Please join the Nineteenth Century Forum for a public lecture given by Alicia Christoff, Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College.

It may seem strange to pair Jonathan Glazer’s unsettling science fiction film Under the Skin (2013), about an alien inhabiting the body of a woman (played by Scarlett Johannson), with Thomas Hardy’s much more terrestrial Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). This talk, however, brings the film and novel together to show that Tess too is a skin story: a story of “beautiful feminine tissue,” bodily surfaces, phenomenological sensation, the male gaze, female agency, embodiment, and their violation – and an implicit story of racialization as well. The talk builds on Kaja Silverman’s foundational essay on female subjectivity and specularity in Tess by testing it against Under the Skin, which I argue eerily re-echoes many of the Victorian novel’s central images and tropes. More largely, I am interested in how the act of pairing Victorian and modern texts can provide Victorian studies scholars ways of engaging new work in critical theory – here, recent theorizations of race, blackness, and visuality – that is sometimes felt to be debarred by our objects of study.