“Reared in Shade”: The Potential of Liminality and the Limits of Victorian Historical Discourse in Matthew Arnold’s “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”

Abstract: Though Matthew Arnold’s “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” depicts isolation, it actively engages with the historical discourses of the Victorian era. I view Arnold’s poem as rejecting two competing historiographical narratives. The dominant Victorian conception of history, popularized by writers such as Thomas Macaulay and Charles Lyell, viewed history as constant, linear improvement: Insight and prosperity gradually replace the superstitions and squalor of the past. The other narrative, supported by thinkers such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, conveys the opposite, that the commercialist and utilitarian present degraded the sincerity and intimate sense of community that defined the medieval past. Arnold’s speaker in “Grande Chartreuse,” melancholy at the anxious modern world, feels the temptation to believe in these narratives, but Arnold emphasizes the need to reject this temptation. I argue that viewing “Grande Chartreuse” in the context of Victorian historical debates reveals it to be more than a personal lament. Arnold views these historical narratives as too absolutist. Rejecting them means rejecting the dream of absolute clarity, but for Arnold such a choice is not innately tragic. “Grande Chartreuse,” I demonstrate, asserts the value of contemplative distance, of finding serenity by examining both narratives without dogmatically committing to either.