Romanticism and Visuality

Fragments, History, Spectacle

Sophie Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781135899301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book investigates the productive crosscurrents between visual culture and literary texts in the Romantic period, focusing on the construction and manipulation of the visual, the impact of new visual media on the literary and historical imagination, and on fragments and ruins as occupying the shifting border between the visible and the invisible. It examines a broad selection of instances that reflect debates over how seeing should itself be viewed: instances, from Daguerre's Diorama, to the staging of Coleridge's play Remorse, to the figure of the Medusa in Shelley's poetry and at the Phantasmagoria, in which the very act of seeing is represented or dramatized. In reconsidering literary engagements with the expanding visual field, this study argues that the popular culture of Regency Britain reflected not just emergent and highly capitalized forms of mass entertainment, but also a lively interest in the aesthetic and conceptual dimensions of looking. What is commonly thought to be the Romantic resistance to the visible gives way to a generative fascination with the visual and its imaginative--even spectacular--possibilities.

1
Introduction

Regarding Visuality—From the Picturesque to the Panorama

In his Salon of 1767, Diderot, under the briefest of titles—“Small, Very Small Ruin”—embarks upon an extended description of a painting by Hubert Robert. These are just the first sentences of a skilful verbal sketch that takes its reader through every imaginable visual detail of the work:

To the right, the sloping roof of a shed set against a wall. Beneath this shed covered with straw, barrels, some of them evidently full and on their sides, others empty and upright. Above the roof, the remainder of the wall, damaged and covered with parasitic plants. To the extreme left, at the top of this wall, a bit of a columned balustrade in ruins.¹

And in this vein he continues, as though conjuring it into being himself, designating for each element its rightful place: “On the balustrade a pot of flowers.” Or: “To the extreme left, the door of a house; within the house, leaning on the lower half of the door, a woman observing the activity in the street” (201). At first sight, so to speak, a comprehensive word-picture emerges of Robert’s painting.

Diderot, however, uses this instance—it is not clear whether it is the painting or his description itself that is the subject of his reflections—as an example of the problems both of describing and of understanding, or comprehending, a description. The greater the number of details, he suggests, the greater is the difference between the actual image and the one imagined by the reader: a surfeit of detail obscures rather than clarifies the image. Diderot moves from these difficulties to a meditation on the difference between seeing and imagining, suggesting that the eye and the imagination “play across the same field.” But then again, he speculates, perhaps it would be more accurate to state that “the field of the imagination is inversely proportioned to that of the eye” (202). These are important reflections, not only for their attempt to think through the relation of the visible to the imaginary, but because the audience for whom Diderot was writing did not and probably would not ever see the original artworks for themselves. His Salon commentaries were thus a substitute, a supplement, for sight, and as Thomas Crow has argued, this absence or disappearance of the object “announces” the modern conditions of art viewing, which remain largely dependent on memory: full comprehension of the work of art can be arrived at only, he suggests, retrospectively, after its unfolding in memory, but also in recognition of the loss of the object.² An invisible painting of a ruin—invisible, that is, to Diderot’s imagined reader—is a potent reminder of that distance. But this small (very small) narrative points in another, though related direction: to the way the question of the visible is shaped by the invisible, and with it, brings into view the limits of what can be perceived.

I

It is the central contention of this study that representations of seeing, and displays of the “invisible,” speak for an acute interest in the conceptual and epistemological as well as cultural questions thrown up by vision and the visible at the turn of the nineteenth century. This book is not concerned with optics, or with the science of vision as such.³ Rather, it investigates a variety of instances in literature and visual culture where “seeing” becomes a preoccupation that is simultaneously material and thematic. In the Romantic period, this preoccupation takes on apparently distinct forms: in a thriving visual culture that trades on (and trumps) prevailing aesthetic models, and in a literary culture that, at first sight, denigrates the visual. The former, at least, is not an entirely new development in the period, for as Peter de Bolla’s work has shown, it was in the middle years of the eighteenth century that “the culture of visuality” became visible for the first time.⁴ Mid-eighteenth-century Britain was obsessed, de Bolla argues, with “visibility, spectacle, display.” And this obsession is apparent in the extraordinary array of diversions available to the eighteenth-century spectator that he catalogues: public hangings (and other spectacles of punishment), theatrical performances, art exhibitions, masquerades, fireworks, dances, fêtes champêtres, scientific demonstrations, and much more.⁵ From portraiture to the visual entertainments of Vauxhall Gardens, looking becomes a more conscious and culturally inflected act, with a range of new practices and forms of representation: looking itself becomes visible.

