Encountering the Niobe’s Children: Vernon Lee’s Queer Formalism and the Empathy of Sculpture

Ventrella, Francesco

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_9

Francesco Ventrella⁶

Part of the book series: Genders and Sexualities in History ((GSX))

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Abstract

The materiality of sculpture was essential to Vernon Lee’s psychological theory of aesthetics based on the beholder’s physical responses. Through collaboration with her lover Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, Lee developed a theory of embodiment based on German psychological empathy theories which was reliant on gallery rather than laboratory experiments. This chapter focuses on the reception of their work within the psychological circles of the time and, in contrast to interpretation of the two women’s intellectual collaboration as a transposition of lesbian desire, I argue that Lee’s dialogue with Karl Groos around the concept of “inner mimicry” is essential to examine how sculpture also allowed her to explore sexuality plastically. Originating in late-Victorian discourses around formalism, Lee’s aesthetic engagement with the past represents an ethics of embodiment that resonated with modern theories of sexuality.

This research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust. I would like to acknowledge Rowan Bailey, Julia Bryan Wilson, Zorian Clayton, The Drakes, Gordon Hall and Dawn Hoskins for responding with incisive comments to previous versions of this essay.

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Notes

1.
“Man lernt nichts wenn man ihn lieset, aber man wird etwas,” J.P. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1955), 215.
2.
Vernon Lee, “Art and Life I,” Contemporary Review 69 (May 1896), 666.
3.
Vernon Lee, Laurus Nobilis: Chapters on Art and Life (London: John Lane, 1909), 91.
4.
Vernon Lee, Beautyand Ugliness and Other Studies in PsychologicalAesthetics (London: John Lane, 1912), 266. Italics in the original text.
5.
Michael Hatt, “Thoughts and Things: Sculpture and the Victorian Nude,” in Exposed: TheVictorianNude, ed. Alison Smith (London: Tate, 2001), 37–49 (37).
6.
On this regard, see Alex Potts, “Male Phantasy and Modern Sculpture,” Oxford Art Journal 15, no. 2 (1992): 38–47. For an exploration of the queer tensions of sculpture in Britain during the long nineteenth century, see David Getsy, Body Doubles: Sculpture inBritain, 1877–1905 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
7.
Kathy Alexis Psomiades, “‘Still Burning from This Strangling Embrace’: Vernon Lee on Desire and Aesthetics,” in VictorianSexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 21–41 (30).
8.
Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, Vol. 2: History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 9.
9.
I take the reading of Foucault’s askēsis as exercise from Ladelle McWhorter, “Asceticism/Askēsis: Foucault’s Thinking Historical Subjectivity,” in Ethics and Danger: Essays on Heidegger and Continental Thought, eds. Arleen B. Dallery, Charles E. Scott, and P. Holley Robert (Albany: State University of New York Press), 243–54.
10.
Susan Lanzoni, “Practicing Psychology in the Art Gallery: Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics of Empathy,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 45, no. 4 (2009): 330–54; Carolyn Burdett, “‘The Subjective Inside Us Can Turn into the Objective Outside’: Vernon Lee’s Psychological Aesthetics,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 12 (2011): n.p.; Kirsty Martin, Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy:Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Benjamin Morgan, “Critical Empathy: Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics and the Origins of Close Reading,” VictorianStudies 55, no. 1 (2012): 31–56.
11.
Jonah Siegel, “The Material of Form: Vernon Lee at the Vatican and Out of It,” VictorianStudies 55, no. 2 (2013): 189–201 (199).
12.
Scholars have already noted that Lee’s essay is intertextually connected to Pater’s ‘Child in the House’ (1878). Stefano Evangelista, BritishAestheticismand Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 56.
13.
Stefano Evangelista, “Vernon Lee in the Vatican: The Uneasy Alliance of Aestheticism and Archaeology,” VictorianStudies 52, no. 1 (2009): 31–41 (38).
14.
Evangelista, BritishAestheticism, 61.
15.
Vernon Lee, “The Child in the Vatican,” in Belcaro: Being Studies on Sundry Aesthetic Questions (London: W. Satchell, 1881), 17–48 (20).
16.
Lee, “The Child,” 48.
17.
Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine ou Analyse Électro-Physiologique de l’Expression des Passions (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1876).
18.
Lee, “The Child,” 43.
19.
Lee, “The Child,” 34.
20.
Lee, “The Child,” 29.
21.
Lee, “The Child,” 20.
22.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 142.
23.
Siegel, “The Material of Form,” 193, 194.
24.
