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theses

This dissertation argues that the perception and representation of the seemingly objective details that proliferate in Victorian literature and aesthetics are modes for the constitution of subjectivity, in the work of four Victorian writers: John Ruskin, Robert Browning, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde. Traditionally, literary details, as parts that resist containment within larger narrative structures and formal imperatives, have been viewed as empty, superfluous entities, synonymous with minuteness and marginality, the supposedly manifest visual nature of which translates into unproblematic and objective verbal representation. However, Victorian writers were keenly aware – and apprehensive – that details (derived from the French détailler: to carve), far from being given entities, are created by subjects through processes of selection and analysis, so that the appearance of objectivity they present is generated by, and can reveal, perceiving subjects. Victorian writers employed the perception and (mis)interpretation of details by characters as a plot device to represent and interrogate subjectivities. Simultaneously, they identified the selection of details as a means of generating the writer’s personal style, precisely because details resist attempts at containment. Thus, the Victorians reconceptualized the aesthetic imperfection of details into an enabling condition for the generation of subjectivity.

I trace the representation of details through two seemingly opposed, major nineteenth-century movements: realism and Aestheticism. My first chapter examines how John Ruskin audaciously champions the irregular ornamental details of Gothic architecture as expressive of the artisan’s free subjectivity – while still seeking to contain them within larger aesthetic frameworks, in The Stones of Venice (1851-3). My second chapter explores how Robert Browning emancipates details and subjectivity from containment in The Ring and the Book (1868-9), which proliferates in details seemingly unrelated to the plot. My third chapter examines how George Eliot represents the serious epistemic imperative to “dwell on every detail and its possible meaning” in Middlemarch (1871-2) as leading to powerful, but objectively misguided, subjective awakenings. My final chapter traces how Oscar Wilde ironically consummates details’ subjective tendencies identified by Ruskin, by representing attention to the details of artworks as a pleasurable mode of self-constitution and self-dissolution in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).

ETD_10327

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-rytn-df97

ETD doctoral

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