Engendering Landscape Perception: Romanticism and the Standards for Looking

Abstract

George Campbell can think of no more illustrative an image for his delineation of the progress science makes from the specific to the general than the opening of the comprehensive vista known as the prospect. The prevalence of this viewpoint as a metaphor, however, is matched by its exclusivity, for despite Campbell’s republican emphasis on those undefined ‘people’ who can progress from the confined ‘bottom’ to the ‘lofty peak’, such a journey is not so easily undertaken after all. Indeed, a twentieth-century critical analogue to Campbell’s utopian scheme would be John Barrell’s intensely historical rendering of the same ideal:

The inability to [produce abstract ideas ‘out of the raw data of experience’] was usually represented as in part the result of a lack of education, a lack which characterised women and the vulgar; and … women are generally represented in the period as incapable of generalising to any important degree… [I]n the matter of political authority, legitimated [by the ability to abstract], women were almost entirely out of the question, and the issue to be decided was which men could pass the test of taste. (‘Politics’ 19)

In all sciences, we rise from the individual to the species … [and] arrive … at the knowledge of general truths … In this progress we are like people, who, from a low and confined bottom, where the view is confined to a few acres, gradually ascend a lofty peak or promontory. The prospect is perpetually enlarging at every moment, and when we reach the summit, the boundless horizon, comprehending all the variety of sea and land, hill and valley, town and country, arable and desert, lies under the eyes at once.¹