Victorian Visual Culture

When reading The Romance of a Shop by Amy Levy, I was struck by the suddenness and the ease in which racial slurs were used by the Lorimer women and by the author herself in her narration of the story. It reminded me that we need to pay attention to how active women were in participating in and upholding the system of racism and enslavement. 

The Lorimer sisters are encased within a world that is described in feminine terminology, as the bonds between the sisters are, at the beginning of the novel, the most important relationships the sisters have. The novel is a detailed account of middle-class life for white British women, and is primarily situated within the bounds of the photography studio that becomes both the domestic and work-related realm of the Lorimer sisters. Though the novel doesn’t offer a sophisticated account of race relations at the time, we can still pull out important fragments that offer readers glimpses of the absent presence of racial tensions in the minds of white British women. 

The first instance of a racial slur being used is by Lucy, who says that the girls must “work like *******, and not have very much to eat” in order to get their photography studio ready for the public (Levy 35). Linking unpaid, domestic work to the system of enslavement reveals what might be an understanding grounded in solidarity between two oppressed groups, but that possibility is shut off through the usage of incredibly violent descriptive language. Enslaved people’s labor is degraded, and the Lorimer sisters use this particular racial slur as a way to center their own struggles with unpaid domestic labor. The Lorimer’s unpaid work is also a temporary arrangement, as once they are finished setting up their studio, they will be able to receive monetary compensation for their work. This is not the case for enslaved people, making this comparison another example of the way that the labor of enslaved people is deliberately invisibilized. 

The second instance of the slur being used is by the omniscient narrator, who describes that “Gertrude worked like a ****** that day, which fortunately for the state of mind, turned out an unusually busy one” (Levy 78). As a reader, the way that this racial slur is used in the exact same context both times is significant. Both the narrator and the Lorimer sisters act as uncanny, robotic arbiters of the way that racialized labor appears in this text. Clearly, there is something troubling about the system of enslavement to them, but these ideas don’t fully surface in their minds to form a coherent critique of it. Racism appears in the text as anxious, repetitive fragments.

The language of empire is also central to this story’s progressive push toward a resolution. When Frank Jermyn is tasked with going to Africa to make engravings of the war happening there for The Woodcut, neither the sisters nor the men around them acknowledge any specific details of the war. In fact, when Frank Jermyn’s engravings are published, Phyllis is described as “yawning over a copy of The Woodcut; which was opened at a page of engravings headed: ‘The War in Africa; from sketches by our special artist’” (Levy 117). The sisters are not emotionally moved by the circumstances, nor are they acknowledging the British empire’s role in the violence of war. “The War in Africa” becomes something for Phyllis to yawn over within the confines of her domestic space, as the entire concept of “Africa” is verbally and visually abstracted in this novel. Frank’s illustrations are not described in any detail, shutting down any possibility of a visual representation of the violence in Africa for the reader. 

Examining the way that race shows up in Victorian texts sometimes means reading into the perceived absence of race, as characters like the Lorimer sisters seem uninterested in acknowledging the system of enslavement but still find significant ways to commit verbal violence. The presence of slurs needs to be expanded upon by scholars instead of being casually looked over as “products of the Victorian era,” as the context around their usage is significant. In this particular context, racial slurs are linked to labor, revealing a piece of Victorian women’s attitudes toward the racialization of work. It’s useful to ask ourselves: What slur is being used and why? What does this reveal about the representation of race in Victorian texts? This work is part of filling in the scholarly silences around race in the Victorian era, and a way to take white women’s complicity into account. 

Works Cited

Levy, Amy. The Romance of a Shop. Mint Editions, 1888.