Jane Francesca Elgee, Lady Wilde’s, “The Famine Year” demonstrates visual culture in quite a macabre way. The poem’s language forces the audience to envision the scenes of agony and anguish brought on by famine, instead of turning a blind eye or erasing the gruesome realities.
“And some of us grow cold and white—we know not what it means; But, as they lie beside us, we tremble in our dreams. There’s a gaunt crowd on the highway—are ye come to pray to man, With hollow eyes that cannot weep, and for words your faces wan?” (Elgee, 13-16)
The above lines from the poem’s second stanza are a great example of just one of these instances in which her language creates a ghastly image. There is no way around imagining the horrid conditions and painful deaths of those affected by the famine- the only way to ignore it would be to stop reading. She ties in religious imagery numerous times alongside her portrayal of famine, which then forces the audience to consider the moral implications of ignoring- or even actively harming- those affected by famine. The poem’s last stanza directly begs the audience to reflect on those implications and asserts that those who idly stood by and those responsible for the conditions will be punished by God.
“We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools to build your pride, But God will yet take vengeance for the souls for whom Christ died. Now is your hour of pleasure—bask ye in the world’s caress; But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses, From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses, For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes. A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand, And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land” (41-48)
The very last line asserts that those responsible for the famine are murderers. While they may not have directly taken someone’s life, they indirectly caused many, many, deaths. That line ends the poem in an extremely powerful way, tying together the entire message into one line. There is no way to misunderstand her meaning- there are people to blame for all this suffering, and they will get their punishment.
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.
Last week I happened upon a webcomic called Fisheye Placebo, a cyberpunk story that explores technology, surveillance, censorship, and the power of art as a tool for resistance. Though it’s still ongoing, I’d totally recommend reading it in its current entirety (as it is not too long and I could probably write for pages about this scene, cross-dressing photojournalism, politically satirical guerrilla art, and other subjects which occur in the comic); however, here I’ll just be talking about Chapter 2, Part 9. I’ve selected a panel from the comic which I think is particularly important, and I’ve put a link just below that.
Two university students walk past a brick wall they have passed many times before. A figure with a black beanie hat has been painted on the wall, cross-legged, holding a sign that reads: KEEP YOUR COINS. I WANT CHANGE. Below it rests a single flower in a dried spatter of blood. Not long ago, a man sat in its place holding the same sign. A police officer is painting over the figure on the wall. Soon, the whole scene will be a white smear.
This image and the scene as a whole hold a very emotionally charged tension between authoritarian violence and artistic resistance, and they make some acute arguments about whom we sympathize with, whom we empathize with, and what propels us to seek change. In a lot of Victorian-era photography (John Thomson’s work comes to mind), sympathy seems to come from a one-directional connection to a victimized subject. The subject may or may not be seen as a victim of a larger problem, and they may or may not have their history told, but in large part their direct perspective is unimportant. They tend to become objects in snapshots, with history but no will. The onlooker is not implicated in a larger social project; they never empathize, and in fact they sympathize by realizing the difference between themself and the victimized subject. Sympathy seems to be manufactured by alienating the onlooker from the subject, and forcing the onlooker to imagine themself in the subject’s place, as if the subject themself is a vessel for self-reflection.
In this scene, though, the subject of sympathy has a clear message, and he shares it with all who pass by. Even after the man’s disappearance and possible death, an artist has preserved that message, if only briefly before the police white it out. Vance, the university student in red, pays more attention each time he passes the scene, and only fully absorbs the message once the man’s story is ended, retold, and erased. It isn’t just imagination he has to work with here; all he needs to do is see and comprehend the reality being erased and retold in story and erased again before him, a reality and story which substantiates the need for the sitting man’s message. That message, and the sitting man’s will (i.e. desire), become like a last will (i.e. and testament), though the bequeathing here rather takes the form of a responsibility. The image I included above indicates the additive power of simultaneously seeing multiple layers of systemic violence and marginalization, not just as a scene of sympathy, but as a story of a will violently deprived.
At the end of the scene, the normally very selfish Vance literally takes the sitting man’s place. The scene frames sympathy and empathy as components of a transformative transfer of will from the victimized subject to the implicated onlooker. If I wanted to text-hop my way into a logical anachronism, I would suggest that this scene offers an answer to the question in my previous blog post about Bleak House, the question of what, beyond just sympathy, we can trust when viewing sympathetic subjects: perhaps what we can trust is a will and a story. Perhaps we can trust the story enough that we can shoulder its protagonist’s will, and perhaps we can trust that will, when fulfilled, to put give that story a proper resolution and not an erasure.
