Notes
Notes introduction 1. Most critics agree that first-wave Gothic begins in 1764 with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story; Robert Miles presents an exception: “The date 1750 in its very arbitrariness is meant to signify that Gothic has no strictly identifiable beginning” (Gothic Writing 8). Miles, however, concurs with “conventional periodization” in deeming that first-wave Gothic fiction ends with Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). More recently, Rictor Norton, whose Gothic Readings: The First Wave extends to 1840, reads both Melmoth the Wanderer and William Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834) as attempts to revive the Gothic (viii). Texts cited after 1834, however, either cross the Atlantic or turn from fiction to reader responses. Historically oriented critics choose a political end date, 1832, the year of the Reform Act (e.g., James Watt). My end date coincides with Franz J. Potter’s in The History of Gothic Publishing 1800–1835: Exhuming the Trade. His book, like mine, is keenly concerned with noncanonical Gothic fiction. 2. I am currently developing a sequel addressing picture identification in the years 1836–1918. 3. A House of Commons report in 1811 defines the middling classes as “the farmer, the tradesman, the shopkeeper, and other industrious descriptions of persons” (House of Commons, “Report of the Bullion Committee” 162). 4. Family Portraits, though not a full-blown Gothic novel, contains a haunted lake, castle, picture gallery, rival brothers, and a (nearly) forced marriage. 5. This essay gives portraits short shrift, focusing primarily on Gothic architecture. 6. In spite of its historical and generic variety, Gothic fiction has little to do with actual Gothic painting, which flourished between 1280 and 1515. chapter 1: theory and/of picture identification 1. See also Derrida’s Of Grammatology and On the Name. 2. See Foucault’s Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish. 3. Stimilli lays contemporary “face-blindness” at the door of the Greek sculpture (1), an argument that ignores the rest of art history. Portrait historians confirm that the Greeks were the exception rather than the rule (Breckenridge 10). 296 not e s to pa ge s 2 6 – 7 4 4. Foucault elsewhere concedes that “the form of similarity uncovers the rational order ” of many discourses (The Birth of the Clinic 6). 5. See also the Nineteenth-Century Contexts special issue, Nineteenth-Century Photography : Contexts, Discourses, Legacies 22.4 (Stein), and almost any discussion of realism in literature and art since the 1980s. 6. Some critics, including Smith and Windes, posit a pragmatic benefit of essentialist myths of identity, helping minority groups to forge self-definitions against their definitions by dominant cultures. chapter 2: the politics of picture identification 1. Portrait and picture are interchangeable terms between 1764 and 1835, often referring to the same artifact within a single sentence. 2. There were, of course, variations on and exceptions to this trend. 3. Color versions of figures 2.1–2.4 are available on the Web sites of the institutions listed in the captions. 4. The term was coined by Robert Graves in The Greek Myths. Keenly attuned to local, political meanings of myths (“A true science of myth should begin with the study of archaeology, history, and comparative religion, not in the psychologist’s consulting room” [preface to 1960 edition, 12]), Graves opposes approaches that read myths as “original revelations of the pre-conscious psyche,” insisting that “Greek mythology was no more mysterious in origin than are modern election cartoons.” Subsequent scholars, including Ellen Spolsky, focus more on the science than the politics of the term, using it “to assert the importance of . . . anthropological and biological contextualization to students of interart relationships” (12). 5. Print media galleries, such as Thomas Birch’s Heads of Illustrious Persons of Great Britain (1743), appeared before 1764. 6. Soane’s and Burdett’s portraits appear in volume 5 (1834). Each entry begins on a new page 1. 7. For a fuller discussion of marital portraits, see West, Portraiture 148–59. 8. Two English translations by Thomas Holloway and Thomas Holcraft were published in 1789. I cite Holcraft, 2nd edition, 1804. 9. Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is a likely precursor to the pile-up of identificatory resemblance. Yet while it includes Perdita’s resemblance to her mother, it does not employ a portrait to make the identification. Even so, the mother’s live body appears as sculpture as well as in memory to reinforce resemblances between bodies and their aesthetic representations. 10. The...
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