Scrutinizing Beauty
Eleanor Dobson, Daisy Gudmunsen
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Crooked Antics: The Visions of Jenny Wren in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend
Tamsin Evernden
doi:10.59860/wph.a697a3a

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.

Elegance Beyond the Boundaries: The Russian Fashion Publication Modnyi magazin and the Concept of an ‘Elegant Woman’
Maria Alesina
doi:10.59860/wph.a6b2c41

How did elegance, from being a privilege of aristocracy, acquire inclusive meaning across socially and culturally diverse contexts? Furthermore, as a form of beauty, what impact did it have on broader socio-cultural developments, and by which means? The concept of elegance was popularized in the nineteenth century through fashion magazines, whose commercial purpose and transnational character determined the way it was shaped and diffused. Simultaneously, since one of the periodical press’s functions is to provide readers with the sense of belonging to a particular group, fashion magazines’ emphasis on elegance entailed the development of imagined communities symbolically related to this concept. By referring to the Russian fashion periodical Modnyi magazin (1862–83), I present, firstly, how commercialization and transnationalization of the fashion press became the driving factors for the elaboration of the inclusive notion of elegance as related to Parisian fashion but not limited to it. Secondly, I demonstrate how this editorial concept influenced readers’ social habitus and helped to shape new forms of social affiliation beyond class-related and national borders.

Beauty, the Artist and the Scientist: Aesthetic Education in Zola’s Le Docteur Pascal
Tuo Liu
doi:10.59860/wph.a7c2088

This paper investigates the role of beauty in the last work of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels, Le Docteur Pascal. As a writer, Zola professed an interest in representing the truth in all its forms, which includes subjects previously perceived as unworthy of representation, such as the lowly and the ugly. Zola also claimed to be inspired by the scientific method, as he believed that the writer should adopt the observing gaze of the experimenter. I show how Le Docteur Pascal allows for a more nuanced understanding of Zola’s naturalist project. Through the character of Clotilde, Zola integrates beauty into his worldview, as the scientist Pascal receives an aesthetic education. Though this education is not without dangers, beauty ultimately serves an ethical function alongside science and progress, and Zola acknowledges the limits of an exclusively detached scientific gaze.

The Pursuit of Beauty in Late-Victorian Illustration
Mariana Oliveira Pires
doi:10.59860/wph.a8d146b

In late-nineteenth-century Britain, the Arts and Crafts Move­ment’s aspiration to the symbolic, often spiritual potential more traditionally associated with the finer arts of painting and sculpture blossomed in a vibrant and fruitful praise of ornament, technique, and design. In the context of a fast-developing material culture, the aesthete’s worship of beauty and cult of form reverberated through a perplexing world of urban modernity obsessed with surface decoration, images of floral-carpeted rooms, and highly ornate, heavily gilt publishers’ bindings. The leading artistic principle of the time was a prime commitment to the ‘sense of the beautiful’, and the motivation to produce both useful and visually appealing objects lay at the heart of one commercially and artistically thriving enterprise: book illustration. From William Morris and Walter Crane, to Walter Pater and Aubrey Beardsley, this paper considers the place of book illustration in the broader context of the artistic revival of fin-de-siècle surface decoration practices and the aesthetic and design theories that fuelled them.

‘Some terrible wind-tortured place’: Beauty, Imagism and the Littoral in H.D.’s Sea Garden
Elizabeth O’Connor
doi:10.59860/wph.a057232

This essay explores notions of beauty in the first collection of the modernist poet H.D. (1886–1961), focussing specifically on seashore imagery and how this is used to de- and re-construct notions of beauty and poetic value. Sea Garden, published in 1916, traverses a coastal landscape and documents both its physical features and its unseen meanings. Wildflowers, rock formations, shellfish, and woodlands are placed alongside Hellenic nymphs and spirits, the footprints of past and present human dwellings, and the aesthetic eye of the poet. This collection propelled H.D. to literary acclaim by aligning her work with Imagism, an aesthetic movement defined by poet Ezra Pound that emphasized clarity and directness in verse. H.D.’s involvement with the movement is clear in her depiction of the landscape; portraits of wildflowers are rendered with almost scientific precision, whilst the physicality of the coastal vista is deconstructed into the immediate physical qualities of sand, saltwater, waves, and air. Ecological reality and a detailed eye for natural forms are used as vehicles to explore and define this Imagist aesthetic. Yet this collection, and indeed H.D. as a poet, consistently evades definition. In the same way that a shoreline is and is not land, is and is not sea, H.D. establishes dualisms in her verse that are constantly interrogated and questioned. The separations between human and natural, male and female, named and unknown, beauty and ugliness are found arbitrary and constricting in their separation, and new forms of beauty and poetic legitimacy located in the space between them. This essay traces the significance of the physical shore landscape in H.D.’s experiments with Imagism and the early formation of her poetic voice.

Nietzschean Allegory: The Perversion of Apollonian and Dionysian Beauty in No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood
Tom Cobb
doi:10.59860/wph.a166291

In his 1872 book The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argues that beauty emerges from the combination of the ‘Apollonian’, which derives from the Greek god of wisdom, and the ‘Dionysian’, a force personified by the Greek god of chaos and religious ecstasy. This article explores an allegorical interpretation of Nietzsche’s dichotomy in two 2007 Westerns and literary adaptations, No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood. Drawing on political readings of these films and on the history of Apollonian and Dionysian allegory, I postulate that these animi frame the ideological conflicts of post-9/11 America, supplanting the exultation of Nietzsche’s original ideal of beauty with dysphoria. The article first considers Douglas Kellner’s analysis, which champions both pictures for their allegorical and philosophical properties. It then delineates Nietzsche’s understanding of the Apollonian and Dionysian. It subsequently applies these phenomena to No Country for Old Men and its representation of an America plagued by sectarian violence and denuded of authority. I follow the evocation of this declinist subtext with an analysis of There Will be Blood, where I argue that the Apollonian and Dionysian serve to satirize the Bush administration’s state of imperial overstretch and fracturing electoral coalition.

Psychopath Aesthetics: The Example of the Cannibal
Dominique Gracia
doi:10.59860/wph.a2756d8

Serious crime is often aestheticized on television through the female (or feminized) body of the victim. Forced to reveal themselves as objects for interrogation, dissection, and examination, these bodies are presented for our consumption. Here, I ask whether such consumed objects can be classed as beautiful in a Kantian sense by turning to a particular case of what I call psychopath aesthetics: those of the notorious fictional cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, in Hannibal on NBC (2013–15). Hannibal’s central anthropophagy compounds the synaesthetic association between beautiful murders and delicious deaths, aesthetics and taste. Whilst the horrific and taboo nature of Hannibal’s crimes might seem to preclude any Kantian approach to beauty, I explore how his acting out of his psychopath morality in accordance with a psychopath aesthetics is grounded in Kantian hope and judgments of taste.