Course Blog

At first reading, A. C. Swinburne’s poem “A Match” is singsong and uncomplicated – a simple set of rhymes, possibly for children, certainly not entirely out of place in a book of children’s poetry. The rhyme scheme is easy to follow, the ostensible theme a traditional one of a lover’s desire to become one with the beloved. It’s a common idea in love poems, and the mere sound of the poem itself lends an extra veil of simplicity.

But on a level below the superficial, “A Match” is full of troubling dichotomies and, eventually, a sexuality directly opposed to the traditional, “normal” British standard of acceptable sex. The poem begins with a pleasant stanza about love and greenery, echoing the marriage vows in its inclusion of “sad or singing weather” and “green pleasure or grey grief” – in sickness and in health, for better or for worse. While not a direct repetition of these extremely traditional words, the dichotomies here reflect the typical, time-honored marriage vows, creating in the first stanza an image of normalcy and tradition-bound love that Victorians would have expected and accepted.

The second stanza maintains this customary view of love: words, tune, and song are equated to love. The first mentions of physical sex are here: “with double sound and single/delight our lips would mingle, with kisses glad as birds are.” The idea of single delight, although cleanly separated by the line break, evokes a sexual aspect emphasized by the “double sound” and “kisses.”

However, the second stanza is still pretty tame. The third stanza initiates the first troubling dichotomy: “If i were life, my darling, and I your love were death.” This coupling, of life and death, while inevitable in biological life, is atypical of “normal” love poetry: life and death exist around each other but not at the same time in one body or semblance, which contradicts the previous two stanzas’ coupling of two things which typically exist at the same time in one form.

The fourth stanza continues the dichotomies, making them even more troubling. Sorrow and joy go together now, and the lovers “play for lives and seasons/with loving looks and treasons.” The idea of the lovers playing, possibly against of each other, especially with the added opposition of loving looks and treasons – a deceit to conceal a betrayal – is undoing the conventional, unexceptional love poetry of the first two stanzas, and the fifth stanza continues the pattern of opposition. “Till day like night were shady/and night were bright like day” undoes the traditions established in the first stanza: while maintaining a dichotomy, the conventionality of the marriage vows has been eclipsed by a new, inexplicable dichotomy far from the marriage conventions of obedience and fidelity (the treasons of the last stanza).

The last stanza at last reveals the goal that the previous five stanzas have been working towards. Here, pleasure and pain are equated, and love is not only hunted, plucked, and taught (perhaps disciplined), but given a rein. These ideas are far, very far, from the utterly conventional, classical love from earlier in the poem. The poem ends on the repetition of pleasure and pain; all the previous stanzas have ended on similar repetitions, but the last stanza ends on a distinctly sinister note. Love plus hunting, plucking, teaching, and reining equals a view of sexuality and love that the Victorians would have ostensibly abhorred: with its echoes of BDSM and violence in a sexual context, the last stanza undoes all the work of the last several stanzas without breaking the rhyme scheme or in any way changing the pattern of the rest of the poem.

Swinburne has used the conventions of Victorian love poetry agains the Victorian conception of love. Since he never breaks the pattern that he sets up, and since the poem is so easy to mistake for a simple paean to a beloved, Swinburne is essentially fooling readers (especially readers contemporary to him, who would in the main choose to ignore the more troubling aspects of the poem) into a conception of love which they already expect.

The progression of the poem and its eventual descent into sexual “perversion” is a strong reflection of the degeneration/regeneration so curious to the Victorians. The motifs of weather and cycles which fill the poem are distinctly regenerative, but the Victorians would call the progression of sexuality degenerative. “The degenerate was…anything deviating from a middle-class-defined ‘normalcy'” (Ledger and Luckhurst xxii). By following the standards of poetry, Swinburne completely undoes the Victorian standard of love and sex.

