| In examining the familiar fictional representations of Victorian amateur music, critics have largely focused on music's place in the portfolio of feminine and domestic accomplishments: performance as display, as substitute for work, as index of social standing, as mating ritual. But none of these interpretations adequately explains the ubiquity of music or the moral weight attached to it in either Victorian fiction or the society that produced that fiction. What is missing even from the recent, rapidly expanding body of work on music's place in Victorian society and literature is a sufficiently vivid sense of the ways in which the prevailing beliefs about music's influence on individual and national character penetrated the consciousness of even the tone-deaf. Those ways, I suggest, were overwhelmingly textual: words about music were as pervasive in Victorian Britain as music itself. My dissertation is constructed as a series of case studies, exploring three kinds of "textual music" and the ideas behind them. Chapter One describes the participation of the male Victorian sages in the ongoing cultural discourse about music. The sages offer evidence that a belief in music's moral influence was indeed an inescapable part of the highest intellectual life of Victorian Britain; in Chapter Two I examine another sage, George Eliot, and the ways in which that prevailing belief about music is complicated in Eliot's letters and The Mill on the Floss by a conflicting belief in music's value as a source of spontaneous emotion. My concluding chapter considers a different body of evidence, the Religious Tract Society's magazine The Leisure Hour, to explore the tensions among evangelical religion, musical practice, and the ideas about music prevalent in the wider Victorian culture. This is the beginning, not the end, of an understanding of how the theory of Victorian domestic music collided with its practice and its representations. |
