2010 British Women Writers Conference

I'm very pleased to have had my paper proposal accepted for next year's 18th-19th Century British Women Writers Conference, taking place at Texas A&M University from the 8th to 11th April 2010. This will be my first time speaking at a conference abroad, and I'm especially pleased to be able to go as the conference theme is "Journeys" so in addition to this being a good opportunity to present my own research, it will be very interesting to find out more about the kind of work that is being carried out in this field in the US academic community. My paper is provisionally titled "'Wandering out into the World': Women Walking in the mid-Victorian Novel" and will explore accounts of women walking alone in selected novels by Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot. Taking the framework of the gendered associations of travel spaces as a starting point, I argue that Bronte and Eliot contend with these assumptions by positioning women walking alone in the streets, and explore spatial gendering through the embodied experience of travellers by demonstrating how gendered codes act to alter the ways in which bodies and spaces interact. Furthermore, these narratives go beyond gendered codes to explore the process of travel as a material, embodied practice and thus offer illuminating perspectives on the subject-space relationship that have implications for the critical understanding of literary geographies. The paper will demonstrate how focusing on the movement of characters through space – particularly in the process of walking – enables the development of a more fluid, mobile theorisation of spatiality that is attentive to the transitory nature of the embodied subject-space relationship.

Charlotte Mathieson : 14 Dec 2009 09:40 |  Tags: Conferences English PhD Victorians |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Railways in Art

I've spent the term writing about representations of railways in Victorian literature, out of which have emerged some interesting and unexpected themes and ideas. So far the chapter falls around two main themes: the carriage as a disruptive force that severs the body from connection with the surounding journey-space; and the new spatial context that the carriage produces within itself. In both, images of the body of the travelling subject provide a locus for understanding the new and disrupted spatial contexts that the railway produces.

Often, literary representations are characterised by absence: many journeys aren't described in great detail, travelling bodies often disappear from view. This makes the fleeting glances of travellers all the more interesting- often, the merest appearance of a hand here, or a railway rug there, provide rich sites for analysis within the context of spatiality. For instance, Dickens' description of Dombey's journey notes how objects appear "close at hand and almost in the grasp, ever flying from the travellers, and a deceitful distance ever moving slowly with him” (p.311); that slight reference to Dombey’s hand is so crucial in articulating the loss of embodied contact with journey-space that the railway journey enforces, capturing how spatial perception is thrown into confusion not only due to the velocity of the train but also because the body has lost its relational sense of spatial understanding in this new mode of travel in which space can only be perceived, not experienced in an embodied sense, through the barrier of the window.

Much of this analysis depends on constructing theoretical frameworks for understanding the significance of these passages, and artistic representations of the railways are useful here in supporting and developing a sense of how the carriage-space was perceived and understood. The exhibition Art in the Age of Steam that I went to last year has been extremely useful in this respect, thanks to the wonderful exhibition catalogue that I was lucky enough to be given. I've been looking in particular at images of railway carriage interiors, which aren't often detailed in the texts I'm looking at, and paintings therefore provide a useful supplement for thinking about how this new spatial context was conceptualised. Augustus Egg's "The Travelling Companions" (1862) is especially indicative, full of suggestions that resonate with the ideas I've been working on.

The painting emphasises the enclosure and privacy of the railway carriage: the framing of the visual field is such that the compartment is seemingly little bigger than that of a horse-drawn carriage, and everything is close, pushed in upon itself. The mirroring of the two girls exaggerates this sense of enclosure, drawing the carriage space in upon itself, and also creates this as an intensely private scene, locking the girls (presumably sisters) into a self-contained unit. This private bond between them places the domestic as central to the image, and everything about the interior operates to suggest that they are within a domestic interior; there's a complete denial of this as public, open space and the doubling furthers this by acting to exclude the possibility of anything else entering into this frame of vision.

