Realism at Risk: The Representation of the Arts in Victorian Fiction

The dissertation argues that the preoccupation with art in the Victorian novel is, paradoxically, an articulation of the nineteenth-century movement towards realism. Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Eliot, and Hardy endanger their own claim to truth by repeatedly calling attention to the fictive status of painting, theater, and music. The characteristic Victorian practice of exposing the illusiveness of art should put the realism of the novel itself at risk; instead, the effect of openly invoking the problem of representation is ultimately to defuse it. Focusing on novels that incorporate a variety of arts, from sculpture to opera, the dissertation shows that it is the Victorian juxtaposition of multiple arts which enables the novelists to construct densely realistic fictional worlds out of such unlikely materials. Chapter One clarifies the Victorian use of artistic cross-referencing by contrasting it with the Romantic reliance on single-art analogies. The ascendance of music metaphors in Romantic literature reflects a growing interest in natural experience that is explicitly contrasted with the aesthetic experience represented by the picturesque. This opposition between nature and art is reconfigured by the Victorians into an opposition between the real or true and the false. Chapter Two suggests that Thackeray and Bronte collapse all distinctions between the arts, distinguishing only between true art and an illusive, theatrical mode. By freeing the arts from the positions they had long been assigned on the basis of their individual formal capabilities, Thackeray and Bronte allowed for the development of a new artistic hierarchy, one based on moral, rather than aesthetic, considerations. Chapter Three shows how Eliot\u27s association of different characters with specific arts produces a hierarchy in which visual art represents a detached and static simplification of reality, theatrical art is linked with deception, and music alone is capable of representing truth. Chapter Four demonstrates that for Hardy, aesthetic appreciation is a valid response to natural beauty, and concludes by suggesting that Hardy\u27s willingness to regard people and things as art anticipates the transition from Victorian realism to Aestheticism