Mapping the Visual Culture in Gaskell’s Time

Chapter One

Mapping the Visual Culture in Gaskell’s Time

This chapter will read Victorian novels and photography together under the same cultural context, trying to discern visual elements out of realist novels, a textural medium of representation in essence. The chapter will first sketch a brief history of visual technology, examining how the advent of photography impacts the Victorians’

understanding of vision. It argues that photographic technology and positivist ideology reinforce each other, and together they contribute to a prevailing belief that it is possible to achieve mimesis through the aids of visual apparatus. Inspired by Nancy Armstrong’s argument that the Victorian era is a historical juncture of

photography and literature, I will examine Victorian novels under the light of visual culture. From the contemporary discourse of the novel, I want to highlight the fact that vision is an essential mechanism in novel writing and reading. To push the argument further, I define the “photographic impulse”—the novel’s propensity to visualize stories—as a driving force of realistic novels. By juxtaposing photographic techniques and novelistic skills, I will demonstrate that many techniques of

representation in realist novels parallel those introduced by photography. Therefore, examining Gaskell’s novel against this cultural milieu, the novel’s use of photographic techniques becomes evident. I will spend a few passages identifying photographic techniques from Gaskell’s novel Wives and Daughters. I conclude that although the novel narrates stories in textual form, visual techniques is an important ingredient that should not be ignored, because they will have great influence upon meaning

production and characterization. Arguments in this chapter will serve as the

foundation for discussions in the succeeding chapters.

I. Images in the Age of Photography

I will begin with a short history of the invention of photography. The advent of photography was a result of a long evolvement. Before photography came into being, camera obscura was the most widely used instrument to reproduce images throughout the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries (Crary 27). It was a device that allowed the light travel through a small hole and then projected on a screen, which was usually located in a darkened room or a box. The viewer could thus study a target object by scrutinizing its images reflected on the screen. Because of its capacity of projecting distant scenery or enlarging an object, camera obscura was applied mainly in the realm of entertainment and painting. Painters could observe objects closely through the aides of camera obscura. And for those who pursued realistic representation of the world, they could even copy the outline of the image directly by means of this device (Crary 33).

In addition to artists, scientists of the time used camera obscura as a model to explain the mechanism of visual perception.

They believed that human vision might work just as camera obscura did, with the light traveling into the eyes and then projecting on the retina (47). Therefore, whether in the realm of art, science, or everyday life, camera obscura had been a common visual practice in Europe until the advent of photography.

In the beginning of the nineteenth century, photography was developed in France by Hippolyte Bayard and in England by Fox Talbot at about the same time.

Each of them worked independently to improve Louis Daguerre’s (1789-1851) daguerreotype, a technique that used a plate coated with chemicals sensitive to light.

Talbot and Bayard overcame the disadvantage of daguerreotype, which could only expose once; they replaced the chemical plate with negatives that could produce an

2 For detailed discussion on the operation of camera obscura, see Joel Snyder’s “Picturing Vision,”

1980.

infinite number of copies, and thus developed daguerreotype into photography known to us today. Because of the nature of its reproducibility, photography was regarded as a technical breakthrough from daguerreotype. As early as the 1830s, there were documents of responses after seeing this new invention; and by the 1850s,

photography had replaced the status of camera obscura as a popular practice in European life (Armstrong 7).

Many critics have noted that the advent of photography had a great impact on the Victorian life: it influenced not only their concept of image, but their sense of time (Fell 81; McQuire 13-17; Mirzoeff 64-90). Two examples would suffice to illustrate how photography broadened the Victorians’ visual experience. First of all,

photography created a new experience in terms of time. When the Victorians saw

their images captured and fastened onto a piece of paper, they were surprised at the

camera’s capability to freeze movements. As a viewer of the time exclaimed, “the

most fleeting of all things—a shadow, is fixed and made permanent…. What would

you say to looking in a mirror and having the image fastened?” (quoted in McQuire

13-14). To the Victorian viewers, they were amazed that moving things in reality

were not only captured, but frozen the moment it was taken. Another impact was the

camera’s capacity to amplify details: it was able to capture things that were difficult or

even impossible to perceive before. A Victorian was quoted for his amazement at

the “magical” effect of the camera, wondering that photography almost achieve the

performance of a magnifier: “the minute truths of the many objects, the exquisite

delicacy of the penciling, if we may be allowed the phrase, can only be discovered

with a magnifying glass” (The Athenaeum, quoted in Buckland 44). In other words,

with the assistance of camera, the Victorians could look at things beyond the limits of

human physical constraints: to look from the viewpoints they had never imagined

before, or to capture images beyond the constraint of physical limitations. As Scott

McQuire puts it, “camera technologies have redefined the rhythms of representation and the horizons of knowledge” (2).