The possibility of anything else entering the carriage is further prevented by the voluminous dresses that take up almost half of the picture - this provides an interesting resonance with literary depictions in which we so frequently see characters bundelled or parcelled up in numerous coats, rugs, blankets etc. Here, this "parcelling up" asserts their class status, surrounding the women in wealth and luxury which offers layers of protection from the industrialised mode of transport - there is not the merest suggestion of the railway as machine ensemble here. The dresses also act on gendered terms - that these women can travel alone in the carriage reflects the new travel possibilities that railways provided women with; but questions and concerns of the propriety of women travelling alone were subject of much discussion in the early years of railway travel and in literature women risk being villified for doing so (in the texts I've read, women often travel alone only in desperate or extraordinary circumstances). The enclosure of the carriage entailed potential connotations as a sexualised space (although that goes back to horse-drawn carriages too- think of Madame Bovary): but here, there's safety suggested as the "travelling companions" ensure propriety is upheld; and the layers of their dresses conceal their bodies from the possibility of sexual contact or the intrusion of a gazing male - there's literally no space for a male intruder with all those layers of silk!

So we have here a space that seems to be drawing away from its reality as a railway-compartment and instead seeking to recreate a feminised, domestic sense of space. Even the view from the window resists the railway: although this centralised, the view beyond features as little more than a back-drop to the foreground. It's also so static: there is no suggestion that the train is moving rapidly, not only is the view perfectly framed but only the curtain tassle at the top of the window shows any sign of movement. It's typical, too, to see the girls engaged in reading and sleeping- the railway journey enables the traveller to do something other than travel; travelling is now a privatised, individual experience. But this is, of coures, only to consider the first-class carriage; a very different experience of rail travel is presented in images of third-class carriages- but I'll save that for another blog post soon.

Charlotte Mathieson : 11 Dec 2009 15:19 |  Tags: Art PhD Railways Victorians |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

"Through the Sash Window": History of Art Seminar @ University of Warwick, 2nd December 09

As part of the History of Art Department's Seminar Series, Dr. Steven Parrissien gave a talk on Wednesday entitled "Through the Sash Window: Space and the Home in the Early 19th Century". I found this to be a thoroughly interesting and engaging talk which gave me a fresh perspective on ideas of space in the 19th Century. The focus was on the early 19th century- just up to the 1830s- which Parrissien situated as a period in which the middle-classes were able, for the first time, to choose how to decorate their homes (the term "interior decoration" was first used in 1807): with industralisation and the subsequent growing wealth of middle classes, people were more able to devote time an money to the decoration of the home. Home design was largely about demonstrations of wealth, with the home as a venue for displaying new wealth; but Parrissien also emphasised the importance of having choice over how the home was decorated, conveying the sense of excitement and possibility in this new mode of display- pictures of interiors of homes showed the new fabrics and designs on offer; the talk also touched on the periodicals and magazines on home interior design which were being produced by the 1820s, displaying all the wonderful items that could be chosen.

Much of the talk focused on windows- a subject which has interested me since reading Isobel Armstrong's Victorian Glassworlds, and many of the themes here resonated with Armstrong's work. Parrissien detailed the revoltions in glass production that allowed for developments in the construction and design of window: glass could be produced as bigger panes, and with greater clarity (earlier, thicker types of glass offered limited visibility, with windows functioning predominantly to let in light); the window could therefore be constructed to offer a bigger, clearer viewing space. The view from the window now featured as integral to a room, almost part of its decoration: this is emphasised in paintings that position the window view as almost a painting-within-a-painting, creating a landscape in itself.

However, not only was the view out improved, but so too was the view in: the passer-by on the street could more easily see into the home. This de-stabilised the typical public/private sense of space: whilst the home might be ideally conceptualised as an enclosed, private world, the window disturbs this relation and opens up the home which is now a transparent, more vulnerable space that can be penetrated by the gaze of those outside, as well as being more aware from inside of the presence of that "beyond". Parrissien ended by positing the increased importance of spaces around the home, such as the front garden and the front door, as a form of protection and boundary from the outside world.

