Romantics at the Tate

Whilst in London, I went to Tate Britain to see their exhibition on the Romantics. The exhibition blurb claims that it ‘presents Romantic art in Britain, its origins, inspirations and legacies’, and I think it does this well. It’s in the Clore Gallery, where the Turners live, so it’s quite heavy on the Turner. The first room of the exhibition takes six aspects of Romanticism as a broader movement, and illustrates them with appropriate pictures. These aspects are Hopes and Fears, relating to European unrest, for example, and illustrated by some biblical and classical-subject paintings; The Artist’s Life, looking at the myth of the Romantic writer or artist as hero, such as Blake or Constable. The isolation in Turner’s images of ‘Interior of a Prison’, and Blake’s ‘A Vision’ promulgate this vision of the solitary heroic creative genius. The section on Word and Image looks at illustrations, especially Turner’s, though I was disappointed not to see some Blake in this section. Near and Far looks at geographic images, from the Lakes to Italy, while Past, Present, Future sees writers and artists as ‘time-travellers, prophets and moralists’ in which the myth of Albion is central. Finally, Seeing Nature anticipates Pre-Raphaelitism in its interest in the details of the natural world. In this section, Francis Danby’s ‘Romantic Woodland’ seems to sum up a Gothic approach to nature – brooding, remote but slightly threatening; beautiful.

The rest of the exhibition is an ‘imaginary’ Romantics exhibition, featuring paintings which were exhibited and/or popular during the period of Romanticism. It includes a room of early Turner and a room of late Turner; Constable and his contemporaries; Blake (of course); and a collection of more general pictures which give a wonderful feel for Romantic images. Of course this includes Wallis’s Chatterton, which appears on the poster (see above), as well as Etty, Wilkie, Eastlake, Landseer and many more. There are also several paintings by Richard Dadd, including his most famous, ‘The Fairy-Feller’s Master Stroke’.

I was particularly struck by Constable’s ‘Sketch for “Hadleigh Castle”‘ (right), which seems, in its gloomy, desolate landscape with ruins and no glimpse of hope, to depict a very Romantic state of mind, closely linked to the Gothic. In fact Constable did this sketch after the death of his wife, so probably was in a rather gloomy state of mind.

So much is made of Romanticism as a literary phenomenon (and rightly so), but less, as far as I know, is made of it as a wider state of mind which affected art as well. This exhibition provides wonderful context, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. It’s on until July, and it’s free, so do go!

Collectors 2: Horace Walpole

The Victoria and Albert Museum is currently hosting the first ever exhibition on the eighteenth-century writer and collector Horace Walpole, whose collections were housed at Strawberry Hill, an eccentric manor house in Twickenham which, after major restoration work, will open to the public in the Autumn. The V&A’s exhibition, Walpole and Strawberry Hill, features items from the house, which display the eccentricities of Walpole himself, and the extent to which the house befitted the man who created the Gothic literary genre with his first novel, The Castle of Otranto, in 1764.

The first object I saw in the exhibition was an “official” portrait of him by Reynolds, which sets the tone for the man himself, wanting to be seen as a gentleman of taste, a scholar, a historian, and indeed something like a (respectable) Gothic hero. It is difficult not to look at the objects in the exhibition as comments on Walpole, his eclectic taste and his clearly unusual behaviour. For example, he enjoyed objects with Royal connections, and thus greeted visitors to Strawberry Hill (on the occasions when he was not hiding from them) wearing gloves reputed to have belonged to James I, topped with a wooden cravat carved by Grinling Gibbons. He also owned a non-reflective mirror that belonged to Dr Dee, used for seeing Satan, apparently, and a lock of Mary Tudor’s hair.

