Author: laverdim

Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper published their collection of poems, Sight and Song, under the pseudonym Michael Cooper in 1892. In the preface of their collection, Bradley and Cooper reveal that their poems are supposed to be “objective” reflections of art, void of subjective “theor[ies or] fancies” (https://michaelfield.dickinson.edu/node/228). Objectivity in poetry is difficult, however, because art in itself is interpreted by a subjective audience.

The preface of their book quotes Gustave Flaubert, who said: “Transport yourself, by mental effort, into your characters, not attract them to yourself” (https://michaelfield.dickinson.edu/node/228). The act of transporting oneself into a character is bound to reflect one’s own interpretation and association of people with certain actions and events. Even if Cooper and Bradley are to go “into [the] characters” of whom they write, they are going into their perception of those characters.  For instance, in their poem “L’Indifférent,” they write that the boy “dances.” Since the painting displays only a snapshot of the character, Cooper and Bradley have no way of knowing whether he truly “dances,” or is simply walking or posing. Furthermore, the poets connect his presence to that of Mercury, the Roman messenger god (https://michaelfield.dickinson.edu/book/l-indiff%C3%A9rent). Although the Victorian Era is known to invoke mythological figures, the intentional choice to connect his “wingy hat” to Roman mythology reflects the poets’ understanding—conscious or not—that this boy is himself a messenger (https://michaelfield.dickinson.edu/book/l-indiff%C3%A9rent). Perhaps if other members of society had seen this painting and were writing about it, they would see the boy as a young aristocrat, not a messenger at all.

Additionally, Cooper and Bradley are caught up on the age of the “gay youngster” (https://michaelfield.dickinson.edu/book/l-indiff%C3%A9rent). They write that “though old enough for manhood’s bliss,/ he is a boy,/ who dances and must die” (https://michaelfield.dickinson.edu/book/l-indiff%C3%A9rent). Whereas another viewer might see the painting differently, Cooper and Bradley’s gaze falls on his age and mortality, leaving out, for instance, a description of the background, which is full of trees and a mix of light and shadowy colors. This could reveal another symbolic element of the painting that Cooper and Bradley are unable to convey to readers because their perspective accentuates different elements of the painting.

Michael Field’s other poem, A Pietà, incorporates ideas of decadence when describing Christ.  The poem begins by stating: “By a swathe of the delicate, lifted skin :/  The half-closed eyes show grey,/ Leaden fissures ‘ the dead man’s face is clay” (https://michaelfield.dickinson.edu/book/a-piet%C3%A0).

The extremely descriptive language of “delicate” skin, and “half-closed,” “grey,” eyes around a “clay-like” face allows Cooper and Bradley to paint their own picture in the readers’ heads. This is influential because many of the readers would not have seen the painting first-hand, or if they had it would have been in a newspaper. The freedom to rewrite the painting and influence how the audience would picture its details gives Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper the liberty to put forth their own spin on the effect of the painting. They can manipulate how the audience perceives it and what the audience should take away from it. Thus, their ability to adjust the audience’s perception contradicts the preface of their collection of poems, Sight and Song, which states that art should be more than “subjective enjoyment” (https://michaelfield.dickinson.edu/node/228).

Lionel Johnson’s 1897 poem, “A Decadent’s Lyric,” exemplifies an erotic atmosphere of the 19^th century that can be used as a lens through which to analyze Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Johnson begins his poem by alluding to sex as a simultaneously joyful and shameful act. He writes, “Sometimes, in very joy of shame,/ Our flesh becomes one living flame” (Johnson 1-2). Joy generally connotes something holistic and good. Contrarily, shame connotes an act that must be kept secret for fear of criticism. Usually, shame is connected with immoral acts. Therefore, by uniting both shame and joy in the sexual act of “flesh becom[ing] one,” Johnson reveals that sex cannot be set apart as either solely joyful or solely shameful. To generalize the time period, people considered sex as a procreative act that was only moral when it occurred in private, between a husband and wife. Taken out of that setting, sex was considered shameful. Wilde’s novel has many erotic scenes that directly connect to Johnson’s sexual poem. However, more generally, Johnson’s poem suggests that he finds a sense of goodness in acts that other people consider immoral, and that such beautiful immorality can be good. This prioritization of beauty to immorality is directly materialized in Wilde’s novel.

Wilde prefaces The Picture of Dorian Gray by asserting the value of beauty and capturing the feelings of aestheticism. He writes, “Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty” (Wilde 3). The idea of beauty is subjective. Nevertheless, Wilde describes how if something could be considered beautiful, its beauty should be all it is appreciated for. Therefore, Wilde states that people who take things that possess any traits that could be considered beautiful and downgrade them as immoral or “ugly” are themselves “faulty,” “corrupt” people. To this extent, beauty should not be overshadowed by whether an act is moral or immoral. If people can see beauty in sexual acts, then that beauty should be celebrated. Wilde would condemn people who consider sex shameful because he would say they are limiting their perspectives.

