Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900

Weliver, Phyllis

doi:10.4324/9781315559452

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Lewes, Weliver shows that 'Music-making as representative of automotive processes was a significant and recurring example in scientific studies which led to an understanding that there can be multiple levels of consciousness coexisting within one person'. 82 The notion of 'levels of consciousness', of which Weliver speaks, was being followed by Hardy as a reader. He noted from G.H.…”

Section: The Habit Of Haunting; the Haunting Of Habitmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…97 The very fact that the examples Hardy came across are mainly different from those Weliver highlights only further proves her point that 'Keyboard playing was a recurring nineteenth-century example of how association worked and how habits were acquired'. 98 Writing on 'Work and the Body in Hardy', Scarry notes that 'The human creature is for him not now and then but habitually embodied: it has at every moment a physical circumference and boundary'. 99 'Habitually embodied' is an interesting phrase for this discussion, since I argue that in his memories of playing musical instruments, Hardy offers the reader the embodiment specific to having acquired habit.…”

Section: The Habit Of Haunting; the Haunting Of Habitmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘Habitually Embodied’ Memories: The Materiality and Physicality of Music in Hardy's Poetry

Charlwood¹

2020

Nineteenth-Century Music Review

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This article reads Thomas Hardy's many musical instrument poems as the meeting point for the concerns of several critical fields: material culture, memory studies and the emerging interdisciplinary field of musical haptics. Close readings illuminate not only their relevance to such enquiries, but also how Hardy's manipulation of poetic form engenders a tactile musicality or 'poetics of touch' (as Marion Thain puts it). This article focuses on the aspects of these poems which have undergone least exploration: the depiction of the bodily effort involved in music-playing. While some of the poems are critical favourites ('Old Furniture') many of those studied here are routinely overlooked.A mnemonically-minded poet, Hardy wrote about the memories objects hold and the memories that may be mediated through them. For Hardy, the history of objects is inseparable from that of their now-dead owners: person and thing are tied together in memory. This is in part due to an object's inherent tangibility, and musical instruments are particularly tactile objects, benefiting from the further mnemonic of music itself.The core of the article considers Hardy's late poem 'Haunting Fingers: A Phantasy in a Museum of Musical Instruments', which hears instruments speak out their memories of being touched, and through memory feel 'old muscles travel/Over their tense contours'. Revisions to the manuscript show Hardy removing 'death' and privileging instead the immediacy of remembered touch.Paying attention to the reading and note-taking Hardy did within nineteenth-century science, this article traces Hardy's imaginative explorations of the processes involved in playing musical instruments back to discoveries about the workings of the unconscious. Saleeby, James, Maudesley and Bastian informed Hardy's knowledge of the science behind music-playing, while musical haptics helps this study unpack why Hardy attends to the interactions which take place at the point of mechanical contact: finger to key, and to string.English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy lived through the transformation of the Victorian world into a burgeoning modern society. 1 He is also a poet of memory, thematizing memory in his verse, as well as engaging with the mnemonic forms of traditional versification. It is telling that in 1917, Hardy thanks J.J. Foster for sending the 'beautiful volumes' of Miniature Painters, but finds them 1 I am indebted to the three anonymous readers of this article for their helpful suggestions in revising the article. The research presented here was partly funded by the AHRC as part of my doctorate, and much more recently owes its finished form to the 'Diseases of Modern Life' project at the University of Oxford, funded by the European Research Council under grant agreement 340121.Nineteenth-Century Music Review, page 1 of 25

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Section: The Habit Of Haunting; the Haunting Of Habitmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Habit Of Haunting; the Haunting Of Habitmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Habitually Embodied’ Memories: The Materiality and Physicality of Music in Hardy's Poetry

Charlwood¹

2020

Nineteenth-Century Music Review

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“…Beryl Gray's George Eliot and Music (1989) and Delia da Sousa Correa's George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (2003) tread much the same ground, although Sousa Correa's text is more thorough (as is to be expected from a later study) and each scholar interprets novels such as The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Daniel Deronda (1876) somewhat differently. George Eliot's novels are also analyzed at length in Phyllis Weliver's Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900 (2000) – nearly half the book, in fact, focuses on Eliot – and in a number of the essays collected in Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff's edited collection The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (2004). These single-author studies, though valuable, did little to persuade Victorianists in general of the value of music as a field of study, precisely because they were single-author studies, and because they did not significantly challenge scholarly consensus on the novels they examined.…”

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The Condition of Music in Victorian Scholarship

Peak

2016

Victorian Literature and Culture

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Many Victorian commentators, from Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin on, saw music as the most primitive of all the arts, an inarticulate precursor of language, and yet many Victorians, particularly towards the end of the century, also saw music as the purest of all art forms. The tremendous tension between these two views meant that music provided, and provides, an ideal way to understand more completely Victorian ideas about evolution, gender, and race in relation to aesthetics, although scholarship on music has only begun to consider those relationships. But as Vernon Lee long ago pointed out, in a series of thoughtful essays about music published in Fraser's Magazine and other periodicals in the 1870s and 1880s, music has always been slower to develop than other arts or fields of study. This is in fact why musicologists speak of “nineteenth-century music,” rather than Victorian music: the Romantic period in music, for example, is starting as the Romantic period in literature had largely ended; the English Musical Renaissance comes after the renaissance period in British literature; and so on. Musicology, likewise, is a comparatively young field, and the study of nineteenth-century British music – long limited to Gilbert and Sullivan, if considered at all – younger yet. Studies of literature that engage with music as an important part of the historical context of a given text depend on developments in musicology for a proper understanding of that context, which is why such works are comparatively few. Why music should be slower to develop than other fields is a question outside the scope of this essay, but the good news is that in the past ten years a number of useful and valuable works of scholarship on nineteenth-century British music have appeared, examining not only neglected composers and musical works, but also performers, concert organizers, music publishers, instruments and their history, and evolutionary, Orientalist, and nationalist discourses about music. This scholarship, valuable in itself, not only expands our knowledge of musicology and cultural history; by pointing out some of the deep connections between literature and music in the Victorian period, such scholarship also suggests new ways to think about literary forms, canon formation, and aesthetic theories.

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2024

Acoustics in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science

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Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900

Cited by 4 publications

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‘Habitually Embodied’ Memories: The Materiality and Physicality of Music in Hardy's Poetry

‘Habitually Embodied’ Memories: The Materiality and Physicality of Music in Hardy's Poetry

The Condition of Music in Victorian Scholarship

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