Victorian Visual Culture

Isabella’s comment about the inefficacy of Alice in Korean reminded me of my forays into the world of the Japanese translation. I speak of the “world” of the translation because isn’t just one Japanese translation but dozens, and because the inefficacy of these translations didn’t prevent them from inspiring an obsession so intense that Alice might be considered one of the most important influences of modern Japanese culture. Japan was the first Asian country to translate Alice – the first edition was published serially in 1908 – and dozens of other attempts proceeded over the following decades. However, most translators concern themselves with presenting a story that a Japanese child would understand rather than attempting to convey Carroll’s wit or wordplay. The 1908 version added conventional Japanese morals and made Alice marry a king as reward for her bravery at the end, and even the most recent translations convert all the feet and miles to the metric system. Without the linguistic complexities of the original, the dominant features of Alice in Japanese become surrealism (which in Japanese sometimes veers into unhinged nonsense, as in a phonetically-rendered “Jabberwocky”) and the perfect Western “cuteness” of the protagonist. “Alicemania” in Japan focuses primarily on the latter feature.

Illustrations from a Taisho-era edition of Alice.

While Alice is remarkable in the West in that it is a book about a girl that isn’t inherently a girls’ book, in Japan it has been intrinsically connected to shoujo (girls’) culture since its 1908 publication in the magazine Shoujo no Tomo (Girl’s Friend). Among the many 20th-century shoujo works that draw from Alice are Pandora Hearts, which features Alice as a godlike controller of worlds, and Alice in the Land of Hearts, which features a teenage Alice meeting attractive male versions of all the Wonderland regulars. Beginning around the 1980s, shoujo culture birthed kawaii culture, an aesthetic devoted to everything cute that often includes a heavy dose of Alice imagery. For example, the official birthplace of Hello Kitty, the central icon of kawaii culture, is England, which Sanrio states is an homage to Alice.

Hello Kitty in a 2014 Alice-themed musical show.

Kawaii culture perhaps manifested most dramatically in a youth fashion subculture inspired by Alice’s famous outfit: knee-length dresses puffed out with crinolines, frilled pinafores, stiff headbands, stockings and Mary Janes. The style has been most widely known as “lolita” since the 1990s, when the crossdressing pop star Mana compared his crinolined groupies to that other literary prepubescent, but both the designers and wearers of the style maintain homage to Alice. All of the seven leading lolita brands (Angelic Pretty, Baby the Stars Shine Bright, Moi-Meme Moitie, Innocent World, Metamorphose, Victorian Maiden, Mary Magdalene) have released at least one design named after Alice. One wonders what Carroll would have thought of these thousands young women in their late teens and twenties – perhaps his least-favorite age – traipsing around Tokyo dressed as his muse.

Image from Innocent World’s 2013 catalog.

Metamorphose’s Alice-themed collaboration with Disney.

Quebecois lolita Fanny Bissonette in a Mary Magdalene dress.

At this point I realize that a short blog post is really not the place to try to delineate all the intricacies of Alicemania in Japan. I haven’t even mentioned the Alice-themed restaurants in Tokyo or the size of the Alice section in Tokyo Disneyland or Miyuki-chan in Wonderland, celebrity shoujo author CLAMP’s  sexploitation-esque farce about bikini-clad versions of Wonderland characters propositioning a bemused Japanese schoolgirl. Alicemania probably reveals something profound about post-Perry Japanese culture, but for now I have only the following conclusion: there is something about the immortal seven-year-old that fascinates Japanese audiences, but it’s something more superficial than Carroll’s linguistic acrobatics.

Montgomery, Lall D. “The Eastern Alice.” Literature East & West 7.1 (1963).

Suzuki, Michiko. Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2010.

Wakabayashi, Judy. “Foreign Bones, Japanese Flesh: Translations and the Emergence of Modern Children’s Literature in Japan.” Japanese Language and Literature 42.1 (2008): 227-55.

Yano, Christine Reiko. Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific. 2013.

Monden, Masafumi. “Transcultural Flow of Demure Aesthetics: Examining Cultural Globalisation through Gothic & Lolita Fashion.” New Voices: A Journal for Emerging Scholars of Japanese Studies in Australia 2.1 (2008): 21-40.

