Fiction's likeness: Portraits in English and American novels from "Frankenstein" to "Middlemarch".
Item
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Title
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Fiction's likeness: Portraits in English and American novels from "Frankenstein" to "Middlemarch".
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Identifier
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AAI9946177
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identifier
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9946177
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Creator
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Hollander, Elizabeth.
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Contributor
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Director: Rachel M. Brownstein
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Date
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1999
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Modern | Literature, American | Literature, English
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Abstract
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This dissertation looks at the way the theme of portraits came to enhance and complicate the conditions of narrative in English and American fiction during the nineteenth century. As figures of narrative ekphrasis, fictional portraits evoke various ambiguous, paradoxical, often competitive relations, not only between subject and spectator, painter and sitter, but between the realms of experience that they seem to embody. My readings of a variety of works from both sides of the Atlantic show how portraits were used to effect various kinds of fictional transformation---in terms of narrative mode, gender, genre, character and aesthetic consciousness---which served an arena for working out different problems in the narrative construction of fictional reality. Focusing on the mechanics and development of the portrait trope is especially helpful in illuminating a complex and potent gender paradigm which figures prominently in all these texts, and indeed in most aspects of word and image relations in the nineteenth century.;The argument begins with Frankenstein, which establishes a narrative mode informed by the interdependence of looks and speech and uses a portrait to effect a crucial link between mimetic artifice and authorial self-formation. Chapter 1 explains the narrative mechanism of portraits in Gothic works by Matthew Lewis, Charles Maturin, Washington Allston and Washington Irving. Chapter 2 examines Romantic anxieties of self-exposure and authorship in a group of short fictions about portraits and simulacra by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Chapter 3 addresses these developments in narrative genre, using Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Herman Melville's Pierre to analyze the role played by portraits in the attempt to overcome or transcend previous Gothic and Romantic conventions of authorship and gender. Chapter 4 considers how the narrative function of portraits intersects with developing iconographies; of realism in works by Hawthorne, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Louisa May Alcott. Chapter 5 concludes the study with a reading of how the portrait likenesses in Middlemarch establish the dynamics of its central marriage triangle and thus participate in the novel's more comprehensive modulation between aesthetic sensibility and societal norms.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
