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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
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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

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