Whitney Davis, “Winckelmann Divided: Mourning the Death of Art History,” The Journal of Homosexuality 27, no. 1–2 (1994): 141–60.
25.
Lee, “The Child,” 44.
26.
Lee, “The Child,” 46.
27.
Aloïs Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie (1901) quoted in Fiona Candlin, “The Dubious Inheritance of Touch: Art History and Museum Access,” Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 2 (2006): 137–54 (140).
28.
Lee, “The Child,” 28.
29.
Lee, “The Child,” 46.
30.
Neville Hoad, “Arrested Development or the Queerness of Savages: Resisting Evolutionary Narratives of Difference,” Postcolonial Studies 3, no. 2 (2000): 133–58. See also Jana Funke, “Navigating the Past: Sexuality, Race and the Uses of the Primitive in Magnus Hirschfeld’s Travel Writings,” in Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past, eds. Fisher and Rebecca Langlands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 111–34.
31.
On the queer temporalities of the child’s “sideway growth” see Kathryn Bond Stockton, “Growing Sideways, or Versions of the Queer Child: The Ghost, the Homosexual, the Freudian, the Innocent, and the Interval of Animal,” in Curioser. On the Queerness of the Children, eds. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 277–315.
32.
Lee, “The Child,” 26.
33.
Lee, “The Child,” 27. The fact that this passage is repeated twice, only slightly altered in the very conclusion of the essay, only adds to the instrumental effect of resonance and relay inherent to Lee’s argument.
34.
In 1923 Vernon Lee gives the translation to Edward Titchener. Anstruther-Thomson, Art and Man, 73. On the translation of Einfühlung in the context of modernist psychology see Susan Lanzoni, “Empathy in Translation: Movement and Image in the Psychological Laboratory,” Science in Context 25, no. 3 (2012): 301–27.
35.
Vernon Lee, The Beautiful: An Introduction to PsychologicalAesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 65.
36.
Lee, Beautyand Ugliness, 254.
37.
Lee had already elaborated on the beauty of fragments in Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, “Beauty and Ugliness” (Part II), Contemporary Review 72 (November 1897), 669–88 (678); see also Lee, “Central Problem of Aesthetics,” in Beautyand Ugliness, 77–151 (108).
38.
Furtwängler proposed his reconstructions of the Venus de Milo in 1893 in a volume translated by Lee’s friend, the archaeologist Eugénie Sellers, Masterpiece of Greek Sculpture (London: William Heinemann, 1895), 378–84.
39.
Lee, “Aesthetic Responsiveness,” in Beautyand Ugliness, 241–350 (254).
40.
Emmanuel Löwy, The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art (London: Duckworth, 1907).
41.
Lee, “Aesthetic Responsiveness,” 255.
42.
Lee was aware of the problematic inconsistency of the terminology used in the experiments. Lee, “Central Problem of Aesthetics,” in Beautyand Ugliness, 91.
43.
Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, “Beauty and Ugliness” (Part II), 669–88 (681). Groos’ German letters to Lee in fact retain the English expression “körperliche Adjustments”. Karl Groos to Violet Paget, 15 February 1901. Papers of Vernon Lee, Somerville College Library. All translations of Groos’ letters are the author’s own.
44.
Karl Groos, Die Spiele der Menschen (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1899), 424.
45.
Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, “Beauty and Ugliness” (Part I), 552.
46.
The term “bodily resonance” is used incidentally only once. Lee, Beautyand Ugliness, 96.
47.
Following the lukewarm initial responses to “Beauty and Ugliness”, Lee decided to address the community of German psychologists in the most authoritative journal of the time. The initial comment from editor Max Dessoir that “[o]ur journal is strictly scientific; pure art-historical works are excluded” suggests a bias towards Lee’s alleged disciplinary affiliations. Max Dessoir to Violet Paget, 9 May 1906. All translations of Dessoir’s letters are the author’s own. Nonetheless, the article appeared as “Weiteres über Einfühlung und ästhetisches Miterleben,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 5 (1910): 145–90. The English translation of the article, with copious footnotes and annotations, appeared in Lee, “The Central Problem of Aesthetics,” in Beautyand Ugliness, 77–151.
48.
“It seems to me that continuous reference to your personal development pushes the subject matter into the background”. Max Dessoir to Violet Paget, 7 October 1909. Vernon Lee Correspondence, Somerville College Library.
49.
Theodor Lipps, “Dritter aesthetischer Literaturbericht,” Archiv für Systematische Philosophie 6, no. 3 (1900): 377–409; Lee, “The Central Problem,” Beautyand Ugliness, 96–7.
50.
Lee, Beautyand Ugliness, viii.
51.
Lee, “Introduction,” Art and Man, 94.
52.
Renate Brosch, “‘Art Can Do Nothing Without the Collaboration of the Beholder’: Vernon Lee’s Theory of Aesthetic Response,” in ImageScapes: Studies in Intermediality, eds. Christian Emden and Gabriele Rippl (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 97–116 (111).
