No greater challenge was put to the night/day duality than the advent of artificial lighting by gas, around 1830, and electricity, from the 1880s onwards. When lit-up, spaces became entirely different places, and I will demonstrate this thanks to many enchanting and intriguing examples from the French 19th century literary canon as well as rarely-seen archival material from civil engineering, advertising and private letters.
Public spaces when lit in these new ways, such as the streets of Paris; private spaces, such as drawing rooms and bedrooms; and semi-public spaces, such as theatres, and the places of work of domestic servants; brought a radical challenge to circadian æsthetics. When it became possible for individuals and architects to design and control lighting atmospheres, the night changed forever.
My paper argues that writers were challenged by the new potentials brought by lighting for narrative signposting, for directing their readers’ attention around the narrative space. Hugo’s conceits depended on the night, with the day representing an idealised and enlightened state. By presenting a big data analysis of light and darkness terms in the 19th century literature, I will show the extent to which Hugo stains his darkness with dirty light: oil, tallow candles and rats de cave, a prison lantern. By the age of electricity, this had changed: Zola, for his part, anticipated cinematic techniques by using the night/day duality as focus, making tight luminescent frames around his characters and zooming in on details.
The paper interrogates the night/day duality in the context of technological change.