Atelier n°4 – Etudes Victoriennes et Edouardiennes (SFEVE)
Responsables de l’atelier
Laurence Roussillon-Constanty
Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour
laurence.roussillon-constanty@univ-pau.fr
Fabienne Moine
UPEC
fabienne.moine@wanadoo.fr
Jeanne Barangé
Université Bordeaux Montaigne
jeanne.barange@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr
« ‘Yo’r a stranger and a foreigner’: Negotiating the Boundaries of ‘Englishness’ in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South »
Before even attempting to speak of “Englishness”, the question of borders immediately arises: the concept in itself begs to be defined, and its relevance and mechanisms cannot be discussed without first delineating its definitional boundaries – boundaries which are inevitably changing, subjective, and much debated. In this paper, I intend to explore the relevance of such a concept in relation to Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, a novel which, from its title, invites to consider ideas of geographical, social, and cultural divisions, and the role and pertinence of borders, be they physical or imaginary. I will argue that Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, through its dichotomous representation of England, puts into light a cultural “battle” between North and South – embodied by the growing tension between the main characters, John Thornton and Margaret Hale – which puts at stake not only economic and social concerns, but also the definition of national identity, and the prevalence of the most authentic version of “Englishness”. Through the union of Margaret and John, the depiction of the consequences of a partial understanding of others, and the emphasis on the dangers of overindulging in one’s local pride, Gaskell insists on the importance of recognising the other side as “one of us”. Her approach is an invitation to consider the “and” in the title no longer as a border between different regions, but as a bridge. The novel, I argue, means to displace the border in order to enlarge the definition of Englishness, so as to include local colour, without erasing cultural specificities. Finally, I will contend that Gaskell’s response to the tension between national unity – the cornerstone of “Englishness” – and the existence of seemingly opposed ideals is achieved through the recognition of the Other’s value, and that this Other has many faces in North and South.
Biographie
Jeanne Barangé est agrégée d’anglais et doctorante contractuelle en troisième année à l’Université Bordeaux Montaigne. Sa thèse, dirigée par Nathalie Jaëck, porte sur la notion d’‘Englishness’ et la construction du sentiment national dans les oeuvres d’autrices du 19e siècle, en particulier Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell et George Eliot.
Medhi Bouakkaz
Université Paris Cité
mehdi.bouakkaz@gmail.com
« Gerard Manley, figure de l’excès et de la marge ? »
Si l’oeuvre du poète Gerard Manley Hopkins continue de dérouter nombre de lecteurs, c’est sans doute par la manière dont elle semble se plaire à refuser tout rattachement à un foyer commun. Victorien, Hopkins l’est de par ses préoccupations ainsi que par les valeurs qu’il fait fièrement siennes. Moderne, il l’est de par une poétique pour laquelle tout est langage, même si ce langage se doit de retrouver le souffle vivifiant du logos divin dont Hopkins quête la trace dans tous les recoins de la création. La date de publication des poèmes de Hopkins par son ami Robert Bridges au début du 20e siècle marque bien la position marginale de ce poète par rapport à l’époque et la société qui l’ont vu naître. Marginalité acceptée par Hopkins qui, par le double mouvement de sa conversion au catholicisme et de son choix de la prêtrise, fera du retrait un lieu où sa sensibilité trouvera le moyen d’explorer le chatoiement bigarré d’un réel qu’il cherche à rendre palpable dans ses poèmes. On est d’ailleurs frappé par les contradictions qui traversent ceux-ci. Recherche d’une richesse lexicale et sonore qui se veut imitation d’un réel explosif et en excès, mais dans le même temps respect des formes traditionnelles, puis utilisation d’un nouveau rythme qui puisse insuffler une ardeur renouvelée aux formes qu’Hopkins trouve à sa disposition. Hopkins travaille la limite, le contour et les frontières des formes en prenant bien garde d’en réguler l’excès : s’il y a une saturation de sons et de signifiants, celle-ci figureparadoxalement la maîtrise du poète captateur quasi photographique d’évènements toujours « extatiques », à la marge de ce qui est la norme. En ce sens nous nous poserons la question suivante : en quoi l’écriture de Hopkins est-elle une écriture qui se joue des frontières et de la marge ?
