Diffusing Expectation and oher Victorian outlines

A recent bachelor's thesis:

Diffusing Expectations in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening: Women Ahead of their Time and Challenging Society’s Ideals
by Laura Georgina Eagles
Mid Sweden University
Department of Humanities (English)
Autumn 2019

In the twentieth century, the phrase ‘independent women’ was catapulted to attention by the group Destiny’s Child whose lyrics to the song “Independent Women Part 1” included the words “Do what I want, live how I wanna live” (2001). Destiny’s Child may have introduced to a new generation that all women have a right to be independent, but this is a movement long in creation. Feminism has been making its moves for centuries, in fact, the very first woman’s rights conference was held in New York in 1848 and as stated by Selden et al., although the word feminism “may only have come into English usage in the 1890s, women’s conscious struggle to resist patriarchy goes much further back” . The nineteenth century, therefore, was starting to see a change and there were two authors who made waves by infusing their protagonists with an unquestionable independence. These two authors were Charlotte Brontë and Kate Chopin and they did this through their lead characters of Jane Eyre and Edna Pontellier respectively.

And a recent thesis:

Victorian outlines: the crisis of individuation in nineteenth-century literature and art
by Annael Skye Jonas-Paneth
Boston University
2020

This dissertation explores how in the mid-nineteenth-century, the outline, an element in art, became a symbolic form for the relationship between the individual and society. Artists like J.M.W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites either blurred or overstressed their outlines to highlight tensions in the ideal of the liberal individual. Writers like Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot responded with their own experiments in characterization and plot. In attending to the conceptual analogies between the outline of figures in art, the outline of literary character, and the outline of the individual in society, I explore the gradual decline of the cultural narrative of personal development and the waning of the belief in the ability to individuate in an ever-burgeoning society. Because of the ease with which the outline’s symbolic meaning traverses the boundaries of painting, literature, and lived experience, it fosters a verbal-visual vocabulary for experiencing sociality to which the visually literate Victorians were intuitively attuned. Chapter one surveys the debate about outline, tracing a line from Blake to Ruskin. Focusing on outlines in Turner’s Snow-Storm and Millais’s Isabella, I demonstrate painting’s ability to formally articulate social critique. The following chapters explore some ways in which texts experiment with outline: diffusion, evasion, and superimposition. For instance, in In Memoriam A.H.H., rather than regain a distinguishable selfhood after loss, Tennyson gradually blends his own self with the selves that surround him, in line with Turner’s aerial perspective. In Villette, Brontë draws on her experience as a failed artist and her reading of Ruskin’s Modern Painters to fashion a uniquely feminine method of characterization, which I call negative space. She defines Lucy Snowe by filling in the space around her, leaving her to come out in relief. Finally, inspired by the photographic technique of double-exposure, Middlemarch develops characters by superimposing their identities upon one another, so that their outlines can no longer protect their illusion of singularity. Middlemarch shows how the most superficial social impulse of projecting our own preconceived notions onto our neighbors, can actually enrich rather than diminish their identities, and thus help to develop society as a whole.