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

5. Portraits, Progeny, Iconolatry, and Iconoclasm

c h a p t e r f i v e Portraits, Progeny, Iconolatry, and Iconoclasm [T]he portraits of their high descended ancestry seemed starting from their gorgeous frames to converse, as the tale of their virtues and their valor was told in their presence. —Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1819, 457) Gothic fiction makes much of the aristocratic tradition that renders portraits and progeny parallel imaged afterlives of forebears (see chapter 2). Progenitors are the relative “originals” of both progeny and portraits: “I examined her features; they bore a striking resemblance to the picture. But no wonder—the original was her father” (Sinclair, The Mysterious Florentine, 1809, 3.10). When in John Palmer Jr.’s The Mystery of the Black Tower (1796) a son is instructed to wear his father’s miniature “within your bosom” and to “treasure it as your existence” (10), he is identified by his father’s image, with his father’s image, and as his father’s image. Chapter 2 documents that portraits and progeny are in this period fused in a shared rhetoric rendering both portraits. Beyond such rhetoric, children take on the attributes of portraits, while portraits are personified in Gothic fiction. A man in Elizabeth Helme’s The Farmer of Inglewood Forest (1823) admires a portrait as “very pretty and very like,” then wagers, “I’ll lay you five shillings to fivepence that Fanny will show you one ten times more natural of William in the course of a month or two” (100, emphasis in original). Conversely, portraits are personified in Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815): p or t r a i t s , p ro ge n y, ic onol at ry, a nd ic ono c l a s m 139 [P]ointing to his family pictures, [he] observed with a gracious smile, “Indeed these venerable gentlemen . . . were they capable of expressing themselves, would join me, sir, in thanking you for the favor you have conferred upon the house of Hazlewood by taking care and trouble, sir, and interest in behalf of the young gentleman who is to continue their name and family.” Thrice bowed Glossin, and each time more profoundly than before: once in honor of the knight who stood upright before him, once in respect to the quiet personages who patiently hung upon the wainscot, and a third time in deference to the young gentleman who was to carry on the name and family. (2.89) The threefold bow gestures to the threefold reinforcement of ancestors, portraits, and progeny in perpetuating aristocratic power. The bond is not solely rhetorical; it is also scopic and theatrical. If The Farmer of Inglewood Forest figures procreation as an act of portraiture at the start of life, Guy Mannering figures portraits and progeny as afterlives at its end. Progeny and portraits project aristocratic identities into futurity: portraits fix them; progeny perpetuate them. Progeny appear to resurrect dead forebears. A mother in Catherine Cuthbertson’s Rosabella (1817) tells her child, “so striking is your resemblance to your father . . . in you live again ‘his every look, his every feature’” (5.140). Although some texts contrast “cold and insensible” portraits to the “living images” of progeny (Matthew Lewis, “The Four Facardins,” 1808, 3.112, 208), others figure portraits as repositories for souls, which animate them. Declaring, “I want my portrait painted. . . . I have no children, and I do not wish to die altogether” (480), the protagonist of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Portrait” (published in Britain in 1835) believes that “if his living features were once faithfully represented, his soul would be in some sort transferred to the portrait and be saved from complete annihilation” (481). Portraiture’s dual temporal functions, in which “the past are kept in lively remembrance and the present are ensured immortality” (Disraeli 13), reinforce the dual temporality of genealogy that grounds aristocratic positions. Progeny’s purpose is to continue (and, in many cases, to restore) the power and glory of lineages represented by ancestral portraits; living descendants are themselves destined to become part of these galleries, displaced and extenuated by future progeny. However, Gothic fiction frequently challenges traditional uses of progeny and portraits, setting them in collusion against aristocratic lineage. Elizabeth Craven ’s1 Modern Anecdotes of the Ancient Family of the Kinkvervankotsdarsprakengotchderns (1779) features 140 p or t r a i t ur e a nd b r i t is h g ot h ic...