Biographie
Professeur agrégé d’anglais au lycée Jules Ferry de Versailles depuis 2019, après avoir travaillé lors de mon mémoire de master autour de l’œuvre de Lord Byron, il travaille depuis 2022 sur l’œuvre du poète victorien Gerard Manley Hopkins sous la direction du Professeur Jean-Marie Fournier. Son projet de thèse s’intitule « Gerard Manley Hopkins, poète de ‘l’intension’? »
Catherine Heyrendt
Université de Reims Champagne Ardennes
catherine.heyrendt@univ-reims.fr
« Blurring disciplinary boundaries, entering the public sphere and traveling the world : Harriet Martineau’s multiple border crossing »
Against all expectations, Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), a « little deaf woman at Norwich », as Lord Brougham once described her, became a Victorian household name. The 6th child of a provincial middle-class family, she rose to fame and moved to London as the bestselling author of Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-1834), which was widely read across Europe. Martineau’s geographical relocation was largely the outcome of her crossing borders between different scientific and literary genres; she had put together a compelling blend of didactic fiction in order to popularise the theories of Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. In doing so, not only was she ahead of her time (many, including James Mill, thought her innovative format would not work, Dickens’ social novels being still to come), but she also transgressed a societal boundary. While it had become socially acceptable for women to author fiction, few dared venture into the field of political economy – a field that was traditionally reserved to men, being by no stretch of the imagination an extension of women’s accepted area of competence (unlike health or education). Martineau was eager to use her prominence in the public sphere as a means to geographical border crossing. In the wake of her Illustrations, she toured the USA for almost two years, occasionally fearing for her life on account of her known abolitionist stance. Her journey led to the publication of two books, including How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), which made her a pioneer in the field of sociology. Following a period of illness, perhaps precipitated by the stress that her unusual social standing entailed, Martineau eagerly visited the Middle East, riding Egyptian camels and visiting harems. Besides traveling the world, she continued to cross societal and disciplinary borders into the field of history, becoming one of the first widely read female British historians, as well as a historical novelist, before embracing an influential journalistic career. This paper, which delves into Martineau’s correspondence and autobiographical writings in order to gain further insight, argues that her fluid border crossing was both exceptional and a cause for her subsequent declining fame, as she could not be pinned down to a single discipline, at a time when the golden age of humanists had come to an end.
Biographie
Catherine Heyrendt est Maître de Conférences-HDR en Civilisation britannique à l’Université de Reims Champagne Ardenne. Ses travaux portent principalement sur l’histoire des idées à l’époque victorienne. Elle est l’auteur d’une thèse et d’une douzaine d’articles sur Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). Ses travaux les plus récents portent sur Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), et l’accès des femmes aux professions à l’ère victorienne. Catherine Heyrendt est également l’auteur d’un manuel de civilisation britannique (The United Kingdom Today. Comprendre le Royaume-Uni aujourd’hui. Ellipses 2022) et de la biographie gourmande Winston Churchill (Payot 2016).
