Ekphrasis and Realism: The Representation of the Visual Arts in Victorian Literature, 1850-1900

Abstract

The visual arts featured prominently across Victorian realist texts, and ekphrasis–the verbal representation of a visual representation–places visuality at a central and productive position in these texts. This thesis seeks to explain how Victorian writers use ekphrasis in distinctive ways to navigate visions in realistic representations and to articulate their literary realisms.

The introductory chapter employs visual, gender and cross-cultural theories to explore how ekphrasis is important to writers as they present their realist aesthetics. In chapters one and two, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and George Eliot’s Adam Bede both express appreciation for Dutch painting about ordinary people against conventional female images of fallen women or angels in the house. In chapters three and four, Pre-Raphaelitism is considered to examine Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ekphrastic poems and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Their ekphrases of female portraits form a dialogue with women writers’ responses and landscape representations, revealing how writers filter the perceptions of gender norms to build their own interpretations of reality. Chapter five links Oscar Wilde’s representations of Oriental art objects to male portraits in The Picture of Dorian Gray, where material culture and masculine desire are considered to explore how Wilde combines aestheticism and realism to forge an idealized realism. The study concludes with W. B. Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” to trace a continuity in literary debates about art and life beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth century.

Although Brontë, Eliot, Rossetti, Hardy, and Wilde may express different realisms, they have a similar strategy, employing ekphrasis to awaken subjective vision. Ekphrasis unites their understandings of subject and object as well as internality and external realities in articulating literary realism, interpreting social realities regarding identity and gender questions in the nineteenth century. In this way, the visual arts in these Victorian texts are represented and perceived both as objects and as consciousness, which anticipates the twentieth-century movement of phenomenology.