Portrait Stories by Michal Peled Ginsburg (review)

Michal Peled Ginsburg’s Portrait Stories offers a clearly-written, rigorous, in-depth and enlightening examination of fictions about painted portraits. With well-defined chronological, national, and generic parameters, Portrait Stories examines nineteenth-century short stories and novellas from European and American literary traditions (American, British, French, German, and Russian). The timeframe in question reflects the distinctiveness of nineteenth-century stories, according to Ginsburg, in which the figures of the artist and the viewer play as important roles as the portrait itself. Ginsburg suggests that nineteenth-century portrait stories entail a shift away from the equation of the figure represented in the portrait and the person that the image represents (the “subject”). That is, the author notes, the portrait no longer “refers unambiguously to a real, existing, specific person” (4). This shift away from direct referentiality results in a complex dynamic absent from pre-nineteenth-century tales, which more often featured supernatural or magical portraits without a known human creator. Along with the artist and viewer, the process of painting the portrait comes to the foreground in the tales that Ginsburg examines.

To her credit, her literary repertoire runs the gamut from the usual suspects, including Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” and Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, to texts less familiar to the anglophone reader, albeit in some cases by canonical authors. Students and general readers, and even some scholars, are unlikely to be familiar with anglophone stories such as Henry James’s “The Special Type” and “The Tone of Time” no less than French works such as Balzac’s La Maison du chat-qui-pelote and Georges Sand’s “Le Chateau de Pictordu.” In these cases, as well as those on the spectrum between well known and little known, the reader will certainly come away from Portrait Stories with insights into familiar texts or inspiration to read new ones.

Ginsburg distinguishes her study from books such as Françoise Meltzer’s Salome and the Dance of Writing, which diminish the specificity of the portrait (10). By contrast, Ginsburg highlights the portrait within stories as the site “where intersubjective relations of desire, identification, rivalry, projection, aggression, guilt, idealization, misrecognition, get organized” (10). Of course, as the author suggests, stories in portraits are purely verbal constructions.

In the introduction, Ginsburg frames her subsequent discussions of artist-por-trait-viewer relationships with Charles Sanders Pierce’s concepts of the iconic, the symbolic and the indexical. The “iconic” characterizes the relationships between the portrait and the subject, since the portrait resembles the subject, more or less, but definitionally. Pierce’s symbolic (conventional) may supplement the iconic in describing the portrait-subject connection. Finally, the “indexical” describes the relationship between the artist and the portrait, as the latters bears a trace or imprint of the former (6).

Close textual analysis constitutes Ginsburg’s forte here and the book’s prime strength. The highlight of the first chapter, on Poe’s “Oval Portrait,” lies in the analysis of the description of the eponymous portrait’s “absolute life-likeliness of expression.” Ginsburg astutely calls other critics on their slippage from Poe’s neologism “life-likeliness” to the more common word, “life-likeness” (21). She traces “life-likeliness” intertextually to Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” interpreting it as being buried alive (22). Other moments of insightful, nuanced textual analysis that occur include the discussion in Chapter Five of the names “Nicolo” (an orphan) and “Colino” (a Genovese nobleman) in Kleist’s “Der Findling,” ultimately a merely semantic resemblance which fails to prove a connection between the foundling and the portrait of the nobleman, despite suspicions to the contrary (85). Chapter One also sets the stage for several of the themes developed throughout the work, including the portrait as a representation of an individual; the power of the painter over the subject; and the role of gender, albeit not necessarily through the typical paradigm of the male gaze as embodying the male subject’s power over the female object (25).

The second chapter, on James’s...