The ekphrastic fantastic: gazing at magic portraits in Victorian fiction【翻译】

ABSTRACT
While Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray depicts the quintessential
literary portrait endowed with uncanny life and movement, dozens of such magic
portraits are featured in Victorian fiction. From the ravishing picture of the title character
in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret to the coveted portrait of a Romantic
poet in Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, imagined portraits in these texts serve as
conduits of desire and fear—windows into passions and repressions that reveal not only
the images’ external effects but their relation to the unconscious of their viewers. My
dissertation turns a critical eye on this gallery of ekphrastic pictures—those not actually
visible to the reader but rather visualizable through verbal description—to argue that the
meditations on representation and desire that these novels and stories perform not only
anticipate but augment theories of the image and the gaze developed primarily since the
advent of cinema. Though the dissertation benefits from film theory’s models of visual
exchange, the distinctions between these portraits and images in film open up fertile
analytical terrain. Ekphrastic magic portraits provide a unique opportunity to delve into
the intersecting realms of word painting and image perception, the optics of desire and
subjectivity, to advance critical discourses in visual studies that are framed both
historically and theoretically. Using psychoanalytic and narratological methodologies,
particularly those relevant to feminist and queer image theory, “The Ekphrastic Fantastic”
demonstrates how the fictional visual exchanges on display in magic portrait stories
elucidate various power struggles regarding sexuality and narrative structuring. These
literary pictures thereby provide new access to the social and artistic commentaries that
often subtend Victorian fiction.
Each chapter considers three primary texts and the branch of image theory most
relevant to their deployment of magic portraits. Laura Mulvey’s foundational essay,
2
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” provides the point of departure in the first
chapter, which looks at Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret,
and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. The second chapter addresses Margaret
Oliphant’s “The Portrait,” Thomas Hardy’s “An Imaginative Woman,” and James’s The
Aspern Papers with further feminist insights from Vivian Sobchack and Teresa de
Lauretis. The final chapter determines the relationship of principles of visual
representation and narrative production of the Aesthetic movement to magic portraits in
Walter Pater’s “Sebastian van Storck,” Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst,” and Wilde’s
Dorian Gray, particularly as they relate to the nascent medium of cinema and the theories
that soon as well as later arose to account for the impact of its kinetic mirage. The arc of
my argument emphasizes how, as the Victorian period advances, the portraits become
increasingly animate and subversive in their challenges to patriarchal gender norms and
narrative formulas. In this way, they become the mechanisms by which new models of
psycho-sexual relations can be expressed and new social and narrative systems can
emerge.
Abstract Approved: ____________________________________
Thesis Supervisor
____________________________________
Title and Department
____________________________________
Date
THE EKPHRASTIC FANTASTIC: GAZING AT MAGIC PORTRAITS IN
VICTORIAN FICTION
by
Deborah Maria Manion
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
July 2010
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Garrett Stewart
Copyright by
DEBORAH MARIA MANION
2010
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
_______________________
PH.D. THESIS
_______________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Deborah Maria Manion
has been approved by the Examining Committee
for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in English at the July 2010 graduation.
Thesis Committee: ___________________________________
Garrett Stewart, Thesis Supervisor
___________________________________
Florence Boos
___________________________________
Kevin Kopelson
___________________________________
Teresa Mangum
___________________________________
Steven Ungar
ii
To my mother, Diana, and to Ron
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Timely completion of this thesis would not have been possible without the
generous support of a University of Iowa Ballard/Seashore Dissertation Year Fellowship
for 2009-2010 and an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Seminar Fellowship for the
summer of 2009. My progress was also enhanced by the offer of a one-year position in
Iowa’s Department of English teaching Victorian literature and culture. I am deeply
grateful for each of these honors and the confidence they express in my contributions to
the field as a scholar and a teacher.
I am inexpressibly grateful for the mentorship of my dissertation director, Garrett
Stewart, and for his unflagging enthusiasm and encouragement throughout my time at
Iowa. From his “Literature as Letters” class in my very first semester, through three
additional courses, including the intensive Mellon seminar on narrative theory, to his
spirited engagement with the whole of this thesis, he has had a profound impact on my
development. I am also greatly indebted to my other committee members: Kevin
Kopelson, who has been willing to read “any- and everything,” allowing me to benefit
from his always impeccable attention to details of style, nuances of argument, and
resources for further research; Florence Boos, who is more generous with her time,
encyclopedic knowledge of the period, and personal library than is really fathomable;
Teresa Mangum, who has been an inspiring advisor from my week at Dickens Universe
through to my first job, and whose eleventh-hour heroics on my committee were vital as I
raced to the finish; and Steven Ungar, who has been similarly gracious, good humored,
and quite fortuitously well-suited to advise me on this project. I also appreciate the
guidance I have received from Mary Lou Emery, Brooks Landon, and Louis-Georges
Schwartz along the way.
