Rosalind White | Royal Holloway, University of London (original) (raw)

Uploads

Papers by Rosalind White

The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 2020

Communication with the dead is not characteristically associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. Howeve... more Communication with the dead is not characteristically associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. However, lodged in the Rare Books Collection of the University of British Columbia is a remarkable diary kept by William Michael Rossetti. It consists of a small series of 27 handwritten folios entitled simply "Memoranda by himself." This diary is a meticulous record of twenty spirit-ualist séances that took place between 1865 and 1868, séances that attracted a number of Pre-Raphaelite artists, their friends, and family members. By 1865 spiritualism was practised widely throughout Britain. Though summoning the dead was by no means a recent preoccupation, it appeared in its modern form in America in the late 1840s, was brought simultaneously to England and the Continent in the early 1850s, and was widely disseminated by the 1860s. It was a highly controversial practice and drew in many famous names, for and against. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an early convert, Charles Dickens a vigorous opponent, but its adherents ranged from Queen Victoria at one end of the social spectrum to Mary Marshall-poor, vulgar, but hugely eminent as the "washerwoman medium"-at the other. Séances, both public and private, took place throughout the country. Some were spectacular displays of showmanship involving large audiences; some were intimate, devout gatherings, while others took the form of after-dinner entertainment. The social, anthropological, and religious status of spiritualism has been much debated, but one important factor drove people to the darkened room of the medium: the desire to contact a dead loved-one. It was this motive that lay behind the séances in William Michael Rossetti's diary, since many of them were driven by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's desire to reach out to the dead Elizabeth Siddal. Though William was of course present at all the séances, not all were attended by his brother, and the "spirit" of Elizabeth Sid-The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, ns 29 (Fall 2020)

Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 2019

Journeying through the looking glass, this paper will examine autoerotic anxiety in the works of ... more Journeying through the looking glass, this paper will examine autoerotic anxiety in the works of Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Pre-Raphaelite muse, enshrined within the metaphor of the mirror, became a prism through which the artist sought to refract his own desires. In this hermeneutic hall of mirrors feminine identity habitually recedes into the distance. At times, however, the female muse becomes a defiant mirror image that holds the artist in her reflexive thrall. Incorporating phenomena such as “the Venus effect”, Lacanian mirror theory, psychiatric photography, and the Contagious Diseases Act of 1864: I will examine how the looking glass, as a reflective, translucent medium, became inextricably intertwined with femininity. This paper draws on Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Glassworlds and the work of pre-Raphaelite scholars J. B Bullen and J. H. Miller who first identified Rossetti’s love of crafting “mirrors of masculine desire”.

Book Reviews by Rosalind White

The Burlington Magazine, 2021

Archives of Natural History, 2018

Conference Presentations by Rosalind White

Emotional Knowledge, Past and Present , 2018

Embarrassing Bodies: Feeling Self-Conscious in the Nineteenth Century’ sponsored by the Wellcome Trust., 2016

In the early nineteenth-century, the worry of beings seen ‘with all your implements about you,’ a... more In the early nineteenth-century, the worry of beings seen ‘with all your implements about you,’ and being ‘stared and grinned at’ was an abiding bugbear for many naturalists.

This sense of embarrassment becomes clear when we examine the paraphernalia of the period. In order to evade public scrutiny (as well as private chagrin) naturalists often concealed their equipment. Faux books stored specimens, nets were designed to look like umbrellas, and devised so that the hoop could be carried under one’s clothes. Alternately, they were worn strapped to the entomologist’s back - to be passed off as guns. Furthermore, green nets were preferred as, though white made insects more perceptible, green ‘had the merit of being less conspicuous’ where ‘the white never fails to attract a little crowd’.

However, naturalists also habitually eschewed embarrassment and wore their passion for their subject with unabashed eccentricity. Professor Wentworth Thompson, for example, continued to use a battered old umbrella for chasing butterflies. Naturalists were often determined to preserve the beloved peculiarities of their profession: continuing to favor top hats, even when they were no longer fashionable (as they could double to store specimens) and conversely using their vasculum to store sandwiches to such an extent that English sandwich-boxes, to this day, are a different size to those on the continent.

This paper endeavours to answer the question - how did naturalists approach the derision and scepticism that surrounded their profession before the advent of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and how was this embarrassment both articulated and subverted? Furthermore, did gender play a part in both the emotional ecology of natural history and the nature of a naturalist’s embarrassment?

Anxious forms: Masculinities in Crisis in the long 19th century | Glasgow University, 2016

Nineteenth-century natural history in many ways dwelt within the feminine sphere of Victorian cul... more Nineteenth-century natural history in many ways dwelt within the feminine sphere of Victorian culture. For many naturalists the domestic home and its surrounding gardens and greenhouses provided the perfect workplace for their research. Darwin, for example, relied heavily upon the epistolary observations of both the wives of his associates and his own daughters. He trusted seemingly domestic trivia concerning the peculiarities of pets, children and garden-plants alongside scientific data.

However, as the century progressed the Victorians began ‘to construct the public sphere (where science belonged) as a masculine domain of rationality, in contrast with the domestic world where feminine emotions reigned’ Notions of masculinity became intimately embedded into the scientific method as science itself was severed from the domestic realm and confined to the laboratory.

My paper endeavours to unpick the concept of ‘the maleness of the Man of Reason’, in which ‘reason progress, and masculinity [are] thoroughly knotted together.’ As acute sensitivity is increasingly replaced ‘by a controlling gaze more befitting the new man of science’ what happens to the naturalist of old? At a time when divisions between the spheres of amateur and professional and public and private amplified notions of gender difference, why did science become the cultural arena upon which the Victorian crisis of masculinity played out?