The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature (review)

In The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature, Antonia Losano merges what she identifies as two separate yet related lines in nineteenth-century gender debates: first, how the increasingly common figure of the female painter raised controversial questions regarding a woman’s ability to engage in a masculine art world; and second, how women writers of the Victorian period often destabilized social and cultural notions of women in their writings. Losano argues that because both female artists and writers struggled to separate their art from their gender, women writers utilized the figure of the female artist “not only to engage with social and aesthetic debates about art in general, but also to consider the cultural position of their [the writers’] own medium” (pp. 3–4). Her study offers many provocative and lucid analyses of the relationship between female artists and novels by their contemporaries that challenge traditional ways of reading canonical and noncanonical examples of Victorian women’s fiction.

The strength of Losano’s study comes early when she provides stimulating close-readings of two Brontë novels and most directly investigates the relationship between women writers and women artists. In chapter 2, she reevaluates The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) by analyzing the inclusion of Helen’s diary as Anne Brontë’s attempt to allow the protagonist, a painter, to authorize her own narrative, and thus become a producer of the text rather than a product. Chapter 3 presents a similarly illuminating discussion of Jane Eyre (1847) by arguing that Jane’s artwork, both the drawings themselves and the circumstances surrounding their production and exhibition to other characters, enables Charlotte Brontë to “grapple with the dangers of sexual objectification, social disenfranchisement, and aesthetic regimentation” (p. 99).

Chapters 4 through 7 are arranged thematically, considering, respectively, fictional representations of women artists working in the fields of portraiture, illustration, design, and engraving; Victorian representations of Angelica Kauffman; physical deformity as granting freedoms to fictionalized female artists; and the New Women fiction of Mary Ward. This thematic structure works well for chapters 6 and 7 by including insightful and engaging commentary, but it is problematic for chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 6, entitled “Disfigurement and Beauty in Dinah Craik and Charlotte Young,” discusses the ways that disfigurement allows the heroines of Dinah Craik’s Olive (1850) and Charlotte Yonge’s Pillars of the House (1873) to become successful producers of art rather than being objectified themselves. Chapter 7, entitled “Painting the New Woman: Mary Ward and the Woman Artist,” examines two New Woman novels by Mary Ward, The History of David Grieve (1892) and The Mating of Lydia (1913), to show that Ward positioned female sexuality as dangerous to female painters in order to “dramatize the conflicts that arise when economic motivations coexist with affective, aesthetic goals” (p. 218). However, in chapter 4, entitled “Making a Living: Howitt, Eliot, Oliphant,” the thematic structure forces Losano to combine readings of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks (1866), and Anna Mary Howitt’s “Sisters in Art” (1852); by squeezing her discussions of these texts together around the central theme of women working in less prestigious fields of art, Losano only analyzes one small portion of each text, which is often done without much consideration for its relationship to the larger narrative. The thematic arrangement also detracts from her overall argument in chapter 5, entitled “The Afterlife of Angelica Kauffman,” where she investigates Victorian imaginings of the eighteenth-century painter, Angelica Kauffman, produced visually and rhetorically, specifically in Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s novel Miss Angel and Fulham Lawn (1876). Here Losano seems more committed to exploring the particular figure of Kauffman in both literary and visual representations than in focusing on the relationship between the female artist and Ritchie’s novel.

Losano’s emphasis on actual female artists rather than on their significance as fictional characters is most pronounced in chapter 1, which offers an interesting and in-depth history of the contested figure of the woman...