Furthermore, Wilde uses Lord Henry in order to personify aestheticism. In chapter VI, Lord Henry states, “We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices” (Wilde 72). Henry, a manipulative man who challenges the way Basil and Dorian Gray live their lives, does not necessarily deny that people have moral prejudices. Rather, he believes that people can have them, but to articulate them and judge others would be wrong. Henry believes that if a thing is beautiful (which, again, is subjective and what one person considers beautiful another could consider horrid), people should praise it for its beauty. In this sense, Henry chooses not to find “ugly meanings in beautiful things,” but to find “beautiful meanings in beautiful things.”

Additionally, Henry takes pride in the enticing, beautiful nature of his immorality. He tells Dorian, “You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit” (Wilde 77). Henry openly acknowledges that his lifestyle is full of “sins, but he believes it is those sins that make him beautiful to people like Dorian. Therefore, if there is a beauty in his lifestyle, he does not believe he should change it or focus on morality.

 

Johnson, Lionel. “A Decadent’s Lyric.” Aesthetes and Decadents, pp.121, 1897.

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York, Penguin Classics, 1891.

Carol A Senf’s article, “Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror,” asserts that Count Dracula may not be the real villain of Dracula, and therefore challenges the usual reading of Bram Stoker’s novel. Senf states that most people consider Dracula a myth about “the opposition of Good and Evil” (421). It is this general assumption that allows Count Dracula to be labeled as the evil character who contrasts and challenges the virtuous intentions of Jonathan Harker and his acquaintances. Senf picks up on similarities, however, that show the likeness of Dracula’s and Jonathan’s group’s actions. To this extent, Senf tries to argue that readers must question whether the “evil” characters are Dracula or Jonathan’s group.

To start, Senf challenges the narrative structure of Dracula. She states that the narration is a “jigsaw puzzle of isolated and frequently trivial facts; and it is only when the novel is more than half over that the central characters…band together to destroy [Dracula]” (Senf 422). By comparing the narrative formation to a “jigsaw puzzle” Senf arouses ideas of a confusing layout that has to be put together piece by piece until it fits into place in the mind of the puzzle maker (or in this case Mina Harker). Mina, Jonathan, Van Helsing and Seward’s perspectives are only subjective. Senf continues, “Dracula is never seen objectively and never permitted to speak for himself while his actions are recorded by people who have determined to destroy him” (424). Jonathan and his friends have observations about Dracula, through which they assume Dracula is evil, but their assumption of his lack of goodness challenges the reader to consider how Dracula would see himself or how he would label Jonathan.

Furthermore, the fact that it takes Jonathan’s group more than halfway through the novel to realize that Dracula is dangerous and needs to be killed challenges their credibility. If he had been truly evil, they should have known that from the beginning and been willing to stand up to him then. However, they did not feel threatened at first by him, and many of the characters (including Jonathan, Lucy, Mina and Van Helsing) each experience a moment of enticement by Dracula or the other vampire characters. Their mixed sentiments of interest, confusion and fear places doubt in the readers minds over whether or not they correctly chose to label him as dangerous. Additionally, any group that “bands together to destroy” a character or establishment engages in group-think, which prevents them from critically analyzing Dracula’s actions. Jonathan and his friends’ group-think perspectives are blind to any of Dracula’s good qualities and makes them robotic people who have been convinced to kill Dracula even though they only have limited evidence.

On another note, the narrative of Dracula justifies the actions of Van Helsing and the other men even though, from a different perspective, their actions could be just as bad. For instance, they “break into [Lucy’s] tomb and desecrate her body, break into Dracula’s houses, frequently resort to bribery and coercion… and openly admit that they are responsible for the deaths of five alleged vampires” (Senf 425). Taken together, the actions of the protagonists are also bad, but their first-person narration justifies and protects them from being labeled as the villains.

At the end of the novel, Mina makes Dracula look liberated after being murdered by Jonathan and Quincey. Mina narrates that as soon as they had killed him, she thought she would “be glad as long as [she] live[s] that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace” (Stoker 401). From Mina’s perspective, Dracula settles into a “look of peace” because he has been freed from his never-ending evil obligation to desecrate souls. However, if, as Senf argues should be, the audience were to hear Dracula’s perspective in this scene, there would be an opportunity to confront Mina’s subjective analysis with Dracula’s description of his real feelings. Although the audience cannot know for sure if Dracula’s murder was peaceful for him or not, only analyzing it from Mina and her friends’ perspectives does not allow an objective opinion to be made and leaves out key elements of the plot that only Dracula could articulate.

In his 1908 “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” Sigmund Freud asserts that peoples’ phantasies could be associated with mental illness. He states, “If phantasies become over-luxuriant and over-powerful, the conditions are laid for an onset of neurosis or psychosis” (424). Bram Stoker’s Dracula is full of “over-luxuriant” and “over-powerful” descriptions that reveal his obsession with the changing gender roles of the time.

