers can reflect on calibrations of per­ ception in order to be able to adopt a sympathetic stance towards others and to monitor their own behaviour accordingly. Adam Bede is an aisthetic novel precisely because of its reflection on calibrations of perception. Within the mode of ethical realism, the novel utilizes this reflection to shed light on ethical concerns such as how experiences, emotions, received notions, pre­ judices or, more generally, psychological and physiological parameters shape people’s world views, choices, actions, thoughts and feelings, and in what way and to what extent those parameters need to be taken into account in order for people to be able to make ethical judgements in the first place.

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The narrator makes it quite clear that these considerations are paramount in assessing characters when he remarks on the subtle influences on Adam’s thoughts during his father’s funeral: But Adam’s thoughts of Hetty did not deafen him to the service; they rather blended with all the other deep feelings for which the church service was a channel to him this afternoon, as a certain consciousness of our entire past and our imagined future blends itself with all our moments of keen sensibility. […] The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past: no wonder the secret escapes the unsympathising observer, who might as well put on his spectacles to discern odours. (Eliot 1897a, I: 300) With the service rituals functioning as a “channel” (300) for his thoughts and emotions, Adam reflects on his situation, which is defined by a psycho­ logical ‘blend’ of past and future with his current sensibilities. What the narrator reveals here is that “moments of keen sensibility” (300), in parti­ cular, are overwritten by projections, memories and imaginations and that emotions are triggered not by their object alone but by subjective projections that make objects appear in a particular light. Adam sees Hetty through a veil of schemata consisting of previous experiences, expectations and ima­ ginary future happenings – a co-mingling of influences visible only to a sympathetic readerly eye. Sympathy is the ethical attitude that reveals such interdependencies, whereas its lack can only culminate in a parapraxis of perception. Sympathy takes the place of a ‘common sense’, fostering under­ standing where a single sense hardly perceives anything. Sympathy grants insights where (empirical) analysis fails. The novel’s marriage plot, which depicts how Adam first chooses wrongly and prefers Hetty to Dinah, constructs this as a crucial mistake that, according to the plot’s logic, is necessary to create the narrative space for the novel and to drive the plot to its final tableau. Adam ‘learns’ to abstract from Hetty Sorrel’s beauty and ‘learns’ to cherish the Methodist preacher Dinah Morris’s ‘deeper’ character traits. He has to change his way of seeing in order to ‘see’ the right spouse: Tender and deep as his love for Hetty had been – so deep that the roots of it would never be torn away – his love for Dinah was better and more precious to him; for it was the outgrowth of that fuller life which had come to him from his acquaintance with deep sorrow. […] “[S]he’s better than I am – there’s less o’ self in her, and pride.” (Eliot 1897a, II: 365–366) In women, ‘goodness’ is constructed as a function of repression and self­ denial.36 Adam’s eventual economic, as well as marital, success and the process

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of self-culture that culminates in an idealized masculinity are enabled by the enfeebling of both his possible love objects, a characteristic frequently asso­ ciated with the male Bildungsroman. Dinah fosters Adam’s development and helps him to be less severe on his fellows (see Eliot 2008: 182). Jennifer Uglow even goes so far as to argue that “Dinah is the means of her husband’s growth to true perception” (1987: 112). Perception, in the sense of the way in which characters conceive of their environment, as well as their fellow beings, is thus revealed to be a social construction in Adam Bede. In Eliot’s ethical realism, character constellations and particular character interactions shape characters’ outlook and calibrate perception. In contrast to Hetty, Dinah is constructed as Adam’s complement. She is also positioned as a model reader, in the sense that she can directly see what a sign system evokes; rather than sticking to the materiality of the sign, she actualizes a mental percept. When Adam meets Dinah to ask her about her decision regarding his marriage proposal, he approaches her very carefully in order not to startle her: with the fine instinct of a lover, he felt that it would be best for her to hear his voice before she saw him. He came within three paces of her and then said, “Dinah!” She started without looking round, as if she connected the sound with no place. “Dinah!” Adam said again. He knew quite well what was in her mind. She was so accustomed to think of impressions as purely spiritual monitions, that she looked for no material visible accompaniment of the voice. (Eliot 1897a, II: 368) Dinah is able to see what she hears; she is characterized by a high capacity for synaesthesia, in the sense that sound is immediately trans­ lated into image. Of course, this is consistent with her religious affilia­ tion to Methodism, in which the word is salvation made flesh. Adam Bede’s idealized form of narrative is one that evokes direct percepts on the basis of a medium rendered transparent. While the narrator allows readers to look into the inky mirror, thus granting them visions of the past, Dinah, the heroine who prevails in the story, is decidedly a heroine of the spoken word. In contrast to the visual and fetishized representation of Hetty, Dinah is primarily a character of voice and expression. The sound of her voice has a strong impact on her listeners (see Adams 1991: 234) and reveals once more the analogy between sympathy and aurality, rather than visuality. In her sermons, she is able to evoke the bodily presence of those she talks about, particularly the saviour: “she made them feel that he was among them bodily” (Eliot 1897a, I: 40). She is therefore, like the narrator, a magician of the word, opening vistas through oral narration and presentifying that which is absent in order to establish a connection to the past. The reader encounters her like the stranger travelling through the country as s/he travels

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through the diegetic world. The sound of Dinah’s voice captures attention and is able to enrapture listeners and readers alike (see Schroeder 2011: 187): Hitherto the traveller had been chained to the spot against his will by the charm of Dinah’s mellow treble tones, which had a variety of modula­ tion like that of a fine instrument touched with the unconscious skill of musical instinct. The simple things she said seemed like novelties, as a melody strikes us with a new feeling when we hear it sung by the pure voice of a boyish chorister; the quiet depth of conviction with which she spoke seemed in itself an evidence for the truth of her message. He saw that she had thoroughly arrested her hearers. The villagers had pressed nearer to her, and there was no longer anything but grave attention on all faces. (Eliot 1897a, I: 36) Dinah remains unaware of the effect she engenders with her voice, as well as her appearance. By comparing the modulation of her “mellow treble tones” to an “instrument touched with the unconscious skill of musical instinct” (36), the novel constructs her as a medium who is inspired with a message without being conscious of the mediation. The traveller had been interested in the course of her sermon, as if it had been the development of a drama — for there is this sort of fascination in all sincere unpremeditated eloquence, which opens to one the inward drama of the speaker’s emotions. (44) Dinah is associated with interiority from the very beginning and renounces herself for others: ‘Ah, their poor aged mother!’ said Dinah, dropping her hands, and looking before her with pitying eyes, as if she saw the object of her sympathy. ‘She will mourn heavily; for Seth has told me she’s of an anxious, troubled heart. I must go and see if I can give her any help.’ (135) Dinah’s sympathy for others and her readiness to work can be considered “two of Dinah’s cross-class specialities” (Homans 1993: 162), which single her out for social ascent, but, by the end of the novel, “ha[ve] been contained” (163). The association of Dinah with sympathy and aurality is only slightly altered once she falls in love with Adam, when she becomes self-conscious of her own physicality under his male gaze. Adam, in turn, is affected by looking at Dinah: But now her slim figure, her plain black gown, and her pale serene face, impressed him with all the force that belongs to a reality contrasted

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with a preoccupying fancy. For the first moment or two he made no answer, but looked at her with the concentrated, examining glance which a man gives to an object in which he has suddenly begun to be interested. Dinah, for the first time in her life, felt a painful self-con­ sciousness; there was something in the dark penetrating glance of this strong man so different from the mildness and timidity of his brother Seth. A faint blush came, which deepened as she wondered at it. This blush recalled Adam from his forgetfulness.37 (Eliot 1897a, I: 173) Within the logic of ethical realism, this passage makes it clear that Adam’s newly interested male gaze reveals a new perception of a ‘reality’, rather than the ‘fancy’ he has for Hetty. His love for Hetty is based on a projection, his own fancy of how she might be, which does not correspond to who she actually is. These different ways of looking at another person are associated with the hermeneutic and ethical programme of ethical realism: understanding the other is possible only if one leaves room for the other’s otherness, ‘seeing the reality of the other’, rather than imagining one’s own fancy to be mirrored back by the other conceived of as a screen for one’s own desires. Adam sees Hetty as someone who might fulfil his dreams by taking up the role assigned to the social position of a ‘wife’; as a consequence, he never obtains access to Hetty’s thoughts and feelings. Conversely, once Adam meets Dinah ‘with interest’, he has to see beyond the surface and gets insight into a ‘reality’, so that Dinah is singled out for a ‘true’ relationship. Understanding the other entails the ethical task of refraining from epistemic violence – from subjecting the other to one’s own categories. Understanding others is frequently aligned with understanding texts (see Singleton 2011: 246), so that the way in which characters understand one another can be aligned to ways of reading. Hetty “becomes a kind of text to be interpreted, allowing the novel to function as a critique of the ways her exterior is read” (R. Mitchell 2008: 148), which highlights the subtle ways in which the novel allows criticism of its own construction. Hetty is a character who tries to control how she appears to others, “so that her pain cannot be read” (152), a concealment that forecloses the option for others to recognize and, possibly, share her pain. Hetty remains a surface to be (mis)read and is thus inaccessible for ethical realism. Once Dinah falls in love with Adam, the novel describes her along sen­ sational, suddenly more strongly embodied lines. Dinah becomes a nervous body that can be read symptomatically: It was as if Dinah had put her hands unawares on a vibrating chord; she was shaken with an intense thrill, and for the instant felt nothing else; then she knew her cheeks were glowing, and dared not look round, but stood still, distressed because she could not say good-morning in a friendly way. (Eliot 1897a, II: 308)

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The connection is conveyed by vibrating chords; thus, Dinah becomes the model representative of sympathy, interiority and “a love that is properly trained into domesticity by the tools of industry and housewifery” (Gates 1998: 32). The novel’s foundational constitution, aisth-ethically supple­ mented by chapter 17, culminates in an exclusive definition of ethical realism and prescribes the range of possible behaviour for its characters, whose perception is calibrated accordingly. When, by the end of the novel, Dinah strains her eyes “as she looks for something in the distance” (Eliot 1897a, II: 374), craving for her husband to return, this domestic tableau provides a final framing for the ideal/ideological sympathetic couple on the diegetic level. On the heterodiegetic level, sympathy can be triggered by the senses or even by remembered sense impressions. By extension, this is the model for the implied and even the real reader, as the latter is instructed to return to the percepts of the novel in retrospect to reflect further on its possible insights, catering to what James Sully calls the novel’s “after-impression” (1881: 378). The narrator, for example, comments on the perceptions that he metaleptically shares with Adam as both visit Mrs Poyser at the Hall Farm: Ah! I think I taste that whey now — with a flavour so delicate that one can hardly distinguish it from an odour, and with that soft gliding warmth that fills one’s imagination with a still, happy dreaminess. And the light music of the dropping whey is in my ears, mingling with the twittering of a bird outside the wire network window — the window overlooking the garden, and shaded by tall Gueldres roses. (Eliot 1897a, I: 327) This highly synaesthetic passage connects the taste of whey with its smell as well as the concomitant impressions of the remembered scene, such as the sound of birds and the view from the window. Memory is conceived of here as sensual synthesis, resulting in an emotional cathexis of the past (“Ah!”, 327). This presentification is enabled by the sensual repossession of the scene. The past is animated and rendered alive by the processual descrip­ tion – for instance, the dropping or twittering, indicating the passing of time. The memory of the taste of whey, which soon seemingly turns into a smell – smell being the most evocative sense with regard to memories – becomes tied to feelings of warmth and kindles the imagination, which is thus enabled to participate in the bygone scene. This representation of recollection confirms the importance for ethical realism of modulating (a remembered) participation or immersion and reflexivity. A sympathetic relationship to the past can be achieved by providing the reader with opportunities to imagine her/himself as a deictic centre in the scenes depicted. Furthermore, the novel’s modulated perspective structure and creation of presence effects foster particular subject effects. The imaginary subject

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position constructed for the implied reader by such calibrations of percep­ tion is modelled along the lines of liberal tenets and a self-help ideology. The perspective structure allows for the construction of a vantage point of aloofness that enables abstraction and evaluation in order to prepare the ideal reader to re-engage in the bustle of the ‘society’ on the diegetic level with heightened sensibility and reflection.38 The different vantage points from which the diegetic world can be experienced thus alternate between immersive participation and self-reflexive observation – an interplay that fosters an ethics of the novel by allowing for reflection on the characters’ actions with benevolence, as one intermittently partakes in and emotionally cathects the diegetic world. It is not a dissecting gaze, but one that is based on participant observation. The hermeneutic insight performed by the novel is that “meaning, virtue, or beauty […] is actually a product of the historically, socially, and materially determined schema by which one perceives the world” (Singleton 2011: 246). To make readers reflect on the contextual determination of per­ ception and, consequently, the situatedness and embodiedness of all under­ standing, the novel creates a perspective structure that caters to an interplay of perspectives, aisthetically described and conveyed.

2.2 Middlemarch: The Mediation of Perception through Symbolic Forms Middlemarch, a “life like gallery”, as John Blackwood calls the novel (Eliot 2000: 533), or a “panorama” of different perspectives, as Henry James argues (1987b: 75),39 reveals perception to be dependent on the mediating effects of “history, economics, politics, art and science” (Boehm-Schnitker 2022: 48). Further described as an “inextricable web of affinities” (Darwin, qtd. in Beer 2000: 156), the multiplot-novel may well be called “organic” (Arnold 2019: 121): “Eliot was interested in writing fiction that could depict internal sense experience” (121) and offers a “sensory form of epistemology” in Middlemarch (124). This sensory epistemology depends on calibrations of perception that, I suggest, correspond to what Ernst Cassirer calls symbolic forms;40 they shape the “‘pathways’ from the senses to meaning” (Habermann 2010: 17).41 Thus, they modulate the ways in which individual characters perceive their environ­ ments at particular historical moments and affect how characters can channel and process these perceptions (see Boehm-Schnitker 2022: 49).42 In Mid­ dlemarch, the senses are “historically and culturally generated ways of knowing and understanding” (Smith 2007: 3). Middlemarch illustrates how different characters confer meaning on their surroundings, as well as on their own lives and relationships, and reveals how this process is tinged by personal and con­ textual factors, including identity markers such as gender and class and perso­ nal qualities such as particular moods, feelings, predispositions and prejudices, and the limitations of perspective or susceptibility that they impose. In short, Middlemarch calibrates perception by modulations of the different, culturally specific symbolic forms.

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In his 1921 essay Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs, Cassirer pro­ vides a concise definition of a symbolic form: Under a ‘symbolic form’ should be understood every energy of mind [Energie des Geistes] through which a mental content of meaning [geis­ tiger Bedeutungsgehalt] is connected to a concrete, sensory sign [konk­ retes sinnliches Zeichen] and made to adhere internally to it. (qtd. in Krois 1987: 50) He describes his approach as a ‘phenomenology of cognition’ intended to explore the ways in which different disciplines such as myth, art or science form objects of cognition differently, and thus geared to analyse the ways of objectification characteristic of these different disciplines (see Cassirer 1965: 209). Furthermore, he argues that something like a ‘naked perception’ lack­ ing any semiotic function is impossible, because perception is always already imbued with processes of meaning construction (see 214). I take this as the initial reference point for my analysis of Eliot’s Middlemarch. Cassirer seems to be particularly apt as a reference point for this novel because his view of a comprehensive culture, in the sense of a network of intra-actions, corresponds to Eliot’s ideals with respect to literary form, as outlined in her “Notes on Form in Art”. Cassirer claims that every item of consciousness is part of a network of manifold relations (see 1955a, I: 97), even using meta­ phors similar to those that appear in Middlemarch: In Eliot’s novel, perceptions and impressions are similarly transmo­ grified into individual sensescapes,43 in the double sense of what char­ acters perceive and how they make sense of it. All characters serve as perceptive ‘filters’ and, by virtue of that function, turn what they per­ ceive as reality into their individual reality: their individual outlook, to be reflected on by readers in the wider panorama of Middlemarch. (Boehm-Schnitker 2022: 49; emphasis in the original)44 Apart from the novel’s famous passage on the filtering function of percep­ tion – If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. (Eliot 1897b, I: 297–298)45 – Middlemarch also “reveals the interdependences between perception and anaesthesia, between individual implicit and explicit silencing processes or forms of ‘insulation’ and mediated ways of expression” (Boehm-Schnitker 2022: 50). In her “Quarry for ‘Middlemarch’”, Eliot correspondingly

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includes the entry “Mikroscopische Untersuchungen. By Schwann, 1838–9” (2000: 543). Theodor Schwann did important research on nerve cells and related cells such as the Schwann cell; in addition, he explored myelination, i.e. the process by which nerve cells are insulated. The metaphor of ‘insula­ tion’ is justified because it corresponds to a basic neurological insight of which Eliot was well aware: the fact that nerve fibres are themselves ‘well wadded’ with myelin so that they can transmit impulses more easily. The fibres require insulation in order to function properly in the first place, so that an organism may perceive something as something, rather than being overwhelmed by a myriad of impressions. Literary representation depends on a similar ‘selectivity’; the perceptions of characters are thus shaped by their individual ‘insulations’, even though they, in turn, may then be subject to critique. The novel illustrates that perception is always already qualified by general as well as individual calibrations of a variety of influences derived from “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” factors such as environments (Eliot 1963b: 434), ‘media’, and ‘psychological’ dispositions of characters. Calibrations of perception are presented as the basis for interpretations in Middlemarch, which is structurally reflected in the novel’s multiperspectivity. What is more, the foreclosure of the “roar which lies on the other side of silence” powerfully illustrates the novel’s aim to negotiate the boundary of the sayable (Eliot 1897b, I: 297), mediating possible translations of that which eludes expressibility and revealing the ways in which interdictions or forms of implicit censorship modulate characters’ comportment and performativity. Despite contemporary criticism of Middlemarch as lacking form,46 I argue that the novel is clearly structured by the ways in which perceptions are calibrated: symbolic forms, perspective structures, environments, historical contexts and physiological and psychological determinants such as parti­ cular susceptibilities, desires, feelings and thoughts. The novel’s realism is thus both a function of symbolic forms and a reflection on that function. Furthermore, Middlemarch’s “realism has a decidedly aisthetic quality, in that its very narrative performs the successive development of several embodied perspectives that coalesce to form a panorama of a community situated in a specific historical setting” (Boehm-Schnitker 2022: 52; see also Auyoung 2018: 87; Star 2013: 840). In the following, I will focus particularly on history, language, art and economics as fundamental symbolic forms that calibrate the characters’ perceptions in Middlemarch. 2.2.1 History: Middlemarch’s Fundamental Symbolic Form History, as well as reflection on historiography (see Berns 2020: 400–401), is the largest of the frameworks that Middlemarch supplies as symbolic forms calibrating perception both on the extradiegetic and on the diegetic level. Narrative continuity serves as a web in which the characters’ history is spun and by which their ‘life courses’ and corresponding individual outlooks are shaped. Both history and historiography are also central to the novel’s

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variety of realism – and, even more fundamentally, to its very foundational constitution. As in Adam Bede, the latter is performed by a paratext, which is even more clearly set off from the novel proper as an individual chapter entitled the “Prelude”.47 This provides a historiographical reflection on character construction and introduces a strategy “by which the metonymic unfolding of Eliot’s narrative is infused by […] metaphors” (A.H. Miller 2013: 154): that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mys­ terious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? […] Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a con­ stant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the mean­ ness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. (Eliot 1897b, I: 1–2) WHO

The Prelude invites the reader to interpret the novel’s ‘heroine’ Dorothea Brooke, who is introduced in the first book, as one of a plethora of “later­ born Theresas” (2),48 and thus in metaphorical analogy to the saint, whose hagiography provides established genre conventions for the description of lives of women more generally. The narrative and ethical task of the novel, however, is to deviate from established models and do memory work for those whose lives remain largely unrecorded in established historiography. The narrative strategies to forge a link between historiography and novel writing perform a sleight of hand to causally connect a general historical interest – which, according to the narrator, must include a special interest in Saint Theresa – with an even more specific interest in Dorothea Brooke. The subject of the Prelude’s opening sentence is an interrogative pronoun defined by a relative clause that refers to a reader with a great epistemolo­ gical interest in history and grammatically procrastinates the predicate spe­ cifying how this “Who” (1) might be further characterized. The ideal reading position thus created has some affinity with the novel’s implied reader and is successively fleshed out in order to train readers to occupy that position. Middlemarch opens with an empty space for its ideal implied reader; however, if this reader has an inclination “to know the history of man” (1, my emphasis), and to explore the ways in which the personified agent “Time” (1) conducts (scientific) experiments with people in varying historical contexts, ‘he’ is cunningly supplied with several substitutions for this interest. The predicate defining the ideal reader comes in the guise of a rhetorical question stating that any historically interested person must have

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pondered Saint Theresa’s life; this implies a highly probable, almost causal relationship between an interest in general history and an interest in Saint Theresa.49 The first substitution that takes place in the process of defining the ideal reader thus concentrates the “history of man” on the hagiography of a woman (1). As Saint Theresa is constructed as a model representative,50 “the historical exemplar” (Gallagher 2005: 67) or the “sample” (J. Hillis Miller 1975: 126)51 of history, structurally she takes up the position of what may be called an “exclusive inclusion” (Agamben 1998: 21; emphasis in the original). As an ‘example’, Theresa is part of the story only by representing a (proto)type that cannot logically be part of the group that it describes on the grounds of its very exemplarity, which distinguishes it from the group defined by its characteristics.52 Moreover, “no sooner is the type – ‘There­ sas’ – named than it begins to dissolve, […] the stories of all the other Theresas veer off from this norm” (Gallagher 2005: 67); Dorothea is con­ structed as a deviation from the norm,53 with regard to both her life course and the generic conventions shaping this life. It is this deviation that enables and propels the narrative; the norm cannot be narrated, as the brief summary of characters’ later lives in the Finale illustrates. In her own ‘historical’ context, Dorothea’s life cannot be epic like Theresa’s – a fact that becomes evident when, for instance, her first husband, Mr Casaubon, fails to correspond to the model of John Milton that Dorothea has imagined for him. It is rather a variety of possibilities represented, for example, by a generic reliance on the picaresque novel that provides episodes of “mistakes” (Eliot 1897b, I: 2) and “draws on one of the oldest novelistic types, the female Quixote” (Gallagher 2005: 69). Other literary moulds are provided by the social novel of the 1840s, describing a life course full of aspirations and lack of opportunity, or, on a larger scale, by borrowing from the tragedy featuring a female protagonist. Women’s history, however, is rarely recorded or mourned – and thus eventually forgotten, unless a woman is a saint. Middlemarch, by contrast, lets its readers mourn life courses hitherto untold and foregrounds the quotidian as that which frequently remains unwritten but crucially shapes ‘our’ lives. The novel’s ethical pro­ gramme is to extend the range of historiography and to narrate the fates of ordinary people whose “daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas” (Eliot 1897b, III: 465), thereby fostering an understanding of the historical impact of the quotidian. Rather than becoming “great”, Dorothea “becomes middle-class” (May­ nard 2009: 112), a change in social status that, once achieved, becomes sub­ narratable and, by the same token, normalized, as that which goes without saying. Middlemarch’s implicit historiographic metafiction conveys the view that every word and act wield the power to shape lives, presenting a reflec­ tion on fictional and actual words and acting as an ethical obligation. As regards the novel’s character construction, deviation from a type enables the particularity of character. The ideal reader, interested as ‘he’ is in the grand scale of “the history of man” (Eliot 1897b, I: 1), is finally presented with a ‘herstory’, the story of one of the “later-born Theresas” (Eliot 1897b, I: 2).

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The novel’s foundational constitution relies on a form of metalepsis that offers the particularity of fiction in place of an interest in general history and simultaneously casts the implied reader as one who desires what Catherine Gallagher calls “[b]eing-in-particular” (2005: 69). Such novelistic particularity is further characterized by “a yearning towards embodiment” (70); ethical rea­ lism comes into its own within Middlemarch’s “immanence” (73), culminating in characters’ ‘realization’ through deviation from types and norms. As Galla­ gher puts it, “Eliot uses the gap between type and instance to create a momen­ tum, an impulse towards the prosaic that is indistinguishable from the desire to read a fiction” (68). Aisthetic strategies of character construction support this desire, as well as the impression of the identity between history and fiction. Instead of a “sympathy ready-made” (Eliot 1856: 30) invested in Saint Theresa as a type, Dorothea represents novelistic particularity, whose realiza­ tion as a fully fleshed-out character is rendered desirable for readers and enables a short moment of ‘recognition’, in the sense that the character’s embodiment as a transient novelistic achievement – perhaps most melo­ dramatically and impressively conveyed by Dorothea’s exclamation “‘Oh, I cannot bear it – my heart will break’” (Eliot 1897b, III: 426),54 with reference to her decision finally to marry Will Ladislaw – positions both character and reader as embodied beings of ‘flesh and blood’ who are equally part of history. It is ‘life’ that ‘we’ share, that turns us into historical agents and that reveals ‘our’ communality as historical agents past and present (see Shiller 1997: 542). The ‘history’ envisioned in Middlemarch culminates in a sympathetic union of embodied character and embodied reader (see Gallagher 2005: 73), to drive home the point that ‘life’ is history and history is ‘life’. This is illustrated by the novel’s frequent reflections on the interdependence of ‘dead’ artefacts of history and living interaction in the context of historiographic and novelistic trans­ mission. The relationship between Will and Dorothea, as one that is highly shaped by contextual factors such as Mr Casaubon’s will and public opinion, as well as by the characters’ capacity to understand their own desires, long remains on the brink between realization and repression. Book IV, “The Widow and the Wife”, marks a phase in their relationship that still prevents its realization. This is conveyed by an interplay between ‘life’ and its monumentalization or ossification: “Good God!” Will burst out passionately, rising, with his hat still in his hand, and walking away to a marble table, where he suddenly turned and leaned his back against it. The blood had mounted to his face and neck, and he looked almost angry. It had seemed to him as if they were like two creatures slowly turning to marble in each other’s presence, while their hearts were conscious and their eyes were yearning. (Eliot 1897b, III: 16) Marble, as the material not only of the table in this domestic scene, but of the statues both Will and Dorothea admired in Rome (see Eliot 1897b, I:

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288), is used as a complex image partaking – apart from its symbolic materiality – of both metaphor and metonymy. On the one hand, Will’s passion, represented by the blood rushing to his face, is contrasted with the cold materiality and stillness of the table – this scene becomes an allegory that sets off the material’s white deadness from his pulsating life.56 On the other, the very contiguity of marble and ‘flesh’ – Will’s physical proximity to the cold material – threatens to turn the latter into the former; mere metonymical contiguity might trigger a metamorphosis transmuting passio­ nate life into dead marble, and thus into historically transmissible material, subject to the same hermeneutic processes and (mis)interpretations. Will and Dorothea, as potential marble statues, intimate a pathos formula, arresting movement, passion and agitation, in art. The scene itself is highly effective as a melodramatic tableau, literally freezing or freeze-framing passion – conscious hearts and yearning eyes (see Eliot 1897b, III: 16) – in an aesthe­ ticized representation as sculpture, which, as material artefacts or media of quotidian history, may be transmitted to later generations to be admired in exhibitions where, like Dorothea and Will, the respective audiences may or may not have the required skills to ‘read’ the statues’ meaning. For the novel reader, the scene illustrates the particular characters’ desires and gives ‘life’ to the verbal representation, tying in with Will’s opinion that language “gives a fuller image” than painting or sculpture (Eliot 1897b, I: 292). Eliot’s approach to the aesthetic impression of marble insinuates emotional force and conveys a (kin)aesthetic of feelings through art. With regard to “our perception of meaning in art”, Eliot implies that works of art, too, transmit “a ‘roar which lies on the other side of silence’; perhaps the other side of a mute painting, a curve of silent sculpture, or the narrative form of a novel” (Star 2013: 853). For Eliot’s ethics of a novelistic historiography, every “Form in Art” (Eliot 1963b: 432) communicates not merely its material, but ‘life’, and thus partakes of the web of history made up of even the slightest quotidian act. As she argues in “Notes on Form in Art”, “Artistic form, as distinguished from mere imitation, begins in sculpture & painting with composition or the selection of attitudes & the formation of groups, let the objects be of what order they may” (434). When Will and Dorothea meet in the Vatican Museum, their ‘historical’ interaction is mingled with the reception of art, so that the novel creates an allegory on the ways in which personal memory may finally be passed on as pathos formulas of cultural memory in the context of a larger temporal scale. Scenes of passion may be represented by marble sculptures or other media, and later generations will require the her­ meneutic capacities to read them, but they will always read them differently. Historical communication is a communication of difference. As Gail Marshall has shown, sculpture has a particular affinity with history: “The pasts that sculptures refer to […] are often instances of a classical aesthetic which binds its subject into an intimate, visceral relationship with that past, and which is often experienced as a form of entrapment” (2020: 1). References to 55

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sculpture in Middlemarch enable characters to experience “different forms of historical duration” (17), which underscores the importance of this scene for the characters’ experientiality in the context of the symbolic form of history. The intricate texture of Dorothea’s life course as a deviation from the type of Saint Theresa is closely connected to further reflections on history. The novel’s successive development of the saint-like Dorothea as an embo­ died, desirous young woman is achieved by connecting her to particular historical landmarks that turn out to be crucial in her own life. The opening of chapter 19 relating Dorothea’s wedding journey emulates the style of the Gospel of St Luke relating the birth of Jesus Christ (Lk 2, 1–5),57 and allows for an analogy between Christ’s and Dorothea’s histories, both of which partake of religious and profane discourses in the capital of the Roman empire: George the Fourth was still reigning over the privacies of Wind­ sor, when the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, and Mr Vincy was mayor of the old corporation in Middlemarch, Mrs Casaubon, born Dorothea Brooke, had taken her wedding journey to Rome. (Eliot 1897b, I: 287)

WHEN

After the enumeration of historical personages such as the reigning king and the current Prime Minister, Mr Vincy is presented as a political character in the novel’s provincial life; the novel again provides an ontological metalepsis that glosses over the fundamental difference between historical references and diegetic characters. The ensuing chapter focuses on the way in which Dorothea perceives Rome. The city serves as a historical allegory, providing a heterotopia of different ages, represented by its architecture as well as by the different styles of art exhibited in its museums. It is described as “the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathering from afar” (Eliot 1897b, I: 295).58 While the chapter opens with the narra­ tor’s discourse, this description may well be focalized on Dorothea; the verb ‘seems’ indicates that Rome appears to her like a “funeral procession” (295), a semantic donor field that also qualifies her honeymoon. This setting situ­ ates Dorothea’s early marriage within the presence of the past, where Dor­ othea’s liveliness is out of place.59 Rome serves as semanticized space – more concretely, as a chronotope60 – and is functionalized for Dorothea’s characterization, as her insertion into the spatial presence of history is employed to provide her with greater insight into her position in life and to help her to realize how she feels in her time. Her perspective on the city is minutely qualified in Middlemarch, where her perception is described as calibrated by her upbringing in a par­ ticular religious and national environment, as well as by her personal cir­ cumstances, her cognitive structures and her physiology:

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To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Pro­ testant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. (Eliot 1897b, I: 295–296; my emphasis) Dorothea as an individual character is distinguished from a generalized group of people commanding a knowledge that enables them to turn Rome’s contrasts into a comprehensible whole. For Dorothea, the city remains “unintelligible” (296); its different ways of life, derived from different his­ torical eras, cannot be turned into single “principles” (296) that might guide her action, and her aisthetic approach to her surroundings, evaluating them by a code of pleasure and pain, turns Rome into an almost sublime experi­ ence, in that it overwhelms her senses, but she is unable to grasp rationally what she perceives. Dorothea’s experience of Rome is used to qualify her perceptive filters – the way in which she deals with impressions – and thus to illustrate the way in which the character’s perspective is defined. In addition, Dorothea visits places in Rome that condense this experience even more conspicuously. Museums, in particular, serve as “heterotopias”, as well as “heterochronies”, in the sense that they embody the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself out­ side of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century. (Foucault 1986: 26) Edward Casaubon is closely connected with both locations and represents historicity as a repository, removed from other people’s lives, whose sole

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function is to accumulate more information. Dorothea becomes associated with them through her marriage to him, but is shown to be ‘out of place’ there. Her visits to the Vatican Museum allegorize her emotional and intel­ lectual dislocation during her honeymoon.61 She experiences Rome’s monu­ ments and museums as a “vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual” (Eliot 1897b, I: 296). Her ensuing confusion, as the narrator com­ ments, is hardly “very exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among incongruities and left to ‘find their feet’ among them, while their elders go about their business” (297). Dorothea is unable to ‘find her feet’; she remains out of place, which prepares a process of emotional maturation in the wake of her Roman experience. In Rome, Dorothea’s life becomes situated in the context of vast stretches of time in order both to illustrate its inconsequentiality in the face of eternity and to emphasize its individual significance. The chronotope of Rome accentuates Dorothea’s characteristics all the more clearly. In Middlemarch, the interaction between the material world and char­ acters’ emotional life is highly aisthetic, focusing on embodiment and per­ ception. A paradigmatic example revealing the ways in which personal history depends on embodiment is a scene after Dorothea’s return to Lowick Manor from Rome. Here Dorothea is set off as a figure from her sur­ roundings to underline the fact that she comes back from her honeymoon a changed woman. It is not only the overwhelming intercultural experience in Rome and her exposure, without preparation, to art as and layers of history that she cannot comprehend; there is also her growing insight into the aridity of her husband’s mind, leading to the conclusion that “a manifold pregnant existence” is an impossibility in her marriage (Eliot 1897b, II: 3). These realizations alter her perception substantially and illustrate the inter­ twinement of personal experiences in time and calibrations of perception. They are the mental reflection consequent on her experience in Rome, where she does not yet have any distinctly shapen grievance that she could state even to herself; and in the midst of her confused thought and passion, the mental act that was struggling forth into clearness was a self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault of her own spiritual poverty. (Eliot 1897b, I: 294) While this thought report emphasizes the slow process by which Dorothea becomes conscious of her own thoughts and starts to grapple with the dis­ appointments of her marriage, the narrator makes it quite clear that Dor­ othea’s calamity does not qualify for the high art of tragedy. The narrator admits that he cannot suppose that when Mrs Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some

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discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. (Eliot 1897b, I: 297; my emphasis) Conversely, the novel represents the very iterability of quotidian tragedies: the disillusionment, rendered as a fall from high hopes, that may occur in any life. It depicts an iteration of Saint Theresa’s model life course in the guise of Dorothea, who must give up her imaginary idealization of Mr Casaubon as a Miltonic impersonation and of herself as his helpmeet. Insinuating that his audience lacks susceptibility for such tragedies, the nar­ rator tries to pave the way for a new susceptibility for the ‘usual’ by a rhetorical sleight of hand, seemingly “declaring Dorothea’s crying sub­ narratable” (Warhol 2013: 58). The strategy of claiming an apparent “unnarratability” (49) is sympto­ matic of the novel’s negotiation of a cultural anaesthesia. Middlemarch’s realism is an attempt to overcome the unrepresentability of the ordinary and the usual; it portrays the quotidian tragedy of Dorothea’s failure to live up to and to realize her own ideal(ized) life course. It is therefore, at least in part, a de casibus tragedy of the fall of a character from high aspirations, transposed into a domestic context and a narrative mode. In a variation of Fielding, Middlemarch presents a ‘tragic epic-poem in prose’ (see Fielding 1985: 25), and provides an intimation of “that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (Eliot 1897b, I: 297). Eliot’s realism narrates on the threshold of a cultural anaesthesia, mediated by infinitesimally approximating the unnarratable and by strategies of unnarratability. As James Sully emphasizes in “George Eliot’s Art”, Eliot’s novels help to render visible generally unobservable psychological processes (see Sully 1881: 388), subjecting them to a regime of representation and representability in realism. Thus, emergent perceptions are brought into the range of tellability. Such emergent percep­ tions are frequently conveyed by affective descriptions of embodiment, as with the description of Dorothea’s return from Rome. When Dorothea arrives in Lowick Manor and enters her boudoir, the place she left three months previously no longer appears to be the same to her: “The very furniture in the room seemed to have shrunk since she saw it before” (Eliot 1897b, II: 1–2). She herself feels strangely removed from her environment; her own presence in the house appears to her like “an incon­ gruous renewal of life and glow” (2). As in Rome, Dorothea feels ‘out of place’; the character and her ‘medium’ no longer harmonize. The implied reader is invited to witness Dorothea’s psychological turmoil by means of its narratological transposition to her visual, physiological and spatial sensescape. The mismatch of character and environment, the difference between

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figure and ground, emphasizes Dorothea’s repositioning and reorientation after her wedding journey, which is conveyed very much by spatial cate­ gories and an appeal to the reader’s gaze, while Dorothea’s mind is entirely absorbed in introspection. Her mental absorption throws into relief her physical presence: her heightened insight into her own situation is mediated by embodi­ ment. It is her “bodily orientation”, “the implicit perception one has of the rela­ tions between the parts of one’s body” (Star 2013: 843), that guides her mental process. One might go so far as to say that this focus on embodied orienta­ tion in and a correspondingly limited and contextualized interpretation of one’s environment fundamentally characterizes Eliot’s realism in Middlemarch: Writing a realist novel […] requires not so much a complex interweave of characters and minute description of scenes and objects; rather it is the narration of one’s apprehension of a particular placement of oneself in the world, a ‘process of Orientation’ (to use Lewes’s phrasing) in and to that world, which gives forth a continual experience of being both a given whole in one’s own right and a part of another whole – which, by reason of this embeddedness, one can sense but never fully comprehend. (Star 2013: 250) Middlemarch continuously mediates between individual orientations – sensescapes that are decidedly emplaced and perspectivized – and larger contexts so as to reveal the vacillation between character and a specific situatedness in a particular time and place. After her return from Rome, Dorothea is clearly re-situated. While she moves about in the room guided by an implicit bodily orientation, the deic­ tic markers are reduced to a minimum, and there are some textual lacunae that the implied reader must fill on the basis of the visual information pro­ vided. When, on a January morning, Dorothea’s “blooming full-pulsed youth” and physicality are contrasted with the cold weather outside, as well as with the “stifling oppression” and lifelessness within the domestic context (Eliot 1897b, II: 3), the narrator’s rhetoric carves out Dorothea’s bodily plasticity before any indication of direction in the room is given: She was glowing from her morning toilette as only healthful youth can glow: there was gem-like brightness on her coiled hair and in her hazel eyes; there was warm red life in her lips; her throat had a breathing whiteness above the differing white of the fur which itself seemed to wind about her neck and cling down her blue-grey pelisse with a tenderness gathered from her own, a sentient commingled innocence which kept its loveliness against the crystalline purity of the out-door snow. As she laid the cameo-cases on the table in the bow-window, she unconsciously kept her hands on them, immediately absorbed in looking out on the still, white enclosure which made her visible world. (Eliot 1897b, II: 2; my emphases)

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The passage is characterized by an “intensifying infusion” of the metony­ mical narrative by metaphor, by “visual juxtaposition” – for example, of different kinds of whiteness surrounding Dorothea – and by a strategy that may be called “intimation”, in that the sequential representation of Dor­ othea’s body mimics “the slow cascade of our gaze” (A.H. Miller 2013: 154). The whole passage is designed to frame the scene, “and within that enclosed space it can seem that everything named has a meaning” (154). This semiotic density also achieves highly aisthetic effects through the plastic representa­ tion of Dorothea as embodied, conveying “a crystalizing sense of incarnate presence” (Star 2013: 845) and a strongly aestheticized kind of perception (see 850). Before her visit to Rome, she had focused mainly on ideas or mental concepts – for example, her plans for new housing schemes for the poor and her religious spirituality; after her return, “it is as though she has been newly developed in a sense of her body and the draw of her own perception – both kinetic and visual” (845–846). The confrontation with historical hybridity in Rome has triggered Dorothea’s relocation in her own context of space and time, which is mediated by a heightened sense of embodiment. After the aisthetic description of Dorothea’s physical presence, the deictics of the verb ‘to lay’ and the adverbial ‘on the table in the bow window’ locate Dorothea in the room, whereas her own gaze is directed out of the window. While her mind is “absorbed” (Eliot 1897b, II: 2) with adjusting to her new situation after her journey to the eternal city, her physical being is strangely dislocated; this indicates her literal repositioning as a character who has been reinvented and is only now beginning to understand her own desires. Crucially, Dorothea experiences herself as fully embodied only after she has realized that her husband denies her any physicality.62 The scope of this process of realization is thus rendered all the more plastic for the reader, who may contemplate Dorothea’s body while her mind is otherwise engaged. With Dorothea’s unfeeling hands on the cameo-cases on the table, her consciousness is directed to a vista outside the frame created by the boudoir, on which the reader’s gaze remains centred. Dorothea does not, therefore, serve as a conscious deictic centre; the deictic information is pro­ vided by the narrator and visually realized by the reader’s gaze. Initially, the reader’s gaze is closely aligned with Dorothea’s fur, “a sentient commingled innocence” (Eliot 1897b, II: 2), rendering the implied reader sentient by mere contiguity (see A.H. Miller 2013: 154). The reader’s perspective may mean­ der between a position closely attached to Dorothea’s body and a perspec­ tive surveying the boudoir, observing the process of her repositioning in time and space. The experience of history in Rome results in both Dorothea’s relocation in and her reinterpretation of the present, which appears to her as a present in the past: “The ideas and hopes which were living in her mind when she first saw this room nearly three months before were present now only as memories: she judged them as we judge transient and departed things” (Eliot 1897b, II: 4). Aligning Dorothea’s and the reader’s judgement, the narrator

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reveals the full scope of Dorothea’s disillusionment, which proves wrong all her previous expectations of married life and of her new subject position as a wife. In contrast to the transience of her past hopes, she finds a new orientation by looking at “the miniature of Mr Casaubon’s aunt Julia” (see A.H. Miller 2013: 156) – that is to say, by an interaction with a work of art that turns out to be newly meaningful to her in her changed position: What breadths of experience Dorothea seemed to have passed over since she first looked at this miniature! She felt a new companionship with it, as if it had an ear for her and could see how she was looking at it. (Eliot 2000: 173) What this free indirect discourse followed by a thought report conveys is a veritable fusion of horizons, a close perceptual interaction between the character and the miniature, a new hermeneutic option on the basis of a new communion of fates in Dorothea’s changed circumstances. The miniature is one of the few things in her surroundings she experiences as alive. It has eyes and ears to acknowledge her identity and to listen to her; it seems ani­ mated and becomes ‘iconic’:63 the hair and eyes seemed to be sending out light, the face was masculine and beamed on her with that full gaze which tells her on whom it falls that she is too interesting for the slightest movement of her eyelid to pass unnoticed and uninterpreted. (Eliot 1897b, II: 5) With Ernst Cassirer, one may argue that this moment is charged with “symbolic pregnance” for Dorothea. Symbolic pregnance is defined as the relation in consequence of which a sensuous thing embraces a meaning and represents it for consciousness: this pregnance can be reduced neither to merely reproductive processes nor to mediated intel­ lectual processes – it must ultimately be recognized as an independent and autonomous determination, without which neither an object nor a subject, neither a unity of the thing nor a unity of the self would be given to us. (Cassirer 1957, III: 235) While Cassirer focuses on a fundamental level of perception and the fact that perception is an integral part of meaning making, I suggest that Middlemarch transposes this constitutive process of perception into novelistic discourse and functionalizes it for its character construction, which is part and parcel of the novel’s panoramic structure. That the miniature “seemed to be sending out light” (Eliot 1897b, II: 5; my emphasis) is part of the narrator’s discourse, which verbalizes and represents a process that, for Dorothea, proves much

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more direct and that has an immediate impact on her, inextricably linked to her perception in this situation. The miniature interpellates Dorothea as a subject who is newly aware of herself and is no longer absorbed by her surroundings. Her unconscious and implicit bodily orientation has paved the way for a dif­ ferently modulated subject position by means of an aisthetic interplay between Dorothea’s gaze and the miniature. Middlemarch stresses the interrelationship between calibrations of per­ ception and notions of self, which are portrayed very much as embodied and dependent on space. As Sara Ahmed notes, “the materialization of subjects is hence inseparable from objects” (2010: 248–249); furthermore, she argues: “If orientations affect what bodies do, then they also affect how spaces take shape around certain bodies” (250). Dorothea’s new orientation as a subject in a particular space and against a particular background entails a recali­ bration of her perception that decidedly depends on the objects surrounding her and resituates her in a world that comes to restrict her in a newly per­ ceived material way. As it is emphasized that Dorothea needs to be read, to be interpreted, in order to feel alive, this passage also turns into an intermedial allegory on reading the novel. Presentification depends on reading here. Mutual recog­ nition, even if it is mediated by visual art or a reading process, confers pre­ sence on both parties and allows for a virtual tearing down of any barrier of mediation and ontological difference between the diegetic and the empirical world; both seem to be part of the same historical process, sharing, as it were, a general human fate.64 It is after this experience that Dorothea deci­ des to go to her husband in order to see him “glad because of her presence” (Eliot 1897b, II: 5, my emphasis; see A.H. Miller 2013: 158). The arrival of her sister Celia and Mr Brooke interrupts this intended meeting and the desired ratification of her feeling of presence. Nevertheless, as action and dialogue resume, the narrative again turns Dorothea into a narratable and, consequently, readable part of the plot. Dorothea’s strongly aisthetic moment interrupts the flow of narration. By doing so, it serves as the node that, on the one hand, highlights Dorothea’s deviation from her historical type, and, on the other, illustrates that readers and characters alike are part of history, connected by moments of presence and presentification. Moments of absorption are employed in Middlemarch to convey the effect of personal history on characters. Moods calibrate memory; sense impres­ sions come to be associated with both events and the concomitant feelings, and serve as historical markers in individual ‘biographies’. For Dorothea, the memory of Rome remains vivid in her mind. She retains the history of events as a history of affect: Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her afteryears. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed

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Realisms: George Eliot each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina. (Eliot 1897b, I: 297; my emphases)

