The Politics of the (In)audible/ (In)visible in Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown (1884)

1Committed art is generally considered as attempting to bridge the gap between art and reality, while art for art’s sake claims to have severed its connection with reality in order to exist purely in its medium. The two seem to be irreconcilable opposites. However, poetic language and communicational language always intertwine. It would be illusory to think that art and politics do not always mix. Even apoliticism in art is in fact deeply political, asserts Theodor Adorno in his 1962 essay on ‘Commitment.’1 In Politique de la littérature, Jacques Rancière further argues that the uniqueness of literature does not lie in an anti-communicational poetic use of language, but rather in a new way of linking the poetic with the prosaic, the visible and the sayable, things and words.2 Additionnally, Rancière warns, because there is no criterion for establishing an appropriate correlation between the aesthetic and the political, formalist writings have often been interpreted in contradicting ways: as showing political awareness of the contradictions inherent in a social and economic order and as examples of reactionary nihilism.3 On the other hand, committed art ceases to seem completely at odds with formalist works when it is distinguished from what Adorno calls ‘tendentious’ art, i.e. propaganda. For Adorno, committed art in the proper sense never really seeks to produce new legislation or changes in institutions: it works much more subtly ‘at the level of fundamental attitudes.’ The task, he adds commenting on Sartre, ‘is to awaken the free choice of the agent which makes authentic existence possible at all, as opposed to the neutrality of the spectator,’ and this effect can be achieved equally by realist and formalist works.

2But both Adorno and Rancière underline that the content to which the artist commits himself is ‘inherently ambiguous’ (Adorno 180) since there is no formula that establishes a constant link between an artistic form and a political meaning. Logically enough, this leads Jacques Rancière bluntly to assert in a 2003 interview that commitment is

an in-between notion that is vacuous as an aesthetic notion and also as a political notion. It can be said that an artist is committed as a person, and possibly that he is committed by his writings, his paintings, his films, which contribute to a certain type of political struggle. An artist can be committed, but what does it mean to say that his art is committed? Commitment is not a category of art. This does not mean that art is apolitical. It means that aesthetics has its own politics, or its own meta-politics.4

3So, reflecting on autonomy and commitment in Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown from this perspective implies that we discuss the meta-politics of literature in this novel. For Rancière, the meta-politics of literature have to do with the way in which literature participates in the distribution and redistribution of places, times, spaces, identities; what it makes ‘visible’ that was invisible before, or ‘audible’ that was not heard before, thus ‘liberating political possibilities by undoing the formatting of reality produced by state-controlled media, by undoing the relations between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable’ (Rancière 2004, 65). After examining Vernon Lee’s engagement with the ethics of aestheticism, the purpose of this study will therefore be to analyze Lee’s challenge of aestheticism from the platform of gender and class and to suggest how the novel disturbs what Rancière calls the ‘meaningful fabric of the sensible’ (Rancière 2004, 63) by attending to issues of visibility, audibility, and intelligibility.

4In her first novel Miss Brown,5 the cosmopolitan 28-year old Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935) painted a critical picture of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the Aesthetic circle, with which however she was associated and where she was praised for her scholarship and her wit. With this bold, anti-aestheticist novel Lee alienated numerous friends and acquaintances, among whom Henry James, to whom the book was dedicated, as well as her mentor Walter Pater, the Morrises, the Rossettis, and Oscar Wilde, who all felt satirized. In Miss Brown she critiqued the ideological underpinnings of the Aesthetic movement of the 70s and 80s, analyzing in particular how this supposedly disinterested artistic creed often consisted in intellectualizing or repressing reality by objectifying the body in all its forms. Through the description of the career of the Scottish-born servant Anne Brown, this Bildungsroman particularly exposed the illusory nature of the supposed ‘autonomy’ achieved by British male Aesthetes, by denouncing the social, political, intellectual and sexual exploitation of working class models and muses. Achieving aesthetic independence, however, need not take this exploitative form, Lee suggested. She wished to restore a sense of social responsibility to artistic practice. Ultimately, her novel posed the question of the possibility for an alternative ethical (female) aesthetic voice. Lee’s aesthetics thus paved the way for what has been called ‘female aestheticism,’ a combination of political awareness and commitment to artistic innovation.6