John Addington Symonds “Love in Dreams”

As the title of this poem suggests Symonds explores the dynamics between love and dreaming. The first lines of this poem read as though Symonds is responding to someone. “Love hath his poppy-wreath/Not Night alone.” (Symonds 1-2) The use of the “Not” in the second line makes it seem as though someone has just said that Night alone has a poppy-wreath and Symonds is writing his disagreement with them here. Poppies represent a few different things. In classical texts poppies often represent sleep. Perhaps this is what Symonds is responding to by arguing that Love also brings sleep, or is associated with sleep, not just the night time. The other connotations of poppies allow for more complexity in these lines. Poppies also are placed on the graves of fallen soldiers because they are connected with blood. This would make these more morbid, suggesting that Love is a fallen soldier. Or perhaps that Love is as dangerous as the Night is and also has its fair share of dead. There is also a homoerotic reading to poppies. With that in mind these lines could refer to homosexuality as being about Love as much as it is about the sin that happens at “Night”. Night was perhaps a time to do the deeds you wouldn’t during the day such as sex. Symonds here is claiming that Love is also homoerotic and a place of this expression of same sex desire.

Combining these literary connections to those in “The Language and Poetry of Flowers” published in 1875 makes for some interesting intersections. Poppies, depending on their color, can mean consolation, fantastic extravagance or sleep. The question of what kind of poppy wreath Love has seems to hinge on what kind of poppy wreath Night has. Night is a time of consolation and mourning the hard day, as well as being a time for extravagance and indulgences of many kinds. Not that these are entirely oppositional ideas but they bring out different meanings to these lines. If we read with consolation in mind then the rest of the poem is rather sad. The dream, all the “fancy fine” and “soul of youth” are present to appease the speaker because of some sadness or disappointment. When overlapped with the homoerotic reading it would seem that these dreams are consolation for his unrequited or sinful love. The overlap between homoeroticism and fantastic extravagance is slightly more positive about same sex love. Night is viewed as a time for the sinful, the taboo, and the excessive (i.e. drinking or sexing a lot) which has a connotation of indulgence. Night is a time to let out the impulses you keep in all day, like same sex desire, and it seems this poem is saying that Love is also a place/time where this indulgence should be/is permitted. When in Love, as in the Night, there should be a fantastic extravagance in same sex desires.

While all these different associates with poppies allow these first lines to have many overlapping meanings. There is no way to know exactly which version of “poppy wreath” that Symonds is referring to. This slippage between signifier, signified and sign creates possibilities of meaning. It is a place to potentially hide taboo subjects or reform social relationships in “confusingly disorderly ways” (Levine). The semiotic confusion doesn’t preclude meaning but expands it. The openness of these lines, and the way they could mean many things, shows how language is connected to who is reading it and how they choose to read it. It also shows how artists, like Wilde and his character Basil, are perhaps in their work as well as being apart from it. There are many combinations and connotations to just these two opening lines, and these possibilities produce meaning and readings for this poem.

 

“Poppy.” A Dictionary of Literary Symbols. Michael Ferber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Credo Reference.Web. 17 Apr. 2016.

The Picture of Dorian Gray and A.C. Swinburne’s “Before the Mirror” both obsess over objects, exposing fin de siècle anxieties and coping mechanisms. Both works stuff an incredible amount of physical, beautiful things into a small space. Dorian’s house is filled with books and trinkets and paintings, all either a distraction from unhappiness and anxiety over a fleeting utopian moment in society, or an outlet for those anxieties, a way to project something onto the art that we ourselves cannot process. As Dorian’s painting grows more grotesque, perhaps this signals that he stores his anxieties in the painting; it acts as Pandora’s box.

Swinburne’s “Before the Mirror” similarly provides a structured form onto which we can project fin de siècle anxieties. Or, perhaps it acts as a way to preserve a way of thinking that a new century may destroy. The poem is aurally pleasing, describes visually beautiful images, etc.; maybe readers fear that those images will be sullied as the new century dawns?

