An Anatomy of Melancholy, or The Strange Beauty in Walter Pater’s The Child in the House
Michele Brugnetti
Sapienza University of Rome, Italy; University of Silesia in Katowice, PolandMichele Brugnetti is a doctoral student enrolled in the PhD program in English Literature, Language, and Translation Studies at the Sapienza University of Rome (specializing in Literary and Cultural Studies), in collaboration with the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. In 2023, he obtained a master's degree in English and Anglo-American Studies from Sapienza University of Rome, with a thesis in English literature titled “Aesthetic Novel: Multiplicity of Form, Imaginative Memory, and the Melancholy of the Moment in Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean.” In 2021, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Lingue, Culture, Letterature, Traduzione at the same university. His doctoral project focuses on the intersection of the British novel and British Aestheticism, particularly in the works of Walter Pater, Ouida, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Machen. He is a member of the Italian Oscar Wilde Society, the International Walter Pater Society, Associazione Italiana di Anglistica, the European Society for the Study of English, and the British Association for Victorian Studies.
https://orcid.org/0009-0001-0049-2362
Abstract
The object of this paper is to offer a new understanding of Walter Pater’s assessment of beauty as a process that contains within itself the pangs of melancholy; first, since Pater himself suggests in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry that beauty is to be investigated in its singular, relative appearance, I propose to examine his refusal of dogmatism to grasp the multifariousness of experience; second, I will turn to Pater’s short story to provide an example of a perceiving subject whose appraisal of beauty is marred by a sense of melancholy. Employing Bourdieusian terminology, I will then argue that by positioning the appraisal of beauty as a Baudelarian practice that requires “a difficult initiation,” Pater may also be aiming at legitimizing the role as a British aesthete as a nomothete of the autonomy of art. Lastly, I will consider some notions of Bachelard’s Poetics of Reverie, as to explore the technique of imaginative recollection employed by Pater in The Child in the House is a crucial component in his effort to substantiate the far-reaching breadth of aesthetic perception as an experience that claims completeness in itself.
Keywords:
beauty, aesthetic, perception, melancholy, autonomy of art, imaginative recollectionReferences
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Sapienza University of Rome, Italy; University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland
Michele Brugnetti is a doctoral student enrolled in the PhD program in English Literature, Language, and Translation Studies at the Sapienza University of Rome (specializing in Literary and Cultural Studies), in collaboration with the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. In 2023, he obtained a master's degree in English and Anglo-American Studies from Sapienza University of Rome, with a thesis in English literature titled “Aesthetic Novel: Multiplicity of Form, Imaginative Memory, and the Melancholy of the Moment in Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean.” In 2021, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Lingue, Culture, Letterature, Traduzione at the same university. His doctoral project focuses on the intersection of the British novel and British Aestheticism, particularly in the works of Walter Pater, Ouida, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Machen. He is a member of the Italian Oscar Wilde Society, the International Walter Pater Society, Associazione Italiana di Anglistica, the European Society for the Study of English, and the British Association for Victorian Studies.
https://orcid.org/0009-0001-0049-2362