Charlotte Mathieson : 06 Dec 2009 14:43 |  Tags: Seminar Victorians |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

1 year to go…

Well, there wasn't much to report on here over the summer. After speaking at the conference I wrote about I spent a few weeks buried away writing Chapter 4, so that I could complete it before going on a much-needed break to Cornwall. After that, September passed in a bit of a blur- it's amazing how much time and energy moving house takes, and the next thing I knew it was October and the start of my final year- eeek!!!

Chapter 4 turned out to be a long one, with a huge amount of information crammed in as there is just so much work on Europe that had to be brought into my thinking about the literary representation of European spaces. The Victorian British conception of Europe, tensions between Britain and Europe, writing by British travellers to the continent and ensuing representational issues, anxieties over national identity, hostility towards Britain, Imperial competition and rivalry on the one hand and shared ideologies of superiority on the other, the remains of the Grand Tour, the emergence of honeymoon and family trips, female travellers, anticipation and anxieties of modernity... All of these issues, and more, filter through representations of journeys to Europe in just a handful of mid-Victorian novels. This left me with a difficult chapter to get into a coherent written form- not least, trying to order all of this into a linear argument caused me a lot of headaches- a spatial map of the chapter would have been much easire (and appropriate!)

The finished chapter ended up at around 20,000 words, which brings the thesis total to over 60,000 words so far (all desperately waiting to be re-written). This means that my plan to write 2 more chapters is now adapting to just one more lengthy chapter on railway journeys- which works nicely, as I don't think there's enough material for 2 whole chapters, and it also relieves a bit of stress as it allows me to finish writing the first draft of the thesis by sometime around Christmas and therefore get cracking on the entire re-write in term 2, in time to give my supervisors the near-finished thesis in mid-June... but I don't want to think about that just yet...

For now, the focus is on shaping my writing about the railway journey- once again, there is a lot of relevant research out there, so I'm working on getting my own approach to it shaped out, which as always means close attention to travelling bodies and how they are positioned in spatial understandings. So far, I've been coming up against a lot of absences- lack of detailed descriptions of railway journeys, and bodies notably absent from descriptions that are present- which seems significant in itself. Although it's also more than a little frustrating, wishing that just somewhere there is a book with a fantastically detailed railway journey, but also terrified that there might be one such novel and I haven't/won't find it before finishing the PhD!

Charlotte Mathieson : 11 Oct 2009 21:33 |  Tags: English PhD |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

"Between the Covers" @ The Women's Library

Writing about web page http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/thewomenslibrary/whats-on/exhibitions/betweenthecovers.cfm

"Between the Covers: Women's Magazines and their Readers" is the current exhibition at The Women's Library, which I finally got to visit this weekend. The exhibition brought together a fascinating collection of magazines, following their development from the late 17th century (the first magazine was dated back to the 1690s and the earliest exhibit on display was from the 1770s) up to the present day. The content of magazines had unsurprisingly remained somewhat consistent throughout the years, with an emphasis on beauty and fashion in particular, but shifts in how different themes were addressed reflected the changing conceptions of "femininity"; different readerships were also, of course, an issue with a split in the market occurring from the early 20th century. The relationship between magazines and the different waves of women's liberation movements was interesting, as magazines played an important role right from the earliest formations of feminism in the 19th century, and more recently in second-wave feminism. Supplementing the many visual resources were recordings of interviews with women that had been highly instrumental in the development of magazines in the latter part of the twentieth century, such as Sue O'Sullivan, editor of feminist magazine Spare Rib.

It was particularly interesting to visit this exhibition with my mother who could not only remember the magazines that had been influential for women of her era - from the first magazines aimed at teenage girls in the late '60s, through to those for career women of the '80s - but could also recall the magazines that my Grandma read in the 1950s: it was surprising just how dated and old-fashioned these now looked, with their knitting patterns and articles on the Royal Family as the "celebrity" culture of the day!

