Unsolved Seas

 A recent scholarly book with Brontë-related content:

The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language

All at Sea

Matthew P. M. Kerr

Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780192843999

2022

To write about the sea in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to do so against a vast accretion of past deeds, patterns of thought, and particularly patterns of expression, many of which had begun to feel not just settled but exhausted. The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language takes up this circumstance, showing how prose writers in this period grappled with the super-conventionalized nature of the sea as a setting, as a shaper of plot and character, as a structuring motif, and as a source of metaphor.

But while writing about the sea required careful negotiation of multiple and sometimes conflicting associations, the sea's multiplicity and freight function not just as impediments to thought or expression but as sources of intellectual and expressive possibilities. The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language treats a provocatively diverse group of key authors spanning from the 1830s to the 1930s and including both those inextricably associated with the sea (Frederick Marryat, Joseph Conrad) and those whose writings are less obviously marine, such as Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Virginia Woolf. What these writers share, among other things, is that they simultaneously register and turn to account the difficulties that attend writing about, and writing with, the sea. In the process, their sea-writing sheds new light on the value of marginalized representational techniques including repetition, cliché, and imprecision.

The book includes the chapter:

Unsolved Seas the Victorian Novel: Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens and Brontë

This chapter attends to nineteenth-century texts where the sea lurks in the background—as the context for a sojourn or a crossing or a memory, or as a figurative element. The first part of the discussion shows how the Victorian novel’s sprawl and supposed formlessness were sometimes negotiated through marine objects, experiences, and metaphor. Particular attention is paid to a sea-shell metaphor used by George Eliot. The other sections examine three canonical Victorian novels: William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. These texts reveal a set of authors who were to varying degrees attracted by the sea, unsure about the depth of their commitment to it, and interested in making imaginative use of that same irresolution. The chapter also contains a short discussion of Victorian sea-poetry, in which the more rigorous formal structures of verse discipline marine vagueness.