Like a Proustian madeleine, a feeling of forlornness triggers memories asso­ ciated with Rome, which remain with Dorothea both as a mental imprint and as dreamlike images, as evoked by the comparison with the magic lan­ tern, creating Dorothea’s ‘mental cinema’ of her own past.65 She remembers this forlornness by imagining her own position with regard to a wide array of impressions derived from St Peter’s architecture, its spatial arrangement and its artworks. The mosaics, in particular, overwhelm Dorothea with the figures’ “intention” (297), their pathos formulas, their arrested gestures shaped by art. This mingling of moods, emotions and sense impressions provides memory itself with an aisthetic quality and imbues novelistic ‘his­ toriography’ with the aisthetics of individual remembrances. While hagio­ graphy shapes the life of a saint, aisthetics shapes the novel by communicating the concrete way in which history is experienced by indivi­ dual characters in a deviation from the norm – established by the genre capturing the life of St Theresa, for example. The aisthetics of history, the affect images of memory and their impact on individual life courses are registered in Middlemarch. The novel provides a reflection on embodied history and features an aisthetics based on embodiment. Correspondingly, it provides plastic descriptions of characters’ bodies and passions; further­ more, it creates moments of realization for characters, granting insights into their personal development, which are mediated by the interaction of char­ acters with works of art, as well as figments of their own imagination. Such imaginary mediations between embodied characters and their attempts to relate to their historical and material condition are crucial to Middlemarch’s aisthetic quality. The novel’s concluding part, entitled “Finale” (Eliot 1897b, III: 455), closes the frame opened by the Prelude and rounds off the novel’s historio­ graphic project. In turn, the last chapter functions as a kind of paratext, by providing a historiographical and metafictional reflection, as well as a sum­ mary of the characters’ lives after the narrative proper has closed: limit is a beginning as well as an ending. Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years? For the fragment of a life, how­ ever typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a

EVERY

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grand retrieval. Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many nar­ ratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic — the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.66 (Eliot 1897b, III: 455; my emphasis) In the metafictional reflection, the narrator presents limitation as the very con­ dition of possibility of story-telling; limitation is required for the selection of the novel’s beginning, as well as for its conclusion. While the novel’s diverse plot-strands are brought to some culmination or other – Bulstrode’s sins are exposed, Dorothea decides to marry Ladislaw, the Vincys are financially secure etc. – the panorama finds a limit in the Finale, as it can only offer a condensa­ tion,67 a summary of further developments. On the one hand, this again approximates the novel to history, because it implies that the different slices of characters’ lives continue after the narrative’s closure, just as the lives of his­ torical subjects would; on the other, it makes apparent that the novel as a form has found a limit in its attempt at expansive narration of deviations from types and norms. “[T]he fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web” (Eliot 1897b, III: 455), the narrator argues. Even when readers relate characters to types they have themselves encountered – which assumes a simi­ larity between fiction and reality due to the possibility of generalizing from the particular – those characters are supposed to be more than mere “sample[s]” (455); they are particular instances of a convoluted story with a plethora of plot lines. The narrator intimates that the marriage plot, which used to provide nar­ rative closure, now serves only as a beginning for further plot lines, which may, but need not, confer some structure on the intricate webs of life.68 By establishing deviation from types and norms as the very norm or definition, and thus delimi­ tation, of the novel form, Middlemarch provides a reflection on the fact that the novel itself is limited by the norms that it inculcates by its very foundational constitution, as well as the historically specific conventions to which it is subject. Middlemarch is thus defined by an attempt to perform its own dissolution as a means by which the ‘real’ can be represented; the ‘real’ is a differential of the norm, so the novel finds a new means of writing under erasure.69 Considering that Middlemarch is from its inception the story of Dor­ othea – “but why always Dorothea”? (Eliot 1897b, II: 9) – and the history of a woman’s life, it is interesting that a critique of the norms delimiting female life courses is ingrained in the unnarratable; gender suppression is thus part of the norm, of normalization, and thus unnarratable. As Lee Anna Maynard observes: Eliot’s formulation of closure […] offers an appearance of compliance and conformity to formal (and cultural) expectations that acts as a

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Realisms: George Eliot screen for less acceptable emotions, such as rage at the dearth of options and/or the secret negotiation of hope for new possibilities. (Maynard 2009: 112)

The norm, the sub-narratable, performs the cultural anaesthesia required to forestall social change. On the brink of political reform, gender hierarchies remain in place and marriage is used as a typical option for closure. As in Adam Bede, the critique of gender inequality in Middlemarch remains implicit, hidden in the unsayable: “a woman’s life encompassing great social usefulness will not generate a narrative because it cannot exist or even be imagined in the world Eliot depicts or the culture in which she herself lives” (Maynard 2009: 109). Thus, the whole structure of the novel performs a negotiation between individual forms of expression and social contexts that delimit what can be articulated at a particular historical moment. The detour of the Prelude, drawing on the genre of hagiography as a model for the literary representation of female life courses, turns out to be a crucial strategy of the text’s foundational constitution to articulate the unsayable through careful orchestration of what can and cannot be said. In contrast to Celia’s “common-sense” (Eliot 1897b, I: 7), which positions her in the very pink of ‘normal’ femininity, Dorothea’s divergences frequently result in silences and require literary mediation, as in the case of her return from Rome. The depiction of insignificant moments is thus part and parcel of the novel’s historiographic metafiction, which singles out small acts as means of change; it is the repetition of norms with slight differences that may effect social change. Dorothea’s story, in particular, is framed by the Prelude and the Finale: Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know. (Eliot 1897b, III: 464–465) Dorothea’s story does not live up to aesthetic ideals: it is a deviation from them in historically specific circumstances, providing a medium for her ‘life’ that no longer bears any similarity to models of Christian hagiographies or antique tragedies. Imperfect and quotidian socio-historical contexts nevertheless

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shape life courses, and, again, the empirical world of the reader is presented in analogy to the diegetic world. “[W]e insignificant people” contribute to and even shape other people’s histories (465) – which, in the context of Eliot’s ethical rea­ lism, entails the ethical task of reflecting on one’s own responsibility for the happiness of others. Time and again, the novel underlines the shaping power of history and the pressure of contextual factors that determine people’s life courses and individual outlook: For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly.70 (Eliot 1897b, I: 218–219) This passage highlights the everyday tragedy of lost opportunities and fail­ ure to rise above one’s circumstances to shape one’s own fate, which, because it is rarely consciously reflected on or openly articulated, requires a vicarious articulation – for instance, by a novel. Personal history, personal life courses, leave an imprint and calibrate perception, and it is history’s impact on individual lives that the novel intends to record. To achieve that, the narrator endeavours to “represent subnarratable elements whose very obscurity has rendered them supranarratable” (Warhol 2013: 58); that is to say, he reveals that which “need[s] not be told because it is too obvious or boring” as something that “cannot be told because it is ineffable or inex­ pressible” (49) and thus “implies that the very imperceptibility of the ordinary makes these seemingly insignificant details impossible to speak about” (58). Ordinary, everyday history is the new sublime in Middlemarch: the novel form mediates a cultural anaesthesia, i.e. that which cannot be consciously processed or worked through on the level of the characters, through aisthetics, incorporating the symbolic form of history to convey the reciprocal shaping power of individuals and contexts. As readers, we can get access to the characters’ foreclosed thoughts, emotions and perceptions through the narrator and through the characters’ senses and sensations shaped by specific historical contexts. 2.2.2 ‘Language’, ‘Art’ and ‘Economics’ Language is the first symbolic form discussed by Cassirer in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. It provides a code transforming percepts in a historically specific medium that structures it fundamentally:

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Realisms: George Eliot The process of language formation shows for example how the chaos of immediate impressions takes on order and clarity for us only when we ‘name’ it and so permeate it with the function of linguistic thought and expression. […] Thus language becomes one of the human spirit’s basic implements, by which we progress from the world of mere sensation to the world of intuition and ideas.71 (Cassirer 1955a, I: 87–88)

Cassirer thus illustrates the fundamental power of language to shape per­ cepts, as well as the processual character of meaning making. The way in which a symbolic form constructs its objects conveys a sense to its users that, by that very construction, it grasps the ‘reality’ of the objects repre­ sented (see 88). As a symbolic form, language constitutes a genuine and specific way of constructing meaning: “all linguistic expression, far from being a mere copy of the given world of sensation or intuition, possesses a definite independent character of ‘signification’” (1955a, I: 108). A particular expression is not the secondary expression of a previous and analytically separable perceptive process but is involved in the very process of meaning making. Eliot’s novelistic project carves out the ways in which different characters ‘have the world’ differently through language. Middlemarch’s narrator argues, for instance, that “the meaning we attach to words depends on our feeling” (Eliot 1897b, I: 337) and frequently reflects on the hermeneutic impact of the different subjective colourings of perception that influence characters’ interpretations of their worlds.72 Furthermore, the narrator fre­ quently emphasizes the flexibility of interpretations during characters’ youths, while time and circumstances narrow down the options for inter­ pretation of signs. In the case of Dorothea, her initial youthful hopefulness, reflected in a versatile use of language yielding a plethora of potential interpretations, becomes restricted by legal considerations, limiting her lan­ guage, her scope of perception and her range of action: Miss Brooke argued from words and dispositions not less unhesitatingly than other young ladies of her age. Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and coloured by a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge. (Eliot 1897b, I: 34) Whereas Dorothea’s idealism corresponds to a wide spectrum of interpretive options – in analogy with a wide range of evolutionary possibilities of development during stages of youth that later become more clearly deter­ mined and restricted – Mr Casaubon’s will seeking to prevent her marriage to Will Ladislaw and the will’s impact on public opinion narrow down those options, as well as her means of expression:

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“Sorrow comes in so many ways. Two years ago I had no notion of that—I mean of the unexpected way in which trouble comes, and ties our hands, and makes us silent when we long to speak. I used to despise women a little for not shaping their lives more, and doing better things. I was very fond of doing as I liked, but I have almost given it up,” she ended, smiling playfully. (Eliot 1897b, III: 18) The path from the senses to meaning is clearly modulated by circumstances, which, in turn, impact on language use. What is more, the limitations imposed on Dorothea’s behaviour by Casaubon’s will result in the exercise of implicit censorship, in the sense that performatives codified in the will can “produce a set of social effects [which] work their social power not only to regulate bodies, but to form them as well” (Butler 1997: 158–159). Apart from its impact on their relationship shortly before Will Ladislaw leaves Middlemarch, Dorothea’s confession to Will reveals the implicit power hierarchies condemning Dorothea to remain silent and to restrict her speech to that which it is possible to utter in this situation. This becomes all the more conspicuous when a third person enters the room and severely alters the character configuration of the scene: “Sir James was a power in a way unguessed by himself. Entering at that moment, he was an incorporation of the strongest reasons through which Will’s pride became a repellent force, keeping him asunder from Dorothea” (Eliot 1897b, III: 20). The scene has a strong theatrical quality, providing a character con­ figuration as a power constellation structured by the different characters’ embodiment of different social backgrounds, stances and options to speak. Every word, gesture and feature is constantly being interpreted, but the restriction of expression opens up ample space for misinterpretations. The scene highlights the interaction of bodies, presentified by a heightened emo­ tionality, and reveals the characters’ struggle with the social norms delimiting the range of actions available to them and marking possible transgressions. The scene is charged with an aisthetic quality, as the characters’ feelings and stances – Dorothea’s and Will’s still unacknowledged love and Sir James’s moral rejection of any kind of contact between them – are represented by the performance of embodied social interaction, with the social hierarchy between them reflected in their very comportment. What and how the characters per­ ceive, and how they are able, in that situation, to interpret what they perceive, are restricted and modulated by their awareness of each other’s different stan­ ces and forms of conduct, embedded in a network of social hierarchies and corresponding behavioural scripts. Embodiment, calibrations of perception and their impact on the hermeneutic options available are defining features of Middlemarch’s realism; the novel foregrounds the interdependence of a char­ acter’s position, be it social or emotional, the corresponding embodiment of that position as habitus and emotional disposition, and the range of options at their disposal. Correspondingly, power hierarchies, as reflected in language use, are transposed into the novel’s very aisthetics.

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Aisthetics is also closely connected to aesthetic reflections on both lan­ guage and pictorial art. Confronted with Naumann’s predilection for visual representation, which causes him to recommend thinking of “‘Mistress Second-Cousin as antique form animated by Christian sentiment — a sort of Christian Antigone — sensuous force controlled by spiritual passion’” (Eliot 1897b, I: 290), Will provides an intermedial reflection on the different arts’ respective capacities for expressing female beauty, in particular: “Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about repre­ sentations of women. As if a woman were a mere coloured super­ ficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment. — This woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice, pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of her.” (Eliot 1897b, I: 292) The main limitations Will emphasizes are sculpture’s and painting’s lack of motion and sound, which language can at least attempt to mimic by transcoding them.73 Thus, he awards language a greater capacity to represent vivacity – including in the biological sense of aliveness, marked by voice and movement. Eliot herself, in “Notes on Form in Art”, qualifies sculpture and painting as arts defined by the “composition or the selection of attitudes & the formation of groups” (Eliot 1963b: 434), singling out embodied (social) stances or pathos formulas as the object of these arts. In a similar vein, Will Ladislaw grants further aesthetic authority to the representational capacity of writing. The difference in perception – Naumann sees Dorothea as a figure embodying aesthetic styles, while Will expresses his love for Dorothea by con­ ceiving of her as an animated person with a voice that Naumann’s art fails to capture – is reflected in their different conceptions of art. This is further illu­ strated by Will’s definition of a poet and poetry, which, however, turns out to be a stance that also objectifies Dorothea: “To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion — a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling fla­ shes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.” […] “You are a poem — and that is to be the best part of a poet — what makes up the poet’s consciousness in his best moods,” said Will, showing such originality as we all share with the morning and the spring-time and other endless renewals. (Eliot 1897b, I: 341–342; emphasis in the original)

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Fashioning himself along the lines of a Romanticist poetology, Will appro­ priates notions of masculinity that envisage women as the content or object of men’s reflective and poetic powers. Apart from the close interconnection between feeling and knowledge and the strong alliance of the poet with nature, this self-fashioning entails heightened perceptive powers. The poet needs to discern the minutest differences. Poetic souls thus seem particularly adaptive. Dorothea develops alongside the poet in a synecdochical relation­ ship, as the best part of his consciousness, which affirms the view that the representation of women in art is tied to both aesthetic and social values in Will’s aesthetic theory and in the Victorian conventions of realist repre­ sentation more generally. Dorothea’s notion of art differs widely from Will’s with regard to art’s social function. This becomes most apparent in the debate where Dorothea argues for an aesthetics of everyday life against an aestheticist notion of art, which Will derives from Romanticist tenets: “I fear you are a heretic about art generally. How is that? I should have expected you to be very sensitive to the beautiful everywhere.” “I sup­ pose I am dull about many things,” said Dorothea, simply. “I should like to make life beautiful — I mean everybody’s life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it.” “I call that the fanaticism of sympathy,” said Will, impetuously. “You might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement. If you carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn evil that you might have no advantage over others. The best piety is to enjoy — when you can.” (Eliot 1897b, I: 335–336) Dorothea bemoans the social exclusivity of art and reflects on the fact that aesthetic appreciation is a learned capacity amounting to cultural capital. When she meets Will for the first time and is asked to judge his drawings, she replies: ‘I am no judge of these things,’ […] not coldly, but with an eager deprecation of the appeal to her. ‘You know, uncle, I never see the beauty of those pictures which you say are so much praised. They are a language I do not understand.’ (Eliot 1897b, I: 17) Aesthetic judgement is analogized to a language that has to be learnt, and Will as an artist attempts to undertake such an education. However, Dor­ othea still disagrees with him regarding the function of art as a form of social distinction, whereas Will defends the privilege of enjoying the

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pleasures of beauty against claims of social equality that, for him, goes hand in hand with a perceptive dullness due to socialization. In his view, the perceptive powers of the poet enable progress in one’s susceptibilities, while their discarding would imply retrogression. He takes social inequality as a given and enjoyment as an opportunity for liberation in any social circum­ stances. The different perspectives of the two characters thus reflect the interdependence of their social status and their view of aesthetics. As char­ acters coming from different economic backgrounds, Dorothea and Will can finally marry after negotiating their social differences through their debate on aesthetics. Aesthetics is the field in which they discuss their stances towards pleasure and, finally, Dorothea agrees to enjoy herself in a happy and sexually fulfilled marriage to Will. Linguistic and aesthetic reflections also occur on the extra- and hetero­ diegetic levels of the narrator’s self-fashioning in Middlemarch. The novel’s metafictional reflections are closely aligned with historiographical reflections and a discussion of the changed relationship between the novel and history. The narrator describes crucial differences between Henry Fielding’s approach to the novel in the eighteenth century and the conventions char­ acterizing his own time of writing: historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happi­ ness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm­ chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spa­ cious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a parrot-house. I at least have so much to do in unravel­ ling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and inter­ woven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of rele­ vancies called the universe. (Eliot 1897b, I: 213–214; my emphasis)

A GREAT

While eighteenth-century novelists are described as the giants by whom our nineteenth-century narrator is dwarfed, the narrator is sufficiently self-con­ fident to characterize his own position in literary history, which is dis­ tinguished from that of the preceding century mainly by a condensed perception of time and the experience of increased complexity of social interrelations. Any attempt at imitation would result in a meagre parody.

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For literary representation, the narrator formulates the correspondingly calibrated aim of shedding light on a selected extract from the complex texture of “certain human lots” (214). The differences between the eight­ eenth- and nineteenth-century novel are seen as reflecting an incisive histor­ ical difference, with corresponding changes in the literary conventions at a novelist’s disposal. The changed narrative pace, for example, is related to an accelerated passing of time adapted to “our needs” (Eliot 1897b, I: 213), which, in turn, are affected by economic changes (“time, like money”, 213). The novel’s historiographical metafiction finds its correlate in a reflection on the very language that can be used and on the corresponding conventionalized limits on literary expression, structure and form. Novel writing is represented as a function of its historical context and thus as an articulation of cultural evolution. Economics serves as another crucial symbolic form in Middlemarch, cali­ brating perception, shaping behaviour and determining the options for social interaction. The very context of provincial life provides an experimental reduction of social interaction that the novel employs to render social interdependencies and their effect on the characters’ outlooks observable. Regarding Lydgate’s life choices, Middlemarch is charged with the function of fate: Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are con­ stantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. (Eliot 1897b, I: 142; my emphasis) Economics can be considered a symbolic form with an impact on characters’ perceptions; it has an impact on their social interrelations and on their consciousness thereof.74 For Dorothea, the decision to remarry and to choose Will Ladislaw as her husband is closely connected to her subjection to an economic regime and a domestic rationale; thus, economics and the oikos are closely intertwined. She suggests to Will: “‘We could live quite well on my own fortune – it is too much – seven hundred a-year – I want so little – no new clothes – and I will learn what everything costs’” (Eliot 1897b, III: 427). Learning the price of things is part of a change of outlook entailed by Dorothea’s envisaging her reduced economic means. Whereas Dorothea accepts economizing as the price for her marital choice, Rosamond Vincy opts for Lydgate in order to rid herself of the need to economize and thus to harmonize her class-con­ scious self-fashioning with her financial means. Her economic situation sets limits to her outlook and what is supposed to be understood as happiness: “Rosamond felt that she might have been happier if she had not been the

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daughter of a Middlemarch manufacturer. She disliked anything which reminded her that her mother’s father had been an innkeeper” (Eliot 1897b, I: 150). Rosamond therefore spends her time imitating a socially elevated habitus and imagining her social ascent: “She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own” (Eliot 1897b, I: 175; emphasis in the original).75 In order to escape her lowly economic context, she histrionically embodies the comportment associated with a dif­ ferent social stratum; it is manners and beauty that allow her this social ascent by performance, this repeating of social norms differently to achieve her own ends. Her marriage to Lydgate seems to her to be an opportunity to climb the social ladder, but her imagined and imaginary future life course is thwarted by debt and (temporary) financial ruin (see Eliot 1897b, I: 252). Economics not only impacts on characters’ auto-images, but also on their options for ‘having the world’ more widely. Structuring the path from the senses to meaning, it conditions the range of behaviour and social interac­ tions because economic capital determines social and cultural capital, as well as options for agency. Furthermore, it impacts on characters’ perception of temporality, as the passing of time is divided up by the terms and conditions of credits or leases, which, in turn, delimit agency as soon as ‘time runs out’ and the material means of agency are withdrawn. While this is generally valid for all characters, there is a further subdivision of groups of characters in Middlemarch who are more or less affected by economic considerations. Within the “Rosamond-Lydgate-Bulstrode story”, characters’ very lives and public personae depend on their economic means, and only Rosamond finally thrives in this form (Rothfield 1992: 106). In this plot strand, medical aspects closely intertwine with economic ones, as characters’ physiological well-being is very much dependent on their economic means. As Lydgate’s debts increase, he treats himself to opium, for example. The threat of addiction marks him as physically and physiologically dependent on money; within a moral discourse such as the mid-Victorian discourse on drugs, his resorting to opium also implies a decline in character.76 Money is thus fur­ ther characterized by the metaphorical analogy to drug consumption, emphasizing the bodily impact of poverty. Similarly, Bulstrode’s health deteriorates as the immoral means by which he acquired his wealth are exposed. A parallel is drawn between the flow of money and the vital bloodstream; Middlemarch as a novelistic form is structured by such differ­ ent forms of ‘circulation’. Other characters, such as the Garths, belong to a different group defined by “an immediacy and transparency of reality, and in particular the reality of character” (Rothfield 1992: 103). As such, they have different means of overcoming financial calamities, as is shown when Caleb Garth is required to pay Fred Vincy’s debts. Caleb, who understands ‘business’ as “the skilful application of labour”, not as “money transactions” (Eliot 1897b, III: 28), lives up to the self-help ideology that defines Adam Bede and remains

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untainted by a capitalist rationale. When Mary and Fred finally reproduce this lifestyle, they ‘safeguard’ a more strongly rural, agricultural and idea­ lized way of life for which the novel betrays some nostalgia (see Shaw 1999: 261–262). The symbolic form of economics thus calibrates perception due to its severe material impact on the ways in which characters can ‘see’ them­ selves, their environment and the way in which their very comportment is affected by the financial leeway open to them. Tertius Lydgate’s calibration of perception, and moral outlook, are most incisively curtailed in Middlemarch. As a young man, Tertius still imagines himself to be entirely independent of economic considerations: He was but seven-and-twenty, an age at which many men are not quite common—at which they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in avoid­ ance, thinking that Mammon shall never put a bit in their mouths and get astride their backs, but rather that Mammon, if they have anything to do with him, shall draw their chariot. (Eliot 1897b, I: 215; my emphasis) At this young age, Lydgate believes that he is able to shape his own future. However, his plot line soon illustrates that, as a medical student without any affiliation to the traditional universities of Oxford and Cambridge and without social ties to the established surgeons and physicians in Mid­ dlemarch, he is utterly dependent on material means, which challenges and, ultimately, disproves the notion of unhampered development of the indivi­ dual.77 The material circumstances calibrating Lydgate’s perception are illustrated by reference to everyday material contexts, such as furniture: Lydgate’s spots of commonness lay in the complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of noble intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found in ordinary men of the world: that distinction of mind which belonged to his intellectual ardour, did not penetrate his feeling and judgment about furniture, or women, or the desirability of its being known (without his telling) that he was better born than other country surgeons. He did not mean to think of furniture at present; but when­ ever he did so, it was to be feared that neither biology nor schemes of reform would lift him above the vulgarity of feeling that there would be an incompatibility in his furniture not being of the best. (Eliot 1897b, I: 227–228; my emphasis) This explicit narratorial characterization reveals that, while, at 27, Lydgate was not “quite common” (215), he already has “spots of commonness” (227), which extend, among other things, to his evaluation of furniture. His miscalculation regarding his purchasing power eventually plays a part in his financial ruin, as he is not long able to afford the superior quality of the furniture chosen for his house, which also exceeds his financial means.

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Furniture, as an aspect of everyday life and material culture, is represented as a crucial factor in shaping Lydgate’s outlook. A reference to furniture also introduces one of the central allegories (or as Eliot calls it, parables) for the egocentric structure of how people perceive their own (material) circumstances, the allegory of the pier-glass (see J. Hillis Miller 1975: 138–142): eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multi­ tudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a ligh­ ted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent—of Miss Vincy, for example. (Eliot 1897b, I: 403) AN

A piece of “ugly furniture” (403) is able to reflect the egocentric view of its owner; the narrator exploits the close connection between the interior dec­ oration of houses and their inhabitants, another metonymical relationship that reveals the interdependence of material context and calibrations of perception. The immediate, material environment is aisthetically relevant. Furthermore, this passage’s epistemological implication entails the insight that perception centred on the subject must be understood as the effect of a subjective positing of one’s own perspective as central, which is far from reflecting the actual conditions of existence. On an even larger scale, anthropocentrism appears as a subject effect, derived from the structuring capacity of perception and, by extension, understanding. Taking the pierglass example and many others into consideration, Alberto Gabriele emphasizes the visual quality of Eliot’s realism that, he claims, proves par­ ticularly “sensitive to visual spectacles and contemporary technology of vision”; he describes this brand of realism as “pre-cinematographic” because “the complex multiplicity of reality yields to the cogent understanding of a parallel vision of intuited unity next and antithetical to the multidirectional pulls of modernity” (Gabriele 2020: 148). Consequently, the novel and precinematographic vision share “the self-reflexive awareness of the optical and cognitive move from fragments to a dynamic unity performed by the viewers themselves” (148). This is a different view on the same phenomenon, arguing that, referencing emerging media technology, one can observe similar stra­ tegies of synthesis added to a mass of unstructured, chaotic impressions. Pre-cinematography and human perception provide a vantage point that

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creates unity out of multiplicity and thereby sheds light on the fact that this unity is always a particular, perspectivized and constructed unity challenged by a plethora of other perspectives. Lydgate’s egocentrism and corresponding selective perception are reflected in his intellectual vigour and ethical ideals, but also in his general com­ monness, which is conflated with a failure to reflect on alternative perspec­ tives and a lack of sympathy for others. This is tragically revealed when he realizes that Rosamond is unwilling to support him as a partner in bad times, particularly with regard to the financial straits the couple faces (see Eliot 1897b, III: 92). As both Rosamond and Tertius Lydgate only project their own desires onto their respective partner, the narrator is the only instance capable of highlighting the different ‘investments’ in their relation­ ship: “Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond! Each lived in a world of which the other knew nothing” (Eliot 1897b, I: 251). Lydgate must face his economic calamity on his own, and in the end his youthful vigour and idealism are entirely subdued by necessity. Economic scarcity narrows down his perspective and calibrates his perception differently. The first indication of Lydgate’s submission to economic circumstances is his vote for a new chaplain for the Middlemarch Infirmary, in which his view is influenced by his financial dependence on Mr Bulstrode: “It may be offensive to others. But I shall not desist from voting with him on that account.” Lydgate immediately wrote down “Tyke.” So the Rev. Walter Tyke became chaplain to the Infirmary, and Lydgate con­ tinued to work with Mr Bulstrode. He was really uncertain whether Tyke were not the more suitable candidate, and yet his consciousness told him that if he had been quite free from indirect bias he should have voted for Mr Farebrother. (Eliot 1897b, I: 284–285) His choices slowly narrow down the range of options in his life and, corre­ spondingly, have a bearing on ethics, because material obligations bias his actions (see Eliot 1897b, III: 316). Eventually, Lydgate is made to realize that his financial dependence on Bulstrode taints his professional integrity and aligns him with Bulstrode’s interests. The following free indirect thought illustrates his complicity: But if he had not received any money — if Bulstrode had never revoked his cold recommendation of bankruptcy — would he, Lydgate, have abstained from all inquiry even on finding the man dead? — would the shrinking from an insult to Bulstrode — would the dubiousness of all medical treatment and the argument that his own treatment would pass for the wrong with most members of his profession — have had just the same force or significance with him? (Eliot 1897b, III: 316)

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Lydgate now understands himself as a failure measured against his original professional ideals (see Eliot 1897b, III: 459). The novel thus identifies him as one of those men whose fate is a common lot – whose youthful selfconcept is so altered by circumstance that, were his younger self ever to return to experience his changed situation in advanced years, it would con­ sider the “furniture ghastly” (Eliot 1897b, I: 219).78 Lydgate’s course of life, like Dorothea’s, provides an ordinary tragedy, a fall from high ideals through his tragic flaw, his “spots of commonness” (Eliot 1897b, I: 227), causing his subjection to Mammon, of which he believed himself to be free in his youth. This submission transforms his outlook on life, channels his perception of his circumstances and social environment, and finally renders his life a failure to himself. Middlemarch thus reveals economics to be a symbolic form that shapes perception; this is further reflected “in a formal mode that creates a bridge between material and psychological realism” (Ryder 2017: 236). The town Middlemarch is the emblematic circumstantial factor effecting this change, subjecting Lydgate to its shaping power: Not only young virgins of that town, but grey-bearded men also, were often in haste to conjecture how a new acquaintance might be wrought into their purposes, contented with very vague knowledge as to the way in which life had been shaping him for that instrumentality. Mid­ dlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowing Lydgate and assimilating him very comfortably. (Eliot 1897b, I: 233) While Lydgate comes to the town to revolutionize its medical practitioners, he ends up being shaped by the limited options Middlemarch grants him. Generally, Lydgate’s medical career depends on the economic circumstances provided in Middlemarch, but the interdependencies can be considered to reach even further, as the concurring symbolic forms coalesce in the novel and inform one another. Medicine, economics, politics and language turn out to be intricately intertwined.79 In Middlemarch, culture is envisaged as the entirety of symbolic forms. This view, articulated on the level of the novel as a whole, safeguards a society’s ability to communicate in the face of increased historical, social and disciplinary differentiations. Taking into account myth, religion, lan­ guage, art, science and economics, the novel is in itself a political statement on the intersection of different symbolic forms, guaranteeing the mutual comprehensibility of increasingly specialized disciplinary discourses, for which Eliot serves as a novelistic mediator. Consequently, the novel is positioned as the form par excellence to achieve an articulation of and communication between symbolic forms. Apart from such a phenomen­ ological view of culture, Middlemarch is structured to reflect on the text’s dependence on its performative construction by a constitutional foundation and forms of implicit censorship to maintain the construction thus achieved.

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Correspondingly, it reveals how change can come about by having characters repeat norms differently within the range of particular historical contexts and environments shaping both the narratological means of representation, on the extradiegetic level, and perception, together with individual outlooks, on the diegetic level. On the level of characters’ perception, Middlemarch illustrates the calibration of perception by emphasizing characters’ embodiment and the corresponding limitations on their perception. This is enhanced by an aisthetic rhetoric that relies on metaphors such as the pier-glass or on sensual language to convey characters’ emotions and thoughts. Middlemarch adheres to an ais­ thetically mediated realism, which impacts on how the novel’s ethical outlook can be conceptualized and positions the novel form as a central systemic interdiscourse, integrating differentiating discourses and disciplines in the last third of the nineteenth century.

Notes 1 Eliot, in turn, is delighted that Dallas – “one of the most influential figures in the mid-century literary community” (Flynn 2016: 49) – “‘is an enthusiastic admirer’” (qtd. in Flynn 2016: 49). Debra Gettelman discusses Dallas’s importance for Eliot, particularly with regard to his notion of the unconscious and his emphasis on sympathy (see Gettelman 2005: 35–36). See also Clayton 1979: 647. In terms of social difference, Mark Warren McLaughlin claims that Dallas affirms “Adam Bede’s participation in the construction of just such a middle-class culture” (McLaughlin 1994: 64). 2 She is also quick to deduce that Adam Bede was written by a female author. In her 1859 review, however, she still uses masculine personal pronouns to refer to ‘George Eliot’. 3 In her review of Riehl’s Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft (1851) and Land und Leute (1853), which make up the first two volumes of his Naturgeschichte des Volkes als Grundlage einer deutschen Socialpolitik (1851–1869), Eliot praises Riehl’s request for a new methodology for the study of cultural history and sociology (see Eliot 1963a: 267) that is “based on ‘rambling research’, at least. By rambling, I mean going somewhere on one’s own two feet, to see things with one’s own eyes and hear things with one’s own ears” (Riehl 1869: 3–4; co-translated from the German by Nadine Böhm-Schnitker and Mark Taplin). The basis for such a perambulatory approach is the aisthetics of a participant observation (see Kreisel 2003: 555). 4 As Dinah Birch shows: [t]he affective mode, with its direct and immediate appeal to the emotions of the reader, became powerfully influential in domestic fiction in the 1850s, as it was developed in such works as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), in Charles Dickens’s phenomenally popular and successful novels, or, over the Atlantic, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). It was a development that was closely bound up with complex tensions produced by the changing gender politics of the novel in the 1840s and 1850s, as the rise of the domestic novel accentuated the feminine dimensions of fiction. (2010: 12) The importance of affect for the novel reveals a struggle for a literary appeal to readers’ senses that is fought out most acerbically between ‘realists’ and ‘sensationalists’. 5 See Hertz 2003: 98 for a historical explanation of this reference. See also Auer­ bach for a discussion of the similarity between Hetty Sorrel and the narrator, both of whom rely on mirrors, albeit in different ways (Auerbach 1982: 178).

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6 From mid-Victorian times onwards, ink was increasingly mass-produced (see Maywald 2010: 43), whereas in Adam Bede (as well as The Moonstone), it is charged with a mythical or even magical quality, bringing forth possible worlds. This beginning also tends to dislocate the author’s voice, not only by sublating it in the narrative instance, but by pretending that it is preceded by and equal to sor­ cery. Interestingly, the comparison of authorship with sorcery also implies that the author’s work is erased. Writing is not labour, but magically evokes another world that one can ‘see directly’. Barbara Hardy, too, underlines the constitutive role of ink when she argues: “Two ink-drops, one impersonal and ‘single’, the other parti­ cular and the first of many, compound an elaborate creative fiat” (2010: 30). She further emphasizes the relevance of the senses in this scene when she claims: “George Eliot’s creativity is self-delighting, as it embodies knowledge and thought in dynamic, affective and sensuous forms” (30). In doing so, she closely relates the text’s foundational constitution to its appeal to the senses, which I regard as crucial for an aisthetics of the novel. Hardy locates the novel’s aisthetic appeal in the objects described: “Humanity and objects are analysed and generalized, but because they are imagined and written by an artist, not a sociologist or an anthropologist, they are particularized and endowed with sensuous and affective power” (34). 7 Rachel Bowlby also draws attention to the appropriation of magic, arguing that the narrator’s promise to do likewise amounts to a performative creation of the past: “The past will appear, or reappear, in a promised future in which, in the double sense, it is shown: it will appear in reality, and it is a performance” (2011: 417; emphasis in the original). 8 See Isobel Armstrong for a discussion of Eliot’s references to Spinoza’s Ethics in her redefinition of Smith’s Enlightenment concept of sympathy and her strong emphasis on the affects as embodied and connected to the imagination (Arm­ strong 2013: 296–300). See also Clare Carlisle (2020). 9 Ian Adam has highlighted the sensational quality of the plot strand around Hetty (see Adam 1975: 145). Royce Mahawatte has explored the references to the gothic (2013), while there is a long tradition on the pastoral (see Gates 1998: 20). 10 See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, and Bhabha 1994: 34–35. See also Cottom 1987: 7. For the need to incorporate the other, see Bowlby 2011: 427. See also Josephine McDonagh, who understands the exclusion of otherness as a pre­ requisite for instituting a new order (see 2001: 248). 11 Janice Schroeder highlights the synaesthesia of the narrator’s statement, arguing that “Eliot sutures a visual metaphor onto an oral/vocal one: the novel as ‘defective mirror’ whose reflection is narrated aloud by a courtroom witness” (2011: 182). Jon Singleton (2011) observes that the term ‘faithful’ – according to his definition of ‘faith’ (see 240) – indicates “the historically and socially deter­ mined cognitive schema of the implied author” (252), thus highlighting the situ­ ated, embodied and historically specific perspective of the narrative instance, which cannot be correctly described as ‘omniscient’. 12 Sarah Gates makes this explicit when she shows how the inculcation of ethical realism requires that “‘unrealistic’ systems of representing reality must fall before the newly sharpened, newly realistic scythe” (1998: 24). The exclusion of char­ acters is frequently discussed along lines of class (see also Mark Warren McLaughlin 1994: 56). 13 See Janice Schroeder for a discussion of “Hayslope as a particular kind of soundscape” (2011: 183). Schroeder also analyses Adam’s voice and the fact that “the reader hears Adam before seeing him” (183). She argues that “Adam’s thoroughly embodied voice” is apparently “coherent with his idealized workingclass frame” (183). 14 Whereas the original creation is very much a ‘digital’ one, in that God lets Adam come alive by the touch of his finger, the image in Eliot’s novel is the pen’s

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penetration of a drop or egg of ink, drawing attention to a different art and its instruments. The novel as a whole negotiates an interplay between surveillance and active intervention (see Kreisel 2003: 541–543), thus addressing a central conundrum of ethical realism (see Menke 2000: 630). The narrator cannot intervene to make all characters ‘do the right thing’, as this would obliterate the motivation for telling the story in the first place (see Kreisel 2003: 541–542). To school readers in an ethical realist perspective, the novel needs to reveal the right conduct, but it cannot represent it from the beginning, as the narrative would then collapse. It is thus hardly surprising that Adam Bede is considered “the most scopophilic of Eliot’s novels” (J. Mitchell 1994: 91). As to the characters, Adam remains as unconscious of the surveilling gaze as Dinah, whereas Hetty is always conscious of how she is seen. This has several implications. It underscores once again that Dinah and Adam merge with their environment and are not self-centred. As a result, they blend in seamlessly with their socio-historical context and can serve as representatives of particular character types. Hetty, by contrast, is narcissistic and highly aware of the possible perspectives that others may have on her. Con­ sequently, she is a character who renders readerly voyeurism conspicuous and challenges the seamless articulation of character and context. In doing so, she challenges the plausibility of class hierarchies and established power structures (see Dalley 2008: 559). I use the term ‘intermediality’ here in the sense that the novel tries to mimic other media, such as painting, using its own means. See, for example, Werner Wolf (2008: 327). Monika Brown, too, argues that Adam Bede “imitates some of [Dutch genre paintings’] purposes and techniques” (1990: 127). In particular, Eliot refers to Gerrit Dou’s The Spinner’s Prayer (c. 1645) and A Young Woman at her Toilet (1667) (see Gould 2012: 406; 416), as a model for her writing. Critics have long been aware of this reference (see, for example, Witemeyer 1979: 2; Yeazell 2008: 91–124). Gould discusses the vital role played by genre painting, alongside philosophy, in enabling Eliot to establish a specifi­ cally novelistic ethics. Jacques Rancière mentions genre painting as one of the examples that illustrate his thesis that “a regime of perception, sensation and interpretation of art is constituted and transformed by welcoming images, objects and performances that seemed most opposed to the idea of fine art” (2013: X). James Eli Adams argues for instance that “[t]he entire novel aspires constantly towards the condition of music”, which can be considered “the emblematic lan­ guage of sympathy” (1991: 237). Sound studies more generally have emphasized the intermedial evocation of aurality. See Elaine Scarry, who argues that work is hard to represent in the novel because “[i]t is the essential nature of work to be perpetual, repetitive, habitual. There is no formal convention in any genre of literature that would make it either possi­ ble or desirable to portray it in all its constancy and repetitiveness” (1994: 65). Robyn Warhol has shown on the basis of Scarry’s argument that Hetty’s work, unnarratable due to its iteration, is therefore portrayed by means of a summary, “in gerunds that suggest repeated or habitual motions rather than narrating dis­ crete acts” (Warhol 2013: 60). Warhol also lists strategies such as “metonymy and nominalization” (60). With regard to food presentation, Roland Barthes highlights the mythical func­ tion of surfaces in his essay on “Ornamental Cookery” in which he analyses the food representation in Elle magazine, directed at a working-class readership. Dishes are shown “as objects at once near and inaccessible, whose consumption can perfectly well be accomplished simply by looking” (Barthes 1998: 79). In contrast to magazines presenting food for social strata with “purchasing power” (79), Elle just sells an idea(l), a “dream-like cookery” (79), hiding the fact that

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readers cannot actually afford the food represented. Although Barthes’s analysis refers to a completely different socio-historical and cultural context, it is nevertheless helpful to read the representation of the dairy in Adam Bede as a mythical repre­ sentation, designed to appeal to an urban readership craving for the bucolic idyll. 21 See also Gettelman 2005: 34. This strategy chimes with Walter Hartright’s description of Laura in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Hartright encourages readers to evoke for themselves an effect similar to that which Laura has on him, so that they might treasure fully their impression of the character (see Collins 2008a: 50). Robyn Warhol describes Hetty’s “beauty as supranarra­ table” (Warhol 2013: 57), i.e. as that which “cannot be told because it is ineffable or inexpressible” (49). This is indicated by the phrase “[i]t is of little use for me to tell you” (Eliot 2008: 76). 22 Although the novel does not leave much room for sympathy with Hetty – Nina Auerbach argues convincingly that “the novel’s rhetoric forbids the reader to like Hetty” (1982: 174; see also McLaughlin 1994: 69; Gettelman 2005: 41) – it never­ theless applies strategies that align Hetty with novel writing (see Auerbach 1982: 178) and, albeit without her being aware of it, with connecting (see 176) and remembering (see Greiner 2013: 107), i.e. key aspects of Eliot’s ethical realism. It is only through these brittle interconnections and interpretations that Hetty emerges as a character excluded from a viable subject position by an orchestrated social con­ demnation in which the reader is complicit. The novel reveals the dire ethical con­ sequences of patriarchal gender norms almost imperceptibly (see McDonagh 2001: 257–259). In addition, through Hetty’s association with novel writing (see Bowlby 2011: 427), she can be understood as an unconscious transmitter of history (see Greiner 2013: 106). Sarah Gates draws attention to the generic options for resistance when she claims, drawing on Eve Sedgwick, that Eliot differentiates “between valuations and analysis that can be measured in her continuing reliance on alter­ native generic forms to articulate potential in her female characters and on realistic demystification of those forms to enact the cramping of that potential” (Gates 1998: 32; emphases in the original). So Gates sees a New Historicist oscillation between resistance and containment at work in Adam Bede, which underlines the rather conservative thrust of the novel. Deanna Kreisel analyses Hetty, a character who is intent on concealing her feelings, as well as her pregnancy and the infanticide, in the context of Marian Evans’s own incognito as George Eliot and the narrative vacilla­ tion between sympathy and intervention in Adam Bede (see Kreisel 2003: 541–570). Against this background, she argues that “Hetty Sorrel – simultaneously kittenish and hard-hearted, fertile and unmaternal – brings together, threatens to destabilize, and ultimately helps to resolve the tensions inherent in Eliot’s masculine incognito and her narrative project writ large” (543). Here again, Hetty is the character most closely connected to Eliot’s negotiation of female authorship. 23 She is therefore turned into a myth of the dairymaid, in much the same way as Roland Barthes describes the “Basque chalet” in the context of Paris: the adhomination is so frank that I feel this chalet has just been created on the spot, for me, like a magical object springing up in my present life with­ out any trace of the history which has caused it. For this interpellant speech is at the same time a frozen speech: at the moment of reaching me, it sus­ pends itself, turns away and assumes the look of a generality: it stiffens, it makes itself look neutral and innocent. (1998: 125; emphasis in the original) In a similar fashion, Hetty appears as the paragon of idyllic dairymaids in the context of everyday peasant life and interpellates ‘viewers’ as the very myth of such an idyll.

