Soundscapes and Affective Resonance in (Neo-)Victorianism

Abstract

Sound and voice have been invoked in neo-Victorian criticism since its beginning, and we have utilised the notion of the author as medium: for example, the medium’s ability to communicate with the dead has been used as metaphor for the dialogue between past and present, and the author functioning as a medium partaking of the world of the dead and 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, 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/immateriality, embodiment/disembodiment, including acoustics. Moreover, I would like to argue that the paradoxical nature of the movement is predicated upon the ambivalent nature of the notion of noise, and that, in a way, neo-Victorianism functions as a noise in that it interrupts our present, and acquires a productive value, following Michel Serres. Therefore, in this paper I will consider neo-Victorianism as a noise, and I will discuss soundscapes and affective sensoriality in a selection of texts. Then, 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.

Keywords

• senses
• noise
• neo-Victorianism
• Fox (Essie)
• Roberts (Michèle)