Victorian Visual Culture

In class we discussed how in his essay On Duty with Inspector Field, Dickens endows Inspector Field with “magical properties.” One of the ways Dickens depicts Field as an all-powerful agent of the law is by conveying how familiar Field is with everyone he encounters during his rounds of the city. Field, with his acute “roving eye”, shows his familiarity with the city’s criminals during a visit to a haunt of “noted thieves” (9). It behooved a detective to know who has committed crimes, the thinking being that they may do so again.

With ever expanding urban populations, it seems impossible that a detective in a sprawling city like New York or London would have the ability to be so intimately acquainted with the criminal community. In the late 19th century, years after Dickens’ nighttime sojourn with Field, an inspector in America appears to have mimicked what Field was able to do in London with the assistance of photography. In The Burden of Representation John Tagg highlights an important pivot in the use photography when he writes, “It was no longer a privilege to be pictured but the burden of a new class of the surveilled” (Tagg, 59). Detectives no longer had to depend upon memory, but draw from physical catalogue of images and descriptions of those they had arrested.

In his article, “Cheats, Swindlers and Ne’er-Do-Wells: A New York Family Album” Dan Barry describes Inspector Thomas F. Byrnes of New York City “whose legacy straddles fame and infamy” (Barry). A controversial figure, Byrnes “believed that criminals had no civil rights, considered torture to be just another investigative tool” (Barry). One of the less horrendous “investigative tool[s]” Byrnes exploited was photography: “Byrnes is perhaps most famous for enhancing and popularizing what came to be known as the Rogues’ Gallery: a collection of hundreds of photographs of criminals, along with detailed descriptions of their looks and habits, which detectives were expected to memorize.” Police could be now familiarize themselves with noted criminals without putting in years of observation or forming relationships the way Field and other inspectors had done before. The image of the gallery of criminal portraits created a  juxtaposition in my mind with the National Portrait Gallery in England. Instead of the artistoracy, however, here were images of “Lord Courtney — a.k.a. Lord Beresford, a.k.a. Sir Harry Vane of Her Majesty’s Lights — a suave British commoner who liked to swindle money from the wealthy belles he bedazzled” (Barry). Barry’s article is entertaining for the anecdotes he shares about some of the more flamboyant criminals in the gallery, whose names (“Poodle Murphy” for one) seem like characters from an old Hollywood gangster film

When Byrnes eventually became the chief of the Detective Bureau he took measures to reinvigorate the department by training the officers “how to conduct surveillance, gather intelligence, and analyze data. His cultivation of informants in every alley and dive, as well as of reporters at every newspaper, fed his growing reputation as a gifted sleuth who knew the mugs and thugs better than they knew themselves” (Barry). Here, Byrnes reminds me of Sherlock Holmes, who often calls upon a vast network of informants for assistance in his work.

One aspect of Barry’s article that I found interesting was that he frames the photographs and attendant descriptions, which survive in the form of Byrnes’ 1886 collection “Professional Criminals of America,”  as telling stories about people whose lives would have otherwise remained unknown. Barry describes the portraits as “maps of hard miles: the Irish potato famine and the Civil War, the Bowery dives and the Five Points squalor, the rough childhoods spent hawking matches and squawking the news” (Barry). While the photographs were used by Byrnes and the police as identification and surveillance, they can now function as an archive of marginalized lives and stories.

Sources:

Barry, Dan. “Cheats, Swindlers and Ne’er-Do-Wells: A New York Family Album.” Feb 09 2018. Web. ProQuest. 19 Sep. 2018.

Dickens, Charles. On Duty with Inspector Field.

Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation.

In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote a new play, Salomé, in French, though of course his native language was English. The theme and plot of this play are Biblical, but it does not follow a Biblical script. In the original story, there is an unnamed dancer who performs prior to the beheading of John the Baptist; in Wilde’s revision, this dancer becomes the seductress Salomé, who performs the dance of the seven veils under the condition that she is given the head of John the Baptist. Once he is beheaded, she kisses the head, but in the end she is punished for her manipulations, and is crushed to death. The play was first performed in Paris in 1896; it was not allowed to be performed in Britain because of a law that prohibited Biblical subjects in plays.