At the other end of the Romantic period, in Victorian Britain, a powerful fascination with the act of seeing persists. This is the territory charted by Kate Flint’s interdisciplinary study, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, which examines many facets of the Victorians’ attitude toward sight, from scientific advances illuminating the relationship of eye to brain, to new optical instruments and technologies of spectatorship. Flint’s interest is as much in the problem of decipherment as in practices of observation: in an awareness of the limits of vision, and the tantalizing presence of the unseen, which even inventions such as the microscope and the photograph did little to resolve.⁶ Flint argues that a number of prominent Victorian preoccupations—from attention to physiognomy and related detail, to modes of symbolic realism evident in the paintings of the pre-Raphaelites and in literary texts such as those of Dickens and Eliot—broach the question of the invisible as much as they evince the importance of visibility, and the perhaps more prevalent drive toward specularity. Interest in the unconscious, in mysteries of identity, in what lies buried under cities such as London: all of these suggest a potent threat implicit in the presence of the invisible.⁷ Not to be able to see, moreover, evokes the domains of the imagination and of memory, which Flint suggests operated on Victorian sensibilities as a powerful legacy of Romanticism.

Clearly, the turn toward the invisible that animated the nineteenth century—as a cultural preoccupation and a source of anxiety—has its roots in preceding decades. These decades, spanning roughly the period 1780 to 1825, saw increased attention to the place of the invisible, in the midst of an equally strong cultural investment in all things visible. The prominence of figurative and metaphoric uses of sight in literary texts of the period argues, moreover, for an interest in acts of seeing that intersected, often producing conflicting effects, with a correspondent interest in acts of the imagination. In the Romantic period, there is a more palpable antagonism between visual display and imaginative endeavour—an antagonism, however, that is not simply negative or combative, but generative. When Romantic texts are situated alongside emerging visual media, it becomes possible to “see” the impact made by the paradigms and procedures of visual modes on the writing of the period. However, this study further contends that those visual modes were conceived in terms that emphasized, in a thematic as well as material way, the very nature and limits of visuality. Adapting a formulation from W. J. T. Mitchell’s recent study, What Do Pictures Want?, I argue that what is at stake is how seeing itself should be seen—and shown.⁸

Recent studies have begun to explore the significance of prominent visual modes for larger cultural debates. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, for example, in The Shock of the Real, points to a widening gulf between Romantic theories of artistic production that emphasized original genius and an idealized view of the imagination, and a burgeoning visual culture industry that traded on mass reproduction, spectacle, and simulation.⁹ Wood argues that when viewed in this context, much Romantic aesthetic ideology is really a reaction not, or not only, to the Enlightenment rationalism of the eighteenth century, but to the coming into being of the visual culture of modernity, with the profound and at times perplexing paradigm shifts that it produced. It was, he argues, the growing bourgeois taste for visual novelty and spectacles of the “real” that prompted the largely negative high-brow reaction to the mimetic representationalism of displays such as “Belzoni’s Tomb,” mounted at Bullock’s London Museum in 1821. This popular exhibition, after which the museum was renamed the “Egyptian Hall,” staged a lurid and sensational mock-up of tombs, statues, and sarcophagi recently excavated from the Valley of the Kings. The eye of the visitor was gratified by a thrilling and extravagant simulacrum of the real, rather than by a disinterested display of art divorced from historical context and setting, as one might encounter it at the more up-market Elgin Marbles Gallery, newly opened in the British Museum (2).

It was, Wood argues, precisely in the face of widespread public fascination with mimic entertainments such as this that Coleridge emphatically dismissed “simulations of nature” as “loathsome” and “disgusting” (3); the deceptions of a copy or “Fac Simile” of the real were not only disappointing, but at an extreme, potentially “shocking.” Technologically contrived illusionism, such as that of the panorama and the diorama, revealed a complex fascination with reality effects and simulated experience that was often aligned with vulgar visual novelty. And yet this is only one side of the coin. As I argue in Chapter 7, Coleridge, in staging Remorse, displays a profound interest in the epistemological and aesthetic “play of semblance” that theatrical illusion makes possible, and embraces rather willingly the sensational new contrivances of Georgian stagecraft. The relationship of visual deception to the ethical rehabilitation of the play’s villain in Remorse is not simply a theme, but a self-conscious feature of the play’s (visual) proceedings. Much of the apparently negative reaction to mimetic representationalism, on the part not only of Coleridge but of his contemporaries, derived from a strong sense of what form aesthetic illusion, properly speaking, should take—and expressed an investment in an ideal visuality, one might say, rather than antivisuality as such.

