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Image and Narration in Mary Shelley's Keepsake Stories

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Image and Narration in Mary Shelley's Keepsake Stories 159 REBEKKA ROHLEDER Transformations: Image and Narration in Mary Shelley's Keepsake Stories 1. Introduction In the frame narrative of Mary Shelley's story "The Invisible Girl" (1832) a remarkable thing happens. The narrator Describes a picture – one which the story's readers can immeDiately compare with its own Description, since this picture is (almost) identical with the engraving which accompanies the story anD which was, at its first publication in an annual, The Keepsake, placeD on the opposite page. What is remarkable in the narrator's account of the picture is his sudden self-consciousness: This drawing represented a lovely girl in the very pride and bloom of youth; her dress was simple, in the fashion of the day – (remember, reader, I write at the beginning of the eighteenth century), her countenance was embellished by a look of mingled innocence and intelligence, to which was added the imprint of serenity of soul and natural cheerfulness. (Shelley 1990, 190) "[R]emember, reaDer, I write at the beginning of the eighteenth century:" As soon as the narrator begins to describe an image, he breaks character. Until then, that is, there has been no indication that he might be addressing readers outside his own century. In addition to that, if the early 18th-century setting were at all relevant for the story which follows, this is not exactly the most elegant way of conveying this information, all of which leaves the reaDer with the question of what, if not unaccountable narrative awkwardness, is the point of this disruptive moment. To begin with, narrative Disruptions regularly feature in the Descriptions of images in Mary Shelley's stories. Thus, in another tale, "FerdinanDo Eboli" (1828), which I will discuss below, the accompanying engraving, which is described towards the end of the story, abruptly introDuces an intraDiegetic narrator, whom the reaDer knows, until then, as a character only, and who functions as a narrator for exactly two sentences before the extraDiegetic narrator who has been telling the story so far takes over again (Shelley 1990, 78). The relationship of narration and images is clearly marked as a topic of interest in these stories. It should be noteD that Shelley's tales for the annuals are not simply stories with illustrations. In annuals – publications which became extremely popular from the late 1820s on – it was not the engravings which illustrateD the literary text. Rather, it was the other way arounD: many of the stories anD poems which were publisheD in them were commissioneD to accompany a pre-existing engraving, except with very famous authors whose contributions the editors wanted to secure. For most authors, even when there was alreaDy a finisheD text, this text might have to be aDapteD in order to accommodate the image – something which Shelley sometimes haD to Do when writing for annuals, aDDing a Description or changing characters' names (Robinson 1990, xvi). Nonetheless, the relationship of those passages which refer to the accompanying Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 32.1 (Spring 2021): 159-178. Anglistik, Jahrgang 32 (2021), Ausgabe 1 © 2021 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 160 REBEKKA ROHLEDER engravings with the rest of the story remains fraught. Narrators take a noticeable break from storytelling in order to Describe either the image as an image, or the scene it shows, in much more Detail than the economy of such a brief story justifies; in aDDition to that, as we have already seen, some narrators suddenly act out of character in these passages. The annuals' emphasis on pictures was also one of the reasons for the fact that their cultural prestige was relatively low. They were, moreover, associated with domestic femininity; with political anD artistic conservatism; they were DecideDly sentimental; they were a commercial proDuct aimeD at a miDDle-class, middlebrow audience. Some aspects of this mixture rendered them ideologically and aesthetically suspect for many authors at the time; others still render them suspect for critics today. The annuals just did and do not appear as a convincing platform for serious literary works (Harris 2015, 20). Accordingly, critics tend to explicitly or implicitly look for mitigating circumstances for the fact that in the 1820s and 1830s "the Author of Frankenstein" published several stories in The Keepsake (as well as one in another annual, Heath's Book of Beauty, anD possibly also in a thirD, Forget Me Not1). Critics commonly employ two strategies in orDer to square Shelley as a serious author with Shelley the author of stories for the annuals. The first is a biographical argument, founded on the fact that she needed the money – The Keepsake paid well – which is coupleD, however, with the assertion that she founD the "constraints placeD Winter Journals upon [her] art" (Robinson 1990, xvi) in the annuals extremely