Distempered Visions: Reading Narratives of Specular Mourning in Victorian fiction

Abstract

This thesis questions the phenomenological force and function of mourning in the fiction of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, bringing together models of contemporary visuality with modalities of loss, to emphasise a dialectic of affective pain as intimate vision. While Victorian visual culture has been substantially addressed by recent scholarship, there remains a paucity of investigation into what I read as an optic chiasmus of altered modes of seeing and modes of feeling. With a focus on two of the key novelists of the period, I have selected four novels that are fascinated by the nature of warped vision and blindness, questioning how literature might depict mourning in a world newly crowded by the visual. From this starting point, I examine the ways in which both novelists appropriated optical tropes to articulate the lived experience of a traumatised consciousness. The mourning subject becomes the site of specular, phantasmal inquiry in their works, and thus my own method follows the conditions of this connection. This particularised account of the themes of loss and mourning has not been significantly addressed in the scholarship, despite the fact that all four texts explicitly emphasise subjective trauma. How is the private and intimate altered by the fluid specularity of the new optics of the period?

Weaving together nineteenth-century physics, optics, and visual technologies with changing notions of subjectivity and the experience of consciousness, my work foregrounds the phenomenological depictions of visualised suffering in the novels. Exploring the intersection of the technologized Victorian eye and the feeling, grieving subject, I draw out the transitivity of optical fragmentation that Brontë and Eliot manipulate to extend the textual scope of elegiac representation. By looking closely at the slippage of socio-cultural modes of vision and inner life, I argue that the precarious nature of the visual became a space in which both writers could articulate a phenomenology of loss.

Taking Brontë’s fears for her father’s encroaching blindness as a point of departure, I begin with Jane Eyre (1847), conventionally read as a narrative of resolute visual authority. Through a series of close readings, I draw out the anxiety that shadows the novel’s depiction of the eye. I am interested in the ways the biographical meets the socio-cultural in Brontë’s discourse of vision, and Jane Eyre’s theme of blindness is a fruitful place of entry into that query.

Villette (1853) was written after Brontë’s visits to London’s Great Exhibition and offers a distinct engagement with the Victorian visual culture, employing a more sophisticated and complex imbrication of the private and the social modes of visualised loss. This chapter explores how Brontë’s most devastating and final work accommodates the problem of the mourning subject in a hyper-visual sphere.

In the second half of the thesis, I turn to Eliot’s The Lifted Veil (1859) andRomola (1862-3), two works which have traditionally garnered the least amount of critical attention, often described as misplaced in the author’s oeuvre. In The Lifted Veil the various epistemological crises of the mid-century moment find expression in Eliot’s horrifying first-person account of delimited, inescapable sensory experience. Contravening the established critical view of the tale, with an emphasis on the protagonist’s preternatural visionary capacities, I focus on Eliot’s use of the terms of Victorian lens culture to elucidate the blind spots of this first-person narrative.

In Romola, Eliot depicts a heroine who imagines more profoundly than her counterparts what it might mean to live with the endlessness of mourning. Taking up Eliot’s exploration of phenomenal embodiment, which contrasts with the empirical, observational aesthetic of traditional realism, I point to the tension that defines the sensory life in the novel.

Through being attentive to the correspondences of mourning and decentralized perspectival geographies, I argue for a closer look at the phenomenally descriptive in its own right as performing a different ontology of radical loss.