Swinburne’s poem employs a rhyme scheme that repeats ABABCCB, or a variation on that form, throughout each stanza, but the scheme becomes more unexpected with each stanza. By the end of the poem, the last stanza is MNMNO, and O has nothing to rhyme with, nothing to appease the uneasiness the reader feels at ending the line abruptly. In this way, Swinburne structures his poem to provide peace and comfort to his readers, yet he makes them uneasy just in undoing that structure without explicitly telling them. The rhyme scheme becomes a hidden source of anxiety.

“Before the Mirror” is about surreptitious emotions, ones that people can hide, making them that much more anxiety producing. The first stanza shows, for want of a less cliché phrase, that things are not what they seem. “White rose in red rose-garden/Is not so white” (lines 1-2). The most innocent image known to society – a white (meaning virginal) rose (meaning love) flower (meaning woman) – “is not so white,” is not as virginal as it appears. It cannot be trusted. Swinburne undoes idyllic images, shattering the safe cage society has locked itself into, showing that we cannot escape inevitable changes. That, I think, is the ultimate fin de siècle anxiety.

The Picture of Dorian Gray can help us understand this phenomenon. Dorian’s chief anxiety is that someone will see his portrait and discover his sinful nature. But maybe the larger cultural anxiety there is that beautiful things can change, that we cannot place faith in their permanence because even objects can prove fallible. Perhaps we cannot rely on anything, and we cannot even trust ourselves to obey the law or remain model citizens. If Dorian starts out as an example of the best in Victorian England’s society (white, male, rich, young, beautiful), and even he becomes severely flawed, how can the rest of society hope to save themselves?

The Picture of Dorian Gray can be interpreted in many ways, but when compared with Swinburne’s “Before the Mirror,” both works seems to feed on the same societal worry that even the structure we rely on can fail us. Swinburne’s poetry is very structured, but even that sometimes changes. Dorian believes objects will prove perfect while humans prove fallible, but his portrait turns against him. Both works expose the fin de siècle anxiety that perhaps the very structure of society, which we rely on for stability as we negotiate other issues, undermines our attempts to salvage the remains of a fleeting moment.

In an incredible coincidence, my roommate asked me to read through Christina Rosetti’s “Goblin Market” with her (in essence, help her analyze it), right after I finished reading John Addington Symonds’ “Love in Dreams.” Immediately I was struck by the similar themes the two shared.

Laura “dreamed of melons, as a traveller sees/False waves in a desert drouth/With shade of leaf-crowned trees,/And burns the thirstier in the sandful breeze” (Rosetti, 8). In a similar fashion, the narrator of Symonds’ poem dreams “A dream so dear, so deep,/All dreams above,/That I still pray to sleep” (lines 13-15).

Both characters dream of temptation, what is forbidden: Laura, the goblins’ fairy fruit; Symonds’ narrator, “the soul of youth” (12) – a young man for him to love. Both poems describe the characters only able to access their desires in their dreams: Laura is rendered unable to hear the goblins and thus unable to attain their fruit in her waking hours; Symonds’ narrator is repressing his desire for young men in his waking hours due to societal pressure and intolerance of homosexuality.

Both poems have a couplet rhyme scheme, creating a soothing, nursery-rhyme-like rhythm. “Goblin Market” is intended as a nursery rhyme, according to Rosetti, and “Love in Dreams” seems to be soothing the reader to sleep as the narrator does.

The rhyme scheme of couplets and the theme of temptation that intersect in these poems interact elsewhere as well: medieval-era plays. The couplet rhyme scheme is attributed to devils within these plays, used as they speak to tempt and torment humanity on stage. Indeed, in Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, the modern devil mocks Iniquity, the medieval demon, for outdated ideas of vice fit for the year 500 (that is, the medieval age) rather than the current year 1616 (I.i.84-86). The 1616 audience would have recognized Iniquity’s medieval speech patterns from other popular medieval plays, such as Mankind. Both poems definitely include major temptations to the characters: goblins tempting Laura in “Goblin Market” and Love tempting the narrator in Symonds’ “Love in Dreams.”

