Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709–1791 by Alison Conway (review)

humanities 395 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 In chapters 2 through 5, Chilton analyses the cast of commedia characters, the gestures and movement vocabulary associated with each role, and their dissemination to the court and masquerading amateurs. Backed by extensive research, her investigation of the integration of the commedia among the arts and within broader society brings pleasure to the eye and the mind. Well-known and obscure illustrations, beautifully rendered in half-tone or colour reproduction, reinforce the excellent textual analysis: here a surviving eighteenth-century dress is compared to a portrait by Antoine Pesne, there an actor=s pose, known from large-scale or miniature sculptures, is linked to a Callot print. The characters come to life in the frescoed Hall of Masks at Cesky Krumlov Castle, the Italian garden sculptures, or the porcelain figures from the Duke of Weissenfels=s series. Her section on gesture and dance make the postures of the Meissen sculptures all the more >readable.= Certain body language was attached to each stock character B Harlequin=s bow, the forlorn stance of Pierrot, or the dancing figure of Columbine B each has hermeneutic significance across national or class boundaries. In Chapter 4, Chilton discusses the court of Augustus the Strong of Saxony, where the formula for true porcelain technique was perfected. The porcelain figures invented and produced by such artists as the model master Johann Gottlieb Kirchner and the painter Johann Joachim Kändler are the natural outgrowth of a court culture dedicated to a plentitude of entertainments on Italian comedy themes. The great florescence of painted porcelains lasted about twenty years from the mid-1730s, and what a production it was, coinciding with the dominance of rococo design ideals and comedy themes in statuettes and dessert services. From Meissen the porcelain craze spread across Europe. As the courtiers danced the night away in masked balls, the elegant and witty porcelain figures glittered on the sideboard. Chilton=s text and scientific catalogue of the Gardiner ceramic collection is more than a finely crafted art-history book. Yes, she shows off these fine porcelains to their best advantage, with all the attendant technical information, but also she explicates them within the complex social and cultural history inspired by one theatrical phenomenon. Full of historical detail and abundantly illustrated, we partake of an aesthetic and intellectual repast. (JO LYNN EDWARDS) Alison Conway. Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709B1791 University of Toronto Press. xii, 294. $65.00 In Private Interests, Alison Conway asserts that through its use of portraiture the eighteenth-century novel >entertains the idea of private interests as both 396 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 decorous and illicit, and creates its literary interest through sustaining a tension between these competing definitions of the idea.= Moreover, Conway argues that through the novel=s distinctive use of portraiture, a >third definition of private interests emerges, one that highlights women=s capacity to claim agency as spectacles and spectators, as subjects figured as both embodied and critical within the visual moment created by the novel=s representation of the portrait.= Conway thus advances a thesis about the rise of the novel that opposes the anti-visual bias embedded in most postFoucauldian accounts of the same history. Moreover, she rejects teleological views of rising domesticity as defined by Nancy Armstrong, Harriet Guest, and Mary Poovey to assert, instead, the persistent force of Restoration ideology on the formal and ethical structures of mid- and later eighteenthcentury fiction and culture. Conway insists that women of the eighteenth century achieved a powerful cultural agency through the spectatorial dynamics of portraiture in both its literal and figurative forms. Conway=s book thereby challenges and seeks to correct recent revisionist accounts of the rise of the novel. Despite its focus on portraiture, the grounding discipline for this study is literary analysis; innovations in interact theory and intermedia aesthetics by, for example, Peter Wagner and W.J.T. Mitchell do not figure in the argument . Instead, this otherwise thoroughly researched and broadly conceived work explores formal and ideological parallels among narratives by...