Beyond likeness : materiality, temporality and the form of portraiture in the nineteenth-century English novel

Abstract

This thesis examines the ubiquitous presence of fictional portraits in the nineteenth-century English novel, from the Gothic tradition to the Victorian fin de siècle. In highlighting these portraits’ visual qualities and drawing upon the history of nineteenth-century portraiture, this thesis argues against the common scholarly reading of fictional portraits as functional plot devices or auxiliary narrative components. Their presence in the novel, I contend, offers an alternative and equally capable representational mode. Fictional portraits capture, expose and dramatize emotions and desires that the novel is hesitant to acknowledge. Moreover, the ways in which novelistic characters react to fictional portraits--affectively, cognitively and epistemologically--further problematize certain sociopolitical values that the nineteenth-century novel has been said to uphold. This thesis pays attention to moments when fictional portraits introduce alternative, digressive or even competing cognitive modes of reading, knowing, and feeling. Focusing on Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), the first chapter argues that novelistic portrait-making scenes draw attention to the physical labor of portrait making and the materiality of the resulting art object. Therefore, they invoke affective desires and digressive values that are laid within the novel’s subtext and compete with the values more explicitly advocated. The second chapter explores how the novel complicates its linear narrative timeline by reflecting on different traditions of portraiture in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain. It argues that fictional portraits introduce their own historical and representational associations into the novel’s developmental arc and therefore problematize the notion of progressive history. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Northanger Abbey (1817), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Middlemarch (1871) are examined in this chapter to trace the trajectory in which nineteenth-century realist and sensation fictions inherit as well as renovate the Gothic portrait. The final chapter gestures towards a more abstract link between visuality and knowledge explored in Henry James’s and Oscar Wilde’s late-nineteenth-century novels, The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). It argues that portrait art--a term stretched to its broader sense to include the practice of visual framing--is mediated by James and Wilde to tease out the moral, ethical and epistemological implications embedded in the act of seeing.