The reason of presenting a history here is to follow Jonathan Crary, whose purpose is not merely to investigate the visual technology, but to trace the genealogy of visual power, and to investigate the ideology of vision embodied in different visual instruments.

He argues that each optical device embodies a paradigm of visual perception specific to its time and culture. Crary’s idea could be summarized as the following:

The optical devices in question, most significantly, are points of intersection where philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic discourses overlap with

mechanical techniques, institutional requirements, and socioeconomic forces. Each of them is understandable not simply as the material object in question, or as part of a history of technology, but for the way in which it is embedded in a much larger assemblage of events and powers. (8)

In other words, the focus is not on the materiality of camera obscura or photography, but on the ideology of power and knowledge they could embody. Sharing the same belief with Crary that technology is subordinated to the larger part of cultural and social force, therefore, my concern in this section is to probe the ideology of vision projected by the technology of photography in the Victorian period.

Crary’s argument leads us to heed the fact that, when photography came into being in the nineteenth century, it was also the time when positivism held sway (Sturken & Cartwright 16; McQuire 33). Positivism is the philosophical thinking

3 Crary’s Crary’s ambition to sketch a genealogy of vision follows the tradition of Foucault. Foucault explains the meaning of genealogy in his book Power/Knowledge: “One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that’s to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework. And this is what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domain of objects, etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to a field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history” (New York 1980) 117.

that emphasizes the importance of evidence, especially evidence that can be proven through scientific experimentation. As Marita Sturken defines, “positivism involves the belief that empirical truths can be established through visual evidence” (16).

Under the influence of positivism, photography was trusted by the Victorians as an unbiased tool, a truth-telling instrument that could be used to record the reality faithfully. In comparison with the human eyes, as Armstrong explains, “the modern optical apparatus seemed relatively neutral and impervious to such influences, as only a machine could be” (76-77). And in comparison with paintings, photography could achieve an accuracy that surpassed any endeavors of the artisans. Consequently, camera became “the” evidence-producing device cherished by positivists. The Victorians regarded camera as a neutral instrument that would not be swayed by emotion, whereas human perception could be easily affected, and might be subjected to a variety of human factors, such as “mood swings, fagging attentiveness,

hallucinations, and a variety of outside pressures” (Armstrong 76-77). As a result, while the ideology of positivism elevated the status of photography, the capability of camera also reinforced positivist thinking during the Victorian period.

Combining the positivist ideology and the photographic power, therefore, there was a prevailing faith in images in the age of photography. That is to say, the belief persisted that people could get access to the world through the images they saw.

This reliance on image could be regarded as a fundamental breakthrough from the

anti-mimesis tradition since Plato. Plato argued in his cave allegory that the images

perceived by human beings were merely copies of the ideal, or reflections of the real

world; images were deviations away from the truth, and thus could not be taken as the

reality. While Plato’s argument was basically hostile to visual representation, at the

turn of the nineteenth-century, the advent of photography enhanced people’s belief in

the possibility of faithful representation through images. Although there has been

debate over the reliability of photographic images since the mid-1800, generally speaking, during the high time of photography, the optimistic attitude toward the capability of the new technology overweighed the concerns over its reliability (Sturken & Cartwright 16).