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24 While Hetty’s beauty is frequently underlined by quasi-visual descriptions of her outward appearance and by her entrancing effect on others, one must admit “that Dinah is also a spectacle” (C. Levine 2003: 113). Hetty, however, remains entirely self-centred and narcissistic (see 121; also see J. Mitchell 1994: 93), whereas Dinah is open to others (see Eliot 2008: 118–120); consequently, their visual beauty results in entirely different outcomes. Dinah’s can thus be appropriated for the ends of ethical realism. 25 With Levinas, one may argue that this passage invites an ethical reflection on the readers’ relationship to Hetty, as it elicits an imagined face-to-face confrontation that implies the possibility of violence due to the great and incomprehensible effect that Hetty has on her fellow beings (see Nestor 2002: 7; 11). 26 Within the context of the Victorian Gothic, Mario Ortiz Robles has revealed that “the literary use of animal imagery makes visible those mechanisms of biopower that would otherwise remain implicit in the discursive employment of the law” (2015: 21). What is shown in Eliot’s Adam Bede is something quite similar, despite the fact that Gothic ‘monstrosity’ is negotiated in the context of infanti­ cide within a realist frame. The monster as such would, of course, not have been containable by realism, but Hetty is constructed to convey a kind of ‘moral monstrosity’ (see Homans 1993: 167). The monster is presented as a decidedly liminal being, marking that which remains, to use Agamben’s language, excluded as the socio-political being emerges in the context of political sovereignty (see Ortiz Robles 2015: 20). 27 Regarding the novel’s plot, George Eliot claimed that the case of Mary Voce, who poisoned her child in 1802 and was executed on the Nottingham gallows, “lay in [her] mind for years on years, as a dead germ, apparently – till time had made [her] mind a nidus in which it could fructify; it then turned out to be the germ of ‘Adam Bede’” (Haight 1954, III: 176). 28 Her generic exclusion from realism goes hand in hand with her generational exclusion: her child does not live, and Hetty dies before she turns 25. Her life escapes the power ‘to make live’ (see Foucault 2004: 241), the novel lets her die. Nevertheless, the pastoral and the melodrama provide frames for Hetty’s body which stays present as an aisthetic impression, as a felt effect throughout the novel. 29 Although Adam Bede clearly partakes of the pastoral mode in a literary sense, biopolitical issues are germinally present in the novel through its focus on the marriage plot and its depiction of infanticide in a context of middle-class norms and normalizations (see Foucault 2004: 253). 30 See Ute Kleinmann’s discussion of framing practices characteristic of and specific to Gerrit Dou’s painting, which became a particular focus of scholarly attention in the nineteenth century (Kleinmann 1996: 33–34). Dou’s practices tie in with Eliot’s literary strategy of providing frames to hedge access to the diegetic world and to elicit epistemological reflections. 31 Sarah Gates also draws attention to the novel’s generic hybridity, challenging a critical tradition that reads Adam Bede “as essentially monogeneric”, on the basis that realism revises older generic traditions into a singular new one. Whereas other critical strands allow for “generic conflict”, but restrict their analysis to only one genre other than realism, Gates argues that “the ‘pastoral myth’ is only one of several such narrative trajectories and that the novel’s domestic closure is achieved by a conscientious appropriation or sacrifice of those trajectories by a realism that has been enriched or widened by the encounter” (1998: 20; emphases in the original). See also Kate Faber Oestreich, who discusses the final tableau in the context of fetishism (2006: 92). 32 These are represented through Hetty’s association with melodrama and the pas­ toral mode. The preacher Dinah does her utmost to melt Hetty’s ‘hardened heart’

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Realisms: George Eliot and to reveal to the reader her innermost thoughts; this is both part of an Evangelical probing of the culprit’s contrition, as a condition of forgiveness, and an exertion of pastoral power in a Foucauldian sense to obtain access to a sub­ ject’s innermost feelings. Within the novel’s moral set-up, Hetty’s confession is the only means to obtain proof that she has at least some kind of ‘motherly feeling’ towards her child, and thus a rudimentary form of the emotional dis­ position required for Eliot’s concept of realism, which is based on fellow-feeling and an extension of sympathy. Thus, Hetty’s heart needs to be ‘softened’ and ‘opened’ before any further community is even thinkable and thus betrays the fault lines of ethical realism. One might add that the family life Dinah and Adam lead does not conform entirely to the ideal of heteronormative domesticity, because Seth complements the couple and extends it to a triangle. This reveals some fissures in the final tableau that expose it as contingent. As R.E. Sopher argues, “George Eliot com­ plicates any easy identification with Adam and suggests that there exist multiple ways of living ethically in the world” (2012: 2); the apparent channelling and focusing strategies in the novel are counteracted by subordinated or marginalized alternatives. Sopher provides an analysis of the relevance of minor characters such as Seth Bede. Building on that, I contend that Seth, who is denied a wife and family by the plot, remains as a reminder of alternative ways of life within the final tableau, as yet unrealized but possibly realizable in the future. See also Pauline Nestor, who argues that “Eliot’s exploration of ethics in fiction turns not just on the issue of sympathy but, specifically, on the question of dif­ ference” (2002: 7), and Isobel Armstrong, who, drawing on Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, claims that Eliot tried to achieve “a critical sympathy that explored difference” (Armstrong 2013: 296). Rebecca N. Mitchell emphasizes that, in Adam Bede, “learning how to read is aligned with an act of achieving humanity itself” (2008: 145). This underlines once more Hetty’s association with animals and results in her exclusion from the moral realist picture frame created by the plot. See also Kucich (1987: 141–142) and George Levine (2008: 25). See Margaret Homans’s reading of this scene, which shows how it transposes class difference onto gender difference (1993: 164). See also her comments on Dinah’s paradoxical position, simultaneously representing “angelic transcendence” as a pre­ requisite for her class transcendence and becoming sexualized in order that she can be Adam’s wife and “become the signifier of his rising status” (167). As Rebecca N. Mitchell, drawing on Judith Mitchell, highlights, “Adam’s gaze in this scene objectifies Dinah” (2008: 161). Mitchell claims that “her ‘painful self-consciousness’ is due to feeling surveyed as object” (161; emphasis in the original). See also Cottom on Eliot’s affiliation with liberalism (1987: 7), as well as Robert Dingley’s discussion of politics and the historical insecurity of ascriptions such as ‘liberal’, ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’ (2013: 223). Henry James was one of the first to describe Middlemarch as a “panorama”; see his review of Middlemarch, first published in The Galaxy 15 (1873), 424–425. For the novel’s editorial history, which differs widely from that of Adam Bede, see Joanne Shattock 2013: 23–33, esp. 25–27 and 30–31. My definition of symbolic forms is derived from Cassirer’s Philosophy of Sym­ bolic Forms. Brian Swann first applied the notion of symbolic forms to Mid­ dlemarch in his analysis of the novel; however, his approach is situated in an entirely different theoretical context and intends “to reconcile both schools of criticism [approaches following Northrop Frye and Neo-Aristotelian approaches centring on R.S. Crane], by stressing the fact that literal and symbolic are not exclusive; that the ‘literal action’ can possess the qualities of a long poem” (Swann 1972: 306; emphasis in the original).

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41 Cassirer himself describes this in a similar fashion as “roads by which the spirit proceeds towards its objectivization, i.e., its self-revelation” (1955a, I: 78). I do not claim that Eliot ‘applies’ Cassirer in any way, but her approach is so similar in Middlemarch that I suggest that she anticipates the notion of symbolic forms and identifies a comparable array of forms as extrinsic factors calibrating per­ ception, including history, language, art, myth and religion, science, politics and economics. She lays many of the foundations for this in “Notes on Form in Art”, which allows the inference that, like Cassirer, she takes a phenomenological point of view, at least where the novel is concerned. See Summer J. Star (2013), who also emphasizes Eliot’s phenomenological approach, drawing mainly on “Notes on Form in Art”, but also on the poetological essay “Looking Inward” in Impressions of Theophrastus Such (see 840). 42 My view ties in to some degree with David Carroll’s insight that disciplines such as “historiography, mythology, philology, sociology, and anthropology” are paramount for the novelist: “George Eliot was fundamentally concerned with all these branches of learning because each was grappling in its own way with the problem of interpretation” (1992: 3). While Carroll focuses on the relevance of hermeneutics, I think that symbolic forms illustrate even more fundamentally that Eliot explores the conditions of possibility of understanding by focusing on calibrations of perception. 43 As Marcus K. Jones argues, “each character in Eliot’s novel has a unique per­ spective on reality” (2015: 2). Dana Shiller similarly argues that “what Eliot draws our attention to are the ways in which these facts [the ‘bare facts’ of his­ tory, NBS] are perceived” (1997: 544). 44 See Gage McWeeny for a discussion of how Middlemarch diverges from a sociological perspective, despite its attempt to create a panorama of Mid­ dlemarch’s social world (e.g. 2009: 539). 45 George Levine argues that this passage, “though it echoes Huxley, is directly related to the question of the connection between imagination and morality” (1980: 15). He explains that the “roar” “is beyond the sensibilities of most people” and that their “common incapacity to perceive and feel more than coarsely, with anything like the minuteness and intensity of the Lydgatian researcher, is a kind of stupidity towards which the narrator sustains some ambivalence” (15). 46 Henry James emphasized Middlemarch’s “diffuseness” and famously asked, “If we write novels so, how shall we write History?” (1987b: 81), while the reviewer for the Saturday Review hedged his evaluation with the conditional, “If we are to call Middlemarch a novel at all” (Eliot 2000: 573). 47 For a Hegelian reading of the Prelude, see Günter Bachmann 2000, esp. 195–197. Furthermore, the title of Middlemarch’s opening chapter echoes Wordsworth’s “The Prelude.” It therefore provides an ironic commentary on the differences between the Romantic construction of the masculine subject and the Victorian limitation on a corresponding self-realization for women. 48 For a short discussion of different readings of the Prelude and the passage on St Theresa, in particular, see Lee Anna Maynard 2009: 78–79. 49 While this connection may apply to particular readers, it is not a logical con­ nection, but a non sequitur presented as a gnomic truth. See also Schabert for Eliot’s notion of biography, described as a combination of the typical and the individual and enmeshing the causal with the contingent (Schabert 1997: 492). 50 See also Shaw 1999: 234, who emphasizes the extent to which Dorothea’s options of perception and feeling are shaped by her historical situation (see 236). 51 For a critique of Miller’s approach, see Paxman 2003, esp. 108. 52 In prototype semantics, the prototype supplies the core definition of a species, while most actual instances diverge from it. In a similar fashion, Dorothea as the

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Realisms: George Eliot fictional construct of a specific woman deviates from Saint Theresa’s type and only thus gains ‘reality’; the instantiation of a type is the means by which the novel’s realism is constructed. For Eliot’s character construction and the con­ struction of types versus round characters, see Audrey Jaffe’s study on the nove­ listic response to the emergence of statistical averages, which is in line with Gallagher’s concerns (see Jaffe 2010: 31). This has even wider repercussions from the point of view of evolutionary theory. As Gillian Beer argues, “variation is the key to evolutionary development. Diversification, not truth to type, is the creative principle, as [Darwin] empha­ sises throughout the first chapter of The Origin of Species whose title is ‘Varia­ tion Under Domestication’” (2000: 140; emphasis in the original). Audrey Jaffe has highlighted the fact that, in line with notions of political economy as characterized by William Stanley Jevons (see Jaffe 2010: 36), characters in Middlemarch tend to express the degree or intensity of feeling, rather than being able to interpret such feeling: “Thus while it may not be possible to determine what others feel, Eliot’s narrator, characters, and read­ ers famously assess how much feeling they have, attributing to a degree – a relative amount – the quality of an objective reality” (38; emphasis in the original). The novel’s hermeneutics therefore ties in with calibrations of feeling determined by political economy. One of these statues is that of “the reclining Ariadne, then called Cleopatra”, described as lying “in the marble voluptuousness of her beauty” (Eliot 1897b, I: 288). It serves to contrast the sculpture of antiquity with the living ‘statue’ Dor­ othea Brooke, portrayed as “a breathing blooming girl” whose “pose” Ladislaw’s friend Naumann admires, thus objectifying her as a work of art (288). As is the case several times in the novel, embodied characters are contrasted with cold marble, the principal material used to monumentalize both historical and mythi­ cal characters. For a wider discussion of Eliot’s use of art, see Kanwit 2013: 112; 116–125. Gillian Beer points out the general relevance of Ariadne: “Ariadne, who can offer a means of disentangling the labyrinth, is historically beyond the reach of the characters, but is invoked by George Eliot as part of the shared worldknowledge of herself and her reader” (2000: 165). In Physiological Æsthetics, Grant Allen describes the lack of what he terms the “Ideal Sensuous Pleasure of suggested feelings” (1977: 236) as definitive of sculp­ ture and argues that “[t]he thermal effect of marble is rather chilly than cool” (236): “The coldness, hardness, and whiteness of marble limbs save them from any suggestion of the lower feelings; which, on the contrary, are inextricably bound up with the pleasures of colour and of soft warm touch” (236). Allen consequently argues that touch “afford[s] us feelings which may be unreservedly classed as æsthetic” and enters directly into the composition of art (89). Together with his emphasis on the body as “a machine” that transforms “potential into kinetic energy” (18), Allen devises an aesthetics that tries to explain the aesthetic potential and impact of gestures, movements and quasi-perceptions. Like Allen, Eliot assigns marble a function that allows for the sublimation of desire into art. Judith Mitchell thus aptly calls Dorothea “one of George Eliot’s ‘monumental’ heroines” (Mitchell 1994: 130). St Luke, as author of both a gospel and the Acts, is the historian among the evangelists (see Schnelle 1999: 258), and hence an apt reference point for the ‘history’ of Middlemarch. See Molly Ryder for an analysis of Eliot’s use of architectural metaphors for the brain and mind as well as for the importance of “Dorothea’s spatial imagina­ tion” (Ryder 2017: 231), for example with regard to her realization that her marriage with Casaubon is a kind of living death.

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59 See Harry E. Shaw’s chapter title “Dorothea in and out of Place” (1999: 229) and the connection that he makes between Eliot’s historical realism and “staying in your place” (261). 60 The notion of the chronotope is derived from Mikhail Bakhtin’s essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”. Bakhtin defines the chronotope as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artis­ tically expressed in literature”, so that time “thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the move­ ments of time, plot and history” (1981b: 84). Importantly, this has effects on the representation of characters (see 85). The chronotope can thus be considered part of aisthetics, in the sense that such articulations of time and space impact on or are evoked by a character’s perception and can determine the situation of char­ acters within the plot. 61 Michel Foucault also describes the honeymoon as a heterotopia because deflora­ tion is to take place “‘elsewhere’” (1986: 24). The closely knit interaction between space, time and character during Dorothea’s wedding journey thus proves formative for the character’s further development. 62 See Barbara Hardy, who shows that Casaubon is “impotent”, as is implicitly represented in the novel (Hardy 1964: 120). 63 In this scene, the miniature, an art object, suddenly seems to have the capacity to ‘look back’. This passage may well be inspired by Eliot’s reading of Hegel, who argues in the third chapter of his lectures on aesthetics, “Das Kunstschöne oder das Ideal”: “von der Kunst [ist] zu behaupten, daß sich jede Gestalt an allen Punkten der sichtbaren Oberfläche zum Auge verwandle, welches der Sitz der Seele ist und den Geist zur Erscheinung bringt” (Hegel 1970, I: 203). In a similar fashion, Dorothea perceives the miniature as animated, as having a ‘soul’ able to interact with her. 64 This aisthetic feat of presentification would allow the readers to be re-situated in a similar way to Dorothea. As participants in a quotidian history, we find that moments of embodiment, as thoughts slowly come into consciousness, interrupt the accounts that we can give of our own lives (see Butler 2005: e.g. 7–8; 10–11; 15; 19; 23; 30; 36–40). Judith Butler argues that “a theory of subject formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can serve a conception of ethics, and, indeed, responsibility” (19). Eliot, in a similar fashion, reveals the ways in which accounts are always exteriorizations, in that her novel reflects on the divisions between what the characters can give an account of and what the nar­ rator relates. This division acknowledges that an account is always already an exteriorization and representation in language, which can never be congruous with what it is to represent. Thus, Middlemarch reveals the ways in which a lack of full self-knowledge can be the basis for ethical realism. Aisthetics, as an aes­ thetics decidedly situated in embodiment, with a corresponding limitation of perspective through calibrations of perception, must therefore be considered the principal means by which Eliot’s form of realism is achieved. Her aisthetics is the aesthetic transposition of this ethical realism. 65 See also Alberto Gabriele (2020: 141). 66 The beginning of the quotation relates back to “Notes on Form in Art”, in that the novel form depends on difference in its inception and in its conclusion: it is the limit, or a difference, that constitutes beginning and ending. In the case of the ending, mere limitation seems able to provide a conclusion to the Middlemarch panorama. That history is not a homogeneous process is also underlined in the following passage, which emphasizes history’s non-teleology and the possibility of mere coincidence: “We know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos. — In fact, the world is full

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Realisms: George Eliot of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities” (Eliot 1897b, I: 124). For Eliot’s strategy of condensation regarding her characters, see Jaffe 2010: 31. Carolyn Lesjak argues that, for Eliot, “everything truly is politics, which, in turn, necessitates experimentation with form and character in order to find the means by which to demonstrate the deep relatedness of all aspects of social life” (Lesjak 2013: 339). This ties in with Robyn Warhol’s claim that Eliot tries to turn the sub-narratable into the supra-narratable (see Warhol 2013: 58). Thus, Mid­ dlemarch can be understood as a novel that aspires to turn the ordinary into the sublime and that exemplifies the negotiation of cultural anaesthesia. This argu­ ment is also germane to the silencing mechanisms that the novel represents with regard to the gender hierarchies in relationships between married couples (see Dowling 1995: 330–331). Without mentioning the term, Dowling nevertheless draws attention to the relevance of the marriage plot for biopolitics, due to the fact that, following the implementation of the Divorce Act or the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, crucial decisions of the divorce courts increasingly centred on the “‘health’” of marriages (323; 328). George Levine has highlighted Eliot’s proximity to deconstruction avant la lettre, see Levine 1980: 5. Audrey Jaffe singles out the notion of the ‘average’, in the context of the emer­ gence of Victorian statistics, as a crucial issue negotiated in Eliot’s Middlemarch. She argues: the novel also illustrates in exemplary fashion the conceptual and affective consequences of what had, by the time of its writing, attained the status of an intuitive truth: that in order for some individuals to be exceptional, others must embody the roles of median, midpoint, lowest common denominator. Middlemarch fleshes out the never very abstract abstractions of the nineteenthcentury statistical imagination: an imagination in which the idea of the average begins to appear in the form of a person. (Jaffe 2010: 24; see also 26; 33–34) Furthermore, Cassirer argues that the relationship between subject and object is achieved in a particular way in each symbolic form. “[I]n analyzing the cultural forms we cannot begin with a rigid dogmatic distinction between the subjective and the objective”, he argues; rather, each mental energy contributes to the con­ stitution of the notion of self and world (1955a, I: 93). Cassirer conceives of perception as something related to the self: “What makes the particular percep­ tion a perception, what distinguishes it as a ‘perceptual’ quality from any mate­ rial quality is precisely its ‘appurtenance to the self’” (101). Consequently, Cassirer allows for a connection between calibrations of perception and subject effects. See also Lawrence Rothfield, who argues that “thought and perception, although distinct from language, are organized through (or at least according to the same rules as) the language or sign system one uses” (1992: 92). As Elaine Auyoung contends, “Ladislaw’s claims about the superiority of verbal over visual representation reflect Eliot’s own careful study of long-standing dis­ tinctions between the sister arts” (2018: 90). Audrey Jaffe has examined the particular effect of economics on affect (see 2010: 24). Lee Anna Maynard adds that Rosamond “thus follows conduct-book-decrees to the letter” (Maynard 2009: 80). The treatment of opium in Middlemarch represents a departure from a Roman­ ticist idealizing discourse of opium in the vein of Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Whereas these writers refer to the drug as, among other things, creative inspiration and palliative pharmakon, Eliot portrays its failure to dull Lydgate’s emotional pain; in addition, its consumption provides no inspiration for Will Ladislaw and no healing for Raffles. In Eliot’s high-Victorian

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novel, the ineffectiveness of opium illustrates that historical determinants out­ weigh Romanticist notions of inspiration. 77 See Carolyn Lesjak, who takes the relevance of material circumstantial factors in Middlemarch as an indicator of Eliot’s divergence from “an idealist concept of interiority as the essence of personality” associated with liberalism (Lesjak 2013: 341) in favour of “the profound materiality of character” (340). She, too, emphasizes the economic structures of relationships in Middlemarch (see 345). 78 See also the use of ‘ghastly’ for Dorothea as she considers her life with Casau­ bon: “now it appeared that she was more and more to live in a virtual tomb, where there was the apparatus of a ghastly labour producing what would never see the light” (Eliot 1897b, II: 307). 79 For such intertwinements, see McCormack: Hope for the patient’s recovery directs attention anew to possible remedies, and among those proposed for the Condition of England and figured as drugs, many have to do with the written and/or spoken word, including the education of the masses, the distribution of improving literature, and political Reform itself. (2000: 6) See also Bewell, who argues for a close “association of the politics of Reform with the cholera epidemic” among the middle classes (1998: 156). Middlemarch can thus be read as a condition-of-England novel: reform and infection are ana­ logized and the nation is treated along with the novel’s other patients, for whom the healing process very much depends on the methods their respective doctor has at his disposal.

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Sensationalisms Wilkie Collins

3.1 Performative Aisthetics in The Woman in White Wilkie Collins’s paradigmatic sensation novel The Woman in White creates sensoria with particular emphasis on visuality and tactility. Furthermore, it negotiates the role of judgement, both in a juridical and in an aesthetic sense. The text showcases its own performative production and thus not only reflects on the foundational performative constitution of ‘the novel’, but grants insights into the relevance of legal discourses, both as a topic – The Woman in White deals with legal issues such as marriage and inheritance – and as an underlying structure that determines the conditions of possibility of the novel. In other words, it reveals the rules or ‘laws’ by which the text has to abide according to the foundational constitution of the text – which, at least in the retro­ spective critical construction, is said to inaugurate a new genre, and, as such, a new set of conventions to be intertextually emulated in further novelistic production. This constitution determines the very concatenation of sentences, the kinds of differends occurring, as well as the rules for what can be said and what remains ineffable – what can be perceived or experi­ enced and what remains foreclosed. Simultaneously, this impacts on the rules governing characters’ (gendered) conduct. The Woman in White reveals and self-consciously reflects on the ways in which perception is channelled, both for characters on a diegetic level and for actual readers, on the basis of its performative constitution. Controlled by the editor-narrator Walter Hartright, the novel subjects characters to a calibration of perception in order to normalize a gendered outlook that is nevertheless placed in question by this very negotiation. Introduced as a “story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve” (Collins 1900a, I: 7), The Woman in White rhetorically pre-empts the essentialization of gender difference whose con­ struction represents the outcome of the whole narrative; it is in fact a “monomania” of masculinity (Collins 1900a, I: 119).1 The novel’s structure thus showcases the fact that such an essential view is not ‘in place’ but must be produced. Calibrations of perception are correspondingly functionalized to harness perception to gender difference, a strategy that, on the level of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003387510-4

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text as a whole, opens up space for deconstruction and illustrates the close connection between aisthetics and socio-political discourses. As an “intermediate work” of sensation fiction (Kendrick 1977: 35), The Woman in White renders transparent the ‘laws’ of textual production, thus reflecting on moral concepts of character, novelistic claims of truth-telling and, finally, the condition of possibility of textual referentiality. For that reason, Collins’s sensation fiction can be considered a proto-deconstruc­ tionist genre, in that it exhibits its simultaneous reliance on and breach of realist conventions. Drawing on the distinction between the novel of char­ acter, or “portrait”, and the novel of plot, or “chain”, Walter M. Kendrick has observed that [t]he “chain” of The Woman in White is its own nature as language, a language which is not life; while the “portrait,” which the faith of rea­ lism made preeminent, is a matter of agreement between writer and reader, a contract which states that language shall efface itself before what it portrays. At the heart of The Woman in White stands the momentous question whether the chain might not precede the portrait, whether the language of any text might not generate the reality which it pretends to imitate. (1977: 35) Collins’s The Woman in White can thus be read metafictionally, in that it implicitly articulates its own textuality, but masks the fact that the reality allegedly imitated does not exist (see Baudrillard 2001: 173). While the novel still appears to rely on the realist contract that “there must somewhere be texts which are trusted to be transparent” (Kendrick 1977: 34), it offers the text as a “game”, which critics saw as creating “the value of the elements in such a novel” by reference “to other elements in the same novel” (21). Apart from such textual immanence, which prescribes the hunt for clues in detec­ tive fiction, the illusion of realist referentiality is surrendered to the con­ struction of sensations through a particular distribution of information that relies on metonymic effects of contiguity, among other things. The novel can thus be understood to be concerned with “the problem how to see and how to interpret” (Bourne Taylor 1988: 11). Walter illustrates this himself when he muses on the way in which he fatally connects the woman in white with all the events that have occurred since his first meeting with her: I had not the shadow of a reason, thus far, for connecting Sir Percival Glyde with the suspicious words of inquiry that had been spoken to me by the woman in white. And yet, I did connect him with them. Was it because he had now become associated in my mind with Miss Fairlie; Miss Fairlie being, in her turn, associated with Anne Catherick, since the night when I discovered the ominous likeness between them? (Collins 1900a, II: 113)

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Contiguity and, with it, association and reiteration of established motifs or the repeated appearance of characters introduced, are the means by which sensational meanings are created; they allow for the construction of sudden insights into possible connections, but leave room for doubt, so that more information needs to be acquired to substantiate the associations that have been made. The affective suture to the text is thus dispelled by turning the reading experience into an epistemological treasure hunt and by interrupting immersive passages. Fostering suspense and eliciting interest in further instalments of the novel, this strategy also illustrates the narrative pattern introduced by Walter in his own editorial practices. Walter juxtaposes eyewitness accounts and provides possible connections between them, but these are never fully ascertained; rather, he actively emplots instances that may well be mere coincidences (see Bourne Taylor 1988: 46). The reader is assigned the task of synthesizing clues so that the plethora of signifiers can finally be charged with meaning and thus interpreted, while the basis for such a synthesis remains insecure; in other words, sensation fiction reveals that meaning is a retrospective construction, just as sensation itself is an ex post affectation. In addition, this process “is often mediated through the struggle within the subjective narrating consciousness to separate thoughts, to distinguish between valid and delusory perceptions, to doubt whether one can trust the evidence of the senses” (46–47; emphasis in the original). Such questions touch on epistemology and hermeneutics, as well as aisthetics, as the con­ structive process of perception is self-reflexively highlighted through the narratological set-up. Collins himself, at least implicitly, acknowledges the necessity of emplot­ ment in the preface to the 1860 three-decker edition of The Woman in White, where he reveals that the synthesis of clues forms the basis of sus­ pense. Asking potential reviewers not to provide the usual plot summaries in order not to destroy “the interest of curiosity, and the excitement of sur­ prise” as central assets of sensation fiction (Collins 2008a: 646), he argues that it is hardly possible to provide a representative abstract of the story within the confines of a review. Commenting on the size of the novel, which comprises “more than a thousand closely printed pages”, Collins claims that a large portion “of this space is occupied by hundreds of little ‘connecting links,’ of trifling value in themselves, but of the utmost importance in maintaining the smoothness, the reality, and the probability of the entire narrative” (645). Collins explains that the interstices between the different accounts provided require a plausible fabrication of connections – in other words, some emplotment – in order to create the seeming continuity of action, the reality effects and the very conditions of probability of the story, which apparently hinges on the connections rather than the accounts them­ selves. The corresponding reading position has been constructed as “para­ noid” (D.A. Miller 1986: 115). These links provide the crucial editorial concatenations between different characters’ discourses and, only as such,

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allow for sensational effects. Narrative truth is thus the effect not of ‘mim­ esis’, but of a sufficiently seamless suture of single accounts. However, the text that makes up the novel is not just Walter’s “monomania” (Collins 1900a, I: 119), but rather a reflection on text production and the narrative ‘laws’ of coherence at a moment in literary history when narrative omnis­ cience loses plausibility. Calibrations of perception and strategies to guide the reader’s attention are means by which such concatenations are made plausible and become effective through affect.2 The guided insight into the secrets of the text elicited by the readerly hunt for clues conflates ‘detection’ with ‘truth’, and affect with the affirmation of the truth detected. The Woman in White begins with a constative in a short chapter entitled “The Story begun by WALTER HARTRIGHT, of Clement’s Inn, Teacher of Drawing”, which explicitly showcases the ‘authorial’ act of a foundational constitution of the fictional ‘world’: “This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve” (Collins 1900a, I: 7). This is a curious first sentence that establishes the text as a story of endurance and achievement, both personified as the actual agents of the story, and thus as a narrative whose completion remains a promise at this stage. In fact, the text designated by the demonstrative pronoun is not the one that follows immediately, but that beginning in chapter II, where the story proper starts. The first chapter, entitled “Preamble” in the serialized publication (26 November 1859: 95), functions as a paratext and meta­ fictionally introduces an allegedly new form of narrating a novel, offering a sequence of eyewitness accounts.3 In addition, it introduces the narrator, Walter Hartright, who, by presenting himself as a fictional editor, appro­ priates the tasks of an implied author, in the sense that he organizes and structures the accounts that follow and prompts the eyewitnesses to speak. This emphasis on a narrative bricolage of perspectives is vital to the novel’s aisthetics, as it connects tellability, in the sense of what can be told about the events, to different deictic centres; perspective is thus embodied. The preamble sets out the rules the ‘story’ needs to abide by. Through its constitutive construction, or the institutional “inclusive exclusion” (Agam­ ben 1998: 18), the narrative establishes itself as a rule-bound text. However, the alleged unity of ‘the’ story is in fact a multiplicity of stories, a patch­ work awaiting further suture and emplotment. By presenting Hartright as the unifying instance of the collected ‘reports’, this strategy at once states and conceals the fact that the unity of the story is Walter’s own construction and fabulation. This way of narrating also responds to an epistemological conundrum that was emerging as an effect of the ‘crisis of perception’ that defines the mid- and late-Victorian era. The fictional editor of The Woman in White offers several eyewitnesses instead of one omniscient narrator, thus revealing that a unified, ‘Olympian’ point of view is no longer plausible; it is replaced by a collection of testimonies collated with a mosaic of scenes, an approach that fits in well with serialized publication and the reading pro­ cesses which that involves, based on piecing together individual parts of the

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story. Walter as editor thus redeems the loss of a privileged overview by combining a plurality of perspectives, based on what the respective narrators have ‘perceived’ with their own senses and can thus be proven to be ‘empirically true’. The structure of the story’s presentation amounts to a “struggle over how to see, over the control of time and memory, and over the control of writing” (Bourne Taylor 1988: 99–100). As such, it reveals the ways in which the novel enacts a power play about the narrative control of perspective and its concomitant calibration of perception as crucial aspects of its aisthetic appeal. This struggle is part and parcel of the articulation of the novel’s mor­ phological parts: the order of events, the concatenation of the individual accounts. The Woman in White forms a more ambiguous embedded chain: each individual utterance gains meaning from the way it has been placed in the chain, which is presented as a continual progression but is in reality a continual, con­ tradictory process of reappropriation and redefinition. (Bourne Taylor 1988: 100) The novel thus portrays on several levels that coherence – be that in terms of meaning construction, story-telling or identity formation – can be achieved only through the articulation of disparate parts, which is always interest-based. Walter, as the assembler of these stories, actively constructs a ‘truth’ out of the fragments of the narrative, but conceals this for the greater part of the story by emphasizing his role as a diegetic character, after slyly admitting to his function in the paratext. There, Walter refers to himself in the third person, which indicates the split subject positions that he takes up: When the writer of these introductory lines (Walter Hartright, by name) happens to be more closely connected than others with the incidents to be recorded, he will describe them in his own person. When his experi­ ence fails, he will retire from the position of narrator. (Collins 1900a, I: 7–8)4 As a character, Walter is not an assembler; as an assembler, he is not a character. Thus, he oscillates between the two roles like a reversible figure, with the benefit that this allows him to dissemble his own motivations; the main narrator operates with projections of himself, which, at times, present(ify) him metaleptically where he is not. By splitting himself into character and editor, Walter is able to allay possible suspicions regarding his own interests and investments in compiling the story in a particular way and the extent of his editorial intervention in the individual texts. His emphasis on romance and his self-fashioning as a young man succumbing to the snares of love serve as an important decoy in this respect: because his interests centre on the marriage and inheritance plots at the end of the story, which lie in the

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past for Walter in his role of fictional editor, they do not seem to provide a direct motivation for telling the story in the first place. As Ortiz Robles outlines, according to a performative view of the novel, “narrative excess depends on performative infelicity. ‘Circumlocution’ is the name the novel gives to this narrative principle” (2010b: 15). With the marriage plot and the inheritance plot consummated, there is nothing further to tell; thus, Wal­ ter’s interests are fulfilled after his narrative has helped to justify and ratify his motives. Walter, as quasi implied author, guarantees the coherence of the multiplicity of perspectives presented in the novel, but the reader cannot be sure whether those perspectives can be aligned to a unified view or whether they actually remain variable and are merely constructed as adding up by Walter. He claims that the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one wit­ ness – with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect. (Collins 1900a, I: 8; my emphases)5 Metonymically shifting the constructive process of writing to its instrument, Walter personifies the pen as accomplishing this task, so that the writing process itself provides sufficient authorization for the text as product. The aim is to tell ‘the truth’. With this “same object”, the reader is required to assemble and evaluate the individual witness accounts and to construct a coherent overall statement, a process in which he or she is guided by Walter, as fictional editor. As a structural trait of the novel, the assembly of fragments pertains not only to epistemological questions of story-telling, but to character con­ struction. The capitalized presentation of the words ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ in Walter’s description of the narrative that follows indicates that the story itself entails constructing the ‘Man’ and the ‘Woman’. The sensation novel can thus be said to appropriate the plot structure of the Bildungsroman, in that it describes the course of Walter’s life from unemployed drawing master to successful member of society benefiting from his wife’s considerable inheritance, as well as Laura’s path to becoming the happily married mother of a male heir to her father’s estate and wealth.6 The ‘story’ is thus func­ tionalized by Walter as a means of constructing himself as a character who deserves the name ‘Hartright’, which requires a hermeneutics of suspicion regarding Walter’s strategies of self-fashioning. The Woman in White reveals the pitfalls of romance when Hartright reaps what the ‘villain’ Sir Percival Glyde has sown by marrying the latter’s widow Lady Glyde; this renders the ‘right heart’ signified by Walter’s name dubious, at least, and shows that he is “manipulating the narrative for his own ends” (Perkins and Donaghy 1990: 392). This is nicely illustrated by the way in which he feigns ignorance regarding the collection of proof for his version of events:

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Walter’s representation of his auto-image not only illustrates important generic and narratological features – an “ambiguity suggested by the idea of ‘telling a secret’”, for which the narrator “must first be party to holding the secret” (Brantlinger 1982: 20), thus “becoming a figure no longer to be trus­ ted” (15) – but allows further inferences to be made about the silencing processes implied by the construction of sensational secrets (“prevented me from asking any questions”). The functionalization of ignorance, whether feigned or genuine, and processes of silencing and withholding information are necessary to produce a sensational revelation. Sensation thus depends on a form of cultural anaesthesia. In analogy to a play’s prologue, the novel’s opening line encapsulates the plot in a nutshell and provides, on a meta-level, a “set of instructions according to which the fictional world is to be recovered and reassembled” (Doležel 1988: 489). Implicitly, in its very constitution, it also supplies the rules by which the ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ of the story need to abide and indi­ cates what is to count as possible or impossible in the diegetic world. Since the novel showcases its own constitution through its fictional editor, it is not surprising that it draws heavily on legal discourses; not only are these the­ matically addressed in the marriage and inheritance plot and represented by characters such as the solicitors Mr Gilmore and Mr Kyrle, but they are a structural condition of possibility of the novel as novel (see Gaylin 2001: 311). That the reader is faced with a wider legal context is revealed imme­ diately after The Woman in White’s opening line: If the machinery of the Law could be depended on to fathom every case of suspicion, and to conduct every process of inquiry, with moderate assistance only from the lubricating influences of oil of gold, the events which fill these pages might have claimed their share of the public attention in a Court of Justice. (Collins 1900a, I: 7) By insinuating that the story might have been a ‘real’ court case, Walter not only attempts to bolster the notion that he is telling a story that has actually happened, but introduces a structural model and posits that the case deserves public attention. He interpellates implied readers as judges of the fraud case represented: “As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now” (Collins 1900a; I: 7). As a result, the reader’s judgement on the literary value of the novel coincides with their judgement

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on the truth-claims of the case and the moral rectitude of the fictional editor and other characters in their role as witnesses for the defence, speaking on behalf of Laura, Lady Glyde, against her husband, Sir Percival Glyde. The roles are thus clearly assigned. Despite the fact that the structure was con­ sidered innovative at the time, ultimately the ‘foreword’ asks readers to do what they do in every case of novel reading: to judge values and morals of the story. However, Collins himself describes the story as “emotional” (Baker and Clarke 1999: 191), thus substituting overall effect and plausibility for epistemological scrutiny. On the whole, this form of interpellation proved successful and readers evaluated characters’ claims in the context of literary conventions such as the assumption that a telling name like Hartright designates sincerity; E.S. Dallas’s minute reconstruction of the case proper was an exception to the rule. When Walter eventually closes this legal frame, he fashions himself as a self-made man outside the bounds of the law and, by the same token, as an independent, free agent no longer fettered to the constitutional frame he himself has set up: It was strange to look back and to see now, that the poverty which had denied us all hope of assistance, had been the indirect means of our success, by forcing me to act for myself. If we had been rich enough to find legal help, what would have been the result? The gain (on Mr. Kyrle’s own showing) would have been more than doubtful; the loss — judging by the plain test of events as they had really happened — cer­ tain. The Law would never have obtained me my interview with Mrs. Catherick. The Law would never have made Pesca the means of forcing a confession from the Count. (Collins 1900a, II: 377; my emphasis) In retrospect (and in actuality, by his marriage), Walter reveals that what he lacked, apart from money, was agency. This realization serves to legitimize his extra-legal actions; what is more, the lack of legal structures to support his cause is represented as a necessary condition for Walter to establish himself as an autonomous male subject. For Walter, the sensation novel is a Bildungsroman, whose mechanisms he simultaneously accepts and disavows by fashioning himself as independent of the ‘Law’. However, the elements of the plot that are not covered by the law – the interview with Mrs Catherick or Pesca’s role in uncovering Fosco’s past – are those enabled by the quasilegal hearing Walter provides for the reader in the form of the novel. Installing himself as the director of his life-theatre, he fashions himself as actor and agent, but conceals his role of fictional editor constructing the frame for his own success story. The ‘emotional’ story is said to abide exclusively by heart-right, the law of the heart, which reveals the romance plot to be Walter’s manipulative intervention to orchestrate perception. Before Walter takes up the position of a character in the story, he clearly institutes himself as such in the preamble: “Let Walter Hartright, teacher of

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drawing, aged twenty-eight years, be heard first” (Collins 1900a, I: 8). Speaking of himself in the third person in the first chapter, Walter perfor­ matively institutes himself as the first-person narrator and asks for the implied readers’ consent by another performative, the imperative to ‘let’ Walter begin. He is thus authorized to account for “the series of events” (8) he has witnessed by the sleight of hand of a self-authorization, achieved by the initial splitting of a narrating and an experiencing I. This is crucial in enabling him to record his experiences because, to render them re-pre­ sentable, he must transfer them into narrative discourse, a process that entails a Lyotardian differend between physiological sensations and the mode of discourse. This has two implications for the text that makes up The Woman in White. Firstly, it makes abundantly clear that the story told is a translation of Walter’s embodied experience into narrative discourse. The medial transcoding involved in this process of translation necessarily distorts his experience, which is further distorted by Walter’s narrative intervention – or interference, for that matter. Secondly, the rules by which this translation has to abide for Walter to render plausible and to legitimize his story closely resemble conventions of domestic realism, which also determine the char­ acters’ gender performances – or, to be more precise, which determine Walter’s gender performance and his corresponding representation of other characters’ gender performances, revealing the norms for their gender per­ formativity. To fashion himself as a model of Victorian virility, Walter turns every other character into a type, a puppet whom he directs (which also goes for every text or statement that those characters produce). The Woman in White could thus be described as “A Novel Without a Hero”, like Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, because in it Walter merely enacts his own phantasmatic monodrama, acting himself and using other characters as foils to throw his identity into relief. This illustrates the many calibrations of perception that the story-telling entails: the story’s possible appeal is fun­ damentally down to the literary construction of perspective, orchestrated by Walter as the “master” narrative instance (Collins 1900a, II: 120). He filters his own perceptions in his capacity of experiencing I and renders them palatable as “a domestic history of the most gentle and unexciting kind” (Oliphant 1862: 566). The actual experience of characters is thus channelled by Walter according to the social rules of which he partakes, and by generic rules directing his novel-making. The narrative concludes with an imperative similar to the one with which it started: “let Marian end our Story” (Collins 1900a, II: 387), Walter asks the implied reader. This final imperative is the narrator’s very last sentence in the novel, and follows on from Marian’s own closing words, directly quoted by Walter, some lines previously. Thus, while it is again Walter who performatively ends the story, he purportedly shifts the actual ending to Marian, who is functionalized as an instance of closure by the narrator, now operating simultaneously as the fictional editor – an intervention that reveals

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that narrative power rests in the combination of the two roles in a single identity. As Walter appropriates Marian’s words, he performs “a narrative gesture which repeats earlier incarcerations” (Gaylin 2001: 321), in that he encloses Marian’s discourse in his own and subjects it to confines defined by himself. The whole novel turns out to be a justification for Walter’s role in this series of events, and finally presents and apparently justifies him as the (father of the) “Heir of Limmeridge” (Collins 1900a, II: 387) in Marian’s appropriated ratification: So she spoke. In writing those last words, I have written all. The pen falters in my hand; the long, happy labour of many months is over! Marian was the good angel of our lives – let Marian end our Story. (387) In its preamble, the novel asks the reader to judge the testimonies of the witnesses that it presents; in its conclusion, it appeals to the reader to corroborate Walter’s version of events. Having the last word, he relin­ quishes the task of writer and compiler and seemingly lets Marian’s words provide closure, again shifting responsibility for the way in which the accounts were emplotted to a different character at the very moment when he is firmly installed as an integrated male subject. However, by this very ploy, he simultaneously disempowers Marian, whose discourse is incorpo­ rated into his own, and who is desexualized as a ‘good angel’. She is reduced to a ‘phallophoric’, indexical function: instead of wielding phallic power, taking up the pen that Walter relinquishes at the end of his narrative, for instance, she merely represents Walter’s child as a socially acceptable substitute.7 This analogous construction of the novel’s beginning and ending also reveals the performativity of the novel. Although it cannot account for the disruptive act of positing that inaugurates it as a text, it must nevertheless represent it by performing an act of closure on the order of institutional performatives (“I do” as happy ending) that at one and the same time becomes the material trace of its own origin. (Ortiz Robles 2010b: 23; emphasis in the original) The Woman in White attempts to account for its inauguration at the very beginning, but can do so only by adding a paratext, in the form of the pre­ amble. The novel text itself cannot show its own constitution. Conversely, the ending represents performatives – for example, the ‘I do’ concluding the marriage plot, which is the reason for telling the story in the first place. The felicitous completion of marriage and inheritance at the end of the novel can only perform the end of the possibility of narrative; in doing so, it illumi­ nates the very conditions for narrative. The Woman in White can thus be seen as a novel that not only ‘inaugurates’ a new genre, but presents a

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metanarrative reflexion on novel writing and novelistic meaning making on which the perceptive realms represented depend. 3.1.1 Temporality and the Aisthetics of Touch A central feature of sensation fiction is its temporal structure, as a condition for its construction of suspense. The genre’s eventness can only come about “when the novel’s constative and performative structures of reference inter­ rupt each other”, resulting in “an event that gets disseminated along the narrative line” (Ortiz Robles 2010b: 23). To achieve that, the novel’s dis­ tribution of information and temporal structure are crucial, down to the linguistic level of tenses. While the preamble of The Woman in White is delivered mostly in the present tense, the second chapter conforms to the narrative proper and is written in the past tense, taking us back to “the last day of July” in London in 1849 and to a 28-year-old Walter, who is “out of health, out of spirits, and, if the truth must be told, out of money as well” (Collins 1900a, I: 8). Within this setting, Walter is established as a deictic centre of the first part of the story, with whom the perspective of the implied reader is aligned. The first sensational scene in this passage, the scene with which the first instalment of The Woman in White culminates (see Collins 1859: 104), involves Walter’s meeting the woman in white, Anne Catherick, in the middle of the night at a crossroads on his way to London. I will term this paradigmatic sensation scene the ‘touch scene’. It is char­ acterized by an aisthetic quality that depends on strategies that allow for readers’ vicarious experience by subjecting them to the scene’s eventness. “The narrative devices usually associated with the production of sensation (surprises, interruptions, reversals, enigmas, thrills, chills, and spills)” can, with Ortiz Robles, “be understood as narrative events rather than structural analogies to the shock endured by the reading body, or, if they are that, they are only analogous on account of their eventness” (2010a: 844; emphasis in the original). It is sensation as event, as affective disruption, that helps to explain sensation fiction’s popular appeal, as well as its quasi-immediate impact on the reader (see 2010a: 845). This eventness is aisthetically prepared in the touch scene by narratologi­ cally focalizing on Walter’s experiencing I, by a careful orchestration of the distribution of information and by the calibration of attention (in both the internal and the external communication system of the novel). Furthermore, the scene’s sensational effect is achieved by constructing a plasticity of set­ ting, intermedially incorporating visual forms of representation, and by catering to a vicarious kinaesthesia that lends itself to imitative engagement by the reader, who is able to participate empathically in the action por­ trayed.8 This can be seen as a form of narrative engagement appealing to the senses through a high degree of cognitive involvement and sensual repre­ sentations of textual information for the reader (see Bilandzic 2014: 277). The aisthetic quality of the touch scene is a function of a plastic setting, a

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close alignment of readers with the deictic centre and a vivid description of the deictic centre’s perceptions and experiences, which can only later be verbalized and rationalized. Correspondingly, Margaret Oliphant claims that [f]ew readers will be able to resist the mysterious thrill of this sudden touch. […] The silent woman lays her hand upon our shoulder as well as upon that of Mr Walter Hartright – yet nothing can be more simple and clear than the narrative, or more free from exaggeration. (Oliphant 1862: 571, my emphases; see Amigoni 2011: 57) The touch scene is constructed in such a way that it allows readers to ima­ ginatively simulate and vicariously experience Walter’s movements, percep­ tions and feelings. Sensation fiction is thus characterized by a shortcircuiting of character and reader through the construction of a shared per­ ceptive realm, which produces blind spots by narrowing down the scope of perspective through internal focalization on one character. These strategies create suspense and, by the same token, function as ideological commu­ nicators. This view is underscored by Rachel Ablow, who argues that the touch scene is vital to the novel’s emotional effect and functions as a decoy to render readers gullible: the first sensational moment in the text calls attention to the potential consequences of the meaninglessness of feeling. [… I]t insists on feel­ ing’s transmissibility. […] We may not feel exactly the same thrill that Walter does, but whatever we do feel may make us that much more willing to accept his excuses. (Ablow 2012: 206–207) Ablow sees sensation as defined by quasi-electric transmission, which transfers shock effects without assigning them meaning or rational sig­ nificance. In The Gay Science, E.S. Dallas emphasizes the importance of touch as a means of affecting readers. When discussing art’s appeal to the unconscious, he uses the metaphor of touch and a physical/physiological vocabulary. Because sensation fiction is closely aligned with tactility, it appeals primarily to senses of proximity. Dallas argues: Through knowledge, through consciousness, the artist appeals to the unconscious part of us. The poet’s words, the artist’s touches, are elec­ tric; and we feel those words, and the shock of those touches, going through us in a way we cannot define, but always giving us a thrill of pleasure, awakening distant associations, and filling us with the sense of a mental possession beyond that of which we are daily and hourly conscious. (Dallas 1999, I: 316)