Finally, circling back to the explicitly Victorian, this scene also compels me to consider the way in which Victorian images convey a story when they deal with violence, tragedy, and sympathetic figures, and where those images situate external onlookers in relation to that story. Intentional or no, the presence or lack of an onlooker in visual art is a constructed effect, and I think it’s important to spend time considering how Victorian art treats those people and scenes made unseen. And, perhaps, in line with the argument I’ve tried to trace here, if an image can be read as suggesting a replacement of a figure with the viewer, how does such a replacement transform the figure and the viewer, and what is the ideology behind those transformations?
Works Cited Yan, Wenqing. “Chapter 2: Mutable: Part 9.” Fisheye Placebo, 2021. Yuumei Art, http://www.yuumeiart.com.
I was inspired by @flannerylangton’s post about missing context in Felice Beato’s photographs, that there is an implied context inserted by the viewer. Beato’s photograph, Clock Tower, Lucknow, 1858, encapsulates the wanderer’s imagination: the sole individual in the picture stands ahead, back to the viewer, hands on hips, (assumedly) marveling at the ravaged clock tower; the anonymity of the individual appropriately embodies the viewer, and that is the issue (Chaudhary 81).
One can imagine oneself wondering about the empty space, the ruins, the potential this space holds — what must have happened. The issue of imagery bereft of context, which notably existed in British homes, and which now floats around on the internet with sentence-long blurbs that hardly situate, is that Western minds construct; the enduring armchair historian.
I considered the photograph before I read Zahid R. Chaudhary’s Afterimage of Empire, and I like many Western viewers, reveled at the possibility of the past; I considered the “natural” degradation of an unused space and filled the black and white image with inaccuracies: people, color, meaning — a mythical history. Chaudhary’s impression of the “phantasmagoric aesthetic,” as it relates to Beato’s photograph, illuminates the “technical mediation” and, “penetration” by fantasy and imagination — the root word “phantasm” calls to mind insertions of ghosts, even, who falsely occupy the land (Chaudhary 81). These ghosts are spectral manifestations of colonialism, too.
In viewing photography, history becomes an insubstantial plaything; the adventurer’s ignorant prerogative is to preserve this photograph, to ask questions, to lament over the lost history. Objective facts loosen in private British collections of memorabilia, and the impression of the photograph becomes that it is evidence of history itself; just the word, just the mystery of it. In doing so, blame and violence are manipulated — whatever occurred is softened by the capacity of a lost past. Chaudhary describes the process that renders violence not “invisible,” but digestible: “Such apperception includes an alienation from one’s own social and physical embodiment that becomes the ground from which otherwise invisible violence towards others[…]may be witnessed with comparative ease” (Chaudhary 81). Ruin and pain, to the Western audience, are distorted by this “apperception,” which leaves room for impressionistic descriptions of photographic history. This is much like the City of Gold, in a sense, which has an indiscernible location and an insertable history, and in being so is blindly sought after in the ultimate Western, self-serving fantasy.
Work Cited
Chaudhary, Zahid. Aftermath of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
“A Scandal in Bohemia” has stuck with me since my first reading, and not only because I read it for two classes in the same week. Like others on this blog, I was struck by the power Irene Adler holds over Sherlock Holmes and the way she wields this power as a woman in the masculine world of Conan Doyle’s stories. Specifically, I’m interested in how her photograph can create this power: in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” photography is a means of controlling one’s image, and by extension, one’s identity.
As readers, our understanding of Irene Adler is formed only by male descriptions of her. The closest we come to seeing Adler directly is when we hear her voice in the letter she has left Holmes, but she is not physically present in this scene. And despite the fact that her photograph is central to the story, we do not get a textual description of the photograph, nor is there an illustration of her without a disguise. It seems that Adler loses control over her own image: she is objectified, both by the men who see her only for her beauty, and in the physical objects through which she is seen.
This story is one that hinges on the dichotomy between seeing or being seen, or seeing and observing. Holmes begins the story telling Watson, “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear” (2). From an early point, sight is central to the narrative. Yet Holmes’ biggest failure is that he fails to observe Adler – he does not see through her disguise – while Adler succeeds in observing him when she sees through his.