I'm not a reader of any women's magazines, far preferring the content of online feminist magazines/blogs like The F-Word, and it would've been interesting if the exhibition had considered how the internet has changed (if indeed it has) the demands on publication of women's magazines- there are a number of feminist publications in print such as Subtextbut these often struggle to maintain a wide readership (in stark contrast to the vast and ever-growing amount of cheap tat like Heat etc. that seem increasingly pervasive on the magazine racks) but the internet has enabled feminist content to reach a wider population than it's even been able to achieve through print distribution.

The exhibition continues to run until the end of August, and it's definitely worth a visit- I'll certainly be keeping an eye out for future events at The Women's Library as it seems they have a wonderful collection of resources to be discovered.

Charlotte Mathieson : 13 Jul 2009 09:32 |  Tags: Exhibitions Feminism |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Literary London 2009: 9th–10th July @ Queen Mary, University of London

Writing about web page http://www.literarylondon.org/cfp.html

This was the first time that I'd attended the Literary London Conference, an annual event that is now in its 8th year of running; I was attracted by the theme of this year's conference, "Urban Geographies", and although I could only make it to first of the two days it proved to be an interesting and intellectually productive day.

Professor Miles Ogborn, a cultural geographer, commenced proceedings with a plenary address on "Re-mapping Literary London", which was by far the highlight of the day. Ogborn spoke about the relationship between geography and literary studies, discussing how the disciplines have interacted thus far and identifying the ways in which future developments are beginning to take shape. Speaking from the perspective of a cultural geographer, Ogborn provided some illuminating insights into how geography views the literary interest in its discipline, beginning by stating that cultural geography has some fundamental problems with literary studies. These focused around issues of representation- the forms of representation that literary studies privileges, and the issue of representation itself. To the cultural geographer, the very forms that literary studies works with seem entirely antithetical to the work of geographers. Ogborn then discussed the recent developments in geography with regards to representation, engaging with the non-representational theory posited by Nigel Thrift, which is situated within a broader inter-disciplinary shift towards a focus on practice: a perspective that challenges the view of world as text in favour of other forms of being, multiplicity. Ogborn posited the question, is this bad news for literary geography, referring to a 2005 essay in New Formations which addressed some of these issues. He discussed the approaches that have recently developed, identifying a disjuncture between two directions that have emerged- one focusing on ideas of the text as cultural production, issues of authorship of space and text, formal aesthetics; and another that thinks about the materiality of space and text, the relationship between the two as enactive, embodied, performative. The latter notion of practice was posited as the direction that literary geography can most successfully engage with as it continues to develop in coming years.

I attended three panels throughout the rest of the day. The panel on Kipling and Doyle was, obviously, focused on a slightly later period than that which I work on, so it was interesting to hear about how issues of urban representation developed in the later year of the nineteenth century: I was particularly interested in Mary Conde's paper on Kipling in which she spoke of London as a transition-space in Kipling's work, identifying images of doorways as central to this. I presented in the first of two panels on the Nineteenth-Century novel, discussing the urban encounter in Charlotte Bronte's Villette through a focus on movement, positing walking as a mode through which to theorise subject-space relationships (abstract can be found here). It was an interesting panel, with papers by Nicola Minott-Ahl on dystopian spaces in Vanity Fair, and David Stewart on J.G. Lockhart's writing on Edinburgh. After this, a second panel on the Nineteenth-Century novel included papers by Richard Dennis, who spoke on Gissing's The Unclassed, and Matthew Ingelby who discussed representations of building plots and urban sprawl from 1850-1900. In Richard Dennis' paper I was particularly interested in his discussion of the differences between two editions of Gissing's text: Dennis mapped out the journeys around London undertaken by characters in the different editions, which revealed crucial differences to where and how characters moved around the city- the later edition showed an opening-up of the space of the city. Matthew Ingleby's paper provided an indicative example of how "real" and "textual" spaces can be read in parallel, and I particularly enjoyed his close analysis of passages that revealed parallel methods of textual/spatial construction at work in the city.