The idea of temptation in dreams is also attributed to Lucifer in the medieval York Plays, tying the two themes together as the two poems do. The idea of humanity as vulnerable while unconscious is embedded deep in our DNA, primal instincts that shape our fears.

Freud would argue that our dreams contain not only fears but also desires – desires so secret and deep that we dare not face them during the day, only accessing them when they slip from the subconscious mind into our dreams. In both Christina Rosetti’s “Goblin Market” and John Addington Symonds’ “Love in Dreams,” both characters Laura and the narrator face deep desires as the subject of both of their dreams. But the real question is whether or not we should we fear these deepest desires appearing in our dreams, and the power they hold over us.

Rosetti, Christina. Goblin Market and Other Poems. Dover Thrift Editions. New York: Dover Publications, 1994. Print.

Ben Jonson. “The Devil is an Ass.” London, 1616. Web. http://www.hollowaypages.com/jonson1692devil.htm

Throughout Wilde’s novel, readers are encouraged by Lord Henry to view Dorian Gray as an interesting mind to be observed and analyzed. Therefore, who better to pull into the psychoanalysis of Dorian than Freud himself. In his speech on Writers and Day-Dreaming, Freud provided an analysis on the act of day-dreaming and fantasies for adults that is useful in understanding Dorian’s relationship with the young and beautiful actress, Sibyl.

Sibyl is nothing more than an idea to Dorian; she is not an actual person of substance in his mind, instead she is a proxy for his own fantasy of immortality. He first noticed her on the stage, and from that moment on she was an ever-changing and malleable idea. She was someone new each night that Dorian went to see her, and he could always return to whichever representation or role that he enjoyed most. “Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?” (Freud, 144). Dorian never understood that there was more to Sibyl than her art because he did not want to. He could continue to love her as her performance, and therefore she could be anything he wanted her to be.

“I have seen her in every age, in every costume. Ordinary women never appeal to one’s imagination. They are limited to their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets… But an actress! Oh how different an actress is! Harry! Why didn’t you tell me that the only thing worth loving is an actress” (Wilde, 51).

Sibyl was never a real person to him, she was only a piece of living, breathing art for him to admire. Dorian’s love for Sibyl stems from these grand romances that have lived for centuries, never losing their beauty and their relevance to society and human emotion, that she portrays on stage. There is the immortality of beauty that Dorian will never possess, and is constantly reminded of through his portrait, and Sibyl has had to carry the torch of that beauty through her performances.

When discussing an orphan’s fantasy for a successful life that centers around a stable family and home, Freud explained:

“In the phantasy, the dreamer has regained what he possessed in his happy childhood – the protecting house, the loving parents and the first objects of his affectionate feelings. You will see this example from the way in which the wish makes use of an occasion in the present to construct, on the pattern of the past, a picture of the future.”

By planting seeds of discontent in Dorian’s mind, and the idea that the most important thing he has is his youth and beauty that comes with it, Lord Henry took away Dorian’s happiness. Lord Henry encouraged Dorian to think about things he wasn’t quite ready for, therefore in idealizing Sibyl, Dorian is regaining the innocence and beauty that was stripped from him. However he is also building his idea of an ideal future, because Sibyl is a symbol of the immortality of beautiful art, therefore he can regain the delusion of his own beauty’s immortality by latching it on to Sibyl’s work.

Basically, Dorian’s passion for his actress stems from the fact that he can not separate her performance from who she is as a person. This then makes me wonder about Freud’s idea of when a child begins to separate play from reality, and therefore as an adult they are able to separate fantasy from reality. Personally, I don’t think Dorian ever learned to separate one from the other, which is how we ended up with this situation.

Objects get almost as much attention in Dorian Gray as people. Whole pages of Chapter XI are devoted to listing Dorian’s various materialist pursuits and passions; we often hear about what a character is wearing or lying down on; the material world is as important to the characters as the social and emotional ones. In fact, objects define the characters: Lord Henry’s cigarettes and expensive clothes display his vanity and opulence, the painting defines Dorian Gray. Objects – and objectification – are so important in Dorian Gray because they define the era, its interactions, and its people.

