Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England (review)

According to Ohio State University Press, the Victorian Critical Interventions series of which this excellent volume is a part promises "provocative, theory-based forays into some of the most heated discussions in Victorian studies today, with the goal of redefining what we both know and do in this field"; Linda M. Shires's Perspectives amply delivers on these claims. Her title points to the imaginative perspective that she takes on the Victorians' complication of the question of point of view. While familiar enough to literary scholars—and thoughtfully examined by Shires herself in earlier work on the dramatic monologue and the double poem—her topic is immeasurably enriched by being viewed through the lens of classical visual perspective and its contestation in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

The visual is fundamental, Shire argues, to our understanding of the ways in which the Victorians knew and represented their world; her book brings the insights of recent critical and theoretical work on visuality, particularly as it relates to the perspectival paradigm, to bear upon nineteenth-century literary and visual culture. How do certain features that seem fundamentally characteristic of the Victorian literary imagination—the skepticism at the heart of the realist project that informs the narrative technique of so much Victorian fiction, for example, or the unsettling of the Romantic idea of a unified subject in genres such as the dramatic monologue—relate to what Jonathan Crary describes as the radically transformed "techniques of the observer" in the same period? It is only by engaging in genuinely interdisciplinary work across literary and visual fields, Shires proposes, and by comprehending the parallels between, for instance, experimentation in realist point of view and classical linear perspective, that we can productively complicate the rather crude rupture narratives that have tended to dominate both literary and visual histories of the end of Renaissance perspective and the rise of modernism.

And this is what the book very successfully does. Beginning with a statement of the centrality of perspective understood literally as an optical term in art education, Shires moves quickly from Ruskin's manual for the girls at Winnington Hall School, The Elements of Perspective (1859), into a consideration of how perspective "comes to us mediated by metaphor and thus inflects art history and literary history with questions of epistemology" (4). In what follows, she takes issue equally with those who suggest that renaissance perspective was decisively routed in the early nineteenth century to be replaced by a newly subjective model of vision, and those who locate the moment of formal innovation at the end of the century with the advent of modernism. Instead, she argues for a more nuanced understanding of the nineteenth century as a period when traditional monocular and universalizing models of vision and the observer co-existed with alternative models that emphasized stereoscopy, multifocality, relativism, and partiality in a dynamic creative dialogue that played out over decades and informs what we think of as the most distinctive traits of Victorian literary and visual culture.

Shires proves her thesis in a transgeneric study that moves from a comparison of the paintings of J. M. W. Turner (who was for thirty years Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy) and William Dyce with the angular perspectives of Romantic and Victorian poetry; through the double art (in which paintings and poems are paired) of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; to the photography of Henry Peach Robinson and Clementina Hawarden; culminating in a final chapter on 1860s fiction by Wilkie Collins and George Eliot that experiments with narrative point of view in ways that compare with Robert Browning's poetry. At the beginning of this last chapter, she poses a key question that is clearly fundamental to her methodology: "What does visual perspective have to do with narrative point of view? Can one really talk in the same breath about painting, photography, fiction, and poetry, despite real generic differences...