The Victorian Guitar, Exoticism, and Extinction Discourse from Radcliffe to Wilde

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the often-overlooked Victorian guitar and its place in the musicological history of the long nineteenth century and in various canonical and non-canonical literary representations from those of Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Yonge to George Du Maurier and Oscar Wilde, in the light of some Victorian music historians’ and contemporary organologists’ search for a stringed cultural heritage extending to the far reaches of empire. Some Victorian music historians regarded instruments as developmental yardsticks, signifying a culture, nation, or people’s evolutionary progress, a process belonging to what Patrick Brantlinger has called ‘extinction discourse’. In the context of an interdisciplinary discussion of the guitar’s position amid the period’s obsession with uncovering origins and constructing archives, as well as fostering technical innovation—displayed at the Great Exhibition—and shifting modes of performance, this article argues that despite the changing instrument’s rise in status over the period, literary representations adhered to older, sentimental, exotic, spiritual, and, increasingly decadent and homoerotic associations. Anxiety about decadence in concert with calls for preservation but also rationalization of salvaged cultural forms, including musical instruments, led some to advocate a type of musical eugenics, ostensibly to facilitate the creation of a new music of the future.