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

8. Iconism and the Aesthetics of Gothic Fiction

Iconism and the Aesthetics of Gothic Fiction c h a p t e r e i g h t iconism A fashioning, a true and lively description. [rhetoric] A figure when a person or thing is represented to the life. —Nathan Bailey, The Universal Etymological Dictionary (1737) The soft limpid air made all things into pictures, into Turners , into Titians. —Anne Thackeray Ritchie, preface to Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800, xii–xiii) Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars, authors, and readers are keenly concerned with the pictorial properties of verbal language, particularly with the capacities of words to raise mental images. One term for this is iconism. The OED (1989) offers two definitions: “A representation by some image or figure; imagery ; metaphor” and “Semiotics. The quality or fact of being an icon or intentional sign.” It deems the first definition obsolete; however, it was not so between 1764 and 1835. Moreover, recent debates in linguistics have restored this obsolete definition to iconism. Peirce argues, “Language and all abstracted thinking, such as belongs to minds who think in words, is of the symbolic nature,” but he adds a qualification: “Many words, though strictly symbols, are so far iconic that they are apt to determine iconic interpretants or, as we say, to call up lively images” (“New 204 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 Elements” 2.307). Scholars both building on and deconstructing the work of Ferdinand de Saussure counter that “no linguistic signs have nonarbitrary features,” preferring to see language “as a self-contained, autonomous semiotic system with its own internal forces of meaning and change independent of the world” (Anderson 16). Umberto Eco maintains that any resemblance between iconic signs (including pictorial images) and their referents is conventional: “[S]imilarity does not concern the relationship between the image and its object, but that between the image and a previously culturalized content” (204). However, more recent scholars contend that Eco’s is an overstated, ideologically biased claim. In Grammar of Iconism, Earl R. Anderson observes that some language “imitate[s] or represent[s] by means of partial resemblance” (99). He calls this iconism. Cognitive linguists, sociolinguists, and theorists of sign language1 join Anderson in reasserting the iconic properties of verbal language that the OED deems obsolete in 1989. Because Saussure pronounced language a system of sounds, the paradigmatic iconic verbal form has been and remains onomatopoeia. However, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, iconism was a predominantly pictorial affair; the term is prevalent in religious, philosophical, art, and rhetorical discourses, where it refers to religious icons, biblical prophecy, mental images, symbols in art, and figurative language. More broadly, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of language are joined to theories of mind by a chain of imaging. Aristotle’s claim that “words are the images of thoughts and letters are the images of words” is set regularly in dialogue with Bonheurs’s alternative, “Thoughts are the images of things as words are the images of thoughts,” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (e.g., Newbury 1762, 1.18; Rollin 1804, 1.443; Spedding, Ellis, and Heath 1858, 4.439). So extensively are these ideas embraced that a periodical writer declares in 1836: “It is a self-evident truth of many profound philosophers that words are the images of thoughts” (S. D. W. 1836, 197, emphasis in original). Although iconism is present in other fiction and also in nonfiction, it rarely emerges there with as much intensity as it does in Gothic fiction. Indeed, the pictorial nature of Romantic Gothic writing has been singled out for special consideration and discussed from many angles, including the Romantic imagination ,2 Gothic theatrical spectacle,3 the ascendancy of realism,4 feminist psychoanalytic voyeurism,5 visual technology,6 and politics.7 However, its relation to portraiture and picture identification remains to be established. The OED indicates that portrait has an elastic usage across visual and verbal fields. Although it once included visual representations of all sorts, by the late sixteenth century, it referred principally to representations of persons. Its usage in verbal discourse ic on i s m a nd t h e a e s t h e t ic s of g o t h ic f ic t ion 205 was constrained by its usage in the visual arts, so that portraits...