5Miss Brown came out only a few months after Euphorion (1884) and three years after Belcaro (1881). In these collections of essays Vernon Lee showed herself a convinced aesthete, privileging form over content, but an aesthete concerned with the ethical implications of her art too. Her allegiance to Pater’s theories is especially clear in the essay ‘Ruskinism’ in which she criticizes John Ruskin for trying to identify moral and physical perfection. The aesthetic and the ethical are separate spheres for Lee, as ‘the qualities of right and wrong, and of beautiful and ugly, and our perceptions of them, belong to different parts of our being.’7 ‘Beauty is a physical quality,’ she adds, and there is ‘no justice, no charity, no moral excellence in physical beauty’ (Lee 1884, 210). Freed from moral imperatives, the aesthetic critic asserts that ‘the creation of perfect beauty is the highest aim of the artist.’ Besides, like Pater, Lee acknowledges the central role of pleasure in the assessment of a work of art and favours a sensual rather than intellectual appreciation of art. But as Stefano Evangelista points out, as a woman and as a lesbian, Lee held a ‘doubly marginalized position in the cultural life of her times’8 and, while aestheticism gave her a language to explore gender difference and ideas of androgyny, it also constrained her within a masculine discourse, so that Lee came to formulate her own version of art for art’s sake. Moreover, she gradually reached the conclusion that without qualifications such ideas could be dangerously misinterpreted. She believed notably that the Aesthetic movement had perverted the nature of art by reducing it to hedonism, self-indulgence, and ultimately moral corruption. The character of Edmund Lewis in Miss Brown represents this most morbid side of aestheticism: to Lewis, art is a cover for all sorts of immoral and socially unacceptable acts. He chooses his subjects for the sole purpose of shocking his viewers and watching their reaction, as when he displays his erotic nude drawings before the vicar’s very young daughters, slyly watching the effect on them. Lewis’s only motivation as an artist lies in his morbid voyeurism. This, to Lee, is an obvious perversion of the principle of art for art’s sake. While imagining themselves to be progressive and bold, the aesthetes of Miss Brown make ‘the mistake of thinking indecent things interesting and dramatic’ (182) and believing that ‘[e]verything is legitimate for the sake of an artistic effect’ (194). Anne, on the other hand, takes a much nobler view of the role of art. She even fancies she can encourage Hamlin to break away from the school of aesthetic poetry, which in her assessment is ‘evidently running to seed’ (184); as for aestheticism in painting, she believes it has also reached a dead end:

The school of mere beautiful suggestion, which scorned reality and mechanical skill as a bird scorns the ground, was fast sinking into nullity. [...] ‘Go to Paris and study for a year or so under Bastien-Lepage, or Henner, or Duran,’ [Anne] said, with a smile at the vanity of her own words.
Hamlin could not even conceive that she was in earnest, that anyone could dream of seeing anything in modern French painting, that anyone could be so mad as to think of his studying. (Lee 2004, 276)

6Early on, she expects Hamlin to be the one who will ‘revolutionise poetry’ (Lee 2004, 184) and start ‘a new era in poetry,’ ‘bolder, simpler, and more healthy’ (Lee 2004, 189). She commends his ‘attempts at a new way of describing things’ in the hopes that he will actually start ‘describing new things’ (Lee 2004, 184). Hamlin’s ‘Ballad of the Fens’ is supposed to be such a sample of healthy aestheticism. It is described as both realist, Wordsworthian and Zolaesque by his horrified poet friends who immediately reject the poem. Arguably, this evocation of a form of ethical aesthetic poetry about rural England, which Anne supports but Hamlin eventually refuses to pursue, is reminiscent of what Vernon Lee’s close companion, the aesthetic poet A. Mary F. Robinson, was attempting at the time, in her third volume of verse The New Arcadia and Other Poems, published the same year as Miss Brown and dedicated to Lee.

