Art, Race, and Fantastic Color Change in the Victorian Novel

159 Pages·2018·1.368 MB·English

by  Jessica Durgan

Art, Race, and Fantastic Color
Change in the Victorian Novel
As a study of color in the Victorian novel, this volume notices and an-
alyzes a peculiar literary phenomenon in which Victorian authors who
were also trained as artists dream up fantastically colored characters for
their fiction. These strange and eccentric characters include the purple
madwoman Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), the
blue gentleman Oscar Dubourg from Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch
(1872), the red peddler Diggory Venn in Thomas Hardy’s The Return
of the Native (1878), and the little yellow girls of Arthur Conan Doyle’s
“The Yellow Face” (1893) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret
Garden (1911). While color has been historically viewed as suspicious
and seductive in Western culture, the Victorian period constitutes a sig-
nificant moment in the history of color: the rapid development of new
color technologies and the upheavals of the first avant-garde art move-
ments result in an increase in coloring’s prestige in the art academies.
At the same time, race science appropriates color, using it as a criterion
for classification in the establishment of global racial hierarchies. These
artist-authors draw on color’s traditional association with constructions
of otherness to consider questions of identity and difference through the
imaginative possibilities of color.
Jessica Durgan is Associate Professor of English at Bemidji State Univer-
sity, where she teaches courses in British literature and film studies. Her
work has previously appeared in journals such as Victorian Literature
and Culture and Persuasions Online as well as in the book collections
Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consum-
erism to Celebrity Culture and The Victorian Era in Twenty-First Cen-
tury Children’s and Adolescence Literature and Culture.
Among the Victorians and Modernists
Edited by Dennis Denisoff
This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature, art,
and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social, tech-
nological, and scientific innovations that arose among the Victorians and
Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited to, artistic and
cultural debates and movements; influential figures and communities;
and agitations and developments regarding subjects such as animals,
commodification, decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire, ecology,
gender, nationalism, the paranormal, performance, public art, sex,
socialism, spiritualities, transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that
address continuities between the Victorians and Modernists are wel-
come. Work on recent responses to the periods such as Neo-Victorian
novels, graphic novels, and film will also be considered.
9 Testing New Opinions and Courting New Impressions
New Perspectives on Walter Pater
Edited by Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada, Martine Lambert-
Charbonnier and Charlotte Riberyrol
10 Edwardian Culture
Beyond the Garden Party
Samuel Shaw, Sarah Shaw and Naomi Carle
11 The Female Fantastic
Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s
Edited by Elizabeth McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, and
Rebecca Soares
12 Art, Race, and Fantastic Color Change in the Victorian Novel
Jessica Durgan
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.
routledge.com/Among-the-Victorians-and-Modernists/book-series/
ASHSER4035
Art, Race, and Fantastic
Color Change in the
Victorian Novel
Jessica Durgan
First published 2019
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Jessica Durgan to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Durgan, Jessica, author.
Title: Art, race, and fantastic color change in the Victorian
novel / Jessica Durgan.
Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. | Series: Among
the Victorians and modernists; 12 | Includes bibliographical
references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018045376 (print) |
LCCN 2018053353 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: English fiction—19th century—History
and criticism. | Symbolism of colors in literature. | Literature
and society—Great Britain—History—19th century. | Other
(Philosophy) in literature.
Classification: LCC PR878.R34 (ebook) | LCC PR878.R34 D87
2019 (print) | DDC 823/.809—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045376
ISBN: 978-0-367-13894-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-02907-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
To all my family, friends, and colleagues who have helped
make this book possible.

Contents
List of Figures ix
Introduction 1
1 Purple: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre 18
2 Blue: Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch 47
3 Red: Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native 70
4 Yellow: Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Yellow Face”
and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden 99
Conclusion 133
Index 143

List of Figures
I.1 Caricature of Delacroix and Ingres Dueling in front of
the Institut de France. French School,
c. 1828. Courtesy of Bridgeman Art Library 7