Some connections between art and the reading struck me. During the Victorian Era, an Academic style of painting was extremely popular with the public. These Academics, artists such as Jean-Leon Gerome and Paul Dellaroche, painted in a way which conveys many traditional Victorian values. For example, crisp linear divisions and idealized representations of nature and people are characteristics typical of the Academics. It seems that the Victorians and the Academics both had a desire idealize life, “hide reality, shut out nature.” (ch. 20)
The narrator tells us that “the revolutionary art movement of Charles’s day was the Pre-Raphaelite.” (ch. 20) While I disagree that they were much of a revolutionary movement, the Pre-Raphaelites did make some attempts to reject Victorian values. They tried to rebel against the sterility that they saw in the popular Academic style and began to make “an attempt to admit nature and sexuality.” (ch 20) One example of such an attempt is John Millais’ Ophelia. This painting shows a young woman laying in a creek with only her face poking above the water. There are some strange sexual undertones in the painting, but really it isn’t too rebellious. The woman is wearing a flowing Victorian style dress, and both the natural setting and her figure are highly idealized. The pre-Raphaelites seem to have hardly made a departure from “idealized … décor-conscious … approach to external reality” that is so typical of the Academic painters and the Victorian Era.
In many ways, Charles is similar to the Pre-Raphaelite art movement. He makes it obvious that he doesn’t like aspects of Victorianism, “he found English society too hidebound, English solemnity too solemn … [and] English religion too bigoted.” (Ch 17) Despite all these objections, Charles, like the pre-Raphaelites, doesn’t seem to be capable of completely detaching himself from his culture’s values. By choosing to marry Ernestina he is not “doing the most intelligent thing” but instead “the most obvious.” (ch 17) There is also evidence of Charles’ inability to divorce himself from Victorian values when he discovers that duty, not Ernestina, Darwin, or Sarah, “was his real wife.” (ch 23) Later, Charles shows the typical Victorian value of emotional suppression when he feels “the need to once again show the stiff upper lip.” (ch 26) At the end of the reading, Charles abandons attempts to resolve his dilemma with Sarah, and instead tries to make her vanish. He asks for “anything to be rid of her” and settles for Ernestina—“a very inferior vintage.” (ch 27
Charles, like the Pre-Raphaelites, seems to have failed in rebellion against Victorianism. Charles’s failure sentences him to an unhappy marriage and a life bound by the strict confines and duties of his society. The Pre-Raphaelite’s failure has left them remembered as a minor art movement whose attempts at rebellion have been overshadowed by the Impressionist’s complete rejection of idealism and Academic values.