As Dorian becomes more and more corrupt, he collects more and more things: jewels, tapestries, all sorts of luxurious and expensive things. But the painting is the possession that Dorian values most and from which he can’t bear to be away, and eventually it is the painting that kills him.

In Dorian’s death scene, it is unclear who does the stabbing: whether Dorian stabs himself, the painting stabs Dorian, or Dorian stabs the painting and some metaphysical interaction winds up with the knife in Dorian’s heart. The pictures is Dorian’s possession; he is “in” it in that he possesses it and that his soul is inside it; and when he attempts to kill the possession, he kills himself.

Thinking of Basil Hallward’s murder, Dorian feels no need to confess. “Who would believe him? There was no trace of the murdered man anywhere. Everything belonging to him had been destroyed” (Wilde 211). By destroying both Basil’s body and his possessions, Dorian ensures his utter disappearance; the destruction of the possessions, the things that Basil owns, is more crucial to the death than Basil’s body. Basil’s life is in his possessions as well as his body, and only when both these things are destroyed can he really be dead.

Furthermore, as Dorian’s murderous instincts turn to the painting, he thinks “There was only one bit of evidence left against him. The picture itself – that was evidence. He would destroy it. . . . It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it” (Wilde 212). The painting is a “bit,” a physical thing; Dorian believes it is evidence against himself, despite the fact that no innocent observer would understand its significance having come upon it unawares. Dorian’s knowledge of the painting, his knowledge that it was slowly growing older and uglier, his memories of it which had marred his emotions, has acted as his conscience, reminding him of the evil he has done.

The painting as a material object acted as an emotional or mental part of Dorian’s self: an object has been part of Dorian’s entire identity. When Dorian stabs the picture, he himself is stabbed through the heart, and despite the vagueness of this actual event – how does the knife actually end up in Dorian? – the connection between physical self, intangible soul, and material painting is clear. Dorian’s soul is contained in the painting. When he tries to kill the soul, through the painting, he himself is killed.

The criticism of materialism inherent in this passage is clear: too much of Dorian is in the painting (as Basil Hallward feared too much of himself would go into it), and his attempt to destroy a material object ends in his own death. With this hindsight, all the objects in the book are thrown into a more menacing light; Lord Henry’s cigarettes and clothes, Sybil’s props, all the possessions and objects belonging to various characters throughout the book appear now as manifestations of selves, of identities trapped in material goods. The consumer society of the Victorian Era was dangerous and frighteningly superficial; through the connection between Dorian and his painting, Wilde reveals the worst possible outcome of placing too high a value on objects.

Dorian’s definition by objects is solidified in the last sentence of the novel. “It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was” (Wilde 213). At the last, Dorian’s material possessions – his rings – define his identity, not his appearance or his selfhood. Dorian himself is reduced to the material qualities of the things he owns; at his death, he too is an object, no longer possessed or possessing anything, and unable to be defined or even recognized by anything except the possessions left on his body.

As I’ve been taking this course on Victorian literature, I’ve been studying Medieval texts through the idea of Medieval angels and demons. We’ve followed the development of the representations of these dichotomies through the morality plays, and then through to some early modern plays. In the morality plays, a playwright could actually show on stage the entities of God, Christ, and Satan, just not the actual sacraments. This stemmed out of the idea that, because the actors were all monks for the morality plays, if the sacraments were performed on stage, it wasn’t so much an act or show anymore, it could be considered the real deal. Past the Reformation, though, as drama evolved, and societal ideals changed, plays couldn’t have God, Angels, Demons, or Christ on stage. Charles Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus was one of the last of these plays that could do this, and the shift can be seen with Shakespeare’s plays. Because these entities couldn’t show up on stage any more, playwrights had to get a little more creative, and had to start representing these same ideas, just through the characters on stage. So no longer were there characters like Mephistopheles, but you could start to see angelic characters, like Desdemona, and demonic characters, like Iago.

