Victoria Coulson, Universitry of Cambridge,  England

Tyntesfield House and Charlotte Mary Yonge:

Sacralizing the domestic in Victorian Gothic representation

    This paper 'reads' Victorian Gothic domestic architecture alongside the

    English nineteenth-century domestic novel in order to articulate common

    themes and structures in these contemporaneous representational forms. Using

    photographs, plans, and other visual materials as well as literary texts,

    the paper focuses on the mid-Victorian commitment to purifying domestic

    representational forms (novels and houses) through a sacralization of both

    verbal and non-verbal structures of meaning.

            The paper takes as the first of its two central 'texts' Tyntesfield House,

    near Bristol in England. The self-made millionaire, and Oxford Movement

    Christian, William Gibbs bought a Georgian manor house which he commissioned

    a local architect, Norton, to redesign, enlarge, and glorify (1863-6). After

    Gibbs's death, his son commissioned further alterations (Woodyer, 1885-9)

    which consolidated the building's whole-hearted Gothicism. The result was

    Tyntesfield House, a spectacular 43-bedroom Victorian Gothic mansion, which

    remained in the ownership of the Gibbs family until 2002.

    In relation to ecclesiastic architecture, George L. Hersey has analyzed High

    Victorian Gothic as an eloquent medium of missionary Christianity whose

    roots lie in nineteenth-century associationism, a theory of design which

    held that buildings should 'express' their function through contrasting

    volumes, masses, and distribution of detail; the central 'message' of

    Victorian Gothic churches, Hersey argues, is one of didactic torment,

    'offer[ing] to the observer the prospect of his own suffering for Christ'.

            This paper uses a comparable semiotic approach to propose that the

    expressive function of domestic Gothic may be understood as a religious

    purification of family life. The most extraordinary - yet archetypal -

    feature of Tyntesfield is the enormous private chapel (by Arthur Blomfield),

    fully integrated into the main body of the house and thus expressing at the

    level of architectural structure the cultural project of sacralizing the

    domestic sphere. Blomfield later completed a consonant commission in the

    design of Selwyn College, Cambridge, whose Master's Lodge (1883) similarly

    effects domestic comfort within an ecclesiastic architectural idiom.

    Tyntesfield House may thus be analyzed as an architectural text whose

    physical structures narrate an authoritative Victorian story about the

    relations between material, domestic experience and the redemptive realm of

    Oxford Movement Christianity.

            In the sphere of literary production, the most prolific and popular exponent

    of this mid-Victorian missionary Christianity was Charlotte Mary Yonge

    (1823-1901), a close friend of the Gibbs family, and frequent visitor to

    Tyntesfield. Yonge's bestselling novel The Daisy Chain (1856) forms the

    second major focus of the paper.

            The paper argues that The Daisy Chain may be seen as the literary

    counterpart to Tyntesfield House, in that its expressive and didactic

    project is a cognate purification of domestic narrative through the

    sacralizing cadences of religious discourse. The novel begins with a happy

    family of eleven children, and proceeds to dismantle this extravagantly

    procreative nucleus by a series of disasters and sacrifices whose effect is

    to break up domestic and sexual relations and replace them with missionary

    work at home and abroad; the plot culminates in the consecration of a new

    church, and the almost total imposition of celibacy on its protagonists.

    Like a Gothic church, The Daisy Chain functions as a purifying medium, a

    machine à souffrir for characters and readers alike, participating in a

    Victorian literary tradition of the house as torture appliance that

    stretches from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) to Henry James's The

    Spoils of Poynton (1897). Yonge's characters shift at moments of high drama

    into fluent biblicalese, an effect which echoes at sentence-level the

    novel's symbolic and structural commitments to a sacralization of secular

    discourse clearly akin to the semiotic project of Victorian Gothic domestic

    architecture.