II. Images in the Victorian Novels

After examining the ideology of vision embodied in photography, namely, the Victorians’ trust and reliance on images to understand the world, this section will continue to probe the same concept of vision manifested in the field of literature. I will demonstrate that just as viewers of photography are confident in the possibility of visual representation, the Victorian readership is established upon a consensus

between writers and readers—a belief that it is possible to see the real world through textual representations. Conventionally, in the realm of literature, “the Victorian period” encompasses the time spanning from Wuthering Heights (1847) to Lord Jim (1900), and does not exactly conform to the queen Victoria’s regime (David; Dennis;

Wheeler). During this period, in spite of the diverse writing styles or tenets, realism is regarded as “the dominant mode of representation and the dominating reading practice of the Victorian era” (Furst 63). The following are the Victorian literati’s discourses on realism, which reflects the era’s attitude toward writing, reading, and criticizing novels. They reveal how images dominated the practice of novel reading and writing at the time—while realistic novelists wrote with the real world in mind as a referent, readers expected to read stories that they could relate to their real life experience, and even the critics of the time used realistic representation as a criterion to evaluate novels.

To begin with, among realist authors, it was a convention to compare novel

writing to the acts of seeing. As Philippe Duranty stated in a journal Réalisme in

1856, the mission of a novelist should be “to see things clearly, as they really were, and to draw appropriate conclusions from this clear apprehension of reality” (quoted in Furst 6). This statement could be taken as the tenor of the Victorian novel, because writers of the time always wrote as if there was a preexistent reality out there as a referent. To show the reader what was happening, realist novelists talked as if they wanted to share their vision, or the sight they saw, with the reader, whether it was through a persona participating in stories, or through an undisguised authorial voice.

For instance, through her narrator of Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot employed the metaphor of eye-witness to present stories, promising to “give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind,” as if “in the

witness-box narrating my experience on oath” (quoted in Furst 3). And in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1987), Conrad addressed to readers his purpose explicitly: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.

That—and no more, and is everything” (quoted in Shires 62). Therefore, seeing had become an integral part of narrating stories. The examples above support John Rignall’s statement that seeing is of central importance in the practice of realism (i).

Indeed, the claim of authorial truth by novelists was not yet challenged or defied in the Victorian novel, as it would later become a source of manipulation in postmodern fictions. When the narrator swore to tell the truth in a realist novel, readers of the time willingly believed in the given visual information without

challenging its reliability. As Lillian R. Furst argued, the convention of realism was largely based on a “consensus of vision” between the narrator and readers (66).

While novelists endeavored to provide persuasive visual information of what he or

she saw, it took willing suspension of disbelief on the reader’s part to make sense of

stories (Furst 11). What I want to stress here is that both writers and readers of the

time were involved in a reading practice largely based on images. Both perceived novels as a form of visual representation, considering a vivid image as the key to successful representation. Thus Furst has it right when stating that, “The novelist’s true end product is not the printed page, but the illusion created in the reader’s mind”

(71).

In addition to writers and readers, Victorian critics also took images as criteria to discuss and comment on novels. Many terms used to describe the task of

realism—to portray, represent, or to illustrate life—were inseparable from vision.

For instance, critics of the time often compared novels to paintings, believing that writing a novel was analogous to painting a realistic image of the world. For instance, Anthony Trollope stated his principle of evaluating novels: “A novel should be a picture of common life enlivened by humor and sweetened by pathos”

(Autobiography 1883; quoted in Dennis 58). In The Art of Fiction (1884), Hanry James contended that “the art of painter and the art of novelists” should be regarded as brothers, because they shared a common purpose to represent and to illustrate life (49). Last but not least, George Eliot appropriated concepts from pictorial arts to demonstrate the quality of novels:

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin—the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvelous facility which we mistook for genius, is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion…. It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings.

(quoted in Dennis 79)

In this passage Eliot meant to demonstrate realism as an artistic virtuosity, arguing

that to achieve verisimilitude is much more difficult than being imaginative. By so

doing, she also united the novels and paintings under the tenet of representation,

namely, arts that resort to vision to capture the reality. These examples show that there was indeed a tendency among the Victorian literati to investigate realist novels with images in mind as an important means of representation.

To sum up, whereas novelists endeavored to visualize stories by providing visual information, the Victorian readership was equipped with the capability to read images out of the lines. It becomes clear that in the realm of the Victorian literature, both the practice of novel and realistic ideology reinforced the power of

images—images were regarded as useful tools for communication, and reliable referents to the reality.