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Partly despite himself, Dallas elucidates the precise aisthetics of a genre ‘preaching to the nerves’. Aisthetics is closely tied to touch, triggering a “sense of mental possession” (316) similar to the construction of presence effects. Sensational shock effects are ‘thrilling’, and, as in The Woman in White, literally ‘touching’, granting a glimpse of unconscious processes. In a similar vein, Patrick Brantlinger has argued that the sensational is “always in excess of language, to be experienced, like the Real for Lacan, only as a blow or shock that cannot be communicated through either writing or speech” (1998: 161). The sensational can thus be seen to stand in a structural analogy to psychoanalytical processes of trauma that render ‘patients’ speechless. As Ortiz Robles has shown, the transmission of feeling – or rather, affect – is not actually direct, but is an effect of a performatively created event. The Woman in White links touch to sensational shock effects and, by the very structure of its initial touch scene, reflects on the construction of the novel itself. Mario Ortiz Robles emphasizes “the cultural value of affect” and the genre’s “immediacy of corporeal appeal”, exploring the concrete textual strategies that it uses to appeal to readers’ feelings and “subjectivity” and the ways in which the sensational provocation of affect is instrumental for subject formations within the text (2010a: 845; emphasis in the original). His performative approach to sensation fiction and strategies of subject constitution not only provides insights into the foundational constitution of the novel as a whole, but helps to explain the corresponding subject forma­ tions in the novel. Within nineteenth-century criticism, Margaret Oliphant highlights the importance of the touch scene by observing that this is the “first ‘point’ in the story” (1862: 571), gesturing towards its function as a nodal point – or ‘crossroads’ – both triggering and connecting several plot strands. Ortiz Robles, in turn, sees the touch scene as a fundamental ‘anchor’ for sensational story-telling (see 2010a: 848), highlighting its func­ tion as a crossing point of constatives and performatives that are structural prerequisites for sensational eventness (see 2010a: 859). The purpose of the scene is to establish the affectively and ideologically charged point from which the events of the story can be perceived and con­ textualized, and thus to anchor the events that follow. As a nodal point, the passage positions readers in a strictly affective way and forecloses a reading position that would allow them to grasp its key role as ideological backup for Walter’s version of events. The clues that enable readers to interpret the story all refer back to this one scene, which provides a monocausal expla­ nation for the events described in the novel and thus draws attention away from more complex ones. All replays and repetitions are hinged on the touch scene, which both reveals and forecloses the mechanisms used in the novel to let readers disavow recognition of the strategies by which they are affected and sensationalized. On the diegetic level, this sensationalization amounts to rendering the character speechless as well as unaccountable for the story, which indicates sensation’s possible transgressivity. Sensational

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events, as in the concept of the crossing, can be seen as effects of an inter­ ference between affective eventness and narrative discursivity. Analysing the touch scene as a novelistic event of paramount importance for Walter’s subject formation, Ortiz Robles argues that it emblematizes the interruption of two different discursive orders: an order of repre­ sentation that captures events and submits them to interpretation (the solution to an enigma) and an order of performance whereby the event being represented (the touch) impinges on the body as an involuntary sensation that stops narrative flow. The stop-start movement of this inaugural episode is thus also the material trace of the event, or, better, the eventness, of the touch, which is registered at the level of narrative as a ‘coincidence’ with long-term storytelling consequences while, at the level of affect, it is experienced as a short-lived moment whose sheer corporeality renders it inaccessible to narrative interpretation. (Ortiz Robles 2010a: 847) An aisthetic corpo-reality thus complements the discursive realm of representa­ tion in sensation fiction. The representational and the performative order corre­ spond to Walter’s split subject position as narrating and experiencing I, the subject of enunciation and the subject of the enounced, so processes of subject formation also register on a narratological level, affecting the establishment of a deictic centre and the corresponding possibility of referencing a character’s sen­ sorial setting. The touch scene serves as a relay for these overlapping discourses and subject events. It establishes a mode of story-telling characterized by gaps and reiterations of this “‘primal scene’” (D.A. Miller 1986: 110) to drive forward the narrative and to generate ever more instalments, like a “tireless writing machine” producing “text, affect” and “subject events” (Ortiz Robles 2010a: 854). The Woman in White thus showcases “subject formation as a species of novelization” (846; emphasis in the original), and does so by ‘crossing’ telling and showing, narrative discourse and direct experience, emotion and affect. In The Woman in White, Walter Hartright recounts the event of the touch as follows: I had mechanically turned in this latter direction, and was strolling along the lonely high-road – idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like – when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick. There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road – there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments; her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her. I was far too

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Anne’s touch arrests Walter’s physiological processes, and he seems to be transmogrified into a nervous body, unable to speak; thus, the narrating and experiencing I are completely dissociated. As a character, Walter can only physiologically process signals or electric currents and, as he himself con­ fesses, he cannot speak. The recounting of the story is possible only as a retrograde narrativization of the event, a fact reflected in the tense structure of the passage; the event itself, as well as its aftermath, is, at the moment of its occurrence, unspeakable. Walter as experiencing I is bereft of language, hence his failure to respond to Anne’s question – “‘Is that the road to London?’” (Collins 1900a, I: 30); it appears that he cannot consciously hear and process this information. After feeling Anne’s touch and reacting by turning around and gripping the handle of his stick – an act that constitutes a metonymical articulation of his sexual arousal and provides him with the sensation of actively touching something himself, instead of passively being touched from behind – he is captured solely by the visual stimuli of Anne’s appearance. He “looked attentively at her” (30) and describes her features and then her voice, which he perceives as having “something curiously still and mechanical in its tones” (30). Characterizing Anne as uncannily machine-like, Walter slowly recovers and regains speech: “‘You must excuse my not answering you before. I was rather startled by your sudden appear­ ance in the road; and I am, even now, quite unable to account for it’” (31; my emphases). Whereas the dialogue in this scene is typically in the present tense – Walter performatively asks Anne to forgive his impoliteness – the event of the touch is recounted in the past tense. However, the present experiencing I is unable “to account for it” (31), articulating not only his inability to express what has just happened, but the very structure of the sensational. The touch itself can only be narrated, as the narrative discourse can be appropriated only by the fully formed subject Walter Hartright in retrospect. The perceptive immediacy of the scene is established not only by its set­ ting, but by the use of tenses in the chapter and the close alignment of the implied reader’s perspective with Walter’s narrowing internal focalization. As the scene is introduced by many situational frames related in the past perfect simple, the narrative present is closely tied to what happened pre­ viously until Anne’s sudden touch interrupts this background action. On his journey back to London, the character-cum-narrator Walter Hartright begins to concentrate his attention on his inner feelings: [W]hen I had left the Heath, and had turned into the by-road, where there was less to see, the ideas naturally engendered by the approaching

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change in my habits and occupations, gradually drew more and more of my attention exclusively to themselves. By the time I had arrived at the end of the road, I had become completely absorbed in my own fanciful visions of Limmeridge House. (Collins 1900a, I: 29; my emphases) The touch scene is not represented as a continuous sequence of action, but as a sudden occurrence within a frame of background action. Walter’s per­ ceptive focus as deictic centre is set on introspection, and the space and setting in which the experiencing I is situated is characterized as a kind of heterotopia, in the sense that Walter’s imaginary vision of Limmeridge overshadows “that particular point of my walk where four roads met” (29), at which he automatically and without thinking takes the road to London. It is thus Walter’s lack of awareness effecting the narrative manipulation of readers’ attention that produces the ‘thrill’ or shock regarded as character­ istic of the sensational. Through an internal focalization on the experiencing I, the implied reader’s perspective is narrowed down to Walter’s introspec­ tion and becomes equally oblivious of his surroundings, until a ‘fragmented’ hand enters the visualized ‘frame’ of the setting and ruptures Walter’s rev­ erie. Walter Hartright is touched – D.A. Miller even argues he is “taken” (1986: 117) – from behind by Anne Catherick, who, as Walter soon learns, has just escaped from an asylum. The literary construction of the relation­ ship between character and setting, as well as the temporal structure of the scene, resembles film strategies creating suspense: framing a character so as to deprive him of action space conventionally indicates a sudden turn of events, especially in the horror genre, which can be seen as exaggerating strategies of sensation fiction. The author of an 1860 review in The Guardian makes an intermedial com­ parison between the plasticity of the novel’s setting and stereograph printing, claiming that Collins “paints his scenes with a fullness and accuracy which produces the effect of a stereograph”, so that the settings “stand out before the eye like known and familiar scenes” (Page 1974: 91). This plasticity of setting, I argue, is a relevant aisthetic strategy to create an environment appealing to the senses, so that the reader can vicariously participate in the spatial scenes thus created. The creation of virtual space serves to establish directionality, in the sense that it allows characters to be positioned and readers to ‘take places’ within the setting, which, in turn, is related to the perspective structure of the text. If we understand the narrative construction of space in analogy to “con­ cepts of space and place in terms of social relations” (Massey 1994: 2), narrative spatiality can be seen as an effect of a novel’s character constellation within a sufficiently specified setting. This aisthetic strategy of constructing a setting on the basis of the interaction of characters intersects with their performance and performativity. Strategies of trompe l’œil, rendering the setting apparently three-dimen­ sional, become part of a melodramatic tableau in the touch scene, which is

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comparable to a filmic freeze frame, or, for that matter, spirit photography. The moment when Walter is arrested by Anne’s touch is emblematized and, in terms of consumer retention, can be remembered as an icon, charged with the affective attitude of the scene. As such, it proves instrumental in inducing readers to consume books characterized by such pathos formulas. The scene is also interesting from the point of view of Victorian critical discourse, as it provides an implicit commentary on the battle between literary conventions associated with either realism or sensationalism. Walter’s meeting with Anne at a crossroads may be considered an ironic allusion to central metaphors of Victorian novel criticism, which repre­ sents the novel of plot “as a chain or a road” and the novel of character “as a drawing or a portrait” (Kendrick 1977: 20). Taking issue with this differentiation, Collins brings together the strongly visualized character of Anne with the crossroads of a complicated plot (see Collins 1900a, I: 20), thus allegorizing his critical opinion as outlined in the 1861 preface to the novel (Collins 2008a: 4). The temporal structure of the passage also reveals that this situation is characterized by pauses, in which the narration moves forward while the action remains frozen. These pauses generate further enigmas besides those that are openly addressed, such as Percival Glyde’s secret of illegitimacy. Sensational story-telling comprises the creation of gaps and pauses, a chiasm between narrative progress and iconicity, between verbal relatability and a visual wonderment. The narrative insinuation of filling these gaps or integrating them into a continuous story is the narrativization of that which cannot be put into words, as it is perceptively and affectively overwhelming. Sensations are effects of such chiastic overlaps in which the answer does not directly follow a question or a promise is not immediately given. In short, they are effects of “a blank space” that tells “the whole story” (Collins 1900a, II: 203); that is, a paradox of representing the unsayable or perceiving the unperceivable, which amounts to a differend between different modes of representation. 3.1.2 Sensational Negotiations of Structures of Feeling and Viable Subjectivities Sensation fiction introduces narrative structures revealing the lack of control on the level of characters, as well as of the narrators. The sensational con­ ception of character is a central part of “the poetics of the sensation novel”: In rejecting the premise that we know an individual – and can assign him or her a character – on the basis of information we take in through our senses, the sensation novel was not simply refusing the gambit of realism; it also proposed an entirely different way of being, knowing, and interacting with other human beings as a community. (N. Armstrong 2012: 139–140; my emphasis)

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Analysing Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Nancy Armstrong shows that, whereas the character of realism requires the “repetition of appearance and behaviour over time to sediment a character” (140), the sensational character proves more mercurial, replacing such “solidity” with “a sequence of zigzags and loops” (141). She goes on to argue that Braddon’s paradigmatic sensation novel also reveals the ways in which the stimulus-response chain is reversed, in that Lady Audley’s Pre-Raphaelite portrait proves “a record of how the painter responded to her”, rather than a ‘faithful’ representation, which “also blurs the distinction between stimulus and object” (140). This is a twofold insight into both calibrations of the senses and constructions of character in the novel, aspects that are closely related in sensation fiction. The repetition of a char­ acter’s appearance is not functionalized to let a character materialize over time as a recognizable entity, but rather to illustrate the fact that iterations of the set of traits generally geared towards making up a character may alter from context to context. While this rarely amounts to the utter dissolution of the concept of ‘character’, it nevertheless challenges ‘character’ as a stable, unified entity. Although The Woman in White retains more of the Bildungsroman structure than Lady Audley’s Secret does (see N. Armstrong 2012: 141), generally the realist character, possessing a stable set of traits, convictions and attitudes, can be pitted against sensational characters who, with every repetition of their die­ getic occurrence, may turn out to have changed, to be not what they seemed, to have lost capabilities they used to have, and so on. Through repetition and recurrence, character is tied to sensation fiction’s temporal structure: Where earlier novels trace a sequence of gradual changes turning past into present, the sensation novel takes a chronological slice through both personal and historical time that turns past into the eternal present of repetition-compulsion. This slice disables affiliations based on lineage and personal sympathy. (N. Armstrong 2012: 143) This renders the options for the implied reader’s bricolage of information per­ taining to a character brittle, as every reiteration of the ‘character’ may actually present a different ‘personality’. In The Woman in White, this applies to the similarity in appearance between Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick who, as the story progresses, become interchangeable (see Bourne Taylor 1988: 99). It takes all of Walter Hartright’s efforts to prove that Laura is in fact Laura and not Anne, and thus the rightful heiress to Limmeridge; however, the evidence itself turns out to be highly performative, as it is based on the ‘consent’ of the village community orchestrated by Walter (see Collins 1900a, II: 375). The plausibility of Walter’s version of events depends on his ability “to see differently, partly by appropriating others’ perceptions” (Bourne Taylor 1988: 109) and to authorize his point of view by invoking the law or a community’s affirmation. As Ann Gaylin elucidates,

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Sensationalisms: Wilkie Collins Laura recovers her identity only through the dissemination of private information to a larger public audience, and through public recognition of her by the male villagers and farm labourers on her estate, who col­ lectively vote her into existence at the end of the novel. (Gaylin 2001: 309)

Fictional ‘truth’ is the effect of a manipulation of collective ways of per­ ceiving something or someone as someone: to perceive Laura as Laura, it is necessary to project or confer markers of identity on a character’s otherwise indeterminate ‘screen’ of bodily appearance. Ronald Thomas argues that, in the 1850s and 1860s, “‘character’ had taken on a totemic value in the context of Victorian debates about ‘moral management’” and that “literary critics were taking part in a common ‘discourse of moralization’ within Victorian culture aimed at resisting the kind of character-eroding effects that sensation fiction was perceived to foster” (1999: 62). The fear of sensation fiction can thus be understood as the articulation of the loss of a particular notion of subjectivity and, concomitantly, an arguably secure identity of character in the novel. Sensation fiction clearly challenges “the self-distancing individual capable of disciplining his impulses and planning his life” (Wiener 1994: 47; emphasis in the original). Sensation fiction depends for its effects on a chiastic relationship between that which can be articulated and that which needs to remain in the closet, between expressing and silencing, and on transferrals of that which can be said and that which must remain unspoken on different narratological levels. Characters’ physiology can betray that which cannot be said openly in nar­ rative discourse, so the reader’s body is required as a kind of echo chamber to spell out the gaps in the text and to act out the transferrals that it per­ forms. Criticism thus functions as a discourse highlighting precisely those aspects that are not yet ready for articulation in the socio-cultural context of writing – or, to put it differently, criticism translates literary articulations of the unsayable into a terminology of value judgements and renders them available for later processing in a different key, in the form of what Freud terms a “mnemic symbol” (Freud and Breuer 1955: 90).9 Jonathan Loesberg has identified some key structural aspects of sensa­ tional plots: “The plot operates through various forms of transference and reversal to isolate the moments when it produces the sensation response apart from any thematic readability” (1986: 118; my emphases). Loesberg’s emphasis on transference paves the way for a rhetorical analysis of sensation fiction, which may elucidate the effects that it achieves through the use of tropes such as metonymy, metaphor, and catachresis (see Ortiz Robles 2010a: 851). It also gestures towards a psychoanalytically informed reading of sensation fiction, in that transference and reversal can achieve their sen­ sational ends only when, say, the characters to be reversed are so described as to be cathected accordingly by the reader. The principle of doubling typical of sensation fiction (see Hughes 1980: 20) is consequently a structural

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prerequisite for sensational transferences and reversals, which depend on the recognition of something that is hauntingly repeated, with a difference, within parallel constructions. The doubling reveals what the narrative repe­ tition of acts naturalizes through its very conventionality – that is to say, the volatility of character construction, as well as its subversive potential in such repetitions, rendered conspicuous by the sudden chiastic reversal that such sedimented identities undergo. Such reiterations also allow for the creation of uncanny effects. The uncanny, as defined by Sigmund Freud in 1919, retrospectively lends itself to an analysis of sensation fiction for several reasons. Firstly, Freud can be said to analyse, in a different context, “the same terrain as his near con­ temporaries among the novelists” (Pykett 2012: 219), who frequently explore extreme psychic states and phenomena of the unconscious, as well as the repression and release of psychic energies, in sensation fiction: sensation and the fantastic in fiction are forms of the personal or poli­ tical unconscious; the return of the repressed in which ‘unconscious psychic energy bursts out from the constraints of the conscious ego,’ or in which subjugated, silenced, or invisible social groups or impulses rise up against the social institutions of forces which seek to deny or contain them. (Pykett 2012: 212) The sensational can thus be read as an articulation of that which is repres­ sed or concealed, negotiated through calibrations of affect and perception. This level of experience is also what renders the sensational so popular and appealing: it can, in some ways, be directly felt, like the thrill of gossip, the uncovering of a secret or a scandalous breach of mores. This aspect of being concealed or hidden is ingrained in a particular semantic component of the German heimlich. Its negation, indicated by the prefix ‘un-’, therefore implies “that which uncovers or discovers what is normally concealed” (Pykett 2012: 219), tying in nicely with the fact that sensation fiction centres around a secret that needs to be discovered or ‘detected’ by sleuth figures – a characteristic that feeds into generic developments in detective fiction. Sen­ sation fiction’s domestic or heimlich connotations turn out to be unheimlich, after all; thus, the genre is rightly seen as the gothic laid at our doorstep (see James 1921: 110). Jenny Bourne Taylor has highlighted the interdependence of both aspects in sensation fiction and shown that Collins uses the uncanny as a means of creating both aesthetic effects and epistemological uncertainty, ingrained in perception. She highlights that characters deviating from the norm, “obsessively repeated figures”, “continually come back in a way that challenges the boundaries that were founded on their exclusion” (Bourne Taylor 1988: 16). What she reveals here is that sensation fiction’s pre­ occupation with identity is not merely a thematic concern; rather, the very structure of the genre partakes of processes of identity construction (see

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1988: 63–64). In line with Lacanian psychosemiotics, this approach relies on processes of projection or an imaginary identification with ideal egos. When these do not mirror the expected self-image, they appear uncanny, as a character is then faced with the self as other. (Self‑)perception, the uncanny and the sensational are intricately intertwined in Collins’s fiction. The return of the repressed, which pertains to identity formation as well as to the integrity of the text as a consistent and coherent cultural product, is not only the gist of the uncanny and a feature of the sensational, but, more pervasively, a figure that renders visible the conditions of possibility of the novel. The return of the repressed illustrates the performative constitu­ tion of a text and its constitutive exclusions in the very process of cultural construction. The insecurity of perception and the challenge to a unilinear articulation of signifier and signified open up a space for the novelistic illustration of ‘ways of perceiving’. Correspondingly, the proto-sleuths of sensation fiction guide readers to an arguably ‘deeper’ understanding of the text, discovering what lies ‘beneath’ the surface of sign systems and unco­ vering meaning – which, however, is constructed as such a ‘deep structure’ in the first place. The insight that sensation fiction is structured around a secret (see also Harrison and Fantina 2006: xii) illustrates the fact that sensational narrative discourse is an effect of a mystery, which, in turn, is frequently constructed as something inexpressible – something beyond words. The structure of sensation fiction is determined not only by the unsayable, but by a cultural anaesthesia, in the sense that, corresponding to the ineffable, the sensational depends on calibrations of perception. Sensation fiction can be said to con­ struct an enigma that a detective figure may progressively reveal in order to safeguard the notion that some truth remains accessible. Thus, it mimics the structure of a Baudrillardian third-order simulacrum, which masks the fact that there is no prior reality (see Baudrillard 2001: 173)10 or systemic core, in a structuralist sense, that determines and fixes meaning. On the contrary, Collins’s sensation novels frequently allude to the fact that the centre is empty, that a structuring principle is absent. This is achieved by a sleight of hand consisting in the construction of a ‘deeper’ level, i.e. that which is to be uncovered or de-tected when the ‘cover-stories’ produced by the novel are finally exposed for its readers, who can then spot what was hidden by the text all along. Thus, by its very structure and distribution of information, sensation fiction does not quite account for the insight that it actually pro­ vides: namely, that, within the crisis of perception, ‘truth’ is no longer accessible but is rather a semiological construct. Furthermore, this structure reflects the economic contexts of print culture: Collins “learned most rapidly and skilfully to exploit the mechanics of enigma and suspense encouraged by the weekly number” (Baker 2005: xxxii). The Woman in White, which was serialized in Dickens’s weekly All the Year Round between 26 November 1859 and 25 August 1860 (see Page 1974: 78) and “marked a breakthrough in middle-range mass journalism”

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(Bourne Taylor 1988: 23), is structured around empty spaces and is thus rightly called an “Enigma Novel” (Page 1974: 109). The woman in white herself is a ‘blank’ figure (see Daly 2009: 33), while Sir Percival Glyde’s ‘illegitimacy’ is proven by a missing entry in “the duplicate register of Old Welmingham Church” (Collins 1900a, II: 201); the story therefore turns around emptied literary categories such as character or the ‘gist’ of the story. Walter describes his attempt to find the entry for the marriage of Sir Percival’s parents in the register as follows: I turned to the month of September, eighteen hundred and three. I found the marriage of the man whose Christian name was the same as my own. I found the double register of the marriages of the two brothers. And between these entries, at the bottom of the page—? Nothing! Not a vestige of the entry which recorded the marriage of Sir Felix Glyde and Cecilia Jane Elster, in the register of the church! My heart gave a great bound, and throbbed as if it would stifle me. I looked again – I was afraid to believe the evidence of my own eyes. No! not a doubt. The marriage was not there. [… T]here was a blank space. […] That space told the whole story! […] The idea that he was not Sir Percival Glyde at all, that he had no more claim to the baronetcy and to Blackwater Park than the poorest laborer who worked on the estate, had never occurred to my mind. […] The disclosure of that secret […] would deprive him, at one blow, of the name, the rank, the estate, the whole social existence that he had usurped. This was the Secret, and it was mine! (Collins 1900a, II: 202–204; my emphases) The passage illustrates two vital aspects of the novel and many other texts by Collins.11 Firstly, the narrative is structured around an empty space fashioned as a secret for sensational effect. The secret is one of illegitimacy, which draws on some key themes of sensation fiction: legal discourses, marriage law and questions of inheritance. Secondly, this empty space has the power to strip Sir Percival Glyde of his legal and social identity, emphasizing the legal and material consequences of the unwritten. The pas­ sage thus self-reflexively alludes to the dependence of any literary statement on that which remains un(re)marked, on that which functions as the condi­ tion of possibility of a literary statement in the first place. This is even mirrored in the rhetoric of the passage, as it contains several dashes hinting at the ineffable. The rhetorical figure of aposiopesis is one of the principal devices that Collins uses to achieve an effect through gaps in writing. It relies on what Wolfgang Iser would call “empty spaces” or “blanks” (1987: 41; 48), textual lacunae that need to be filled in by the reader, thus eliciting an emotional response. The introduction of a double-layered textual structure – cover-story and the sensational secret to be discovered – not only ties in with Victorian

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scientific insights into processes of ‘unconscious cerebration’ (Carpenter 1875: 515), but provokes a hermeneutics of suspicion as a corresponding reading strategy, further professionalized through the detective figure. The reading disposition is harnessed to a novelistic ‘Fort-Da’-game, with the sensational thrill that the discoveries made may not be what one has expected or may reveal the expected changed or metamorphosed. This is the structural equivalent to the sensational use of the uncanny, which may con­ sist in the return of the repressed, i.e. in the changed re-encounter with what was once familiar. It can therefore be argued that structural aspects of plot and psychological dynamics are closely intertwined in sensation fiction. As fatal recurrences, repetitions insinuate a greater meaningfulness than they may actually have simply because reiterated marks turn into signs that can be assigned further significance, despite the fact that they have no prior ‘reality’. The repeated appearances of the woman in white in Collins’s novel – “Again, and yet again, the woman in white. There was a fatality in it” (Collins 1900a, I: 112; emphasis in the original) – finally turn into a “monomania” (119) for Walter, and he soon fashions her as the key to his life (see 119).12 Such recurrences of ‘almost but not quite’ the same situa­ tion draw attention to the process of repetition in the course of perfor­ mative reiterations that are at the root of the to a large extent naturalized and, as such, invisible processual construction of characters and subjectivities. A performative approach to character construction can reveal the processes by which ‘new’ men and women are formulated – for example, by reading uncanny doublings of character as symptomatic illustrations of the arbi­ trariness of identities and reflections on the social allocation of subject positions. Sensation fiction gestures towards a central aisthetic concern, the emer­ gence of a new structure of feeling, which, however, is not yet articulatable; thus, the genre takes on the articulation of a change that cannot yet be expressed. In The Woman in White, Anne fearfully asks Walter several times to promise “not to interfere” with her (Collins 1900a, I: 33), a promise that he makes only after her third plea. The event of the touch thus obviously establishes a narrative structure that relies on repetition and repeatability, and is thus adapted to the processes of serialization. Sensa­ tional thrill is generated by what happens ‘in between’ – in the interstices between a plea and a promise, a question and an answer, or, in physiologi­ cal parlance, a stimulus and a response. Walter’s seeming reluctance to promise not to interfere is fraught with uncertainty. Why, for example, does he “trace these lines, self-distrustfully, with the shadows of after-events darkening the very paper I write on” (33–34)? Does this refer only to the morality of letting Anne escape even though she is required to return to the asylum (see D.A. Miller 1986: 111), or to the morality of Walter’s conduct? Why does the narrating I “tremble” when he finally responds “‘Yes’” to her plea? Walter’s eventual yes is uttered only after a passage asking for the readers’ tolerance:

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As she repeated the words for the third time, she came close to me, and laid her hand, with a sudden gentle stealthiness, on my bosom – a thin hand; a cold hand (when I removed it with mine) even on that sultry night. Remember that I was young; remember that the hand which touched me was a woman’s. (Collins 1900a, I: 34) During the pause between her question and his answer – Walter admits that he tries to “gain time by questioning her” himself (34) – he leaves a lot of gaps for possible interferences, which, however, remain unsaid, leaving room, or blanks, for further sensational effects (see Ortiz Robles 2010a: 848). This allusion to the possibility of interferences in the narrative space opened up by Anne’s plea and Walter’s reluctance to provide an answer may explain the “vague sense of something like self-reproach” (Collins 1900a, I: 35) to which Walter confesses. His unspecified feeling of guilt and the gaps leaving things – possibly interferences – unsaid turn the narrative itself into a long story of self-legitimization (see Gaylin 2001: 321). Collins’s use of strategies of sensational subject construction, as well as interruption of the narrative through sensational eventness, is corroborated by the semiology of the scene, which is conducive to the novel’s character con­ struction as well as to aisthetics. Ortiz Robles reads the woman in white as a rhetorical figure in the novel – or, drawing on Deleuze, as a figural – in the sense that it “escapes illustration by means of narrative disruption, becoming quite literally a ‘matter of fact’ that acts immediately upon the nervous system” (Ortiz Robles 2010a: 854). As such, she represents less a character than a blank space and lends herself all the more to Walter’s masculine subject formation through projections of difference onto ‘the woman in white’, whether she is called Anne, Laura or “Woman” (Collins 1900a, I: 7). Walter responds to Anne’s touch as if to a tactile de-interpellation that dissolves his identity, such that he feels compelled to ask: “Was I Walter Hartright?” (Collins 1900a, I: 34). The narrative that follows tells the story of how Walter can ‘piece himself together again’, how he can become a ‘man’ after the shock of the feminine touch from behind: his character con­ struction is thus showcased as a combination or suture of fragments, just as the story itself is. However, in this situation, the encounter with the woman in white has a bearing on the possibility of narration, as well as the estab­ lishment of subjectivity, which itself corresponds to text production in that the entry into the symbolic entails what Lacan calls submission to the law of the father, and thus a severing from the dyad with the mother that, within language, can be expressed but only desired. According to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the symbolic and the semiotic,13 the semiotic may disturb the symbolic through its particular kind of rhetoricity, its rhythm and, one might add, its figurality. The effect that the woman in white has on Walter’s identity can be explained as a threat of the dissolution of several fore­ closures, the first of which concerns the performative power of language.

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Character construction involves a sedimentation of meaning achieved by the reiterated ascription of traits, behaviours and appearances that is enabled only by this foreclosure. The woman in white, however, as the quasi-hallucinatory apparition in the middle of the night, is the trace of this foreclosure and threatens to dissolve entirely the novelistic character as an ‘individual’. As Judith Butler explains, “[t]he condition for the subject’s survival is precisely the foreclosure of what threatens the subject most fun­ damentally; thus the ‘bar’ produces the threat and defends against it at the same time” (1997: 135).14 The encounter with the woman in white enacts exactly that: the imaginary articulation of the subject’s proximity to this bar and its own dissolution and, simultaneously, its own making. Mario Ortiz Robles describes the role of foreclosure in the functioning of the novel: [T]he novel, as the symbolic repository of the “Real,” allows us to read such foreclosure as the condition of possibility of (constative) narrative and the re-emergence of the foreclosed performative force as the per­ formance of the material subject-predicates of a hallucinated “indivi­ dual.” Indeed, it is the implicit censorship of performative language use in the period under consideration that, for instance, “bars” women from performing the sort of speech acts that consolidate the public sphere as the exclusive domain of men; men from speaking the name of their love for men; the lower classes from gaining access to the discursive “privi­ leges” of the middle classes; the “lower” races from declaring their “civilized” humanity. The institutionally erected “bars” that exert the performative foreclosure of certain forms of performativity act as the very foundations of the performativity of the “individual.” (Ortiz Robles 2010b: 30) As a ghostlike figure, Anne Catherick is the figure of a foreclosure in the Real, a foreclosure of that which, in the social context evoked by Collins’s novel, cannot be. Despite and because of its iteration of these norms, this foreclosure renders the processes of social censorship regulating the constitution of gendered subjects visible and reveals the violence that makes ‘men’ and ‘women’ conform to viable subject positions. In other words, The Woman in White amounts to a meta-dis­ course on realist conventions governing the conditions of possibility of subject constitution and character construction. The novel uses innovative forms of story-telling as a means of simultaneously controlling and revealing the calibra­ tions of perception necessary to uphold these social structures and, by the same token, uncovers the violence that this entails. While the realist liberal individual must disavow the fact that it depends on such forms of foreclosure to ward off any challenge to established power hierarchies, The Woman in White rehearses the encounter with the very processes that keep Walter’s identity in place, as long as they remain foreclosed, and thus renders them visible. The whole narrative portrays the persistent effects of this meeting on Walter and the norms that regulate his further conduct and the sedimentation of his character:

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The rules that constrain the intelligibility of the subject continue to structure the subject throughout his or her life. And this structuring is never fully complete. Acting one’s place in language continues the sub­ ject’s viability, where that viability is held in place by a threat both produced and defended against, the threat of a certain dissolution of the subject. (Butler 1997: 136) As Butler explains, this process is dependent on the intelligibility of speech as a symptom of a subject’s viability; where clarity of speech is lacking, it may well lead to “psychiatric incarceration” (136). Within the diegetic world described in The Woman in White, such incarceration may be triggered by deviation from social norms, classified as ‘moral insanity’ (see Gaylin 2001: 309). Walter’s story is his rather desperate construction of a viable subject position for himself, while Anne is reduced to a foil for his ‘monomania’, his obsession with defining his own identity. Initially, however, she repre­ sents the possibility of his dissolution, dissolving the narrative grid of char­ acter construction. The passages following Walter’s nocturnal encounter with the woman in white articulate the dissolution of the deictic centre of the narrative. As has already been outlined, this is set in place after the mirror stage and, conse­ quently, the entry into the symbolic, which regulates the viability of subjects as well as the realm of the sayable. Doubting the connection between him­ self and his own name, Walter also articulates some distrust with regard to his writing. The frequent repetitions with a difference in the narrative and the split subject position of Walter as experiencing and narrating I are two conspicuous indicators of the possible unreliability of the text, aside from Walter’s subconscious desires. Despite the presence effect of the touch scene, one must not forget that Walter is retelling the story of his encounter with the woman in white three years after its occurrence in the narrated time. Thus, the narrative insinuates an immediacy that the narrative situation cannot redeem. For example, Anne confesses that she “was obliged to steal after […], and touch [Walter]” (Collins 1900a, I: 32), a sentence that Walter as narrator repeats, betraying the narratological split between experiencing I and narrating I. Conversely, from the position of the implied sensational reader, both narrative instances are merged; the content represented is thus metaleptically transformed into an event, which affects the implied reader in the same way as it does Walter in the retelling. Walter’s repetition of Anne’s utterance – “Steal after me and touch me? Why not call to me?” (32) – is not placed in inverted commas as direct speech, but reads like a paradoxical free indirect discourse in a firstperson narrative, displaying the inner split of the character-narrator, which complicates the representation of the event of the touch in the coherent language of retrospective. The narrating I has, by the time of narration, managed to position himself as a ‘man’, whereas the experiencing I is

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‘feminized’ or rendered nervous by Anne’s touch (see D.A. Miller 1986: 110–112). Richard Aczel defines free indirect discourse (FID) as “a construction of the reader working on the basis of contextual cues” (1998: 478) or as “an alterity effect” (494), in the sense that it is “constituted in the perceived dif­ ference of voice in the FID utterance from the voice of the broader utterance in which it is embedded” (478). Despite the unusual association with firstperson narrative, it can be argued that the different language styles used by the narrating and experiencing I in this scene – one relating a coherent story as the narrator, one questioning the very possibility of representation in the face of affect – produce such an alterity effect, amounting to alternative subject effects. ‘Walter’ comprises two subject positions, one as an embo­ died, nervous experiencing body and one as an organizing and narrating entity, controlling the distribution of information and the order of events. The experiencing I is rendered utterly insecure by the touch, losing its orientation as a deictic centre and even the position from which Walter was able to align the subject of enunciation with the subject of the enounced. With the narrating and experiencing I dissociated, even the designation of the subject of the enounced becomes dubious. Does the ‘I’ on the page cor­ respond to ‘Walter Hartright’? This insecurity points to a regression in Walter’s subject formation. Faced with the figural of the woman in white, the symbolic order and, with it, the law of the father, the psychoanalytical correspondence to the legal context opened up in the novel’s first chapter, are shaken and Walter glimpses the threshold between the semiotic and the symbolic, and thus the threshold of the very possibility of narration. Lyotard’s concept of the figural can be usefully applied to the concrete semiotic aspects of the process of meaning making and subject constitution. Vlad Ionescu summarizes this approach and differentiates discourse from the figural: Discourse produces sense by maintaining regular spaces between terms; the figural produces sense by engaging the desiring body in its relation to signs that are plastic, visual, and dense. […] The figural designates the gesture that breaks through language and reveals its purely visual forms. [… T]he figural, like the dream-work, disturbs all differentiated structures and inscribes an excess of sense that is not meant to be read but seen. […] Just as in Freud’s analysis of the dream, the figural is a setup that forces us to look at language as a visible space worked by desire and not just as a signaling chain of signifiers. (Ionescu 2013: 146; 148, emphasis in original) The figural, in contradistinction to the semiotic, is thus a decidedly visual effect of desire disturbing the symbolic. The woman in white functions as a figural not only because she serves to interrupt the narrative flow and pre­ sents an object of desire for Walter (see, for example, Collins 1900a, I: 34),

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but because she introduces visuality into Walter’s story – “this extraordinary apparition” (30). Furthermore, she is devised as a character who remains a rather shadowy character-type, rather than a fully fledged round character. Forcing “us to look at language” (Ionescu 2013: 148), she is the phantom gesturing towards the necessity of self-reflexivity. In keeping with her intro­ duction as a figural, Walter grants the woman in white hardly any narrative space. As narrator-editor, he restricts her opportunities for expression drasti­ cally compared with, for example, Marian, who is permitted to present her diary, in which – editorial intrusions aside – she is the speaker. Anne Catherick is reduced to an automaton, a description that is tied to her voice and, later, to her limited cognitive abilities: “The voice, little as I had yet heard of it, had something curiously still and mechanical in its tones, and the utterance was remarkably rapid” (Collins 1900a, I: 30–31). The sound of her voice, as per­ ceived by Walter and evaluated by his narrative, helps to reduce Anne’s char­ acter to a figural in a retrospective verbalization, while Walter’s experiencing I is utterly dumbfounded by the encounter. The difference between the char­ acters is constituted by the description of her tone of voice and the velocity and urgency of her speech. Walter’s interpretation of it as ‘mechanical’ is a dis­ cursive strategy to deprive Anne of agency, to render her static, uncannily machine-like, and to stave off the threat that she poses. This strategy reveals the restrictions that must be placed on Anne to enable the bourgeois masculine ideal to emerge by the end of the novel. Anne’s dialogue is restricted to a few lines and characterized, as Mrs Fairlie relates in a letter to her husband, by an “unusual slowness in acquiring ideas” and a corresponding tendency to retain received notions indelibly (Collins 1900a, I: 87), rather like a wax tablet to be inscribed with ideas. Tying in with her (and Laura’s or Woman’s [my emphasis]) con­ struction as a ‘character sketch’, bordering on a chimera, she is associated less with meaning than with indexicality, in the sense that she mostly points to meaning, rather than expressing it. Walter’s narrative correspondingly constructs Anne as lacking traits typical of literary characters: he describes her as “this woman, whose name, whose character, whose story, whose objects in life, whose very presence by my side, at that moment, were fathomless mysteries to me” (34). As a “recognizable realit[y]” (5), she is a means of story-telling, required as a counterpoint for Walter’s meaning making. Through her inclusion as a figural, she incites wonder, it is true, but functionally she is an exchangeable entity, as the identity switch with Laura illustrates. Significantly, Walter meets Anne “pointing to the dark cloud over London” (30); thus, she briefly assumes the role of a schematic deictic centre at the same time as Walter’s subjectivity disintegrates in the face of the figural and his immediate libidinal cathexis. However, her deic­ tics is literally that of a figure pointing, rather than a steady reference point for the story as a whole. Vlad Ionescu relates the role of the figural to a distinction between sense and sensibility:

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Sensationalisms: Wilkie Collins There is a gap between the sensible and the sensed, the aisthesis and the exterior correlate, and discourse tends to convert this gap by reducing exteriority, that which is seen and touched, to the interiority of lan­ guage. Discourse turns deictics (designation) into the dialectics of sig­ nification (the interior negation of language). (Ionescu 2013: 149)

This transformation of real sense experience into language is mirrored in the narratological set-up of The Woman in White and showcased by Walter as fictional editor, with his split subject position separated into a narrating and an experiencing I. The shock that Walter experiences is described in retro­ spect by the mature Walter as narrator, who concedes that the event had a powerful effect on him, but veils it in the emplotment that follows. Given Walter’s confessions of guilt, the narrative as a whole reads like a justifica­ tion to affirm his position as a man of society, a position secured by mar­ rying Laura and thus gaining access to her wealth. The figure of the woman in white, doubled in Laura Fairlie, is vital for the process of Walter’s subject formation. In one of several reiterations of the touch event, Walter turns the shock of touch into a shock of recognition or anagnorisis, thus transposing the physical to the cognitive plane. With regard to anagnorisis as a trait of the tragedy, Nicholas Dames has high­ lighted the indebtedness of Victorian literary theory to a physiological interpretation of Aristotelian poetics. Tragedy is understood as mak[ing] its consumers feel katharsis through an only slightly variable, and certainly perfectable, order of events, which went under the names ‘recognition’ (anagnorèsis) and ‘reversal’ (peripeteia). Similarly, the novel is a machine constructed to make its reader feel through an only slightly variable, and possibly perfectable, order of events, which goes under the name of a periodic alternation between shock and lassitude. In each instance, a theory of plot order leads to a theory of generically specific affects, which can be used to summarize a literary genre. (Dames 2007: 57–58; my emphasis) Via its generic incorporation of melodrama, sensation fiction keeps ties to the tragedy and strongly relies on recognition and reversal for its plotting, a strategy which fosters readers’ emotional engagement in sensational stories. In The Woman in White, this structure is applied for aisthetic effect. Walter’s perception of the figure of the woman in white is repeated when he meets Laura Fairlie. In this repetition with a difference, Walter is able to recognize a resemblance, establishing an element of stability in his percep­ tion of the shape or outline of the figure he encounters. This recognition allows him to dispel the indistinct feeling that there is “something wanting” in Laura, or perhaps in himself (Collins 1900a, I: 75). “All my attention was concentrated on the white gleam of Miss Fairlie’s muslin dress”, Walter

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confesses, as Marian reads out a letter describing the striking similarity between Anne and Laura. She was ‘the living likeness, in her hair, her complexion, the color of her eyes, and the shape of her face –’ I started up from the ottoman, before Miss Halcombe could pronounce the next words. A thrill of the same feeling which ran through me when the touch was laid upon my shoulder on the lonely high-road, chilled me again. There stood Miss Fairlie, a white figure, alone in the moonlight; … the living image … of the woman in white! … That ‘something wanting’ was my own recognition of the ominous likeness between the fugitive from the asylum and my pupil at Limmeridge House. (Collins 1900a, I: 98–99) Walter’s initial irritation at the perceptual similarity between the two women in white is symptomatic of a crisis of perception, in that the simi­ larity between Laura and Anne is first experienced as an uncanny resem­ blance, which, cognitively, cannot be turned into a seamless identity. Walter’s perception of the two women leads him to believe that he is meet­ ing Anne a second time, while cognitively he is able to recognize Laura as a different person. The passage can thus be read as a reflection on the phe­ nomenology of perception and the construction of identity on the basis of the stability of perception. The ‘something wanting’ in Laura comprises not just Walter’s explicit interpretation of the phrase – his inability to recognize the likeness between Anne and Laura – but the lack of physicality with Laura at that stage and the desires of Laura herself: there is something wanting within her. Walter’s recognition entails a retrospective transferral of ‘something wanting’ from one woman to the other – concretely, from a madwoman to a romantic heroine and heiress – as well as a transferral of something wanting wrongly in Walter to a heterosexual wanting. His recognition of the likeness between the women stands in for the likeness between himself and desired objects and establishes a quasi-predetermined end for the story in the haven of married respectability. This recognition is also rendered into an event for the reader. As Mar­ garet Oliphant puts it, “The reader’s nerves are affected just like the hero’s. He feels the thrill of the untoward resemblance, an ominous painful mys­ tery” (1862: 572). The supposedly male reader is thus included in Walter’s journey to becoming a ‘man’, on which relevant progress is made after his sojourn in Central America and the corresponding rites de passage. After his return, Walter reveals his motivations and his success: In the waters of a new life I had tempered my nature afresh. In the stern school of extremity and danger my will had learned to be strong, my heart to be resolute, my mind to rely on itself. I had gone out to fly from my own future. I came back to face it, as a man should. To face

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Enabled to perform a masculinity defined by self-reliance, will power, emo­ tional self-control and self-suppression, Walter comes closer to realist char­ acter ideals. However, these attitudes do not yet define his sensational, easily affected self of the novel’s First Epoch. Initially, male subject formation is revealed to be dependent on two screens of projection: women in white or blank spaces. As a drawing master, Walter seems to be particularly well suited to filling empty screens, and his occupation indicates the intertwine­ ment of gender constructions with aesthetic discourses. His comments on his watercolour of Laura are revealing: Does my poor portrait of her, my fond, patient labor of long and happy days, show me these things? Ah! how few of them are in the dim, mechanical drawing, and how many in the mind with which I regard it! … The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realize. The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls. Then, and then only, has it passed beyond the narrow region on which light falls, in this world, from the pencil and the pen. Think of her as you thought of the first woman who quickened the pulses within you that the rest of her sex had no art to stir… Take her as the visionary nursling of your own fancy. (Collins 1900a, II: 73–74) Here, Collins clothes Dallas’s approach to aesthetics in novelistic form. Aesthetics is presented as something appealing to and emerging from the unconscious. But quite unlike Dallas, who attempts to purge his ‘science of pleasure’, his Gay Science, of naughty sexual undertones (see Dallas 1999, II: 296), Collins intricately combines the two. In The Woman in White, conceptions of beauty remain shadowy for Walter until a woman who embodies them appears. The possibility of aesthetic appreciation is thus clearly connected with the gendered body: the male artist learns to give form to shadowy conceptions, and the ‘pure’ woman, the lady in white, for whom Laura stands in, is the necessary screen for that, a screen materialized in Walter’s portrait. That she is also a screen for sexual projec­ tions becomes clear in the last line – “Take her as the visionary nursling of your own fancy” – which invites the male reader to reduce the character Laura to a

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dummy that triggers their own desires. Laura and Anne are thus aligned by their literary conception as schematic characters. In the gender politics of the novel, Anne and Laura embody Dallas’s idea of a ‘pure woman’, in the sense that they are placeholders for the concept of femininity. Only they are positioned to safeguard cultural refinement and civilization, a kind of civilization based on family, domesticity and property. Consequently, Marian Halcombe is reduced to an indexical figure in the end, when she acquaints Walter Hartright with his son (see Collins 1900a, II: 387). As the opposite of the ‘pure’ woman, Marian is represented as a character of mixture – she intertwines traits associated with femininity and masculinity, for instance, rather than embodying a ‘pure’ woman – but also a much more physical being than her half-sister, at least at the beginning of the novel. As such, she is an object of desire to which Walter cannot suc­ cumb if the story is to fulfil the function of legitimizing a form of masculi­ nity suited to a romance plot and capable of affirming the bourgeois nuclear family, the only social model that can grant Walter unproblematic and morally untainted access to Laura’s wealth. Constructions of gender are thus crucial to the smoothness of the plot. Walter’s narrative ensures that the character construction, the character constellation and the contrasts and correspondences between characters work out in such a way that “Laura and Walter achieve beauty, harmony, and romantic union” (Halberstam 2002: 360). According to Judith Halberstam, Marian represents female masculinity and therefore poses a threat to Walter’s affectionate self of the First Epoch (see 359), which he needs to alter to render the romance plot plausible. Gender constructions are a socio-cultural terrain in which calibrations of perception intersect with power hierarchies, the validity of aesthetic norms and generic conventions. The ascription of ugliness to gendered bodies is part and parcel of this conglomerate. When Walter sees Marian for the first time, he is at first enraptured by the beauty of her figure, but then revolted by her masculine face. He begins by constructing a male gaze, which clearly objectifies the female object of the gaze and fragments Marian’s body by singling out particular parts for ‘aesthetic’ appreciation. Her face finally interrupts his gaze and thwarts his attempts to position Marian as a sex­ ualized and fetishized object. However, the shock of this interruption, which renders the process by which Walter objectifies Marian conscious and obvious, is projected onto Marian herself, who is positioned as an ugly woman. Walter is quick to point out that she initially provoked disgust in him in order to show that she was falsely cathected as an object of desire: I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of

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Sensationalisms: Wilkie Collins expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window – and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps – and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer – and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly! (Collins 1900a, I: 46)

Walter, the drawing master, begins to describe the scene with a keen eye for form and treasures the fact that Marian does not wear “stays” (46), thus betraying a predilection for ‘natural’ female forms.15 In addition, the parallel construction of the last three sentences and the rhetorical gradatio, appar­ ently leading to a climax, fashion Marian as a possible object of desire; this, however, is counteracted by the final ‘discovery’ of her ugliness as soon as Walter is able to see her distinctly. His surprise, or rather, disgust, at her ugliness reinstates distance, despite the increasing spatial proximity of the two characters. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed claims that “[d]isgust involves a fascination with the event as image” (2004: 96); thus, the scene created by Walter brings together in a tableau a simultaneity of repulsion and attraction. The visuality of the scene enables Marian’s facial ugliness to be retained as an image and excludes her from the position of a romantic love interest for the rest of the novel. Her “almost swarthy [complexion]”, “the dark down on her upper lip” and her “large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw” (Collins 1900a, I: 46) are rationalizations of Walter’s “aesthetic displeasure” (Halberstam 2002: 360), which itself forms part of a struggle over subject positions and power relations. Disgust can be understood as a powerful emotion to maintain power hierarchies (see Ahmed 2004: 88), particularly as it requires and commands consent in social groups and thus may construct an interpretive community that ratifies the attitude of disgust, as well as the social exclusion of a body designated as disgusting. The scene itself, in which the suggestion that a beautiful woman is about to be revealed is followed by sudden, surprising disappointment, is structured like a joke to elicit laughter vis-à-vis the aes­ thetic incompatibility of Marian’s figure and face. The reader is thus once again interpellated as male and positioned as an audience to affirm Walter’s own masculinity. The calibration of perception in the scene is defined by its initial strategies of visualization, preparing a tableau in which a romantic heroine is presented as a dazzling vision to the experiencing I and in the reader’s imagination, and in which her spatial approach is represented as desirable, only to reject her once she is revealed to be ‘ugly’. As Halberstam explains, “The dilemma of the masculine and therefore ugly woman functions as the specter that haunts feminine identification in order to ensure that few women cathect onto female masculinity through either identification or desire” (2002: 359). Here, the cathexis is withdrawn both by Walter and, by analogy, by the community of male readers con­ structed as representing the norm (see 361).