The only disappointment of the day was that I had to leave before Rachel Lichtenstein's plenary on "Excavating Memory"; I've not yet read On Brick Lane or any of her other work, but having read about this when I was preparing for the conference I'm looking forward to getting myself a copy for some interesting summer reading.

Charlotte Mathieson : 10 Jul 2009 11:23 |  Tags: Conferences English Victorians |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

June update

Another quick update from me- this term has been an awful lot busier than expected! After writing an initial draft of chapter 4 I've spent a few weeks re-drafting the structure of the chapter, as the material on travelling through European spaces proved rather difficult to manage. However, now the re-structuring work is done the actual re-write should be relatively straightforward.

The programme for Literary London is now up on the conference website- I'm speaking on the first day, in the first of two panels on The Nineteenth-Century Novel. The rest of the schedule looks very interesting, and with 5 parallel sessions throughout both days there's plenty of choice when it comes to which panels to attend.

I've started preparing my paper for this conference and will get a chance to trial my initial thoughts at the English Department Symposium tomorrow. I stepped in at rather short notice to fill a last-minute gap in the programme, so I was working very hard yesterday trying to get a presentable paper together! It will be very much a work-in-progress piece but it will be a useful opportunity to get some feedback before the London conference, especially as structuring the paper has proved challenging.

At least next week I'll be taking a much-needed week off!

Charlotte Mathieson : 23 Jun 2009 08:36 |  Tags: Conferences English PhD Victorians |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Arts Faculty Postgraduate Seminar Series – week 7

Charlotte Mathieson : 31 May 2009 12:45 |  Tags: English Event PhD Seminar Series |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Arts Faculty Postgraduate Seminar Series – Week 5

Charlotte Mathieson : 18 May 2009 08:11 |  Tags: English PhD Seminar Series |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Arts Faculty Postgraduate Seminar Series – Term 3

The Arts Faculty Postgraduate Seminar Series will be holding three events this term. The first seminar is this Wednesday (week 3) at 5.30pm in the Graduate Space.

Papers will start at 5.30pm, lasting approximately 20 minutes each with questions between each, followed by discussion and time to socialise over refreshments at the end - wine, soft drinks, and nibbles are provided.

All Arts Faculty Postgraduate students are welcome to attend.

For further enquiries, please contact one of the organisers:

Adam Putz: a.putz@warwick.ac.uk

Arina Lungu: a.n.lungu@warwick.ac.uk

Charlotte Mathieson: c.e.mathieson@warwick.ac.uk

Jeanine Tuschling: j.tuschling@warwick.ac.uk

Details of the Term 3 programme are as follows:

WEEK 3 – Wednesday 6^th May

Anthony Bounds (Department of History): West Indian Independence and Decolonisation in the 20^th Century

Clea Rivalta (Department of Italian Studies): “The representation of Fascism in post-war Italy: the case of Alberto Moravia"

Chair:            Arina Lungu (English Department)  

WEEK 5 – Wednesday 20^th May

Dom Holdaway (Department of Italian Studies): “Uomini e no: Recomposing Masculinities in the films of Paolo Sorrentino”

Serena Bassi (Department of Italian Studies): "Rewriting texts and constructing cultures for the market: an exploration of the commercial success of Gomorrah Italy's other mafia in the UK".

Chair:             Mariarita Martino (Department of Italian Studies)

WEEK 7 – Wednesday 3^rd June

Ji Won Chung (Department of English): “Late-Victorian Beauty and the Female Body”

                   

La Tasha Brown (Centre for Translation & Comparative Cultural Studies): "The Black Caribbean Diasporic Urban Experience, 1970-1980."

Chair:             Jeanine Tuschling (Department of German Studies)

Charlotte Mathieson : 04 May 2009 21:49 |  Tags: English PhD Seminar Series |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem