Lindsay P Wilhelm | Oklahoma State University (original) (raw)

Papers by Lindsay P Wilhelm

Nineteenth-Century Literature, Jun 1, 2023

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Aug 31, 2023

Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 2023

The Hawaiʻi of literary renown seems to exist outside the normal flow of time. Charles Warren Sto... more The Hawaiʻi of literary renown seems to exist outside the normal flow of time. Charles Warren Stoddard, in his memoir Hawaiian Life: Lazy Letters from Low Latitudes (1894), recalls the beautiful ‘boat-boy of Lahaina’ in just such temporally ambiguous terms: although the travel writer had not seen the native youth in years, Stoddard muses that ‘the finger of Time doubles up the moment it points toward him’, so that ‘he must be still lying in wait for me, […] not a day older, not a particle changed’. In the case of Hawaiʻi, this pervasive trope of stasis exists in tension with alternative and often contradictory models of time as cyclical, regressive, and even hyper-accelerated, such that Hawaiian history appears to unfold in fits and starts, jumping forward and looping backward in ways that resist linear understandings of progress. Later in Hawaiian Life, for instance, Stoddard reflects on the fate of Kane-Pihi, a local fisherman who in the span of a few months transforms from a ‘gentle savage’ into a streetwise petty thief and eventual convict. For Stoddard, Kane-Pihi’s rapid evolution – which ends with his ignominious death in prison – recreates in miniature the story of a race doomed to collapse under the weight of modernity and its steady drumbeat of ‘development’.

Journal of European Periodical Studies

Literature Compass, 2016

The past 30 years have witnessed a marked growth in critical studies of science and literature in... more The past 30 years have witnessed a marked growth in critical studies of science and literature in late nineteenth-century Britain. This essay seeks to highlight a small, but expanding, subset of research within this larger field that specifically concerns the intersections of evolutionary science and literary aestheticism. As this essay explains, scholars have gradually uncovered the significant inf luence that evolutionary science brought to bear on aesthetic thought. By delving into the archive, literary historians have also come to recognize that this inf luence was reciprocated, in large part because the relationship between evolutionary science and aestheticism was widely recognized by Victorian readers: even as scientific language permeated aesthetic writing, popular associations between the two movements steered scientific inquiry in certain directions. In conclusion, this essay suggests areas for future critical expansion and considers several striking affinities between evolutionism and aestheticism that merit particular exploration. In the years since Gillian Beer published her groundbreaking study of Charles Darwin's inf luence on the nineteenth-century novelists, Darwin's Plots (1983), science and literature has become an increasingly popular subspecialty in Victorian studies. Beer's bookwith its penetrating analyses of Darwin's "imaginative consequences for science, literature, society, and feeling" (2)in many ways proved the viability and utility of her expansive, interdisciplinary approach. A number of inf luential monographs quickly followed, including J. A. V. Chapple's Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1986) and George Levine's Darwin and the Novelists (1988). More recently, Beer, in her capacity as the general editor of the Cambridge Studies in the Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture series, has presided over a veritable explosion of publications on the subject of Victorian science and literature: David Amigoni's Colonies, Cults, and Evolution (2011), Anne DeWitt's Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel (2013), Anne Stiles's Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (2012) and Jessica Straley's Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children's Literature (2016) are just a few of the science and literature titles in the series. As this catalogue suggests, scholars have enthusiastically responded to (if not always agreed with) Levine's assertion that science and literature are both "modes of discourse" that "can and should be studied as deriving from common cultural sources" ("One Culture" 3-4). His stance on the "kinship" of science and literature (7), central to his "One Culture" model of Victorian studies, continues to loom large over nineteenth-century scholarship. 1 Within the burgeoning field of Victorian science and literature, a smaller but growing subset of research focuses specifically on evolutionary science and British aestheticismthe "art for art's sake" movement that came to prominence in the 1860s with the controversial publication of Algernon Charles Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866) and Walter Pater's collection of critical essays Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). It is the gradual expansion of this particular area of interest that concerns me here. As I will explain, scholars have paid increasing

Nineteenth-Century Literature, 2021

Nineteenth-century British representations of Hawai'i reveal an uneasy fascination with the islan... more Nineteenth-century British representations of Hawai'i reveal an uneasy fascination with the islands' apparent collocation of beauty and decay. The travel writer Isabella Bird, in her memoir The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875), neatly captures what many foreigners saw as Hawai'i's central paradox: "Bright dresses, bright eyes, bright sunshine. .. make up the sunny side of native life," she says of one Hawaiian town, "but there are dark moral shadows; the population is shrinking away, and rumours of leprosy are afloat." 1 Certainly, Bird's peculiarly dualistic assessment of "native life" speaks to what scholar Rod Edmond describes as "a counter-discourse of the diseased Pacific"a paradigm, dating back to the moment of contact, in counterpoise to the dominant Western view of the South Pacific as an