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The initial desirability of her ‘natural’, “delightfully undeformed” body (Collins 2008a: 31), at which Walter directs his aesthetically sublimated male gaze, turns into revulsion. The fetishization of Marian’s body as the drawing master’s ideal figure, which would neutralize the threat that she poses to the phantasma of original sameness, is counteracted by her mascu­ line face; she thus remains a counterpoint for Walter’s identity construction. Walter invites assent to his evaluation, so that gender hierarchies come to be negotiated through the ascription of either beauty or ugliness according to a gendered ‘aesthetics’. The scene clearly illustrates that such ascriptions are culturally coded, as Walter’s sense perception is framed by aesthetic con­ ventions, in terms of both description and evaluation. This scene’s calibration of perception, which elicits the consent of the implied reader in order to be culturally operative, moulds affective stances in order to keep a bourgeois family ideal in place, to uphold middle-class gender roles and to grant Walter access to the cultural position of the male hero, who rightfully claims his prize at the end. Calibrations of perception that tie in with these rules contribute to the validity of the cultural norms that regulate the conditions for the performative enactment of viable subject positions, from which Marian is finally excluded despite the fact that her ironic remarks render the constructive process as such visible. As Ortiz Robles points out, “[i]ronic interruption is an event in which ‘fact’ and ‘fic­ tion’ cease to be strategically interchangeable, making visible the materiality of language as such” (2010b: 23). In a witty ‘fill in the blanks’ exercise, for instance, Marian describes the differences between her and her half-sister Laura: I have got nothing, and she has a fortune. I am dark and ugly, and she is fair and pretty. Everybody thinks me crabbed and odd (with perfect justice); and everybody thinks her sweet-tempered and charming (with more justice still). In short, she is an angel; and I am — Try some of that marmalade, Mr. Hartright, and finish the sentence, in the name of female propriety, for yourself. (Collins 1900a, I: 50) Again alluding to the unspeakability of her alleged ugliness she allows Walter to supply his own descriptor for her after conforming to female propriety by offering the marmalade; at the same time, she articulates the fact that Laura makes the much more conventional, and, as such, more lucrative, romantic heroine. Within the constitutional realm of The Woman in White, Marian is the only character who can make such remarks, at least in the half of the novel preceding Walter’s journey to Central America, and only as long as her subject position remains, if not generally viable, then at least possible, within the secured boundaries of her family home. Walter cannot allow himself to succumb to his initial attraction to Marian. His rejection is not just ‘personal’, but structural, in that he attempts to render

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his disgust perceivable for the reader and thus to construct social (male) assent to the aesthetic and erotic devaluation of female masculinity. In order to con­ struct his own subject position, Walter requires the ‘pure woman’ – the woman in white – who, in the dual version of Anne and Laura, allows him to posit his subjectivity as a man and secures the standards by which aesthetic appreciation is possible. Corresponding to the sensational structure that creates gaps in order to suture and to fill them, Anne and Laura both represent “an empty space that must be introduced so that it can be ‘filled in’ later” (Daly 2009: 33). The novel thus seems to be a domestic novel in sensational guise, affirming heteronormativity together with aesthetic normativity despite its sensational traits. However, the repetition compulsion triggered by the touch of the woman in white and Walter’s desperate attempts to fix identity attest to the instability of those norms. By representing this process in the making, the sen­ sation novel makes the ideological intertwinements of gender, aesthetics and civilization come apart at the seams. The novel reveals the fact that it is based on a foundational constitution that inculcates the norms of a marriage plot and partakes heavily of domestic realism. The corresponding construction of char­ acters “as recognizable realities” (Collins 1900a, I: 5) forecloses Marian’s options for a ‘happy’ ending according to these conventions. Ultimately, the novel reveals that the inclusive exclusion on which it is based concerns the very physicality of women, their bare life, and includes only their sociopolitical identities as wives in a patriarchal context. Despite the fact that Laura takes the role of female protagonist in the marriage plot, she is reduced to “‘Woman’, as such” (Ortiz Robles 2010a: 851), an empty subject position that can be filled by characters representing the essentialized femininity conducive to the marriage plot, but not by characters such as Marian. By the end of the Second Epoch, Laura has lost her identity; she is con­ sidered “socially, morally, legally – dead” (Collins 1900a, II: 55). Even though she regains her social, moral and legal identity as Laura Fairlie, heiress of Limmeridge, she cannot fully regain it, as she has difficulty remembering her own past; thus, her identity is rendered highly insecure, at least in a Lockean sense, despite, or possibly because of, Walter’s efforts. With “her beauty faded, her mind clouded”, Walter ‘owns’ and redefines her: “Mine to support, to protect, to cherish, to restore” (56). He goes so far as to break his promise to present eye- and earwitness accounts and finally appropriates both Marian’s and Laura’s narratives: I shall relate both narratives, not in the words (often interrupted, often inevitably confused) of the speakers themselves, but in the words of the brief, plain, studiously simple abstract which I committed to writing for my own guidance and for the guidance of my legal adviser. (57) Both women are physically and mentally diminished, and then deprived of the capacity to speak for themselves. Their stories are refashioned by Walter

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as an “abstract” (57), providing information sufficient to ascertain Laura’s identity legally. The whole story depends on Walter’s claim to be the authoritative inter­ pretive instance in the novel. This is also revealed by the metonymic proxi­ mity of Laura to letters, in both senses of the word; she is more or less the product of the ‘letters’ Walter provides or brings together in his edition. It is the letter of Laura’s mother that enables Walter to ‘recognize’ Anne in Laura; it is the tombstone with Laura’s name on it that enables him to recognize Laura as Laura. She is what he reads, and more importantly, what he interprets. At the close of the novel’s Second Epoch, Walter, having returned from Central America, meets Laura and Marian at the graveyard and deliberately walks around Laura’s gravestone in order not to see her name engraved there. This graveyard scene supplements the recognition scene in which Marian reads out her mother’s letter and Walter finally dis­ covers the similarity between Laura and Anne. Correspondingly, it makes the character take shape as the phantasma of a ‘letter’. As Marian and Laura approach Walter, the scene that he sees gives the lie to the inscription on the gravestone: the veiled woman had possession of me, body and soul. She stopped on one side of the grave. We stood face to face, with the tombstone between us. She was close to the inscription on the side of the pedestal. Her gown touched the black letters. […] The woman lifted her veil. ‘Sacred to the Memory of Laura, Lady Glyde—’ Laura, Lady Glyde, was standing by the inscription, and was looking at me over the grave. (52–53) Laura appears like the metonymically produced phantom of the inscription, the evocation of the written word and, by extension, the phantasma of Walter’s narrative. As such, she is the husk of literary convention and is exposed as such. The exclusion of female physicality accounts for the spec­ trality of both Laura and Anne, whom Walter describes as “the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages as it haunted my life […]. Like a Shadow she first came to me, in the loneliness of the night. Like a Shadow she passes away, in the loneliness of the dead” (277). Anne’s evanescence is the condition of possibility of Laura’s re-appearance (see Bourne Taylor 1988: 101). On the diegetic level, the threat to identity posed by uncanny effects such as doubling and the uncertainty of the animate-inanimate divide is finally repelled by correlating signifiers, signifieds and referents in the graveyard scene; the uncanny pertaining to identity is transferred to a gothic setting, which, however, can easily be replaced by hearth and home. In other words, the security of home – or securing a home for himself, the goal of Walter’s narrative – is safeguarded by ensuring the rigidity of identity markers; whether Laura is actually Laura is of no importance as long as her identity

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remains the same, in the sense that the same meaning can be read off her at any time and others can acknowledge her to be a person conventionally defined as ‘Laura’. The drawing master’s aestheticized gaze thus constructs a phantasmatic essence of woman, sensation fiction’s version of Petrarch’s Laura, who is forced into silence by her admirer’s narrative verbosity. When E.S. Dallas argues that aesthetic value depends on such pureness of ‘Woman’, he makes explicit the fact that aesthetic evaluation is an effect of the same patriarchal social structure that requires Walter to construct his masculinity at the price of reducing his love interest to a shadowy figure, who can assume any form ‘quickening the pulse’ (see Collins 1900a, I: 74) in order to affirm a romantic beauty catalogue. By showcasing its performative constitution, The Woman in White opens up space for narrative self-reflexivity and thus illuminates gener­ ically specific calibrations of perception with wider political repercussions such as gender constructions and their concomitant power hierarchies. The perceptions of characters are orchestrated by the narrator-editor Walter Hartright, who requires the novel to fashion him along the lines of an ideal and idealized Victorian middle-class masculinity. To come to grips with the heterosexual matrix in a patriarchal society, Walter appropriates the position of an editor to allocate subject positions to characters who might jeopardize his own position, especially Marian. Struggling to stave off castration anxiety and to negate his possible homosexuality, Walter trans­ fers his paranoia and fear of suspicion to most other characters and implicates them in the solution of his ‘case’. Marian, for example, con­ fesses in the first lines of her continuation of the story in the “Extracts from her Diary” that she was “sadly distrustful of [her]self” after she failed to recognize Laura’s attachment to Walter; after that, she “hesitate [s] about everything else” (Collins 1900a, I: 243). The characters’ percep­ tions are thus imbued with suspicion and paranoia, which, however, also represents a hermeneutics of suspicion that reveals the ways in which novels conspire to normalize particular subject positions in the first place. Perceptions, both in the internal communication system between characters and in the external communication system with the reader, are charged with affect and sensationalized in order to make the consequences of cali­ brations of perceptions felt. In their embodiment of introjections of cultural ‘incarcerations’ (see D.A. Miller 1986: 112), characters bear the traces of social formations as physical and physiological symptoms and thus encode them for further working through. The very popularity of sensation fiction is conducive to dis­ seminating this content widely. A desensationalization of sensation fiction translates affective shock into a form of social criticism independent of the norms of realist fiction and shakes the notions of the liberal subject and binary gender constructions that underpin it. The aisthetics of sensation thus articulates the social violence of ego ideals and gestures towards extending the range of viable subjects.

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3.2 The Moonstone: Cultural Anaesthesia and a Politics of Narrative Deferral Frequently classified as one of the first detective novels (see T.S. Eliot 1999: 464), The Moonstone also provides “serious social criticism” (Reed 1973: 281) and represents “one of the first major works in the fiction of the unconscious” (Marshall 1970: 77). Published in 1868,16 during the heyday of physiological psychology (see Ryan 2012: 53), it draws mainly on two con­ flicting physiological theories – as put forward by William B. Carpenter and John Elliotson, a friend of Collins’s (see Ryan 2012: 40) – to render plausible the main plot element of the novel: Franklin Blake’s theft of the Moonstone from his cousin (see Pierce and Chander 2020: 476), Rachel Verinder, while in an opium-induced trance. The narratives compiled in The Moonstone correspondingly centre around an unconscious act, challenging mid-Victor­ ian ideals of character and action, and, as in The Woman in White, con­ structing an empty centre that provokes and produces discourse. This turns the novel into a retrograde process of becoming conscious of and allocating meaning to something by interpreting circumstantial evidence, eyewitness reports, signs and symptoms, as in an analytic drama.17 Rachel, in turn, inherited the precious gem from their uncle, John Hern­ castle. However, this inheritance cannot serve as a bequest of property, as it cannot be fed into an economic cycle of transmission (see Duncan 1994: 311); rather, it passes on a “curse of vengeance” connected with the colonial history of the Moonstone (Thomas 2006: 71). As a symbol of impossible appropriation, the gem functions as a nodal point representing the discursive spectrum that the novel negotiates – a spectrum that includes gender, colo­ nial, economic, religious, aesthetic and psycho-physiological discourses. The Moonstone, opium and ink serve as complex and interconnected symbols and metaphors illustrating the manifold interrelationships between empire, domesticity and the aisthetics of the novel. Psycho-physiological discourses not only supply characters with the ‘ner­ vous costume’ typical of sensation fiction, but are highly important for the novel’s articulation of social and colonial critique through a negotiation of what is repressed or forgotten, of what may or may not surface to con­ sciousness. The novel reflects on the restrictions inculcated by its own cul­ turally specific foundational constitution and sheds light on the effects of implicit censorship within the confinement of the novel’s literary conven­ tions. Consequently, the novel’s interest for aisthetics lies less in figural representations of perception on a surface level, but rather in negotiations of “the hidden soul” (Dallas 1999, I: 199; see Bourne Taylor 1988: 196–197), in textual strategies of hiding and de-tecting, in its cultural anaesthesia. The Moonstone articulates that which cannot yet be said – for instance, colonial and sexual guilt; exclusions along the lines of class, race, the able body and gender; and aesthetically sanctioned devaluations of particular literary forms, such as sensation fiction – and thus provides a prototype of cultural

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anaesthesia. Franklin Blake’s unconscious theft, together with its experi­ mental restaging, introduces a veritable cultural anaesthesia, an opiuminduced oblivious state, and establishes its observation and description as a possible reading position for the novel in general. The novel pits a political against a domestic unconscious,18 which is mirrored by its frame structure and its notion of characters as ‘containers of secrets’. Structurally, Franklin Blake’s unconscious theft of the Moonstone reiterates the consciously inflic­ ted colonial invasion of Seringapatam in a domestic setting19 and accent­ uates unacknowledged injustices precisely by leaving them imperceptible to the character himself. The novel puts parapraxes of perception centre-stage and reflects on the epistemological and aesthetic consequences of such parapraxes in a context spanning psycho-physiology, gender hierarchies, colonial history, drug addiction and aesthetics. In the novel, physiological discourses inform an aesthetics of the uncon­ scious. Dr Candy’s medical assistant Ezra Jennings explicitly quotes the authority of several physiologists, among them William Carpenter (see Col­ lins 1900b, II: 60–61), who introduced the notion of ‘unconscious cerebra­ tion’ to shed light on subliminal forms of cognition. Carpenter’s scientific approach, which was widely supported in Victorian discourses on physiol­ ogy, comprises an analysis of liminal states of consciousness as well as of the influence of narcotics, all of which crucially calibrate perception in The Moonstone: In 1853 W.B. Carpenter (1813–85), the physiologist, introduced the concept of ‘unconscious cerebration’, the hidden activity of the mind and its behaviour in states of suspended consciousness like sleep, hyp­ nosis, and drunkenness. The suggestion that the unconscious might act in opposition to the conscious self was a source of moral anxiety, but it had creative possibilities: Wilkie Collins and Dickens used it to dra­ matic effect in their ‘sensation’ novels The Moonstone (1868) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). (Gilmour 2009: 141) The ambiguity between moral anxiety and literary creativity that Robin Gilmour addresses here is one that The Moonstone exploits for aisthetic effect, as well as for narratological reflection with regard not just to char­ acter, but to action, narrative perspective and structure. The discourses referenced help to establish The Moonstone as a communication system appealing to the unconscious and conveying hidden meanings through its subtext, reflecting the close mid-Victorian interconnection between authors, “particularly of serialized texts”, and their readership (Blumberg 2005: 179). Collins’s novel activates one of E.S. Dallas’s central aesthetic tenets: the view that “art is a force that operates unconsciously on life. It is not a doc­ trine; it is not science. There is knowledge in it, but it reaches to something beyond knowledge” (Dallas 1999, I: 90). Understanding criticism as a

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“science of pleasure” (II, 3), Dallas concentrates on the literary strategies that appeal to the unconscious. Collins’s novel employs the ‘hidden soul’ in order to communicate through the unconscious and through its subtext what cannot be stated explicitly within the prevailing discursive regime at the time of writing (see Heller 1992: 156). The Moonstone articulates its complex politics by offering itself as a ‘container’ of unconscious secrets that can be communicated only through the novel’s ‘hidden soul’. However, this communication, in a feat enabling its own potentiality as a cultural product to be consumed, is delayed and deferred to make the narrative possible.20 The Moonstone embraces Dallas’s notion of aesthetics as the “pleasure of trance” (Dallas 1999, II: 121) and as an aspect of “self-forgetting” (II, 110), which centres on the automatic functions of the mind; it exemplifies how such an aesthetics might be translated into the novel form and can be read both as an ironic commentary on and as a cunning application of Dallas’s theory. In The Gay Science, Dallas discusses the ways in which imagination can be understood partly as memory, but “memory automatic and unconscious” (Dallas 1999, I: 209), and opens up a frame of reference that bears compar­ ison with The Moonstone, with its combination of forgetfulness and opium trances. Dallas draws on Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater to argue that drug-induced experiences may grant access to memories otherwise irretrievable. Interestingly, De Quincey’s confession, Dallas’s aesthetic theory and Collins’s novel form an intertextual conglom­ erate affirming literary constructions of opium consumption. Dallas argues: De Quincey, in the dreams of his opium-eating days, felt the same power [of memory for keeping every detail, NB-S] in himself. Things which, if he had been told of them when waking he could not have acknowledged as parts of his former experience, were in his dreams so placed before him with all the chance colour and feelings of the original moment, that at once he knew them and owned their memorial identity. […] In this unfailing record two things particularly call for attention; the first, that understanding is not essential to memory; the second, that the memory of things not understood may be vital within us. (212–213) This reads like a blueprint for Franklin Blake’s revisitation of his opiuminduced experiences. Although Franklin consciously acknowledges that he must have committed the theft only late in the story, his unconscious memory has saved the proceedings in his body-memory, meaning that the theft can be re-enacted without being consciously acknowledged; memory is entirely somatized.21 This mirrors the effects of colonial discourse in The Moonstone, as colonial atrocities are never openly acknowledged by the characters but only implicitly communicated by the novel as a whole, par­ ticularly by its structure.

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In The Gay Science, Dallas argues that “the mind never forgets: what it once seizes, it holds to the death, and cannot let go” (211). He goes on to say that “whether we know it or not, the senses register with a photographic accuracy whatever passes before them, and that the register, though it may be lost, is always imperishable” (215). Accordingly, memory can be reactivated: “Looks and tones come back upon us with strange vividness from the far past; and we can picture to the life transactions of which it is supposed that we have never had any experience” (218). Dallas thus anticipates notions such as the Freudian mnemic symbol, which conserves a memory until the psyche is able to grapple with it22 – just as The Moonstone encodes memories of colonial atrocities without directly addressing them. Dallas argues that “[w]e are unconscious of the automatic energy within us until its work is achieved and the effect of it is not to be resisted” (222). In the light of Dallas’s aesthetic discourse, Collins’s novel may be understood as a communicator that grants access to a knowledge remaining dormant for a long time in great segments of a cultural community. While Franklin Blake is never conscious of the crime that he commits, his bodily memory betrays that which remains unacknowledged. It is his body and his conduct in which colonial guilt remains indelible. The theatrical re-enactment and repetition of the theft in the experiment led by Ezra Jennings encapsulates a reminder of colonial guilt (see Bourne Taylor 1988: 175),23 and the novel con­ tains it in its representation of the domestic characters’ conduct and the cali­ bration of their perception reflected by their habitus. The whole, particularly political, impact of the theft remains foreclosed, despite the fact that the action itself is observed by several onlookers. The Moonstone contains references not only to Dallas and Carpenter, but to a contending approach to the unconscious represented by the mesmerist John Elliotson (see Bourne Taylor 1988: 183–185). In the “Third Narrative”, Franklin Blake describes how he is introduced to Elliotson’s theories by Ezra Jennings (Collins 1900b, II: 61): “The book in your hand is Doctor Elliotson’s Human Physiology; and the case which the doctor cites rests on the well-known authority of Mr. Combe.” The passage pointed out to me was expressed in these terms: — “Dr. Abel informed me,” says Mr. Combe, “of an Irish porter to a warehouse, who forgot, when sober, what he had done when drunk; but, being drunk, again recollected the transactions of his former state of intoxication. On one occasion, being drunk, he had lost a parcel of some value, and in his sober moments could give no account of it. Next time he was intoxicated, he recollected that he had left the parcel at a certain house, and there being no address on it, it had remained there safely, and was got on his calling for it.” (Collins 1900b, II: 61) Bourne Taylor notes both the difference in status between the physiologists mentioned in the novel, with Elliotson being part of the phrenological

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tradition and a “marginalized advocate of mesmerism”, whereas Carpenter represents the authorized discourse of physiological psychology (Bourne Taylor 1988: 183), and the differences in their conception of the uncon­ scious: the ‘lost parcel’ model, as against Dallas’s notion of the ‘hidden soul’ (see 205). The different approaches referenced in the novel as external evi­ dence to render the story plausible cannot be reconciled, she contends (see Hutter 1975: 198). The novel’s intertextual references thus frequently serve simultaneously to authorize and to undercut what they represent. Symptomatically, Jacques Derrida connects literary production with drug addiction by discussing the double function of the pharmakon as both heal­ ing and harmful in Plato’s Phaedrus (see Derrida 2003: 25), in which Socrates presents writing as an ambivalent practice by relating a story. Whereas the Egyptian god Theuth advocates writing as a “beneficial phar­ makon because […] it enables us to repeat, and thus to remember”, enabling “good repetition, in the service of anamnesis”, the king considers writing “more to do with forgetting, the simulacrum, and bad repetition than it does with anamnesis and truth” (24; emphasis in the original). By pitting “memory” against mere “recollection” (24), the story ties writing not only to repetition – a central feature of plotting in Collins’s novel – but also to different ways of remembering and forgetting, and, by extension, to parti­ cular notions of morality and the subject: Writing is irresponsibility itself, the orphanage of a wandering and playing sign. Writing is not only a drug, it is also a game, paidia, and a bad game if not guided by a concern for philosophical truth. Thus, in the idiom of the familial scene, there is no father to answer for it, and no living, purely living speech can help it. (24; emphasis in the original) Writing as the medium of the novel partakes of the pharmakon’s ambiva­ lence, communicating a message, but without any liability. Thus, novel writing defies the responsible subject at its very outset and by its very prac­ tice. “The bad pharmakon can always parasitize the good pharmakon” (Derrida 2003: 24), Derrida goes on to argue. Novel writing can be seen as both contributing to and undermining memory, which is fundamental to both the literary value and the social relevance of the genre. In The Moon­ stone, as in Derrida’s familial allegory, fathers frequently die early, leaving not only a moral and financial legacy, but also the question of interpreta­ tion – for instance, the task of interpreting John Herncastle’s will (see Col­ lins 1900b; I: 71). The novel’s inheritance plot evokes corresponding legal discourses, which require “the conscious, vigilant, and normal subject, master of his or her intentions and desires” (Derrida 2003: 21). Sensation fiction in general and The Moonstone in particular challenge this subject notion by emphasizing the unconscious and the effects of opium, and thus contribute to a negotiation of the conditions of possibility of legal validity.

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By revealing the challenge posed to the rational subject by the drug-induced unconscious, Collins’s novel reflects on legal validity, together with the logic of literary conventions. Besides, The Moonstone reflects on remembering and forgetting in a complex socio-economic context and ties these issues to the author’s writing practices and to questions of responsible subjectivity, both with regard to the author himself and, on the diegetic level, with regard to the conditions of possibility of literary characters as moral agents, as in the case of Franklin Blake. Writing, as the medium of the novel and, on the level of the story, as a means of aiding characters’ memory by retrieving information from oblivion (as in the case of Ezra Jennings’s reconstruction of Dr Candy’s lost memories), further connects these issues with psycho-physiological aesthetics. Thus, The Moonstone’s inclusion of opium not only metaphorizes colonial and economic interdependences, but illuminates a network of discourses related to literary production and the range of possible ways in which ‘aesthetics’ can be defined. Drawing on E.S. Dallas’s aesthetics of the unconscious, Collins articulates the complex discursive network of which mid-Victorian literary production partakes. While ‘pleasure’ and ‘play’ are crucial qualifiers of aesthetic production and reception in Dal­ las’s framework, they also figure in drug-related discourses, as Derrida highlights: “Pleasure and play (now still as with Plato) are not in them­ selves condemned unless they are inauthentic and void of truth” (2003: 26). Derrida brings up issues that gained high currency in the Victorian debate about the divide between realism and sensation fiction: it is the truth value, the ‘authentic’ expression of an author so painstakingly safeguarded by George Eliot, that is at stake with regard to automatic writing, in the sense of psycho-physiology or drug use, which revives Romantic notions of inspiration in a different key. While truth value can easily be concatenated with economic value, most conservative critics reduce sensational writing to little more than a register­ ing of electric signals, in both its process of production and its reception. By doing so, they obliterate the effort involved in these processes, which, how­ ever, is necessary to render plausible the discourses on authors’ property rights and on society as community.24 Drug consumption, like an entirely physiological notion of the human, “threatens the social bond” (Derrida 2003: 37), a position that Collins’s novel reflects by representing a set of drug users. John Herncastle, most probably “given up to smoking opium” (Collins 1900b, I: 54), and Ezra Jennings, frequently “under the influence of a dose of laudanum” (Collins 1900b, II: 63), are situated at the margins of the story, and Franklin Blake, who “act[s] unconsciously and irresponsibly, under the influence of opium” (63), needs to be re-integrated into society and shown to be innocent of the crime that he commits (see Schramm 2000: 190). In the mid-Victorian social context, the author ideal is closely tied to the notion of the responsible subject, upholding truth value, but “the drug addict as such produces nothing, nothing true or real” (Derrida 2003: 26).

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Collins, however, uses the network of discourses relating to opium to articulate the complex interconnections of writing, psycho-physiological aes­ thetics, notions of subjectivity, responsibility and literary conventions more broadly. Drug experiences partake of a network of discourses connecting issues that Collins’s novel articulates and that Derrida describes succinctly: We are here dealing with a metaphysical burden and a history which we must never stop questioning. We have at stake here no less than the self, consciousness, reason, liberty, the responsible subject, alienation, one’s own body or the foreign body, sexual difference, the unconscious, repression or suppression, the different “parts” of the body, injection, introjection, incorporation (oral or not), the relationship to death (mourning and interiorization), idealization, sublimation, the real and the law, and I could go on. (Derrida 2003: 31) The same concerns inform the heated critical debate on sensation fiction, which explains why a genre that renders writing and reading analogous to bodily physiology and, as in The Moonstone, to drug experiences provoked such acerbic responses. The Moonstone reflects on the conditions of possi­ bility of character corresponding to a responsible subject, of remembering and forgetting within a framework of socio-economic and colonial dis­ courses and of literary forms of representation. 3.2.1 Habitualizations: Opium, Somatization and the Politics of Forgetting Semiotically, the Moonstone, a solid object made of “mere carbon” (Collins 1900b, I: 105), functions like the sliding signifier of proto-post-structuralist theory: it can never be possessed or fixed, but only passed on, thus drawing attention to what is elided or erased by its (always temporary) physical presence. The stone surmounts the economy of British value systems and is not representable within them. As Murthwaite recapitulates when he observes the stone in the shrine of Somnauth, “there, in the forehead of the deity, gleamed the yellow Diamond, whose splendour had last shone on me, in England, from the bosom of a woman’s dress” (Collins 1900b, II: 190; see also I: 110).25 Outside its original religious context, the Moonstone is fetishized as an aesthetic ornament, which, in a Marxist sense, forecloses the economic dependency on labour power in a colonial as well as a domestic context, and, in a Freudian sense, symbolizes Rachel Verinder’s virginity, thus intermingling colonial, class and gender discourses. Betteredge describes the stone’s effect as rather decentring, especially with regard to the sense of vision: When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed

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The Moonstone as both object and unfathomable depth resembles Roland Barthes’s illustration of how myth works: it performs a semiological oscil­ lation between meaning and form: one “can at will focus on the scenery or on the window pane” (Barthes 1998: 123), seeing either a full, seemingly unmediated view or the very materiality of the medium. Betteredge high­ lights the difference between the Moonstone as a material object and as a power that captivates the vision and dissolves boundaries of space. For him, the diamond remains “unfathomable” (Collins 1900b, I: 105), opaque and incomprehensible, completely disorienting his perception. This reveals not only the Moonstone’s fetishistic quality, in the sense that it retains some of its initial sacrality, but its symbolic capacity to challenge the boundaries between the subjective and the objective, set down by Franklin Blake’s German education (see Collins 1900b, I: 71). When the viewer looks into the stone, their subjective vision is awed, making cognitive differentiations impossible and dissolving the boundary between subject and object – as with sensational effects more generally. Conversely, a purely objectifying gaze that considers the Moonstone only as a precious thing amounts to a mis­ reading, as it fails to comprehend its actual impact. The dual capacity of the Moonstone reveals that the diamond, which has the power to jeopardize British subjectivity and to threaten its utter dissolution, simultaneously provides the material basis on which this subjectivity is built.26 The Moonstone’s “legacy of trouble and danger” (Collins 1900b, I: 57) manifests itself in its function as a meme, as a signifier leaving traces of memory, which many of the English characters try to forget – and, indeed, can forget through the use of drugs and narcotics such as tobacco, alcohol and opium (see Zieger 2011: 208–219). These substances tie the ‘centre’ of the Empire to its ‘margins’ not only in an economic, but also in a medical and even a physiological respect: “Habit-forming substances reveal the imperial dependence on colonial resources and labour – a dependency felt physiologically, at the intimate physical level of craving – and yet forgotten most easily in the effects of oblivion” (211).27 This habit formation can be connected to further aisthetic somatizations of socially constructed beha­ viours, in the sense that habitualization is one of the strategies by which knowledge can be turned into implicit knowledge, rendering forms of con­ duct ‘automatic’ and – drawing on Dallas’s aesthetic idiom – ‘unconscious’. As such, they eventually go without saying, become naturalized and nor­ malize ‘blind spots’ within structures of feeling and habitualized practices. Opium, just like the Moonstone, functions as a junction for several dis­ courses and serves to illustrate material, cultural and socio-historical inter­ dependences between Britain and its colonies. Opium as a pharmakon combines contradictory characteristics and, like writing, serves as both an

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“antidote and as poison” (Derrida 2003: 25; emphasis in the original). It may stimulate the mind, but it can equally serve as an anaesthetic; it may have a palliative function, but it can also cause addiction and pain; it appears in the form of laudanum, which was to be found in many Victorian households, but is also a colonial drug that serves as a means of imperial expansion and colonial exploitation. In The Moonstone, the drug enables an oblivion with political impact, in that Franklin Blake remains unconscious of his actions related to the Moonstone, and thus allegorizes the naturalization of colonial exploitation in a domestic context. As Lillian Nayder has shown, Blake delivers the stone on behalf of his uncle, whose designation as “‘the Honourable John’”, a moniker for the East India Company,28 associates him with the Company “and its suspect practices from the outset” (Nayder 2006: 148). These practices include two Opium Wars,29 fought to protect the Company’s – and, by exten­ sion, Britain’s – “‘right’ to import opium from India to China against the laws of the land, resolving their trade imbalance” (140). The Moonstone negotiates this complex topic by inserting opium’s medi­ cal function in a domestic context, as advocated by Dr Candy and Ezra Jennings, and evokes the drug’s colonial import by embedding the domestic story within a colonial frame narrative (see Bourne Taylor 1988: 179). This two-edged story is emblematized, at least to some extent, in Franklin Blake’s involuntary consumption of opium: “Like those subject to British rule and forced into economic and physical dependence on opium, Blake experiences, under its influence, a loss of selfhood and autonomy that mirrors the con­ dition of the colonised” (Nayder 2006: 148). Ezra Jennings’s attempt to prove Blake’s innocence reveals both his innocence and his guilt.30 Through the double pharmakon of opium and writing, which serve as allegories of remembering and forgetting, the drug and novel writing are firmly inter­ twined. This intertwinement is crucial to The Moonstone’s negotiation of cultural and political memory via a cultural anaesthesia based on notions of the unconscious. Semiotically, Ezra Jennings’s experiment is inspired by his transcription of Dr Candy’s fragmentary utterances and his expert interpretation and recon­ struction of a seemingly lost testimony, which mirrors the ‘lost’ testimony of colonial guilt that the novel negotiates by omitting decisive historical events such as the ‘Indian Mutiny’ (see Duncan 1994: 308). The physiologist is able to reconstruct Dr Candy’s incoherent ‘ramblings’ after a fever-induced memory loss into a meaningful text and, in doing so, to retrieve the infor­ mation that Candy had Franklin drugged with opium without his knowl­ edge (see Bourne Taylor 1988: 191). The Moonstone thus presents a plot that illustrates the ways in which ‘truth’ turns out to be a retrospective construction. As perception is itself a retrospective interpretation of sense data – and, moreover, one that depends on psycho-physiological processes – it seems that it can be authorized only by scientifically controlled frame­ works such as the apparatus of the ‘experiment’ or by a collective of wit­ nesses who can mutually corroborate their subjective views.

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The Moonstone does more than explore liminal states of consciousness, it provides “a complex model of the mind” (Bourne Taylor 1988: 177). The story is plotted in such a way as to perform a process by which memory is (re-)constructed and reveals that memory is understood as a faculty depen­ dent on physiological processes, exposed to various vicissitudes triggered by physiological, chemical and circumstantial influences, which may result in false memories. In addressing the capacities and fallacies of memory, the novel provides a synthesis of fragmented pieces of information. Our active intervention in the “transformation” of memory, James Sully argues, becomes conspicuous when we are in the midst of the operation of trying to ‘interpret’ an old manuscript which has got partially obliterated, or of ‘restoring’ a faded picture; in each of which operations error will be pretty sure to creep in through an importation of the restorer’s own ideals into the relic of the past. (1880: 426) Sully makes quite explicit that reconstructions of history depend on a literal re-membering, tinted by the perspective and value judgements of the person recalling the past. In The Moonstone, it is Dr Candy’s incomplete narrative of the events of the night when the Moonstone was stolen that requires reconstructing. This document is the only piece of information that can prove Franklin’s innocence and provide the crucial insights required to clear up the mystery of the theft. It is the capacity to revisit, to re-read and ima­ ginatively to fill in the gaps of the past in the most probable manner that can safeguard the integrity of identity down the timeline of history. Correspondingly, The Moonstone’s aisthetics entails a reiterative perfor­ mance of reconstructed impressions along the lines of interest-based self­ fashionings. However, the novel complicates this typical set-up by revealing the positions from which such constructions take place. This is reflected in the novel’s multiple narratives, “pointing the way toward a literature in which truth is perceived as conjectural and relative and point-of-view becomes a major issue” (Lonoff 1982: 159), which can be read as a response to the crisis of perception reflected in narrative structure. It is the social and, allegedly, moral outcast, Ezra Jennings, who provides a coherently synthe­ sized narrative to corroborate Franklin Blake’s innocence, paving the way for Franklin’s marriage by clearing him of all charges pertaining to the theft. While writing a book on “the brain and the nervous system” (Collins 1900b, II: 33), Jennings claims to have found out that patients in a delirium like Dr Candy, despite being unable to speak coherently, can still think coherently (see 34). He explains to Blake that he recorded in shorthand what Dr Candy said when he was delirious with fever and then transcribed the code ‘in the ordinary form of writing – leaving large spaces between the broken phrases, and even the single words, as they had fallen disconnectedly from

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Mr. Candy’s lips. I then treated the result thus obtained on something like the principle which one adopts in putting together a child’s “puzzle.” It is all confusion to begin with; but it may be all brought into order and shape, if you can only find the right way. Acting on this plan, I filled in the blank spaces on the paper with what the words or phrases on either side of it suggested to me as the speaker’s meaning; altering over and over again, until my additions followed naturally on the spoken words which came before them, and fitted naturally into the spoken words which came after them.’ (Collins 1900b, II: 34) Novelistic representation is here shown to be a probabilistic function of linguistic coherence and cohesion, collocation and idiomaticity, which, by extension, reflects on and complicates the options for literary forms of representation. Read as a general reflection on representation, the above passage reveals an awareness of the different medial modulations of repre­ sentation, of “Encoding, Decoding” (Hall 2007: 477) and of the need for a retrospective process of construction when presenting a ‘history’ of events. While Jennings’s transcription of Dr Candy’s delirious speech into short­ hand already entails an encoding with its own medial logic, as well as the possibility of mistakes in the process of reiteration, the second transcoding into writing may be equally faulty. Moreover, like the process of reading as conceived of in Wolfgang Iser’s reader response theory, it ‘fills in gaps’ on the basis of Jennings’s interpretation of what the doctor may have said on the evening when the Moonstone was stolen from Rachel Verinder (see Iser 1987: 41), so that his transcription turns out to be a documentation of his ‘reading’ process, in the sense of listening and interpreting fragmentary information that requires emplotment (see Brooks 1984: 170). Considering Roland Barthes’s contention that “myth is speech stolen and restored” (1998: 125; emphasis in the original), The Moonstone can be understood as an allegory of myth-making. Remembering and forgetting, sobriety and trance, and the full possession of the senses and their loss constitute an emplotted ‘history’ that renders practices and processes of construction visible. Different states of mind, inaccessible to one another, not only alter a character’s perception and disposition, but influence how memories are retrievable. The following conversation between Franklin Blake and Ezra Jennings illustrates this mechanism, along with the role of attention and the relevance of ‘science’ as a discourse that authorizes, legitimizes and renders plausible theories regarding mental states: ‘Give me five minutes of your attention; and I will undertake to show you that science sanctions my proposal, fanciful as it may seem. Here, in the first place, is the physiological principle on which I am acting, stated by no less a person than Dr. Carpenter. Read it for yourself.’ He

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Sensationalisms: Wilkie Collins handed me the slip of paper which had marked the place in the book. It contained a few lines of writing, as follows: “There seems much ground for the belief that every sensory impression which has once been recog­ nized by the perceptive consciousness, is registered (so to speak) in the brain, and may be reproduced at some subsequent time, although there may be no consciousness of its existence in the mind during the whole intermediate period.” ‘Is that plain, so far?’ asked Ezra Jennings. ‘Per­ fectly plain.’ (Collins 1900b, II: 60; emphasis in the original)

This physiological reference point is invoked to explain that Blake may indeed have stolen the Moonstone without being conscious of it and that Dr Candy may have access to cognitive content that he can no longer con­ sciously remember. Physiology provides a background for the central experiment that will repeat the theft under the influence of opium so that it can be witnessed by others, who can publicly testify to Blake’s innocence. In the “Secret Theatre of Home” (Bourne Taylor 1988), the past is repeated or reperformed in a domestic setting, and opium is used to produce a kind of unconscious that is tacitly still regulated, a state of passive derangement that does not necessarily involve or imply the disintegration of Blake’s social identity, and which offers him a past to be visited, not a history to be narrated. (Bourne Taylor 1988: 186) Here the intertextual connection between the novel and drama is brought into play. Blake’s previous experience is both envisaged as a sense-scape, a kind of virtual space that can be re-entered and sensually refashioned, and turned into a visual display that allows for voyeuristic observation by others. The theatricality of the experiment depends on the physical re­ enactment of the Moonstone’s theft. This turns Franklin Blake into ‘the body of proof’, in the sense that his physical presence is required for the experiment, but the attribution of any significance to his unconscious phy­ sical presence must be supplied by a ‘body of witnesses’, who, as a com­ munity, are able to testify to the truth value of the proceedings. In the process, “the body of the most unlikely (and very English) suspect is made into a theatre of scientific observation that tells its own story to the medical expert and to the gathered community” (Thomas 2006: 68). In other words, re-enacting a previously unconscious performance allows the unconscious to be reperformed, as, according to Carpenter, Bain and Dallas, the senses forever save their impressions. Even though this is not translatable into consciousness for the experiencer himself, it can be turned into a “public spectacle” for others (Thomas 2006: 74), who can testify to it through their eyewitness accounts, i.e. the unconscious can be subjected to the parameters of an ‘experiment’ and narrativized in the novel itself. Paradoxically, while

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the unconscious is rendered observable for a community of eyewitnesses, the scene simultaneously reiterates forgetting, in that the experiment ‘proves’ Blake’s innocence rather than revealing his inherited guilt. At this stage, he has inherited his father’s fortune, but he can only allegorically re-enact Herncastle’s guilt in a domestic context, so that this guilt remains an unconscious phantom represented in the novel’s mode of showing rather than telling. The novel thus cunningly performs the implicit censorship required to bring about the “domestic” novel, ensuring that its “wild” ori­ gins are barred from consciousness (Page 1974: 169), but nevertheless articulated. Conversely, this authorizes the novel as a form, for the novel records that which eludes consciousness, but nevertheless acts as a vital motor of human lives. Crucially, the experiment potentially entails a re-membering of that which remains foreclosed in the explicit narrative. Having Franklin Blake recon­ ceive his story by structuring it himself and letting eyewitnesses weigh up the circumstantial evidence to create the context for his opium-induced first­ hand experience comes as close as possible to his initial experience by having him retrace his steps, but simultaneously entails a repeated fore­ closure of what he cannot consciously remember. He himself becomes the ‘body of evidence’ during the re-staging of the theft, while his disembodied voice as a narrator weaves together stories to render his innocence plausible; his innocence thus crucially depends on the separation of body (of/as evi­ dence) and mind and the disavowal of their intricate connection. 3.2.2 The Aisthetics of ‘Character’ The Moonstone is a self-reflexive text on the conditions of possibility of ‘character’. It reveals the implications of, as well as the restrictions on, characters’ conduct within a complex framework of racial, class and gender inequalities that seems to leave only two options (apart from suicide) for characters excluded from conventional plot lines and their corresponding viable subject positions: either to live with the secrets one becomes privy to and to keep them at great personal cost, or to remain entirely unconscious of the socio-political enmeshments one is implicated in and to reiterate plot structures that preclude the price to be paid for the lifestyles represented in the romance, marriage and inheritance plots so characteristic of ‘the’ Vic­ torian novel. The Moonstone emphasizes the embodiment of secrets and the corresponding psycho-physiological effects on the respective characters, together with the energy or energeia created between them, amounting to a performative and theatrical aisthetics. According to William B. Carpenter’s notion of unconscious cerebration, “the mind becomes aware of its actions only retrospectively” (Ryan 2012: 160); thus, fiction “can reveal even those workings of a person’s mind that are not apparent to the individual” (161). The notion of unconscious cere­ bration paves the way for new forms of character formation that can

