Victorian Escapism

Victorian Escapism

I. Romantic and Victorian Differences

  • Victorian desire to escape from everyday reality: social rigours, laws, mentalities, conventions.
    • Escaping into a world of their own.
    • Escaping into times populated by previous generations.
    • Escaping into spaces, nature.
  • Victorian escapism vs Romantic escapism:
    • Victorian: less violent, more decreased in intensity, less passionate, lacks dramatic flow, reduced to a delicate, sensitive, tamed element.
    • Romantic: violent, more intense, outbursts of passion, cosmic dramatic intensity.

II. "Places" of Escape

  • Nature.
  • Exotic spaces.
  • Religion.
  • Eros.
  • Cultural past.
  • Childhood.
  • Dream.
  • Art.
  • Nature's connotations encompass other escape routes, except for art, which remains isolated in the Victorian view.
  • Definitions of Nature:
    • A. Physical power causing phenomena of the material world.
    • B. Uncultivated or wild area.
    • C. Human nature.
    • D. Inherent impulses determining character or action.

Tamed, Mild, Domesticated Nature

A. An Optimistic Perspective on Domesticating Nature
  • Exotic nature in William Morris's designs (1834-1896):
    • Mild natural elements: flowers, plants, trees, non-ferocious animals (bees, birds, a tamed lion).
    • Symmetrical patterns creating a hypnotical effect and pleasant atmosphere.
  • Nature as a temporary retreat in Kensington Gardens (Matthew Arnold: Lines Written in Kensington Gardens).
  • Kipling’s Jungle Book:
    • Exotic space where nature is wild and dangerous.
    • Mowgli learns to make friends and control nature within the jungle, himself, and village people.
    • Utilizing animal wisdom to tame the wild nature of man.
B. A Pessimistic Perspective on Nature
  • Nature as an indomitable evil exterior force, wild (and evil) human nature.
  • Sadness and loneliness suggested by the unweeded garden:
    • Burnett’s Secret Garden.
    • Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations: the fallen garden of Miss Havisham.
    • Description from Great Expectations: a wilderness with old melon frames and cucumber frames producing spontaneous growth of old hats and boots, with a weedy offshoot into the likeness of a battered saucepan.

Hostile Nature

  • Abandoned garden in Tennyson’s Mariana (stanza 4):

    • Blackened waters, creeping moss, one poplar tree with a twisted trunk.
    • Mariana, stanza 4:


    About a stone-cast from the wall
    A sluice with blacken’d waters slept,
    And o’er it many, round and small,
    The cluster’d marish-mosses crept.
    Hard by a poplar shook away,
    All silver green with gnarled bark:
    For leagues no other tree did mark
    The level waste, the rounding grey.
    She only said, ‘My life is dreary,
    He cometh not,’ she said;
    She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
    I would that I were dead!’

  • Definitions:

    • Sluice: sliding gate for water.
    • Gnarled bark: twisted bark.

Garden of Death

  • Proserpine’s garden of death (Swinburne’s):

    • No growth or moor or coppice, no heather-flower or vine, but bloomless buds of poppies, green grapes of Proserpine.


    Nor growth or moor or coppice,
    No heather-flower or vine,
    But bloomless buds of poppies,
    Green grapes of Proserpine,
    Pale beds of blowing rushes
    Where no leaf blooms or blushes
    Save this whereout she crushes
    For dead men deadly wine.

  • Coppice: area of small trees.

Eroticised Nature

  • Seen as an evil woman.
  • Matthew Arnold opposes nature's violence to man's mildness (male).
  • In Harmony with Nature: “… In harmony with nature?/ Restless fool… the last impossibility/ Nature and man can never be fast friends.”
  • Nature as violent phenomena or the nature of women: “Nature is fickle”.
  • Nature becomes eroticised in this context.
  • Victorian literature describes some men as effeminate (melancholy, sad, wailing), leading to the opposite reaction with woman characters: the Proserpine type.
    • La femme fatale in an eroticised space (Arabella, Becky, Miss Havisham via Estella, Proserpine).
    • Men come to her garden and are lulled to the sleep of death: “She waits for each and other/ She waits for all men born…”
  • Works like The Garden of Proserpine, In Harmony with Nature, The Lady of Shallot, Wuthering Heights, Jude the Obscure present a power game in a battle of the sexes.
    • Meeting with the other is suicidal or brings about death.
    • Nature must be controlled as a woman should.
    • She represents the anti-social principle of wilderness, the irrational.
  • Irrational feminine principle as man’s alter ego (Carl Jung’s animus-anima).
    • Bertha Mason is Edward’s anti-social ego.
    • Arabella is Jude’s irrational subconsciousness.
    • Catherine is Edgar Linton’s wild suppressed self.
    • Attempts to tame these feminine natures become oppressive and lead to madness, dizziness, sickness, and death because they cannot be tamed.

Escape in Religion

  • Escape from the Puritan to the Catholic approach to divinity (Hopkins), from atheism and industrialism to the Christian religion.
  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poems echo Dante, with the divine acquiring a feminine touch through the departed woman.
  • Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam:
    • Addressing God to overcome despair despite Science doubting Him.
  • Arthur Clough's The Latest Decalogue:
    • Expresses worry over Victorian society's mercantilism.
    • Uses irony and sarcasm to regenerate people.
  • God replaced by the spirit/metaphysics of nature:
    • God is absent but an energy of nature exists.
    • Pantheism creating poetic texts - Romantic reminiscence (Wuthering Heights, In Harmony with Nature, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the D’Ubervilles).
  • Nature becomes a malignant divinity, the place of sin (a jungle of passions), a weird ritualised nature (Stonehenge).

Escape in Eros

  • The protagonist (Jude) is atopos: caught between the bad angel (Arabella) and the good angel (Susan).
  • The lamented beloved woman (The Blessed Damozel, My Last Duchess) becomes a ghostly presence.
    • The dead woman becomes objectified because she is now controlled.
    • Allan Edgar Poe: the most interesting subject of poetry is a dead woman because the poet can explore the intensities of love infinitely, becoming in love with love itself.
  • Woman as an evil beauty (Proserpine, Arabella):
    • Believed to be initiated in the mysteries of birth, love, and death.
    • Proserpine initiates men into evil love and death.
    • Arabella initiates Jude into physical love, contributing to his destruction.
  • In Victorian literature, both men and women can be seduced and abandoned.
  • Novels and poems feature seducers (Heathcliff, Ulysses, the Duke of Ferrara, Lockwood, Rochester, St. John Rivers, Drummel, Alec D’Uberville).
  • Victims can be characters or the reader.

Return to Past Cultural Models

  • The Pre-Raphaelites:
    • Dante Gabriel Rossetti (poet and painter).
    • John Everett Millais (painter).
    • William Holman Hunt (painter).
    • Maddox-Brown.
    • William Michael Rossetti (art critic, Dante’s brother).
  • Developed a cult of “the immortals” (Jesus Christ, Homer, King Alfred, Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Leonardo DaVinci).
  • Reacted against Victorian materialism and Neo-Classical conventions.
  • Produced earnest, quasi-religious works.

Retreat into Childhood and into Dream

  • Childhood is felt as a prison (Dickens: David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations) or a nightmare (Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass).
  • For Alice, growing up and entering the adult world is a nightmare.

Escape in Art

  • Art is superior to reality: Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (art for art’s sake doctrine).
  • Art creates its own self-sufficient universe (My Last Duchess).