The Language of Painting in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction
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The Language of Painting in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction by Ermina D. van Pletzen Thesis presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English University of Cape Town University of Cape Town June 1995 The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University of Cape Town For my parents Acknmvledgements I wish to thank Dr Peter hno~-Sha\v, under \\ho-;e supenrnon I produced this thesis. for patient advice and much stimulating conversation about literature and the visual a11s through th..: years. \ Iy gratitude goes to friends and family members \\ho encouraged and supporkd nli.: in numerous \\ays: my pan:n!s and Japie and Cniha , an Pktzen for making it possible to unde11ake thl: project l'am. Don and Lesky Ilay-\rhitton for l:ndkss care and assistance. \ lark 1rilson and Jen. John. Rogl:r and Chtistinc Ferguson tor constant hdp and companionship. Ralph and Rosalind Goodman tor their generous focndship. ( iknda Jacobs. Yvette Hutchison and Elsah~ Ray tor spirited encouragement and ( 'arolyn \khinm:y who made it possihk to tinish in lime. I am gratetul to Dr Peter Linehan and \Ir .lotm h.effigan ol St John· s ( ·oHege tor helping me ammgc the visit to Carnb1idgc eluting \\hich I gathtTed much ot mv material. and to the l'niversi!_\ of Cap,;.'. Town for fin,ml."ial assistam:,:. To .\_k:,,:andcr Hay-\rhitton. \\hose patience \\a.-; 1:ndless. I am much irnkbkd. F.Y.P. The financial assistance of the Centre for Science Development (HSRC, South Africa) towards this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed in this work, or conclusions arrived at, are those ofthe author and are not to be attributed to the Centre for Science Development. Abstract This thesis examines the material and aesthetic sustenance which the novel as developing genre drew from the burgeoning popular interest in the visual arts, particularly the pictorial arts, which took place during the course of the nineteenth century in Britain. The first chapter develops the concept of the language of painting which for the purposes of the thesis refers to the linguistic transactions occurring between word and pictorial image when writers on art formulate their impressions in language. This type of discourse is described as governed by conceptual repetition and firmly established techniques of ekphrasis, as well as by indirect and peripheral modes of reference, not to the concrete stylistic features of the works of art under consideration, but to their effect on the viewer, the metaphors they call to mind, and the processes which can be inferred about their conception. The first chapter also gives a survey of the most important thematic strains and structural developments which had been imported into literature by the end of the eighteenth century. A chapter is then dedicated to each of five nineteenth-century novelists, Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Henry James, mapping out their individual grasp and knowledge of pictorial art in their particular circumstances, their experience of the art world, and the extent to which their experience of art is mediated by current painterly discourses. Each chapter next considers how pictorial material is appropriated in these novelists' fiction and whether the fiction draws structural support and meaning from pictorial concepts. The thesis furthermore investigates the inverse question of how the fiction itself becomes a context which not only reflects, but also shapes and alters inherited languages of painting. The second chapter approaches Austen's social satire against the background of the aesthetic traditions which she inherits from the eighteenth century. It is argued that her own novelistic aesthetic gains more from the discourses surrounding the practice of picturesque landscape appreciation (and related forms) than from Reynolds's doctrine of the general and ideal dominating the mid to late eighteenth century. The third chapter looks at the marked changes which occurred in the production and appreciation of pictorial art in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and finds that paintings and the language of painting became far more accessible as new galleries and exhibitions opened to the public and were reviewed in periodicals and the popular press. This is the background against which Thackeray's expansive social satire is examined. The discussion involves the ways in which his fiction makes use ( or fails to make use) of the variegated aesthetic emerging from his eccentric art reviews and his fiction's mimicking of the workings of caricature (and his own illustrations). The fourth chapter shows Charlotte Bronte's approach