III. Photographic Impulses of the Victorian Novels

In Fiction in the Age of Photography (2002), Armstrong inspires us to read the nineteenth-century novels under the same cultural background of photography.

Armstrong reminds us with a piece of historical evidence that actually, the advent of photography coincided with the time when literary realism was a dominating practice.

She contends that both photography and literature were saturated in the same cultural ambiance, sharing the same purpose to achieve visual verisimilitude, and in return strengthened that ambiance. Armstrong’s argument establishes an association between realist novels and photography, highlighting the fact that they were both products and producers of the nineteenth-century visual culture.

Indeed, several critics have noticed the prevailing use of images in realist novels, and they tend to emphasize the affinity between realist novels and cinema:

some try to find interchangeability between realistic novels and narrative films, and

some argue that the narrative skills in the late Victorian novels inspire the uses of

modern film language.

However, I would like to emphasize that since photography and novelistic realism prevailed at about the same time, it might be fruitful to make a parallel examination between photography and literature under the same cultural milieu. Thus following Armstrong, I suggest that we restore realist novels back to its cultural background, reading realist novels side by side with photography, and see how the techniques of vision function in these novels.

Examining novels in the age of photography, consequently, I define the

“photographic impulse” as a driving force underlying realist novels, which impels novels to visualize stories into concrete images. The photographic impulse not only reflects novelists’ enthusiasm on visual representation, but also embodies the era’s belief in images. Nancy Armstrong also uses the term “photographic” to

demonstrate visual-oriented quality of realistic novels, stating that: “Writing that aims to be taken as realistic is ‘photographic’ in that it promised to give readers access to a world…and sought to do so by offering certain kinds of visual information” (26).

Moreover than that, many visually-based techniques in realist novels, including the use of perspectives, details, and spectacle, could be regarded as the products of the photographic impulse. As I will illustrate below, these visual techniques are conventional practices that assist the novelists in presenting stories more efficiently, so as to achieve a sense of verisimilitude. For instance, presenting stories from a certain perspective mimics a real situation of seeing, in which one person could only have one focus at a time. Providing details signifies scrutinizing an object more closely, while using spectacles would build up an overview of a scene. To put in Armstrong’s words, “perspective, detail, spectacle, or simply an abundance of visual description served to create, enlarge, revise, or update the reality shared by Victorian

4 See Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (1949); Alan Spiegel, Fiction and the Camera Eye (1976); Keith Cohen, Film and Fiction (1979).

readers” (6).

There are some novelistic skills parallel to the photographic techniques. First, analogous to the camera eye in photography, realist novels usually present stories through the eyes of an imaginary observer. Like Conrad’s vow to let the reader see, or Eliot’s metaphor of standing witness, stories in many Victorian novels are

presented as if there is an observer who shares the vision he or she witnessed with the readers. The imaginary observer enabled by the novel might be the omniscient narrator, or one of the characters in the story, while different characters may assume the role of observer in different occasions. He or she as an observer functions like a reporting device that records events, locations, or other characters, and then share the visual information it obtained with the readers. What is more important, the viewing position of the observer amounts to that of a photographer. When taking a

photograph, the photographer does not get involved in the event, but stands behind the camera and decides which object to capture. He is absent from the images he takes, and is thus invisible to the viewers of the photograph. Similarly, when depicting a character or an event in the novel, the imaginary observer is removed from what he is witnessing or recounting. As Sturken and Cartwright point out blatantly, looking involves relationship of power: “To look is to actively make meaning of that world….

To willfully look or not is to exercise choice and influence” (10). Therefore, one may conclude that both the imaginary observer in the novel, and the invisible

photographer behind the camera, occupy the same viewing position—a vantage point of looking—during the process of visual representation.

Moreover, similar to the camera’s capability to freeze the flow of time, the

Victorian novels produce effects similar to the snapshots of a camera. According to

Nancy Armstrong, faces are an obsession for both Victorian photographers and

novelists. She argues that Victorian novelists are “the ones to take advantage of the

propensity of visual appearance to bestow an identity on an individual which they claim to discover in the person, place, or thing itself” (125). In other words, novelists assign their characters a place “within a system of visual differences” by means of scrutinizing and depicting images of faces (126).

