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

1. Theory and/of Picture Identification

c h a p t e r o n e Theory and/of Picture Identification A good portrait cannot be painted without some of the best talents of the poet and of the philosopher. —Hartley Coleridge, “A Modest Defense of Painting” (1832, 33) We have seen that, in spite of picture identification’s global ubiquity in establishing social identity today and current academia’s keen interest in identity, picture identification is addressed rarely in literary and cultural studies or by the theories that inform them. Before the theoretical turn, academics neglected picture identification because formalism mandated separatist discussions of aesthetic forms and because picture identification’s hybrid verbal-visual intersemiotics challenged disciplinary boundaries, word-and-image hierarchies, and distinctions between “high” and “low” art. After the breakdown of disciplinary boundaries and the rise of cultural studies, identity politics, postmodernism, and poststructuralism , picture identification’s emphasis on mimetic resemblance and Gothic associations with humanism, bourgeois individualism, and metaphysics led to a preoccupation with debunking it. Even in the nineteenth century, Theodore Duret opined scornfully, “The triumph of the art of the bourgeoisie is the portrait ” (1867, qtd. in West, Portraiture 82). Because the central focus of this book is precisely on how the bourgeoisie used picture identification to “triumph” repre- 20 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 sentationally and socially, it is committed to probing these discredited ideologies, practices, agendas, and narratives. Although picture identification resonates in various senses as the introduction attests, its baseline definition as a cultural practice is the mimetic matching of an embodied, presented face to a named, represented face to establish social identity. All of picture identification’s essential ingredients (whatever else it may contain)—proper names, physiognomic faces, and mimetic resemblances—have been attacked unilaterally by otherwise diverging theories as agents of patriarchy , capitalism, individualism, humanism, and a host of other excoriated -isms (sexism, racism, nationalism, etc.). Proper names have been dismantled into common nouns; physiognomic faces have been displaced by bodies; mimetic resemblance has been dismissed as naïve realism. When picture identification has been considered, it has generally been at the level of common nouns, bodies, and collective identities (Rovee; Torpey; Caplan and Torpey) or as a process of subjective , projective (usually psychoanalytic) subject formation rather than a practice of social identification (Fay, Fashioning Faces; Wright; Felber). Although these are illuminating studies and critiques of proper nouns, physiognomic faces, and mimetic resemblance have been valuable, a great deal of information has been lost through such emphases and negations. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, arguably the triumvirate of the theoretical turn in the humanities, all favor common over proper nouns. In Signsponge, Derrida deconstructs proper nouns (the bedrock of patriarchy) to show their roots in “improper” and common nouns. Deconstructing the proper name, Ponge, to the common noun, éponge (sponge), he writes that “the sponge expunges the proper name, puts it outside of itself, effaces and loses it, soils it as well in order to make it into a common noun” (64). Foucault too is concerned with social identity and identification at the level of common nouns rather than proper names1—with the classification of prisoners, the insane, the diseased, and the like.2 Assessing a portrait, he asserts that the proper name . . . is merely an artifice: it gives us a finger to point with . . . to pass surreptitiously from the space where one speaks to the space where one looks; in other words, to fold one over the other as though they were equivalents . . . if one wishes to keep the relation of language to vision open . . . then one must erase those proper names and preserve the infinity of the task. (“Las Meninas” 9–10) Likewise, the “Name-of-the-Father” that positions the subject in the Lacanian social order moves ambiguously between common and proper nouns: “The Father has so very many [names] that there is no Name which could be his proper name, t h e ory a nd / of p ic t ur e ide n t i f ic at ion 21 except the Name as an existence” (Ornicar? 6–7: 7, qtd. in Regnault 73). But when Lacan represents the proper name as a negative number, arguing that it signifies “what the subject is missing in thinking he is exhaustively accounted for by his cogito—he is...