to painting as an expressive rather than a satirical image. It traces her exploration of paintings as emotional and psychological spaces, and focuses on the way in which her idiosyncratic vision shapes and alters languages of painting acquired mostly at second hand. The fifth chapter develops this enquiry by considering how Eliot's intellectualism deals with the personal and cultural symbolism inherent in works of pictorial art. It is argued that her use of pictorial imagery reveals contradictory strains in her fiction: on the one hand she employs a Ruskinian language of moral realism to theorise about a didactic-realistic aesthetic for the novel; on the other hand the symbolic implications of the works which she alludes to import an idealism at variance with this aesthetic into her fiction. Chapter six indicates that whereas Eliot's attempt at illustrating her novelistic aesthetic from the language of painting is almost entirely based on an appraisal of painterly subject-matter, James expands the scope of this language's signifying power in fiction by deploying formal aspects of painting as structuring principles for the novel. The thesis ends by briefly relating James's use of painting to reflect self-consciously on the shape of the novel to developments in the modern novel. Table ot ( 'ontents ( 'hapter < )ne The Language of Painting: , \ \ Iethod and Smrn; l liston ( 'hapter T\\o .lane .\usten: ,\ ··\,anton h.ind of d1ace .. through .\esthetic Tradition 59 Chapter Three Picture ( rossip and Picto1ial Rhapsody: Thac1.eray\; Pictures ot Satin: and Sentiment Chapter Four l 'harlotte Bronw and the Pk:tun: ot Sdf-E:--:pn:ssion U7 ( 'haptcT Fi,c Towards a British \ ladonna: ( reorge Eiiot and the ··naturalist idear· Chapter Si'\ Thi..: .\rt of I .ifr - Thi.: Lik of, \rt in 1 k:nn' James ·s FiL·tion .259 Chapter One The Language of Painting: A Method and Some History Not only metaphor: cultural motif, immanent religion, a faith and a church. One thing always linked to another thing. In a verse epistle to his painter friend, Mr Jervas, Pope works imagery drawn from the art of painting into skilled heroic couplets, giving concrete illustration to his belief in the fruitful interaction between the Sister Arts. But the poem does more than pay personal tribute to the joys and inspirations of such artistic partnerships. 1 While Pope is musing upon the frequency with which "images reflect from art to art" in his own experience (20), the poem itself enters into a vibrant and many-voiced conversation about the arts which reverberates motives and ideas far beyond the immediate scope of his creative friendship with Jervas. In the first place, he quite deliberately slots the poem into a wider discursive context by attaching it, quite literally, to a text which lies at the core of the gradually expanding body of literature which was coming into being on painting in neo-classical England. The work is De arte graphica (1668), Du Fresnoy' s terse Latin poem which activates a wealth of further intertextual links: it explicitly moulds its title on Horace's De arte poetica, stamps the influential ut pictura poesis motif onto its opening lines, and fixes to these a polished fragment drawn from the mythical past of aesthetic theory, Simonides' vividly equivocal conception (quoted by Plutarch) of picture as dumb poetry and poetry as speaking picture. In the rest of Du Fresnoy' s poem, well-worn aphorism, classical precept, and technical advice stand side by side, together providing a formidable catalogue of beliefs, ideas, and practices, ancient as well as modem, surrounding the art of painting. Pope's epistle refers cryptically to many of these formulas, deftly turning painterly concept into literary effect, adapting Du Fresnoy (and his sources) to his own purposes, and even drawing creative sustenance from the fact that he is not dealing with the parent text in the original, but in the ready-transmuted form of Dryden's prose translation (which, in tum, relies heavily on De Piles' loose rendering of the poem into French). 2 The intertextual chain, initially forged quite self-consciously, soon passes out of Pope's personal control, for in the second place his poetic tribute to Jervas (through 2 Du Fresnoy and Dryden) forms part of a whole group of writings related in some way or other to De arte graphica. One of these, William Mason's florid poetic translation of 1783, reprints the "Epistle to Jervas" in its entirety, thus again fusing Pope's poem, this time retrospectively, with Du Fresnoy' s appearance and continued influence in English writing on painting. Using Pope as a model, Mason prefaces his translation with an epistle to Joshua Reynolds, whose authoritative "Notes on the Art of Painting" functions as an appendix to this encyclopaedic edition of De arte graphica.