Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian FictionOxford University Press, 2004 M02 19 - 232 pages Who smells? Surveying nearly eighty novels written in the 1860s to answer that impolite question, Common Scents provides a new reading of Victorian values, particularly as they assess the relative merits of men and women, spirit and matter. In depictions of comparative encounters, the commonplace meetings of everyday life, such fiction often registers the inequalities that distinguish one individual from another by marking one of them with a smell. In a surprisingly consistent fashion, these references constitute what cultural anthropologists call an osmology, a system of differentiations that reveals the status within a particular culture of the persons and things associated with specific odors. Featuring often innocuous and even potentially pleasing aromas emanating from food, flowers, and certain kinds of labor, novels of the 1860s array their characters into distinct categories, finding in some rather than others olfactory proof of their materiality. Central to this osmology is the difference between characters who give off odors and those who do not, and this study draws upon the work of Victorian psychophysiologists and popular commentators on the senses to establish the subtlety with which fictional representations make that distinction. By exploring the far-reaching implications of this osmology in specific novels by Dickens, Eliot, Meredith, Oliphant, Trollope, and Yonge, Common Scents argues that the strikingly similar plots and characterizations typical of the 1860s, responding as they do to the economic and political concerns of the decade, reconfigure conventional understandings of the relations between men and women. Determining who smells reveals what Victorian culture at its epitome takes for granted as a deeply embedded common sense, the recognition of whose self-evident truth seems to be as instinctive and automatic as a response to an odor. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 57
Page 3
... physical experience ; but it is the sense that Victorian novelists frequently invoke to depict what happens when one character encounters another . Such meetings constitute only one category of the many kinds of events that Vic- torian ...
... physical experience ; but it is the sense that Victorian novelists frequently invoke to depict what happens when one character encounters another . Such meetings constitute only one category of the many kinds of events that Vic- torian ...
Page 6
... physical world , however , begins to suggest why the meanings conveyed by odors justify extended analysis . At the Victorian midcentury there was enough interest in sensory expe- rience to establish a school of common sense on its ...
... physical world , however , begins to suggest why the meanings conveyed by odors justify extended analysis . At the Victorian midcentury there was enough interest in sensory expe- rience to establish a school of common sense on its ...
Page 7
... physically the distinc- tion between what smells and what does not , to recognize some kinds of people and not others as capable of either giving off or responding to odors . As such , reading is a form of olfactory exercise INTRODUCTION 7.
... physically the distinc- tion between what smells and what does not , to recognize some kinds of people and not others as capable of either giving off or responding to odors . As such , reading is a form of olfactory exercise INTRODUCTION 7.
Page 8
... physical comforts , his supposed superiority to bodily experiences simply makes more significant his representation — not to mention the reader's imaginative apprehension of him — through responses to the material traces of substances ...
... physical comforts , his supposed superiority to bodily experiences simply makes more significant his representation — not to mention the reader's imaginative apprehension of him — through responses to the material traces of substances ...
Page 9
... physical , has much to say about what Bain calls " the discrimination of material bodies . " The novelistic representations of smells and smelling ultimately constitute a structure of sensations , to use a version of Raymond Williams's ...
... physical , has much to say about what Bain calls " the discrimination of material bodies . " The novelistic representations of smells and smelling ultimately constitute a structure of sensations , to use a version of Raymond Williams's ...
Other editions - View all
Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction Janice Carlisle Limited preview - 2004 |
Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction Janice Carlisle Limited preview - 2004 |
Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction Janice Carlisle Limited preview - 2004 |
Common terms and phrases
Anthony Trollope aroma Arthur Vincent artisans associated Bain become Bella body Boffin Cambridge chapter characteristic characters Charles Dickens Classen Clever Woman commodities comparative encounters defined depicted Dickens Dickens's dust heaps effect Eliot Esther Evan Harrington Evan's exchange Expectations explains father Felix Holt female flowers Gender genteel gentility gentleman George Eliot groom-price Harold Herbert high-Victorian fiction identify inodorate John Harmon Johnny Robinson labor lady Lizzie Lorton London male manhood marriage marry Marx Marx's Mary Elizabeth Braddon material melancholia melancholic mid-Victorian middle-class Middlemarch Mutual Friend narrator nineteenth-century odors odour offers olfaction olfactory olfactory encounters osmology of high-Victorian Oxford perfume physical Pip's plot political Poovey Rachel recognizes Reform relation responses reveal role Rose Salem Chapel scents sensations sense sensory smell social status story substance tion trade tradesmen Trollope Trollope's typical Victorian culture Victorian fiction Victorian Literature Vincent Wegg Wemmick women workers working-class Wrayburn York young