Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification, 1764–1835 by Kamilla Elliott (review)

Kamilla Elliott’s book joins a growing body of literature on the significance of portraiture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing. Her focus is Gothic fiction, a mass-cultural mode with distinctive, but contested, political resonance. Elliott’s main contribution is the eponymous concept of “picture identification,” which she defines as “an intersemi-otic practice that … matches an embodied, presented face to a named, represented face to verify social identity” (2). Picture identification also affords “a cultural, representational space in which identities and ideologies contest for power, resources, and positions” (38). Elliott’s aim is to show how the theory and practice of picture identification affected the conceptualization of identity during the years associated with the emergence of Gothic fiction. Her overriding interest is “the downward mobility of picture identification” (81), the fact that more and more people in this period—women in particular—both come into visibility as the subjects of portraiture and become frequent viewers of portraits. Through what she calls the “iconotropic bourgeois reworkings of aristocratic picture identification” (47), Elliott discerns in Gothic novels a repeated clash between present and past, living and dead. Picture identification mobilizes a complex dialectic between portraits of the contemporary generation and portraits of previous generations.

Gender is a crucial issue in picture identification, and some of the best pages here offer close readings of novels in which we see the emancipatory potential of specifically female forms of picture identification. In the British culture of eighteenth-century portraiture, a culture centred in the portrait gallery and in the pseudo-science of physiognomy, women are marginal, disempowered and unfranchised. But in popular Gothic fiction, whatever the political endgame, women often play a more active role in discerning the meanings of portraiture, and they do so in a way that is inextricable from the broader frisson of class shifts. Matriarchal picture identifications in these fictions tend to get associated with middle-class ideologies, over and against aristocratic ones, effectively “remaking [picture identification] in the image of bourgeois values” (122). The force of female portrait-viewing in Gothic fiction, as Elliott shows, is the way in which it often undoes patriarchy by disrupting and undermining the hierarchies typically established through portraiture (as in the patriarchal ancestral gallery). The discussion of portrait miniatures—a recurrent element in Gothic fiction—offers an illuminating example of these dynamics, particularly in relation to gender. In a reading of Sophia Lee’s The Recess, which Elliott notes as “the first Gothic novel to picture-identify women” (71, 124), we see some of the key tenets of her non- (or anti-) psychoanalytic approach. Assessing the heroine’s matriarchal picture identification as she gazes at her image in a mirror, Elliott writes that “it is conventional to read such dynamics in Lacanian terms,” but adds that it is the daughter’s “picture identification [with her ‘natural birth mother’], not the Name of the Father, that ushers the daughter into the social order” (125). Elliott’s final chapters, which explore multiple modes of iconophilia, draw out this valuable critique of the prevailing psychoanalytic approach.

Elliott seems at times unsure how politically efficacious she wants picture identification to be. Her stated emphasis is “the knowledge, power and authority that portraits grant to their perceivers,” and the critical force of picture identification as she reads it is “to relocate the authority of portraiture from the ruling classes represented by portraits and their official circulators to ordinary viewers of portraits” (171). Yet she (rightly) observes ambiguities as well. Particularly in the Gothic inheritance plot, picture identification is said to foreground “thinly veiled prophetic parables of middle-class ascendancy” (66). Such ideological complexity is acknowledged in a discussion of Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House, which is “as concerned with the threat to established middle-class gentry from the lower ranks as … with the downward mobility of old aristocracy” (150). Smith’s...