Celia Jarvis
Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour
celia.jarvis@univ-pau.fr
« Bordering the visible world: Lilias Trotter’s ways of seeing and the new genre of the spiritual travel guide »
Lilias Trotter, a young British painter and favourite of John Ruskin, moves across borders and continents to Algeria at the end of the nineteenth century in response to a ‘call’ from God. Trotter writes a pivotal text called Between the Desert and the Sea which she sends home to friends, family and supporters imploring them to ‘come and look at it [Algeria]’ with her, stating: ‘The colour pages and the letterpress are with one and the same intent-to make you see. Many things begin with seeing in this world of ours.’ In this talk I will respond to Trotter’s statement that her text Between the Desert and the Sea is ‘not a travel guide’ by asking to what extent that is actually true of her text, and if indeed this text (which looks, sounds, reads like a nineteenth-century travel guide) is not a travel guide, how did she actually want her text to be read and received exactly? What can this tell us about Trotter’s vision of the world – both visible and invisible? and what does this reveal about her readership? I argue that Trotter repurposes the traditional travel guide in order to communicate her vision of Algeria. I argue that what Trotter means by ‘seeing’ in her invitation to ‘come…look…see’2 is not a photographic ‘seeing’ but rather a mystical seeing, which goes beyond sight, and reaches to a holistic, meditative experience of both the physical and spiritual landscape that she engages with. This talk considers ‘crossings and borders’ not only in terms of the literal, physical borders Trotter attempts to dismantle in the writing of her text, but also in terms of crossing the boundaries between the visible and invisible worlds of Algeria and its spirituality. This is part of my wider PhD research in Trotter’s way of seeing as a case study for the Christian mystic visionary at the end of the nineteenth century.
Biographie
Celia Jarvis is a second year PhD student writing a thesis entitled : Christian Devotional Experience in Nineteenth-Century British Art and Literature. She focuses on the writings and paintings of Christian missionary Lilias Trotter, a friend of John Ruskin, who lived and worked in Algeria at the end of the nineteenth-century. Celia is studying her PhD in cotutelle under the supervision of Professor Laurence Roussillon-Constanty at the University of Pau, and Professor Emma Mason at the University of Warwick
Béatrice Laurent
Université Bordeaux Montaigne
beatrice.laurent@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr
Crossing Borders: William Holman Hunt in the Holy Land
The Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) travelled extensively to and across the Holy Land, where he painted some of his most famous religious pictures. Writing from Jerusalem to his friend William Bell Scott in 1870, he described his physical experience of travel in space as an intellectual motion in time: ‘We pass not merely from village to town, and from town to desert, or to an Arab encampment, lying down for the night’s rest under the unscreened stars ; but we pass from century to century, from Abraham to Cambyses, from Herototus to Jesus Christ, then to Mohammed and so to the Crusaders. There are, too, such undreamed-of scenes as though they did not belong to this world, but rather to the moon’ (WHH to WBS 7 April 1870, Scott, Autobiographical notes, vol.2,89). Hunt’s enthusiasm for the Eastern landscapes came at a cost though, as he explored the countryside looking for specific backgrounds for his paintings alongside a man who became his model and ‘was a notorious highway robber’ (WHH to WBS 30 Sept 1871, Scott, Autobiographical notes, vol.2,104). With this man who ‘rode like a Centaur’ and caused ‘a wholesome dread into all the country’ wherever they went, Hunt also crossed the border of Victorian respectability (WHH to WBS 30 Sept 1871, Scott, Autobiographical notes, vol.2,104). Holman Hunt’s experiences abroad involved physical motion, temporal dislocation, and cultural disorientation. Drawing on previous research and archival material, this paper intends to examine the impact of the artist’s travels and stays abroad on his life and art.
Biographie
Béatrice Laurent is a Pre-Raphaelite scholar who earned her PhD in English studies in 2000 at the University of Avignon. From 2002 until 2017, she was an Assistant Professor at the university of the French West Indies in Martinique. She is now Professor of Victorian Studies at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne in France. In her books Provence and the British Imagination (co-edited, 2013), Sleeping Beauties in Victorian Britain: Cultural; Literary and Artistic Explorations of a Myth (edited, 2015) and Water and Women in the Victorian Imagination (2021) she explores the interaction between literature, visual art and theoretical discourses.
