Seafoam and Water: Thyrza as Artist in George Gissing’s Thyrza (1887)

This essay argues that in Thyrza, Gissing links the sea to artistic expression through the titular heroine, Thyrza Trent, whose music is paralleled with the sound of the foam-producing sea, and who is out of her natural element in Lambeth but at home on the seashore. It treats Thyrza as Gissing’s attempt to express his developing ideas in 1886 about art and creativity in relation the external world, both natural and social. From seafoam to marine aquariums, clouds, and lakes, water plays a vital role in the novel, shoring up characters’ constitutional responses to their surroundings, whether it be the quiet lake, flowing river, or wild seashore, which Gissing associates with the intellectual aesthete, the factory worker, and the sensitive artist, respectively. A central contention is that in the space of the littoral, Thyrza experiences a oneness with nature aligned to Schopenhauer’s ideas regarding music and the artist’s access to the universal, and to the concept of oceanic feeling regaining currency today in what Erika Balsom describes as the “search for what it means to belong to the whole of a world in our time of ecological, humanitarian, and political emergency” (9). A reorientation of perspective to incorporate the terraqueous elements illuminates that despite its sentimental and idealistic features, Thyrza expresses an awe and veneration for the planetary that Dipesh Chakrabarty and Bruno Latour suggest that we need to recover, a “reverence,” or “some kind of a feeling that this is much bigger than I am” (Chakrabarty 216).