SESSION: Victorian Art after Trans Studies
The nineteenth century saw profound transformations in how being and embodiment were figured across British culture. Art and science were at the forefront of these changes. As new forms of subjectivity were being formulated, the relationship between the self and the body, and between the body and life itself, were being reconfigured in visual productions and scientific writings alike. These transformations were entangled with new, ambivalent, and profoundly modern ways of thinking about gender, sexuality, form, and the nature and limits of the human. In Victorian art, the body was opened up to forces and flows which constituted and exceeded it.
This panel invites papers that centre trans studies as a lens for exploring these turbulent transformations in nineteenth-century art. What modes of embodiment, being, or becoming come into view when Victorian visual culture is approached via trans theory? What kinds of subjects and materials come to matter differently? What are the uses of transness—attuned to transition, indeterminacy, multiplicity, and bodily change—as a theoretical and historical framework?
Session Convenors:
Frankie Dytor, University of Exeter
Emma Merkling, University of Manchester
Session Speakers:
Melissa Gustin, National Museums Liverpool
‘Solar Metamorphoses: G F Watts, Gender, and Transformation’
G F Watts regularly turned to narratives of transformation from mythology for his artistic subjects. Of these, his best-known is perhaps Clytie, produced in several media. In this body of work, Watts transformed ideas, materials, and bodies across several levels, merging known and unknown models, both masculine and feminine, transhistorical references, and intermedial cross-pollination within his own oeuvre. This set of works offers a set of ideas and connections building from the starting point of a historically perceived binary divide within the sculptural Clytie, building from the Greek myth of the origins of gender and through to the Renaissance, humanity and super-humanity, and the depiction of solar energy. This paper will also address Watts’s unfinished sculpture Aurora, which was intended to personify the inhuman and incorporeal effect of a sunbeam as an attempt to transform the power of the sun into a recognisable form, in this case, a highly stylised figure with breasts but sometimes described as being modelled by a man. Watts’s superhuman and allegorical figures offer an idiosyncratic but productive avenue for engaging with trans readings and studies as work by a cisgendered Victorian male artist whose personal view on his work was often given as “I paint ideas, not things,” allowing his work to be theorised and explored outside of literal and limited representational practices.
Caroline Arscott, The Courtauld Institute of Art
‘The conjugal double body in Ford Madox Brown’s painting’
This paper examines the double portrait in oil on canvas by Ford Madox Brown of Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Henry Fawcett. The picture is dated 1872 (exhibited 1874). Brown was repeatedly described in the 1860s and 70s as a painter in whose output eccentricity and the grotesque marred the work. I suggest that the hybridising linkage between the sitters in the portrait challenges singular identity and gendered positions in a way that could be troubling for viewers seeking clearly differentiated and appropriate gender types. Moreover, the composition enacts a proliferation of equally charged points of touch, decentering the libidinal focus. This portrait shows the tender, attentive gaze of Mrs Fawcett as she completes a document with her blind husband, Professor Fawcett. The interlocked and pointing fingers show cooperation and eroticised bodily conjunction in a situation where the mutilated husband gains a prosthetic extension in the person of his wife. Both their signatures appear on the pictured document. In the same year as the portrait, they jointly published Essays and Lectures on Social and Political Subjects. The essays advocating equal employment opportunities for women, proportional representation, etc., were assigned by initials to one or other Fawcett, but reviewers were struck by the stylistic and intellectual similarity, amounting to interchangeability. The trans theory of media networks, as articulated by Ozum Hatipoglu (2018), suggests ways in which the hybridisation of the aural/locutory biologized male figure and the symbol-wielding technologized female figure enables the radical envisioning of identity spread across technological systems.
Francesco Ventrella, University of Sussex
‘A feeling for form: trans affects at the turn of the century’
In the late nineteenth century, feeling participated in a materialist economy of forms which elected art and artworks as webs of affective exchange between bodies and objects. Stemming from a trans engagement with nineteenth-century psychological aesthetics, this paper looks at coeval theories of Einfühlung, or empathy as relational tactics to trans gender and build instead new aesthetic binds that have the capacity “for making visible, bringing into experience, or knowing genders as mutable, successive, and multiple”. Empathy, or the capacity to feel into an object, allows us to look at Victorian affects as hermeneutic constructs for historical investigation. Drawing on Alexis A. Ferguson’s distinction between the nominal and the conceptual uses of “trans” in Victorian studies (2023), the paper strategically focuses on two case studies. Firstly, I look at the gender mobility of Alessandro di Marco, the Italian model who sat for many Victorian painters, and most notably as Venus for Walter Crane. I argue that the gender unfixity of Di Marco’s modelling is symptomatic of the ethnic construction of Southern Italians in late-Victorian culture that resonated with the popularization of femminielli in scientific literature of the time. The second case study, instead, turns to Vernon Lee’s use of empathy in art writing as an attempt to transcend the binary limits of gender in works of figurative art. As I argue that Lee’s empathy challenges its sexological use in relation to Eonism, or sexo-aesthetic inversion (Havelock Ellis, 1915), the paper suggests that trans theories of affect can revitalize Victorian art history by advocating for inclusive definitions of sex along with contextually grounded interpretations of gender.
Sarah Betzer, University of Virginia, and Kings College, University of Cambridge
Relief’s Trans Affordances
In recent years, art historians have developed rich analyses of Victorian authors’ engagement with exemplary historic art forms and makers– whether Renaissance or antique–as opportunities for queer identifications. This paper centres a less scrutinized aspect of British art writing of the final decades of the nineteenth century: a preoccupation with relief sculpture. If the opposition between painting and sculpture has been foundational for an understanding of art in the long European tradition, the theory, practice, and reception of relief sculpture muddied any such clean distinctions, operating as it did in the interval between the pictorial and the plastic. Might the advent of trans studies–and with it a sharpened attunement to forms, processes, and media that work between, or against, or indeed fundamentally call into question, structuring polarities–help frame a new examination of Victorian relief preoccupations?
By the time authors such as Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, and John Addington Symonds formulated their relief reflections, a familiar historical telos for sculpture entailed a developmental logic of ever greater in-the-round-ness. Familiar from Pliny, this logic still governed archaeological and Classicist analyses of the period. But by the early 1890s, relief was newly activated thanks to Adolf von Hildebrand’s Das Problem der Form in Der Bildenden Kunst (1893; published as The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture in 1907). Set against this art-theoretical volatility, key episodes in which relief was deployed by Pater, Lee, and Symonds allow for a new sense of the affordances offered by this unruly, necessarily liminal, medium.