Seeing Through a Glass Darkly: Perspective in Romantic and Victorian Landscape

Abstract

In ‘The Victorianism of Victorian Literature’, Michael Timko argues that the period may largely be defined by its ‘engagement’ with epistemological as opposed to metaphysical issues. Timko contrasts the Romantics’ ‘faith in the interdependence of [self and nature]’ with the Victorians’ ‘epistemological despair’ over ‘man’s ability to know…at a time when it was especially urgent for him to learn more about himself and his world’ (Timko 1975, p. 611). I would like to explore ways in which the shift from metaphysical to epistemological perspective transforms the landscape emblem bequeathed to the Victorians by the Romantics. The Romantics’ belief in a metaphysical absolute uniting perceiver and landscape breaks down in the Victorian period; anxiety over the ‘ability to know’ results in a sceptical noetics that controls the presentation of landscape in Victorian poems as diverse as Idylls of the King, In Memoriam, Empedocles on Etna, Clough’s Amours de Voyage, Emily Brontë’s Stars and Hardy’s After a Journey and By the Runic Stone. In Kantian terms, Romantic landscape emblematises, if not the existence, then at least the quest for the noumenon subsisting beneath perceptual transformations of phenomena in nature, while Victorian landscape emblematises the poet’s quest for verification of the grounds of knowledge.