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accommodate both conscious and unconscious acts, so that ‘character’ becomes at least a double-layered entity. The Moonstone employs forms of cultural anaesthesia in order to draw attention to the ways in which the (un) viability of particular subject positions is discursively produced, effecting calibrations of perception that, if they are socially sanctioned, construct ‘the real’ accordingly. The Moonstone not only represents calibrations of per­ ception, but reveals them to be functions of power hierarchies in the context of different discourses, be they colonial, racial, class or gender discourses. The novel translates the social system of differences into a reflection on different ‘positions’ for its characters in their respective constellations. The socially coded network of relations between characters is one of the main means by which the novel represents and reflects on forms of embodiment, and, correspondingly, calibrations of characters’ perceptions within its complex network of interrelated discourses. The Moonstone shows that categories of difference, and the options they open up or foreclose for agents positioned accordingly, are embodied, anticipating Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus. The kinds of interaction possible for characters are conditioned by their ‘positions’ and the ‘places’ that they can occupy. Their allocated posi­ tions, in turn, calibrate perceptions, emotions, conduct and the stances they take towards one another. The ways in which these options and restrictions are felt depend on whether the characters concerned are able to acquiesce in the ‘places’ assigned to them: that is to say, on whether they occupy a viable subject position. While Gabriel Betteredge is quite content not to process and verbalize things he ought not to perceive according to his position – “It is one of the rules in my life, never to notice what I don’t understand” (Collins 2008b: 41) – Rosanna Spearman and ‘Limping Lucy’ articulate the injustice of a social system that allocates social positions without acknowl­ edging systemic forms of exclusion. According to Betteredge’s evaluation of the staff, Rosanna is “the plainest woman in the house, with the additional misfortune of having one shoulder bigger than the other” (Collins 1900b, I: 39). Along with social marginality, physical disability is a qualifier of characters affecting their perception in Collins’s novels. Kate Flint has shown that there is a close connection between disabilities – or, as in Rosanna’s case, deformities – and “sensory perception” (Flint 2006: 156). Flint claims that “Collins is offering, through these exceptional characters, a commentary on the role played by the senses in perception in general” (157), and that this focus on the scope of the senses is mirrored in “the attention he pays to the vocabulary of sensory cogni­ tion – both literal and metaphorical – throughout his prose” (157). Mar­ ginalized or disabled characters are accorded particular importance because, thanks to what Flint calls their extraordinary “sensory cognition” (157), they illumine that which remains excluded in a conventional plot. Rosanna reveals that the conventional marriage plot forestalls the position of a her­ oine for her, but her perceptions and thoughts function as a self-reflexive commentary on exactly that. In addition to this social commentary, Flint’s

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formulation echoes an aesthetic discourse, as the phrase ‘sensory cognition’ evokes Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s definition of aesthetics (see Baum­ garten 2007: §§1, 10–11). The extraordinary perception of marginalized characters can, by extension, be seen to articulate the intertwinements of Collins’s prose and aisthetic discourse. Sensory cognition, as a psychological approach to aesthetics that relies strongly on the etymological meaning of the term (‘perception’), is not only a central element of characterization in the novel, but also gestures towards the importance of aesthetics in the sense of aisthetics in The Moonstone. In the novel’s character constellation, Rosanna both doubles and is set against Rachel Verinder. Both serve to keep Franklin’s secret: “Their secrecy perpetuates the mystery and, in so doing, allows the novel – the history of the crime and its complicated solution – to come into being” (Blumberg 2005: 175). The need to re-enact the theft is the consequence of a witness’s, Rachel’s, deliberate silence, and thus of her failure to account for the ‘truth’. What this silence produces instead is the novel itself, as an articulation of the difficulty of establishing the ‘truth’ once perception is shown to be ‘subjective’ (see Thomas 2006: 75) – the constant concern of Blake’s German metaphysical education. Thus, the account that makes up The Moonstone supplements the eyewitness account in the form of a narrativization and an emplotment of that which previously remained ‘subjective’. Rosanna is characterized not just by her desire to take Rachel’s place as Franklin’s romantic love interest, but by “her silent tongue and her solitary ways” (Collins 1900b, I: 39; see 52–53). Betteredge also spots a ‘certain something’ about her, “just a dash of something that wasn’t like a house­ maid, and that was like a lady”, which he cannot really localize: “It might have been in her voice, or it might have been in her face” (39; emphasis in the original). Rosanna is associated both with the novel’s paradigmatic symbol of the unconscious, the Shivering Sand, and with the je-ne-sais-quoi, which features as an aisthetic signifier in Dallas’s The Gay Science; by this shorthand, she is again connected to an unconscious aesthetics, translated into her gendered appeal as ‘a woman’, and to the unconscious more gen­ erally. Like Rachel, Rosanna is not awarded a position as a contractual narrator in The Moonstone as “they would have to give away the plot” (Lonoff 1982: 154), thus thwarting the novel’s structure. Their respective ‘confessions’ of the truth must therefore be transcoded and deferred to allow the novel to create sensational effects by slowly revealing the secrets that have been kept. Unlike Rachel, Rosanna writes and, in fact, posts a letter to Franklin Blake, which grants her a posthumous opportunity to speak. In the letter, she can boldly state what she feels because she is dead by the time he comes to read it; thus, she sheds light on the ways in which social positions are upheld by different kinds of performance, habitualized and psychologi­ cally anchored in characters’ performativities. She ponders why Franklin would not fall in love with her but prefers Rachel, and “insinuates that female beauty and male desire are also class-constructs” (Mehta 1995: 626):

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Sensationalisms: Wilkie Collins ‘Suppose you put Miss Rachel into a servant’s dress, and took her ornaments off—? I don’t know what is the use of my writing in this way. It can’t be denied that she had a bad figure; she was too thin. But who can tell what the men like? [… I]t does stir one up to hear Miss Rachel called pretty, when one knows all the time that it’s her dress does it, and her confidence in herself.’ (Collins 1900b, I: 516)

Rosanna’s insinuation is represented here by an aposiopesis. The dash makes the inference clear, but the rhetorical device illustrates that Rosanna hesitates to spell it out because of her social position. In his description of his “young lady” (88), Betteredge himself reflects on the cultural construc­ tion of beauty. Defying Petrarch’s catalogue of beauty in the fashion of Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 (see Duncan-Jones 2010: 375), he describes Rachel as follows: If you happen to like dark women (who, I am informed, have gone out of fashion latterly in the gay world), and if you have no particular pre­ judice in favour of size, I answer for Miss Rachel as one of the prettiest girls your eyes ever looked on. She was small and slim, but all in fine proportion from top to toe. To see her sit down, to see her get up, and specially to see her walk, was enough to satisfy any man in his senses that the graces of her figure (if you will pardon me the expression) were in her flesh, and not in her clothes. Her hair was the blackest I ever saw. Her eyes matched her hair. Her nose was not quite large enough, I admit. (Collins 1900b, I: 89) What Betteredge focuses on to corroborate Rachel’s bodily beauty are aspects of comportment, posture and demeanour, of habitus, rather than, strictly speaking, of the ‘flesh’. He thus reinforces, albeit unwittingly, Rosanna’s critical view: it is the positions characters can take that delimit their behavioural options and define the limits of their viability as subjects. In her rivalry with Rachel, Rosanna competes with a woman of a different class and, ironically, enables Rachel to take the position of a romantic her­ oine by sacrificing herself. The two characters mirror each other and shed light on the allocation of different subject positions. All that remains of Rosanna is her letter to Franklin, while Rachel becomes his wife ‘in the flesh’. Rosanna’s lack of a position in the social system after her suicide allows her at least a restricted means of expression, whereas Rachel, as a heroine of the marriage plot, remains silenced: “Just as Rosanna sees the letter enabling her to say the things she cannot say in person, Rachel ima­ gines writing a letter that would offer Franklin help without requiring them to acknowledge any shame aloud” (Blumberg 2005: 177). Thus, Rachel remains an accomplice of the conventional marriage plot, which demands

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Franklin’s innocence, while Rosanna can begin to point out the pitfalls of this convention and its socio-economic repercussions. Structurally, the novel performs a bifurcation as well as a “chiastic” con­ nection between Rachel and Rosanna (Blumberg 2005: 176), between living character and dead letter, between aesthetic beauty, visible on the outside and corroborated by material riches, and socio-economic deprivation visua­ lized in Rosanna’s bodily deformity, poverty and social marginalization. Correspondingly, when it comes to the ‘places’ that characters may take, the plot sacrifices the servant to corroborate a middle-class lifestyle that can only be upheld by debts, within an economic and imperial framework geared towards depriving the working classes, as well as the colonized, of a large share of the means of living generally available. In her posthumous confession, Rosanna reflects on the construction of beauty through dress and the options for a positive self-image. She notes that types of behaviour that are permissible in a lady “would cost a servant her place” (Collins 1900b, I: 516; my emphasis), by which I understand her to be referring not only to her means of subsistence but to her very viability as a subject. In her letter, Rosanna grants that she “might have got on in [her] place”, were it not for her falling in love with Franklin, whom she compares to “a prince in a fairy-story” and whose appearance conjures up “the happy life [she] had never led yet” (515; my emphasis). It is her moral ‘reformation’ that makes her “try for better things” (517) and dissociates her from her “fellow-servants in [her] new place” (517; my emphasis). Reformed from a thief to a servant in a respectable household, she feels ‘out of place’ and aspires to attract a fairy-tale lover who might raise her up the social ladder (see Ahmed 2010: 254). However, the marriage market reveals that her moral reformation does not suffice for her social ascent. While she can caress Franklin’s pillow or other objects belonging to him when she tidies his room, thus turning them into fetishistic substitutes for the absent man, he fails to notice both her domestic labour and her labour of love, as Rosanna complains in her letter: “‘You never noticed it, any more than you noticed me. I beg your pardon; I am forgetting myself’” (Collins 1900b, I: 520). This forgetting herself, in the sense that she disregards the restrictions of her social position, echoes E.S. Dallas’s definition of aesthetics as “self­ forgetting” (1999, II: 110), so that social transgression and aesthetic pleasure coincide in a mental state of oblivion. Forgetting the self cuts one loose from the ties between the subject and a neatly defined identity, thus pre-empting the mechanisms of power restricting subjectivity. What Rosanna craves is to make Franklin notice her, to see her: “‘I tried—oh, dear, how I tried—to get you to look at me’” (Collins 1900b, I: 515). It is only the roses as a substitute for herself that he might – more or less consciously – have noticed. Rosanna triumphs over Rachel only in the realm of this symbolic exchange: “‘you wore my roses oftener than either you or she thought’” (516; emphasis in the original). Other than these sub­ stitutes, Franklin never notices her due to a kind of class-blindness – a

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blindness in agreement with his own habitus and its corresponding habi­ tualized focus of perception – and remains fully unconscious of his failure. Within the novel’s social system, Rosanna does not manage ‘to take Rachel’s place’; she can only act out this dream symbolically. When Limping Lucy, the only character showing outright disgust at Franklin Blake, his class-blindness and his disregard for Rosanna (see 500), asks him whether he felt any remorse seeing “‘a poor girl in service’” (500), Franklin replies in the negative with a surprised “‘Why should I?’” (500). From her own social position and character perspective, Lucy is unable to understand what Rosanna may have seen in Franklin (see 500). The social position that characters may take calibrates their outlook and determines their range of perception. Thus, Franklin Blake’s unconscious act of theft is used not only as a means of motivating the plot but in order thoroughly to probe literary ‘character’ and to reveal the implications of seemingly the most innocent acts within a network of social, economic and political implications. The role of the unconscious in the novel is also to highlight the aisthetic possi­ bilities of psycho-physiological approaches to aesthetics, approaches that serve to turn the novel into a multilayered communication system. 3.2.3 ‘Hysteria’, Differends and Phantomatic Transmissions ‘Hysteria’ performs “the maximal conversion of psychic affect into somatic meaning – meaning enacted on the body itself” (Brooks 1994: 21) and its prevalence in The Moonstone underlines its aisthetics by the transformation of affect into bodily signs. The novel’s references to hysteria not only indi­ cate its reliance on psycho-physiological discourses; they are a central fea­ ture of its character construction and plot development. The depth of some characters is constructed by their incorporation of a secret, comparable to the Moonstone’s “flaw” (Collins 1900b, I: 64). Rachel Verinder is associated with the gem by her “defect” (Collins 1900b, I: 89), which, as Betteredge bemoans, lies in the fact “that she had ideas of her own, and was stiffnecked enough to set the fashions themselves at defiance, if the fashions didn’t suit her views” (90).31 Rachel and the stone are thus analogized by a defect, raising questions about their respective ‘value’ and the possibilities for appropriation. Rachel’s flaw is represented by the secret she incorpo­ rates. When she finally reveals the secret to Franklin, only the mere husk of convention remains: she fills the placeholder for the marriage plot and has nothing left to say. The secret that she has kept – that Franklin Blake is the perpetrator of a colonial crime within a domestic context – evaporates as deed and agent are dissociated, so that Franklin cannot be held responsible for what he has unconsciously done (see Duncan 1994: 310; 313; Mehta 1995: 645). Female characters such as Rachel Verinder and Rosanna Spearman, who either directly witness or quickly infer Franklin’s guilt, are also jeopardized as moral agents, because they are implicated in Franklin’s guilt. For love,

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both ‘encapsulate’ his secret in their own bodies, remain silent and are thus turned into hysterics (see Heller 1992: 153), marginalized by the plot. Both Rachel and Rosanna abide by a compromised morality, which, within the social system they are a part of, is intended to secure a gentleman’s ‘good name’ – Rosanna literally hides this name in a box that she buries in the Shivering Sand. This place also serves as the setting for her suicide, so that she herself is consumed by the novel’s metaphorical unconscious and her hardships are correspondingly marginalized and forgotten. Both Rosanna and Rachel ‘bear’ a name that is not theirs but that clearly marks them. The Moonstone draws attention to the constructedness of social conventions, using sensation as well as alternate mental states to articulate the intricate connections between colonial atrocities, represented by the theft of the Moonstone, romantic entanglements and class differences. The intertwine­ ment of these aspects is constructed as a network of complicities, effected by characters keeping secrets. These secrets can be read off bodies, but cannot be publicly articulated. Aisthetics thus represents a central strategy of com­ munication in The Moonstone. Franklin Blake’s theft is not verbally articulated by Rachel and Rosanna until Blake himself slowly realizes the actual ‘chain of events’. This realiza­ tion, which takes up the majority of the novel, is further delayed by Blake’s reluctance to receive the information transmitted to him in writing (see Heller 1992: 147) by Rosanna Spearman’s letter and memorandum, delivered to Blake by Limping Lucy. Tying in with the novel’s general imagery, Rosanna’s written messages are presented within ‘containers’, whose open­ ing Blake describes in his “Third Narrative” (Collins 1900b, I: 478): “I broke the seal. The envelope contained a letter, and this, in its turn, contained a slip of paper” (501). This mise-en-abîme of containers comprises Rosanna’s memorandum, which is intended to help Franklin remember what he has never been conscious of, the theft of the Moonstone. Franklin is instructed to use a stick to find the chain by which the box is fastened and, in order to retrieve it, to feel along the stick, among the seaweed (beginning from the end of the stick which points towards the beacon), for the Chain. To run my hand along the Chain, when found, until I come to the part of it which stretches over the edge of the rocks, down into the quicksand. And then to pull the chain. (502; emphasis in the original) The box containing the evidence of the theft is the remnant of an “improper burial[]” (Berthin 2010: 6), and can be accessed only by way of a chain. It is simultaneously figured as a retrieval of meaning from the unconscious and a retrieval of a lost voice from the past, a communication from the dead Rosanna. Rosanna thus circumvents the foreclosure that barred her from speaking her mind previously, when she was positioned as a servant and

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stigmatized as a thief, under suspicion from very early on in the investiga­ tion. The box’s retrieval, enabled only by a chain fastened to that which remains solid, the rocks, when the Sands elide determination, is clearly cathected with both pleasure and fear.32 The novel thus symbolizes an unobser­ vable process, and does so by applying an imagery that involves ‘containers’ of letters and clues, retrieval chains and a landscape oscillating between the solid and the instable. The chain can also be understood as representing the con­ catenation or enchaining of sentences that contribute to the production of a dif­ ferend, thus drawing attention to the power structures and silencing mechanisms in communication. The enchaining or silencing of narratives in The Moonstone negotiates the sayable and the unsayable, modulated by social and literary norms, represented by Franklin’s editorial choices and interventions, and realized by reflections of the positions that characters can take. With regard to social norms, the dominance of the marriage plot fore­ grounds questions of gender, most prominently for the two female char­ acters who serve as ‘containers’ of Franklin’s secret, and are correspondingly changed by it. This secret is encapsulated and somatized in the women’s bodies. For Rachel, this corresponds to an encrypting of Franklin’s name, as her keeping his secret allows her to retain him as a loved object. Summar­ izing Nicolas Abraham’s concept of the crypt, Christine Berthin explains that “[a] refusal to lose a highly cathected love object might lead to his/her phantasmatic inclusion in the ego, in a psychic crypt separate from the ego, yet outside of the ego, concealed and yet gesturing towards the ego” (Berthin 2010: 5). Rachel’s response to Franklin’s theft can thus be read along the lines of both hysteria and encrypting, which corresponds to the container motif so prevalent in the novel. Both approaches help to clarify the dynam­ ics behind ‘keeping a secret’. Ultimately, “the ‘form of hysterics’ is, literally, the text as a whole” (Bourne Taylor 1988: 201). Indeed, The Moonstone can be understood as the effect and result of ‘hysteria’ (see Showalter 1997: 33–38). Sigmund Freud argues that, to trigger hysteria, “an idea must be intentionally repressed from consciousness and excluded from associative modification” (Freud and Breuer 1955: 116). Like its characters, the novel serves as a ‘container’ of secrets, repressing and simultaneously salvaging an ‘idea’ for later working through. Explicitly, this concerns the fact that Franklin committed the theft, but implicitly the novel’s ‘dead’ letters also bear the memory of some “unconscious guilt” (Bourne Taylor 1988: 200). The novel thus replicates a structure that, in hysteria, is said to trigger nervous tension caused by repression, in keeping with sensation fic­ tion’s alleged ‘preaching to the nerves’. In The Moonstone, the discourse on hysteria serves as a complex frame of reference that lends itself to theatrical representations of predominantly female suffering (see Showalter 1997: 36) and is simultaneously used to provide a somatized depiction of social injustices. The evocations of the illness in Collins’s novel are an important aspect of an ais­ thetics expressed by somatized forms of conduct, habitualized behaviour and corresponding restrictions of perception.

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In the nineteenth century, Jean-Martin Charcot “defined hysteria as a physical illness caused by a hereditary defect or traumatic wound in the central nervous system that gives rise to epileptiform attacks” (Showalter 1997: 30). Symptoms signalling the advent of a fit may include so-called “attitudes passionelles” (31), while milder expressions of the illness may be indicated by the “loss of voice” (38). Hysteria is thus a form of silencing on both a symptomatic and a social level, a silencing that is then articulated by the body. “Inevitably, we all live out the social stories of our time” (1997: 6), Elaine Showalter argues, highlighting the ways in which forms of embodi­ ment convey social meanings and articulate inequalities. This interpretation of hysteria is corroborated not only by textual evidence, but by the fact that hysteria also serves as a metafictional trope. Crucially, Rachel asks Godfrey Ablewhite as he proposes to her why she feels as if she is “stifling for want of breath” and whether there may be “a form of hysterics that bursts into words instead of tears? I dare say!” (Collins 1900b, I: 389). This allegorizes the way in which the novel “bursts into words” (389) to convey socio-his­ torical injustices and inequalities by encapsulating the secret of the stolen Moonstone in the idiom of psycho-physiology. Apart from using hysteria as a trope for writing, The Moonstone articu­ lates encrypted meaning. The very encapsulation of a secret within the novel that generates it in the first place incorporates discourses on the uncon­ scious, including an aesthetics of the unconscious, in order to communicate the unspeakable through a process of transmitting the secret inter­ generationally in and through writing. Thus, the novel articulates that which cannot be said in a given historical moment, but contains it for the time being. By serving as a container of secrets and encrypting meaning, The Moonstone performs what it describes. By extension, this turns the novel form itself into a highly relevant psycho-social medium and justifies it on the basis that it encrypts important memories in a way that renders content communicable without explicitly stating it. Crucially for an aisthetic approach, the transmission of unconscious mnemonic content is manifested in characters’ altered forms of perception, and relies on an aesthetics of the unconscious in order to turn the novel form into a communicator or medium of haunting secrets. Nicolas Abra­ ham’s psychoanalytical concept of the “phantom” helps explain this further. The phantom “is meant to objectify […] the gap produced in us by the concealment of some part of a love object’s life” and “the gaps left within us by the secrets of others” (Abraham and Torok 1994b: 171). His theory deals with the ghostly return of “those who took unspeakable secrets to the grave” (171), which is then passed on as a “phantom” of memory, or, more precisely, the phantom of a previous generation’s secrets manifested in the present generation (171). The Moonstone stages such a “transgenerational” haunting (Berthin 2010: 4), in that it illustrates the history of a long line of dispossessions and the transmission of ‘unspeakable secrets’ within a family whose roots go back to

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colonial exploits – among them, the theft of the Moonstone during “The Storming of Seringapatam (1799)” (Collins 1900b, I: 5). The Moonstone opens by way of a “Prologue”, “Extracted from a family paper” (5; empha­ sis in the original), which serves as the novel’s opening frame, finally closed by Mr Murthwaite in the third statement of its “Epilogue” (Collins 1900b, II: 185–190). The novel’s foundational constitution is thus made dependent on that framework, revealing the connections between the domestic ‘centre’ and the colonial ‘frame’. The whole family history is based on secrets that need to be kept and, leaving aside the novel itself, can be communicated only within the family (see 1900b, I: 5). In The Shell and the Kernel, Nicolas Abraham poses a question that is closely related to the interconnection between the novel’s foundational con­ stitution and the retrospective discursive transmission of a consciously inaccessible event, as well as the dialectic between character and letter: how to include in a discourse – in any one whatever – the very thing which, being the precondition of discourse, fundamentally escapes it? If nonpresence, the kernel and ultimate ground of all discourse, is made to speak, can it – must it – make itself heard in and through presence to self? (Abraham and Torok 1994a: 84) This ties in with foundational constitutions, in which the founding perfor­ matives cannot be part of that which they constitute, and corresponds to the very structure of the novel, which is based on secrets and can be produced only as long as those secrets are contained or repressed, as they evaporate, along with the novel itself, once they are revealed. Furthermore, it corre­ sponds to the novel’s negotiation of presence and absence in its alternation of ‘letters’ and ‘characters’ in their respective double meanings. The Moon­ stone thus performs its dependence on the conditions of possibility of its own existence, in that it performs and reveals in each of its instalments that it can articulate itself only by living up to the standards of norms established by implicit censorship. The novel reflects the fact that its very texture depends on the rules for that which cannot be said: that is, on the norms brought about by implicit censorship in the aftermath of the Indian Rebel­ lion. This is represented by the incorporation of the secret motivating text production and ending it once it is revealed, which amounts to an inclusive exclusion and is reflected in the novel’s structure, where the main body of the novel depends on the paratextual introduction of a secret that it cannot openly articulate without evaporating. In that context, Franklin Blake can be seen as acting out the secrets of his forebears when he unconsciously steals the Moonstone. The phantom, according to Abraham, “is a formation of the unconscious that has never been conscious – for good reason. It passes – in a way yet to be determined – from the parent’s unconscious into the child’s” (Abraham and Torok 1994b: 173). Abraham’s approach helps to conceptualize the fact that Franklin remains

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unconscious of both iterations of the theft. In the second reiteration, the event is made accessible only to a public circle wider than his family, who, however, witness the scene as a repetition of Franklin’s ‘guilt which is not guilt’, as the theft was committed without his being conscious of the act. One might, how­ ever, also read it as an acting out of the phantom of colonial guilt that Franklin unconsciously retraces. It is his father who agrees to guard the Moonstone in John Herncastle’s stead (see Collins 1900b, I: 59–66); Herncastle is Blake senior’s “brother-in-law” (59), and Franklin’s father accepts the charge only in exchange for papers that might help him to “prove his title to that unlucky Dukedom” (59). While the cousin of Herncastle who supplies the ‘family paper’ remains anonymous, Blake senior comes closest to being implicated in the business of the Moonstone: his attempt to join the nobility in a domestic context parallels Herncastle’s attempt to get into money in a colonial one. Franklin, in turn, succeeds to this moral and financial legacy when he transmits the diamond to his cousin Rachel and when he inherits his father’s wealth and fortune. The novel’s structure mirrors the effects of the phantom of past generations’ haunting secrets, in that “the words used by the phantom to carry out its return […] refer to the unspeakable” and “[t]he phantom is summoned […] when it is recognized that a gap was transmitted to the subject” (Abraham and Torok 1994b: 174). Allegorically, Ezra Jennings’s strategy to fill in gaps in Dr Candy’s fragmentary speech connects the reading practices applied to sensation fiction to the transmission of gaps in Abraham’s sense. By incorporating secrets, The Moonstone conveys such gaps to its readers and uses letters, characters and words to articulate and communicate historical silences. The Moonstone’s “text itself is a crypt” (Royle 1991: 62) and can be read along the lines of a “‘Cryptaesthesia’”, a term that refers to the notion of the crypt and to aesthetics, at the same time as alluding to the telepathic capacity of the text to see us coming, read us, deter­ mining us and our strange inclusion, cryptaesthetically working over our ‘own’ language, working over us, ourselves. (61; emphases in the original) This accounts for the ways in which The Moonstone communicates encrypted historical secrets and for its focus on reading practices and detection, with the latter seemingly presenting an antidote to the secrets that are the novel’s ‘topic’. In addition, The Moonstone draws on the more general definition of cryptaesthesia as a paranormal form of communication, defined by the OED as follows: “A supernormal faculty of perception, whether clairvoyant or telepathic” (see Royle 1991: 60). Clairvoyance thus functions as the explicit articulation of the “supernormal”: the look into ink, like the reading of the novel, may reveal more than meets the eye. Interest­ ingly, the phantom can be ascertained by a subject’s “habits and actions”, particularly as

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Sensationalisms: Wilkie Collins it pursues its work of disarray in silence. Let us note that the phantom is sustained by secreted words, invisible gnomes whose aim is to wreak havoc, from within the unconscious, in the coherence of logical pro­ gression. Finally, it gives rise to endless repetition and, more often than not, eludes rationalization. (Abraham and Torok 1994b: 175)

Pre-empting this psychoanalytical theory in its very structure, The Moon­ stone achieves something quite comparable: it has Franklin steal the Moon­ stone in a silent action that can be designated only by medical advisors such as Ezra Jennings and that, after a history of repetitions, is also repeated in the novel itself. This gestures to the fact that such repetitions are inscribed in habitualized forms of conduct that, drawing on performativity, also define habitus and ‘character’. In this way, the novel performs a construction of character on the basis of the phantoms of the past. Cunningly, it applies habitforming substances to illustrate this (see Zieger 2011: 211). Opium serves as a connection from domestic desires, externalized into habitualized practices of consumption, whose wider repercussions are foreclosed. The Moonstone corresponds to a form of psychoanalytical analysis that “can only give rise to constructions with all their attendant uncertainties” (Abraham and Torok 1994b: 174). The Moonstone is a construction that objectifies the phantom and by doing so, communicates it, through a para­ phrase or a vicarious representation of a secret that loses its threat once the subject realizes that they are merely the carrier of someone else’s secret (see 175). Collins’s novel simultaneously corroborates and challenges this view: on the one hand, Franklin Blake learns that he is not guilty of the theft at all and can proceed to marry Rachel Verinder; on the other, he is implicated in a colonial, imperial, patriarchal and literary history that does not fully exonerate him. The novel alters the meaning of the inheritance plot, transmitting the Moonstone to a host of cousins and a secret, a silent phantom, to a host of readers by way of letters, characters and words. Aisthetic characters com­ municate socio-economic effects on the body through the somatization of corresponding restrictions in the diegetic world and showcase the ways in which habitualization codes political power hierarchies. The calibration of characters’ perceptions figures as a symptom of the past’s hidden secrets; the novel serves as the past’s hidden soul. Sensation fiction registers historical change by transcoding it into unconsciously charged subject positions, cathecting the positions one can take within a context of accelerating mod­ ernization with some unconscious energy, articulating change without expressing it. The genre thus couches historical and domestic fiction in the idiom of physiological psychology, turning the body into the primary medium of history; what is more, it articulates central Victorian plotlines – the romance and inheritance plots – with colonial guilt and thus reveals how the main ‘heroes’ of the Victorian novel are simultaneously its ‘villains’.

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Notes 1 John Kucich argues that “melancholic male protagonists” represent “an impor­ tant key to Collins’s conception of gender difference, since they dramatise what he saw as an identity crisis plaguing mid-Victorian men” (2006: 125). 2 On the role of affect in immersive reading positions, see Bilandzic 2014: 277. 3 It has often been noted that there are many precursors for this kind of narrative form, including the epistolary novel, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Bulwer-Lytton’s Eugene Aram. In his introduction to The Woman in White, John Sutherland also mentions some direct forerunners, such as a collaboration between Collins and Dickens entitled The Wreck of the Golden Mary and Dinah Mulock Craik’s A Life for a Life; he even insinuates that Collins may have copied the structure from the latter, as “Craik’s novel came out in late July 1859, while Collins was at Broadstairs, racking his brains about how best to begin The Woman in White” (Collins 2008a: xv). In that context, Ann Gaylin comments on Collins’s own position in the literary field, arguing that he attempted “to control and contain powerful female competitors” (Gaylin 2001: 327) such as George Eliot, “the original Mary Ann” (326). Collins’s appropriation of these forms can thus be interpreted as a strategy intended to bolster his own position as a writer and as a commentary on the literary field. 4 See Rance 1991: 83 on ‘Hartright’ as a telling name, chosen with much irony. He also emphasizes that while “the hero and heroine are conventional; their char­ acterisation is not” (83). 5 If the comma after “pen” is deleted, the text as self-reflexive text-immanent web immediately betrays itself as in breach of (realist) literary conventions: “the story here presented will be told by more than one pen[] as the story of an offence against the laws” (Collins 2008a: 5). Walter would thus admit to breaking the law, while the novel breaks the laws of realism. 6 See also Gaylin 2001: 324. The way in which The Woman in White appropriates typical structures and conventions of the Bildungsroman is revealing both for the emergence of sensation fiction and for the ironies of the Bildungsroman that it addresses (see Maynard 2005: 283–286; Böhm-Schnitker 2014: 287–300, esp. 297–298). 7 The “triangulated marriage” of Walter, Laura and Marian can also be seen in a more positive light (Dever 2006: 114). 8 See Teresa Brennan for a theory on the transmission of affect (2004: 6). 9 Cora Kaplan defines a mnemic symbol as “a memorial or narrative that embodies and elicits a buried psychic conflict which cannot be resolved in the present” (2007: 7). The symbol is frequently some perception metonymically related to a situation of strong agitation or even trauma that needs to be verbalized or worked through in order to disappear (see Freud and Breuer 1955: 6). She understands literary constructions as encoding memories, particularly memories that are hard to grapple with; literature thus serves as an archive of traumas to be worked through later. I find this approach intriguing for an analysis of what sensation fiction encodes for a later working through. 10 Brantlinger correspondingly argues that the sensational is “the postmodern con­ dition avant la lettre” (1998: 147). 11 In The Moonstone, the secret is revealed in its very making: because Rachel Verinder keeps hidden the fact that she witnessed Franklin Blake stealing the Moonstone, her silence enables the whole story. The ‘secret’ becomes the empty centre that enables the production of the novel in the first place, serving as the initiator of the novel’s foundational constitution, but remaining excluded from its body through an “inclusive exclusion” (Agamben 1998: 18). As Jaya Mehta puts it:

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12 Jenny Bourne Taylor traces this reference to Victorian psychological discourse. In a British context, monomania can refer to “almost any kind of irrational obsession”; it is described in more detail in James Cowles Pritchard’s A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (1835) and On the Different Forms of Insanity in Relation to Jurisprudence (1842) (see Bourne Taylor 1988: 47). Monomania, together with mania and dementia, is one of the forms of intellectual, rather than moral, insanity. It can be defined as a disorder “‘in which the understanding is partially disordered or under the influence of some parti­ cular delusion, referring to one subject and involving one train of ideas, while the intellectual powers appear, when exercised on other subjects, to be altogether unimpaired’” (47). While the boundaries of moral insanity or “perversion” (47; emphasis in the original) are much more changeable, Walter’s monomania affects only a part of his mind, so his general sanity need not be questioned. However, it reveals the ways in which the woman in white narrows down his perspective; the figure is thus constructed as ominously meaningful. 13 For the terminology, see Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (1989: 17–19; 281), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982: 58–62), “Revolution in Poetic Language” (1999: 89–136, esp. 92–93; 97; 100; 102; 114–117). 14 This notion of ‘barring’ as the entry point into language and the law of the father in Lacanian psychoanalysis chime in nicely with legal discourses and the role of the ‘barrister’ as a legal representative defending the subject. Within social dis­ courses, such legal defences tie in with processes of subject formation as such, a connection frequently exploited by Collins. 15 In The Emotions and the Will, Alexander Bain provides a psychological com­ mentary on form that normalizes Walter’s reaction to Marian’s figure: “the supreme charm of the curved outline is relative to human form, as adapted for love. So deeply-rooted is this interest, that we must pronounce it instinctive and hereditary; while, in degree or amount, it is transcendent” (Bain 1875: 242). Against this background, Walter’s initial reaction to Marian’s curves can be considered automatic and instinctive, whereas the recognition of her face marks the onset of a cognitive evaluation of her beauty and eligibility as a partner. Psycho-physiological aesthetics thus provides aesthetic legitimation for gendered power hierarchies. 16 The novel was serialized in Dickens’s All the Year Round between January and August 1868 and “published in three volumes by William Tinsley in July 1868” (Page 1974: 168). Interestingly, contemporary critics were split in their responses to the book, which included both highly laudatory reviews – even Geraldine Jewsbury discusses the novel in a very positive light for the conservative weekly the Athenaeum (see 170–171) – and very negative ones. Charles Dickens, appar­ ently reflecting the growing personal differences between the two writers, com­ bines both responses, initially describing The Moonstone to his “sub-editor” of All the Year Round, W.H. Wills, as “wild, and yet domestic – with excellent character in it, great mystery”, but later denouncing its construction as “weari­ some beyond endurance” (169). 17 The colonial theft of the Moonstone is described in the frame narrative entitled “Prologue: The Storming of Seringapatam (1799). Extracted from a family paper” (emphasis in the original). The tale of Franklin Blake’s theft, initially

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unattributed to him as a character and unaccounted for, is first told as part of the “First Period” of “The Story” – more precisely, in the chapter entitled “The Loss of the Diamond (1848): The events are related by Gabriel Betteredge, housesteward in the service of Julia, Lady Verinder” (Collins 2008b: Contents). In the “Second Period”, it is retraced by Blake as one of several first-person narrators, whom he instructs to provide those parts of the story for which they can serve as eyewitnesses. The novel can thus be considered the result of a retrospective emplotment of deeds, statements and symptoms, which, without the conscious, monetary and authoritative efforts of the compiler, could not have served to exonerate the character Franklin Blake of the crime of stealing a diamond worth around £20,000 from his beloved in 1848 (see Collins 2008b: 37). Like The Woman in White, the novel can be understood as an effect of masculine selffashioning. 18 For a reading of the theft in a domestic context as an allegory of national crime and the greed represented by the East India Company’s exploits in India, see Reed 1973: 286–287. 19 For the relevance of Seringapatam and other historical references, see Reed 1973: 286–287; Free 2006: 343. Marty Roth analyses the figurative intertwinement of drug addiction and colonial invasion (see 2002: 87). Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge succinctly summarize the main points, arguing that the storming of Seringapatam serves as “a significant starting point” for The Moonstone’s blending of British colonialism and the domestic context of the British family: because Victorian history books identified the siege as the beginning of Brit­ ish domination in India; because of the British raiding of the treasury of Tippoo Sultan in which they plundered two million pounds’ worth of ‘specie, jewels, military, and other stores’; and because the siege allowed Collins to displace his critique of the Indian mutiny, still too inflammatory a topic to address directly. (Leighton and Surridge 2009: 211) 20 This is an issue that has been addressed frequently. For the relevance of the secret and the strategy of delay, see, for example, Blumberg 2005: 175; Gruner 1998: 225; T.S. Eliot 1999: 468. 21 See Nicholas Daly, who argues that in sensation fiction more generally “history becomes somatized” (1999: 462). 22 Freud defines the mnemic symbol in the context of his studies on hysteria. In his discussion of “Case 2: Frau Emmy von N., Age 40, from Livonia”, for example, he uses the term to describe “somatic symptoms of hysteria”, such as “memories of pains” (Freud and Breuer 1955: 90). Mnemic symbols thus serve as bodily expressions of psychical traumas and “stand as symbols for them in the activities of memory” (95). The symbolic impact of Franklin Blake’s theft in The Moon­ stone is read only on a concrete level, with its more abstract implications remaining opaque. 23 Ian Duncan makes a similar argument: “Jennings’s ‘experiment,’ in which Blake is once more fed opium to simulate the night of the crime, constitutes a brilliant variation upon the nineteenth-century novelistic topos of amateur theatricals” (Duncan 1994: 313). See also Mehta 1995: 631. More generally, Caroline Levine has shown that the experiment was a guiding principle for Victorian fiction: “the experiment provided both a formal paradigm and an epistemological purpose for suspense fiction in the Victorian period” (2003: 6). 24 See Ashish Roy’s comments on the “property/propriety” nexus in his postcolonial reading of The Moonstone (1993: 660–661). 25 See also Arnold 2011: 95–96.

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26 Interestingly, the Moonstone’s unfathomable depth is analogized with ink (see Mehta 1995: 629), which both represents the material basis of writing (a novel’s manuscript) and is associated with the unfathomable depths of clairvoyance. Collins himself comes to stand in the clairvoyant boy’s position, as he is the one looking at ink and transforming it into a novel that grants its readers access to the most intimate spaces of the fictional world thus created. While the Indians must stay out, the reader is let in on many secrets, even though the final solution and clarification of the plot are delayed. The clairvoyance achieved here by looking into ink and seeing fictional worlds that will probably become reality (see Collins 1900b, I: 32) is comparable to the “sorcer[y]” introduced by the narrative instance in Adam Bede (Eliot 1897a, I: 3). 27 As Marty Roth argues, the Opium Wars were fought because, allegedly, “there was no other way for England to balance its trade payments except by creating a population of addicts and then catering to their desire” (2002: 89). Connecting the lines of argument suggested by Zieger and Roth shows how intricately dis­ courses of drugs, desire and capitalism are enmeshed in the novel. 28 Wilkie Collins is said to have obtained his own laudanum from sources linked to the East India Company (see Sutherland 2008b: xx). See also Collins 2008b: 30. 29 For a debate on the relevance of the Opium Wars (1839–42; 1856–60) to the novel, see Sutherland 2008b: xx–xxi. See also Boehm-Schnitker 2020: 372–373. 30 Ezra Jennings is pivotal in exonerating Franklin Blake and a complex character who is sacrificed for the conventional romance plot. He is marked by “defor­ mities which often have a feminising effect, making [characters] especially sensi­ tive, attuned to the affective aspects of culture, imaginatively sympathetic towards women” (Flint 2006: 155; my emphases), and thus can be understood, like Rosanna, to have a highly perceptive access to the fictional world that he encounters. Importantly, Jennings is “of hybrid origins” (Mehta 1995: 628) and, as such, is barred from articulating his life story within the novel’s domestic core. He censors his own speech when he tells Franklin: “My father was an English­ man; but my mother—” (Collins 1900b, II: 28–29). Aposiopesis indicates the erasure of that which cannot be said in the prevailing socio-political discourse. As Mehta points out: “Jennings’s unfinished sentence banishes the colonial, the female and the racially marked to the unspoken and unspeakable periphery” (1995: 628). He also comes to stand in a structural analogy to Rosanna: both are buried in nameless graves, blotting out social and racial difference together with their respective gender-bending. Nevertheless, Jennings leaves a trace in the reader by being thus foreclosed in the narrative, according to the rules of the foundational constitution of the novel as a ‘domestic’ novel. This remaining trace and his observations on the unconscious charge him with vital importance, as an indicator of that which the novel communicates by way of the excluded, the foreclosed and the unconscious. 31 See also Elisabeth Rose Gruner (1998, esp. 222–232). 32 See also Hutter 1975: 204–205.

4

Aestheticisms Vernon Lee

4.1 Aisthetics of Empathy After realisms and sensationalisms, this chapter sketches the further develop­ ment of aisthetics at the turn of the century with a view to the emergence of modernism1 and indicates the applicability of aisthetics as an approach beyond the nineteenth century. With Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), a female aesthete,2 I have chosen a writer who both affirms and challenges what is termed ‘aesthe­ ticism’ as a movement with her own aesthetic theory and with her “anti-aes­ theticist” (Schaffer and Psomiades 1999b: 4) anti-Bildungsroman (see Zorn 2003: 127) Miss Brown (1884).3 Lee develops a strand of aesthetic theory based on the work by James Sully, E.S. Dallas, William James (see Yamboliev 2020: 347; 354), John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Henry James, Oscar Wilde,4 Grant Allen (see Morgan 2012: 36), George Henry Lewes and Alexander Bain (see Dames 2007: 59), a theory that is to some degree already enacted in Miss Brown (see Yamboliev 2020: 349). Her approach concentrates on “embodied aesthetic responses” (Morgan 2012: 34)5 and informs the emergence of modernism – Lee’s theory impacts on Virginia Woolf’s aesthetics in particular (see Denisoff 1999: 251–252).6 Her literary theory can hence be considered an important mediator at a time of transition (see Seeber 2012: 327–344), a context conducive to aisthetics. Lee’s analysis of art and sculpture can be conceived as a theori­ zation of the intricate relationship between art, psychology, aesthetic empathy and embodiment, paving the way for a theory of embodied cognition that posits that “bodily experience is the shape of thought itself” (Cuddy-Keane 2015: 58).7 With her emphasis on empathy and, to some degree, ethics, Lee is considered a proponent of a so-called female aestheticism, “a combination of political awareness and commitment to artistic innovation” (Delyfer 2010: 33). She represents an aisthetic in her own right, exploring, as she does, “[h]ow fiction formalizes our being in the world – and, in so doing, constructs our realities” (Yamboliev 2020: 347). Reflecting on how literature can “canalize” readers’ thoughts and emotions in her essay “On Style” (Lee 1968b: 48), how “Units of Consciousness” (53; emphasis in the original) are subject to “orches­ tration” (58), she pre-empts a lot of the vocabulary that I employ to define aisthetics. DOI: 10.4324/9781003387510-5

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After Lee’s ‘rediscovery’ in the 1970s (see Yuen 2010a: vii), the academic discussion initially concentrated on her biography, in particular on aspects such as her emotional restraint (see e.g. Colby 1970: 252), her “severe mental disturbances” (286), her deafness (see 288) and her “sexual dissidence” (Psomiades 1999: 21).8 Such a strong biographical focus runs the risk of reducing Lee’s aesthetic to an articulation of her – to some extent closeted – lesbianism, and hence of hampering an appreciation of Lee’s texts that exceeds the biographical (see Briggs 2006: 162). In her reading of one of Lee’s ghost stories, “A Wicked Voice”, Sylvia Mieszkowski concludes with “a plea for allowing the author’s sexuality to fade into the background, and focussing, instead, on the desires portrayed in the text and the resulting queer potential of it” (2014: 113, emphases in the original; see also Valentine 2021: 63). Taking my cue from that plea, I argue that Lee’s novel Miss Brown has got queer potential in that it employs strategies of a cultural anaesthesia to articulate the unsayable both on the level of the author, who, as a (lesbian) woman and a writer, provides a critique of the patriarchal politics of aestheticism, and on the level of the character Miss Brown.9 With Anne Brown, the novel introduces a protagonist who, in and through her own body, reveals processes of implicit censorship. Lee uses aisthetics to ironically comment on gender politics alongside aesthetic theories that are endemic to the movements of aestheticism and decadence.10 In his analysis of Lee’s reaction to the Wilde trials, Richard Dellamora has shown how Lee uses the “nonhierarchical” genre of conversation, derived from the philosophical tradition of the dialogue, to articulate a queer politics of self (Dellamora 2004: 535). Furthermore, he sheds light on the cultural importance of what Lee terms “outlawed thought” in her review of Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1895) (Lee 1896: 938). Outlawed thought diverges from the majority that, as such, is defined as the norm (see 942) and creates countercultures as a performative collateral (see Dellamora 2004: 543). Lee employs the genre of the conversation not only to disseminate her own opinions in a polyphony of voices, but also to perform her ideal of both cultural and ethical development as this, too, depends on polyphony: The worst kind of spiritual degeneracy is surely that which is gregar­ ious, and which, for that reason, is unsuspecting of its own existence. To combat it we require to hear every one, to allow every variety of human being to express itself; we require to compare opinion with opinion, to correct bias by bias, to level exaggeration by exaggeration, to taste of all that we may select in everything. For the rule of life is selection; not merely of us by nature and fate, but by us of fate and nature. […] Against degeneracy of soul there is, after all, but one sweeping remedy: the determination to alter continually for the better; the determination to become, rather than to remain, absolutely sane. (Lee 1896: 943; my emphasis)

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Lee’s emphasis on polyphony and becoming, I argue, ties in with her politics of aesthetics revealed in her argument for art’s constant evolution of form: The artistic form has no physical existence: it is a phantom, but in this phantom is the real life of the art. For an art has but a purely mental life; its birth, its growth, and its decay take place not in the hewn stone or printed canvas, but in the mind of the artist, of the artist’s brethren and predecessors, of whole nations for generations and generations; the visible or audible individual work which remains to us is merely the portrait of the abstract artistic form at a given moment of its existence. The work of art is fixed and enduring; the artistic form is shifting and fleeting; […] the artistic form is seen in constant change by the artistic generation in whose mind it exists, even as the individual man is seen in constant change by his contemporaries[.]11 (Lee 1880: 304; my emphasis) While this reveals Lee to be firmly situated in an evolutionary and psycho­ logical aesthetics as suggested by James Sully among others, it also shows that the ethical development of self – which is not untinged by biopolitical discourses promoting the “soul’s hygiene” (1896: 940) – is analogous to aesthetic development. The process of becoming defines both the self and artistic form and each is a function of the respective other. To some degree, Vernon Lee can thus be seen as a theoretician of emergence, especially reflecting on processes of bifurcation in any social positing of norms, not without falling prey, however, to some re-inscriptions of norms, which threaten to cross out the queer potential of her approach. Her aisthetic theory presents both – what one might retrospectively call – a queer theory of self resembling Judith Butler’s emphasis on the processual and perfor­ mative (see, e.g. 1988: 519), and a normative cross-current encapsulated in the notion of ‘sanity’. On the one hand, Lee’s focus on change and becoming allows for the possibility of performative intervention – a kind of interven­ tion that is mirrored in the formal choice of dialogue and conversation in many of her texts on literary theory – and, on the other, fosters a biopolitics of sanity and health, a concern that also defines the asymptotic movement towards sanity as suggested in “Deterioration of Soul” (Lee 1896: 943). Regarding her position in the literary field, Lee has been described as quite dependent on her male mentors, but she has in fact established a public dis­ course in her aesthetic theory that pretends that aesthetics can be discussed exclusively on the object level without paying heed to cultural contexts and patriarchal attempts at marginalization. Jo Briggs discusses the way in which art history became a decidedly masculine discourse, spearheaded by Bernard Berenson – a some-time friend of Lee’s, but soon an opponent who claimed that Lee, and particularly her partner Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, had plagiarized his work (see Briggs 2006: 160; 165). Briggs argues that “the pro­ fessionalization of art history, with which Berenson’s name became associated,

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excluded women. Women became the amateurs against whom male profes­ sionals defined themselves” (2006: 171). In a similar vein, Christa Zorn argues that Lee could only enter the debate on aestheticism – a predominantly male and masculine movement (see Showalter 1993: vii) – by acquiring a “split voice” (Zorn 2003: 126). Lee’s complex cultural position is thus defined by multiple affiliations and allegiances. These may explain why Lee’s female aestheticism can only articu­ late something new by challenging established views within the established idiom. Her attempt at deconstructing the aestheticist “‘masters’” (Zorn 2003: 116) must repeat them to indicate where change is possible. This is reflected in the reading of Miss Brown as a roman à cléf,12 which critiques the decadent turn of aestheticism through a performative reiteration of its major tenets, but the novel also exceeds this reading. Lee draws on aisthetic strategies – instances of embodiment and cultural anaesthesia – to articulate socio-cultural dissidence at a time of transition (see Wachter 1988: 443) and in a cultural climate that tends to marginalize her voice. In a similar vein, Irena Yamboliev has empha­ sized the performative quality of Miss Brown; she argues that this derives from the novel’s inclusion of the essay, “a genre fundamentally performative, syn­ thetic and projective” that underlines Lee’s aim “to envision a better space for a new kind of social being through the essayistic” (Yamboliev 2020: 362). Ais­ thetics, I claim, is a fundamental strategy to articulate such a space. Lee interweaves a physiological aesthetics with a psychological aes­ thetics – particularly with her research on empathy – and complements them with a strong focus on narrative form, an interest that derives from physio­ logical approaches but also anticipates a modernist formalism. Lee is even considered the inventor of (formal) literary criticism (see Dames 2013: 506) and presents a decisive female voice alongside Henry James (see Colby 1970: 237). Consequently, “Lee contests our received history of a break between Victorian physiological aesthetics and later literary formalisms, especially the New Criticism” (Morgan 2012: 34). She seems a paradigmatic repre­ sentative of a time of accelerated social change and differentiation that needs to reorganize the way in which individual subjects are integrated into social subsystems, a situation fostering the construction of presence effects and aisthetic strategies. While Lee’s aesthetic theory has definitely garnered attention, it is also true that “the marginalization of Lee has been an active, and consistent, process” (Briggs 2006: 172). Hence, active efforts of con­ tinued ‘re-discovery’ are essential in order to justly evaluate female aesthe­ ticism alongside the masculine aestheticism of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Henry James.13 Moreover, as Benjamin Morgan has argued, Lee might turn out a central precursor of current turns and trends in literary theory such as “neuroaesthetics, quantitative literary criticism, cognitive studies, or neuroscientifically oriented affect theory” (Morgan 2017: 251). Focusing on her novel theory and novel practice, I will show the close enmeshments between her own theoretical approaches and aisthetics, which, perhaps, becomes most conspicuous in Miss Brown’s embodied cognition.

