Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-4hvwz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-27T16:07:39.298Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Beside the Reclining Statue: Ekphrasis, Narrative, and Desire in Middlemarch

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Abigail S. Rischin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Eliot's Middlemarch reveals the effective alliance among ekphrasis (a literary response to a visual work of art), narrative, and the portrayal of desire. The novel's richest example of this dynamic occurs in the Vatican Hall of Statues scene, when Will Ladislaw and his painter friend Naumann observe Dorothea poised beside a celebrated antique statue, “the reclining Ariadne, then called Cleopatra.” Capitalizing on this statue's history of mistaken identity, Eliot affirms the power of visual art for literary representation by using the statue in three important ways: as a catalyst for the birth of desire, as a prefiguration of the novel's romance plot (through narrative references to the myth of Ariadne), and as a vehicle for representing female eroticism, which the statue's long-standing association with Cleopatra underscores.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 111 , Issue 5 , October 1996 , pp. 1121 - 1132
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Andres, Sophia “The Germ and the Picture in Middlemarch.” ELH 55 (1988): 853–85.10.2307/2873139CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barkan, Leonard “The Beholder's Tale: Ancient Sculpture, Renaissance Narrative.” Representations 44 (1993): 133–13.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Miller, Richard. New York: Hill, 1974.Google Scholar
Beaty, Jerome “Notes.” Eliot, Middlemarch 773–77.Google Scholar
Bober, Phyllis Pray, and Rubenstein, Ruth. Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture. London: Miller, 1986.Google Scholar
Brooks, Peter “Storied Bodies; or, Nana at Last Unveiled.” Critical Inquiry 16 (1989): 1–12.10.1086/448524CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Catullus. “Poems.” Trans. F. W. Cornish. Catullus, Tibullus, and Pervigilium Veneris. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962. 1–183.Google Scholar
The Compact Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1991.Google Scholar
[Jean] Duchesne and [Etienne] Réveil. Museum of Painting and Sculpture; or, Collection of the Principal Pictures, Statues, and Bas-Reliefs in the Public and Private Galleries of Europe…. Vol. 1. London: Bossange, 1828.Google Scholar
Eliot, George “Belles Lettres.” Westminster Review 66 (1856): 311. Rpt. in Eliot, Notebook 284.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. George Eliot: A Writer's Notebook, 1854-1879, and Uncollected Writings. Ed. Wiesenfarth, Joseph. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1981.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. New York: Bantam, 1985.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. “Stahr's Torso II.” Westminster Review 65 (1856): 347–34. Rpt. in Eliot, Notebook 275–27.Google Scholar
Gross, Kenneth. The Dream of the Moving Statue. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.10.7591/9781501734892CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hands, Timothy. A George Eliot Chronology. London: Macmillan, 1989.Google Scholar
Hardy, Barbara. Particularities: Readings in George Eliot. Athens: Ohio UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.Google Scholar
Hollander, John. The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.Google Scholar
Hollander, John “The Poetics of Ekphrasis.” Word and Image 4.1 (1988): 209–20.Google Scholar
Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams, and Distortions. New York: Harper, 1990.Google Scholar
Kasson, Joy. Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Lessing, G. E. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. 1766. Trans. Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.Google Scholar
Mandelker, Amy “A Painted Lady: Ekphrasis in Anna Karenina.” Comparative Literature 43 (1991): 1–19.10.2307/1770990CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matus, Jill L “Looking at Cleopatra: The Expression and Exhibition of Desire in Villette.” Victorian Literature and Culture 21 (1993): 345–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McMaster, Juliet “George Eliot's Language of the Sense.” George Eliot, a Centenary Tribute. Ed. Haight, Gordon S. and Van Arsdale, Rosemary T. Totowa: Barnes, 1982. 11–27.Google Scholar
Meltzer, Françoise. Salomé and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.10.7208/chicago/9780226519654.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, W. J. T “Ekphrasis and the Other.” South Atlantic Quarterly 91 (1992): 695–719.Google Scholar
Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.10.7208/chicago/9780226148052.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murray, John III. A Handbook of Rome and Its Environs. London: Murray, 1858. Vol. 2 of The Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy.Google Scholar
Nicholes, Joseph “Dorothea in the Moated Grange: Millais's Mariana and the Middlemarch Window Scenes.” Victorians Institute Journal 20 (1992): 93–124.Google Scholar
Ovid. Heroides and Amores. Trans. Grant Showerman. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977.Google Scholar
Philostratus. Imagines. Trans. Fairbanks, Arthur. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1931.Google Scholar
Rischin, Abigail “Ekphrasis and the Art of Rescue: Rossetti's Sonnets ‘For”Ruggiero and Angelica“ by Ingres.‘ ” The Eye of the Poet: Studies in the Reciprocity of the Visual and Literary Arts from the Renaissance to the Present. Ed. Golahny, Amy. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1996. 214–21.Google Scholar
Rischin, Abigail. Speaking Looks: Varieties of Ekphrastic Experience in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Diss. Yale U, 1995. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1996.Google Scholar
Stahr, Adolf. Torso: Kunst, Künstler, und Kunstwerke. Vol. 2. Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1878.Google Scholar
Visconti, Ennio Quirino. Il Museo Pio Clementino, descritto da Ennio Quirino Visconti. Rome: Muri, 1784.Google Scholar
Wiesenfarth, Joseph. George Eliot's Mythmaking. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1977.Google Scholar
Wiesenfarth, Joseph “Middlemarch: The Language of Art.” PMLA 97 (1982): 360–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Witemeyer, Hugh. George Eliot and the Visual Arts. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979Google Scholar