Narrative Challenges to Visual, Gendered Boundaries: Mary Shelley and Henry Fuseli

Narrative Challenges to Visual, Gendered Boundaries: Mary Shelley and Henry Fuseli Sophia Andres The relationship between poetry and painting can be traced as far back as Plato (601a-605b). Simonides' later claim that poetry is a speaking picture and painting a mute poem remained undisputed for centuries and so did Horace's ut pictura poesis. Other classical authors such as Longinus, Quintilian, and Lucian made various remarks on the relation of the arts, but it was not until 1766 that Gotthold Lessing established the limitations of poetry and painting in his seminal Laocoon. Where actions are the true subjects of poetry, Lessing declared, bodies which exist in space with their "visible properties" are the true subjects of painting (77). Although Lessing 's Laocoon has been the subject of controversy since its publication, few critics have disputed his distinction between temporal and spatial arts (Mitchell 96). In the nineteenth century, Romantic poets, rather than maintain the distinction between art and literature, quite often cultivated their intersection. Percy Shelley, for instance, dedicated a poem to a painting of Medusa he saw in the Uffizi gallery: "On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vince in the Florentine Gallery." Sir George Beaumont's Peele Castle served as the inspiration for William Wordsworth's Elegiac Stanzas. Later in the century, Victorian poet-painters, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William MorJNT : Journal of Narrative Theory 31.3 (Fall 2001): 257-282. Copyright © 2001 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 258 JNT ris, interwove poetry and painting in such graceful and enchanting ways as to make readers aware that quite often one art cannot be fully understood or appreciated without the other. In her recent work Realism, Representation , and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Alison Byerly explains several reasons for the nineteenth-century literary artists' fascination with painting. By comparing landscapes to works of art, she points out, Romantic writers attempted to validate the status of poetry as art; by alluding to works of art, realist Victorian writers established "an imaginative space where the fictional world and the real world come together" (121). In the nineteenth century the intersection of painting and narrative frequently disclosed ideological contradictions, often emanating gender conflicts (Andres "Gendered Incongruities"). Such conflicts can be perceived in Matilda (1818) where Mary Shelley has chosen narrative images reminiscent of paintings by the renowned and popular painter Henry Fuseli. Her choice of these paintings, as I will demonstrate, is a deliberate attempt to give voice to figures whose painted silence has promoted stereotypically passive femininity. It could be argued that Shelley does not fundamentally change some of these paintings. But even in these cases, when the narrative of Matilda appears to simply re-draw Fuseli's paintings without substantially altering them, Shelley's text, as I will demonstrate, transforms Fuseli's figures into more complex individuals. Indeed, her feminist narrative transformations of Fuseli's paintings give us insights into gender conflicts not only in this novella but also in her other works as well. By focusing on the articulation of such conflicts, we may also perceive the means by which women writers, like Shelley, attempted to rewrite literary history. Matilda has been primarily interpreted in terms of its autobiographical significance (Hill-Miller, Mellor, Harpold), its revisionism of male Romanticism (Mellor), and its treatment of incest (Knoepflmacher, Veeder, Chatterjee). But this novella, I believe, can be further understood as the site of the intersection of narrative and painting, a writer's attempt to revise stereotypical representations of women engrained in contemporary culture not only by literary works but also by paintings widely circulated in engravings and prints. By transforming Fuseli's painterly, static representations of women into narrative, dynamic, images in Matilda, Shelley breaks the silence of passive female figures, giving them, and by extension her readers, the voice to resist the dominant tradition, the power to Narrative Challenges to Visual, Gendered Boundaries 259 become social agents of change. In Matilda, then, the intersection between painting and narrative is primarily ideological, governed not so much by the laws of genre as by the laws of gender. Before focusing on Matilda, I wish to briefly discuss Fuseli's work, establish Shelley's acquaintance with the painter, and...