I was at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston the other day and ran across a little exhibition about The Pictorialists, a group of photographers from around 1900 who worked to bring their medium into the realm of fine art. While roaming around the show, I discovered The Manger by Gertrude Käsebier, an image from 1899.

The picture, a mother in long white robes and a veil who peers down at a “baby” nestled against her, reminded me of our conversation about Julia Margaret Cameron’s Madonna portraits and the Victorian-era hidden mother images. But instead of the mother cut out of the image like in some photos we saw in class, the baby here is totally invisible in this mother’s arms—in fact, there’s no baby at all! I was a little alarmed when I first learned that the bundled blanket is just a prop in the image; the absence creates a feeling of loss or longing comparable to the sleeping/dead baby images we’ve also looked at. While the image is of a nativity scene, I like to think it could be interpreted as the reverse: a death, a mourning, rather than a birth. Whatever the case, Käsebier’s ability to transform a “normal” woman into a consummate Madonna figure here mirrors Cameron’s photographic talents: celebrating and using the ordinary to make staged arrangements authentic and emotional.

Käsebier, also a mother who took up photography in her forties like Cameron, became a successful photographer quickly after she created The Manger. Aligning with American Alfred Stieglitz, a pioneer in the world of photography and promoter of pictorial photographers, Käsebier took her painting knowledge from art school and applied it to a new kind of image-making style. After the first Kodak camera came out in 1888, photographers of Käsebier’s kind worried about the normality of the photograph, a product of its new accessibility. Hoping for legitimacy as an art form, the group pulled current art trends from painting—impressionism, symbolism, and the Arts and Crafts movement, for example—and incorporated them into their images. The blurred light and shadow and overall soft quality of The Manger heighten its gestural or painterly quality, for example. What do you think?

A closer look:

Käsebier, Gertrude. The Manger. 1800. Platinum print.

Although some of us, myself included, have not read the works of Oscar Wilde before, I would guess that many of us are familiar with Wilde’s (in)famous persona. Although he accomplished much as a poet in college, Wilde became most famous for his “art for art’s sake” mantra after he traveled to the States in December 1881, giving lectures on his thoughts about art, the role of the artist, and aestheticism. These lectures crystallized Wilde as the face of not only the aesthetic movement, but also the antagonizer of normative masculinity.

Much to the chagrin of art and cultural critics in both America and Britain, Oscar Wilde paraded his ostentatious dress, his velvet jacket and signature carnation in its breast pocket, both green. In her article “Fighting Infection: Aestheticism, Degeneration, and the Regulation of Artistic Masculinity,” Sarah Burns discusses the pathologizing of physical appearance and dress, focusing most on the case of Wilde. Linked to the art movement Wilde emblematized, social and moral “decay” could be seen in Wilde’s bohemian aesthetic. The colors green and yellow, for example, were thought to be indicators of weakness, disease, and infection. By extension, Wilde and all he stood for posed an insidious threat to, in Burns’ view, normative masculine behavior and dress. Burns turns to cartoons of the time that either depicted or drew on/alluded to Wilde’s persona, illustrating the dichotomizing of “heathlful” and “diseased” masculinities.

Most of the cartoons Burns cites were drawn by Georges du Maurier, a French illustrator and novelist. Du Maurier produced a series of cartoons that satirized other figureheads of aestheticism, including Charles Baudelaire and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, entitled “A Legend of Camelot,” in 1866. Du Maurier continued this successful mocking theme in later comics. These comics, such as An Infelicitous Question (1897) and Nincompoopiana (1879), depicted the “aesthete in society” as well as confrontations between the effeminate and the strapping or “manly” man. Du Maurier found inspiration in Wilde, as similarities in dress and posture in depictions of the aesthete and in photographs and descriptions of the writer are undeniable.

“An Infelicitous Question.” George du Maurier, 1897.

“Nincompoopania.” George du Maurier, 1879.

For comparison, here’s a photograph of Wilde.

