Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

<i>Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709-1791</i> (review)

2004; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ecf.2004.0032

1911-0243

Elizabeth Wanning Harries,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

322 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION16:2 Alison Conway. Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture oftheEnglish Novel, 1 709-1 791. Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2001. xii + 293pp. CAD$65; £40. ISBN 0-8020-3526-4. One may as well begin with genre. Alison Conway is interested in die ways two suspect eighteendi-century genres—the novel and portrait painting—can illuminate each other. Neither had a privileged place in the aesthetic hierarchy; both were suspect in part because oftheir association with women. She claims that "the eighteenth-century novel uses the painted portrait to analyse die meaning ofwomen's relation to private interests and ... places die idea of the spectacle and the aesthetics of beholding at die centre of its discussion" (p. 3). Portraits, both painted and written, dominate her discussion of both genres. This leads to some revealing set pieces, detailed discussions of the role of the tableau and die miniature in Manley's 1709 romance The New Atalantis, of the various relocations of Clarissa's full-length portrait, supposedly by Joseph Highmore, in Richardson's novel; ofthe miniatures in Eliza Haywood's late novel Miss Betsy Thoughtless and in Fielding's Amelia; and, finally and unsurprisingly, of the portrait of Darcy that initiates Elizabeth Bennet's change of heart in Pride and Prejudice. The portrait of the Widow Wadman that Sterne teasingly invites the (male) reader to create in book 8 of Tristram Shandy comes in for some amusing speculation. Conway also includes detailed discussions of various late seventeenthcentury and eighteentii-century portraits. Like the novel, portraits ofwomen were always poised somewhere between scandal and respectability. Some of the examples she gives—Reynolds's portraits ofKitty Fisher, Gainsborough's portraits of notorious women—help her make that point clear, as do the reviews ofsuch portraits in the MorningHerald and London Chronicle, contemporary pamphlets, and other material she cites. (These quotations are among the high points ofthe book and show her real scholarly engagement with the period.) The notoriety ofthese women helped make their portraits and the prints derived from them eagerly sought commodities; prints of Kitty Fisher as CleopatraDissolving thePearl, for example, seem to have been authorized by Kitty Fisher herself. Conway shows how the portrait subjects both resist and assist in dieir own commodification. But the book ranges far beyond what Conway calls "the portrait trope." She is primarily interested in showing the ways that the visual can escape or even subvert the cultural constraints that critics like Michel Foucault and John Bender have claimed always determine it. In other words, she argues that women were not simply dominated by the aesthetic of the gaze, but learned how to use it for their own, sometimes political, ends. She emphasizes "women's capacity to claim agency as spectacles and spectators, as subjects figured as both embodied and critical within the visual moment created by REVIEWS323 the novel's representation of the portrait" (p. 4). Later eighteenth-century novels do not simply oudine and enforce "domestic ideology"; rather they show their characters in the process of understanding, criticizing, and struggling with it. She insists "on the novel's [and, implicidy, the portrait's] ability to comment on and resist the culture that produced it" (p. 21 1). This interesting claim is derived in part from Marcia Pointon's work on the eighteenth-century portrait, but more generally from the recent interest of feminist criticism in women's agency rather than in women's subordination. Like Pointon, Conway shows that portraits are never simply "a window on the world," but rather are caught up in complex, often conflicting social discourses diat make simple interpretation impossible. Like recent feminist critics of die novel, she works to show the way novels can articulate the complexities of social influence and power. Both genres are ambiguous, playing on two registers at once (one flirting with scandal, one sketching moral guidelines) or, as Ian Watt once said of Pamela, exploiting the attractions of both striptease and sermon. Conway's major contribution is her articulation ofthe ways these registers are held in uneasy suspension and of the ways women themselves were active in determining their own representation. (Her discussion of Angelica Kauffman's various mythological...