Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification, 1764–1835

6. Identifying Pictures

c h a p t e r s i x Identifying Pictures iconology That branch of knowledge which deals with the subject of icons (in any sense of the word); also the subject-matter of this study, icons collectively, or as objects of investigation, etc. —Oxford English Dictionary The undue reverence for antiquity, the authority of names, the pursuit of unattainable objects, the examination only of the rare, the extraordinary, and the great, together with superstition . . . had long opposed the progress of true knowledge. —“Bacon, Francis,” The Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1835, 3.249) iconologies of picture identification Joining political and aesthetic attacks on idealist representation is a growing sense that “undue reverence for antiquity” opposes “the progress of true knowledge .” “Antiquity” represents aristocratic authority; “true knowledge” gestures to bourgeois sources of power. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–2) champions the authority of representation over the representation of authority, vesting i de n t i f y i ng p ic t ur e s 167 what comes later in the chain of imaged identity (the representation) with greater power than what comes before (the represented). If from one angle of view each link in the chain of imaging moves further away from authorizing and authentic originals, from another, each link gathers the cumulative authority of prior images. In aristocratic ideology, the sense that each generation falls off from great originals is countered by the proportionally higher esteem accorded older families: the older the aristocratic family, the greater its value. Yet paradoxically, the older the family, the further it lies from its authorizing origins, making it vulnerable to narratives of decline and fall. Bourgeois ideology also asserts nonnoble social value from both temporal angles of view. Paine argues that the divine origins of ordinary men stretch further back than the Norman Conquest to Genesis ; critics such as Knox argue that bourgeois cultural value is self-fashioned, progressive, and accumulative, like their capitalist economics. In the chain of imaging, only the perception of images comes after the images themselves; perception, therefore, holds authority over the whole chain of images , because it governs the interpretation of the entire chain. Perception is not simply seeing images. In 1690 John Locke nominates perception “the first step and degree towards knowledge . . . the inlet of all knowledge in our minds” (85). For Locke, perception is an implicitly passive “inlet” for empirical knowledge produced actively by the mind. But theories of mind in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries deem perception to be the active production of images. Thomas Reid assesses in 1785 that all philosophers, from Plato to Mr. Hume, agree in this: that we do not perceive external objects immediately, and that the immediate object of perception must be some image present to the mind. So far there appears an unanimity, rarely to be found among philosophers on such abstruse points. (1.416, emphasis added) Under both theories of perception and theologies of inherent imaging, perceivers become part of the chain of imaging. To produce images in cognition is to participate in and resemble the processes of creation, procreation, and re-presentation by which a subject is made in the image of God, parents, or soul; it is to join the chain of imaging that is identity. Imaged identity extends from image to image, inhering in every image it produces and that produces it, including the mental images of perception and memory. Many philosophers figure perception’s production of images in a rhetoric of painting: “a picture of an object . . . painted on the retina”; a “picture on the retina ” produced by “the pencils of rays” (Dugald Stewart, Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1792, 1.97; Moral Philosophy, 1793, 3.387). The pictorial rhetoric of percep- 168 p or t r a i t ur e a nd b r i t is h g ot h ic f ic t ion tion trickles down from philosophy into popular discourses, including encyclopedias , religious publications, school primers, and journals.1 It also appears prominently in Gothic fiction, as chapter 7 expounds. The iconology2 of picture identification, however, is not simply the production of a single mental picture; it involves the production of mimetic resemblance between two images and the attachment of a proper name to those matched images. The proper name frequently opens a space for discourses about those images and that name. Picture identification...