Are We There Yet?: Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism

7. The Hypothetical Tourist

70 Are We There Yet? that have passed before his eyes during a specified period. The fact that Brown, who was not only an American but a fugitive slave, could to some extent absorb the colonizer’s perspective speaks to the power of these exhibitions to shape the viewer’s perceptions.16 The panoramic perspective is not, however, a fully realized“imperial gaze,” with the confidence and stability that term implies. The panoramic traveller is a temporary tourist who knows his visa may expire at any moment. The illusion will dissipate, and he will once again be standing in the Egyptian Hall, or the Colosseum, staring at a canvas on a wall. 7. The Hypothetical Tourist Having outlined the development of the panoramic perspective and its cultivation of a sense of virtual travel on the part of the spectator, I turn now to an analysis of the way in which this visual effect is translated into fiction. Nonfictional attempts to replicate the panoramic perspective, such as the panorama guides and journalistic accounts examined earlier, play a crucial mediating role in this process. They construct the rhetorical strategies of inclusion that are then adopted by the novelists. When this interactive strategy is embedded in a fictional work, as we will see, it serves to enhance the realism of the narrative world. The frontispiece to Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836), which depicts a balloon ascending into the air while the crowd below looks up in admiration, suggests that the author intends to present a kind of panoramic overview of the London scene. Cruikshank’s drawing portrays Boz as a lofty presence surveying a world that cannot be viewed in its entirety by those who compose it. This image provides a concrete personification of the omniscient narrative voice of the nineteenth-­ century novel. The type of visual perspective embodied in accounts of panoramas and balloon journeys finds its parallel in the characteristic narrative perspective of Victorian fiction. The narratologist David Herman (2002) has suggested that, within Gérard Genette’s scheme of classifying narratives into “internally focalized narratives, externally focalized narratives, and nonfocalized narratives,that is,narratives with zero focalization”(304),a passage such as the famous foggy opening of Bleak House seems to approximate “zero focalization ”in that it is“narrated in a manner that does seem to transcend the limits of space and time, the constraints of an individualized point of view”(305). This destabilized, floating, unidentifiable point of view reflects in part an increased experience within Victorian culture of the kind of generalized perspective embodied in panoramas. Going Nowhere: Panoramic Travel 71 In the landscape of the nineteenth-­ century novel, I will argue, we see a specific form of visual representation transformed into a narrative strategy that literalizes the idea of “point of view” in order to complicate our understanding of the interplay between subjective and objective perspectives. The duality of the panoramic perspective, its imaginary instantiation of an alternative self who is an actual traveller, is reflected in the Victorian novelist’s penchant for creating an imaginary onlooker whose perspective is used to characterize a scene or vista. We have already seen that descriptions of panoramas attempt, whether for serious or comic effect,to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality,subjective experience and objective view. Panorama guidebooks reinforce that confusion by addressing themselves to a reader who is simultaneously the viewer of a panorama and an imaginary traveller through the place depicted. The rhetorical effect is similar to that created in the many novels that present key scenes from the point of view of a generalized onlooker, observer, or traveller: the reader is offered a choice of positions to occupy in relation to the scene described. The language of the panoramic accounts like those discussed above may in fact have influenced the development of this mode of landscape description. Most panoramas offered for purchase a companion or key to the exhibition that was usually written in the form of a guidebook, as if the reader was being led through a tour of the actual location. Some“real” guidebooks also used inclusive, present-­ tense narration, but when the represented tour is of a represented place, the reader is placed at a further remove from the actual scene. This format neatly elides the difference between being a real traveller and being the potential traveller imagined by a tourist guide. In “An Illustrated Description of the Diorama of the Ganges,” for example, the author offers to conduct “the stay-­ at...