7In spite of her overt rejection of didacticism in her theoretical essays, Lee did not believe that the field of aesthetics could be morally neutral. Clearly, Lee’s repeated trips to Britain in the early 1880s informed her thoughts on the subject. In her biography of Lee, Vineta Colby describes Lee’s moral outrage at some of the recent works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.9 During these stays Lee met Walter Pater, John A. Symonds, and artists such as George Frederick Watts and Sir Frederick Leighton, but she also travelled in the North of England, observing the contrast between the beautiful yet receding rural landscape and the growing industrial economy. As Colby argues, Lee’s condemnation of the self-indulgent poet painter of the novel Walter Hamlin was probably influenced by the degrading conditions of the labouring classes that she witnessed at that time and by the socialist meetings she attended. In Miss Brown, Anne’s desperate efforts to break ‘the hateful solidarity between herself and the school of aesthetic indifferentism’ (Lee 2004, 254; my emphasis) echo Lee’s attempt at using ‘the moral imperative as a discourse of dissent,’ as Evangelista puts it (Evangelista 100). Already in Belcaro Lee had revised her previously unqualified acceptance of art for art’s sake, notably in the essay ‘Dialogue on Poetic Morality’ in which her recourse to ethics seeks to overthrow Walter Pater’s aesthetic model while still operating within it. In this essay dedicated to A. Mary F. Robinson and dealing with the ethical responsibilities of aesthetics, Vernon Lee theorized how producing and consuming art could be moral activities because they create pleasures generating the feeling of sympathy. Against the indulgences of the leading advocates of aestheticism, Lee thus formed the artistic ambition of making an art that could ‘generate sympathetic compassion and understanding in the reader. Together, [Lee and Robinson] envisioned aesthetic experience as responsive or interactive rather than solitary or solipsistic.’10 Lee’s writing thus oscillates between the demands of autonomous form and her commitment to humankind. In her own choice of words, oddly similar to Rancière’s, literary writing grapples with ethical issues by making things, people, emotions, ideas, connections etc. audible and visible:

the only intrinsic perfection of art is the perfection of form, and such perfection is only obtainable by boldly altering, or even casting aside, the subject with which this form is only imaginatively, most often arbitrarily, connected; and by humbly considering and obeying the inherent necessities of the material in which this form is made visible or audible. (‘The Child in the House,’ [Lee 1884, 48; my emphasis])

8In the opening chapters as well as in the final scene, the eponymous heroine Anne Brown is strikingly silent. The white dress which Lee has her wear at the beginning and close of the novel further enhances the notion of Anne Brown as a mere absence, a blot, an erasure, an obliteration, a nobody, as her last name also suggests. Like the rest of the servants in the Perrys’ home or the poor tenants of Cold Fremley, she is a ‘menial’ (Lee 2004, 25), unnoticeable, invisible, and inaudible. As for her first name, it seems to be interchangeable with any other and Mrs. Macgregor confirms the lack of interest in Miss Brown’s social identity—as signified by the name—, by calling her in turn Margaret, Rachel, and Eliza (Lee 2004, 127-128). Access to Anne’s inner monologue in later chapters, however, reveals to the reader that the protagonist is thinking a great deal, vigorously debating what her responsibilities to Hamlin, to society and to herself are. The beginning of the narrative is less telling, since the aesthete Walter Hamlin serves as focalizer, but the books Anne reads are an indication of her interests. When still a nursemaid in the Italian house of the Perrys, Anne is reading two books: one is a literary text she reads for pleasure and for the enjoyment of beauty (Dante’s Divine Comedy) and the other, which she wants to use as an instrument of social promotion and financial independence, is an Italian grammar book, for Anne wants to train to become as a teacher. She is thus an improbable combination: a servant who is an aesthete with the conscience and the ambitions of a New Woman. But when the male aesthete Walter Hamlin unexpectedly intrudes into her life, develops an interest in her and wishes to give her a small present, he chooses not to follow the advice given by his friend Melton Perry:

give her some school-books. You know she wants to set up as a teacher. Grammars—that sort of thing.
Hamlin made a gesture of disgust. ‘Horrible! —to give her grammars!’ ‘It’s what she wants’ [said Perry.]
‘Why, it would seem—well—it would be like encouraging her to become a daily governess.’
‘That’s just what I wish to do.’
Hamlin did not answer. The idea of Anne Brown giving lessons at two francs the hour jarred upon him. (Lee 2004, 41)

9Hamlin refuses to support Anne’s professional aspirations and to encourage her penchant for grammar books, ignoring equally her other interest in the Rights of Man and the History of the French Revolution. He gives her instead a book on the one subject in which Anne declares to have absolutely no interest, the subject of love: he buys her Dante’s Vita Nuova, which he declares is ‘all about beautiful things and love,’ ‘a little book by Dante, in prose and verse, telling how he met Beatrice, and then how she died’ (Lee 2004, 40). Indeed this rather summary presentation of Dante’s plot describes exactly the effect Hamlin will have on Anne’s destiny bringing her to an intellectual and emotional death.

10Hamlin’s abhorrence for anything that would remind him of Anne’s working class origin is in keeping with his general elitist views. A leader of a group of Aesthetic undergraduates in his Oxford days in the 1870s, Walter Hamlin, is now twelve years later experiencing an identity crisis as well as an aesthetic crisis. The aesthetic craze has turned him into a professional artist and his ideal of high art into mere fashion, into mass culture. In the process he has lost his distinct identity as a maverick artist keen on antagonizing the Philistines. This feeling of having lost his uniqueness together with the realization that art is becoming just like any other commodity and that aesthetic taste is being trivialized have driven Hamlin away from London and sent him to Italy on a visit to an old friend, Melton Perry. While for Anne art is a source of concrete, simple pleasure in life, artistic practice for Hamlin has been an exercise in taste and class distinction more than the result of an aesthetic impulse. Hamlin has a visceral need to differentiate himself and to secure for his art an autonomous status, amoral, apolitical and radically separated from the tainted commercial sphere. Because of his high art aestheticism he cringes at the popular manifestations of the aesthetic movement embodied in the character of Mrs. Perry. Furthermore, Hamlin’s fetichist, essentialist view of art explains why he now despises Mr. Perry, his old Oxford friend, who is no longer free to choose his subjects because he must paint to sell in order to support his wife and six children. Perry, who used to be ‘a wild, roistering half-French creature brought up at Louis-le-Grand and telling wicked French stories’ (Lee 2004, 11), has developed a social conscience though: he is the only artist in the novel objecting to the artistic exploitation of working class bodies, complaining that in his own house ‘there has been far too much of this turning of servants into models’ (Lee 2004, 34). Indeed his formidable aesthetic wife makes it a rule ‘to engage only handsome servants, because it spiritualizes the minds of our children to be brought up constantly surrounded by beautiful human forms’ (Lee 2004, 26). Although she professes to be a Republican, Mrs. Perry’s acknow-ledgement of her servants’ humanity stops at their appearance.

