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The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, by Kate Flint; pp. xvi + 427. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, L45.00, $75.00.
Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850-1900, by Deborah Cherry; pp. xvii + 268. London and New York: Routledge, 2000, L48.00, L14.99 paper, $90.00, $23.95 paper.
Although different in content and methodologies, both of these landmark books are the products of wondrously synthetic research and intelligence, and Victorianists in several interdisciplinary fields will learn a great deal from each.
Kate Flint centers her arguments on the deliberately ironic blind spot of Victorian writings about the visual. She postulates that the Victorians' panoptic society represented a means of control, making the invisible more visible and coping with the vast increase in stimuli occasioned by inventions like the camera and the stereoscope. In a dazzling array of ideas about seeing, specularity, and spectatorship, she displays her own acute panoptic awareness with wide-ranging examples of the technology of vision, such as hot-air balloon surveillance, photography, and magic lanterns.
Chapter 2 provides a highly original examination of the paradoxical nature of dust as a carrier of disease, scientific property, and symbol of class distinctions, among other meanings. Flint is far from making the proverbial mountain out of a molehill-or dusty accretion-and offers an astonishing lineup of dust-generating meanings, from the scientific (stardust), to the aesthetic (arsenic in some green-colored wallpapers) and the social (colonial bacterial dust in India).
In Chapter 3, "Blindness and Insight," Flint's exegesis of John Everett Millais's Blind Girt (1854-56) probes hitherto unmined layers of the protagonist as a blessed Virgin type, an embodiment of inner vision, and a trope of feminine helplessness and society's spiritual blindness. Chapters 4 and 5 are more literary. "Lifting the Veil" is a foray into the realm of medical invasion of the female body. "Under the Ice" reveals how the Victorian imagination tried to comprehend a glacier's ironically huge unseen identity, often represented as a monster, womb symbol, or cave. Flint is never on thin ice in her solid insights about John Brett's Glacier of Rosenlaui (1856)...