I am also enormously grateful to Jessica DeSpain, who read the best and the worst
of all of this, several times over. I don’t know how she found the time, patience, or
iv
willingness to remain so constant a friend, editor, and cheerleader. I owe her much more
than I can repay. I am tremendously thankful for the support of many other friends as
well: Laura Capp, who, with newborn twins to tend to and a dissertation of her own,
always found time to lend her careful eye to substantial sections of this one; Paige
Nelson, for the many study dates and discussions; Heidi Bean, always at the ready with
examples, advice, and support; Ann Pleiss Morris for the home-cooked meals, personally
delivered; and Joanne Nystrom Janssen, in summer stress solidarity. Tembi Bergin-
Batten, Cory Hutchinson-Reuss, and Vickie Larsen were also invaluable readers and
supporters. Other friends for whose help I am most grateful include Anna Stenson,
Lynne Nugent, Stacy Erickson, Eve Rosenbaum, and Jen McGovern.
I could not have completed this program or this dissertation without the generous
support of my mother, Diana, and my sister Donna. From care packages to Joycean trips,
they have provided substantial supplements to my graduate school experience. I am also
tremendously grateful to Ron Bauman for his love and support these many years, and to
our beloved cat, Idgie, who has done more than a little typing on this keyboard herself.
v
ABSTRACT
While Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray depicts the quintessential
literary portrait endowed with uncanny life and movement, dozens of such magic
portraits are featured in Victorian fiction. From the ravishing picture of the title character
in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret to the coveted portrait of a Romantic
poet in Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, imagined portraits in these texts serve as
conduits of desire and fear—windows into passions and repressions that reveal not only
the images’ external effects but their relation to the unconscious of their viewers. My
dissertation turns a critical eye on this gallery of ekphrastic pictures—those not actually
visible to the reader but rather visualizable through verbal description—to argue that the
meditations on representation and desire that these novels and stories perform not only
anticipate but augment theories of the image and the gaze developed primarily since the
advent of cinema. Though the dissertation benefits from film theory’s models of visual
exchange, the distinctions between these portraits and images in film open up fertile
analytical terrain. Ekphrastic magic portraits provide a unique opportunity to delve into
the intersecting realms of word painting and image perception, the optics of desire and
subjectivity, to advance critical discourses in visual studies that are framed both
historically and theoretically. Using psychoanalytic and narratological methodologies,
particularly those relevant to feminist and queer image theory, “The Ekphrastic Fantastic”
demonstrates how the fictional visual exchanges on display in magic portrait stories
elucidate various power struggles regarding sexuality and narrative structuring. These
literary pictures thereby provide new access to the social and artistic commentaries that
often subtend Victorian fiction.
Each chapter considers three primary texts and the branch of image theory most
relevant to their deployment of magic portraits. Laura Mulvey’s foundational essay,
vi
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” provides the point of departure in the first
chapter, which looks at Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret,
and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. The second chapter addresses Margaret
Oliphant’s “The Portrait,” Thomas Hardy’s “An Imaginative Woman,” and James’s The
Aspern Papers with further feminist insights from Vivian Sobchack and Teresa de
Lauretis. The final chapter determines the relationship of principles of visual
representation and narrative production of the Aesthetic movement to magic portraits in
Walter Pater’s “Sebastian van Storck,” Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst,” and Wilde’s
Dorian Gray, particularly as they relate to the nascent medium of cinema and the theories
that soon as well as later arose to account for the impact of its kinetic mirage. The arc of
my argument emphasizes how, as the Victorian period advances, the portraits become
increasingly animate and subversive in their challenges to patriarchal gender norms and
narrative formulas. In this way, they become the mechanisms by which new models of
psycho-sexual relations can be expressed and new social and narrative systems can
emerge.
vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: THE EKPHRASTIC FANTASTIC....................................................1
CHAPTER ONE: PALIMPSEST PORTRAITURE: THE DOUBLE-TAKE IN
“CAPTURING” WOMEN .............................................................................17
Dickens’s Painterly Prowess: Lady Dedlock’s Uncanny Portrait in
Bleak House ....................................................................................................26
Mary Elizabeth Braddon as Feminist Pre-Raphaelite Painter: Lady
Audley’s Uncanny Portrait .............................................................................38
Collins’s Ekphrastic Exposé: Uncanny Lack in the Subjective Image in
The Woman in White.......................................................................................55
The Mid-Victorian Magic Portrait, Looking Forward....................................67
CHAPTER TWO: WRECKING OEDIPUS: EMBODIMENT,
SPECTATORSHIP, AND NARRATIVE PERVERSION IN MAGIC
PORTRAIT FICTION OF THE 1880S..........................................................68
Oliphant’s Domestic Fantastic: Jocasta and the Rebirth of Matriarchy ........78
Fantastic Reciprocity in Hardy: The Poetic, the Pyrrhic, and the
Perverse...........................................................................................................96
The Aspern Papers and Modern Looking.....................................................113
Narrative Rules Unraveled ...........................................................................127
CHAPTER THREE: EKPHRASIS EN-ABYME: AESTHETICISM’S
ANDROGYNY AND PORTRAITURE’S PROLIFERATION ..................131
The Stakes of Queer Visibility: “Sebastian van Storck” and Resistance
to Representation ..........................................................................................141
A Storyboard of Sketches: Vernon Lee’s Art for Narrative’s Sake ............155
The Moving Picture of Dorian Gray: Cinematic Ekphrasis and its
Embedded Genealogy...................................................................................175
Conclusion: Cinema as a Queer Invention ..................................................196
EPILOGUE......................................................................................................................199
BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................205

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