Victorian Visual Culture

Our class made me reflect upon language used in my experience studying literature. Specifically, it has me thinking about literature that contains biased or prejudiced concepts, and how different classes that I have taken go about discussing that differently. In high school, we did read multiple historical texts, including Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice. While these texts contained specific gender and class politics, it was never the primary focus of our class discussions. We mainly focused on more conventional topics, such as plot, character development, themes of reputation, love, and wealth. While we were all aware of the biased notions put forth in the texts, we did not take the time to discuss what they mean, how that rhetoric impacted both historical and contemporary biases, and why we still continue to study these books.

When I got to Mount Holyoke, these conversations began to come more into play. It wasn’t until I’ve studied literature in this way that I realized how it can be easy to read historical texts at face value. It can be easy to read them, say that these ideas were really prevalent at the time, and just leave it at that. Since historical texts are so stressed and emphasized for English students, it’s important to consider the implications of this in the current day. If we are consistently feeding students literature with these ideas, it is important to discuss the issues within them, and how people feel like that relates to the current day. 

I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about the importance of studying historical literature on the whole vs. more modern literature. I felt like a majority of the classes that I’ve taken emphasize older texts, and something that interests me is the movement of ideas through older texts and newer works. From what we’ve read in this class, I’ve noticed that texts from this time period make more leaps in terms of breaking traditional norms. Granted, it is not to a super big extent, and many of the works fall into the same binaries that ruled the time period. However, thinking about “A Scandal in Bohemia” for instance, there were boundaries starting to be pushed. 

I don’t feel like I have the most coherent thoughts when it comes to all of these topics. However, I appreciate not only thinking about the literature in itself, but the weight of the messages it carries both in the time it was written and in the present day.