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A contribution to: Scrutinizing Beauty

Edited by Eleanor Dobson and Daisy Gudmunsen

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 12

Modern Humanities Research Association

open

Abstract.  The art and aesthetics of the Victorian period are often interpreted through lay culture as representing unproblematic ideals of beauty. The acceptance of certain axiomatic conceits influences literary interpretation within the academy too. In Dickens’s final published novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), the young cripple, Jenny Wren, conveys two transcendental experiences: being borne aloft by her ‘blessed children’ when in pain, and smelling ‘miles of flowers’ whilst working in the porch of her dingy city lodging. These have been read by critics as evocations of comfort and escape, linked to a beneficent Christian ethos. I challenge these readings as a way of positing that Dickens himself wanted to suggest something commensurate to the greatest extent of pain or suffering, when physiological register can segue into the hallucinatory. I look closely at the imagery and language that Dickens uses to articulate Jenny’s conceits to realize the aesthetic mechanics and to ask whether these can be judged as beautiful, celestial, or if there is a greater complexity at play. I invite suggestion as to a similar reappraisal of our canonical acceptance of dreamy beauty in late Pre-Raphaelite art, where the effect of satiety might trigger uncomfortable as opposed to purely appreciative feelings. The purpose of my essay is to interrogate our staple ideas of beauty in Victorian culture. On a broader level this might premise a critique of a still prevailing stereotype that Victorian beauty is commensurate to inanity, tweeness, or even lack of intelligence.

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