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

Conclusion

Conclusion I was still examining monuments, gazing on pictures, and numbering columns when darkness fell around me. —Lady Sydney Morgan, Florence Macarthy (1818, 1.113) Having observed with the most earnest attention the stately busts that adorned the niches, the heavy gloom of the impending monuments, and the cross-bones, saints, crucifixes , and various other devices suitable to the nature of the place, which were once painted on the walls, but which time had now nearly obliterated, she felt an uneasy sensation stealing upon her mind and, as the partial gleam of the lamp fell upon the ghastly countenances of the marble figures before her, she started involuntarily from the view. —Eleanor Sleath, The Orphan of the Rhine (1798, 146) Still examining monuments, still gazing on pictures, I start involuntarily from the view, uneasily aware that there is a great deal more to be said and that it cannot be said here. This book has emphasized uses of picture identification to promote middle-class ascendancy because my research indicates that this is the primary concern of discourses and practices driving, informing, and following the rise of mass picture identification between 1764 and 1835. As picture identification ties 282 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 faces to proper names to establish social identity intersemiotically, this book ties portraiture to Gothic fiction and other discourses to forge an intersemiotic study of cultural narratives, mythologies, and practices of picture identification. Amid many cultural mythologies and discourses, it has privileged first-wave Gothic fiction because it is more obsessively, pervasively, and didactically concerned with picture identification than any other discourse in the period and because its boundary crossings, addressed by so many critics,1 are particularly hospitable to the many boundaries crossed by and within the ideologies, rhetoric, intersemiotics , and practices of picture identification. No other discourse so deftly and intensively manipulates the politics, iconographies, iconologies, iconotropism, iconism, intersemiotics, iconophilia, and iconophobia of picture identification to mythologize middle-class ascendancy and upper-class decline. While my study has prioritized Gothic fiction for the intensity and pervasiveness of its engagements with picture identification, by the mid-1830s Gothic fiction was critiqued increasingly for its histrionics and lack of realism. In 1834 a reviewer of Andrew Picken’s Traditionary Stories of Old Families and Legendary Illustrations of Family History (1833), a collection of Gothic tales, complains that “it is too much out of common nature, composed of incidents and circumstances and situations that never could have been realized; too wild, romantic, and mysterious for our taste” (53). The tale singled out to illustrate these objections, “The Priors of Lawford,” represents picture identification as similarly “wild”: She led the way, lamp in hand, through narrow passages, long corridors, empty saloons, tapestried chambers, till they entered a large kind of gallery hung round with male and female portraits. “Look at them,” she cried, “Look! These are the portraits of my ancestors, of my family—my mother, my father—they all died mad!” The secret was discovered—the truth revealed—they did look excessively wild. (53, reviewer’s summary, emphasis in original) Identifying herself by ancestral pictures, projecting her future from their past, the “Prior” heroine does not anticipate the happy ending granted by picture identification in so many prior Gothic novels. Her ancestral inheritance is madness produced by in-breeding (“I am doomed by the blood that runs in my veins to be yet a raving maniac”), an inheritance precluding future progeny and bringing about the end of her line (“I must wear out my life in maiden seclusion and go down to the grave, the last and saddest of my race”) (Picken 2.166–7). As the reviewer seeks to tame the excesses of wild Gothic writing with realism and empiricism, so too a doctor seeks to tame and rationalize such “wild” picture identifications within the tale: he “looked at the portraits and made up his mind c onc lus ion 283 that they were none of them half so mad as they supposed . . . assuring her that there were ten chances to two against her turning out insane; that he could see only a little, very little wildness in her eyes” (53).2 The doctor’s prognosis persuades the woman to marry, but a rival for her husband, a female servant, strives to restore the wife...