Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T19:09:35.428Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE LITERARY PORTRAIT AS CENTERFOLD: FETISHISM IN MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON'S LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2007

Lynette Felber
Lynette Felber
Affiliation:
Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

FROM “MY LAST DUCHESS” to The Picture of Dorian Gray, portraits are ubiquitous in Victorian literature – lurking behind velvet curtains or stowed in locked attics, their canvases turned to the wall. The literary portrait, a variation on the copious nineteenth-century description typical of the Victorian novel, provides a verbal representation of physical appearance that most conspicuously functions to establish character. Literary portraits work vicariously, asking readers to conceptualize imaginatively what the characters actually see, requiring that they visualize a painting – see it in their mind's eye. Verbal and visual, private and portable, the literary portrait is a memento of an exciting reading experience. To better understand the appeal of literary portraits in the Victorian era, we might explore the effects of verbal description and the psychosexual impulses motivating the production of literary portraits. Victorian literary portraits commonly fetishize female subjects for a purportedly male gaze; even post-Freud, psychoanalysts view fetishism as a primarily masculine proclivity (Metz 89). Novels such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), to name only one among many, present a fetishistic portrait that seems to be a classic illustration of Mulvey's observation that “[i]n a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female” (11). Film theory offers literary critics ways to theorize specularization – the behavior of “looking” – that precinematic viewers could not yet articulate.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , September 2007 , pp. 471 - 488
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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

Armstrong Nancy. 1999. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge: Harvard UP
Braddon Mary Elizabeth. 1998. Lady Audley's Secret. Oxford: Oxford UP
Brantlinger Patrick. 1982: “What is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37 1– 28.Google Scholar
Brewer Pamela Didlake. 1993: “Pre-Raphaelitism in Lady Audley's Secret.” Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 19. 1 1– 10.Google Scholar
Briganti Chiara. 1991: “Gothic Maidens and Sensation Women: Lady Audley's Journey from the Ruined Mansion to the Madhouse.” Victorian Literature and Culture 19 189– 211.Google Scholar
Carnell Jennifer. 2000. The Literary Lives of M. E. Braddon. Hastings: Sensation
Cvetkovich Ann. 1992. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP
DuPlessis Rachel Blau. 1985. Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana UP
Freud Sigmund. 1950. “Fetishism.” The Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 5: 198– 204.
Gitter Elisabeth G. 1984: “The Power of Women's Hair in the Victorian Imagination.” PMLA 5 936– 54.Google Scholar
Hart Lynda. 1994: “The Victorian Villainess and the Patriarchal Unconscious.” Literature and Psychology 40. 3 1– 25.Google Scholar
Haynie Aeron. “‘An idle handle that was never turned, and a lazy rope so rotten’: The Decay of the Country Estate in Lady Audley's Secret.” Tromp Gilbert, & Haynie, eds. 63– 74.
Heath Stephen. 1984. The Sexual Fix. New York: Schocken
Heller Tamar. 1996: “Recent Work on Victorian Gothic and Sensation Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture 24 349– 66.Google Scholar
Howard Greg. 1999: “Masculinity and Economics in Lady Audley's Secret.” Victorians Institute Journal 27 33– 53.Google Scholar
Hughes Winifred. 1980. Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s. Princeton: Princeton UP
James Henry. 1921. “Miss Braddon.” Notes and Reviews. Cambridge: Dunster House, 108– 16.
Jay Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century Thought. Berkeley: U of California P
Kuhn Annette. 1985. The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Langland Elizabeth. “Enclosure Acts: Framing Women's Bodies in Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret.” Tromp Gilbert, and Haynie, eds. 3– 16.
Marcus Steven. 1974. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Ninteenth-Century England. New York: Basic Books
Marsh Jan, and Pamela Gerrish Nunn, eds. 1999. Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists. New York: Thames and Hudson
Metz Christian. 1985: “Photography and Fetish.” October 34 81– 90.Google Scholar
Montwieler Katherine. “Marketing Sensation: Lady Audley's Secret and Consumer Culture.” Tromp Gilbert, & Haynie, eds. 43– 61.
Mulvey Laura. 1975: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16. 3 6– 18.Google Scholar
Nemesvari Richard. 1995: “Robert Audley's Secret: Male Homosocial Desire in Lady Audley's Secret.” Studies in the Novel 27 515– 28.Google Scholar
Nunn Pamela Gerrish. “A Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood?” Marsh and Nunn, eds. 54– 101.
Pearsall Ronald. 1969. The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality. New York: Macmillan
Petch Simon. 2000: “Robert Audley's Profession.” Studies in the Novel 32 1– 13.Google Scholar
Prettejohn Elizabeth. 2000. The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites. Princeton: Princeton UP
Pykett Lyn. Afterword. Tromp Gilbert, and Haynie, eds. 277– 80.
Pykett Lyn. Afterword. Tromp Gilbert, and Haynie, eds. 1992. The Improper Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. London: Routledge
Rossetti Christina. 1995. “In an Artist's Studio.” Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology. Ed. Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds. Oxford: Blackwell, 365.
Schroeder Natalie. 1988: “Feminine Sensationalism, Eroticism, and Self-Assertion: M. E. Braddon and Ouida.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 7. 1 87– 103.Google Scholar
Sedgwick Eve. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP
Showalter Elaine. 1977. A Literature of Their Own. Expanded ed. 1999. Princeton: Princeton UP
Solomon-Godeau Abigail. 1991. Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P
Tromp Marlene, Pamela K. Gilbert, & Aeron Haynie, eds. 2000. Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context. Albany: SUNY
———. Introduction. Tromp, Gilbert, & Haynie, ed. xv– xviii.