Liking, Dislike, Supervision: Literature and the Visual in Victorian Britain (from the SUMMARY)
This book focuses on the encounters of literature and visuality in Victorian culture, with a special emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. lt aims at exploring why Pre-Raphaelitism, with its specific handling of both literature and visuality, has been granted a centra! position in recent revisions of Victorian culture. Though the answer to that question is far from unequivocal, the central position of Pre-Raphaelitism in recent revisions of Victorian culture seems to be due to its affinity with the procedures of contemporary critical theory. Both Pre-Raphaelitism and contemporary theory, that is, rely on the concept of borderline - be it the borderline between cultures, media, languages, scientific disciplines or psychic structures. The Pre-Raphaelites, with their interest in illustration, ekphrasis, transgression, sensuality, history and cultural Otherness, often operate as an alibi of the very interpretive effort invested in the act of reassessing. This proposition works as the structural backbone of my study, which aims to investigate the ways in which the Pre-Raphaelite procedures have retained their functionality in the sphere of culture.
Further, Pre-Raphaelitism travels well; unlike many other »English schools,« it has effectively influenced other national cultures. Its performance within other cultures testifies to the cultural grafts in what is today perceived as Pre-Raphaelitism, and necessitates a new critical reading of its many border-crossings. This in part explains my interest in Pre-Raphaelitism as a project of cultural
Othering, because my position involves the gazing back of its potential subject and »effectee.« My reading of Pre-Raphaelitism, therefore, aims at charting not only its Victorian vistas, but also its odd geographies.
It would be misleading, though, to claim that my reading of the Pre-Raphaelite optics is therefore the otherwise irretrievable discourse of the Other. Rather than that, I see it as a work on the uneasy and unstable borderline separating yet bringing together the one and the Other in ali their guises. As such, it foregrounds the issue of the contingency of dialogue, which always requires that impossible space of the no man's land, be it the dialogue of media, cultures, histories or theories.
Chapter One analyzes the figure of Dante Gabriel Rossetti as it emerges in recent studies of his work and in his biographies. Most of them construct Rossetti either as a figure of ltalianicity (to borrow a term coined by Roland Barthes) - a figure of narcissism, sensuality, pro-Catholicism and madness inhabiting Victorian spaces and organizing their capillary perimeters, or as a figure of textual anxiety within a more general pathology of symbolic production. This either-or mapping of Rossetti, however, blocks a reading of his hyperactive production of selves and symbols as a performance of the perimeter as such (which stages yet delimits a dialogue of cultures and identities).
The early Pre-Raphaelite fascination with Keats is another illustration of the special value of Italianicity for Victorian culture. Conveniently enough, the two poems that the Pre-Raphaelites chose as the representative sample of Keats - »The Eve of St. Agnes« and »Isabella, or the Pot of Basil« - stage their optics in an imaginary and historicized Italy saturated with sex and violence. Still, the Pre-Raphaelite paintings from Keats utilize his poetry in the same way in which Keats's poetry utilizes Italy. While Keats speaks of sensuality from within a cordon sanitaire constructed out of an imaginary Italy, the Pre-Raphaelites use Keats's poetry as a cordon sanitaire within their own - visual - discourse, enabling them to show yet withhold the representation of excessive desire.
In other words, Pre-Raphaelitism of the late 1840s performs potentially as Isabella's basil, figuring endurable and sanitized sex and violence which, if entirely stifled, might have radically destabilized the more centra! systems of representation. The Pre-Raphaelite revolutionizing of the dominant Victorian visual discourses - in that it was conveniently small-scale, transposed onto Keats, dislocated into historicized and foreign stories - might actually be seen as regulative, because it operated as a kind of
symbolic vaccine, helping protect the realm against the big-scale revolutionary contagion from the Continent. Even if this proposition seems too overtly Foucauldian, tempting one to locate its own dark recesses, it seems operative, especially considering the specifics of the 1848 Royal Academy exhibition, in terms of the visibility simultaneously granted and denied to the young painters' work.
Another Pre-Raphaelite space of Othering is the Holy Land as produced by William Holman Hunt. The chapter on Holman Hunt focuses on the centra! paradox of his career-the fact that the Bible, the Great Code authorizing ali other Victorian codes, as it were, originated in the Middle East, and demanded a coming to terms with abhorrence and repulsion of its cultural geography. Hunt's obsession with the Biblical typology and his ethnographic practices are thus not at odds, but are complementary, because they both rely on the symbolic economy of sacrifice and atonement: it is by willingly exposing oneself to pain and unease of the »wilderness« that one can claim truth over other practices and representations. The practice of atonement thus generated for Hunt a body of metaphors powerful enough to bridge the gap between the Protestant Bible and Victorian sciences. Hunt's 'The Scapegoat' lays bare this procedure, since it represents the very practice of sacrifice and atonement of its author, in a closed circuit of yearning and dislike.
Vienna of Shakespeare's Measurefor Measure, with its prisons, convents and moated granges, is another Pre-Raphaelite space of Othering, ever again sanitizing the representation of sex and violence by displacing them into the discourse and the geography of the Other. While prisons displaced onstage of an imaginary Vienna have staged a number of high-profile New Historicist readings of Shakespeare, my analysis of the Pre-Raphaelite Shakespeare takes up the New Historicist arguments, but focuses on the spaces of Victorian paintings and the Victorian exhibition areas. This, I think, is crucial for a critical reading of the Foucauldian concept of panopticism as used by some of the most prominent authors akin to New Historicism (Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Moritrose, D. A. Miller), since its genealogy is Victorian and cannot be divorced that easily from its historical and cultural contingencies.
The female spaces and enclosures of Christina Rossetti - especially her Goblin Market- provided the framework of the chapter in which I discuss the interdisciplinary crossings of feminism and psychoanalysis. These crossings seem to call for the tradition of unruly writing such as Goblin Market in order to legitimize their own claims, just as Goblin Market relies on flawed bargains and promises for the production of its narrative.
The last chapter deals with the representation 9f the Victorian legacy in British historiographic metafiction, but also with various nineteenth-century knowledges infusing the projects of metahistory
and new historical novels. The figure of this bivalent operation of Victorianism in my text is Merlin of Tennyson and the PreRaphaelites (specifically as pairited by Edward Burne-Jones). The Victorian Merlin, that is, organizes his knowledge of history as a lack and a crisis, providing historiographic metafiction with a suitably paradoxical genealogy.
Yet, what persists in this acknowledgement of lack is in both cases a desire to retain vestiges of referential illusion, even if only in the very metaphors of crisis. It is this unacknowledged desire
sneaking into the acknowledgement of lack that I chose as a fitting end for the book which attempts to analyze the functionality of Victorian art and literature in recent critical structures of liking,
dislike and supervision. (from p. 421-424)
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