Disguise is a means of control here. Holmes is a master of disguise, adopting his appearance at will and with ease. Among Holmes’ visual depictions in the illustrations accompanying the story, his appearance differs dramatically. His hair color changes between illustrations, though this is not mentioned as part of his disguise in the text, and his faces look to be completely different shapes. Holmes has absolute control over how he is perceived. Disguise, when meaningfully used, gives one control over their perception and identity.
This is especially true of Adler. While the purpose of disguise is to conceal, her ability to disguise herself so effectively is notable here because she lacks control over her own image when it comes to readers’ access to her. Where Holmes alters his appearance to affect the way in which he is perceived, Adler has the most control over her identity when she is not perceived at all.
Adler maintains this control through her possession of the photograph of her and the King. By withholding the photograph, Adler has control over who sees her. The photograph is a means of accessing her identity, and her possession of it is her only means of autonomy. This control offers her power over and protection against the men in the story who determine how she is perceived: she considers the image “a weapon which will always secure [her] from any steps which [the King] might take in the future” (14).
Adler’s control doesn’t lie in manipulation, but in concealment, both in in her physical disguise and possession of her photograph. In a story where a photograph is a weapon, Irene Adler’s only means of controlling her identity is to conceal herself entirely.
Works Cited
Doyle, Arthur Conan. “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Stanford University, 2006.
In Dicken’s novel Bleak House, Esther is a highly divisive character in Bleak House, which is interesting of itself because she is really the only constant character within the narrative. As all of the other characters become more and more difficult to keep track of, she is the only one who remains familiar, understandable, and easily memorable. This divisiveness comes from her narrative style, however, and her personality. She, as the narrator, depicts herself as extremely humble, often putting herself down in terms of looks and abilities. However, she is quick to note others’ compliments for her, and the Bleak House becomes full of her understanding that others love her even if she is no as sure of herself.
This all arguably makes herself the perfect character for whom readers might insert themselves into the shoes of. She’s a flat character, being both humble and confident, intelligent yet simple—this makes her the jack of all trades that is so common in these kinds of self-insert stories. This also furthers her ability in becoming the familiarity within the novel, as the narrators begin to shift between her voice and an omniscient perspective—because she is more understandable, and her chapters more familiar, we as readers become more dependent on her. Because of this, we are likely to enjoy her character more, and thus to relate to her more. Esthers character almost tricks us into wanting to become her throughout the length of the story, in order for Bleak House to remain comprehensible and legible.
This does not stay constant, however. As Esther becomes more involved in the complexities and mysteries of her love life and in the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case, she becomes far more secretive and hides more information from the reader. This complicates our relationship with her as readers; for most, the reader has become attached to Esther in a way where they view her as an extension of themselves. To have this supposedly reliable narrator become somewhat deceitful and entirely unreliable ruins our perception of her as a perfect avatar within Victorian England. We begin to have to comprehend the novel on or own, and in fact get a kind of taste of what the novel would have truly been like for Esther—overwhelming, too many people at once, mysteries all around, and heavy confusion surrounding love and family. In this way, we stop pretending to be Esther, and in fact become her.
In interpersonal interactions, there is often the assumption, conscious or not, that in some sense we can know a person by looking at them. Visual cues like body language, eye contact, the many things people express about themselves through the way they dress, and signifiers of things like gender and race play a major role in communication and categorization of the people we encounter; we often feel that, by seeing someone, we can understand them better.
In Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, however, seeing and being seen becomes a means of alienation and dehumanization. Throughout the poem, the guards are frequently referred to as “watchers”, and their primary function is to look upon the prisoners in the jail and actively, intentionally fail to identify with them. They watch the condemned man sleep before his execution and are unable to “understand / How one could sleep so sweet a sleep / With a hangman close at hand”, they watch the other prisoners pray in desperation and wonder why they are suddenly appealing to God, and they “must set a lock upon [their] lips, / And make [their] face a mask” to prevent themselves from reacting to and trying to understand a prisoner’s pain (Wilde). The gaze of the guards on the prisoners takes place in their most vulnerable moments but does not aim for empathy, instead rendering their pain and fragility something unrecognizable and strange. Looking at them in this way only increases their isolation from the rest of humanity; although they are reacting to their circumstances in very human ways, those circumstances mean that the people who watch them at all times will not even extend them pity.
The speaker of the poem also looks at the other prisoners, especially the condemned man, and while this looking functions differently from the unfeeling surveillance of the guards it still leaves the inmates isolated. Their lack of real, substantial connection with other people leaves them to identify so strongly with the condemned man by sight alone that they go through immense suffering alongside him. The sun, the light that makes seeing possible, is frightening and harsh, exposing them in the stark reality of their restricted existence to each other and those who control and punish them.
