Held captive to a picture: Visual experience in nineteenth-century texts and early film (Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, John Ruskin, Sir Alfred Hitchcock)

“Held Captive to a Picture: Visual Experience in Nineteenth-Century Texts and Early Film”, looks at the conflict between visuality and narrative in Victorian novels, prose, and autobiography, as well as primitive and silent cinema. Departing from the dominant critical tendency to subordinate, contain, and interpret the visual through the textual, and in particular, from the concept of “the gaze” which imagines the eye only as it is aligned with power and omniscience, I chart an alternative visuality that radically disrupts narrative coherence. Specifically, I focus on representations of visual experience that displace and fragment the construction of a unified subjectivity and perspective, and lead to narrative breakdown.; Examining this disjunction in works by Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Ruskin, and Hitchcock, I demonstrate how the visual surfaces as a disruptive force that produces unexpected elisions in the fabric of the text, overturning the narrative drive towards selfhood, temporal logic, and control. In addition, I show how these gaps may induce a certain interpretive anxiety in both the text and the critic to “explain [them] away”, as Brontë so aptly put it. I place this anxiety within an anti-visual tradition that can be traced at least to Plato's allegory of the cave, and is especially prominent in the Romantic and Freudian privileging of narrativized depth and interiority over surface deception and instability. The works I look at upset this hierarchy, however, offering instead a distinctly pre-Freudian conception of visual experience as a psychological, formal, and cultural space that cannot be represented within the confines of narrative intention and convention. Whether it is Master Humphrey involuntarily fixating on the image of Little Nell; Ruskin abandoning his autobiographical project to the dazzling glare of fireflies; Lucy Snowe idolatrously tracing the features of Graham Bretton's portrait; or a vaudevillian dancer overpowering the cool, voyeuristic Hitchcockian lens, in each instance the visual disrupts the illusion of subjective coherence and produces narrative breakdown.