South Seas Encounters: Nineteenth-Century Oceania, Britain, and America, 2018

In this paper, I read the Hawaiian royal visit as a touchstone in the cultural relationship between Britain and Hawaiʻi. Accounts of Kapiʻolani's visit—both in the British periodical press and in the memoirs of Liliʻuokalani and Iaukea—become staging grounds, I argue, for overlapping discussions about the nature, function, and future of monarchical institutions. I first contextualize the visit by briefly chronicling the contentious partnership that joined these two constitutional monarchies in the period. Hawaiʻi relied on Britain for diplomatic recognition and political support against the ever-increasing threat of annexation, while Britain, in turn, exploited the islands' strategic location in the Pacific. Both nations also witnessed significant political upheaval in the Jubilee year. Even as Kapiʻolani attended parties and patronized charity bazaars in London, a cabal of predominately American businessmen in Hawaiʻi launched the first in a series of coups that would culminate in the illegal overthrow of Liliʻuokalani in 1893 (as several British newspapers noted, Kapiʻolani was forced to cancel her continental tour to return to her embattled husband). In England, meanwhile, debates over Irish Home Rule raged in Parliament and the press, and developments in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere raised fears about the gradual erosion of Britain's historical sphere of influence. In this vein, I also explore the ways in which Hawaiian and British depictions of the visit—particularly their fixation on pomp and protocol—speak to certain shared anxieties about the integrity and legitimacy of monarchical power. To varying degrees, the “sister soveriegn[s]” that met at the Jubilee presided over kingdoms in crisis, and the records and retellings of their encounter reflect diverse reactions to these crises.

Victorian Literature and Culture, 2018

What measures our distance above the beasts that perish consists in these three things-ethics, in... more What measures our distance above the beasts that perish consists in these three things-ethics, intellect, the sense of beauty.. .. On the third [our existing morality] lays no stress at all; and herein the new hedonism has its raison d'être. It is part of its mission to point out to humanity that literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, the beautifying of life by sound, and form, and word, and colour, are among the most important tasks of civilization.-Grant Allen, "The New Hedonism" (1894), p. 382 Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong. Aesthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilization, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.-Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist" (1890, rev. 1891), p. 204 IN HIS PROVOCATIVE POLEMIC "The New Hedonism," Grant Allen mounts a passionate defense of fin-de-siècle aestheticism by proposing a modern ethic-the titular "new hedonism," which he borrows from Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, rev. 1891)-that fully synthesizes aestheticism's insights with up-to-date scientific knowledge. 1 At first glance, Allen seems an unexpected ally for Wilde, in part because few literary historians have explored the link between the two contemporaries. Many modern-day scholars of Allen's work (including Peter Morton, Bernard Lightman, William Greenslade, and Terence Rodgers) have tended to focus on his popular science writing, his elaborations on Herbert Spencer's evolutionary theories, and his controversial "New Woman" novels The Woman Who Did (1895) and The TypeWriter Girl (1897). 2 Those who do connect Allen and Wilde, such as Nick Freeman, often draw the relationship into focus through the two writers' shared interest in libertarian socialism rather than their overlapping philosophical and aesthetic concerns (111-28). Yet, as we can begin to see in the epigraphs, the association that Allen made between evolutionary progress and the "beautifying of life" echoes one of the most significant claims of Wilde's earlier, dialogic essay, "The Critic as Artist." "Aesthetics," Wilde's speaker, Gilbert, enthuses, "like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change" ("The Critic as Artist" 204).

This essay, published in Victorian Studies, calls attention to the philosophical parallels betwee... more This essay, published in Victorian Studies, calls attention to the philosophical parallels between British aestheticism--the “art for art’s sake” movement founded by Walter Pater in the late 1860s--and a contemporary strain of optimistic evolutionism popularized by iconoclastic mathematician W. K. Clifford in the 1870s. Although evolutionism and aestheticism appear unrelated at first glance, Clifford’s and Pater’s bodies of work reveal common concerns about the influence of scientific materialism on culture and the place of the individual within the evolutionary process. By tracing these commonalities through the work of Clifford, Pater, and aesthetic poet Mathilde Blind, this essay posits a richer account of the interdependent formation of both aesthetic and evolutionary thought in the late nineteenth century.

Conference Presentations by Lindsay P Wilhelm

A paper presented at the International Walter Pater Society 2018 conference, held at the Clark Li... more A paper presented at the International Walter Pater Society 2018 conference, held at the Clark Library in Los Angeles, California.