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4.1.1 An Aisthetic Novel Theory With her approach to the novel, Lee follows the lines of a theory of “Reader Response Victorian Style” (Zorn 2006: 174), but she also mediates between close and distant reading.14 Lee’s Handling of Words is one of “the first examples in English criticism of close, methodical analysis applied to nar­ rative prose” (Lodge 2001: xv), but in her articles on construction and style, Lee’s literary theory “openly insists upon the novel’s susceptibility to mea­ surement” (Dames 2007: 186) and statistical analysis as a form of distant reading. Her theory of the novel is founded on her interest in the modula­ tion and calibration of readers’ perceptions, and thus on central aisthetic concerns. Lee’s “unjustly ignored articles ‘A Dialogue on Novels’ (1885) and ‘On Literary Construction’ (1895) make a case for novelistic technique as the managing of the reader’s attention, interest and sympathy” (Dames 2013: 522–523). Her novel theory also relies on the logic of biopolitics that intends to enhance people’s health through the aid of statistical analysis and the management of the population by way of monitoring their mental life.15 In “Æsthetics of the Novel” (1899), Lee argues that there is a “means of direct emotional contagion: [the author’s] admiration, love, delight, inevi­ tably kindling ours” (1968c: 69). She defines the “specific æsthetic quality of literature” in the following fashion: What it is, I do not, and I suppose nobody nowadays does, know: a charm due to the complex patterns into which (quite apart from sound) the parts of speech, verbs and nouns and adjectives, actives and pas­ sives, variously combined tenses, can be woven even like lines and colours, producing patterns of action and reaction in our mind, our nerve tracks – who knows? in our muscles and heartbeats and breathing, more mysterious, even, than those which we can dimly discern, darkly guess, as effects of visible and audible form. (69) It is decidedly such “complex patterns” (69) that can be statistically assessed and allow insights into an author’s “Handling of Words” (192). Conse­ quently, it is the construction of the text, its patterning, its canalizing of readerly attention, that contributes to a calibration of perception. Lee’s “On Literary Construction” (1895) – an article that “borrowed Dallas’s term to describe a similar process of building wholes out of frag­ mented and textual units” (Dames 2007: 187) – draws on a critical vocabu­ lary typical of Victorian physiological aesthetics that displays an interest in “the unarguably temporal process of any reading” and hence uses “musical analogies” rather than visual ones; it employs “a language of duration, repetition, and sequence” (Dames 2007: 48; emphasis in the original). Ironi­ cally, this corresponds to the decadent motif of influencing others as if playing on an instrument (see Maltz 1999: 221) that Walter Hamlin, the

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male protagonist of Lee’s novel Miss Brown, takes delight in: “[H]e enjoyed playing upon a living soul, all the more upon a soul like this one, slow to respond to his touch, with low and long-sustained vibrations, like those of some deep-toned instrument” (Lee 1884, II: 56). What is described as an ethical failure on Walter’s part in the novel, is basically at the bottom of Lee’s novel theory that operationalizes this mechanism: [Y]ou are constantly introducing new themes, as in a piece of music, and working all the themes into one another. A theme may be a description, a line of argument, a whole personage; but it always represents, on the part of the Reader, a particular way of intellectual acting and existing, a particular kind of mood. Now these moods, being concatenated in their progression, are thereby altered by the other moods they meet. (Lee 1968a: 7) This is an interesting combination of the management of attention, impression and mood on the part of the reader in terms of the distribution of information and a linguistic theory of syntactic, discursive and logical concatenation, tex­ tual cohesion, pragmatics – particularly with regard to perlocution – and of the syntagmatic interaction of phrases that are being concatenated. Lee’s approach can thus be described as a literary morphology of moods that combines formal rules of text production and an aisthetics of reception. As Benjamin Morgan has aptly summarized, “Lee endorses kinesthetic responses to the rhythms of prose while still gesturing towards systemic formalist methods that character­ ized the New Criticism” (2017: 222). It is the ‘technical’ aspect of construction that provides the relay connecting Lee’s reader response theory with formalist and statistical approaches to the novel: The craft of the Writer consists, I am convinced, in manipulating the contents of his Reader’s mind, that is to say, taken from the technical side as distinguished from the psychologic, in construction. Construc­ tion is not only a matter of single words or sentences, but of whole large passages and divisions: and the material which the Writer manip­ ulates is not only the single impressions, single ideas and emotions stored up in the Reader’s mind and deposited there by no act of the Writer’s: the Writer deals likewise with those very moods and trains of thought into which he, by his skilful selection of words and sentences, has grouped the already existing single impressions, the very moods and trains of thought which have been determined by himself in the mind of the Reader. (Lee 1968a: 1) Novel reading is thus envisaged as a very intimate modulation of the read­ ers’ minds and feelings, a modulation that depends on the cultural interplay

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between the author’s skill at construction and the calculated intervention in readers’ knowledge and cultural dispositions. Such a play on the cultural claviature of readers is, however, checked by ethical concerns. In “A Dialogue on Novels” (1885), Lee stages a debate on the novel trig­ gered by a discussion of different novels by the Brontë sisters on location in Yorkshire, in Haworth Moor (see Lee 1885: 378). The debate is led by André Marcel, “the subtle young French critic and novelist, who had come to Yorkshire in order to study the Brontës” (378); Mrs Blake, “the eminent novelist” who puts forth a rather conservative novel theory (378); Baldwin, Vernon Lee’s mouthpiece (see Lee 1910: ix–x) and the later protagonist of Baldwin: Dialogues on Views and Aspirations (1886); and finally Baldwin’s cousin Dorothy Orme, who shares her Christian name with Wordsworth’s sister and serves as the paragon of a female reader in need of protection from naturalist and decadent novels which sever any tie to ethics (see Lee 1885: 401). The aesthetic value of the novel is hence articulated with its ethical value (see 387). Since the latter depends on a depiction of the struggle between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, the novel is consequently a hybrid art form: The arts which deal with man and his passions, and especially the novel, which does so far more exclusively and completely than poetry or the drama, are, compared with painting, or sculpture, or architecture, or music, only half-arts. They can scarcely attain unmixed, absolute beauty; and they are perpetually obliged to deal with unmixed, absolute ugliness. (386) The novel is further hybridized by its incorporation of a variety of discourses: [O]ur emotional and scientific experiences obtained from art, however distant all practical object may have been while obtaining them, mingle with other emotional and scientific experiences obtained, with no desire of pleasure, in the course of events; and thus become part of our viati­ cum for life. Emotional and scientific art […] trains us to feel and comprehend – that is to say, to live. (388) The novel is shown to be the motor of a cultural evolution. Compared to people living in the eighteenth century, the Victorians are represented as having acquired “subtleties of feeling barely known to the minority some hundred years before”, and this emotional refinement is attributed largely to the novelists (389). Drawing on musical metaphors, Baldwin argues that the novelists “have, by playing upon our emotions, immensely increased the sensitiveness, the richness, of this living keyboard; even as a singing-master, by playing on his pupil’s throat, increases the number of the musical inter­ vals which he can intone” (389). Novelists, that is, have the power to alter

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people’s perceptions, emotions as well as the range of their aesthetic sus­ ceptibilities. They provide an ethical training, a power that Lee does not want to see abused.16 Like James Sully, Vernon Lee believes that aesthetic experience “deposits a ‘residue’ which may be rehearsed and contemplated; it leaves a ‘potential condition’ in the memory” (Gettmann 1968: xiv; see Lee 1913: 66). Aesthetic experience may hence have a long-term effect that cre­ ates a certain disposition and mental habit derived from multitudinous cali­ brations of perception. It is this role of memory and the lasting impact on dispositions and behaviour that effects the close intertwinement of ethics and aesthetics: Believing, as I do, in the power of directing human feeling into certain channels rather than into certain others; believing, especially, in the power of reiteration of emotion in constituting our emotional selves, in digging by a constant drop, drop, such moral channels as have already been traced; I must necessarily also believe that the modern human being has been largely fashioned, in all his more delicate peculiarities, by those who have written about him; and most of all, therefore, by the novelist. […] I believe that […] we should find that a good third of what we take to be instinctive knowledge vaguely acquired from perso­ nal experience, is really obtained from the novels which we or our friends have read. (Lee 1885: 390) Lee describes a performative view of subjectivity here, conceiving, as she does, of subject constitution as a constant process of forming and modelling based on a channelling of feeling and perception in the interaction between embodied human beings and literary representations. She makes a strong case for the cultural formation of feeling and knowledge through interaction with cultural products and hence again puts a lot of emphasis on the ethical function of literature, since it actively shapes the subjects that consume it. This view is reflected in her notion of reading, since, to her, readers are predisposed to expect this kind of cultural shaping when they open a novel. The customary reading stance is defined by a corresponding alertness: We are, however, unconsciously prepared to learn a lesson, to be put into a mood, and that lesson learnt will become, remember, a portion of the principles by which we steer our life, that induced mood will become a mood more easily induced among those in which we shall really have to act. (Lee 1885: 393) Lee’s emphasis on the aesthetico-ethical importance of literature and culture insinuates that some form of monitoring of literary production and con­ sumption is mandatory. Such monitoring is provided by Lee’s statistical

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approach to literature that aims at “extracting, classifying and counting up the parts of speech” that selected pages of renowned authors contain and that is geared to analyse pages enough – say all the pages [a writer] ever wrote – of each, turn about, of the authors under comparison in hopes of exhausting all the subjects he had ever written about, and thus arriving at an average classification of all the words which every one of the Writers under comparison ever employed. The Statistical Test applied to Literature. (Lee 1968d: 188–189; emphasis in the original) Ultimately, however, this form of literary analysis aims at “a more rigorous literary phenomenology” (Morgan 2017: 253).

4.2 Miss Brown Miss Brown is certainly an intervention in the debate on the interrelation between ethics and aesthetics in that it conveys a differend to indicate the need for more viable subject positions. It reveals forms of suppression in a patriarchal, heteronormative society (see also Yamboliev 2020: 351), a form of suppression that overlaps with the professionalization and institutionali­ zation of the literary field that marginalizes Lee. Lee’s novel is frequently categorized as New Woman fiction in current criticism, because it addresses “the motif of failed female development and is sceptical about marriage” (Yuen 2010a: viii) and “the constraints created by social and sexual expec­ tations placed on women” (Zorn 2003: 119; see also Valentine 2021: 69). Nevertheless, this categorization must be taken with a grain of salt: “On the whole, she was sympathetic to the concerns which preoccupied her New Woman peers, but she had her own thoughts on certain matters. For instance, Lee did not, in the wake of the Wilde trials, join mainstream fem­ inists in attacking Wilde and his followers” and she reconsidered her critical stance on aestheticism “because of the extremity of the feminist position on moral purity, which condemned aesthetics (for its link to Wilde) and, most of all, did not make room for same-sex desire” (Yuen 2010a: xix). With regard to Anne Brown’s ‘sexlessness’ (see Lee 2010: 207), Christa Zorn, in a similar vein, argues that “Miss Brown resembles other New Woman novels, where purity or asexuality are often ‘constructed around the collapse of heterosexual relationships’” and may point towards “‘sexually dissident desires’” (2003: 120; see also 133).17 While I agree that Anne’s asexuality is employed to gesture towards non-heteronormative relationships, I consider it important to emphasize that this insight should not be used to reduce the novel to an articulation or sublimation of Lee’s own desires (see Miesz­ kowski 2014: 113). Symptomatically, Psomiades argues that Lee did not act on her supposed lesbian desires (see Psomiades 1999: 21), so that they

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apparently ‘need’ to be outed through the novel by proxy. While Lee indeed had close relationships to women such as Annie Meyer, Mary Robinson and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson (see Yuen 2010b: xxvi–xxvii), the question is whether reading her character as occupying a similar social position boils down to a biographical fallacy. I find it more convincing to read Anne’s ‘asexuality’ in the sense of a “lack of sexual attraction” (Bogaert 2012: 22) as a form of both sexual and cultural dissidence (see Dellamora 1999: 5). Describing this as a ‘lack’ is of course an effect of a discourse that is based on the cultural relevance of sexualities and hence this definition is not entirely free of the impetus of relocating sexlessness on a positively defined spectrum of hetero-/ homo- or bisexuality. In my view, Anne’s ‘sexlessness’ is an attempt to stave off any such ascriptions – and this can be achieved as yet only by a ‘nullity’ rather than a denial decidedly because it thwarts the easy ascription of signifiers in the sense of labels – and hence produces discourse, which might entail a liberatory discourse to articulate that which is foreclosed in a differend. The recognition of sex as a nullity in Miss Brown does not imply a cele­ bration of purity, but the attempt to listen to the novel’s form of dissidence. This reading also takes seriously Anne’s indifference to or refusal of any kind of lesbian relationship (see Lee 2010: 78, 310). With Catherine Delyfer (2010: 38–39) and Christa Zorn (see 2003: 139), I argue that Lee criticizes gender hierarchies and sexism much more widely through a depiction of the lack of sexual attraction and through performative silences – through, in fact, a cultural anaesthesia. Implicit censorship limits Anne Brown’s subject constitution and defines the viability of female subjects, determines Anne’s bodily comportment and her perceptions and thoughts. Miss Brown can productively be analysed by drawing on Jacques Ran­ cière’s “meta-politics of literature”: [T]he meta-politics of literature have to do with the way in which lit­ erature participates in the distribution and redistribution of places, times, spaces, identities; what it makes ‘visible’ that was invisible before, or ‘audible’ that was not heard before, thus ‘liberating political possibilities by undoing the formatting of reality produced by statecontrolled media, by undoing the relations between the visible, the say­ able, and the thinkable’. (Delyfer 2010: 32) Miss Brown indeed challenges the “meaningful fabric of the sensible” (Rancière 2004: 63) by throwing into relief Anne Brown’s responses and reactions to the insensibilities of late-Victorian patriarchal society, repre­ sented by the microcosm of aestheticism and decadence. With Delyfer, I argue that, despite her intellectual achievements and the development of her poli­ tical awareness, Anne can only remain inaudible and invisible as a

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Victorian working class woman who is denied her own identity both in the aestheticist and in the socialist worlds of her time. (2010: 39) This is represented by a bodily rigidity – she is described, for example, as “a mass of granite” (Lee 1884, III: 268) – that reveals her to be the statuesque product of a fin-de-siècle Pygmalion, and by Anne’s metaphorical references to deafness and blindness that insulate her from her social environment and render her incapable of understanding others by putting “herself in their place” (131). Anne is represented as self-enclosed and self-sufficient and becomes a token of exchange in the patriarchal context of aestheticism only by way of her fetishization, so that she herself lacks the space for any articulation on her own behalf in the narrative. The social restrictions on Anne’s identity are firmly in place at the open­ ing of the novel, when Anne works as what her employer Mrs Perry calls a “children’s maid” (I, 39) and does not question her social status other than by aspiring to teach languages as “a parlatrice” (72). However, Walter Hamlin, the male protagonist fashioned along the lines of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (see Yuen 2010a: xiii) and – at least regarding his relation to Anne – William Morris, ‘discovers’ Anne as his model and impresses her “with his girlish beauty and pre-Raphaelite verses, as a sort of mixture of Apollo and Eros” (Lee 1884, I: 6). Walter envisions Anne as a “Valkyr or Amazon” (53), as “the real Semiramis” (105)18 or as Galatea whose love he intends to ‘earn’ – in a moral as well as an economic sense, since he pays for her edu­ cation and all her other expenses. He invests in Anne’s beauty in order to fashion himself “a realised ideal” (174) as a wife while Anne, in turn, loves only ideally (see II, 128), which already indicates the non-heteronormative and highly fetishized relationship between the two characters: Walter Hamlin’s life should be crowned by gradually endowing with vitality, and then wooing, awakening the love of this beautiful Galatea whose soul he had moulded, even as Pygmalion had moulded the limbs of the image which he had made to live and to love. (I, 121–122) For Walter and his aestheticist circle, Anne represents “the standard beauty” (II, 18) and he exclusively sees her through aesthetic categories irrespective of her character or biography, thus turning her into a mythical embodiment of Pre-Raphaelite beauty.19 The Hegelian belief in a historical realization of an aesthetic ideal is thus quite literally exemplified in Anne Brown, whose personal sacrifices are reduced to a mere collateral in Walter’s aestheticist scheme of matching form and substance, as it were. Miss Brown starts out with a focalization on Walter, who shares his first name not only with Walter Pater (see Zorn 2003: 116), but also with Wilkie Collins’s Walter Hartright.20 He is introduced as an aesthete whose

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perceptive sensibilities have turned into an over-refinement that seems to culminate in a perceptive indifference: IT was melancholy to admit that Italy also had ceased to interest him, thought Hamlin, as he smoked his cigarette on the hillside above the Villa Arnolfini; melancholy, although, in truth, he had suspected as much throughout the journey, and, indeed, before starting. Pale, milky morning sky, deepening into luminous blue opposite the fast-rising sun; misty blue-green valley bounded by unsubstantial Apennine peaks and Carrara crags; yellow shimmer of vines and of maize, green sparkle of pine and fir branches, glitter of vermilion sand crumbling under his feet among the sear grass and the brown cistus tufts, – all these things seemed to have lost for him their emotional colour, their imaginative luminousness. […] Formerly, at least, such things had soaked into him, dyed his mind with colour, saturated it with light; instead of remaining, as now, so separate from him, so terribly external, that to perceive them required almost an effort. (Lee 1884, I: 3–4)

Walter Hamlin seems to have ceased to live up to Walter Pater’s aestheticist theory that treasures all aesthetic impressions (see Pater 1910: 236–237), and has succumbed to the sin “to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world” (236–237). Hamlin’s characterization can be read as an ironic commentary on the self-fashioning of male aesthetes. His perceptive indifference no longer allows him to differentiate between impressions, so that even his personality becomes nebulously undefined: [I]n his poetry, and in his reality as a man, it struck him that he had little by little got paler and paler, colours turning gradually to tints, and tints to shadows; pleasure, pain, hope, despair, all reduced gradually to a delicate penumbra, a diaphanous intellectual pallor, of which this utter listlessness, this indifference even to having grown indifferent, was, as it were, the faint key-note. The world was a pale and prismatic mist, full of vague, formless ghosts, in which it was possible to see only as far as to-day. (Lee 1884: 5) Walter’s increasing indifference to colour takes to extremes Grant Allen’s notion of aesthetic taste as advanced in Physiological Æsthetics:21 In sight […] the vulgar are pleased by great masses of colour, especially red, orange, and purple, which give their coarse nervous organisation the requisite stimulus: the refined, with nerves of less calibre but greater discriminativeness, require delicate combinations of complementaries, and prefer neutral tints to the glare of primary hues. (Allen 1977: 44)

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Ironically, Walter Hamlin’s over-refined tastes threaten to turn him into an indiscriminate ghostly appearance without personality or character. His perceptive indifference is shown to supplement his moral indifference in the novel. Only when he meets Anne Brown can he be newly interested in his surroundings, but his perception of Anne still relies on stereotyping, as his self-fashioning along the lines of Pygmalion betrays. Walter Hamlin thus contradicts Walter Pater’s recommendation for a processual perception, for a willingness “to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own” (Pater 1910: 237). Walter Hamlin only reiterates such orthodoxies. Rather than becoming an artist in his own right, he is a mere epigone, “a mere weak-spirited and morbid-minded artistic automaton” (Lee 1884, II: 311), as Anne realizes. Reiterating aestheticist arguments for a selfreflexive and self-enclosed notion of art for art’s sake, Walter articulates a decadent sense of belatedness that, for him, can only be alleviated by a reclusion in an aestheticist simulation of reality: What is dead is dead. The only thing that remains for us late comers to do is to pick up the faded petals and keep them, discoloured as they are, to scent our lives. The world is getting uglier and uglier outside us; we must, out of the materials bequeathed to us by former generations, and with the help of our own fancy, build for ourselves a little world within the world, a world of beauty, where we may live with our friends and keep alive whatever small sense of beauty and nobility still remains to us, that it may not get utterly lost, and those who come after us may not be in a wilderness of sordid sights and sordid feelings. (I, 274) This escapist heterotopia of aestheticism amounts to Walter Hamlin’s selfcloseting, screening himself from any intercourse with the world that con­ sequently forestalls creativity, productivity and ethical engagement. From early on, the novel criticizes and discredits Walter’s endeavour to turn Anne into an aestheticist beauty ideal because it must result in a sterile passivity. Consequently, Anne’s correspondence to aestheticist beauty ideals is exposed as an effect of aestheticist discourse: “In the mixed light of the yellow tapers and the grey incense-laden sunbeams, her face acquired a dia­ phanous pallor, as if of a halo surrounding it” (I, 83–84). Revealing the dependence of Anne’s pallor on the colours associated with aestheticism, grey and yellow, the resulting “halo” (83) is revealed to be a product of the discursive operations of the movement. Correspondingly, once she is sub­ jected to this discourse, she is almost wholly unable to see alternatives; it determines the calibration of her ways of seeing. In a conversation about morality and useful knowledge with her socialist cousin Richard Brown, who is represented as the direct opposite of Walter Hamlin – “a singularly unæsthetic man, and confusing beauty with mere utility” (II, 325) – she is at

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first unable to understand him. “Outside there was only yellow fog, and leafless spectral branches; yet her onyx-grey eyes opened slowly, as if she were taking in some faint but glorious vision” (327). The novel makes it very clear that decadence has nothing to offer but an eerie form of austerity. Anne’s vision and her very eye-colour are already determined by an aesthe­ ticist way of seeing so that alternatives seem unreal to her. Anne proves to be entirely impregnated with aestheticist convictions, which reveals Walter’s great success in her ‘education’ or “en-form-ment” (Yamboliev 2020: 350): [I]mbued with Hamlin’s and Chough’s theory that all attempts at improving the world result merely in failure, and that the only wise occupation of a noble mind is to make for itself a paradise of beautiful thoughts and forms and emotions, [Anne] was extremely sceptical of her cousin’s and Marjory’s schemes, and once or twice declared her disbelief with perfect openness. (Lee 1884, II: 32–33) While her introduction to Richard Brown’s social circle and his work provides her with the possibility to fulfil her “desire to be of use” (II, 128), Anne sees her duty in saving Walter from his ‘depraved’ cousin Sacha Elaguine and thus from embracing decadence. Her self-sacrifice can consequently be read as an attempt to contain decadence and to stave off its detrimental ethical effects. With Walter, Anne also tries to salvage the possibility of an ethical aestheticism, an ideal that Vernon Lee’s ‘female aestheticism’ equally strives for. In Miss Brown, the final marriage between Anne and Walter serves to undermine the cultural function of marriage in novels as a means of closure and thus articulates dissidence both on a social and on a generic plane. From his aestheticist point of view, Walter considers a failure to turn Anne into a paragon of Pre-Raphaelite beauty a “waste” or even an “abortion” (I, 119) that he is nevertheless quick to transpose into poetical productivity. He bemoans the potential ‘waste’ in sonnets entitled “Stillborn Joy” or “Lost Loveliness” (I, 119),22 and thus represents his aestheticist project in biopoli­ tically charged terms. Their marriage is depicted as a ghoulish narcissist’s appropriation of the Pre-Raphaelite fetish and thus exposed as a mere con­ sumption that can no longer be idealized as a ‘happy ending’ or an accep­ table closure of a novel, a view that is underlined by the employment of gothic tropes: “Miss Brown suddenly shivered, as he put his arm round her shoulder. The flash of a street lamp as they passed quickly, had shown her Hamlin’s face close to her own, and radiant with the triumph of satisfied vanity” (III, 317). Miss Brown achieves closure only by way of turning the conventional ending of the marriage plot into its uncanny and horrific parody or, in Rancière’s sense, a heterology:23 [A] spectacle does not fit within the sensible framework defined by a network of meanings, an expression does not find its place in the system

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of visible coordinates where it appears. The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as vehicle. It is the dream of an art that would transmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations. Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, con­ versely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification. (Rancière 2004: 63) Miss Brown articulates sexual and cultural dissidence sous rature. Through the gothic description of the marriage as horrific, as inspiring disgust at the close proximity of the husband-turned-fiend, the familiar marriage plot becomes uncanny and garners additional significance, articulating the inher­ ent suppression of Anne as a person by denying her any option of happiness, and, simultaneously, “the truth of women’s unfreedom at the turn of the century” (Yamboliev 2020: 351). This is further underlined by the motif of living death. As has already been indicated, Anne’s marriage to Walter is described as a self-sacrifice (Lee 1884, III: 276) and, despite the fact that Anne is characterized as being accustomed to being unhappy, this sacrifice is qualified as an enormity.24 Losing “the liberty of being herself” (III, 276), of “the independence, the activity, the serenity, the possibility of a life of noble companionship with Richard Brown” (III, 276–277), Anne, fashioned along the lines of Proserpine, felt as might a person lost in a catacomb, and who, having got to a chink, having seen the light and breathed the air, should be condemned to wander again, to rethread for ever the black and choking corridors leading nowhere. (III, 277) This binary between seeing the light and being confined to a catacomb makes it very clear that a life with Walter is no life at all, because it does not allow Anne a sense of her own identity or any kind of viable subject position. The options of viability open to her are spiritualized and thus ‘purified’ in a platonic sense. For Anne, the alternative to marrying Walter is a “noble companionship” (III, 277) that promises selfhood – “being herself” (III, 276) – but Anne acts on a sense of moral obligation (see II, 333; III, 50) to marry Walter that forecloses any option of selfhood for her. In Anne’s social context, selfhood appears like a luxury that equates to a selfishness that she morally rejects. Hence, she finally opts for “the sacrifice of herself” (III, 283). Miss Brown employs a cultural anaesthesia to at least communicate the socio-cultural limitations for women in the late nineteenth century.

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What Anne longs for is merely negative freedom. Freedom to sympathise and to aspire – to do whatever little she still might to carve herself out a spiritual life of her own, no matter how mean and insignificant; freedom to live in that portion of her which was most worthy of life. (II, 52) This alternative between life and death is legible as an articulation of a dis­ sident identity that is tied to Anne’s characterization as a ‘true woman’ and a code of purity (see Psomiades 1999: 25). The narrator ascribes a particular kind of femininity to Anne that points beyond the diegetic level: Masculine women, mere men in disguise, they are not: the very strength and purity of their nature, its intensity as of some undiluted spirit, is dependent upon their cleaner and narrower woman’s nature, upon their narrowness and obstinacy of woman’s mind; they are, and can only be, true women; but women without woman’s instincts and wants, sex­ less – women made not for man but for humankind. Anne Brown was one of these. (Lee 1884, II: 309; my emphases) Anne’s sexlessness and purity may indicate “an alternative sexual style”, but may also point to “the question of how to represent a different, autonomous female voice” (Zorn 2003: 120), and thus a more encompassing form of cultural politics. This autonomy, both on the diegetic level and on the level of the author, is articulated through a pragmatics of silence; there does not as yet seem to be a positive solution for the lack of viable subject positions for characters like Anne in the masculine and homosocial context of aes­ theticism and decadence. Corresponding processes of implicit censorship have already become embodied: Anne has acquired a “habit of silence” (Lee 1884, I: 69). This, in turn, can be read as further evidence for complex articulation of sexual dissidence through silence. As Eve Sedgwick argues, ‘Closetedness’ itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence – not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues parti­ cularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it. (Sedgwick 1990: 3) Idealized, fetishized and objectified, Anne’s personal voice cannot be heard in aestheticist discourse. The novel showcases her lack of voice in con­ versations with Walter. When Anne sits for him, Walter ponders: “If only he could speak to her, or make her speak, he was persuaded it would be much

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easier; but for some unaccountable reason it seemed impossible to set up a conversation” (Lee 1884, I: 65). Their conversations are always defined by socio-cultural hierarchies, and the power imbalance between the two is finally codified by the ‘marriage contract’ that binds them together (see I, 149–150). The foundational constitution of the novel is based on the foreclosure of any life options for Anne outside of marriage, which is reflected by several kinds of exclusion. On the diegetic level, Anne is silenced by the marriage plot in terms of gender and sexuality, by her social class and her racial hybridity. These strategies of marginalization are complemented by a net­ work of intertextual references that become legible on several levels of the novelistic communication system. Anne Brown is, for example, aligned with Wilkie Collins’s ‘woman in white’, Anne Catherick.25 Miss Brown com­ ments not only on the relationship between the drawing-master Walter Hartright and the woman in white as blank or figural, but also on the gen­ eric relation between aestheticism and sensation fiction. Emphasizing aes­ theticism’s reliance on precursors such as Collins or Ouida (see Kandola 2013: 93), Lee acknowledges the movement’s roots in sensationalisms and reveals the close intertwinement of popular and high forms of aestheticism. Talia Schaffer has drawn attention to aestheticism’s close connection to popular women’s writing, Ouida’s in particular: In Ouidean aestheticism, women deliver the epigrams, decorate the houses, and exercise the potent, cynical influence later readers would associate with Lord Henry Wotton. Rereading Ouida’s work reveals that the aes­ thetic novel largely derives from – of all places – popular women’s writing. Much of the later history of aesthetic fiction can be read as an attempt to cover, contest, or accommodate this supposedly shameful origin. (Schaffer 2000: 124) Schaffer’s insight lucidly portrays the complex gendering of aestheticism that – just like sensationalism – is considered a feminine genre and thus feminizes its authors, despite the fact that it was long considered a mascu­ line movement (see Showalter 1993: vii). As Elaine Showalter elucidates, “New Women writers needed to purge aestheticism and decadence of their misogyny and to rewrite the myths of art that denigrated women” (1993: x). Lee’s female aestheticism as well as her critique of the female Bildungsro­ man with Miss Brown are therefore interesting interventions in a critique of aestheticism and decadence and thus a response to a time of transition and cultural differentiation, which renders her work a treasure trove for an aisthetics.26 The relationship between Walter and Anne not only turns heterosexual marriage into a gothic trope; it can also be considered the supplementary realization of the relationship between Walter Hartright and Anne Cathe­ rick that remains unconsummated in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White.

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Symptomatically, Anne Brown is frequently dressed in white. When Walter first sees her, she wears a “white vest and white skirt” and irons the clothes of her employer, Melton Perry, and his family (Lee 1884, I: 15). Once she is introduced – in a “somnambulic” fashion (302) – into the circle of aestheti­ cists, she wears a dress designed by Walter, made “of that Cretan silk, not much thicker than muslin, which is woven in minute wrinkles of palest yel­ lowy white” (306). As Walter’s ward, she is silenced by the machinations of romance, as the following free indirect discourse reveals: Anne sat down. Why did that dress make such a difference to him? Why did he care so much more for her because she had it on? Did he care for her only as a sort of live picture? she thought bitterly. But, after all, it was quite natural on his part to be pleased, since he had invented the dress. And it was very good of him to have thought of her at all. And thus, in a state of enjoyable repentance, she awaited the hour to go to Mrs Argiropoulo. (309–310) Here, Anne at first responds to her objectification but decides not to articu­ late her feeling of degradation because of her gratefulness and romantic attachment to Walter. Finally, when their marriage is announced, she wears “cloth-of-silver” and feels “as she used sometimes to do years ago after a hard morning’s ironing in summer – weary, broken, too numb for thought or pain” (III, 304). Anne’s association with sartorial whiteness thus goes hand in hand with practices of silencing. Like a white canvas, Anne can be inscribed and painted on by the male artist and only thus given actual shape and form to be recognized by Wal­ ter’s aestheticist circle. Walter describes her as a woman without qualities, “a mere blank” (I, 63), which corresponds to Anne Catherick’s construction as a mere character husk that is barred from a full realization. In a similar fashion, Walter Hamlin explains Anne Brown’s alleged lack of character by her social class: One thinks there must be something behind that face, and yet it seems to be a mere blank. My belief is, that people of this condition of life often have very little character – at least none in particular developed. Because, after all, it’s talking and jawing about things which don’t matter a pin that develops our character. The people who have no opportunity for that remain quite without character, until some day they are forced to choose whether they’ll be self-sacrificing creatures or mean pigs. (I, 63–64) For Walter Hamlin, character is based on the luxury of devoting time to the superfluous, the useless, the unnecessary, a luxury Anne Brown cannot

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afford. Thus, he posits Anne as a non-entity in his patriarchal, upper­ middle-class, aestheticist discourse. Ironically, her final self-sacrifice (see III, 283) reveals that Anne has entirely succumbed to this discourse of exclusion and that Walter is merely its executor: To be understood, to be sympathised with, to be loved really and really to love – none of these things would be for her. But, after all, what right had she to any of them? Anne was, in all matters concerning her­ self, a born fatalist and pessimist; the words of Goethe, “Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren,” were to her not an admonition, but a mere statement of fact. (III, 278) The chiastic phrase is taken from Goethe’s Faust, from the second scene in Faust’s study when Faust complains to Mephistopheles about his constant want and the denial of his desires, which precipitates his pact with the devil (I, l. 1549). Anne, in contrast to Faust, seems to acquiesce in this state of deprivation, but also finally sells her soul to the diabolical character Walter Hamlin, who seemingly offers her ultimate freedom, but simultaneously knows how to bind her eternally by exactly this offer. This is the cunning fashion in which Walter makes his proposal: Anne, I love you – and I hope that perhaps some day you may love me; but I want you to be able to love whoever may best deserve you, and merely to do my best that you should care for me. I want you to have a future independent of me – to possess the education and the fortune which shall enable you to marry whomsoever you will, or not to marry at all. Will you let me, for the time being, be your guardian, your father, your brother; let me provide for you, take care of your money, see to your education? I do not ask you to love me, but merely to give me a chance of trying to make you prefer me. (Lee 1884, I: 151) Anne finally subjects herself to this diabolical double bind that offers free­ dom by way of what turns out to be a “form of prostitution” (III, 280), incest or slavery (see II, 277). Anne lacks subject status in the social realm of aestheticism and is as such aptly described as a woman in white. Only transposed as an object of beauty can she figure in any way in Walter Hamlin’s ‘world’. Her object status is reflected in Miss Brown’s narratology. Anne hardly ever becomes a deictic centre in the novel; most of the time, she remains the object of other deictic networks, she is pointed out, pointed to, looked at and observed. Consequently, her perceptions are rarely described through internal focalization. When Hamlin sends her to Mrs Simson’s school at Coblenz, the narrator reports her confused state that is marked by a painful

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insecurity with regard to her feelings and thoughts during the process of her re-education: Her head felt hollow, she seemed to be informed about her feelings rather than to experience them, her own words sounded as if through a whispering-gallery. A couple of weeks ago she had so strong a con­ sciousness of identity and existence, of her own desires and hopes; now she could not well understand how she came to be where she was. [… S]he was depressed by a sense of transition; she was afraid of speaking, and almost of feeling. (I, 202) For Anne’s character to be remodelled, she is reduced to the husk of her out­ ward appearance in order to be infused by aestheticist discourse. Correspond­ ingly, the narrator articulates an impression of hollowness and a dislocation of identity that no longer matches any sense of self (see I, 202). This process is further orchestrated by Walter’s selection of books for Anne to read in order to imbue her “with the imagery and sentiment of that strange eclectic school of our days which we still call pre-Raphaelite” (I, 226). The whole process is a re­ habitualization in the sense that the ‘characterless’ Anne is trained to acquire a new habitus that culminates in the growth of her ‘soul’: “[T]he soul, which had lain as a tiny germ at the bottom of her nature, had expanded and come to the surface” (I, 231). The narrator describes this expansion as the result of “a whole life-poem” (I, 218) that goes on inside her during her stay at Coblenz, a life-poem that is choreographed by Walter Hamlin. Ironically, this expansion of ‘soul’ is only facilitated in order to achieve a pleasant interaction between form and content for Anne’s aestheticist recipients. As soon as Anne becomes interested in socialism and begins to form her own aesthetic judgements – which have a clear slant towards Romanticist poetry (see II, 83) – Walter Hamlin is quick to check this expansion. This is played out in the context of the debate about Walter’s “Ballad of the Fens”, on which Anne tries to have a ‘positive’ influence by inducing Walter to return to ‘realism’: He had stooped to make her, to turn the Perrys’ servant into a lady; in her turn, perhaps she, the woman of the lower classes, might encourage the delicately nurtured poet to attempt things bolder, simpler, and more healthy than he had done before. (II, 84) Her contribution is to entail the opposite of aestheticist delicacy or frailty: strength and above all health, a concern in art that Anne shares with Vernon Lee, who “is keen to qualify and therefore limit the aesthetic paradigm of sexual/cultural experimentation by making a neat distinction between ‘heal­ thy pleasure’ and ‘pain’, that is, perversion” (Evangelista 2006: 97).