Mariana Marquez Pujol
Université Toulouse Capitole
mariana.pujol@ut-capitole.fr
« On the Brink of the Impossible: George Eliot and the Female Bildungsroman »
In his study on the European novel of formation, Franco Moretti suggests that there is a “distinct female Bildungsroman” epitomized by the “Austen-Eliot thread” (Moretti, The Way of the World, 2000, p. 246). The “Eliot thread” has been followed by feminist scholarship at least since the 1970s, and The Mill on the Floss (1860) is often interpreted as the epitome of the renunciations and defeats which trace Maggie Tulliver’ tragic destiny as the novelist George Eliot navigates male-centered fictional patterns. On the borders between conformity and rebellion, the life of protagonist of The Mill echoes the difficulties in adapting the devices of the plot of the novel of development to the lives of young women who are generally barred from the possibilities offered to their male counterparts. Due not only to gender, but also to class and socioeconomic limitations, what critics sometimes refer to as the “female fiction of development” (Abel, Hirsch and Langland, The Voyage In, 1983) in the 19th century unfolds on the threshold between the forms deployed by the genre and their critique. By focusing on the female protagonists of three other novels by George Eliot – Hetty Sorrel (Adam Bede, 1859), Dorothea Brooke (Middlemarch, 1871-1872) and Gwendolyn Harleth (Daniel Deronda, 1876) –, this paper seeks to examine how the idea of ambition shapes the development of these characters. I hope to suggest that the ambitious impulse is what maintains these young women on the verge of the possible and the impossible throughout the narratives, and I argue that the image of the border can shed light on the composition of these characters. Finally, I indicate how Eliot’s formal choices in each one of the plots of these three novels problematize the literary category of the female Bildungsroman.
Biographie
Mariana Teixeira Marques-Pujol an Assistant Professor in English at Université Toulouse Capitole. She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at the Department of English at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil. She is the author of a study on the novels Fanny Hill by John Cleland and Margot la Ravaudeuse attributed to Fougeret de Monbron (Fanny and Margot, libertines: the body and the world in two 18th-century erotic novels, São Paulo, Fap-Unifesp, 2015). She also contributed to Women and Philosophy of the Enlightenment. From the imaginary to the life of ideas (Paris: Garnier, 2020) with an article on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mary Woolstonecraft. She has recently written on North American novelists Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Rebecca Harding Davis.
Laure Nermel
Université de Lille
nermellaure@gmail.com
« L’imaginaire préraphaélite par-delà les frontières : le projet d’illustration des ‘border ballads’ de William Allingham, Elizabeth Siddal et Dante Gabriel Rossetti »
Dans sa correspondance de mai 1854, Dante Gabriel Rossetti s’exprime à propos du projet qu’il a avec sa compagne, Elizabeth Siddal, d’illustrer un recueil de ballades écossaises : « she and I are going to illustrate the old Scottish ballads which Allingham is editing for Routledge ». Les ballades en question sont « Clerk Saunders », « The Lass of Lochroyan » et « The Gay Goshawk », que Siddal marque au crayon sur son exemplaire de Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border de Walter Scott. Scott fait partie de ces écrivains qui s’attèlent au renouveau du genre littéraire qu’est la ballade. Il entreprend plusieurs expéditions dans les régions frontalières de l’Angleterre et de l’Écosse. Il s’entretient avec des habitants en mesure de lui réciter les légendes locales. À l’origine transmise oralement, la ballade est un poème racontant une histoire, composée de trois couplets, suivi d’un envoi. Sa forme fixe, sa dimension narrative et ses thèmes familiers du public victorien en font un texte facile à mémoriser. Ces récits qui se diffusent dans les foyers des classes moyennes convoquent une image légendaire, pré-industrielle des îles britanniques, encore animée par des rites païens. Le but de cette communication est de montrer comment ce projet d’illustration s’inscrit dans la praxis préraphaélite, qui consiste à abolir les frontières entre les différentes formes d’art (ici le chant poétique et les arts visuels). Je m’intéresserai plus particulièrement à la façon dont Siddal rend le lisible visible dans sa production picturale. De plus, les préraphaélites font du patrimoine littéraire anglo-saxon une cause nationale. Cet intérêt pour le folklore écossais traduit la volonté de célébrer une identité résolument britannique, en faisant fi des limites géographiques et culturelles.