Looking at these cartoons, it’s easy to tell which characters are based on Wilde (and James McNeill Whistler, an American artist who created the slogan for the aesthetic movement, “art for art’s sake”). In Nincompoopania, the Wilde-figures are slouched and sprawled like Wilde in the above photograph. All the men in the parlor take this same position. Rather than sitting or standing upright with strong muscles, the men droop – aestheticism has weakened their muscles.

Two women must choose between the strapping gentleman on their left and the aesthete on the right in An Infelicitous Question. Here, du Maurier depicts questions of “proper’ gender performativities of men and women. Burns writes about the outrage cultural critics felt at Wilde, for not only promulgating alternative forms of masculinity, but also providing for women a prominent feminine figure in society. As women flocked to Wilde, critics – mostly men – foresaw a prioritizing of women’s values and rights (e.g., suffrage). This cartoon illustrates the moment of decision for women: to side with Wilde’s sickening subversion or dominant/normative and “healthful” ideas of gender.

This notion of insidious or infectious masculinity became so terrible and widespread that du Maurier and other cartoonists began characterizing Wilde as fungus and sunflowers. Interesting to consider the use of a specific plant in relation to nationalism/national identity. Both comics are of American origin.

“American Wilde.” Anonymous, 1882.

“The Modern Messiah.” George F. Keller, 1881.

The mixed symbolism of the sunflower in these two cartoons exemplifies the mixing of slanderous labels in the Victorian age. Metaphors and language of the body, disease, art, and masculinity culminate in criticism and cartoons. As Burns concludes, this mixing contributed to a dangerous tension surrounding the artistic body and, more broadly, the male body, which began in the nineteenth century and continues today. Wilde’s ostentatiousness and flamboyance is, after all, how we remember him – aside from his art, that is.

Works Consulted:

“Fighting Infection: Aestheticism, Degeneration, and the Regulation of Artistic Masculinity,” Sarah Burns. from Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America. 1996. Print.

“George du Maurier, Illustration and Novelist.” from The Victorian Web.

Oscar Wilde biography, from the Official Oscar Wilde website.

“Part 5: Reading Wilde, Querying Spaces – American Wildes.” from NYU.

Images cited above.

GUYS. GUYS. GUYS.

I would like to continue the story of Oscar Wilde, evil boyfriend (Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas), and evil boyfriend’s dad (The Marquess of Queensberry).

It’s so great. And also not so great, since it ends super-tragically, forced labor-style. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In class, I mentioned how Wilde had an evil boyfriend. Both of them are pictured here, being dandy and in (toxic) love.

Evil boyfriend Douglas had an evil dad named the Marquess of Queensberry, who, to put it mildly, disapproved of their relationship – not because it was somewhat dysfunctional, but because it was, well, gay.

So tensions built up, as they do. Things seemed to come to a head with an incident in which Queensbury showed up to a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest with a bouquet of rotten vegetables, which he intended to throw onto the stage. Wilde learned of this plan and barred Queensberry from the theater. Queensberry countered with this tasteful note:

In normal handwriting, this translates to “For Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite.”

Although I can’t find at present a source to corroborate this, I’ve heard tell that Queensberry purposefully spelled “sodomite” incorrectly so that if Wilde sued him for libel, he could argue that he hadn’t actually called Wilde a “sodomite.” Just a “somdomite.” Which means nothing, except for the fact that it’s obviously the word “sodomite” with an extra M in it.

But back to the story. Wilde did sue Queensberry for libel, in spite of the fact that all of his friends (except boyfriend Douglas) told him it was a terrible idea. Queensberry was arrested promptly. The only way he could claim his innocence was by proving that Wilde was, in fact, engaging in sexual relations with other males. This was not terribly difficult to do. Queensberry was acquitted, and Wilde was promptly tried and convicted for sodomy and gross indecency. He spent the next two years doing hard labor. Three years after his release, he died ill and impoverished.

Which is sad, obviously.

I’m sorry if I sound flippant. Like Oscar Wilde, I sometimes pretend that I don’t take life very seriously.

Anyways. My only source for all of this is Wikipedia. I couldn’t make this stuff up even if I wanted to. So ends this tale of sodomy, tragedy, and rotten veggie bouquets.

Go here and here for further (and endless) fascination. Have wonderful Thanksgivings.