The attacks on meaning are rampant for this work – not only is the Biblical story altered (and not in a way that favors the sexual woman), but the use of French is yet another veil for those wishing to read the play in English. Wilde apparently chose to write in French to produce a different sensibility, a cross-over modeled to some extent on Dante Rossetti, an English Pre-Raphaelite poet and artist who translated Dante and who favored an Italian style. Wilde then chose his lover Alfred Douglas to translate the play. Douglas, whose knowledge of French was poor, made many errors, and although others re-translated including at one point Wilde himself, the version done by Douglas is still used in some “authentic” collections of Wilde’s work.

One person who also attempted a translation was the graphic artist Aubrey Beardsley, who also illustrated an edition of the work. His drawings of Salomé are famous, but Wilde reportedly did not think that they were an appropriate match to his play, and apparently Beardsley returned the favor in that he did not like the play. It was indeed controversial, not like Wilde’s more easygoing comic English plays, and the sexual topic and his choice of translator only served to deepen the scandal associated with it. Wilde was in fact in prison for gross indecency with men when it was first performed.

Salomé, in its various forms, translations, and pictures, captures much about the relationship between art and society in Wilde’s time. There is first of all the love of the exotic, shown not only through the content of this work, but also by the fact that Wilde insisted in writing it in French. There is censorship, by both British society (which would not allow the play to be produced) and French (demonstrated by the fact that Wilde was imprisoned in France). There is interpretation, and even distortion of Biblical material, and society both embraces and critiques such changes.  But Oscar’s Wilde’s place in history appears to be more secure now – his gravesite in Paris is a popular tourist destination, where many kiss his gravestone.

Works Consulted:

Aubrey Beardsley: The Dancer’s Reward: Salomé

Upon the realization that Julia Margaret Cameron took many photos of Ellen Terry apart from “Sadness”, I had to do some investigating. Through this investigation, I came across an overwhelming amount of images of Terry created by many artists. I was shocked at how many depictions of Terry there actually are. Thinking  back to our discussion of Julia Margaret Cameron’s “Sadness” I found it interesting to keep in mind Terry’s role as an actress. Many of the photos I came across depicted Terry in a specific acting role, the most popular being her role as Lady MacBeth.

Rethinking my initial reaction, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. Terry was, after all, from a well known acting family and a well known actress in her own right. I suppose what always surprises me is that the public notion of the “celebrity” was in existence at the time. Some of the photos I came across struck me as distinctly modern in their tendencies. I was also surprised at the range of mediums in which Terry was depicted. From painting to photography, it was fascinating to see how artists captured the image of the actress within a frame.

(c) University of Bristol Theatre Collection; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

(c) University of Bristol Theatre Collection; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

(c) University of Bristol Theatre Collection; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

A while back, I had the pleasure of attending Claudia Rankine’s lecture at Hampshire College. Rankine read several passages from her book, Citizen: an American Lyric, providing personal background on the images and experiences that inspired her to write this book. Citizen explores themes of race and discrimination in the 21^st century. It takes themes and issues that are usually discussed in a historical context and brings them into the modern era. It is this aspect of Citizen, I think, which accounts for why it has struck such a chord with so many readers.

One of the most fascinating things about Citizen is its use of the visual. Every section of the text is accompanied by an image, almost as if to say that for every idea expressed, there is a corresponding visual. For me, these images are a crucial part of what makes Citizen such an effective piece of literature. Going in to see Rankine herself, I was thus curious to see how she would get around the problem of having to read parts of her book without the visual accompaniment.

During the lecture, Rankine had a projector set up, where she displayed the images corresponding to the section of text that she was reading at the time. Before reading, she would always preface the passage with a brief anecdote about the image that was displayed. Personally, having this background information told to me helped me gain a deeper understanding of the images and the passages of the text that accompanied them. Whereas before, the images were a bit of an enigma to me, now I knew the history behind them, which seemed to reveal a whole new dimension of the book to me. Traditionally, I wouldn’t have thought that I would have wanted to have the mystery behind these photos revealed to me. Yet strangely, the fact that I had already read the book before while ignorant of the inspiration behind the photos, I found that this new reading of the text was an interesting companion to my previous reading, rather than serving to erase it.

