Hilary Fraser

A VISUAL FIELD: MICHAEL FIELD AND THE GAZE

In 1892, Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913) published a volume of poetry with the title Sight and Song based on their response to a series of paintings in British and Continental public galleries. Bradley and Cooper, aunt and niece, devoted lovers, who over the three decades of their writing lives produced numerous volumes of poetry and plays collaboratively under the authorial signature “Michael Field,” had already made their name with a volume published in 1889 entitled Long Ago, comprising translations and elaborations of the Sapphic fragments, which has been read as an intriguing and (for the times) audaciously explicit celebration of love between women. The concept of “translation” was as fundamental to the project of Sight and Song as it had been to Long Ago; however, in the later volume it refers not to the literal translation of poetic fragments written in an ancient and other language (as Long Ago ostensibly did) but to the rhetorical act of interpreting visual images. The aim of their new collection of ekphrastic poems was, as they explained in the Preface to Sight and Song, “to translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves” (Michael Field, Sight and Song v). The synaesthetic complexity of Michael Fields language here suggests the multidimensional sensory experience of looking at and responding to visual art works, something the women try to capture in the various kinds of writing they undertake around the production of this volume – their journal and their letters, as well as the poems themselves – in their attempt to provide such a translation. In this essay I should like to explore how Sight and Song continues the project of Long Ago in the sense both of articulating their lesbian experience and of locating them in a cultural tradition, only that experience is here specifically associated with visual hermeneutics and with the circulation of the verbal and the visual, and the cultural connections they make are not with a classical lesbian heritage but with recent and contemporary aestheticians and writers on art – most notably, I suggest, with two other couples who wrote art criticism in collaboration: Bernard Berenson and Mary Costelloe, and Vernon Lee and Clementina (“Kit”) Anstruther-Thomson.

Truth to nature

It is one of the central ironies of the Victorian period that, at the very historical moment when interest in observing and recording natural phenomena was at its most intense and religious, the natural world was emptied of its traditional spiritual meaning by the discovery of the theory of evolution.1 The man who had more influence than anyone over the way the early Victorians looked at the landscape around them, John Ruskin, developed the principles of Paleyan Natural Theology and Wordsworthian sacramentalism to create his own religio-aesthetic philosophy, and in his early writings he celebrated the inspired ‘truths’ of nature and insisted on their faithful representation in art. Ruskin’s precepts about art were the guiding force behind the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, which similarly centred on the minute depiction of nature to the end of penetrating its true spiritual meaning.

Minds, bodies, machines, 1770-1930

Book synopsis: It is during the nineteenth century, the age of machinery, that we begin to witness a sustained exploration of the literal and discursive entanglements of minds, bodies, machines. This book opens with Ann Radcliffes The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and ends in the trenches of the First World War. The overall orientation of the essays is literary and historical but they also touch on philosophy, mathematics, natural history, the history of medicine and psychiatry, computer science, and virtual reality. Tracking the cultural impact of new technologies in the long nineteenth century, the book explores how the machine shifts our conceptions of language, consciousness, human cognition, man/machine boundaries, and the boundaries between materialist and esoteric sciences. Taken together, the essays expand our understanding of what it means to be human.

Always Reminding Us of the Body: J.A. Symonds on the fine arts

In his volume on The Fine Arts in Renaissance in Italy , published in 1877, John Addington Symonds maintains that “the spirit of Christianity and the spirit of figurative art are opposed, not because such art is immoral, but because it cannot free itself from sensuous associations”. Indeed, he goes on to identify “the difficult problem of the relation of the fine arts to Christianity” as “the most thorny question offered to the understanding by the history of the Renaissance”. Signifying the historical moment when, in Symondss formulation, “Christianity and Hellenism kissed each other”, the Renaissance held a particular interest for aesthetic critics and cultural historians at the fin de siècle, such as Walter Pater, Vernon Lee and Michael Field, who were, like Symonds, grappling with the conundrum of the body and its legitimate and illicit pleasures and desires. Drawing on critical work over the last decade on the connections between late Victorian art and aestheticism and the emergence of the homosexual in the social and cultural arena, this article explores Symondss highly embodied and erotic engagement with Renaissance art, and locates his corporeal aesthetic in relation to other late Victorian art historical investigations of the tactile imagination, embodied optics and physiological aesthetics.

Women and the Modelling of Victorian Sculptural Discourse

This article focuses on a selection of nineteenth-century female art critics and connoisseurs who were prominent art writers of their day but whose contribution to the critical history of sculpture has since fallen out of view. I argue that women modelled a sculptural discourse that was distinctive, often personally driven and biographically inflected, and gendered. They deployed various forms of life writing – biography, autobiography, memoir, personal reminiscence, Bildungsroman, letters, gallery journals – as a vehicle for connoisseurship about sculpture. Cosmopolitan in outlook, they understood the importance of personal networks in both the production and the reception of art. Furthermore, female writers responded to the corporeal connections between viewers, models and figurative sculpture in their work. Writing about the three-dimensional representation of the human body in sculptural form enabled women to comment obliquely on issues such as female creativity, sexuality and education.