“BURNT TO THE BONE” WITH LOVE, DAMNATION AND SIN: PHÆDRA AS THE SWINBURNIAN $FEMME$ $\textit{DAMNÉE}$

After nearly two centuries of neglect, Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) revived the tragedy of Phædra in his Poems and Ballads of 1866. Phædra, alongside with his other female characters, has been “branded” as shameless, indecent, masochistic, and obsessive. These analyses tend to present the poet’s protagonists as one-dimensional characters lacking emotional and psychological depth. To fully comprehend Swinburne’s Phædra, this paper observes the short poem not only from the point of Pre-Raphaelitism, but also in associations with Sappho and Baudelaire; Sappho acts as Swinburne’s inspiration for female empowerment, while Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal serves as the origin of the unique archetype of femme damnée, that can often be observed in Swinburne’s poetry of the 1860s. The aim of this paper is to shed a new light on the character of Phædra by comparing Swinburne’s delineation of Phædra with how she is portrayed in the classical originals, and then examine how he adapted her in the society of nineteenth-century England. Like his Pre-Raphaelite friends and many of the Victorian poets and artists, Swinburne’s work, especially early poems and plays, display the author’s revolt and aversion towards the Victorian “false” morality.

A Song, the Sea, and a Listening Boy: Whitman, Swinburne, Delius

Song travels. Walt Whitman's poem ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ (1859) travels across the Atlantic to generate first another poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne (‘On the Cliffs’, 1879) and then a cantata by Frederick Delius (Sea Drift, 1903–04). The three works share less a particular sequence of sounds or words than a scene which is also an aural landscape with three distinct parts: song, or its figure, the singing bird; a rhythmically moving body of water that shapes and carries sound; and a listening boy, moved to translate what he hears into poetic or musical form. Using as historical frame two examples pertinent to nineteenth-century debates about the relations between words and music, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1770 mélodrame, Pygmalion, and Richard Wagner's 1860 essay, ‘Lettre sur la Musique’, this essay maps a Whitman-Swinburne-Delius journey of musical translation. Repetitions of Whitman's scene pose the question of song's travels from birdsong to poetry to musical composition. What travels includes the force behind the original song (its emotional springs) as well as the formal strategies by which different listeners translate what they hear into a poem or a piece of music. The rhythmic presence of the sea, as much a figure for such strategies as the singing bird is for inarticulate song, becomes as significant as that song and the listener it moves.

Bright Sunshine, Dark Shadows

Lindsay Wilhelm, “Bright Sunshine, Dark Shadows: Decadent Beauty and Victorian Views of Hawai‘i” (pp. 495–526) Inspired by the recent global turn in aestheticism and decadence studies, this essay considers how late-Victorian discourses surrounding beauty, pleasure, and morality inform contemporary literary representations of Hawai‘i as both supremely inviting and dangerously languorous. The essay begins with a short overview of the broader geopolitical and historical circumstances that helped shape nineteenth-century understandings of Hawai‘i—a place renowned abroad for its beauty and hospitality, but nonetheless still notorious as the site of James Cook’s death in 1779. Next, the essay traces the peculiar ambivalence with which travel memoirs such as Isabella Bird’s The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875) and Constance Gordon-Cumming’s Fire Fountains (1883) describe their authors’ experiences in the islands. In these memoirs, Hawai‘i evidences the same convergence between beauty and decay that undergirds the controversial aesthetics of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, and other adherents of the creed of “art for art’s sake.” Focusing particularly on Robert Louis Stevenson’s fairy tale “The Bottle Imp” (1891), the essay then examines the ways in which Victorian writers utilize Hawai‘i’s leprosy epidemic as an occasion for exploring the perils of aesthetic hedonism. The essay concludes by briefly turning to the work of nineteenth-century Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau, whose own depictions of the decaying Hawaiian village reveal, by contrast, how these British accounts enlist the language of decadence in the service of empire.

Secularity and the Limits of Reason in Swinburne's “Hymn to Proserpine” and “Hymn of Man”

As the philosopher Charles Taylor argues, some experiences of the secular have surprisingly little to do with the “self-sufficient power of reason” that Kant celebrates in “What Is Enlightenment?” This essay argues that Algernon Charles Swinburne offers such a novel strand of secularity in his “Hymn to Proserpine” and “Hymn of Man.” In these poems, time is a power external to the self that is not transcendent yet which the mind cannot fully grasp. Exploring the age of the Earth and the process of evolution, Victorian scientists had been suggesting that the depths of time lie beyond what the human mind may observe or understand, and this notion of time surfaces in Swinburne's poetry. “Hymn to Proserpine” attends to the limits of reason as it evokes deep time. “Hymn to Man,” in which humans channel the power of time, presents logos as both external and internal to the individual subject. By representing and formally registering deep time, Swinburne's poems restore awe and wonder to a world in which God remains absent. Swinburne presents an enchanted vision of the secular and contributes to the pluralization of nontheistic perspectives.

Sexual and Erotic Transgression Through Aesthetic History: A Study of Algernon Charles Swinburne

This article examines the relationship between Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetic writing and history, especially in regards to how he explores sexual transgressions. The article begins with how aestheticism works in tangent with history to further these transgressions within a historical context and especially within the realm of Victorian Christianity. Next, Swinburne’s medieval aesthetics in “The Leper” will be analyzed in regards specifically necrophilia and the taking care of a leper, and how the writing of this poem was both a condemnation of Christianity and an accidental upholding of it. The violent homoeroticism and monstrous femininity of “Anactoria” are also looked at in reference to a classical history and how he tried and failed to use homoeroticism to his advantage in attempting to transgress against Victorian ideals. Finally, an examination of the relationship between Swinburne’s writing and history will conclude that Swinburne damned his own pre-Raphaelite/aesthetic movement as well as the Decadence movement that came after by accidentally associating these sexual and gender oriented transgressions with aestheticism.

The Worst Man in London

Charles Augustus Milverton, blackmailer of society women in the 1904 story that bears his name, is assumed by critics to be based on a real person – but which real person is open to doubt. The favourite is Charles Augustus Howell, a larger-than-life associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (whose members knew him as ‘Owl’), friend to James McNeill Whistler and Algernon Charles Swinburne, and one-time secretary to John Ruskin. However, it is by no means established that Howell was, in Lancelyn Green’s words, a ‘scoundrel and blackmailer’. He certainly seems to have fallen out with a lot of people, but the more outlandish stories about his life and death – Oscar Wilde may be the source for the claim that Howell was found dying outside a Chelsea public house ‘with his throat cut and a ten shilling piece between his clenched teeth’ – may be urban myths rather than actual facts: his death certificate, for instance, records that he died of pneumonia.

Analogy

Analogy was a crucial conceptual tool for Victorian natural philosophers, who regarded the physical world less in terms of material bodies than formal relationships. Thus, even as they aimed for verisimilitude in their theoretical models, James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday used analogical figures freely, for they understood nature itself to be structured around analogical relations. Like Maxwell, Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote an undergraduate essay on the subject of analogy, conceiving it as fundamental to both scientific advancement and poetic production, where its logic of equivalence subsumes not only metaphor but also rhythm and rhyme. Swinburne’s poems “Before the Mirror” and “Sapphics” dramatize the replacement of the traditional notion of metaphor by the structures of formal analogy.