11But these new surroundings fail to help Walter Hamlin shake off his ennui. Italy, his old source of inspiration, no longer inspires him. A worthy disciple of Pater, he cultivates a ‘habit of gemlike harmonies of color.’ However, he feels that his art, his poetry and his life have lost their ‘emotional color,’ that ‘in his poetry and in his reality as a man [...] he had little by little got paler and paler, colors turning gradually to tints, and tints to shadows’ (Lee 2004,10). It is thus in keeping with his colourless palette that he should feel attracted to Anne, whose name is Brown and whose clothes are white, at least when they first meet. He is struck by her statuesque beauty. In Hamlin’s eyes Anne is a work of art, all surface, no content, no inside: he is

interested in Anne Brown, but not in the whole of Anne Brown. He wished to see more of her but to see more only of her superb physical appearance, and of that sullen, silent and almost haughty manner which accompanied it. As to anything there might be, intellectual or moral, behind this beautiful and dramatic creature, he did not care in the least, and would much rather have seen nothing of it. So far, she was striking, admirable, picturesque, consistent; further details might merely spoil the effect. (Lee 2004, 30)

12The white of her clothes is loaded with significance. Not only does it foreshadow the purity of Anne’s morals and her final marriage with Hamlin, but the white dress is also evocative of the poet’s blank page or the painter’s white canvas: it is the surface onto which Hamlin will write and paint his perfectly egotistical dream of love. The white of her clothes also echoes the ‘habit of silence’ which characterizes her at the beginning and at the end of the book. Hamlin finds her sullenness captivating. Like a ventriloquist, he will indeed take advantage of her silence to make her speak his words: for a while she will be a perfect Galatea moulded exactly according to his Pygmalion’s wishes, just like Jane Burden and Lizzie Siddal with their husbands William Morris and D.G. Rossetti.11 Silent and voiceless in the Perrys’ home because of her status as a servant, she returns to being silent and voiceless at the end of the novel when she becomes engaged to Hamlin and consequently submits to the Victorian law of coverture, which obliterated the identity of the married woman subsuming it in that of the husband’s. Whether as a maid or a bride, her class and her sex conspire to keep her a mere blank. Ultimately, Lee suggests, despite her intellectual achievements and the development of her political awareness, Anne can only remain inaudible and invisible as a Victorian working class woman who is denied her own identity both in the aestheticist and in the socialist worlds of her time.

13There is a political explanation for this narrative paralysis, for the immobilization of Anne’s destiny within the plot. As Perry astutely remarks:

[Anne]’s a kind of mystery. [...] I’ve felt it ever since we’ve had her. One thinks there must be something behind that face, and yet it seems to be a mere blank. My belief is, that people of this condition of life often have very little character—at least none in particular developed. Because, after all, it’s talking and jawing about things which don’t matter a pin that develops our character. The people who have no opportunity for that remain quite without character, until some day they are forced to choose whether they’ll be self-sacrificing creatures or mean pigs. (Lee 2004, 36)

14Early on in the novel, Perry thus describes Anne’s limited choices to become either a ‘self-sacrificing creature,’ i.e.: a creature with no self, no identity, a wife, a ‘slave’ (Lee 2004, 295), or a ‘mean pig,’ an unruly animal. This particular choice of words together with Perry’s classification of people into two categories, those who engage in ‘talking and jawing about’ and those who do not, conjure up interesting parallels with Aristotle’s theory of politics. In Aristotle’s theory of politics, the distinction between political life and mere life rests upon the possession of the logos, which enables citizens to distinguish the good from the bad: for citizens to fulfill their functions they must engage in the life of the city through judging and deliberating, that is through speech. The speaking (political) animal is opposed to the noisy or screaming animal, i.e.: the living being who can only express pain or pleasure (non-political). Rancière’s analysis of the Aristotelian dichotomy between the speaking vs. screaming animal, however, points out that there is a practical difficulty in recognizing who speaks and who screams: concretely, if there is someone a society does not wish to recognize as a political being, it begins by not understanding what they say, by not hearing an utterance but only a noise. For Rancière, political activity precisely starts with the process of negotiating this limit between speech and scream. Politics is a process which makes audible as speaking beings those who were only heard as screaming animals. In Miss Brown, Lee lets the animal speak, as it were, allowing the reader to hear and see Anne Brown’s engagement with the rights and wrongs of aestheticism and socialism.12 Later, Anne becomes radically political when she decides to talk to Hamlin about the terribly promiscuous living conditions of the tenants of Cold Fremley. While the Leigh twins argue over the impossibility of a woman in Anne’s position to even speak about this subject to her future husband, Anne forces herself to bring up the unspeakable to Hamlin’s attention, thus keeping her secret commitment to exploring what the aesthetes silenced and ‘tabooed’ (Lee 2004, 254) and refusing to have the tenants of Cold Fremley ‘live worse than animals’ (Lee 2004, 244) and ‘herd like cattle’ (Lee 2004, 246). Yet Anne’s protestation, like the protestation of Aristotle’s noisy animal, is not heard by Hamlin and the twin sisters are left wondering whether Anne had the audacity to speak or not.

