An Anatomy of Melancholy, or The Strange Beauty in Walter Pater’s The Child in the House

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.