ABSTRACT
Essential to the British home tour was the experience and viewing of landscape, and during the course of the eighteenth century much energy was invested in negotiating and formulating ways to articulate and systematize individual perception, experience and authorship of natural scenery. In turn, and because ‘people imagine a nation to have a unique landscape’, the language of natural description, and the aesthetic theory which so profoundly influenced that vocabulary, came to offer the traveller a means by which ideas about regional and national difference could be explored and inscribed.1 Recent criticism has revealed the complex relationship of female travellers to aesthetic theory by highlighting the way in which the masculinist and elitist assumptions which underpinned eighteenth-century aesthetics discounted the female: ‘the powerful language of aesthetics’ was ‘written by men from a perspective textually marked as masculine’.2 Travel narration exposed the faultlines in that discourse and offered women the textual space to engage with, and also undermine, the dominant ideology. The notion of the disinterested aesthetic subject, as developed by Shaftesbury and Addison and perpetuated by numerous subsequent male aestheticians, relied upon a dichotomous formulation of perception and judgement which set the educated, wealthy, landowning gentleman of taste against the ‘vulgar’, a category which included women, along with anyone of working-class or non-European status. The vulgar were not considered capable of accessing the most developed and significant forms of aesthetic pleasure because their identity denied them the ability to achieve the requisite emotional, intellectual, and material detachment from the landscape. As Elizabeth Bohls has demonstrated, women challenged the ‘founding assumptions’ of such criteria. The notion of the generic perceiver, the concept of disinterested contemplation and the idea that aesthetics can function independently from moral, political or utilitarian concerns, are all questioned and revised by women’s representation of the landscapes of travel.3 This chapter will consider, in specific relation to the home tour, a school of eighteenthcentury aesthetic thought that was lauded by some women and derided by others: the picturesque.