“Like two doomed ships that pass in storm / We had crossed each other’s way: /But we made no sign, we said no word, / We had no word to say; /For we did not meet in the holy night, / But in the shameful day.”
(Wilde)
The image of ships passing each other during a storm feels naturally dark, but Wilde subverts the association of the darkness with the “shameful day”. The day and light bring clarity and visibility to things that the prisoner would rather not be reminded of, and the sense of shame and unworthiness that comes with being reminded of their situation means that identifying and connecting with another prisoner feels too painful to pursue. In this way the prisoners are isolated completely. Identification with another prisoner is dangerous and hurts them by cementing their reality and status, and identification with anyone else such as a guard is rendered impossible by the way each group is positioned. When the condemned man is finally killed, it is a “secret deed”; he is denied identification with anyone in his final moments, and his death is invisible to everyone except the people killing him. He is not allowed to be looked on with pity, sadness, or even anger; he is simply erased.
Portraits of Lady Dedlock appear twice throughout Bleak House, despite Rosa’s attestation in the portrait’s first appearance in the novel that Lady Dedlock’s official portrait had never been engraved (copied) at the forbiddance of Sir Leicester. It appears for the second time at the “Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty,” where Guppy is surprised to hear Mr. Weevle’s claim that it is not, in fact, Lady Dedlock. Fascinatingly, Esther functions parallel to the portraits of her mother when she is mistaken for Lady Dedlock by Jo, and when her resemblance is recognized by Guppy.
Lady Dedlock has no control over her image once it’s been reproduced. She is likely unaware of her portrait’s reproduction, and has no control over it’s usage nor ownership. Similarly, she is unaware of her daughter, nor her striking likeness. Once the resemblance to Esther is made clear it is used against her by Guppy and Mr. Tulkinghorn, placing any power she may possess over her public image in the possession of men. Portraits, in this way, mirror the evidence produced by the sexuality of Lady Dedlock, and mimic the transaction of power which occurs in the possession of image, both figuratively and literally. Additionally, Dickens seems to be claiming a certain sexual connotation to portrait making in his choice to have Sir Leicester unaware of the reproduction of his wife’s portrait, as he is also unaware of the sexual reproduction which has also occurred involving his wife.
Judging by the general tenets of Victorian patriarchal morality, it wouldn’t be a stretch to claim that Dickens is positioning portrait-making as inherently degenerative of feminine virtue, however, I claim that his supposition is more broad than simply reinforcing a social standard. I feel that the allegory he’s presented seeks to position image-making of any kind as a force which renders the subject powerless to the possessor of the image, and that the male possession of female sexuality was merely a convenient parallel at the time of his writing.
I discovered my love for Sherlock Holmes stories about a year ago. As an avid fan of mystery novels, Arthur Conan Doyle’s written adventures of a mechanical detective and his witty sidekick checked all the boxes in what I loved about the genre: cheeky investigative dynamics, elaborate plans, thrilling reveals, logical deductive reasoning. However, in every story that I read, men were at the forefront of it, while many of the women were placed delicately in the domestic background (Watson’s wife being a clear example of this). This was not surprising to me. Placing myself in the looking glass of Victorian literature, I had come to expect that men would always take up the capacity. That is until I first read “A Scandal in Bohemia.”
This one stood out to me immediately as being a bit different from anything I had read from Doyle before. Two major twists: Sherlock Holmes is outwitted, and he is outwitted by a woman. Irene Adler shattered my conceptions that I had created when looking at these stories. How was she occupying this space? How was she taking control of such an immense amount of power? The answers to these questions lies in the power of possession in a particular photograph. Therefore, I wanted to explore how the rise of photography impacted perceptions of women and feminism during the nineteenth century.
In Chapter 1 of John Tagg’s The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photography and History, he describes the rise of photography with the fluidity of social status and class, that “to ‘have one’s portrait done’ was one of the symbolic acts by which individuals from the rising social classes made their ascent visible to themselves and others and classed themselves and others and classed themselves among those who enjoyed social status” (Tagg 37). I would argue that the same could be said about women, that for a long time women were kept invisible by many societal norms: marriage, domesticity, patriarchal values.
