Feeling middle class: sensory perception in Victorian literature and culture

Megan Ward
2008
This dissertation proposes that perception in the Victorian era was not just a source of information but a way of training the self. Representations of the senses defined bourgeois identity through a process that this project labels guided sensing: instilling particular sensations in the body that register as middle-class experience. This work extends both broad considerations of bodily class formation and specific Victorianist interest in the senses by delineating a form of self-fashioning
more » ... was considered sustainable at mid-century but receding by the fin-de-siècle. Reading major literary works alongside scientific texts, domestic manuals, and legal treatises, this dissertation argues that sensory detail established a self-consciously modern practice of the body. The second half of this project shows how later novels of the period interrogated guided sensing, questioning its efficacy in inculcating and sustaining middle-class values. The four chapters each elucidate one of four concepts fundamental to middle-class identity: taste, professionalism, fidelity, and cultivation. The first two chapters read popular journalism and sensation fiction to establish how guided sensing distinguishes middle-class women from men. The discourse of taste in the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine encourages women to ignore sensory information to appear tasteful. At the same time, Charles Dickens' Bleak House and Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone prompt men to emphasize their sharp senses in pursuit of professionalism. Later Victorian novels, however, begin to question guided sensing. The third and fourth chapters show how Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds and Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders diminish the narrative drive of individual mobility. No longer as desirably modern as in the 1850s, guided sensing subsided without the drive of individualism. These novels defer the narrative drive of individual mobility, reconstituting the individual within the social realm's conflicting models of sensory subjectivity. Percipient b [...]
doi:10.7282/t3qc03vv fatcat:5yxbdpmuhngehiigos6yfvbkce