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The Pre-Raphaelites and the “Mood of the Cloister”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Herbert Sussman
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Extract

In his classic study of the Gothic revival, Kenneth Clark describes the transformation of the Gothic from its eighteenth-century associations with the non-rational, the non-civilized, and the mysterious into the sacramental Gothic created in large measure by Pugin and Ruskin. This transformation of medievalism continued through the nineteenth century. By the 1860s, sacramental Gothic had been subverted, changed into what Walter Pater calls in his essay “Aesthetic Poetry” a “profounder medievalism,” a medievalism that is closer in sensibility and artistic form to the contemporaneous Decadent movement on the Continent, to the work of Baudelaire and of Poe. This transformation can be illustrated in the sharp changes in the use of one of the most important signs of Victorian medievalism, the monastic or cloistered life, from the early Victorian writings of Thomas Carlyle, to the work of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and through Dante Gabriel Rossetti's watercolors of the late 1850s and William Morris's Defence of Guenevere volume of 1858, the original subject of Pater's essay.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 8 , Spring 1980 , pp. 45 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

NOTES

1. The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (London: Constable, 1950).Google Scholar

2. Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Bloom, Harold (New York: Signet, 1974), p. 191.Google Scholar References to this essay are cited hereafter in the text.

3. Chandler, Alice, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970).Google Scholar

4. For a more detailed examination of Brotherhood typological theory, see Sussman, Herbert L., Fact into Figure: Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979), chap. 3.Google Scholar

5. Works of John Ruskin, ed. Cook, E. T. and Wedderburn, Alexander (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), xiv, 321.Google Scholar

6. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imiagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), chap. 12.Google Scholar

7. (New York: Signet, 1969), p. 143.Google Scholar

8. See the psychoanalytic reading of the painting by Macbeth, George, “Subliminal Dreams,” in Narrative Art, ed. Hess, Thomas B. and Ashberry, John (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 29–33.Google Scholar

9. “Poe and Tennyson,” PMLA, 88 (1973), 418–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Millais and His Works (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1898), p. 74.Google Scholar

11. Quoted in Ruskin, , Works, xiv, 212.Google Scholar

12. Ruskin, , Works, xiv, 212.Google Scholar

13. See the discussions of this poem in Kirchhoff, Frederick, William Morris (Boston: Twayne, 1979), pp. 50–51Google Scholar, and Lourie, Margaret A., “The Embodiment of Dreams: William Morris' ‘Blue Closet’ Group,” Victorian Poetry, 15 (1977), 193–206.Google Scholar