Högskolan i Halmstad
Deo-Victorian Society in the Neo-Victorian Novel:
A Study of Sensory Perceptions in Michel Faber´s The Crimson Petal and the White
Pepita Eskelin Spring 2011 Eng 91-120
Supervisor:
Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg
Deo-Victorian Society in the Neo-Victorian Novel:
A Study of Sensory Perceptions in Michel Faber´s The Crimson Petal and the White
Pepita Eskelin
Abstract
This paper explores the contemporary reader´s fascination with the Victorian period focusing on Michel Faber´s neo-Victorian novel The Crimson Petal and the White (2002). By
comparing and contrasting various literary elements that link the Victorian novel to
contemporary neo-Victorian fiction it simultaneously shows the similarities and differences between the nineteenth-century Victorian sensorium and that of the present day. It puts particular emphasis on the sensory perceptions of vision and smell, since those two senses are the most prominent ones in Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction and they are also regarded as extremes on the sensory scale. The nineteenth-century urban hygiene campaign transformed, in particular, the perception of olfaction.
This study concludes that our contemporary society bears many similarities to the Victorian period as a society of great change. The renewed interest in the Victorian signifies the twenty-first century reader´s desire for an idealized world set in another time, which yet appears familiar and recognizable. Neo-Victorian fiction thus functions as a means of knowing both your heritage and finding your own place in the present day. The sensory perception of foremost smell is part of our cultural heritage and thus the neo-Victorian novel mirrors the deo-Victorian concept.
Key words: Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, urban hygiene, smell, vision, sensory perceptions, neo-Victorian novel, prostitution
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 3
SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES 7
THE DANGER OF A SIMPLISTIC APPROACH 9
THE SENSES
Vision 13
The Visualization of the Female 14
Images and Objects 16
Smell 21
Urban Hygiene 22
The Attractive and Strange Nature of Smell 26
CONCLUSION 29
WORKS CITED 33
BACKGROUND READING 34