15Anne’s inaudibility and invisibility in the aesthetic and socialist milieus she is exposed to are further complicated by the issue of her ‘sexlessness.’ Anne embodies a deviant type of femininity, as the narrator stresses:

But with Anne Brown it was different. Some few women seem to be born to have been men, or at least not to have been women. [...] They are not intended to be [...] either wives or mothers. Masculine women, mere men in disguise, they are not: the very strength and purity of their nature, its intensity as of some undiluted spirit, is dependent upon their cleaner and narrower woman’s nature, upon their narrowness and obstinacy of woman’s mind; they are, and can only be true women; but women without woman’s instincts and wants, sexless—women made not for man but for humankind. (Lee 2004, 293-4)

16As Stefano Evangelista points out, Anne’s androgynous, possibly lesbian13 femininity is ‘sexless’ only for Victorian males who cannot see her sexuality because it is directed at other women. The latent eroticism in Anne’s relationships with the New Zealander in Coblenz or Sacha Elaguine or Mary Leigh therefore remains ‘outside the realm of the visible’ (Evangelista 102).

17While Adorno asks us not to underestimate the social power of formalist writing, the ‘shock of the unintelligible,’ Rancière refers to the ‘sensible or perceptual shock’ and the impact of what he calls ‘heterology’:

a spectacle does not fit within the sensible framework defined by a network of meanings, an expression does not find its place in the system of visible coordinates where it appears. The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle. It is the dream of an art that would transmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations. As a matter of fact, political art cannot work in the simple form of a meaningful spectacle that would lead to an ‘awareness’ of the state of the world. Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification. (Rancière 2004, 63)

18I would like to argue that the ending of Miss Brown is such a heterology bringing into focus the issues of visibility and audibility informing the novel.

19Many contemporary critics found that Miss Brown’s ending was immoral and violated good taste: even though Anne is free from any economic constraints, thanks to the contract drawn up for her by Hamlin and Richard, she marries a man she detests. While male characters such as Richard find this act unintelligible and thus conclude that Anne must be a ‘mercenary creature’ (Lee 2004, 445) making a marriage of interest, contemporary readers, such as Henry James questioned the credibility of the character of Anne: ‘her offering to marry Hamlin strikes me as false, really unimaginable’ (quoted in Zorn 112). The discrepancy between Anne’s development, her growing social awareness throughout the novel and her sudden self-sacrifice at the end does seem absurd and provocative. Anne’s resignation to marriage shows that her acquired knowledge and her experience failed to make her an independent agent in a society which makes women feel ‘indebted’ to men. Even though the contract drawn up by Hamlin made Anne free on paper, this freedom, this independence always remained insubstantial because Anne never felt free. On the other hand, Lee’s deviation from the narrative expectations built up in the novel is a deliberate attempt at undermining the usual romance plot and challenging social norms. As Christa Zorn argues, by making the typical final marriage unrecognizable, Vernon Lee makes the reader become critical of the expected narrative and also of his own patterns of response. The final ‘shock’ is an injunction to the reader to consider what cruel absurdities, lack of audibility and visibility may perpetuate.