Furthermore, parallel to the framing process of the camera, Victorian novels always frame stories from a certain perspective. In photography, framing is like a selecting mechanism that decides which object can be seen and which cannot.

Similarly, in the realm of novel, to borrow Henry James’s metaphor, the novelistic frame is like the pane of a glass window, through which readers are invited to look inside “the house of fiction” and see what is going on there (Furst 65). It is like “the empty frame” that the realistic authors always carry with them, which marks a

boundary of visibility (Furst 48). As a result, the framing device denotes a screening mechanism in terms of vision. It defines a definite field of viewing, and thus

provides readers/viewers a limited point of view.

IV. Photographic Techniques in Gaskell’s Novel

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters was first serialized on the Cornhill Magazine from 1864 to 1866. If we read Gaskell’s novel against the cultural

background sketched above, it becomes salient that many techniques of representation in the novel are driven by the photographic impulse I have just defined. There are at least four dispositions of the novel that can be regarded as photographic—the ways it appropriates the mechanism of observation, reproduces effects of snapshots, exposes the sequence of observation, and approaches character’s mind through physical observation. The purpose for the moment is to identify and illustrate visual

techniques in Gaskell’s novel. And then in the next chapter, I will continue to probe

how these photographic techniques function in characterization.

To begin with, when presenting a character’s image, one of the most explicit inclinations of Wives and Daughters is to use the mechanism of observer to present characters. For instance, there is a passage presenting Molly’s looks from the perspective of Mr. Kirkpatrick, a visitor in Mr. Gibson’s house. Under his inspection:

Molly struck him as a delicate-looking girl, who might be very pretty if she had had a greater look of health and animation: indeed, looking at her critically, there were beautiful points about her face—long soft grey eyes, black curling eyelashes, rarely-showing dimples, perfect teeth—but there was a languor over all, a slow depression of manner, which contrasted unfavorably with the brightly-colored Cynthia, sparkling, quick, graceful, and witty. (W & D 441)

Here, Molly’s image is constructed by means of visual information provided by an observer. Many subtle details on her face—dimples, teeth, and eyelashes—are exposed to the scrutiny of another character, which functions as a viewing device.

Such detailed descriptions could be achieved only through a careful observation within a short distance. And these bits and pieces of details put together to create an impression of the heroine: that she looks physically delicate and emotionally

vulnerable. As a result, with the devices of observation, the viewer/reader occupies a vantage point to observe their objects of concerns. They look from “a position of privileged knowing and moral judgment,” while characters become objects under close examination (Furst 65).

In some occasions, the novel produces effects similar to snapshots of the

camera. When a character is introduced to readers for the first time, the novel

always provides visual information of the character—such as his or her looks,

physical traits, dresses—like presenting a photograph of that character. Taking

Roger Hamley as an example, when he enters the novel for the first time, the novel describes:

His face was rather square, ruddy-coloured (as his father had said), hair and eyes brown—the latter rather deep-set beneath his thick eyebrows. And he had a trick of wrinkling up his eyelids when he wanted particularly to

observe anything, which made his eyes look even smaller still at such times.

He had a large mouth, with excessively mobile lips; and another trick of his was, that when he was amused at anything, he resisted the impulse to laugh, by a droll manner of twitching and puckering up his mouth, till at length the sense of humour had its way, and his features relaxed, and he broke into a broad sunny smile; his beautiful teeth—his only beautiful feature—breaking out with a white gleam upon the red-brown countenance. (W & D 87).

Based on the information above, Roger’s appearance becomes clear to the readers—he is not handsome, but a plain-looking men; he has a square face with brown complexion, a large mouth with white teeth, brown eyes, and thick eyebrows.

Many subtle movements in his face also become vivid to the reader. Similar to the function of a photographic camera, the narrator’s eyes capture Roger’s image by framing his face, and then scrutinizing subtle features on that face. This visual

technique is reminiscent of the circulation of cartes de visite in the nineteenth-century.

As Armstrong points out, the visual information circulated with cartes de visite becomes the basis for the Victorian readership to determine “whether an individual complied with or fell short of a visual norm” (127). In other words, once a character is captured by the observing device and turned into an image, that image seems to become reproducible, and thus can be circulated, and be appropriated at will.