The house itself is conjured in pictures and in the construction of the exhibition, which feels as though one  is walking through rooms. The feeling of “gloomth”, as Walpole described it, is evident here, and, as Christopher Frayling recently said on BBC Radio 3′s Nightwaves, this exhibition makes one realise that it is “about more than the anecdote of the house”; the collection, and the diverse nature of it, says a lot about material culture of the period as well as about the idea of “shopping-list Gothic” (in which a novel can be said to be Gothic if it contains certain items such as candlesticks, old coffers, a monk, etc). Yet Walpole’s was not the collecting of a connoisseur, but rather that of someone who was compulsive, and ended up with a collection so obscure and diverse that it somehow hangs together very well.

Frayling also suggests that the Gothic chairs which Walpole had made, intended to look old, are perhaps the most important thing in the exhibition, startinig as they did a major revival of neo-medieval furniture. It’s impossible not to be fascinated by the exhibition, but it didn’t quite satisfy my interest; I shall be lining up to see Strawberry Hill when it re-opens.

The Little Stranger

Sarah Waters’ latest novel, The Little Stranger, is a considerable departure from her earlier novels, and in its simplified structure (compared to The Night Watch, for example) and its fast-moving but considered prose, it feels like a more mature work. The plot is deceptively straightforward: set in 1947, a crumbling stately home is haunted, and the family doctor becomes increasingly involved with the mother, son and daughter who live there as he tries to decipher whether there is really a ghost, or a form of delusion. Waters tells the story in a mostly sombre tone; her descriptions are remarkably evocative and detailed, although there is nothing fanciful about her prose; the (male) doctor narrates, and does so in a matter-of-fact tone which makes the events of the book appear all the more chilling. 

The novel is, in fact, remarkably Victorian in style, which is perhaps appropriate as it is a novel which is, as ghost stories always are, about the past returning to haunt the living. In its linear tale, its concentration on the domestic home, the characters’ concern with traditional values, and in its measured prose-style, this appears to be a somewhat traditional, even old-fashioned, ghost story.

However, it is much more than that. The “ghost” or “little stranger” is, it seems, more likely to be a poltergeist, a projection of the unhappiness of one of the characters – if it has not been simply imagined by the family. As the events unfold, Waters ensures that the reader is kept guessing whilst providing enough information to draw one in, and become sufficiently involved to be genuine spine-chilled. Moreover, there are layers and possible interpretations to this novel which give it depth: for example, the class-tension between the gentry, the doctor and the people of the village is carefully explored, and may, one suspects, be a possible cause of the psychic disturbances. The house itself, so Gothic in its crumbling state, represents the beleaguered state of the aristocracy after the wars, and also the crumbling family, struggling to keep going but mentally cracking under the strain. The concluding chapter opens up a different interpretation as to the source of the ghost; it is a novel which makes one think.

Waters has clearly done some considerable research into this novel, and it presents an utterly convincing tale which contrasts the dark and the light of human characters against a grand and terrible sweep of British history.

Research proposals

At the moment, I’m going through the infamous mid-Ph.D. slump, when I’d rather do pretty much anything (including marking GCSE papers, and, apparently, updating my blog) than actually get on with my thesis. However, this is what my thesis is supposedly about:

Thesis title: Christina Rossetti and the Influence of Gothic
Director of Studies: Professor Fiona Robertson
My original title was “Representations of Pre-Raphaelitism in Criticism and Fiction”, and I proposed to examine the myth-making process instigated by the Brotherhood themselves, and subsequently perpetuated by their biographers, who were often related to members of the group or had axes to grind. It became apparent early on in my research that such a study would not be manageable in the context of a Ph.D. Having reviewed recent secondary literature in the field of Pre-Raphaelite studies and the Rossettis, I concluded that there is increasing critical interest in Christina Rossetti’s poetry, but that existing scholarship neglects the important influence of Tractarianism and Gothic literature on her work, and tends to ignore her both her early poems and also her later explicitly devotional poems. I thus decided to make Christina Rossetti the main focus of my research, since this is an area which touches on several developing trends in nineteenth-century studies, such as the increased attention paid to Victorian women poets and the “poetess tradition” since the mid-1990s, and the associated revival of interest in nineteenth-century religious culture, within which women played a central role.
Further research into Rossetti’s poetry from her early poems, often dismissed as juvenilia, which refer to her reading of the Gothic novels of C R Maturin, and the apocalyptic prose of her last years, suggest a Gothic sensibility. Few critics have examined her early engagement with the Gothic, notably through the works of Maturin and Ann Radcliffe, and also through ‘The Vampyre’, a tale written by her uncle, John Polidari. Both her poetics and her subjects reflect this interest in Gothic literature, and my research will cover much new ground by considering Rossetti’s poetry in terms of the Gothic, and exploring her use of the tropes of Gothic, such as fallen women, doubles and spectres.
My planned chapters are:
Christina Rossetti and Gothic Literature (Introduction and literature review)
The Maturin poems and the early influence of Gothic
‘Goblin Market’ and its multiple interpretations
Spectres and spectrality
Gothic and Rossetti’s devotional poems and prose
Gothic, Sing Song and children’s literature

