Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Victorian novelists identified the domestic sphere as a place of sanctuary for middle-class sensibilities in an urban mass culture, but in the Romantic age, the modern distinction between private and public, between the inner life and the theatrical, social self, was not yet clearly articulated. Thus we find, in the rapid expansion of visual arts and entertainments in the period, multiple signs of Romanticism's hybrid nature: as at one time a language of private feeling and a mode of charismatic public performance. It is the problematic crossing Jane Austen addresses in her debut novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811) , in which the heroine Marianne Dashwood is unable to distinguish between true sensibility and the mere performance of it in Willoughby, the lover who exploits her uncritical embrace of Romantic feeling. Marianne must travel from picturesque Devonshire to London for her scene of disillusionment, and this essay will follow in her steps. I begin with the emergence of modern English landscape painting in the late eighteenth century as a visual language of the newly imagined private sphere, in which the ideal of an inviolable inner life resides first with women, both as subjects of the glamorous new genre of landscape portraiture, and as principal consumers in the booming amateur art and landscape tourism markets. My focus then shifts to the headquarters of the new visual-cultural ... log in or subscribe to read full text