Coleridge’s apparent repudiation of the visible in the form of sensational realism is part of a wider resistance to the visible that is also explored by William Galperin, who argues in The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism that “the visible is the central and unrivalled repressed of romanticism.”¹⁰ The visible or material world is no sooner seen, he claims, than it is imaginatively appropriated—as, for example, in the poetic subjectivity dramatised by Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” that “half-perceives and half creates.” The effect of that imaginative appropriation, by which the visible becomes the Freudian “familiar thing that has undergone repression,” mandates its return, a return that can only destabilize the mind’s apparent mastery of the real. The visible is not merely absent from (or, an absence in) the aesthetic ideology of high Romanticism, but is rather that something “whose essential nothingness is both provisional and, paradoxical as it sounds, foundational” (4). The mechanisms by which Galperin shows the visible erupting or returning under pressure of resistance have been shaping forces in our understanding of the period. And yet, engagement with the visible, even in its absence, is everywhere in Romanticism, and not only as a kind of negative index or symptom. I agree that the repudiation of the visual masks a far more complex relation to visuality than first “appears,” but with one important caveat. The visual doesn’t simply return in the Romantic period like that repressed other, but is made. Its apparent basis in the “real” is one of the important things that Romantic engagements with the visual interrogate, and indeed this period may be seen as a transitional moment in which visibility as a construct achieves both cultural prominence and ideological force.

The attempt to think about Romantic literature through its relation to the visual, and to dominant visual motifs, is a central feature of other studies, such as Jacqueline Labbe’s Romantic Visualities.¹¹ The politics of the prospect view, that staple of loco-descriptive poetry, is thoroughly interrogated by Labbe for its (not always so visible) gender- and class-based presuppositions. Building on John Barrell’s work on landscape and authority in the eighteenth century, Labbe elaborates two contrasting viewing positions that reflect a “gendered dichotomy based on a culturally constructed difference in perception—in visuality” (ix). The first is that of the prospect, the eminence from which the poet surveys a landscape, and it suggests the enlarged vision and depth of understanding with which education and class underwrite a rationalist and masculinist point of view. Set against this is the occluded or partial view typical of the bower, which is the haunt of the disenfranchised, and particularly of women: the space enclosed by the landscape that can be surveyed (only) in its details, and from within. The contrast between physical location and the imaginative placement of the poetic I, or between the proprietary eye and the literary eye, shows that these are neither exclusive nor identical, and Labbe investigates the manipulation of these prominent subject positions by writers of both genders.

Labbe’s study is only one example, however, of how visual paradigms can structure specific readings of Romantic texts. Anne McWhir, comparing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to her later novel, The Last Man, suggests contrasting visual modes characteristic of each novel. For Frankenstein, the visual analogue is the portrait, “perhaps with a doubled or mirrored subject,” while the scope and content of The Last Man evokes the apocalyptic panorama of John Martin’s paintings.¹² The relationship between painting, literature, and culture is taken up at length in Christopher Rovee’s Imagining the Gallery: The Social Body of British Romanticism, where he finds in visual culture, and in the “symbolic and social valences” of portraiture specifically, an “index” to the reimagining of the national community in Romantic Britain.¹³ Rovee investigates the shared culture of texts and portraits in the period, attending specifically to how the social body, “glimpsed partially in mass-exhibited and often mass-produced portraits, gets reimagined as an object of representation and of collective fantasy” (8). Portraiture is shown to be an important conceptual category, and a powerful metaphor, as well as a “ubiquitous form of print culture” (10). The space of the exhibition gallery becomes central to the articulation of this emergent visual, and social, paradigm, and a gage of its impact on the body politic.

The full range of exhibitions, displays, and spectacles on view at the end of the eighteenth century has been documented in detail by Richard Altick’s rich compendium, The Shows of London. That looking had become, as noted above, highly mediated and self-conscious, is particularly evident in how it became itself the focus of numerous visual representations: in the often satiric prints of the crowded summer exhibitions at the Royal Academy, in prints of the printshop window and those crowding around to inspect the new images on display, in prints of exhibitions such as Napoleon’s carriage in Bullock’s London Museum, with its swarms of visitors obscuring the object of sight its...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Romanticism
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 ‘Shadows of a Magnitude’
• 3 The Fragment in Ruins
• 4 Seeing Past Rome
• 5 Romantic Idealism and the Interference of Sight
• 6 Making Visible
• 7 Seeing Things (“As They Are”)
• 8 Vision and Revulsion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index