A paper presented at the North American Victorian Studies Association annual conference, November... more A paper presented at the North American Victorian Studies Association annual conference, November 2016, Phoenix, AZ

In June of 1887, distinguished guests from all over the world poured into London to participate i... more In June of 1887, distinguished guests from all over the world poured into London to participate in Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. Few visitors attracted more attention than the Hawaiian royal delegation, which included Queen Kapiʻolani, consort to King Kalākaua, and her sister-in-law Princess Liliʻuokalani, heir to the throne and last monarch of Hawaiʻi. In this paper, I read the Hawaiian royal visit as a touchstone in the cultural relationship between Britain and Hawaiʻi. Accounts of Kapiʻolani's visit—both in the British periodical press and in the memoirs of Liliʻuokalani and Curtis P. Iaukea—become staging grounds, I argue, for overlapping discussions about the nature, function, and future of monarchical institutions. I first contextualize the visit by briefly chronicling the contentious partnership that joined these two constitutional monarchies in the period. Hawaiʻi relied on Britain for diplomatic recognition and political support against the ever-increasing threat of annexation, while Britain, in turn, exploited the islands' strategic location in the Pacific. Both nations also witnessed significant political upheaval in the Jubilee year. Even as Kapiʻolani attended parties and patronized charity bazaars in London, a cabal of predominately American businessmen in Hawaiʻi launched the first in a series of coups that would culminate in the illegal overthrow of Liliʻuokalani in 1893 (as several British newspapers noted, Kapiʻolani was forced to cancel her continental tour to return to her embattled husband). In England, meanwhile, debates over Irish Home Rule raged in Parliament and the press, and developments in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere raised fears about the gradual erosion of Britain's historical sphere of influence. In this vein, I also explore the ways in which Hawaiian and British depictions of the visit—particularly their fixation on pomp and protocol—speak to certain shared anxieties about the integrity and legitimacy of monarchical power. To varying degrees, the “sister soveriegn[s]” that met at the Jubilee presided over kingdoms in crisis, and the records and retellings of their encounter reflect diverse reactions to these crises.

In the 1890s, the historian, art critic, and fiction writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) dwelt at th... more In the 1890s, the historian, art critic, and fiction writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) dwelt at the center of a robust intellectual community of expatriates living in Europe. Among them were American art critic Bernard Berenson, Lee's lover Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, and the lesbian aunt/niece duo Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who together published poetry under the pseudonym Michael Field. Several scholars have addressed this coterie in terms of its sexual history, but few have linked Lee, Berenson, and Field's shared passion for the art gallery with their interest in aestheticism and its privileging of sensual experience. This paper traces within their work of this period conceptions of connoisseurship, aesthetic value, and spectatorial pleasure: concerns they inherited both from the criticism of Walter Pater and from wider nineteenth-century understandings of the physiological basis of aesthetic feeling. Without eliding their disagreements, I argue that Field, Berenson, and Lee look to the gallery as a model for the modes of selection and curation that they deploy in their own writings about art—especially Field's collection of ekphrastic poems Sight and Song (1892), Berenson's survey The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance (1894), Lee's Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895), and “Beauty and Ugliness,” co-authored by Lee and Anstruther-Thomson in 1897. To varying degrees, these works assume that encounters with beautiful objects stimulate various “vital” processes in the spectating body, making art an important component of “the collection of things outside us” that Lee thought shaped subjectivity. To Lee and her circle, I suggest, galleries and their literary analogues represent powerful apparatuses for the cultivation of aesthetic sensibilities and the dissemination of “culture.” In this context, their critical works—which seek to induct adept readers into the pleasures of looking at art correctly—gesture toward an ethical connoisseurship that finds its most enthusiastic expression in Lee's work.

This essay discusses representations of female sexual desire in Charlotte Dacre's controversial n... more This essay discusses representations of female sexual desire in Charlotte Dacre's controversial novel, Zofloya, particularly as a response to Romantic discourses on the subject of love. As has been frequently pointed out before, male Romantic writers often characterized romantic love as self-completion, a reunion with one's likeness or mirrored self; the narcissism inherent in such a concept threatens the (generally female) other with complete erasure. In creating her notoriously assertive and wildly self-interested female characters, Dacre writes through, around, and against these masculine Romantic modes, staging a world in which female sexuality operates within a narcissistic logic—to explosive, often fatal, effect. This essay first seeks to demonstrate how the novel emphatically and repeatedly renders female sexual desire as self-reflexive: that is, attracted to love-objects that reflect the desirer's sexual power. The relationship central to Dacre's novel, between the “heroine” Victoria and the eponymous Moor, represents in this context a culmination of Victoria's narcissistic quest for her likeness, akin (as this paper argues) to the Shelleyan anti-type. In Dacre's description, Victoria and Zofloya's nominal racial differences give way to physical resemblance as Zofloya begins to couch their mutual desire in terms of their complementarity. The tantalizing prospect of conjugal union with one's likeness—a “dream of vanity,” as the narrator says—ultimately breaks down in the face of Zofloya's ever-increasing otherness, and Dacre finally forecloses on masculine Romantic visions of an other that is only an extension of the self.

Talks by Lindsay P Wilhelm

Talk delivered at the UCLA Department of English Winter Athenaeum, February 18, 2016.