Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media by Rachel Teukolsky

Author:Rachel Teukolsky [Teukolsky, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: art, History, Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945), Romanticism, Literary Criticism, Modern, 19th Century
ISBN: 9780198859734
Google: dYLxDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-08-15T20:31:06.066927+00:00

Ghost, Copy, Self: The Woman in White

The themes of female visibility, portraiture, and copyism discussed in this chapter come to the fore in Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White. The novel’s meditations on these subjects are not focused around the medium of photography, and cartes de visite make no appearance in the novel. Yet the novel organizes itself around a series of repetitive female portraits, as it investigates the paradoxes surrounding female character and female exceptionality. These explorations focalize the novel’s larger political interest in the conundrum of the individual’s relation to the mass, a problem, as I’ll show, that the rhetorics of mass portrait photography also circled, without clear resolution.

The Woman in White announces its visual interests in the occupation of its protagonist, Walter Hartright, who serves as a drawing-master in a grand house. The novel portrays humble Walter’s rise to become the house’s owner, while the aristocrats scheming against him receive their just downfalls—a trajectory bespeaking strongly middle-class values. At a low point in the novel, when the main characters are forced to assume a working-class disguise, Walter becomes an anonymous engraver for cheap illustrated newspapers. William R. McKelvy argues that Walter’s engraving work proves the novel’s democratic sensibility, as it shows “an aggressive faith in the industrial arts.”56 Yet the novel’s depictions of new visual media are not clearly democratic. Walter’s furtive work in graphic design, published anonymously, opposes the novel’s broader investment in a good name, reputation, lineage, and class propriety. By the end, he has escaped his demeaning engraving work to ascend as the fitting proprietor of Limmeridge House.57 His high-art, aesthetic sensibility suits him for this genteel role, as evidenced by his identity as a drawing master well-versed in the singular arts of painting and watercolor.58 Meanwhile, photography is the province of the villainous aristocrat and aesthete Mr. Fairlie, who makes photographic reproductions of his beloved art collections in a narcissistic act of self-promotion. If anything, the novel shows how the newer reproductive arts might work hand-in-hand with older, more singular kinds of artworks to promote hierarchy and social order. These conservative investments reflect the way that sensation itself, in both novels and photographs, existed uneasily alongside the language of “democratization” that critics applied to it—as a greater accessibility to mass arts emerged in what was still a highly unequal, hierarchical, and undemocratic society. The Woman in White gains affective energy from this conflict between hierarchy and democratization, mining the conflict in order to generate a sensational story, in particular through its use of the female portrait.

Collins’s novel offers a vexed politics of vision in its numerous portraits of women. A watercolor portrait of Laura launches Walter’s retrospective narration: this image is just one of a surfeit of female portraits, an excess that highlights the novel’s difficulty in characterizing women. Female characters are repeatedly transformed into image, often in scenes of sensational, spectacular display. The framing and flattening of women into pictures enables the persistent doubling, exchange, even interchangeability among certain female characters.

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