Catherine Maxwell

From Dionysus to ‘Dionea’: Vernon Lee's portraits

Abstract Perhaps the portrait has always had a special relationship with death. As an absent presence, a shadow that lingers after the sitter is gone, the portrait is fated to become a deathmask when the subject is no more. Representation preserves the dead who defy the ravages of the grave, but it also prematurely mortifies the living. From the moment of depiction, the portrait is a memento mori reminding its beholders of the subjects inevitable submission to change and decay. Encrypted into the portrait, death waits for its own eventuality — an occurrence that makes a likeness into a monument. Bodily likenesses and simulacra have always had a disquietening power. The art historian Ewa Kuryluk writes: ‘In ancient India and Greece, contemplating ones reflection was considered perilous. Dreaming of ones reflection foreshadowed death to the Greeks’.1 A related fear survives in those cultures where to be filmed or photographed is to risk the appropriation of ones soul. Portraiture as resemblance, a form ...

Scents and Sensibility: The Fragrance of Decadence

‘It makes everyone nervous smelling’, remarks Luca Turin, ‘because smell is such a strong sense.’ Turin, styled ‘the emperor of scent’, a bio- physicist, fragrance chemist, and co-author of a best-selling perfume guide, notes the squeamish reaction of scientific audiences when he talks to them about smell: Real men and scientists feel slightly ridiculous smelling something. I’ll say ‘let me show you some smells,’ and I start passing out vials and everyone titters, like I’ve asked them to take off their clothesor something.. . . When I wrote the perfume guide, most of my read- ers were gay men, and most of my readers assumed I was gay, which I’m not, not that I give a damn. Real men don’t smell things. It’s a female thing.1

Not the whole picture: Browning';s ‘unconquerable shade’

Abstract Of all Brownings poems, ‘My Last Duchess’ is probably the one that has received the most critical attention. Critics have produced any number of essays discussing the Dukes character as alternatively shrewd or witless, speculating on the affective force of the dramatic monologue, and pursuing real-life sources for the dramatis personre. In spite of all this activity, very little has emerged that seems to enhance our initial recognition of the power of this extraordinary poem. The portrait of the Duchess with her ‘spot/Of joy’ (II. 14–15) remains the literary equivalent of Leonardos Mona Lisa with her enigmatic smile. In this article, I would like to re-examine the poem in a way that accounts for its haunting power, but in doing this I also want to suggest reasons why this monologue might be properly regarded as Brownings signature piece, typifying a mode of representation which is as yet critically unacknowledged.

Teaching Nineteenth-Century Aesthetic Prose: A Writing-Intensive Course.

This article reviews a writing-intensive course on nineteenth-century aesthetic prose devised for the undergraduate curriculum of the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, and considers the results to date. Using examples of students’ coursework, the article examines the use of logbooks and creative exercises, considers their effectiveness, and attempts to elucidate their advantages over the traditional essay format. A major premise of the course and the article is that appreciation and understanding of literature is enhanced and expanded by the students’ mediation of the texts through their own writing, allowing them to think with and through the literary matter they are exploring and so to extend themselves as writers and thinkers. Writing is thus seen as an essential part of the disciplinary study of literature.

Vernon Lee and Eugene Lee-Hamilton

Both Eugene Lee-Hamilton and his half-sister Vernon Lee were drawn to images of disinterment and discovery. In one of his earlier sonnets ‘Sunken Gold’, Lee-Hamilton pictures submerged treasure — ‘In dim green depths rot ingot-laden ships’ — a treasure which he compares, as he frequently does, with his own gifts and hopes wasted by the illness which afflicted him from 1873 to 1893 when he began his recovery: So lie the wasted gifts, the long-lost hopes, Beneath the now hushed surface of myself, In lonelier depths than where the diver gropes. They lie deep, deep; but I at times behold In doubtful glimpses, on some reefy shelf, The gleam of irrecoverable gold. (Lee-Hamilton 1884, 131; 2002, 123)1

Michael Field, Death, and the Effigy

Abstract This article examines the views of Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley, the female poetic couple known as ‘Michael Field’, regarding the matter of memorial effigies. Starting with Cooper’s essay ‘Effigies’ (1890) on the memorial sculptures and funeral effigies of Westminster Abbey, it then explores both women’s reactions, as expressed in their shared diaries, to a variety of physical presentations and representations of the dead—mummies, waxworks, the corpses of the Paris morgue—to elicit their expectations of memorial sculpture, and frame their particular reactions to Edward Onslow Ford’s Shelley Memorial, seen on two separate occasions in 1892 and 1897.

‘A queer sort of interest’: Vernon Lee’s Homoerotic Allusion to John Singer Sargent and John Addington Symonds

This essay develops an earlier claim that Vernon Lee’s interactions with male aesthetes were a key force in helping shape her sexual, literary, and professional identity (Maxwell and Pulham 6–8). The most prominent of these men — Walter Pater, John Singer Sargent, Henry James, and John Addington Symonds — were homosexual or homosexually inclined, something not in itself surprising in that aesthetic and decadent culture is strongly linked to sexual dissidence, being often celebratory or reflective of non-normative sexuality. One of the reasons that Lee, like other intellectual lesbian women, may have been attracted to aesthetic and decadent writing by these men was that it offered her a pattern or parallel by which to understand or construct her own sexual and professional identity. Yet such writings can be exclusive, seeking out similarly oriented male readers and implicitly suggesting that the best achievements of high art and culture are those produced by men who desire men. Such exclusivism may be a factor motivating Lee’s often ambivalent portrayal of male aesthetes, whose lives and cultural and artistic projects are invariably disrupted by feminine forces. While Lee maintained an enduring respect and affection for Pater, and cordial relations with Sargent whom she had known from childhood, her friendships with James and Symonds were much more complex and conflicted. Charting Lee’s often intricate relations with all these men would merit a major study in itself, so this essay gives two contrasting examples of formative literary engagements with male aesthetes. The first of these is with the American painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), the second with an intellectual rival, the historian and essayist John Addington Symonds (1840–93).