Biographie
Après un cursus universitaire en Afrique du Sud puis en Angleterre, elle a participé à plusieurs projets de médiation auprès de la Tate Britain et du Museum of London. Guide conférencière de profession depuis 2016, elle propose des visites thématiques pour publics divers dans les musées et quartiers parisiens. Elle termine sa thèse sur la peintre-poëte Elizabeth Siddal (1829 – 1862). En 2021, elle a contribué à la rédaction du premier ouvrage collectif sur les femmes du courant préraphaélite, édité chez Peter Lang. En 2022, elle a été lauréate du John Pickard Essay Prize de la Pre-Raphaelite Society.
Lena Osty
Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3
lena.osty1@univ-lyon3.fr
“Displacements, (Re)formations and Creation in David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.”
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”1 From the first pages of David Copperfield, the eponymous narrator questions the role he plays in his own evolution from childhood to adulthood. He probably wonders if he can be a hero as a man of letters, as the prophet of truth, in a Carlylean sense: “The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal […].”2 Therefore, if David aspires to become a Carlylean hero he needs to turn into an artist to access absolute truth. As a Victorian child however, David’s doubts are legitimate. At that time, children were being constrained and modeled by adults and by society at large. The Victorian proverb “Children should be seen and not heard” uncovers the limits children were being confronted to. Within these limits, (re)creation cannot exist. In the novel, David is first physically confined within one space, his own bedroom, and is prevented from moving. The frontier with the rest of the house is impassable, as David experiences in the fourth chapter, after having bitten Mr Murdstone. Secondly, David is intellectually restrained. This is exemplified with David’s withdrawal from school in chapter 10, after his mother’s death. He is compelled to work for Mr Murdstone. His prominent fear is that he will never be able to reach adulthood if he is denied an education. There is an established frontier between ignorance and knowledge, and without education, David will not be able to abolish it. Yet, despite his young age, David must provide for himself. Thus, even if ignorant, David has already entered adulthood with his adult-like responsibilities. The frontier between these two ages becomes porous, and such instability opens a breach for David to free himself. He manages to escape with the objective to find his great-aunt, Betsey Trotwood. His displacement is protean: he moves physically, and his mind wanders and evolves throughout his initiatory trip. For instance, David remembers happy moments of his past, moments which seem to mingle with his own reality, breaking the linearity of time. In fact, the displacement of frontiers opens a space in which David the narrator can emerge. We shall study the extent to which the uncontrolled abolition of frontiers can lead to creation and positive identification in a historical period willing to establish division and order. It appears that the authoritative attempts to impose stable limits on David – in order to contain and model him – have paradoxically helped him to transcend himself. In his progressive metamorphosis from child to man, and man to artist, and through coercion, David is thus able to abolish different sorts of frontiers: he can travel in space, in time, and especially in fiction. Besides travelling in fiction, he can also travel outside fiction. As an artist, he can reconcile fiction and reality, so that he slowly destroys the boundary between himself and the reader of David Copperfield. Beyond David the narrator, Charles Dickens progressively establishes himself as an artist, choosing David as his incarnation in art. David Copperfield is Dickens’s first first-person narration, so that fiction and reality merge again. David offers the reader his intemporal narrative, as it will now be fixed in art. It does not belong to him anymore, but to the collective memory and legacy. That is probably why, in his preface from 1850, Charles Dickens confesses feeling some “regret in the separation from many companions.”3 The border between creator and creature has dissolved – or has it?
Biographie
Lena Osty est Professeure Agrégée, actuellement Attachée Temporaire d’Enseignement et de Recherche à l’Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, et rattachée au laboratoire de recherche de l’Institut d’Etudes Transtextuelles et Transculturelles. En première année de doctorat sous la direction de Mme Le Professeur Lawrence Gasquet, elle étudie l’oeuvre d’Anne Brontë et de Charles Dickens. Elle s’intéresse plus particulièrement aux principes d’éducation et de connaissance en lien avec la création littéraire au XIXème siècle.