problematic. These constraints included the limited length of the stories as well as the necessity of integrating a reference to an illustration (Robinson 1990; Hofkosh 1993, 208-217). A Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) seconD anD more complex reaDing unDerstanDs these tales, or even The Keepsake in total, as subtly subversive with regard to cultural anD genDer politics (Markley 2000; Sussman 2003; Marino 2015, 29; Vargo 2017, 50-51). Here, the illustrations are not for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution denigrated as a constraint, but such interpretations, illuminating as they are with regard to the stories, are not very interesteD in the images as images. They either ignore them altogether, or they treat text and image as an unproblematic continuum, as if the engravings in the annuals were nothing more than illustrations designed to serve the accompanying texts. Both versions are clearly intended to redeem Shelley as an author from any suspicion of superficiality, incluDing, implicitly at least, the possibility that she chose to aDapt her stories in order to accommoDate a mere image.2 In the following, I would like to propose a Different reaDing, one which takes the texts' fraught relationship with the accompanying engravings more seriously. I will argue that Shelley does not treat these illustrations as an unproblematic continuum with the text. She also Does not treat them as an unwelcome anD superfluous aDDition to a 1 For an illuminating discussion of authorship attribution in the Forget Me Not case, see Crook (2019). For four examples of Shelley's Keepsake stories and accompanying images, see the "Other Works by Mary Shelley" section of Steven Jones's Romantic Circles edition of The Last Man, specifically this page: https://romantic-circles.org/editions/mws/lastman/ mwsfict.htm. 2 Gregory O'Dea's reading is an exception: he analyses Shelley's "striking experiments with the relationships between image and narrative" as criticism of the Romantic aesthetics of the fragment (O'Dea 1997, 65). Anglistik, Jahrgang 32 (2021), Ausgabe 1 © 2021 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) IMAGE AND NARRATION IN MARY SHELLEY'S KEEPSAKE STORIES 161 text that was alreaDy complete in itself. InsteaD, she reacts to the Direct confrontation of her texts with another medium. In those passages of her stories which describe the accompanying engravings, she explores the limits of image and text respectively, introDucing a sometimes bewildering number of references from text to image anD back. Thus, these passages shoulD be reaD as an aesthetic reflection, in particular when they draw attention to unresolved narrative difficulties. In particular, they can be read as a reflection on the transmeDial relationship of picture anD narrative. Here, my reaDing of the interaction of text anD image goes back to Sabine Coelsch-Foisner's reflections on transmeDialisation processes, in which she focuses on the mutual transformation of different media (Coelsch-Foisner 2019, 16-18; 23). This concept is a useful alternative to the meDia hierarchies which critics tenD to apply to Shelley's stories in the annuals, and which, as we will see, many writers in Shelley's own time believed in, but which Shelley’s stories do not support. In the following, I will first look at the cultural position occupied by the annuals and their engravings, before going on to discuss three of Shelley’s stories for The Keepsake: "The Sisters of Albano" anD "FerdinanDo Eboli" (both 1828), anD "The Invisible Girl." In all three stories, the text uses the Description of the engraving as an occasion for an implicit aesthetic reflection, which is relateD to issues that are prominent in contemporary Discussions of the relationship of literature and pictures, namely temporality and a hierarchisation of the senses and art forms. At the same time, however, these issues are also prominent themes of the stories themselves, transforming the pre-existing image into a necessary part of the story. 2. Women, Landscapes and "crimson silk" The annuals themselves have been reaD as going back to long-stanDing traDitions of combining image and text: Katherine D. Harris proposes that the emergence of the annual in the 1820s should be read as "continu[ing] the tradition of a mixed-meDia form that is reminiscent of fifteenth-century emblems" (2015, 2). Annuals at the time certainly made no secret of the fact that it was the illustrations, not the texts, which were at the centre of the whole enterprise anD its commercial success. These illustrations were often steel engravings of pre-existing paintings. The yearly editions of The Keepsake were mainly advertised as books with spectacularly good engravings. In aDDition to that, they were explicitly aDvertiseD as valuable objects, both because they haD contributions from famous artists anD authors anD because they were well- maDe expensive books, which were (as was pointed out in advertisements) sold bound "in crimson silk" ("ADvertisement for The Keepsake for 1829" 1829, 32).
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