53.
Lee, “Introduction,” Art and Man, 8.
54.
On the queer/lesbian boy see Martha Vicinus, “The Adolescent Boy: Fin-de-Siècle Femme Fatale?” in VictorianSexual Dissidence, 83–106.
55.
Lee, “Introduction,” Art and Man, 47.
56.
Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 166–72; Burdett Gardner, The Lesbian Imagination (VictorianStyle): A Psychological and Critical Study of “Vernon Lee” (New York: Garland, 1987); Maltz, ‘Engaging “Delicate Brains”: From Working-Class Enculturation to Upper-Class Lesbian Liberation in Vernon Lee’s and Kit Anstruther-Thomson’s Psychological Aesthetics,’ in Women and BritishAestheticism, eds. Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 211–29 (212). For a critique of these position see Psomiades, “‘Still Burning,’” 29–37; Sally Newman, “The Archival Traces of Desire: Vernon Lee’s Failed Sexuality and the Interpretation of Letters in Lesbian History,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 1–2 (2005): 51–75.
57.
Maltz, “Engaging ‘Delicate Brains’,” 225.
58.
Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, Le role de l’element moteur dans la perception esthetique visuelle. Memoire el questionnaire soumis au quatrième congres de psychologie (Imola: Cooperative Typographique Edit, 1901).
59.
Groos, Die Spiele, 328.
60.
Lee, “Introduction,” Art and Man, 74–5; Burdett, “The Subjective Inside Us,” n.p.
61.
Lee, “Introduction,” Art and Man, 95.
62.
Karl Groos to Violet Paget, 30 July 1901. Papers of Vernon Lee, Somerville College Library.
63.
Lee, “Introduction,” Art and Man, 38. The friend is most likely to be the feminist composer Ethel Smyth who described such sampling in the Vatican with a derisory tone in her autobiography, published after Lee’s death. Ethel Smyth, What Happened Next (London: Longmans and Green, 1940), 160. The episode has been thoroughly commented in Maltz, “Engaging ‘Delicate Brains’,” 222–4.
64.
Lee, “Introduction,” Art and Man, 30.
65.
Lee, “Aesthetic Responsiveness,” in Beautyand Ugliness, 257.
66.
Lee, “Aesthetic Responsiveness,” in Beautyand Ugliness, 299–300.
67.
The role of plasticity in art history has been recently discussed in a panel organised by Rowan Bailey at the 43rd AAH Conference titled The Power of Plasticity Loughborough University, 6–8 April 2017.
68.
Lee, “Introduction,” in Art and Man, 46.
69.
For a discussion of other examples in which women challenged the male discourse of the museum, see Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).
70.
Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews 1961–1984, ed. by Sylvère Lotringer (Boston: MIT Press, 1996), 57–8.
71.
According to José Esteban Muñoz, disidentification “proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture”. See his Disidentifications: Queers of Colour and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 31.
72.
Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality inVictorianOxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 135; Thaïs Morgan, “Reimagining Masculinity in Victorian Criticism: Swinburne and Pater,” VictorianStudies 36, no. 3 (1993): 315–32 (316).
73.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 165–67. Sedgwick writes about Wilde’s Dorian Gray as ‘glass closet’ or open secret.
74.
John Addington Symonds to Havelock Ellis, 17 January 1893. Quoted in John Addington Symondsand Homosexuality: A Critical Edition of Sources, ed. Sean Bready (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 240.
75.
Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Eonism and Other Studies, quoted in Jana Funke, “Intersexions: Dandyism, Cross-Dressing, Transgender,” in LateVictorianInto Modern, eds. Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 441–28 (419). I am grateful to Jana Funke for productive discussions of Ellis.
76.
Havelock Ellis, “Sexo-Aesthetic Inversion,” (Part II) The Alienist and Neurologist 34, no. 2 (1913): 249–79 (276).
77.
Gillian Beer, “The Dissidence of Vernon Lee: Satan the Waster and the Will to Believe,” in Women’s Fiction and the GreatWar, eds. Suzanne Raitt and Trudy Tate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 107–31 (128).
78.
David Getsy, “Capacity,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1–2 (2014): 47–9 (47).

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Francesco Ventrella

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Jana Funke
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Jen Grove

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Ventrella, F. (2019). Encountering the Niobe’s Children: Vernon Lee’s Queer Formalism and the Empathy of Sculpture. In: Funke, J., Grove, J. (eds) Sculpture, Sexuality and History. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_9

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_9
Published: 05 January 2019
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