The Descriptive Aesthetic: British Aestheticism and the Realist Novel in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes detailed description in nineteenth-century realist novels, revealing that this distinctive mode often relies on techniques typically associated with British aestheticism: including symbolism, atmosphere, and luxuriant detail or “purple prose.” By reading canonically realist novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy alongside canonically aestheticist texts by John Ruskin, Arthur Symons, Vernon Lee, and others, I aim to break up the critical consensus around realist description as an essentially verisimilar device. I argue that, paradoxically, realist description teaches the reader to aestheticize reality in order to fully grasp its plenitude, connectedness, and meaning. While scholars often frame realism and aestheticism as antithetical literary modes, their surprisingly aligned descriptive practices reveal significant ethical-aesthetic overlaps.

While my principal intervention is in Victorian realism studies, I also engage in broader transhistorical conversations about description. Novelistic description has often been treated as alternately trivial and threatening: a mechanical proliferation of detail that risks boring the reader, or worse, distracting them from more important textual information (typically conceived as plot or character). The kinds of extended and aesthetically marked description this dissertation emphasizes can seem especially disruptive within the larger structure of a novel, liable to being excerpted or skipped in recognition of their apparent autonomy. However, my readings illustrate that descriptive passages are rarely extractable without loss of meaning; more often, they constitute dialogic formations that comment on, echo, and challenge ideas the realist novel explores, suppresses, or valorizes in other registers.

Each chapter in this dissertation explores description’s distinctive affordances in a few key texts, revealing what we can gain by “reading for description.” In Chapter One, I consider the ubiquity of atmospheric description in John Ruskin’s Modern Painters and Arthur Symons’ Cities. In the nineteenth century, the definition of “atmosphere” expanded to include both material (albeit ethereal) phenomena and subjectively felt impressions—allowing both aestheticist and realist writers to use atmospheric description as a representational shorthand for crucial tensions between materiality and imagination. Chapter Two picks up on Chapter One’s exploration of nineteenth-century atmosphere, focusing on Thomas Hardy’s pervasive descriptions of fogs, mists, dews, smokes, and other airy phenomena in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Ultimately, I argue that atmospheric description counteracts the novel’s plotted drive towards tragic limitation. In Chapter Three, I consider the temporality of description in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and The Lifted Veil and Ruskin’s Praeterita. While scholars often frame description as a static mode in contrast to narrative chronology, I argue that these texts’ descriptive passages instead capture a sense of “compound time”: a quasi-Paterian expansion of the perceptual moment. Chapter Four focuses on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, specifically the set-pieces of description that appear at key junctures in Dorothea’s narrative arc. Working with aestheticist conceptions of the symbol from Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature and Vernon Lee’s Laurus Nobilis and Hauntings, I argue that Eliot’s symbol-rich descriptions imbue reality with powerful “meaningfulness effects.” Finally, my Coda makes explicit an implicit thematic of the preceding chapters: description’s affinity with the affective and ethical orientation of “grief.” I suggest that description’s pedagogy of attentiveness attempts to recognize and honor everyday reality’s inevitable passing-away.