The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel: Narrative Challenges to Visual Gendered Boudaries (review)

Sophia Andres's study of the remembered presence of Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the work of Victorian novelists is a heroic effort: fitfully successful, often irritating, overall somewhat disappointing, but of interest in the new directions it suggests for novel studies. It is Andres's achievement to have shown that not only poetry has intimate relationships with Pre-Raphaelite painting, and in the process to have pushed the study of the novel's embedded relation to Victorian visual culture in new and more subtle directions. She asks both how paintings might affect fiction as compelling, often disturbing cultural presences (with particular attention to Pre-Raphaelite pictures that upset contemporary visual expectations for the representation of gender and sexuality) and what the widespread use of the language of painting in contemporary literary criticism might mean for novelists. Her observations are often fresh and striking, although there are limits to the book's conceptualization and articulation of the larger issues it raises—and a sense that the book does not quite fulfill the promise of its motivating insights.

Andres makes two points that are not obvious without her close attention to reviews and to the novelists' personal papers. Victorian literary critical discourse is saturated in the language of art, to a far greater extent than we have perhaps noted. Critics regularly evaluate fiction in terms of its "pictures," "portraits," and "scenes," and discuss technique as "painting," "retouching," filling "canvases," "darkening shadows," and so forth. Such language, Andres argues, places "pictorial demands" on novelists (xix) that have specific content. Though the metaphors may seem as empty as they are common, they were not dead for Victorians. To restore them to historical life, she suggests we look at particular novelists' awareness of contemporary pictures and artists' practices. While, as she notes, there have been earlier studies of an individual author's use of art, Andres has an unusually keen eye for powerful images whose psychosocial tensions are recalled in fiction together with their visual contours. Andres focuses on four such writers: Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, each of whom, she demonstrates, took special interest in Pre-Raphaelite pictures, often from personal contact with the artists. Turning to the novels—particularly Gaskell's Ruth (1853), Collins's The Woman in White (1860), Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), and Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895)—Andres is very good at noting how visual patterns (light and color as well as figures) derived from specific Pre-Raphaelite paintings can structure novelistic narratives, as if certain images haunted the visual imagination of the author and could be expected to resonate with Victorians who constituted the audiences for both. The images that proved most haunting, she argues, were those that appealed to these novelists' interest in fraught sexual or social relations among men and women. By focusing on one controversial group of artists and attending to the historical impact of their style and subject matter, she makes an intriguing case for this form of cultural haunting and the use that novelists made of it.

Andres's choice of novelists and novels follows from a second, and in her view the major, focus of the book. She is primarily interested in authors' remembrance and reworking of Pre-Raphaelite images that challenge "gender boundaries" and "gender constructs"—her terms, sometimes rather clumsily and repetitiously invoked. Andres is surely right to see these tense and striking Pre-Raphaelite pictures as an important place to demonstrate affinities between novels and painting. Yet the strong focus on gender representation, though it produces illuminating pairings, tends to take over and replace what Andres's book seems initially to promise: a consideration of the relationship between Pre-Raphaelite painting and Victorian fiction that would treat more comprehensively their shared ground—interest in "perceptual, psychological, and poetic realism" (xxiii)—while exploring differences between the two media. The early shock of Pre-Raphaelite...