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Lee emphasizes the connection between art and health in Euphorion and further illustrates it in Miss Brown, where she “radicalizes her use of the moral imperative as a discourse of dissent against the homosocial and mis­ ogynist milieux of the male aesthetes” (Evangelista 2006: 100). However, this dissent, as has been indicated, imports the discourse of biopolitics into aes­ thetics with its emphasis on ‘healthy’ art.27 The intertwinement of biopo­ litics and racism (see Foucault 2004: 256–263) may be the reason for Walter’s racist depiction of Anne. Trying to decipher the mystery of Anne’s appearance, Walter muses about her racial ‘origin’: This girl certainly was no Englishwoman – a Jewess, perhaps. No, never; no Jewess was ever so pure and statuesque of outline: some Eastern, dashed with Hindoo or Negro; they were much coarser, more common, of far more obvious, less subtle beauty. (Lee 1884, I: 26) Anne confirms Walter’s impression of racial hybridity: “‘My mother was an Italian. I think her family came from Sicily or Sardinia, or somewhere where there are Spaniards and Moors,’ she answered; ‘but my father was Scotch. He came from Aberdeen’” (I, 26–27). Anne’s racial identity is decentred, with a Scottish father and a possible black ‘heredity’ that alludes to Dion Boucicault’s 1859 melodrama The Octoroon or Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation novel of the same title, stories that deal with the biopolitical stratification of the human continuum. Walter orientalizes Anne so that race, gender and class intersect to marginalize and silence her. In Miss Brown, this intersection is further underscored by intertextual references that highlight mechanisms of exclusion, particularly Lettres de Mlle Aïssé à Madame Calandrini (1787, see Lee 2010: 232; 344, n. 10), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” (1842). The letters of Mademoiselle Aïssé are quoted to illustrate the intersection of race and gender as a means of suppressing women. What is more, this reference also stresses the fact that such forms of suppression are always also played out in the field of literature, so that it serves as a meta-com­ mentary on Lee’s situation as an author. In Miss Brown, the aestheticist poet Cosmo Chough describes Mademoiselle Aïssé as “‘the soul of virtue – the purest woman – of the eighteenth century’” (Lee 1884, III: 43), thus establishing a connection between her story and Anne’s. Chough celebrates Aïssé as “the most refined and accomplished woman” and recommends reading her letters that, for him, are “perfect gems!” (III, 44). This celebra­ tion, however, needs to be taken with caution from a feminist point of view (see Schaffer and Psomiades 1999b: 1). Chough praises Aïssé for her achievement in a strongly feminized and frequently belittled genre and con­ sumes her letters from a masculine, amoral and aestheticist point of view. This is revealed as soon as he describes her social situation. Aïssé, he ela­ borates, was sold as a slave to the ambassador of Constantinople, who had

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her educated and then said to her: “‘You are my slave; I bought you, I educated you; now love me!’” (Lee 1884, III: 44). The analogy to Walter and Anne is clear. When Anne asks Chough what finally happened to Aïssé, he stammers: “‘Oh – why – she – in short – afterwards – she died’” (III, 45). Postponing this information as long as possible, Chough betrays some of the embarrassment regarding the analogies of the fates of both Aïssé and Anne, but also again draws attention to the fact that the consummation of their relationship can allegorically be equated with slavery and, finally, with death. Anne herself uncannily pre-empts this literary analogy, having ‘life’ imitate ‘art’ unwittingly: “It seemed to her as if she had been sold in the slave market, and were being told ‘now love’” (II, 277). The novel show­ cases Anne’s racial hybridity in order to push the point that marriage, as a form of legalized prostitution, equals the exploitation of humans in the slave trade. The analogy between sexism and racism betrays their shared biopo­ litical practice to reduce humans to bare life. Miss Brown can indeed be evaluated as a feminist piece of New Woman fiction that renders such a discursive formation of exclusion of women legible – both on the textual and on the extra-textual level. In a similar vein, the intertextual reference to Brontë’s Jane Eyre sheds light on intersecting categories of difference operative in women’s suppres­ sion. Additionally, it elaborates on the image of slavery that is used to describe the ménage-à-trois between Anne Brown, Walter Hamlin and Sacha Elaguine. Walter’s wealth, like Edward Rochester’s (see Brontë 1999: 348), is derived from plantations in Jamaica. He can boast a long line of ancestors, with whom he shares a hereditary family resemblance; he is characterized by “features sharp like those of a high-bred race-horse, nervous and wistful and dreamy, as if he were tired of his family having lasted so long” (Lee 1884, II: 49), and thus depicted as a stereotypical aristocratic and over-refined degenerate. His family’s prosperity is revealed to depend on colonialism and the slave trade.28 Walter’s complicity is explicitly addressed in a conversa­ tion about aesthetics and social class in Miss Brown: “I’m sure art will gain ever so much. It’s only what Mr Ruskin has said over and over again, and Mr Morris is always talking about.” “Any one is free to give the lower classes that taste of beauty, as long as I am not required to see or speak to the noble workmen,” said Hamlin. “I hate all that democratic bosh.” “Oh, I know, Watty; your ancestors kept negroes, and you would like to have negroes yourself,” said Mrs Spen­ cer, hotly. “Heaven forbid! I only ask to be left alone, my dear Edith, especially by reformers.” (II, 29–30) While this conversation highlights the social politics of aesthetics and aes­ theticism and the fault lines between the arts and crafts movement and aes­ theticism, it also reveals Walter’s conservative stance on social and racial

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hierarchies. His orientalism analogizes Anne with the slaves kept by Wal­ ter’s family and merely refines this form of socio-economic exploitation by way of the discourse on aestheticism and romance. Furthermore, the duality of Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason in Brontë’s novel mirrors the duality of Anne Brown and Sacha Elaguine in Miss Brown. Sacha, for instance, shares Bertha’s incendiary inclinations. She sets fire to her bed in order to represent herself as haunted by a secret organisation that intends to abduct her child and possibly even to kill her.29 When Anne has­ tens to quench the fire, she reflects on the fate of Sacha’s beautiful white dressing gown, an object that helps to reveal the fire as a hoax: Now, while extinguishing the flames, one of Anne’s first thoughts had somehow been the white satin dressing-gown. What a pity that all that lace should have been consumed! What an annoyance to Cousin Sacha! But, to her surprise and relief, she had seen the dressing-gown, a mass of satin and lace, hanging in perfect safety on a peg at the furthest end of the room – the dressing-gown which, an hour before, had already lain in readiness on the bed. All these ideas moved confusedly through Miss Brown’s brain. Was it a mere ordinary mental delusion, one of those impressions which physiologists explain by the imperfect momentary double action of the two brain-lobes; or was it a recollec­ tion of a suspicion which had long existed in her mind, but uncon­ sciously, not daring to come to the surface? (III, 147) After this incident, Sacha is diagnosed as a hysterical and monomaniac woman with a “strange passion for deceit, for hoax, for theatricality” (Lee 1884, III: 149). This staged scene is semanticized and gains symbolic weight because it is one of the few instances when the narrator represents Anne’s thoughts through an internal focalization. Interestingly, Anne, who is otherwise not associated with vanity and fashion, worries about a dressing gown, which is out of char­ acter. The scene highlights Anne’s cognitive dissonance regarding the place of the dressing gown and the uncanny character of the whole event that Anne can finally trace to a children’s book she had given to Sacha’s daughter. It contains the line “And they never forgot, as long as they lived, that terrible burning bed” (III, 144) that inspires Sacha. When Anne takes a look at the book when tend­ ing Sacha after a ‘hysterical’ fit, she comes across the line, which triggers a synaesthetic blending of the scene in the book and the burning bed: For a moment the words echoed through Anne’s mind as merely so much sound; but, as in the case when we hear a name which awakens associations which we cannot at first define to ourselves, she was con­ scious at the same time of an effort to adjust her faculties, to seize a meaning which was there, but which she could not at once grasp. (III, 144)

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When Anne matches the echoing sound and the witnessed scene, she recog­ nizes Sacha as a fraud, but is also strangely connected to her. As the aspiring governess, she is related to her in a similar fashion as Jane Eyre to Bertha Mason, but she is not equally able to acquiesce in the Bildungsroman/marriage plot that serves as a happy ending in Brontë’s novel.30 As a commentary on the intertext, Sacha elucidates the fact that all the major characters are ill-suited to the subject positions provided in the novelistic marriage plot: ‘Walter is a queer creature,’ went on Madame Elaguine; […] ‘I don’t know how to say it; my ideas aren’t ever very clear: I suppose it’s want of Sittlicher Ernst, and also because I’m hysterical – at least the doctors say so; because I insist on having my own way. […] Oh, Annie dear, I fear, I fear I am a wretch!’ and Madame Elaguine suddenly jumped up from her chair and flung her arms round Miss Brown’s neck and kissed her, with such violence that Anne felt her lips almost like leeches and her teeth pressing into her cheeks. (Lee 1884, III: 200–201) In Miss Brown, Bertha Mason, the ‘madwoman in the attic’ (see Gilbert and Gubar 1979), is translated into a character who insists on “having her own way” (Lee 1884, III: 201), to lead an independent life, and who tries to achieve this through excess. Her attempts at independence are thus con­ tained in patriarchy by othering her morally and ascribing hysteria to her. Anne, in contrast, opts for self-denial. Anne’s relationship to Sacha has been read as a lesbian relationship, par­ ticularly due to the strong emphasis on the “clammy” feeling that is evoked whenever Sacha is close to Anne (III, 198). This clamminess can be referred to Sacha’s “lamia-like qualities” (Psomiades 1999: 26). There are thus indeed some weighty arguments to read the relationship between Sacha, Walter and Anne as a triangulation (see Sedgwick 1985: 21) and thus as an articulation of lesbian desire. In addition, this character constellation replays the trian­ gulation of Marian, Laura and Walter in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. As Kathy Psomiades puts it, “sleeping with Hamlin will be sleeping with Sacha by proxy” (1999: 26). She argues that sexual dissidence is com­ municated in Miss Brown through the novel’s “insistent descriptions of the physical sensations occasioned by the only bodily contacts it narrates, con­ tact between women” (29). Such dissidence, however, can only be claimed against the text, in assuming that it tries to articulate what it does not say. Lesbian desire is represented in a negative fashion only. Richard Dellamora therefore employs the concept of lesbian panic to support a queer reading of the novel: Lee’s obliviousness at one level to the sexual tension between Brown and Sacha is symptomatic of what Patricia Smith has referred to lesbian panic – the phobic response by female writers to female-female desire

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even in a text by an author who may herself be a Sapphist. The sensa­ tional excess of Sacha’s presentation in the novel makes Lee’s novel not only Aesthetic but Decadent – that is, Lee writes from within the very movements that she critiques. It is her role as an internal participantobserver that lends force to the observations she makes from a feminist subject-position rather than vice-versa. (Dellamora 2006: 7) A possible example of lesbian panic would be Anne’s relationship to one of her colleagues at Coblenz school, the institution to which she is sent to acquire the accomplishments of a lady: There, a “little New Zealander” is devastated when Anne leaves the school and gives “a little suppressed sob” at Anne’s departure (Lee 1884, I: 239). When the girl confesses her love and asks Anne to remember her, Anne promises to do so, but “she was already thinking of Hamlin” (I, 240). In this female (romantic?) friendship, Anne is quick to replace her possible lover by Walter and disavows any option of a closer, enduring relationship. Anne’s indifference to the separation can be read as a sign of lesbian panic. Another instance is Anne’s rejection of Sacha, the femme fatale: Miss Brown had a very strong sense that marriage without love was a mere legalised form of prostitution. To become, therefore, the wife of Hamlin, was an intolerable self-degradation – nay, a pollution; for it seemed to her, and the idea sickened her whole soul, that the moral pollution of Sacha Elaguine would be communicated to her. To become the wife of Sacha’s lover! Her limbs seemed to give way, to dissolve; a horrible warm clamminess overtook her; she could not breathe, or breathed only horror.31 (III, 280) The imagined connection between Anne and Sacha is described in strong sensual terms. The internal focalization allows some insight into Anne’s horror at the association with Sacha and her visceral reaction amounts to a physical and psychological dissolution. The option of such a union is hence clearly barred for Anne and her subject constitution is held in place through that bar. Anne’s ready adaptation to her “martyrdom” (III, 276) in marrying Walter reveals ex negativo that she lacks a viable subject position to ‘be herself’ in any other social institution than heterosexual marriage. Lifting that bar consequently results in the dissolution of self. This scene provides the clearest insight into the foundational constitution of the novel that excludes the opportunity to narrate a lesbian relationship. The novel itself is thus subject to a differend, it cannot articulate lesbian desire in the context of patriarchal hegemony. To some degree, lesbian panic can explain what cannot be narrated. However, the novel gestures towards a more encompassing view of the

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viability of subjects and equal participation in a public, non-coercive dis­ course on aesthetics. The interactions between women allow for more pos­ sible relationships than overtly lesbian ones. For instance, when Anne suffers from “[n]ervous prostration” (III, 164), she is cared for by the Leigh sisters and perceives their presence only as “impressions of the kind faces and voices of Mary and Marjory”, which is the only instance in her life when Anne “felt so simply, completely happy; perhaps because, with her tense and tragic character, perfect happiness was possible only in weakness and vagueness” (III, 169). Happiness, for Anne, is thus only possible in situations of transition, of perceptive indecision, on the threshold of consciousness, that is, in psychological spaces that are closer to what Julia Kristeva terms the semiotic rather than the symbolic (see 1989: 17–19; 281), spaces that are undefined by patriarchal law. Viability can only be imagined in a new social framework that is as yet utopian for Anne. Miss Brown thus becomes legi­ ble as an attempt to communicate the unsayable through a cultural anaes­ thesia. Anne’s sexlessness is used to indicate the possibility of a freedom from labelling, categorizing and hierarchizing; it articulates dissidence by showcasing the power exerted by the ascription of sexualities to bodies and gestures at the freedom from those ascriptions altogether. Embodied cognition provides another means to articulate the seemingly impossible. When Anne receives an anonymous letter about the “friendship of two cousins” (Lee 1884, III: 84), alluding to the relationship between Walter and Sacha, she starts to believe that her freedom is within grasp. She “turned the note round and round” (III, 83), and the interplay of touching the letter and realizing what it intends to convey triggers “a hidden imperceptible movement” (III, 87). The haptic experience together with a reflection on the letter’s mean­ ing allows her “to see things which had not before existed” (III, 87). The ‘revolution’ of the letter in her hand facilitates a revolution in her thinking, so that the action is transferred to thought. As the story progresses and Anne is initially assured of the love between Walter and Sacha, she tells her cousin Richard that she believes herself to be free while “playing with a big lapis-lazuli rosary which she had taken off her neck” (III, 184). This rosary acquires some symbolic significance because Anne is introduced as an agnostic who abhors Catholic traditions in particular (see I, 90). Hence, her fondling a rosary seems out of character. This association refers back to Walter’s idealization of her as “the Madonna” (I, 85) of the cathedral where the Perrys attend the mass, and her taking the rosary off enacts her liberation from some of Walter’s ascriptions and fetishizations. Playing with the rosary enables thought processes that she does not quite dare to trust – her realization of her freedom is conveyed hesi­ tantly, she communicates it “almost inaudibly, as if superstitiously afraid that they should be heard” (III, 184). On the level of embodied cognition, she begins to articulate a feeling of freedom that the drift of the novel’s plot quickly fore­ stalls and that cannot quite be put into words. Anne’s freedom remains an impossibility, not even her “negative freedom” can be realized in the confines established by the novel’s foundational constitution (III, 52).

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Finally, the intertextual references to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” (Tennyson 1999: 41–45) further underscore this impossibility and highlight the need for an open discourse with regard to viable subject positions. Anne’s character is associated with selected motifs from Tennyson’s poem, for example with regard to her white dress (see 1999: 44) and the fact that she is described as being secluded in a tower. She needs to mount “the well-like stairs of the old tower palace” (Lee 1884, I: 144) in order for Walter to paint her; she “remained surrounded by a sort of moral moat, alone, isolated, impregnable in a kind of moral fortress” (I, 217); and she “was beginning to experience an intolerable sense of isolation” (II, 135). Yet, in contrast to the Lady of Shalott, Anne does not represent the paragon of the female artist but only the embodi­ ment of beauty. Anne’s development is arrested through her objectification in aestheticist circles, she is encumbered by being idealized and fetishized so that her social context can be read as delimiting as the enclosing tower. Further­ more, Anne’s association with towers sheds light on her phallic quality. The dominant patriarchal discourse in aestheticism explains the need for the fetishization of women, it is an integral part of turning them into emblems of social status.32 Walter can only appropriate Anne in a fetishized form; she represents the phallus, whose possession turns Walter Hamlin into a ‘man’. It is this appropriation, the actual union with Anne’s knight, that leads to her metaphorical death. There is no other social position for Anne than as a token of power and exchange. For Anne, the Lady’s tower represents her being “in bondage, surrounded by walls, a slave” (Lee 1884, II: 311). Being thus imprisoned blends images of marriage with images of slavery in Miss Brown. Through the representation of the high cost of a hegemonic patriarchal discourse through its heterological ending, the novel articulates the need for a ‘sexless’ aestheticism as an inter­ mediate step for the articulation of more viable subject positions. Anne’s asexuality can thus not only be read as a code for lesbian desire, it is used as a metaphor to make a serious suggestion of a form of aestheticism without oppression along the lines of sexuality and sexual orientation, and to abstain from functionalizing sex as a means of suppression. Lee’s novel gestures towards a synthesis between ethical realism and aestheticism – “a very inclusive form of aestheticism” (Schaffer and Psomiades 1999b: 1) – that represents the ideal of an aestheticism that remains open and dynamic by way of its emphasis on thinking ‘outside of the tower’. It is founded on responsiveness33 and exchange. Aisthetics and cultural anaesthesia are vital to communicate this ideal at a time that discursively forecloses the liberation Lee gestures at.

Notes 1 For a discussion of the terms ‘aestheticism’ as a late-Victorian embrace of the notion ‘art for art’s sake’ together with an emphasis on literary quality and form and ‘decadence’ as a subfield that focuses on sensuality and amorality, see Lind­ ner 1983: 63–77. Aestheticism entails many aspects of sensation fiction in that it

184

2 3

4 5 6

7

8

9

10

11

Aestheticisms: Vernon Lee celebrates the hedonist pleasure of perception and sense impression (see 66) so that perception is a central part of the care of self and aestheticism’s hedonist ethics. See Talia Schaffer’s circumspect discussion of the problematic coinage ‘female aesthete’ together with her emphasis on the importance of including women writers into what is considered ‘aestheticism’ (2000: 4–7). Lee is symptomatically absent from many literary histories and historical accounts of literary criticism. She is not mentioned in Gary Day’s Literary Cri­ ticism: A New History (2010), for example. In The Cambridge History of Lit­ erary Criticism, Lee is shortly mentioned by Nicholas Dames (2013: 523) and by Elaine Freedgood, who quotes an illustrative line of “A Dialogue on Novels” (2013: 327). The influence was certainly reciprocal: “Her Socratic dialogues on art preceded, and thus may have influenced, Wilde’s choice of a dialogue format in ‘Decay of Lying’” (Schaffer 2000: 62). In her later career, however, Lee conceives of “aesthetic feeling as primarily mental” (Burdett 2011: 2). As Talia Schaffer outlines, this impact should be considered with caution: “A Room of One’s Own traces women’s literary history up to Charlotte Brontë, then skips to ‘living writers,’ as if the intervening eighty years of women’s writ­ ing did not exist” (2000: 194). See also Martin 2013: 81–131. One must, however, concede that, in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf at least mentions Lee’s “books on aesthetics” (Woolf 1945: 79). Lee’s employment of embodiment and embodied cognition harks back to Alex­ ander Bain’s emphasis on the interdependence of body and thought (see Townley 2012: 868). However, Lee also anticipates many concerns articulated in New Criticism (see Morgan 2012). See also Alison Rutledge for an analysis of Lee’s later, even more strongly modernist approaches to empathy in her travel essays and her novel Louis Norbert (Rutledge 2019). See also the debate on Burdett Gardner’s The Lesbian Imagination, his 1954 dis­ sertation on Vernon Lee republished in 1987. This is a study that “is centrally and obsessively concerned with how her lesbianism affects her work” (Psomiades 1999: 27). There are several biographies on Lee, e.g. by Peter Gunn (1964), Christa Zorn (2003) and Sondeep Kandola (2010), that document the growing interest in her. Irena Yamboliev analyses the novel in a similar way when she argues that “Miss Brown also shows that more-than-referential-realism can be ameliorative, can work not only to expose subjects to harm but also toward erecting socialities more livable for them. Miss Brown does the latter by means of its prose style” (2020: 352). Richard Dellamora argues that an “antihomophobic inquiry tends to ignore other aspects of dissidence; for example, the connections between sexual and cultural dissidence in cultural production by women” (1999: 5). Dellamora thus illustrates the pitfalls of readings exclusively restricted to the category of sexuality and gestures towards the complexity of Lee’s criticism. Lee’s emphasis on the mind of the artist is another aspect that impacts on high modernism with its new form of psychological aesthetics. Particularly in Virginia Woolf’s literary theory, Lee serves as an intertext. Woolf responds to the importance of a fluid adaptation to artistic form in her essay “Modern Fiction”: Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of

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Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; […] Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. (Woolf 1951: 189–190)

12

13 14

15

16

17

18 19

Woolf also retains the evolutionary notion of literature in her claim that female writers need to “think back through [their] mothers” (Woolf 1945: 76) and the claim for the artistic liberty of novelists (see Woolf 1945: 64; Lee 1885: 397). Lee’s novel Miss Brown, dedicated to Henry James, caused social turbulences with friend and foe because many people, Wilde among them, were not too pleased with their representation in the novel (see Colby 1970: 258). Christa Zorn points out that Anne Brown “unmistakeably bears the traits of Jane Morris”, while “the aesthetic painter-poet Walter Hamlin” is “a pale replica of Dante Gabriel Rossetti” (Zorn 2003: 112). Further similarities between Lee’s characters and historical personages are discussed by Sondeep Kandola (see 2010: 11–16) and Yuen (see 2010a: xi–xv). For a thorough investigation of Lee’s approach to aesthetics and to her “object­ oriented empathy” in particular (221), see Morgan 2017: 221–254. My focus here is predominantly her novel theory. As Nicholas Dames has shown, Lee “introduced, if belatedly, close reading as a possible technique of novel theory, at a moment when physiological novel theory yielded to Jamesian formalism, which, at least in Lubbock’s hands, had similarly little use for close reading” (Dames 2007: 190). Dames also discusses I.A. Richard’s dependence on Victorian physiological aesthetics and Vernon Lee (see 249). Many commentators have focused on the relevance of health for Lee and some­ times highlight biopolitical concerns (see for example Briggs 2006: 165; Pso­ miades 1999: 32–34; Kandola 2010: 64). Lee performs a “medicalization of the aesthetic, in which perception is not merely a physiological process, but one that produces health or sickness” (Psomiades 1999: 32). Lee goes on to argue that only nineteenth-century readers are able “to understand such situations as those of Dorothea and Casaubon” in George Eliot’s Mid­ dlemarch (Lee 1885: 390) and that the susceptibilities of previous readers had not been sufficiently refined to recognize the tragic potential of the characters’ rela­ tionship. The novel can hence be seen as both the cause and the effect of a cul­ tural evolution. While the term ‘asexuality’ was only introduced in the early noughts (see Bogaert 2012: 11–22), scholars such as Christa Zorn use the term somewhat anachronis­ tically to describe the construction of Anne Brown’s sexual identity as envisaged in Lee’s novel (see Zorn 2003: 120). This ascription is made during a visit to the opera that reveals Anne to be highly susceptible to this art and hence adaptable to an aestheticist context (see Lee 2010: 36). Laurel Brake illustrates the fact that Anne transposes Walter Pater’s beauty ideal into a feminine key: Lee’s protagonist Anne Brown in her chaste sexlessness bears such a close resemblance to Pater’s early portrait ‘Diaphaneitè’ (1864), unpublished during his lifetime but drawn on in ‘Winckelmann’ (1867), that Lee’s her­ oine might be read in part as a female analogue to Diaphaneitè, Pater’s idealized Hellenic type of the pure, transparent (and predominantly male) character. (Brake 2006: 44)

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20 This sameness in name cannot, however, be seen as an indicator of similarity between Walter Pater and Walter Hamlin. As Christa Zorn argues, [t]he unstable Walter Hamlin, in spite of his suggestive first name, is not a simulacrum of Walter Pater. Lee had the highest respect for Pater’s literary discipline and valued his civil, gentlemanly kindness. She would scarcely have attributed to the Oxford don any of the depraved or lascivious traits depicted in Walter Hamlin. (2003: 116)

21

22 23

24

The name also evokes the aestheticist theoretician Walter Hamilton, whose The Aesthetic Movement in England certainly serves as an inspiration for the way in which Lee approaches the movement, for example as “both a high-art and a masscultural movement” (Schaffer and Psomiades 1999b: 3). Like Collins’s Walter Hartright, Walter Hamlin fashions a woman along the lines of his aesthetic preferences and needs her to achieve some kind of respectable masculinity. Both Walters are feminized and go to some lengths to construct their forms of masculinity, Hartright by mastering adventures in Central America and Hamlin by fashioning himself along the lines of Pygmalion. Grant Allen, whose approach Lee does not explicitly subscribe to in her theory (see 1912: 359), singles out painting as addressing itself to evolved aesthetic pre­ dilections that allow for “the maximum of stimulation with the minimum of fatigue”, which, in itself, is considered to be “the essence of æsthetic pleasure” (Allen 1977: 228). The spectator treasures “first, the actual sensual pleasure of form and colour; second, the ideal sensuous pleasure of suggested softness, smoothness, musical sound, coolness, warmth, sweetness, or comfort generally; third, the ideal emotional pleasure of the various special sentiments; fourth, the intellectual pleasure of skilful imitation” (222–223), and, finally, “the Intellectual Pleasure of Plot-Interest” (228). The first three categories are of particular ais­ thetic appeal. Especially the second category relies on strategies of presentifica­ tion and is directly addressed to the senses: “Flesh is so represented as to convey the notion of softness and warmth. Satin and velvet, grass and moss, tempt us to stroke them” (225). Allen sees these different “classes of Æsthetic pleasure” ide­ ally manifested and realized in “modern post-Raphaelite painting” (232). Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown to some degree mimics the aesthetic achievements of painting as pointed out by Allen and thus can be understood as an intermedial novel, creating, as it does, numerous ‘word-pictures’. The beginning of the novel, set in Italy, is strongly aisthetic, while its later chapters set in London lack this quality and document a change in attitude (see Ormond 1970: 136–137). These titles echo titles by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Lost Days” and “Stillborn Love”, as Yuen points out (2010c: 328, n.91), strengthening the similarity between Hamlin and Rossetti. Vineta Colby has drawn attention to the fact that “Victorian readers of the novel were more shocked by this morbid act of self-immolation than by the villainy of ‘the other woman,’ the sinister and depraved Madame Elaguine” (1970: 257). In addition, she quotes from a review in the Spectator that considered Anne’s deci­ sion to marry Hamlin “revolting” because it “shows an utter perversity in the author’s conception of nobility” (257). So, the first reader responses to the novel already indicate that Anne’s metaphorical annihilation through marriage seemed unexpected and morally opaque. Many commentators found Lee’s character Anne Brown unconvincing and too artificial, particularly with regard to her self-sacrifice at the end of the novel. This is due to some degree to the function Anne is to fulfil. As a symbol of suppression in a patriarchal, heteronormative society, Anne is not afforded a

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25

26

27

28 29

30

31

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viable subject position. Lee’s own ideal of characterization can be seen in the following comment from The Handling of Words: “[S]ome personages in novels are built up […] and some – some personages, but how few! – are really born” (1968a: 26; emphasis in the original). Such characters, Lee surmises, emerge due to “some strong feeling on the part of their author”, for example, the “organic repulsion of incompatible temperaments” or of “love” (27). Hence, genealogi­ cally, Anne seems to be created out of Lee’s strong aversion to a masculine aes­ theticism and decadence, but, as Henry James argues in a letter to Lee dating from 10 May 1885, the novel may have been written “too much in a moral pas­ sion” (qtd. in Zorn 2003: 112). Anne, rather than being a character in her own right, turns into an instrument of cultural critique. Even the perspective structure runs against her, because she is memorable only as a Pre-Raphaelite paragon of beauty and, finally, through her self-sacrifice, that is, through denial and erasure of her own desires. Anne is also constructed along the lines of Marian with regard to her implied lesbian leanings and her incapacitation through a brain fever: “The secret exci­ tement of the last months, joined to the recent overwork, was too much for Anne. One day she was suddenly taken ill, and a little time later she was delir­ ious. ‘Nervous prostration from overwork,’ said the doctors” (Lee 2010: 272). Sensation fiction is frequently evoked, for example as suitable reading for Anne (see 46) or, partly, in the wrong names Mrs McGregor, Hamlin’s aunt Claudia whom the couple lives with in Hammersmith, gives to Anne: Margaret, Rachel and Eliza (see Lee 2010: 84–85). While Margaret rather evokes Margaret Hale from Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–55), Rachel recalls Rachel Ver­ inder from Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Eliza may refer to Aurora’s mother in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel Aurora Floyd (1863). More generally, the sensational can be seen to pave the way for “more profound rebellions of the decadent and modernist writers who, influenced by both impres­ sionism and symbolism, wrote the final epitaphs both for the safer kinds of realism and for the Victorian pieties of hearth and home” (Brantlinger 1998: 164). Walter’s sonnets “Stillborn Joy” or “Lost Loveliness” (Lee 1884, I: 119) thus finally come to designate his marriage. Their ‘unhealthy’ kind of marriage is unlikely to produce offspring and thus biopolitically censured. Anne sacrifices her own happiness in order to save Hamlin from the snares of his cousin Sacha and to lead him back to a morally good life. Bare life is thus entirely subjected to Victorian moral politics (see Foucault 1990: 143). See also Delyfer, who similarly argues for a biopolitical reading (2010: 40). Here, Lee evokes an intertextual web that imitates motifs from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, where Tess needs to confront the eerie portrait gallery in a d’Urberville mansion and notions of family likenesses in The Well-Beloved. In Jane Eyre, Bertha sets Rochester’s bed on fire (see Brontë 1999: 169). In Miss Brown, several motifs are amalgamated in the scene: the reference to a white nightgown evokes The Woman in White and the paranoia of Count Fosco, but also The Moonstone, where the nightgown serves as evidence to convict the criminal. In addition, The Moonstone negotiates theories of the unconscious that are equally evoked in Lee’s novel. Sacha is also characterized, like Walter Hartright, by a monomania, but connected with hysteria (see Lee 1884, II: 267). Anne’s suspicion partnered with Sacha’s theatrical paranoia may be read as a codification of their lesbian desires. Eve Sedgwick describes paranoia as a symp­ tom of homosexual panic in patriarchal societies (see 1985: 91), a psychological condition which is mirrored in the lesbian panic represented in Lee’s novel (see Smith 1995: 569). The open articulation of this view in New Woman fiction must be read in the context of a time when “an interest in naturalist and decadent subjects – crime,

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opium addiction, disease, prostitution – posed a major problem for women wri­ ters who were not supposed to be aware of such issues” (Schaffer and Psomiades 1999b: 1). 32 Cosmo Chough describes Walter as “Sir Galahad vivified” (Lee 1884, III: 41) and thus identifies him with Lancelot’s pure son. In Tennyson’s eponymous poem, Sir Galahad is characterized as having “never felt the kiss of love/ Nor maiden’s hand in mine” (Tennyson 1969: vol. 2, 33). Chough thus provides a frame of reference that constructs Walter as the perfect match for Anne. Within the aes­ theticist circle, both characters are depicted as pure, asexual beings, whose union, however, must then be read as being against their actual sexual inclinations (see Lee 1884, III: 200–201). 33 In her Gallery Diaries, Lee devotes a chapter to “æsthetic responsiveness” in art reception (1911: 241–350, esp. 247). She shows that aesthetic responsiveness requires a method of diligent transcription and recording as “our response to works of art in general and to any work of art in particular varies from day to day, and is connected with variations in our mental and also our bodily condi­ tion” (243). As such, aesthetic responsiveness is integrated into a general human set-up rather than being an elitist faculty, as Sarah Townley argues (see 2012: esp. 866).

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Index

Ablow, Rachel 7, 103 Abraham, Nicolas 148–151; see also The Shell and the Kernel Aczel, Richard 18, 118 Adam Bede 8, 16, 25–33, 35, 40–42, 44–45, 47, 54, 68, 76 Adams, James Eli 9, 26, 27 aesthesiometre 6 aesthetic 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 23, 30–35, 41, 43, 57, 63, 68, 72–74, 92, 111, 122–126, 128–132, 134–136, 143, 145, 157–161, 163–164, 167–168, 173, 176, 181 aestheticism 6, 8, 9, 22, 73, 157, 158, 160, 165–170, 172–179, 183 aesthetics 3–6, 17, 23, 26, 32, 73–74, 122, 125–126, 130–131, 134–135, 143, 145–146, 149, 151, 157, 159–161, 165, 168, 177–178, 182 “Æsthetics of the Novel” 161 affect 4, 11, 15, 23, 26–27, 33, 38, 41, 44, 48, 51, 61, 65, 66, 94–95, 102–105, 108, 111, 117–118, 120–122, 125, 128, 146, 160 agency 5, 76, 99, 119 aisthetics 1–5, 9, 10, 14–16, 19–20, 22–23, 26–28, 30–31, 33, 35–36, 41–42, 66, 69, 71–72, 92–95, 102, 104, 115, 128–129, 138, 141, 143, 146–148, 157–158, 160, 162, 173, 183; politics of 20, 41 aisth-ethics 25, 26, 29, 40–41, 45 aisthetic analysis 6, 21; approach 3, 7, 10, 19, 26, 59, 149; mediation 31 aisthetic cultural studies 10 aisthetic literary studies 14 Allen, Grant 157, 168; see also Physiological Æsthetics

anaesthesia 23, 52; cultural 22, 23, 61, 68–69, 98, 112, 129–130, 137, 142, 158, 160, 167, 171, 182–183 anaesthetics 23 anagnorisis 120 Anstruther-Thomson, Clementina 159, 166 aposiopesis 23, 113, 144 Armstrong, Isobel 4 Armstrong, Nancy 109 art 4, 5, 8, 26, 32–33, 36–37, 43, 51–53, 57–60, 64–66, 69, 72–73, 80, 122, 130, 157, 159, 163, 169, 171, 173, 176–178 aurality 6, 47–48 Austen, Jane 17, 44; see also Northanger Abbey Bain, Alexander 157 Baldwin: Dialogues on Views and Aspirations 163 Banes, Sally 3 Barthes, Roland 29, 136, 139 Baudrillard, Jean 112 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 3, 143 Benjamin, Walter 2 Berenson, Bernard 159 Berthin, Christine 148 biopolitics 3, 40–41, 159, 161, 170, 177–178 body 3–4, 11, 20, 28, 38, 41, 49, 62–63, 102, 105–106, 110, 118, 122–125, 127, 129, 132, 135, 140–141, 146, 149–150, 152, 158; memory 131; signifier 39 Boucicault, Dion 177; see also The Octoroon Bourdieu, Pierre 21 Bourne Taylor, Jenny 5, 111 Bowlby, Rachel 44

216

Index

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 44, 177; see also Lady Audley’s Secret; The Doctor’s Wife Briggs, Jo 159 Brontë, Charlotte 177–180; see also Brontë sisters; Jane Eyre Brontë sisters 163 Butler, Judith 19, 116, 159 calibration 1–3, 5–10, 14–15, 19, 21–23, 28–29, 32, 34–35, 42–45, 47, 50–51, 53, 58, 60, 65, 69, 71, 75, 77–79, 81, 92, 95–96, 100, 102, 109, 111–112, 116, 123–125, 128, 130, 132, 142, 146, 152, 161, 164, 169 Carpenter, William B. 129–130, 132–133, 139–140 Cassirer, Ernst 51–52, 64, 69–70 catachresis 110 cathexis 26, 38, 40, 50–51, 110, 119, 123–124, 148, 152 channel 7, 10, 21, 30, 41, 46, 51, 80, 92, 100, 164 character construction 9, 17–18, 21–22, 27, 35, 39, 54–56, 64, 97, 111, 114–117, 123, 146 Charcot, Jean-Martin 149 cinematograph 6, 78 Clarissa 22 Classen, Constance 2 close reading 4 cognition 4, 30, 52, 130, 142–143, 157, 160, 166, 182 Collins, Wilkie 8, 16, 18, 23, 92, 130, 167, 173, 180; see also The Law and the Lady; The Moonstone; The Woman in White; Connerton, Paul 20 Connor, Steve 4 crisis of perception 6, 17, 95, 112, 121, 138 crisis of subjectivity 6 criticism 5, 7, 8, 9, 20, 49, 53, 104, 108, 110, 128–130, 160–161, 165 crypt 148–149, 151 cryptaesthesia 151 Culler, Jonathan 7, 15 cultural phenomenology 4–5 cultural studies 2, 4, 10 culture 2–4, 6, 20–21, 44, 47, 52, 59, 68, 78, 80, 110, 112, 158, 164 Daguerre, Louis 1 Dallas, E.S. 99, 103, 128, 130, 134, 145, 157; also see The Gay Science

Dames, Nicholas 7, 17, 120 deconstruction 16, 93 deictic centre 37, 42, 50, 63, 95, 102–103, 105, 107, 117–119, 175 deixis 36, 62–63, 119–120, 175 Deleuze, Gilles 115 Dellamora, Richard 158, 180 “The Deterioration of the Soul” 159 “A Dialogue on Novels” 161, 163 differend 16, 26–27, 92, 100, 108, 146, 148, 165–166, 181 discursive practices 7 displacement 27 The Doctor’s Wife 44 drug addiction 130, 133 ekphrasis 36 Eliot, George 8, 16, 25–31, 33–34, 36, 41, 47, 51–54, 56–57, 61–62, 67–70, 72, 78, 80, 134; see also Adam Bede; Middlemarch; “Notes on Form in Art” Elliotson, John 129, 132 ellipsis 22 embodiment 4, 20, 33, 41, 56, 60–63, 66, 71, 81, 128, 141–142, 149, 157, 160, 167, 183 emergence 3–5, 8, 10, 16–17, 114, 116, 157, 159 emotion 4, 7, 17, 20, 26–27, 31, 33, 40, 45–46, 48, 50–51, 57, 59–61, 66, 68–69, 71, 72, 81, 99–100, 103, 105, 113, 120, 122, 124, 142, 157–158, 161–164, 168, 170 empathy 7, 157, 160 enmeshment 3, 4, 8, 21, 26, 30, 37, 141, 160–161 epistemic violence 39, 49 ethics 26, 32, 41, 51, 57, 79, 157, 163–164, 166 Euphorion 177 eventness 102, 104–105, 115 experientiality 27, 58 Faust 175 feeling 3, 4, 5, 16, 20, 22, 33, 37–38, 41–46, 48–53, 57, 60, 63, 65–66, 69,70–73, 103–104, 106, 108, 114–115, 120–121, 131, 136, 162–164, 169, 174, 176, 180, 182 female aestheticism 157, 160, 170, 173 figural 115, 118–119, 129, 173 Fludernik, Monika 29, 39 foreclosure 22, 40, 41, 44, 49, 53, 69, 92, 104, 115–116, 126, 132, 135, 141–142, 147, 152, 166, 171, 173, 183

Index Foucault, Michel 3, 14 foundational constitution 15, 16, 20, 27–32, 40–41, 45, 50, 54, 56, 67, 69, 92, 95, 104, 126, 129, 150, 173, 181, 182 framing 29, 36, 41–43, 45, 50, 57, 107 Freud, Sigmund 111, 148 Frow, John 6 The Gay Science 103, 130, 132, 143 The Gayworthys 23 genre 1, 4–6, 7, 8, 9, 104, 107, 111, 114, 120, 133, 135, 154, 158, 160, 173, 177 genre painting 36–36, 41, 43 genre transition 10 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 175; see also Faust graphing 6, 9 The Handling of Words, 161 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 4, 167, 169 Howes, David 2 Humboldt, Alexander von 1 hysteria 146, 148–149, 180 imagined community 33 immersion 26–27, 29–30, 36, 50–51, 94 implicit censorship 19, 53, 71, 80, 116, 129, 141, 150, 158, 166, 172 implied reader 15, 26–27, 56, 61–63, 98, 100, 102, 106–107, 109, 117, 125 ineffable 16–17, 23, 26, 69, 92, 112–113 inheritance plot 96–98, 133, 141, 152 intermedial 35–36, 65, 72, 102, 107 interpretive community 23, 124 Ionescu, Vlad 118–119 Iser, Wolfgang 113, 139 James, Henry 51, 157, 160 James, William 157 Jane Eyre 177–180 Jastrow, Joseph 6 Kant, Immanuel 4, 23 kinaesthetic 35, 38, 57 Kristeva, Julia 115, 182 Lacan, Jacques 39, 104, 112, 115 Lady Audley’s Secret 44, 109 “The Lady of Shalott” 177, 183 The Law and the Lady 16 Lee, Vernon 8, 157–166, 170, 173, 176–177, 180–181, 183; see also

217

“Æsthetics of the Novel”; Baldwin: Dialogues on Views and Aspirations; “The Deterioration of the Soul”; “A Dialogue on Novels”; Euphorion; The Handling of Words; “On Literary Construction”; Miss Brown; “On Style” Lepecki, André 3 Levine, Caroline 9, 41, 43 Lewes, George Henry 62, 157 liberalism 8, 51, 116, 128 “On Literary Construction” 161 literary criticism 4, 7, 8, 12, 160 literary forms 9, 129, 135, 139 literary strategies 6, 18, 36, 131 literary theory 7, 8, 9, 29, 120, 157, 159–161 Lyotard, Jean-François 16, 100, 118 McLuhan, Marshall 2 male gaze 34, 48–49, 123, 125 marriage plot 46, 67, 97, 101, 126–127, 142, 144, 146, 148, 170–171, 173, 180 masculinity 33, 34, 47, 64, 73, 92, 115, 119, 122–126, 128, 159–160, 172–173, 177 matter 4, 70 measuring 6, 14, 70, 74, 80, 161 media 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10–11, 17, 21–23, 25–26, 28, 31, 35–36, 42–43, 48, 51–53, 57, 61–69, 78, 80–81, 94, 100, 139, 157, 161, 167 melodrama 38–41, 56–57, 108, 120, 177 metafiction 30–31, 55, 66 metalepsis 26–27, 28, 30, 36, 50, 56, 58, 96, 117 metanarrative 25, 27–28, 31, 102 metaphor 1, 6, 22, 30, 41, 52–54, 57, 63, 77, 81, 103, 108, 110, 129, 134, 142, 147, 163, 167, 183 metonymy 22, 29, 33, 35, 37, 54, 57, 78, 93, 97, 106, 110, 127 Middlemarch 8, 18, 51–56, 58, 60–62, 64–71, 74–77, 80–81 Mieszkowski, Sylvia 158 mirror stage 117 Miss Brown 8, 157–158, 160, 162, 165–167, 169–171, 173, 175, 177–180, 181, 183 Mittell, Jason 7 modulate 2, 7–9, 22, 42–43, 48, 50–53, 65, 71, 139, 148, 161–162 The Moonstone 8, 129–135, 137–139, 141–143, 146–152 Morgan, Benjamin 160, 162

218

Index

Morse, Samuel F.B. 1 Mudie’s Select Library 8 multiperspectivity 35, 53

processuality 3 professionalization 8, 114, 159, 165 psychosemiotics 112

Northanger Abbey 44 “Notes on Form in Art” 52, 57, 72 novel effects 7 novel genre 4, 5, 6

Rancière, Jacques 4 reader response theory 42, 139, 162 realism 6, 8, 9, 22, 25–28, 30–35, 40–43, 45, 47, 49–50, 53–54, 56, 61–62, 69, 71, 78, 80, 93, 100, 108, 109, 126, 134, 157, 176, 183 reality effect 26, 29, 38, 94 regulate 2, 7–9, 16, 19, 20, 71, 116–117, 125, 140 resistance 9, 10 rhetoric 10, 14, 22–23, 28, 30, 36, 54, 61–62, 81, 92, 110, 113, 115, 124, 144 Richardson, Samuel 22; see also Clarissa; Pamela Romanticist 31, 73, 176 rupture 10, 20–22, 107, 171 Ruskin, John 23, 157, 178

The Octoroon 177 “On Style” (Lee) 157 Ortiz Robles, Mario 14, 19, 97, 102, 104–105, 115–116, 125 Ouida 173 pain 3, 6, 8, 23, 32, 49, 59, 73, 121, 137, 168, 174–176 Pamela 22 parapraxis of perception 46 Pater, Walter 157, 160, 167–169 perception 1–10, 15, 17–18, 19, 21–23, 26, 28–29, 31–35, 40, 42–47, 49–53, 57–58, 60, 62–65, 69–72, 74–81, 92, 94–96, 99–100, 103, 109, 111–112, 116, 120–121, 123–125, 128–130, 132, 136–139, 142–143, 146, 148–149, 151–152, 161, 164, 166, 169, 175 perceptual schema 42 performativity 3, 4, 9, 14, 15, 18, 22, 53, 100–101, 107, 116, 152 phantom 119, 127, 141, 146, 149–152, 159 phenomenology 5, 52, 121, 165 photograph 1, 6, 108, 132 Physiological Æsthetics 168 physiological psychology 4, 17, 129, 133, 152 physiology 1, 3, 58, 110, 130, 132, 134–135, 140, 149 pleasure 3, 6, 8, 23, 32, 59, 74, 103, 122, 131, 134, 145, 148, 163, 168, 176 power 1, 3, 7–9,15, 19, 26, 41, 44–45, 53, 55, 59, 66, 69–71, 73–74, 77, 80, 96, 101, 113, 115–116, 120, 122–124, 128, 131, 135–136, 142, 145, 148, 152, 164, 173, 182–183 presence 1, 5, 36, 38, 47, 50, 56, 58, 61–63, 65, 104, 119, 135, 140, 150, 160, 182 presence effects 5, 6, 18, 20, 21, 38, 50, 104, 117, 160 presentification 4, 50, 65 preterition 23 primacy effect 29 print culture 3, 112

science 3, 51–52, 78, 80, 122, 130–131, 139 script 3, 21, 71 Sedgwick, Eve 172 self-fashioning 73–75, 96–97, 168–169 self-help 51, 76 sensation 3, 6–8, 23, 69–70, 93–94, 98, 100, 102–106, 108, 110, 128, 147, 180 sensationalism 6, 8, 9, 92, 108, 157, 173 sensation fiction 5, 8, 22, 44, 93–94, 102–105, 107–114, 120, 128–129, 133–135, 148, 151–152, 173 senses 2–8, 14, 21–23, 25–26, 29, 33–37, 46,50–51, 59, 63, 65–66, 69, 71, 76, 94, 96, 102–103, 107–109, 118–120, 122, 125, 132, 135, 137, 139, 140, 142, 144, 171, 176 sensescape 5, 27, 29, 35–36, 52, 61–62 sensorium 2, 3, 5, 6, 9–10, 15–16, 19, 23, 25–26, 29, 33, 92, 105 sensory cognition 142–143 sensory studies 2 sensual turn 2 Shaffer, Talia 173 shape 1–3, 5–7, 9, 15, 23, 42, 44–45, 47, 51, 53, 55–56, 59–60, 65–66, 68–71, 75, 78, 80–81, 120–121, 127, 139, 157, 164, 174 The Shell and the Kernel 150 Shotwell, Alexis 20 Showalter, Elaine 149, 173 sight 6, 33, 37, 43, 168–169 simulacrum 112, 133

Index simulation 436, 103, 169 Singleton, Jon 42 Smith, Mark 3 somatize 3, 131, 135–136, 146, 148, 152 sound 6, 16, 18, 33, 47–48, 50, 72, 119, 161, 176, 179, 180 strategic formalism 9 structures of feeling 5, 20, 44, 109, 136 subgenre 6, 8–10, 20 subject 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 17, 19–22, 27, 31–32, 35, 39, 41, 43, 45, 50, 53–54, 57, 61, 64–65, 67, 78, 80, 92, 99, 101–102, 105, 107–108, 116–117, 128, 133–137, 140, 144–145, 151–152, 157, 160, 164–166, 169, 175, 181–182; constitution 7,18–19, 22, 104, 116, 118, 164, 166, 181; formation 5, 14, 16, 19–20, 104–105, 116, 120, 122; position 10, 22, 64–65, 95, 105, 114, 116–118, 120, 124–126, 128, 141–142, 144, 152, 165, 171–172, 180–181, 183 subjectification 14, 20 subjectivity 6, 7, 18, 104, 110, 116, 119, 126, 134–136, 145, 164 Sully, James 26, 31, 50, 61, 138, 157, 159, 164 surprise effect 22 suture 8, 30, 94–95, 115, 126 symbolic form 51–53, 58, 69, 70, 75, 77, 80 sympathy 23, 27, 38, 56, 73, 77, 79, 109, 161 synaesthesia 22–23, 44, 47, 50, 179 tacit knowledge 20, 21 tactile 38, 115 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 177, 183; see also “The Lady of Shalott” text constitution 9, 27–28, 33 textual analysis 5 touch 48, 94, 102–108, 114–115, 117–118, 120–122, 126, 128, 162, 183 tourist gaze 36–37

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tragedy 38, 44–45, 54–55, 60–61, 68–69, 79–80, 120, 182 transferral 10, 22–23, 100, 103, 110–111, 121, 127–128, 182 transition 5, 10, 59, 157, 160, 173, 176, 182 transposition 10, 22, 61, 64, 71, 120, 170, 175 Trollope, Anthony 1, 7 trompe l’œil 107 Uglow, Jennifer 47 uncanny 111–112, 114, 121, 127, 170–171, 179 unconscious 1, 17–18, 25–26, 35, 42, 48, 62, 103–104, 111, 114, 122, 129–137, 140–143, 146–152, 164, 179 unconscious cerebration 114, 130, 141 unsayable 16–17, 23, 27, 68, 108, 110, 112, 148, 158, 182 unspeakable 19, 27, 106, 149, 151 utilitarianism 8 viability 10, 24, 20, 22, 108, 116–117, 125, 128, 141–142, 144–145, 165–166, 171–172, 181–183 vicarious experience 5, 7, 10, 25, 29–30, 33, 36, 69, 102–103, 106, 152 Victorian physiological school of aesthetics 6, 17 Victorian studies 4 Victorianism 5, 9 visuality 6, 47, 92, 119, 124 Weber, Ernst Heinrich 6 Whitney, Adeline 23; see also The Gayworthys Wilde, Oscar 157, 160 Williams, Raymond 5 The Woman in White 8, 16, 18, 92–98, 100–102, 104–105, 109, 112, 114, 116–117, 120, 122, 125, 128, 129, 173, 180 Zunshine, Lisa 22