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Soundscapes and Affective Resonance in (Neo-)Victorianism

Paysages sonores et résonances affectives (néo)-victoriennes
Rosario Arias

Résumés

Selon Yannis Hamilakis, autrefois le son « était perçu comme une faculté corporelle imprégnée de matérialité. . . et elle avait un impact matériel direct sur les corps des récepteurs » (27). Si nous prêtons attention aux modalités sensorielles de la culture victorienne, cette approche nous permet d’étudier les effets sociaux des engagements sensoriels et d’établir un dialogue continu entre le passé et le présent. En adoptant une approche sensorielle pour re-visiter le passé victorien (dans le néo-victorien), nous nous efforcerons de mieux comprendre « la diversité formelle du monde matériel et de la relier à l’expérience sensorielle et à la mémoire » (Hamilakis 200). En conséquence, il ne s’agit pas seulement de la représentation du passé (victorien), mais « d’une évocation de sa présence, de sa matérialité palpable et vivante, de sa chair » (Hamilakis 199). Le son et la voix ont été invoqués dans la critique néo-victorienne depuis ses débuts, et nous avons utilisé la notion d’auteur comme médium : la capacité du médium à communiquer avec les morts a été utilisée comme métaphore pour le dialogue entre passé et présent, et pour l’auteur incarnant les voix des morts. En outre, le néo-Victorianisme fonctionne comme un bruit en ce qu’il interrompt notre présent, et acquiert une valeur productive, comme le suggère Michel Serres. L’étude de textes choisis pour cet article permettra d’envisager le néo-Victorianisme comme un bruit constitutif de paysages sonores et de sensorialités affectives.

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Notes de l’auteur

This essay has been funded by Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades through the Research project ref. FFI2017-86417-P. I wish to thank Dr Beth Palmer and Dr Danielle Dove who gave me the opportunity to share some ideas about soundscapes in neo-Victorianism in their ‘Neo-Victorianism and the Senses: Sensing the Past’ Conference (22nd March 2019).

Texte intégral

1Sound and voice have been invoked in neo-Victorian criticism since the establishment of the field of Neo-Victorian studies, and, particularly, through the notion of the author as medium. However, my interest here lies not only in the voices of the dead, but also in other sounds and noises to understand the affective negotiation between the Victorian past and today’s culture. In other words, I will argue that the paradoxical nature of the neo-Victorian movement is predicated upon the ambivalent nature of the notion of noise, and that, in a way, neo-Victorianism interrupts our present system, and acquires a productive value, following Michel Serres’s discussion of noise as the parasite in the 1980s. Therefore, in this essay I will consider neo-Victorianism as a noise, and I will discuss soundscapes and affective sensoriality in a selection of texts. I will argue that a framework of sensoriality, through the evocation of sound, voice and noise, helps us interrogate our interaction with the non-human, and makes us think what it is like to be human today.

2These dilemmas are especially relevant when, at the time of writing this essay, we are facing a global pandemic which does not permit human touch, and when the voice has become a privileged sense through virtual interaction. Undoubtedly, the current emphasis on voice and soundscapes is not new to us, as our pre-pandemic lives and homes already experienced drastic changes due to new apps and devices, such as Alexa, a virtual assistant developed by Amazon, with voice interaction, and capable of setting alarms, providing information, and news, among others. Alexa can be upgraded by installing new ‘skills’, which turns the home space into a more automated and interactive area. The appeal that Alexa has among customers may be due to many reasons i.e. it takes us to imaginatively speculate about the posthuman, a future (present?) in which technology does not replace the humans, but it interacts with us, in a more penetrating way, through the disembodied voice. Then, this interaction with voice is resonant with late-Victorian technological innovations such as the phonograph, and can also take us back to the past in establishing a dialogue with the disembodied voices and noises of the Victorians in today’s culture through neo-Victorianism, full of echoes, resonances and voices from the Victorian era, ‘an auscultative age’ (Picker 6–7).

3One important source for the study of the senses has been Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), in the light of this renewed focus on social sensory perception. Many disciplines have resorted to phenomenology to discuss perception as a bodily event, and experience as embodied situatedness, where self and the world are in mutual constitution and interdependence: ‘. . . by thus remaking contact with the body and with the world, we shall also rediscover ourself [sic], since, perceiving as we do with our body, the body is a natural self and, as it were, the subject of perception’ (Merleau-Ponty 239). Then, Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of ‘perception [as] essentially bodily, perspectival, self-deflecting . . . goes beyond the problems of metaphysics . . . to include psychology, biology, culture, language, painting, history, and politics’ (Carman 3).

  • 1 There are other significant projects dealing with sound and digital experimentation, for example, ‘ (...)

4Howes and Classen mention the nineteenth century, with the advent of technological breakthroughs such as the invention of the telephone, the radio and sound-recording devices, as the period which brought ‘both sight and sound together to present sensorially-limited but culturally and psychologically powerful representations of the world’ (3). Clearly, hearing and sound played a major role in Victorian culture, in literal terms but also as a metaphor for communication and meaning (and for the communication between subject and the world) thus offering an approach that privileges the sense of hearing. Recent interest in soundscapes in the Victorian period is due to, among other reasons, the digitization process that the British Library is undertaking concerning the recorded voices of Florence Nightingale and Alfred Tennyson in the ‘Sounds’ archives, collection ‘Early spoken word recordings’.1

5As far as studies on sounds and hearing are concerned in the Victorian age, Steven Connor’s Dumbstruck: a Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000) and John M. Picker’s Victorian Soundscapes (2004) stand out since both discuss Victorian auditory experience, to varying degrees. The Victorian period was an age ‘alive with sound’ (qtd. in Picker 4), alike to our technology-ridden world: the Victorians ‘sought to transform what Romantics had conceived of as a sublime experience into a quantifiable and marketable object or thing, a sonic commodity, in the form of a printed work, a performance, or, ultimately, an audio recording, for that most conspicuous legacy of Victorianism, the modern middle-class consumer’ (Picker 10). Then, as in our contemporary culture, sounds were commodities. Interestingly, the Victorians also found new ways of approaching sound experience as a mysterious force, and as a source of inspiration and wonder in their own world. In a similar fashion, we still perceive that the auditory experience and the sense of hearing are sources of inspiration, that fuel one’s imagination (particularly in a pandemic world). Importantly, Picker’s study offers an insight into social transformations during the Victorian period, and provides an illuminating analysis of Victorian individuals in relation to acoustics, voice and hearing, which helps us understand the pervasive influence of the Victorians today. One case in point was Thomas Carlyle’s campaign against street music, who considered it as sensory excess, which brought about ‘new definitions of noise and its impact’ (Perkins 3) in the configuration of the modern metropolis. Other examples are the figure of Charles Dickens, under study in Ivan Kreilkamp’s Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (2009), which traces how Victorian literature and culture represented the human voice from public speeches and authorial performances in early and mid-century, to mechanically reproducible voice at the end of the century. Another Victorian writer, George Eliot, resorts to the motif of ‘acute hearing’ in Daniel Deronda (1876) to indicate the perception that a sympathetic character might have (Picker 6). She makes use of Hermann von Helmholtz’s acoustic theory of ‘sympathetic vibration’ to indicate that hearing is a physiological form of sympathetic vibration: ‘this theory of acoustics connects the sense of touch to the sense of hearing’ to the extent that Eliot links ‘touch, hearing and voice in Daniel Deronda through Gwendolen’s gothic heroine’ (Mcleod 55–56).

6According to Yannis Hamilakis, in the past sound ‘was seen as a bodily faculty imbued with materiality . . . and it had a direct material impact on the bodies of the receivers’ (27). This has been amply demonstrated by critics performing a kind of ‘acoustic archaeology’ on the silent voices and records of the distant past, to explore the ‘sound effects and the acoustic properties of sites and objects, or architectural complexes’ (Hamilakis 93). The recuperation of those sound effects provides us with information about ‘embodied, sensorial experience and reception’ (93). If we pay attention to ‘a framework of multi-sensoriality’ to discuss sensorial modalities in Victorian culture, this approach allows us to investigate the social effects of sensorial engagements, and to establish an ongoing dialogue between past and present. In turn, in adopting a sensorial approach to re-visit the Victorian past (in neo-Victorianism), we strive to understand better ‘the formal diversity of the material world, and connect it to sensorial experience and to memory’ (Hamilakis 200). As a result, this is not merely the representation of the (Victorian) past, but ‘an evocation of its presence, its palpable, living materiality, its flesh’ (Hamilakis 199); in other words, ‘the conjuring up of lived moments, of corporeal instances’ (66). Nowhere is this more acute than in the Victorian spiritualist movement and the evocation of Spiritualism in neo-Victorianism.

7One of the first attempts at defining ‘neo-Victorianism’ is found in Dana Shiller’s 1997 journal article ‘The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel’, where she uses the term ‘neo-Victorian fiction’ to refer to novels that present ‘a historicity that is indeed concerned with recuperating the substance of bygone eras, and not merely their styles’ (Schiller 539–40). Later, in 2010, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn provide the most often-quoted definition of the field: ‘the “neo-Victorian” is more than historical fiction set in the nineteenth century. To be part of the neo-Victorianism . . . texts (literary, filmic, audio/visual) must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians’ (Heilmann & Llewellyn 4). Now that the field of neo-Victorian studies has crystallised, there is not a particular preoccupation with the prefix used (retro-, post-, faux-, neo-), widely discussed in the 1990s. Rather, critics such as Jessica Cox have turned to other issues that need further analysis and discussion, i.e. concepts and tools, inclusiveness and diversity, periodisation and generic distinctions within the field.

8Interestingly, the ‘voice’ metaphor has been used to discuss neo-Victorianism as a literary mode where several voices are at work (Arias and Pulham, Kontou, Kohlke, Heilmann and Llewellyn). One early example is A. S. Byatt who described her novel, Possession (1990), as a novel about ‘ventriloquism, love for the dead, the presence of literary texts as the voices of persistent ghosts or spirits’ (Byatt 45). More recently, in Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets (2012), Helen Davies underscores the relevance of ventriloquism, and establishes ‘the ventriloquial metaphor as ‘a focal point for negotiating the politics of neo-Victorian literature, to establish the possibilities that the ventriloquial metaphor offers for neo-Victorian re-voicings of the Victorian era . . .’ (Davies 3–6). Davies highlights the paradoxical nature of the ventriloquial metaphor, as it can be both a ‘subversive’ and a ‘conservative’ act (Davies 6) as regards Victorian silenced authors, topics and subjects, a tension which is at work in neo-Victorianism. In other words, Davies perceptively problematises the ‘voice’ metaphor and the recuperation of the forgotten (silenced) others in neo-Victorian oscillations between ‘speaking through’ and ‘speaking for’ modes, as the latter one would obliterate the ‘voice’ of the other by means of repetition of heteronormative and patriarchal discourses (Davies 6).

9As remains clear, sound and voice have been present in neo-Victorian criticism since its beginning through the notion of the author as medium: the medium’s ability to communicate with the dead has been used as a metaphor for the dialogue between past and present. Then, the author, A. S. Byatt, Sarah Waters and Essie Fox, for example, functions as a medium partaking of the world of the dead and the world of the living, thus connecting and embodying the disembodied voices of the dead. However, my interest here lies not only in the voices of the dead, from the perspective of haunting and spectrality, but also in other sound-related phenomena that feature in neo-Victorian novels so as to illustrate that neo-Victorianism impinges on the Victorian duality materiality versus immateriality, embodiment versus disembodiment, illustrated in the portrayal of acoustics. A framework of sensoriality, through the evocation of sound, voice and noise, helps us appreciate the affective negotiation between the Victorian past and today’s culture, as well as between human vs non-human interaction, augmented by technological advances then and now.

Sounds, Spirits and Noise

10Ghosts and sounds bear striking similarities since both of them are absent and present. Sound disappears upon its perception, but it signifies, and the ghost’s existence depends upon its absence, but remains as a trace. The Victorian spiritualist medium, channelling the voice from the dead, used sounds and noises as a means of communication. In fact, the momentous event that gave way to the spiritualist craze happened when Margaret and Kate Fox claimed to communicate by means of rapping sounds with the ghost of a peddler in 1848 at Hydesville (New York). Henry Spicer in Sights and Sounds (1853) provides an interesting account of how the whole episode started off:

It was late on a certain night, about the close of March in the succeeding year, 1848, that the disturbances, which afterwards became so frequent, first commenced. The noise seemed to proceed from one of the bed-rooms, and sounded as though some one was knocking on the floor, moving chairs, &c. Four or five members of the family were at home, and they all got up to ascertain the cause of the noise. Every part of the house was searched, yet nothing could be discovered. . . . The noise was continued that night as long as any one was awake in the house. The following evening they were heard as before, and on the evening of the 21st of March, the neighbours were called in for the first time. (56–57; emphasis added)

11Spicer goes on to include the testimonies of Mr and Mrs Fox who consistently mention the word noise (‘heard the noise’, ‘we first heard the noise on this evening’, ‘I knew it from all other noises I had ever heard in the house’, ‘[t]he girls . . . heard the noise’, page 57), and when their daughters imitated the sound by snapping their fingers, the noise followed up. Then, from the very beginning of the Spiritualist movement, the phenomena related to the spirits have been related to noise and sound. In so doing, since the inception of Spiritualism, the paradoxical nature of the movement is predicated upon the ambivalent nature of the notion of noise; likewise, neo-Victorianism functions as a noise in that it interrupts our present, and acquires a productive value.

  • 2 I wish to acknowledge Rita Felski’s talk ‘On Resonance: Stoner and Theory’ that she gave at the Uni (...)

12Philosopher Michel Serres has considered the notion of noise since the publication of his work The Parasite (1980). Noise is full of difficulty, from a philosophical point of view, because it can mean relation, channel and transition between different points, but also means ‘excess, chaos. Noise is both the matrix of possibility and the cauldron of indifference . . . ’ (Connor 2008, 10). Serres connects noise to the parasite, whose position is to be in the midst of things, but in Serres’s thesis the parasite is not a substantial entity; rather it is understood as a type of relation’ (Thompson 16); in Serres’s words, ‘the position of the parasite is to be between’ (230). Thus, the noise-parasite is fundamental and inevitable, as there are always interferences within a system, ‘there is always the potential for noise within a system; there is always the potential for change’ (16). When noise appears, it interrupts and there is always a response, a reaction, thus involving a change. At this point, it should be mentioned that the notion of resonance is gaining some relevance in critical theory as a way of counterpoising the acceleration caused by contemporary culture, and developed in the work of Hartmut Rosa.2 Following up on Rosa, Anne Fuchs describes resonance as ‘an anthropological ability that connects a human being with others, with her world, and its objects’ (354). Importantly, Fuchs discusses the inherent difficulties in distinguishing between resonance and echo, and points out dialogism and intersubjectivity as key aspects in resonance: the echo is simply repetition and reverberation whereas resonance ‘creates loops of exchange between affectivity and emotion; it is, therefore, dialogic’ (Fuchs 355). Resonance is, then, understood as an experience, but also as a metaphor, and it is this latter meaning that I would like to consider as closely related to noise, which also produces affect. Noise can be productive in that it generates a response, not necessarily positive or negative, which allows us to think of noise as affect:

Noise . . . has the potential to not only diminish bodies, as in, for example, the use of sonic and vibrational weaponry to disperse the particles of crowd-bodies, but also to enhance the power of the body, insomuch that it has the potential to create affirmative and positive affections and responses. (Thompson 28)

13Precisely, noise at the Victorian séance takes up the ‘potential to create affirmative and positive affections and responses’, alongside the capacity to disturb and interrupt the lives of those who attended it, as an altogether affective force. When noise is produced within the context of a séance, this is not merely an interference, but a producer of meaning, according to Jill Galvan: noise or ‘message interference . . .  was not merely extraneous but, paradoxically, acquired a productive value’ (Galvan 84). Seen in this light, noise traverses dualisms, it is neither good nor bad, and escapes from the dichotomy of silence/noise, in the recognition of noise as productive at séances.

Affective Resonance and Ghostly Sounds in (Neo-)Victorianism

14The pioneering work carried out by feminist historians like Janet Oppenheim (7–10) and Alex Owen (1–17) in the 1980s fuelled the imagination of contemporary fiction writers in neo-Victorian novels, like Michèle Roberts’s In the Red Kitchen (1990), A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Conjugal Angel’ (1992) and Possession (1990), Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999), where female mediums use the trance to channel the voices of the dead in the noisy séance, and the close connection between the supernatural and technology.

15One recent example is Essie Fox’s The Goddess and the Thief (2013), set in the 1850s and in the 1860s. This neo-Victorian novel portrays Alice Willoughby who had been raised in Lahore by her ayah, but her father (a doctor) leaves her in London under the care of her aunt, Miss Mercy, who toys with the dead in daily séances. Alice, who finds herself attuned with the occult, becomes involved in a plot to steal the accursed Koh-I-Noor (the diamond seized by Queen Victoria as a spoil of the Anglo-Sikh War), as her aunt and a mysterious character, Lucian Tilbury, want to take advantage of her abilities to see the unseen, the invisible, in the presence of Queen Victoria at a séance:

[Prince Albert’s ghost] vanished away. Where he had been standing no more remained but a rippling of the air, like a haze on an Indian summer’s day. Through that I recall seeing my aunt, standing in the parlour door, her mouth gaping and wide in shock. . . . Now, she was only mortified at what she’d heard and seen of me, clutching two hands against her breast and offering the plaintive gasp, ‘Alice . . .  it cannot be!’ (Fox 70)

16Alice’s sense of hearing is acute, and since she has this ghostly encounter with Prince Albert, she is more sensitive to sounds and noise: ‘So many people in town that day. Such a cacophony of noise! Since my illness I’d barely left the house and perhaps my mind was fragile, for it seemed that the slightest commotion could affect my equilibrium. I was distracted by any sounds that came too sudden, too loud or discordant . . . ’ (Fox 85). Alice shows sensitivity to sound and this symbolizes her receptiveness to the unseen or absent yet present phenomena such as ghosts, which makes her sensitive to sound even when asleep. In fact, as R. Murray Schafer states in his study on acoustics, Our Sonic Environment and the Soundscape: The Tuning of the World (1977): ‘[t]he sense of hearing cannot be closed off at will. There are no earlids. When we go to sleep, our perception of sound is the last door to close and it is also the first to open when we awaken’ (11). Alice’s receptiveness to sounds and noise represents her in-betweenness as she is caught in between the worlds of Victorian London and exotic Lahore. Like noise, she produces meaning and generates disruption, transforming the established system of fraud and deception, in which her aunt and Lucian Tilsbury participate.

17Also, in Michèle Roberts’s In the Red Kitchen (1990) the séance and the female medium feature prominently as the novel traces the evolution of the treatment of hysterical symptoms in women being assimilated by the discourse of spiritualism in the 1870s and 1880s, and associated with female sexual disorder. Moreover, not only does Roberts’s novel examine the connections between hysteria and spiritualism, but also challenges authoritative scientific discourses. In the Red Kitchen deals with the story of three women from three different historical periods: King Hat, the daughter of the Pharaoh and later Pharaoh herself in Ancient Egypt; Flora Milk, a Victorian working-class medium based on the historical figure of Florence Cook, a renowned medium in the London of the 1870s; and Hattie, orphan and writer of recipe books in late twentieth-century Britain. Despite the variety of historical time-settings and the wide range of female voices, the text underlines the connection between women, whose stories become entangled. The novel stages the spiritualist credo as spiritualist believers and sympathisers contended that a medium voluntarily relinquished control over her body and fell into trance for the communication with the dead to take place. Therefore, trance conditions allowed for a wide range of unconventional behaviour in séances.

18Passivity, fragility and inertia were treated as women’s strengths and assets in the spiritualist circles as they generated communication with the spirits. In the novel, Flora falls into mediumistic trances several times, which are interpreted in the novel as hysterical fits by the medical profession and the nerve specialists, and which lead to exhaustion: ‘[t]he fits were followed by exhaustion, and usually by rapid recovery, although occasionally the effects lasted for days’ (Showalter 130). Nevertheless, the trance ‘profoundly challenged central ideas about the formation and definition of (female) agency’ (Massicotte 5). Mediums developed strategies to defy traditional interpretations of agency and authorship: ‘they implied a reconfiguration of the modalities of speech that allowed them to speak, and be heard, in otherwise restrictive contexts’ (Massicotte 11). Roberts’s novel probes Claudie Massicotte’s psychoanalytic perspective and ‘accounts for the destabilizing forces of trance speaking’ (Massicotte 62). In fact, the novel underpins the connection between women as In the Red Kitchen allows its female narrators to generate affect by expressing what is inexpressible, what has been repressed or silenced by the patriarchal discourse, i.e. the female voice, through sounds and noise. They produce meaning and make noise, interrupting the system of the male rational discourse.

19Interestingly, Roberts’s latest novel, The Walworth Beauty (2017), resonates with her earlier novel, In the Red Kitchen, as it is a treasure trove for those familiar with Roberts’s production: the setting (a dual narrative oscillating between Victorian London and a twenty-first-century version of the metropolis), ghostly occurrences, women’s plight in Victorian times intersected with race and class, alongside women’s disadvantageous position in contemporary culture are some of the novel’s main topics. Sounds and noises are meaningful in the Victorian section of the novel where Joseph Benson (the protagonist of the Victorian plotline, and a former police clerk) works for Henry Mayhew and helps him to compile his monumental records of the poor, later to be published as London Labour and The London Poor (1851). Joseph is under Mayhew’s employ because of his prior experience in note taking as a police clerk:

As a police clerk he’d been a master of the tidy, succinct account. Recording interviews in the station with suspects, witnesses, ne’er-do-wells of all sorts, safely seated on the other side of the table from these miscreants, he had translated their grunts, cries, pleas, broken sentences, into something coherent. Subject, verb, object. Commas in the right places. Correct grammar kept everything tidy, just as the police tried to create order in the city.
Writing for Mayhew, however, making sense of these pencilled notes jotted down while Joseph was out and about, felt different. Mayhew demanded clear narrative structure. It sounded so easy. But the words Joseph chased had an energy of their own, just like criminals, they rose up and jumped about, tried to evade control, hid themselves . . . . (Roberts 2017, 120).

20It is true that Mayhew’s methods in interviewing London people remain unknown as ‘[n]o notebooks survive, nor does the questionnaire that Mayhew is said to have used to frame his interviews’ (Groth 118). Then, Mayhew’s fictional assistant, Joseph, underlines the difficulties in transcribing people’s testimonies, making use of Mayhew’s procedure, ‘the model of ear-witnessing, or self-conscious extraction of individual voices from the noise of the street’ (Groth 122). In fact, when Joseph walks around the city, he is overwhelmed with the Victorian soundscape, and tries to apply Mayhew’s model in channelling voice in the midst of noise: ‘A clamour of carts and barrows, jolting over the cobbles, a noise of hammering . . . [a] market seemed to be setting up on the main road. People surged about, their shouts banging back and forth’ (Roberts 2017, 114). His London adventures take him to the house of Mrs Dulcimer, on Apricot Street in Walworth, a black businesswoman Joseph takes to be a brothel keeper. In the contemporary section of the novel, Madeleine (the protagonist, an academic who, in her 60s, has been made redundant due to university cuts) lives in Mrs Dulcimer’s old kitchen (her house had been split into flats), and she hears voices, the cry of a baby and the sound of footsteps. In fact, Michèle Roberts has stated that ‘[t]here are the voices of the hauntings’ and has regarded The Walworth Beauty as ‘a novel with people and voices’ (García-Sánchez 210; emphasis added). Ghosts from the Victorian past infiltrate the present by means of noises and voices, not just to interrupt Madeleine’s peaceful existence, but as producers of meaning:

Perhaps ghosts represent the possibility of stories. Something unfinished, that needs recounting. In the cemetery the ghosts run back and forth, holding out their arms and weeping, wanting to meet someone who won’t be frightened but who’ll listen. I’ll go and sit with some ghosts. Tune in to their stories. Ask them to tune into mine (Roberts 2017, 154).

21The noise caused by ghostly voices and interruptions generates a mutual ‘tuning’ of their stories, both in Victorian and contemporary times, as the ghosts are waiting for us to tell their stories, only if we hear their voices. In this, and in other scenes, it is possible to argue that the noise caused by ghosts produces meaning in what Steven Connor calls a ‘vocalic space’ in which ‘the voice may be grasped as the mediation between the phenomenological body and its social and cultural contexts’ (Connor 2000, 12). In such a vocalic space, the voice(s) predicate upon and articulate ‘different conceptions of space, as well as to enact the different relations between the body, community, time, and divinity’ (Connor 2000, 12). Madeleine’s flat and Mrs Dulcimer’s old kitchen could be taken as ‘vocalic spaces’ since palimpsestically voices travel across time and become entangled in a mutual correspondence between Victorian times and contemporary culture.

22This intermingled vocalic space is highlighted at the end of the novel when Madeleine is reaching Elephant and Castle roundabout (built on top of Walworth Common), and sees Joseph at a distance: ‘Someone en route to a Hallowe’en fancy-dress party. Got up in Dickensian costume: tall hat, an overcoat with flapping skirts. Big beaky nose, in a thin, intelligent face. . . . She tries to speak. . . . They stare at one another’ (Roberts 2017, 374). Joseph and Madeleine, the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries, look at one another in a mirror-like fashion, in a side street where time and space collapse in one, a kind of corridor where voices and noises resonate. This resonance allows for a recognition of social ills in the past, and the ways in which they persistently have a long-life endurance i.e. the ageing woman as an excluded other both in Victorian times and today. The Walworth Beauty, a novel full of noises, produces meaning and generates a response.

23It is true that Roberts had already explored the idea of ‘vocalic space’ in In the Red Kitchen, where Flora states that she is ‘a corridor for others’ voices’, as she is able to communicate messages from the past, a transmitter (the spiritualist medium was regarded as a transmitter of communication), a conduit to make women’s stories heard:

I carry the sorrow of the living and of the dead. No one who is not a medium knows what it costs to launch oneself as a bridge between heaven and earth. . . . Each time I go into trance I am changed, my stock of vitality diminished, my burden of knowledge and sadness increased. . . . I am a hollow stick the spirits blow messages down. I’m the speaking tube in this house in Bayswater, a corridor for others’ voices (Roberts 1999, 92; emphasis added)

  • 3 One cannot help but think of another ‘speaking tube’ in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009) w (...)

24In this case, because of her mediumistic powers, Flora describes herself as ‘the speaking tube’,3 as a transmitter, a kind of human technology, in a way, the counterpart of the cyborg.

Sounds Then and Now: Spiritualism and Technology

25Spiritualism and technology went hand in hand since the dark circle is often described as ‘an intricate technological event itself, once centred on the medium’ (Galvan 80). Jill Galvan has studied the role of the medium as transmitter, as a human technology, which, to some extent, anticipated our conceptualization of the posthuman. N. Katherine Hayles was one of the first critics to theorise the notion of the ‘posthuman’, the fears and pleasures brought about by cybernetics in 1999, when her How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics came out. Her point of departure is that ‘human being is first of all embodied being and the complexities of this embodiment mean that human awareness unfolds in ways very different from those of intelligence embodied in cybernetic machines’ (283–84). Thus, her view of the posthuman offers a nuanced perspective about the human interaction with virtual technology, that resonates with our current scenario in which home automation is a reality today, based on the revolution from electric appliance to network-controlling appliances.

26In the séance, a ‘technological event’, several agents intervene and have a part to play: the sitters, the medium, the spirit control, whose role is alike to that of the operators and machines necessary for the information to be transmitted in communications transfer, i.e. telegraphy. Spiritualism, then, becomes ‘a theory of human-technological fusion’ (Galvan 83). Until the 1870s the medium managed to communicate with the dead by channelling ‘direct’ spirit voice or spontaneous speech, produced independently of the medium. Other types of acoustic phenomena were the playing of musical instruments by invisible hands, rapping sounds on untouched objects, and the noise of apports (sudden appearance of objects as gifts) or other sound-related events. Because the séance took place in the dark, the experience of heightened listening became crucial to the experience of the séance, and also encouraged the link between the sense of hearing and other senses, particularly those of touch, smell and taste.

27Perception of sound and sensory communication were two areas under study by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded by Henry Sidgwick in the 1880s. As Pamela Thurschwell notes, ‘Spiritualism creates contact across inaccessible time, with the dead; telepathy creates contact across inaccessible space, with others who are out of the range of the usual forms of sensory communication’ (16). In the 1880s a group of eminent researchers set themselves to apply scientific principles to supernatural occurrences within the Society for Psychical Research. Although some of the founding members of the SPR were still interested in alleged spiritualist phenomena, by the late 1880s they examined events and instances related to communication with scientific methods. For example, Sir Oliver Lodge, who followed William Crookes as President of the Society for Psychical Research, published a report on the tests and experiments carried out upon one of the most famous nineteenth-century mediums, Eusapia Paladino, an Italian woman who fascinated Cesare Lombroso, entitled ‘Experience of Unusual Physical Phenomena Occurring in the Presence of an Entranced Person (Eusapia Paladino)’ on the 26th October 1894. Among the acoustic phenomena he recorded were the following:

(4) The sounding of the notes of the untouched accordion and piano.
(5) The turning of the key on the inside of the sitting-room door, its removal on to the table, and subsequent replacement in door.
(6) The audible movements and gradual inversion of an untouched heavy table, situated outside the circle; and the finding it inverted afterwards. (Lodge 312)

28In addition to this acoustic phenomenon, there existed a more relevant relationship between the evolution of the séance and the development of technology, through the so-called phenomenon of the ‘direct voice’, ‘a voice which speaks independently of the medium’s vocal organs’ (Connor 2000, 212), employing a trumpet (similar to a megaphone) to amplify the voice. Thus, the channelling of this voice received the name of ‘trumpet mediumship’ since ‘the spirits spoke through a “speaking trumpet” . . . and spirits often compared their medium to a trumpet’ (Manning 71). The ‘trumpet medium’ and the ‘materialisation medium’, the medium that produced full spirit materialization, co-existed but there was progressively a shift of the focus from the auditory to the visual, thus representing the final material proof for the reality of the afterlife and the existence of the spirit world.

29For Jill Galvan, materialisation at the séance provided ‘a comforting sign of the persistence of the human, in distinctly human form’ (86). If the spirit was once disembodied, now it takes full human form through his/her spirit control, thus providing a paradoxical effect of in/visibility, but reassuringly generating information, transmitting data, a message. Spiritualism’s conflicting perspective upon materiality/immateriality interrogated the limits of humanity (Galvan 82), as much as we do today with virtual assistants, like Alexa, or voice recognition devices, in our post-human age. This becomes more obvious towards the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century as a result of technological change and the advent of technological breakthroughs like radio and wireless telegraphy. And then, a new model of consciousness and communication, based upon electronic worlds forged by wireless, emerged during the first decades of the twentieth century.

  • 4 The ‘talking cure’ was one way of deciphering the ‘occluded mysteries of human subjectivity’ that, (...)