Annick Rello
Université Paris Cité
annick.pommier44@orange.fr
« Queer Moves in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford and The Grey Woman »
As a minister’s wife and a mother of four daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell is often regarded as a second-rate, ‘charming’ novelist whose life and work conformed to the social and moral expectations of the Victorian era in which she lived. Such an assumption, however, could not be further from the truth. Gaskell never shied away from controversial issues, which she explored in her novels and her short stories. As she once wrote to her friend, Eliza Fox, following the publication of Ruth in 1853 and the uproar it caused on account of her empathic dealing with ‘a fallen woman’: ‘I think I must be an improper woman without knowing it, I do manage to shock people.” In her life, she never felt hampered by moral principles as highlighted by her meeting (and liking) of Rosa Bonheur, female painter of animals famously known for her dressing as a young man and for her relationships with women. In her fiction, and specially in her short stories published in various periodicals, she carried out experiments of various kinds which often led her to displace boundaries as was the case in her Cranford provincial sketches (December 1851-May 1853) and her Gothic tale, The Grey Woman (1861). The two pieces of writing belong to different genres, and so are rarely paired together. However, in both the novel and the short story, Gaskell disrupts genders through a subversive use of cross-dressing which invariably causes some form of displacement—an almost concomitant spatial displacement associated with travel and the crossing of geographical and physical borders and often brought on by outbreaks of violence; a social displacement shaking social boundaries and moral expectations; a generic displacement with a blurring of genres, and finally a narrative displacement that creates ambiguity and subverts temporality.
Biographie
Professeure agrégée d’anglais, elle enseigne actuellement dans le secondaire. Elle est actuellement en doctorat sous la direction de M. Jean-Marie Fournier à Université Paris Cité. Sa thèse porte sur Elisabeth Gaskell. Membre de la Gaskell Societydepuis de nombreuses années, elle a fait deux communications à la branche londonienne de cette société en 2019 et en 2022.
Nathalie Saudo-Welby
Université de Picardie Jules Vernes
nsaudowelby@gmail.com
« In and out of the Abyss: Jack London and Mary Higgs as Participant Observers »
In the late Victorian and Edwardian period slumming becamea popular pastime among the well-to-do, for purposes which ranged from fulfilling one’s curiosity to philanthropy, data-collecting and ethnographic exploration. Seth Koven defines this practice as “a movement, figured as some kind of ‘descent,’ across urban spatial and class, gender and sexual boundaries” (p. 9). In the early years of the 20th century Jack London and Mary Higgs both broke out of civilization to gain firsthand knowledge of the London underworld from the inside, and narrated their experiences in ThePeople of the Abyss(1903) and Glimpses into the Abyss(1906). My presentation will examine London’s and Higgs’s accounts as early cases of personal sociology, blurring the lines between the inside and the outside, the familiar and the unknown, reality and fiction. In trying to get an embodied knowledge of situations that were difficult to investigate, London and Higgs were engaging in early forms of participant observation. I will also compare how they negotiated the discourse of degeneration, used by social Darwinists at the time to account for the existence of unemployable vagrants and unfit workers.
Biographie
Nathalie Saudo-Welby est Professeure à l’Université de Picardie où elle enseigne la littérature et la traduction. Elle est l’auteure des ouvrages Le Courage de déplaire : le roman féministe à la fin de l’ère victorienne (Classiques Garnier, 2019), et Jack and Jekyll : la dégénérescence en Grande-Bretagne (ENS éditions, 2023) et a publié de nombreux articles et chapitres sur la fiction des années 1880-1914 (George Egerton, George Moore, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells…) Ses recherches portent aussi sur la pratique parodique, et les arts visuels.