Speaking looks: Varieties of ekphrastic experience in nineteenth-century literature

This dissertation explores the complex presence of the visual arts in the nineteenth-century literary imagination. It takes ekphrasis, the literary response to a work of visual art, as the vehicle for that exploration. Turning to ekphrastic experiences in both poetry and narrative fiction, this study interprets the significance of ekphrasis in texts by D. G. Rossetti, Baudelaire, Eliot, and Hawthorne. Through these readings, the dissertation brings into view the narrative dimension of what traditionally has been understood as a descriptive mode; and it reveals the different ways in which ekphrasis may be seen to promote a symbiotic relation between the verbal and visual arts.;The Introduction sketches the history and current status of ekphrasis as a critical term, while also highlighting the potential challenge that ekphrasis poses to Lessing's division between the sister arts. Focussing on Rossetti's "Sonnets for Pictures," Chapter One differentiates between "static" ekphrasis (which describes a work of art) and "dynamic" ekphrasis (which actively interprets and addresses a work of art, reading a narrative in it). The chapter suggests that Rossetti's ekphrastic sonnets, especially the dynamic ones, pay tribute to paintings through the varieties of narrative responses they offer. Chapter two demonstrates that Baudelaire's ekphrastic poems--diversely inspired by painting, etching, and sculpture--utilize the fixity of art to emblematize and reflect on conditions of stasis in life. Chapter three analyzes Eliot's strategic representation of classical sculpture in Middlemarch. It argues that Eliot affirms the power of visual art for narrative fiction by drawing on statuary to serve several functions: to kindle romantic desire, to prefigure the novel's romance plot, and to represent the female erotic body without violating Victorian literary codes of reticence regarding sexuality. The fourth and final chapter presents a reading of The Marble Faun that elucidates Hawthorne's dual interest in suggestiveness and aesthetic reception. Showing that Hawthorne both celebrates the suggestiveness of art and calls on the visual arts to achieve the ideal of suggestiveness in his romance, the chapter argues that Hawthorne's extensive ekphrastic project creates a mutually beneficial, or even symbiotic, verbal-visual dynamic.