Gothic Landscapes

Hockney On Turner, Tate Britain, 11 June 2007 – 3 February 2008
I’m happy to admit that I don’t know as much as I should about Turner (or Hockney, for that matter, though I love his trees – see Bigger Trees Near Water, right). Turner’s affinity for wild landscapes seems to be the focus of this exhibition, displayed through sketches and watercolours to the more finished-looking oils for which he is most famous. What had not really occurred to me before, though, is that Turner paints the landscapes of which the Gothic writers write. I am at the moment programmed to find the Gothic in everything, and the Gothic landscape is at the forefront of my mind – critics see it as the representation of the inner eye, a depiction of the mind, as well as indicative of the heights the hero/ine needs to scale to succeed. Yet it is these heights which help the protagonist to achieve the sublime, that state where they are stronger than their opponents and see the world’s frailty for what it is. When Turner paints St Gotthard, for example, and Snowdon Valley, the craggy splendour both terrifies and uplifts (if you are in a Gothic frame of mind like me) and his Gothic eye seems to me to be painting the indistinct period of overlap between the Romantics and the Victorians. Consider the towering, bleak landscape of St Gotthard (below), and compare it to this extract from The Mysteries of Udolpho:
“At length, the travellers began to ascend among the Apennines. The immense pine-forests, which, at that period, overhung these mountains, and between which the road wound, excluded all view but of the cliffs aspiring above, except, that, now and then, an opening through the dark woods allowed the eye a momentary glimpse of the country below. The gloom of these shades, their solitary silence, except when the breeze swept over their summits, the tremendous precipices of the mountains, that came partially to the eye, each assisted to raise the solemnity of Emily’s feelings into awe; she saw only images of gloomy grandeur, or of dreadful sublimity, around her; other images, equally gloomy and equally terrible, gleamed on her imagination.”
Of course, for the Gothic writers the landscape can depict the awe we feel at the creation of the world, and combine it with the terror of the unknown which lies within it. The natural landscape, with no sign of human occupation, spoke to the readers of Gothic romances as the work of God; and yet Gothic horror is very much the work of mankind, with the bad things that happen being rarely actually supernatural but machinations of the scheming world. Those paintings here which cover manmade scenes (Interior of a Prison, left, for example) still display a towering strength in which a carefully-constructed edifice encloses the space and traps the viewer (particularly when the interior is empty of human figures – it is designed to enclose or confine something other than empty space, so if there’s no-one there then it is you that it encloses). This is of course particularly reinforced when the structure is a prison.
Even in the freshness of his mid-period, his watercolour washes with their pastel colours and intense immediacy, with the brush-strokes apparent, there is a lurking threat of gathering storm clouds: this seems to be the pastoral image of the start of a Gothic novel, where all seems tranquil but the reader knows that something must threaten the happiness of the as yet undeveloped characters. Gothic has strong overtones of temptation and fall, and as such Milton is considered to be a great influence on writers of Gothic, so perhaps the apotheosis of the Gothic that I saw here is in The Temptation on the Pinnacle, which illustrates Milton, though the illustrations for Scott’s Poetical Works come close, depicting the untamed Scottish scenery of which Scott was a masterful illustrator in words.