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theses

This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century elegiac literature and photography exist in a surprisingly close, interconstitutive relationship that enables elegy to continue to redress loss in a culture where the proliferation of images threatens to subsume the work of mourning. The project builds on important scholarship in the history of science and technology in order to demonstrate the troubled role of elegy’s fascination with visual media in the nineteenth century. I identify a pervasive ambivalence about how to visualize the deceased that shapes major elegies by Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Thomas Hardy—works that both desire and resist the photographic technologies they imagine. In Tennyson’s In Memoriam, for example, the poet evokes a medium that will allow him to see Hallam, but he disavows the images themselves as inadequate consolations. Furthermore, I argue that Tennyson’s great poems of light and loss, “Tithon” and “Tithonus,” are concerned with the same paradox of visualizing absence that the scientist John William Draper describes as “tithonicity,” which he defines as the imponderable force responsible for the creation and destruction of photographs. In another poignant instance, Rossetti’s destruction of photographic portraits of his late wife, Elizabeth Siddal, reveals a fearful ambivalence about reproducibility instantiated textually in the elegiac sections of The House of Life. In the age of photography, elegy’s conventional aspiration to mourn and commemorate the dead is not only reshaped as a struggle to reconcile what remains with what cannot return, but the ambivalence towards the beloved’s residual image becomes increasingly acute in verses consumed with traces, outlines, and other signs of loss that the age of photography makes visible. For this reason, I understand photography as a dynamic site—as much cultural as technical. Drawing on recent revisions to the history of photography’s origins in the nineteenth century, I offer an account of Victorian elegy’s vexed relationship with this technology as it develops between the anticipations of photography in Romanticism and the emergent motion pictures of early Modernism.

ETD_5879

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Jesse Hoffman

doi:10.7282/T33N21WD

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.