The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England by Kate Retford (review)

179 of Moral Sentiments—became increasingly fixed. Smith’s system began with the head of the nuclear family and then expanded in concentric circles of filial attachment, but women such as Anne Finch found worthy topics for poetry outside the conventional realms of family, courtship, and marriage. Thus, women poets such as Katherine Phillips and Finch challenged Smith’s objects of legitimate loyalty and love, asserting seriously that they could feel affection and sympathy for other women and even animals or birds; they are all captives , without the ‘‘liberties’’ of the male world. To Ms. Doody, men often look at animals as objects of desire or ownership ; women, on the contrary, look at them as companions or even as symbols of their relationship to others in society. Women could establish historical links to each other by such themes in their poetry, while rejecting similar topics in poetry by men as inappropriate or irrelevant . Questioning another male paradigm, contemporary politics, Charlotte Smith’s poetry often engaged with the conflict surrounding the French Revolution. In particular, Susan Wolfson’s brilliant ‘‘Charlotte Smith’s Emigrants: Forging Connections at the Borders of a Female Tradition’’ argues that Smith’s ‘‘The Emigrants’’ turns the reader’s attention from victims of British aggression to focus on the plight of women and children who are doubly victimized: first by men, and then by the wars men wage against each other. Ms. Wolfson further establishes the degree to which other women writers—Wollstonecraft, Burney , and More—were successful in challenging current gender codes and then shows how Smith fits into the literary tradition of Miltonic republicanism by connecting the ‘‘wretched of the earth’’ with class and communal inequities , rather than personal loss. When viewed in the aggregate, women poets of this very long eighteenth century did not consider themselves divinely inspired or more privileged than others. Rather, they viewed themselves as ‘‘inextricably interwoven in a web of affiliations’’ that included female relatives —both literary and literal—and a community of male friends and literary contemporaries, as well as their rightful literary forebears. The modern critics in this volume show that because women poets were often distanced from traditional ways of seeing, reading, and writing , these gaps created unique opportunities for creative output that did not exist before they experienced and discovered them. I reviewed only those essays especially relevant to the readers of the Scriblerian. Rebecca Shapiro St. Thomas Aquinas College KATE RETFORD. The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in EighteenthCentury England. New Haven and London : Yale, 2006. Pp. 234. $65. If there were ever any doubts that the ideals represented in the conduct literature of the period were roundly embraced by the landed gentry and newly minted upper class of the mid to late eighteenth century, Ms. Retford’s polished presentation of the domestic portraiture of the period would firmly put them to rest. From her opening discussion of pendant portraits to her careful pairing of idealized representations of the newly evolving models of motherhood and fatherhood, Ms. Retford makes the case that family portraits 180 were less an exercise in individual or familial self-expression or even selfreferential artistic style than a deliberate , at times even strategic, effort to reframe the private life of the family within a prescribed public image. To make this case, Ms. Retford wisely leads with the pendant tradition, portraits of a husband and wife intended to be placed side by side, together producing a unified whole through mirroring the composition, framing, and size of the other. In the eighteenth century, the gentleman is usually pictured with the estate in the background or surrounded by the accoutrements of his professional life, the lady typically surrounded by nature or even more deliberately removed from the particularities of her public role through occupying a mythological or fanciful realm. Through the repetition of these images, Ms. Retford does much to shore up the now faltering theory of separate spheres for men and women, as it becomes hard to deny such ocular evidence of the gendered coding of the public and private space. The second chapter complicates this more static tradition of portraiture by chiefly focusing on the promenade portrait. Here, husband and wife are...