Because of these readings, I have had a bit of a difficult time looking at the Victorian text, The Picture of Dorian Gray, without a sort of bias. In the beginning of the book, it starts with a beautiful garden, and a painter creating a work of art. This immediately harkened to the imagery of the garden of eden, and the creation of man. Basil, the painter, begins to talk about how he has “put too much of [himself] into it,” for him to be able to part with the painting, which just made me think of the idea of how in the Bible, God created man in his image. For the two men, Basil Hallward, the painter, and Lord Henry Wotton, the onlooker, to then go and argue in the beautiful garden, about this creation of an image of a man, really just solidified that imagery. In addition to this, Lord Henry continues to put down the church, and talk about vanity, and pride in one’s own image, not in any virtues. Lord Henry continues to make these seemingly outrageous claims, such as that he “like[s] persons better than principles, and [he] like[s] persons with no principles better than anything else in the world,” (Wilde, 12). Basil continues speaking the praises of Dorian, and continues to insist that he “[doesn’t] agree with a single word that you have said, and what is more, Harry, I feel sure you don’t either,” (Wilde, 12).

In his role of creation of an image of man, and insistence in the good of both this man, and in Lord Henry, I can’t help but see Basil Hallward take on a god like role in this text. He continues to try and stand by Dorian’s side, even as Dorian seems to fall from Basil’s grace, and listen more to Lord Henry. Lord Henry Wotton, on the other hand, keeps on tempting Dorian, and talking him into his shallow and materialistic way of thinking. Lord Henry seems to corrupt Dorian, just as the devil would have tempted and corrupted mankind, in the tradition of the morality plays from Medieval literature.

Something that really stood out to me while reading The Picture of Dorian Gray was the curious figure of Sibyl Vane, who appears only shortly as Dorian’s “great love,” but who just as quickly disappears when she commits suicide. After Sibyl performs badly in the play, Dorian immediately loses all love for her: “He flung himself down on the sofa, and turned away his face. ‘You have killed my love,’ he muttered.” (84) What is it that triggers such an immediate response of disgust in Dorian?

In the introduction found in the Penguin Classics edition of the novel, Robert Mighall addresses this curious relationship between Dorian and Sibyl, analyzing the significance of Sibyl as an actress. According to Mighall, Sibyl is an artificial character in the novel – in a sense, she is an actress not only in the story, but also in the novel itself. She is “living in a fairy-tale world,” in which Dorian becomes her real-life “Prince Charming,” and her sole existence occurs on the stage (xxvi):

“‘To-night she is Imogen,’ [Dorian] answered, ‘and to-morrow night she will be Juliet.’

‘When is she Sibyl Vane?’

‘Never.'” (54)

Dorian is “in love with Sibyl’s acting rather than the women herself.” (xxv) For Dorian, Sibyl is an archetype of art – therefore, Dorian’s love of Sibyl is not an emotional love, but an aesthetic love, which can be connected to the theme of Aestheticism that runs throughout the entire novel. According to Aestheticism, ethics and aesthetics are distinct from each other and can’t coexist. This can be seen when Sibyl acts in “Romeo and Juliet” just before she commits suicide – she weaves her love for Dorian into her role of Juliet, intermingling reality with art:

“(…) Dorian, before I met you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. (…) The painted scenes were my world. (…) You came – oh, my beautiful love! – and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is.” (84)

Sibyl’s failure to act well when introduced to reality, as well as her suicide immediately after, are a testament to the Aesthetic notion that art and ethics are opposites, and that “art is destroyed by life and morality, and that ethics and aesthetics belong to separate spheres of thought and judgment.” (xxvii) One could extend this theory of the separation between ethics and aesthetics to the portrait of Dorian Gray – in “real life,” Dorian is an aesthetic version of himself, a handsome man whose beauty remains intact forever, while the portrait is a moral version of himself, a face that becomes more and more corrupted with every sinful act he does. In an interesting reversal, Dorian becomes the “art,” while the portrait becomes the ethical and moral judgment.