For instance, when Jonathan Harker is being cornered by three, sexualized, vampire women, Stoker uses intense animalistic and sexual descriptions to set the scene. He writes from Jonathan’s perspective, “There was a voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth” (45). By saying that she “lapped” her teeth with her tongue Harker describes her in a way that resembles that of a dog. The woman is clearly threatening and holds the power in the scene, but she is also sexualized. Harker goes on to say, “Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat” (45). He then “closed [his] eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited – waited with beating heart” (96). There is a passionate sexual atmosphere in this scene because Jonathan waits in “ecstasy” anticipating the touch of the woman’s “scarlet lips.” By sexualizing this scene, and creating an intense feeling of Jonathan’s anticipation, the scene seems to be one of “over-luxuriant” descriptions and passion. Furthermore, Jonathan is intrigued by the woman’s erotic nature, considering that he uses terms that would connect her with a canine.

Freud might suggest that Jonathan’s anticipation reveals an inner desire for erotic sexual relations with a powerful woman. This would connect to The Longman Anthology’s description of the role of women during the Victorian Era. Many women had been seen as “physically and intellectually inferior, a ‘weaker sex,’” but women were starting to ease their way into a new role during the 19^th century (1061). In conjunction with the challenge to the “weaker” role of women, masculinity was also being challenged. When women had been seen as the “weaker” sex, the man was supposed to be the dominant, powerful figure. The expectations of how women and men were supposed to act individually, but also in relationship with each other, were changing during the 19^th century, and Bram’s depiction of Jonathan Harker and the vampire women could be interpreted as the 19th-century challenge to conventional gender norms.

Going back to what Freud said about there being only a slight difference between phantasies and mental illness challenges the audience to question Bram’s mental state. Since The Longman Anthology asserts that inversions of the conventional relationships between men and women were popular in Victorian literature, it would be logical for Bram’s novel to not only address gender norms a few times throughout the book, but to intentionally refer to these gender inversions as a motif–which it does. Additionally, regardless of whether Bram was sane, his intentional use of inverted-gender-norm motifs reveals that he was phantasizing about them, and perhaps his phantasies were so passionate that they led to a mental illness. If that was the case, it would just be stronger evidence for how influenced 19th-century society was by the changing gender roles. Therefore, readers can determine that Dracula is Bram’s critique of conventional gender norms during the Victorian Era, and the audience can use Dracula to analyze the roles of feminity and masculinity as the 20th-century was getting ready to begin.

When Prendick first discovers the island and its inhabitants, he quickly notices their features. Prendick states that one of the islanders is “clothed in bluish cloth, and was of a copper-coloured hue, with black hair. It seemed grotesque ugliness was an invariable character of these islanders” (Wells 17). Here, Wells uses human-like characteristics and color symbolism to contrast the animalistic and human tendencies of the creatures Moreau created. For instance, being “clothed” suggests a humanlike sense of pride. Humans always walk around clothed, but animals do not. To this extent, Wells was trying to establish that the islanders had some qualities that set them apart from other animals.

Additionally, Wells is very intentional about his use of color symbolism. Referring to “bluish cloth,” “black hair” and a “copper-coloured [skin] hue” arouses various connotations. Blue is unusual to find naturally on cloth. It requires a dyeing process that takes time and thought. By dressing the islanders in blue, Wells suggests they have human characteristics or influences that give them a sense of fashion, thus differentiating them from animals. Blue is also representative of hope and class. Wells may have dressed the islanders in blue in order to depict Moreau’s hope that they will continue gaining humanlike qualities.

Furthermore, the islanders’ “copper-coloured hue” makes them stand out from the typical white Englishman of the time. The Longman Anthology describes the Victorian Age as a period of “blatant racism” (Damrosch 1064). Therefore, the islanders’ different skin tone would have made them appear as having less importance than Prendick, Moreau, and Montgomery, each of whom is assumedly white and Western European. Having “black hair” is also critical to the islanders’ physicality. Firstly, “hair” is different than fur, as hair is connected to humans whereas fur is connected to animals. The “blackness” of the hair further emphasizes the islanders’ differences from the fair skin and hair of Englishmen.

In relation to the novel as a whole, Moreau’s attempt to create humans from animals relates to The Longman Anthology’s description of the Victorian Age as a period of reform. Moreau wanted a scientific way to invent his equal: He was attempting to create a being similar to himself. He taught his creatures how to care about fashion and dye clothes; he even gave them hair. However, Moreau failed because the islanders never possessed true class, as Prendick would have defined it. The islanders’ “black hair” is only one characteristic that distinguishes them from the ideal Englishmen of the time. By placing Moreau’s experimental creatures somewhere between English prestige and Animalia, Wells asserts that it would be impossible for animals or anyone of different backgrounds to be capable of success in the way it was stereotypically defined by white, high-class Englishmen.

When he wrote this book, Wells was passionate against vivisection. If vivisection was proven possible, it would philosophically challenge peoples’ ideas of what humanity is and how to distinguish humans from other animals. If successful, Moreau’s experiments would have reformed religious, social, and scientific perspectives of the time. Nevertheless, Wells designed the book so that Moreau failed, and his failed attempt to create his human equal may be Wells’ way of demonstrating how new perspectives on equality were “destroy[ing] the social fabric” of England (Damrosch 1059). Wells’ critique of giving new people and ideas popularity and equality could have meant that he did not support the reforms or social movements of the time.