Listening to Rankine read, I became aware of a serious flaw in illustrated texts: due to the limits of visual perception, we can only look at one thing at a time. We, the readers, have to choose what to pay attention to at any given time. The result is a disparity between text and image, and we experience each separately. Having the text read to me, however, freed up my eyes to look at the image. I could now experience both at once, which somehow felt more authentic. I now got the sense that the pictures truly accompanied the text, making me feel as though they were truly part of the same work of art.

This raised a great deal of questions for me in regards to how I approach books that have a visual component. I had never much thought of how limited our ability to process visual stimuli is. Incorporating auditory elements to the text, however, allows us to circumvent the shortcomings of the gaze, and experience multiple components of the book at once. I would now be curious, for instance, to see what the effect would be of listening to the audio version of Alice in Wonderland while looking at the illustrations the whole time. How would this change our perception of the book? I usually prefer to read a novel on my own, but the exposure to illustrated texts that I have received in this class, as well as my experience with Claudia Rankine’s reading, has opened my eyes to a great many possibilities when it comes to the various ways in which a book can be read.

As a result of our discussions in class, I’ve become increasingly interested in novels that use images or visual language to supplement the text. One of my favorite examples of this (and the subject of this blog post) is Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed. Mumbo Jumbo is set in an alternate version of the United States in the 1920s. Like Through the Looking Glass, this world is a reflection of rather than a total deviation from our own world. The world of Mumbo Jumbo is one that is dominated by an organization known as The Wallflower Order, a secret society based on early Christian ideology (details later reveal that The Wallflower Order originally attempted to stamp out the polytheistic religions in Africa thousands of years ago). The ultimate goal of the Wallflower Order is to get rid of “Jes Grew”, a disease that is represented through jazz culture and African American influence. Mumbo Jumbo’s protagonist, Papa LaBas, embarks on a quest to save Jes Grew and destabilize the Wallflower Order. This semi-satiric struggle primarily serves as a parallel to the racial upheaval occurring in the 1970s, when the novel was written (Ishmael Reed has long been a leading Civil Rights activist). Throughout the novel, we are shown various images that accompany the text, attempting to “explain” it, even though at times they serve only to make us even more confused in a novel with an already convoluted and nearly impossible to follow plot.

From the beginning, this is a novel that is defined by the visual. Many scholars have commented on its cinematic quality, with the text even ending with a “freeze-frame”.  Beyond this, it also contains a number of images that disrupt the narrative. Some of these are historical photographs of Jazz-Age New York or New Orleans. Others are rough sketches that are difficult to identify. Perhaps the most interesting ones, however, are the ones that play with the novel’s sense of time, with some of them displaying images that hail back to events far before the 20^th century, and others show us scenes of racial upheaval that would likely have taken place closer to the time of the novel’s actual publication. There is no explanation for these pictures, and Reed leaves his reader to piece together the meaning behind them. This is yet another element of this novel that seems to deliberately frustrate the reader’s expectations and ability to read and understand the text.

In class, we have discussed the effects of collage as a medium. Mumbo Jumbo uses the principles behind collage not just in how disparate images are woven into the text, but in how it incorporates various different mediums to create a sort of textual collage. As well as the traditional narrative, the novel is interspersed with stage directions, poetry, and transcriptions of historical documents, many of which do not seem to have much to do with the events that take place in the narrative itself.

This technique, as well as the visual nature of the novel, helps resist the reader’s expectations of how text and image are supposed to function. Throughout the course of the story, we are exposed to images, situations, and time periods that we consider to be familiar to us. When they are all woven together like this, however, it becomes something altogether alien to us. The idea behind this is as follows: we think that we are familiar with the history of this country, and of the racial discourse that has taken place for its entire lifespan. Yet when we are shown it as a whole, rather than in fragmented parts, then we are suddenly unable to identify it. The more visual information we are given, the less we understand what we are looking at. More than anything, Mumbo Jumbo sets out to prove that in order to comprehend something, we must first be made aware of how thoroughly unfamiliar with it we are.