There’s an image from the 1830 novel by Stendhal, Le rouge et le noir, that I haven’t been able to get out of my head. Stendhal uses a simile that compares the novel to a mirror carried along a highway that reflects the clear sky and the muddy road alike: “...un roman est un miroir qui se promène sur une grande route.” If you don’t like to see the mire, argues the narrator, would you blame the man carrying the mirror? The mirror itself? Rather blame the muddy road for having puddles, or the inspector of highways for the bad drainage. This image is part of the narrator’s apology for the realism of this novel: an answer to anticipated detractions about the decision to portray his morally complex characters in an unidealized way.
Many literary scholars have described how the rise of the novel elevated the stories of ordinary people and event into the realm of literature. My dissertation orchestrates a shift of focus, reversing the priority of plot and character in the realist novel in favor of what is normally in the background—moments of plotless description and scene-setting. In other words, my eye is drawn to the way the nineteenth-century realist novel pictures landscapes—like the landscape view captured, figuratively, by Stendhal’s mirror.
Like most of the novels I discuss in my dissertation, Le rouge et le noir is a chronicle of the recent past. In Britain, as in France and elsewhere on the continent, the realist novel held up a powerful mirror to rapid changes transforming nineteenth-century social life. I study that period’s socioeconomic background—from the Napoleonic wars to Britain’s agricultural depression of the 1870s—to show how fiction not only reflects these transformations but also mediates them, actively shaping and framing people’s everyday relationships to their lived present and remembered past.
The nineteenth century was the moment when, for the first time, the past became a place, an imagined place—a rural landscape.
The best way to illustrate how art and literature mediates socioeconomic conditions is through a historical example. If you were traveling through the countryside in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, you might have a Claude glass in your pocket—a sepia-tinted oval mirror, designed to evoke the field of view used by the famous French landscape painter, Claude Lorrain. Tourists and seekers of picturesque scenery used the Claude glass to transform real landscape views into “pictures.” Reversing the pose of Caspar David Freidrich’s Rückenfigur, you’d turn away from the view and angle the mirror over your shoulder to view a reflection of the scene behind you.
Not only did the Claude glass (like Stendhal’s figurative mirror) enclose an actually unbounded view in a ready-made frame, it also captured an image that readily lent itself to reproduction—the flattened picture-plane of the reflection being easier to sketch than real life. As a historical artifact linking tourism, landscape connoisseurship, and artistic amateurism, the Claude glass reflects and participates in a transformation in the way nineteenth-century subjects related to land as landscape and property.
What do these fleeting glimpses—these shadowy reflections—of distant landscapes have to do with the sweeping historical narrative that I locate in the background of my project? I can make a claim here with more clarity than I have the confidence achieve to elsewhere: The nineteenth century was the moment when, for the first time, the past became a place, an imagined place—a rural landscape.
By the early 1800s, the lives of ordinary people in Britain were increasingly removed from the countryside. Meanwhile, artistic and literary representations of rural landscapes—now unmoored from localities and lived experiences—gathered new meanings as they circulated throughout a new mass-media ecosystem. As symbols of nostalgia, leisure, cultural capital, and national identity, images of landscapes came to express urgent and ongoing social and ethical conflicts over property, access, and dispossession.
The framework that shapes this way of seeing the past emerges, I argue, from the rise of the picturesque—“that peculiar kind of beauty,” wrote drawing-master William Gilpin in 1786, “which is agreeable in a picture”—in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Codified by late-eighteenth century landscape architects who were renovating aristocratic estates for a new generation of landed wealth, the picturesque was a style that prized rough and varied natural scenery—the wild and craggy prospect; the ruined cottage—and was, thus, closely allied with eighteenth-century theories property law, land management, and the enclosure of the commons. Enclosure, a century-spanning legal and customary process that stripped people of traditional rights to forage, glean, and pasture on common lands, fueled rural-to-urban migration, swelled the population of metropolitan centers, and spurred the suburbanization of the countryside.
The popularity of the picturesque landscape in art and literature coincided with the progress of processes of privatization that transformed Britain’s countryside and its economy. It also constellated a set of visual and narrative conventions that frame rural places as quaintly premodern, finding beauty in their apparent obsolescence in an industrial era. In nineteenth-century novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, I see the afterlife of the picturesque in nineteenth-century fiction’s realist aesthetics. Picturesque conventions continue to prime our misrecognition of present sites of extraction as belonging to the past. My project wagers that understanding how nineteenth-century fiction transforms and transmits these ways of seeing can help us “read” our twenty-first century world, by laying bare the ethical stakes that still inhere in stories we tell about social and environmental change today—and the invisible costs of privatization, development, and gentrification that these changes entail.