To be visible holds a certain power, a power that can be held in the connotations and context of a single photograph. Irene Adler uses this to make herself visible not just in the context of the scandal itself, but in the context of feminism. Her presence in a photograph is enough to have the King of Bohemia tied in knots to destroy it, to make her invisible from public perception. However, her wit allows her to remain in possession of not only the scandalous photograph but the possession of her identity, perception, and worth. In her final letter to Sherlock Holmes regarding the photo, she ends with: “I keep it only to safeguard myself, and to preserve a weapon which will always secure me from any steps which he might take in the future” (Doyle 14). The depiction of photography as a weapon is tangible power in the hands of a woman. Adler uses this weapon to slice through any misogynistic assumptions and cracks the lens of the great Sherlock Holmes, symbolizing a literal crack in the perception of women within the confines of society. She is rejecting the scenario where the man would have possession over her image and flips it on its head. She holds the image of a King, sending the message that she is more than capable of holding her own and controlling her own public perception.
A lot of these ideas can be transferred to women in the present day. Especially in light of the recent #MeToo movement, keeping women visible is incredibly important in keeping these issues visible. Whether photos come in the form of evidence or simply used as a way of spreading awareness, the rise in photography has paved a path for women to fight for their rights from the oppressive forces of invisibility. The spread of these images on social media fires the flame and keeps female visibility alive. As John Tagg rightly points out, the photograph creates an “exercise of a new kind of power of the social body, generating new kinds of knowledge and newly refined means of control” (Tagg 59).
Works Cited
Doyle, Arthur Conan. “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Stanford University, 2006. Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1988.
In his 1842 travelogue American Notes for General Circulation, Chapter VII “Philadelphia and its Solitary Prison,” Dickens allocates the majority of his writing to intimately detailed and painfully personal descriptions of individual prisoners and their cells in a solitary confinement prison.
Beginning with a gentleman incarcerated for receiving stolen goods, Dickens notes how “he wore a paper hat of his own making, and was pleased to have it noticed and commanded.” The inmate “had very ingeniously manufactured a sort of Dutch clock from some disregarded odds and ends; and his vinegar-bottle served for the pendulum.” Upon seeing Dickens “interested in this contrivance, he looked up at it with a great deal of pride, and said that he had been thinking of improving it, and that he hoped the hammer and a little piece of broken glass beside it ‘would play music before long.’ He had extracted some colours from the yarn with which he worked, and painted a few poor figures on the wall. One, of a female, over the door, he called ‘The Lady of the Lake.’”
After first endearing this man to his reader, Dickens then delivers a hearty blow when describing how the man “smiled” as he “looked at these contrivances to while away the time; but when I looked from them to him, I saw that his lip trembled, and could have counted the beating of his heart. I forget how it came about, but some allusion was made to his having a wife. He shook his head at the word, turned aside, and covered his face with his hands.”
In painting an image of such a crucially human yearning for dignity, comfort, art, and connection, Dickens does what he does best– he provides a face and a name to a subsection of people who suffer. His earlier attestation to the “cruel and wrong” institution of solitary confinement feels largely uncompelling. It reads very much like any other mid-Victorian political opinion article. What is central to and distinctive of Dickens’s political presence as an author of his time is his portrayal of personhood rather than an abstract gesture to the plight of “sufferers” and their “cries,” which is common in typical (often cheap) Victorian solicitations of pathos. He doesn’t lean solely on cliches like those seen in T. R. Grey’s additions to Nat Turner’s confession of a trembling “mother as she presses her infant darling to her bosom.” Granted, T. R. Grey is in a vastly different socio-political context and country than Dickens at the time of that line being written, but cliches hinging on images of vulnerable women aren’t uncommon to Victorian prose. In fact, as evidenced by drawings used to evoke sympathy for the plight of the Irish during their famine such as “Bridget O’Donnell and Children” and “Beggar Woman and Children,” both from the Illustrated London News dating to 1849 and 1843 respectively, there seems to be an iconized image of suffering mothers intentionally targeted to a London audience in order to evoke sympathy and perhaps promote the enacting of reform. Whatever the reason, these images fall short in ways Dickens’s descriptions do not. They attempt to appeal to the values of their audience, and in being an artistic and strategic ploy they remain artistic and strategic. Don’t get me wrong, Dickens takes some linguistic liberties to strategically endear and illicit sympathy for his subjects as well, but his descriptions of those personal details–like missing one’s wife so deeply one can’t put words to it, or crafting oneself a paper hat of which one is tremendously proud– which speak so loudly to a human hunger for dignity and connection hit harder and deeper, and in making so personal and deep a connection from subject to reader they are much less easy to sit with or pass off as symptoms of “great tragedy.”
Victorian Visual Culture 