Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (review)

The Renaissance tradition of the paragone, or competition between the arts, has long encouraged comparisons between literature and visual art that are to the disadvantage of one or the other. In Pictorial Victorians, Julia Thomas examines two forms of nineteenth- century visual art, book illustration and narrative painting, that are particularly vulnerable to accusations of inferiority or subservience to their literary analogues. These hybrid genres, Thomas argues, complicate any attempt at aesthetic hierarchy through their blending of text and image. Verbal and visual representation are not in competition but in dialogue with each other, producing meaning through "the interaction between word, image, and viewer" (12). Thomas credits this interaction with ideological as well as aesthetic significance, suggesting that the "differences of the textual and visual collude in the differences of race, nation, and gender" (19). Thomas attempts to align the image/ text binary, or "marriage," with other dichotomies that were at issue in the period: black/ white, colony/colonizer, female/male. While some of these alignments are more compelling than others, on the whole this approach leads to nuanced and productive readings of several key examples of book illustration and narrative painting.

Thomas's first chapter examines a book whose renown was solidified, if not established, by the popularity of its many illustrated editions: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Though the book seems "to epitomize a happy relation between the visual and the verbal" (23) in which the illustrations are subservient to the story, this turns out to be as deceptive as the myth of happy slaves on Southern plantations. The images created for the novel not only supplement but subsume its textual elements with visual representations that reinforce different themes from Stowe's, adding a stronger satiric element, in particular by borrowing images from "sources that form part of the British experience of slavery and blackness" (48).

Images occupy a similarly subversive role in the illustrations of Alfred Tennyson's work, examined in chapter 2. While some of Thomas's commentary on the famous Moxon edition illustrations—by John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti—is familiar, her focus on the lesser-known illustrations that Eleanor Vere Boyle, or "E. V. B.," did for Tennyson's "May-Queen" offers some important insights into the role of women artists in the period. Thomas sees E. V. B. as doubly disadvantaged by being the mere illustrator of a great poet's works, and a female artist to boot. Yet Boyle's images, Thomas claims, manage to threaten the conventional understanding of the word-image relation as a kind of "gendered hierarchical relation, in which the text and picture are... 'wedded together' and the image is 'faithful,' 'loyal'... or 'subservient' to the words" (73), offering instead an interpretation that diverges significantly from Tennyson's poem.

In "Crinolineomania: Punch's Female Malady," Thomas begins by discussing the history of the crinoline, which she sees as "a metaphor for female emancipation, literally enabling women to occupy a wider sphere," but also "a way of checking this freedom, of emphasizing women's frivolity and irrationality and, by implication, their unsuitability for public life" (78). Analysis of a number of Punch cartoons involving crinolines suggests that these illustrations played an important role in constructing crinoline as an absurd whim of fashion that distracted women from their proper, domestic concerns. The satire of these cartoons is centered in the pictures more than the captions, leading Thomas to see these images as once again subverting the traditional relation between word and image.

With appropriate acknowledgement of Homi Bhabha, the chapter "Nation and Narration: The Englishness of Victorian Narrative Painting" describes the development of a specific sense of "English" painting that rests on an identification of narrative painting with Englishness, domesticity, and nation. While the connection Thomas posits between Victorian and poststructuralist theories of visuality is not the best articulated aspect of this chapter, her discussion of several paintings that highlight...