The victorian ear: gendered acoustics in science and poetry

Abstract

Late-Victorians had a sense of a new “modern theory of hearing,” as it was called by populariser of science Grant Allen, being an exciting innovation, significant enough to affect their conception of both hearing and aesthetics. Based on Hermann Helmholtz’s hypothesis of sympathetic vibration in the cochlea, this theory put emphasis on the organ of hearing, which was conceived, in an image that found a secure place in Victorian people’s imagination, as a self-acting piano that analyses sounds by selecting among them. Also, while the technology of the phonograph actualised the idea of a disembodied voice and the possibility of hearing the past, in hypnotic experiments undertaken within the field of physiological psychology attention was drawn to the role of audition in reaching the unconscious and in defining human subjectivity as automatic. I argue that this new state of affairs was reflected upon the generic upheaval related to a dramatic auditor in late-Victorian women’s poetry. I believe that women poets’ introduction of an autonomous speaking auditor, in dramatic monologue, as well as lyric and narrative poetry, was informed by developments in acoustic science in the period. In my view, an interdisciplinary approach that focuses on physics and physiological psychology, the two most powerful scientific discourses which carried the problematic of audition in the second part of the nineteenth century, can help elucidate the importance of aurality in literature of the period between the 1860s and 1890s: the dramaticity of women’s poetry. The listening self manifest in poetic innovation is saturated by the scientific delineation of audition. I trace acoustic metaphors and motifs, shared by science and poetry in the period, such as sympathetic vibration, the siren, the visual representation of sound, the ear’s capacity for fine discrimination, automatism in aural perception, in the work of scientists like John Tyndall and William Carpenter and poets such as Augusta Webster, Christina Rossetti and Mary Coleridge, and the dramatic monologues of Jean Ingelow, Amy Levy, Violet Fane (Mary M. Lamb) and Mathilde Blind. In the 1870s the ear, having become in scientific discourse something other than the receptor of voice, oscillated between being a reproducing and an autophonous instrument that processed sound. Women poets gendered this new construction, manipulating the gendered character of conventions such as sympathy or aural conception, and applying it to the reception-expression dynamics of their own poetry. They allowed the implications of the scientific construction of audition to interact with the ideological construct of the receptive feminine ear, transforming the metaphor of the feminine ear into a trope of receptive expression.