Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture by Catherine Maxwell

Abstract

 Reviews (p. ); here Steinlight rethinks Gillian Beer’s enormously influential reading of Hardy’s fiction in Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). e novels of Hardy and George Gissing, Steinlight contends, show how characters are ‘unfit to survive’ (p. ), unlike the earlier texts. e book concludes by looking forward, considering how the modernist novel becomes preoccupied with portraying consciousness, not society. Populating the Novel is an extremely accomplished and wide-ranging monograph that contributes forcefully to the field of nineteenth-century novel studies. e argument that the multitude, not the individual, is the focus of nineteenth-century fiction takes criticism in an exciting new direction. Steinlight’s book will soon become an indispensable reference point for academics and advanced students working in the area of literary biopolitics and beyond. U   W  E G B Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture. By C M- . Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xviii+ pp.;  colour plates.£. ISBN ––––. e cosmetics industry struggles with a fundamental sensory conundrum: how can perfume be conveyed or understood in written or visual terms? is engaging study explores how writers responded to that challenge during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its punning title signalling a concern with the literature of perfume and its scientific and cultural context. Catherine Maxwell’s ambitious approach combines penetrative textual analysis with discussions of chemistry, botany , household management, advertising, fashion, and etiquette. is is genuinely interdisciplinary scholarship, though her primary concern remains the poetry of the mid to late nineteenth century. As Maxwell explains, poets were fascinated by the perfumes entering the market from the s because they were no longer mimetic. Instead of copying nature, perfumiers distilled and blended fragrances in ingenious ways, placing the nose of the olfactif on a par with the wine connoisseur’s palate. Unique interactions between perfumes and the bodies of their wearers produced still greater allure, and Maxwell provides revealing discussions of poems such as Arthur Symons’s ‘Peau d’Espagne’ (), which celebrates a fragrance notorious for mimicking the aroma of the female body. What makes this book so distinctive is less its impressive literary analyses than its intriguing engagement with perfume itself. e field of literary studies has generally privileged the interpretative over the instructive, but Maxwell sees no disjunction. Her method is exemplified by her use of Symons’s essay ‘Being a Word on Behalf of Patchouli’ to initiate an exploration of patchouli itself, an Indian plant used as a perfume and insect repellent. Heady and pungent, it proved too overpowering for ‘polite’ Victorian society but was popular in the demi-monde, favoured by MLR, .,   prostitutes or, in male fragrances from the s onwards, by those who flaunted their willingness to breach sexual decorum. Patchouli’s olfactory semiotics were elaborate, and Maxwell does an excellent job of explaining the scent’s significance in late Victorian fashion as well as literature. e book commences by explaining how Victorian perfume—soaps, bouquets, nosegays—was strongly gendered, with women encouraged to ‘favour light and floral fragrances’ rather than those containing ‘animalic extracts such as musk and civet’ (p. ). Male scents were initially governed by similar rules, but by the s, department stores stocked a wide range of masculine cosmetics which drew inspiration from India, China, and Japan. Using perfume catalogues, period advertisements , and etiquette books, Maxwell shows how perfume became as complex a Victorian language as flowers themselves. What follows moves seamlessly between accounts of the composition, manufacture, and usage of various perfumes (some now unable to be made because they contain illegal chemicals), their reputation, and their literary and artistic incarnations. Maxwell considers the relationship between perfumes and remembrance, before presenting insightful examinations of Swinburne, Pater, John Addington Symonds, and Lafcadio Hearn, a passionate advocate for Japanese culture who did much to popularize Far Eastern art. Elsewhere, Maxwell deciphers a hidden language of olfactory decadence, showing how homosexual and lesbian writers deployed perfume as an instrument for encoding transgressive desire. A chapter on Field offers exemplary readings of important poems; another on s dandyism is equally persuasive in exploring Wilde’s use of perfume in his self-stylization. e...