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

10. Fearing Picture Identification

Fearing Picture Identification c h a p t e r t e n iconophobia Hatred of images. —Oxford English Dictionary In recent definitions of iconophobia, including the OED’s, phobia has, somewhat perplexingly, come to signify solely hatred, displacing the fear that figures equally, if not more prominently, in its etymology. Both appear in the OED’s definition of phobia—“A fear, horror, strong dislike, or aversion; esp. an extreme or irrational fear or dread aroused by a particular object or circumstance.” Four words are synonyms for fear and only one for hatred; one (aversion) connotes both. Given Gothic fiction’s preoccupations with horror and terror, restoring fear to current concepts of iconophobia is essential. This book has already addressed various forms of iconophobia, from progeny ’s fears of haunted ancestral portraits to Protestant phobias of Catholic icons to patriarchal phobias of maternal portraits to phobic encounters with one’s own portrait. Discussing Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Walter Scott asserts the near universality of ancestral portrait iconophobia: “There are few who have not felt at some period of their childhood a sort of terror from the manner in which the eye of an ancient portrait appears to fix that of the spectator from every point of view” (“Prefatory Memoir to Walpole,” 1811, xxix). This terror, integral to the power of aristocratic identities, is challenged by Maria1 and Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Practical Education (1798): 256 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 A boy between four and five years old, H——, used to cry bitterly when he was left alone in a room in which there were some old family pictures. It was found that he was much afraid of these pictures: a maid who took care of him had terrified him with the notion that they would come to him or that they were looking at him and would be angry with him if he was not good. To cure him of his fear of pictures, a small sized portrait, which was not amongst the number of those which had frightened him, was produced in broad daylight. A piece of cake was put upon this picture, which the boy was desired to take; he took it, touched the picture, and was shown the canvas at the back of it, which, as it happened to be torn, he could easily identify with the painting; the picture was then given to him for a plaything; he made use of it as a table and became very fond of it as soon as he was convinced that it was not alive and that it could do him no sort of injury. (1.197–8, emphasis in original) The treatise attacks uses of iconophobia to coerce social conformity by reducing their size, presenting them as material objects rather than supernatural icons, subjecting them to rational daylight (a daylight that may well harm old paintings ), exposing what is behind them (nothing), and placing them in the service of the child’s activities (a plate for cake, a toy, a table for activities). Through such reconstructions, the child becomes master; portraits no longer punish but reward him; they no longer inspire phobia but satisfy desire. This lesson epitomizes bourgeois reworkings of aristocratic ancestral iconographies addressed throughout this book. My final chapter, however, is less concerned with interclass iconophobias than with middle-class phobias of their own emerging iconographies, iconologies, iconotropies, iconisms, and iconophilias of picture identification. Embedded in them lie concepts of imaged identity that threaten middle-class, Romantic, sentimental , self-made, subjective, moral identities, as well as middle-class family values and social relations. Insisting on the downward mobility of portrait and political representation produces iconophobic fallout, raising specters of further downward mobility below the rising middle classes to groups whose interests are deemed at odds with theirs. Asserting the authority of representation over what is represented raises phobias about the potential absence of content in middleclass iconographies. Rifts in traditional body-soul bonds challenge middle-class beliefs in identity as a physiognomic selfsameness of body and soul, challenging individualism and mimetic definitions of moral and intellectual worth by extension . Gothic fiction further produces iconophobias of mimesis: phobias of loss of resemblance, lack of resemblance, and excess resemblance. Thus, even as Gothic f e a r i ng p ic t ur...