![]() He drags Lucy off to look at another picture, three sentimental scenes in the life of a virtuous woman, which she finds as absurd as the Cleopatra. Paul Emmanuel discovers her in front of the "Cleopatra" and is shocked - a reaction which shows him to be immune to the cant of connoisseurship, but in thrall to gender stereotyping. Paul Emmanuel, the testy, unhandsome but vital master at Lucy's school, whom she in due course recognizes as a much more fulfilling mate than the superficially eligible Dr. It also provokes an interesting scene with M. It contributes to the characterization of Lucy, a young woman of strong, independent and unconventional views, though her lack of beauty, status or wealth obliges her to keep them to herself most of the time. In itself, the description of the painting has no narrative content the story "pauses" so that it may be delivered. And why are those goblets overturned on the floor, when the people depicted would have had plenty of opportunity, or servants, to pick them up? Lucy's unblinking scrutiny raises questions habitually repressed in the ritual of gallery-visiting, and by holding back the title, "Cleopatra," till the end of her description, she implies the arbitrariness and spuriousness of the historical/mythological justification claimed by the painting, which could just as well have been called Dido or Delilah, or (more honestly) Odalisque. We have become so familiar with the use of drapery in classical paintings of the nude, billowing round the figure in convoluted folds without covering anything except perhaps a few inches of pubic flesh, that we no longer perceive its essential artificiality. ![]() seven-and-twenty yards, I should say, of drapery." The languorous reclining pose, with its tacit erotic invitation, is ridiculed by remarking on its incongruity with the time of day, and the lack of any obvious physical debility. Thus the monumental size of the female figure and the superfluity of drapery about her, facts suppressed in conventional art appreciation, are brought into the open by an empirical calculation of weight and quantity: "from fourteen to sixteen stone. Through her heroine, she exposes these contradictions, and the falsity (as she saw it) of this kind of art, by describing the painting literally and truthfully, putting it in the context of the real life of women, and ignoring the discourse of art history and connoisseurship within which it is "habitually" perceived. The contradictions in such a spectacle were, of course, much more marked in Charlotte Bronte's day, when women were obliged to keep almost every inch of their bodies covered. The painting under observation here belongs to a recognizable type in which the lavish depiction of the female nude is rendered respectable by its attachment to a historical or mythical source, by the intimidating grandeur of its scale, and by various other coded signs that it belongs to high culture. She is secretly in love with an English doctor, John Bretton, who escorts her to art galleries but leaves her to explore them alone - an arrangement which suits her independent spirit. Villette is the fictional name of Brussels, where the heroine and narrator, Lucy Snowe, is obliged to earn her bread as teacher in a girl's school. ![]() Charlotte Bronte does something similar to salon art in the passage quoted here from Villette. One of Shklovsky's examples is a passage where Tolstoy ridicules opera by describing a performance through the eyes of someone who has never seen or heard an opera before. This theory vindicates the distortions and dislocations of modernist writing, but it applies equally well to the great exponents of the realistic novel. According to Victor Shklovsky, the essential purpose of art is to overcome the deadening effects of habit by representing familiar things in unfamiliar ways. Lodge, an honorary professor of modern English literature at the University of Birmingham, is the author of eight novels, including the recent "Paradise News."ĭEFAMILIARIZATION is the usual English translation of ostranenie (literally, "making strange"), another of those invaluable critical terms coined by the Russian Formalists. This is the continuation of a series of brief essays in which British writer David Lodge examines aspects of the novelist's art.
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