In some other occasions, the novel exposes the process of observation—a clear

sequence of transition from one image to another—as if there is an invisible camera

lens that not only frames objects, but also orients the reader’s view. For instance, the following passage on a dinner party is characteristic of this visual trait:

Molly could not tell what to reply to this, so she hung her head and kept silence. Yet she could see that Roger did not change his attitude or remove his hand from the back of his chair, and, impelled by curiosity to find out the cause of his stillness, she looked up at him at length, and saw his gaze fixed on the two who were near the piano. Osborne was saying something eagerly to Cynthia, whose grave eyes were upturned to him with soft intentness of expression, and her pretty mouth half-open, with a sort of impatience for him to cease speaking, that she might reply. (282) This passage contains an obvious visual guideline for the reader’s attention. As if there is an invisible camera that captures scenes, the image frame shifts from Molly to Roger, then to Osborne, and finally to Cynthia. At first the “invisible camera”

frames Molly into the scene, but soon it merges with Molly’s viewpoint and begins to shot from Molly’s position. The first thing Molly observes is the stillness of Roger’s hand; then she looks upward to see what is going on, realizing that Roger’s attention has already been drawn to somewhere else. Tracing Roger’s direction of looking, then, Molly sees Cynthia and Osborne over the other end of the room by the piano.

Molly gives a short glance over Osborne, but her eyes eventually stays on Cynthia’s face, she keenly observing the way Cynthia talks to Osborne. As a result, under photographic techniques like this, the process of visual shifting is explicit.

Following these visually based descriptions, readers become onlookers of a scene, while they share the same view with the observer.

In still other occasions, the novel accesses character’s psychology through

observations on their appearance. For instance, there is a scene in which the novel

presents Cynthia’s low spirit by revealing her manners through Molly’s eyes. The

moment when Molly goes into Cynthia’s room and finds her lying in bed, the novel depicts what Molly sees:

Cynthia was lying upon the bed as if she had thrown herself down on it

without caring for the ease or comfort of her position. She was very still….

When she opened her eyes, she spoke, “Is that you, dear? Don’t go. I like to know that you are there.” (W & D 344)

This passage successfully uses Cynthia’s gestures to visualize her emotion. Without offering Cynthia’s piece of mind, this passage simply delineates the way she throws herself onto her bed. It becomes obvious that Cynthia feels distressed to the extent that she does not care for the ease of her limbs. Her disturbing emotion has

obviously surpassed the basic needs for physical comfort. So exposed under Molly’s observation, Cynthia’s feelings are explicitly displayed in her gestures; as to her

words soliciting for Molly’s accompany, they reinforce Cynthia’s fragile state of mind.

I suggest that this method is driven by the photographic impulse, because it involves a mechanism that accesses one’s inner status of mind by observing how he or she looks and behaves. This strategy of presenting characters is reminiscent of the

nineteenth-century predilection for physiognomy, a theory and practice that identify one’s psychology by studying his or her physical appearance:

[T]he photographer secures with unerring accuracy the external phenomena of each passion, as the really certain indication of internal derangement, and exhibits to the eye the well known sympathy which exists between the diseased brain and the organ and features of the body. (quoted McQuire 39)

In other words, this paradigm of perception strengthens the concept that seeing is

believing. It is opposed to the model of self-analysis, in which characters reveal

their feelings in their own words, such as the way Cynthia discloses her sense of

regret or analyzes her mentality. It could be regarded as a visually-based technique of the novel, because it involves a process of external observation.

This chapter has tried to map the visual culture in Gaskell’s time, so as to restore Gaskell’s novel to its cultural ambience. Analyzing realist novels and

photography under the same cultural background, I define the “photographic impulse”

as a driving force of realist novels. When putting Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters in this cultural context, it becomes easy to identify and illustrate examples of

photographic techniques from Gaskell’s novel. With the notion of visual techniques in mind, therefore, I am going to investigate in chapter two how these visual

techniques interact with narrative techniques of the novel, and how they sway the

characterization of the heroine, and thus influence the general perception of the novel.