Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender, and Romanticism

249 Pages·1998·26.422 MB·English

by  Jacqueline M. Labbe

ROMANTIC VISUALITIES

Romantic Visualities
Landscape, Gender and Romanticism
Jacqueline M. Labbe
flfl
First published in Great Britain 1998 by
ft MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-333-71449-0
First published in the United States of America 1998 by
AS
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 0-312-21221-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Labbe, Jacqueline M., 1965-
Romantic visualities : landscape, gender, and romanticism /
Jacqueline M. Labbe.
p. cm.
Based on the author's thesis (Ph. D, University of Pennsylvania).
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-312-21221-6
1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism.
2. Landscape in literature. 3. Masculinity (Psychology) in
literature. 4. Femininity (Psychology) in literature. 5. Visual
perception in literature. 6. Authorship—Sex differences.
7. Romanticism—Great Britain. 8. Sex role in literature.
9. Picturesque, The. 10. Sublime, The. I. Title.
PR468.L35L33 1997
820.9'32—<lc21 97-31887
CIP
© Jacqueline M. Labbe 1998
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made
without written permission.
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written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and
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Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and
sustained forest sources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire
Contents
List of Plates vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction ix
1 Engendering Landscape Perception: Romanticism 1
and the Standards for Looking
2 Masculinity, the Sublime, the Picturesque: 36
the Allure of Theory
3 Cultivating One's Understanding: the Garden and 66
the Bower
4 'A species of knowledge both useful and 113
ornamental7: Travelling the Romantic Landscape
5 Art, the Eye, and the Natural Text 149
Conclusion 185
Notes 187
Bibliography 207
Index 219
List of Plates
The source for all the plates is Ruth Hayden, Mrs Delany and her
Flower Collages (British Museum Press, 1992)
1. Broad-Crested Cockatoo
2. Fire-Backed Pheasant of Java
3. Aescalus Hippocastanum (Horse Chestnut)
4. Rosa Gallica var. Blush Rose
5. A sample of Mrs Delany's embroidery: the hem of her court
dress
VI
Acknowledgements
In the beginning this book was my PhD dissertation, and thus its
roots extend back through countries and cities to Philadelphia.
There, the supervision of two people ensured that what I produced
was historically and theoretically complete - or as much so as a new
PhD could make it. My deep gratitude and appreciation therefore
goes out to Stuart Curran and Marjorie Levinson for their careful
and constructive input; the first form this book took was undoubt
edly stronger, more inclusive, and more thoughtful as a result of
their generous criticism. Warmest thanks also go to Nina Auerbach
for her support and the inspiration offered by her scholarship. I
must also thank the University of Pennsylvania itself for its finan
cial support during my graduate study there.
Parts of Chapter 3 appeared in Women's Writing 4 (1997) and are
reprinted by permission of Triangle Press. Parts of Chapter 5 will
appear in British Poetry 1744-1798, ed. Tom Woodman, and are
reprinted by permission of Macmillan Press.
As I have moved from Philadelphia, to London, to Chicago, and
back to the UK to Sheffield, the landscape of this book has taken on
different forms and been viewed by different eyes. Although the
friends from Penn are now scattered far and wide, the community
we created there and the memories it has engendered claim my
warmest thoughts: Frederick De Naples, Josh Bellin and Chris
Saitz, and Laura Renick-Buterra help make up the bedrock of my
work. Invaluable support has also been offered by Clare Brant,
Matthew Campbell and Valerie Cotter, Emma Clery, Juliet John,
Robert Miles, Duco van Oostrum, Sue Owen, David Punter,
Dominic Rainsford, Sally Shuttleworth, Judy Simons, and Ashley
Tauchert. Finally, to my family: Jim and Carolyn, Colleen, James,
and Elizabeth - although distant, you people the landscape of my
heart.
J.L.
Sheffield 1997
vn

Introduction
What is the prospect view? What does it mean? As a literary trope,
it is familiar to readers of eighteenth-century literature as the most
common vantage-point from which one may compose or order the
elements of a loco-descriptive poem, but its significance goes
beyond imagery. This book explores the resonances of the prospect
view and its concomitants: disinterestedness, reason, and the
ability to abstract, and situates this point of view as distinctly
gendered, as, in fact, one of the defining characteristics of masculin
ity. Early in the century, Addison valorized 'wide and
undetermined Prospects ... [as] pleasing to the Fancy, as the
Speculation of Eternity or Infinitude are to the Understanding'
over 'Restraint', elaborating that the 'Mind of Man ... is apt to fancy
it self under a sort of Confinement, when the Sight is pent up in a
narrow Compass, and shortened on every side by the
Neighborhood of Walls or Mountains'.1 As this project will show, in
the eighteenth century the mind of a man 'should' resent such
confinement, but the body, and vision, of a woman 'should'
welcome it as her natural environment. The language of the
prospect saturates the eighteenth century and achieves a particular
kind of prominence during the Romantic period, approximately
1770-1835, when it becomes entangled in the sundry movements of
a literature today increasingly seen to be fractured, diverse and infi
nitely various. The prospect view finds its complement in that very
variety and, as Naomi Schor has shown, variety and its concomi
tants, interest, the detail, a perceived inability to reason, are also
distinctly gendered, defining and representing femininity.2 In this
way, even as the female should welcome or at the least accept the
confinement so irksome to the 'Mind of Man', so too that confine
ment is deemed necessary both to keep her under control and
convince her of her need for confinement. In this book, I discuss the
literary and critical movements that endorse, further, or undermine
the gendered dichotomy based on a culturally constructed differ
ence in perception - in visuality.
IX