30According to Jeremy Sconce, telegraphy and telephony ‘had put the listener in immediate, fairly intimate, and ultimately physical contact via a wire with another interlocutor across time and space, wireless offered the potentially more unsettling phenomenon of distant yet instantaneous communication through the open air’ (Sconce 62). The wireless, and its ambiguous nature, although disembodied, presented disturbing forms of contact, producing sounds as having a direct impact on the bodies of the receivers. Metaphors of the ocean, which accounted for the unfathomability of the new media, were utilised to evoke the wonders of distant communication (Sconce 63), which uncannily reminds us of our own metaphors for the world wide web (surf, navigate). As Sconce posits, in his discussion of Edison’s device and other electronic media, radio evoked ‘fundamentally unsettling paradoxes of presence within absence, isolation within community, and intimacy within separation’ (Sconce 82). The uncanny nature of the radio was probed by several investigators, Friedrich Jürgenson and Konstantin Raudive, who used radio receivers and other devices to make spiritual contact and to investigate electronic voice phenomena (EVP) in the twentieth century (Sconce 85). Not only Sconce links EVP with the tradition of the Spiritualists, Crookes, Lodge and Edison as having a distinct ‘lineage in the electronic metaphysics of technological disembodiment’ (91), but also with psychoanalysis in their mutual interest in ‘the occluded mysteries of human subjectivity’ (Sconce 91).4 Then, as now, ‘what is strange is the familiarity of the disembodied voice’ (Connor 2000, 410).

31In conclusion, I have discussed the relevance of sounds and voices in neo-Victorianism: sounds from the past (as noises) interrupt the present and facilitate the evocation and re-emergence of the Victorian past in contemporary culture. The voices of the dead, but other sound-related phenomena, that feature in neo-Victorian novels, illustrate that the Victorian duality materiality/immateriality, interior/exterior, embodiment/disembodiment impinges on neo-Victorianism. A ‘framework of sensoriality’, through the evocation of sound, voice and noise, helps us interrogate our interaction with the non-human, and makes us think what it is like to be human today by means of noise and engagement with the Victorians. This interdependence between Victorian past and contemporary present offers a dynamic interrelated model between past and present, which has important bearings upon the future. Clearly, the Victorians are tangible today through traces, echoes, sounds and ultimately, through sensorial materiality. Therefore, our ongoing fascination with the Victorians, and the current evocation of dis/embodied phenomena, through sensorial description, particularly sound and noise, demonstrates today’s preoccupation with materiality/immateriality, with the concept of the post/human, as well as with the impact of disembodied technologies (especially, during the pandemic caused by Covid-19) upon humanity, now and in the future.

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Notes

1 There are other significant projects dealing with sound and digital experimentation, for example, ‘Sonic Futures’ (James Mansell): https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/whats-on/sonic-futures.

2 I wish to acknowledge Rita Felski’s talk ‘On Resonance: Stoner and Theory’ that she gave at the University of Málaga (3rd December 2020) in an online event. She unfolded her take on resonance following the Frankfurt School and, in particular, the work of Hartmut Rosa for whom the concept of resonance functions on three levels (Lijster & Celikates 65). Felski referred to resonance as a way of building up meaningful relations, thus suggesting a relational understanding of literary works.

3 One cannot help but think of another ‘speaking tube’ in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009) which illustrates the ghostly communication between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

4 The ‘talking cure’ was one way of deciphering the ‘occluded mysteries of human subjectivity’ that, already in vogue in mid-nineteenth century,’ became popularised by Sigmund Freud in the treatment of hysterics at the end of the nineteenth century. This involved a ‘method of listening to the speaking voice [which] promoted proximity [and] a more permeable boundary between speaker and listener through the circulation of a disembodied voice’ (Kahane 12–13).

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Rosario Arias, « Soundscapes and Affective Resonance in (Neo-)Victorianism »Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 94 Automne | 2021, mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2021, consulté le 27 mars 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/9949 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.9949

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Auteur

Rosario Arias

Rosario Arias is Professor of English Literature at the University of Málaga in Spain. She has been a Visiting Researcher at Brunel University (London). She has published a number of articles and book chapters on neo-Victorian fiction, haunting and spectrality, the trace, and on the work of contemporary writers. She has co-edited (with Patricia Pulham, University of Surrey) Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Palgrave, 2010), and she has also published the volume Science, Spiritualism and Technology, a facsimile edition of Spiritualist texts, which belongs to the collection Spiritualism, 1840–1930 (Routledge, 2014). She is Principal Investigator of a funded project on the notion of ‘Orientation.’
Rosario Arias est professeur de littérature anglaise à l’université de Málaga en Espagne. Elle a été chercheuse invitée à l’université Brunel (Londres). Elle est l’auteur de nombreux articles et chapitres de livres sur la fiction néo-victorienne, les fantômes, la trace, et sur le travail des écrivains contemporains. Elle a coédité (avec Patricia Pulham, université de Surrey) Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction : Possessing the Past (Palgrave, 2010), et a également publié le volume Science, Spiritualism and Technology, une édition en fac-similé de textes spiritualistes, dans la collection Spiritualism, 1840-1930 (Routledge, 2014). Elle est chercheuse principale d’un projet financé sur la notion d’« orientation ».

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