If I showed you the contents of my wallet you might be surprised by the number of reader’s cards from rare-book libraries. My research involves the relationship between word and image, and typically tries to reclaim pictures lost to history. It often takes me to special collections in Britain, and occasionally to France.
A couple of years ago my wife and I visited the Louvre in order to look closely at a picture of Venus. We were hurrying down the long corridor of 17th-century Italian paintings when suddenly there it was: Venus at Her Toilet, or The Air, by Francesco Albani. The work shows the goddess of beauty seated in profile before a mirror. The three graces braid her hair and deck her with jewelry, while a swarm of amoretti hold her mirror, tie her sandal laces, and feed her swans. Her winged son, Cupid, hovers just above, playing celestial music upon a harp.
Despite the apparent celebration, the image ultimately tells a story of disappointment. Venus is preparing to meet her lover, Adonis, unaware that a boar has killed him. It may be that her rival Diana actually set the beast loose. The painting is one of four canvases devoted to the elements of earth, air, fire, and water.
In my book Textual Vision, I’ve drawn a connection between the painting and the poem The Rape of the Lock. Alexander Pope’s poem involves the same four elements as well as a contest between Venus and Diana, and also tells a story of loss and betrayal. And in fact the engraved frontispiece of Pope's poem takes its iconography directly from the painting.
Recently, I’ve begun looking at films of Jane Austen’s novels, once again against a historical backdrop. Since the release of Clueless, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion — all in 1995 — her novels have been made into major motion pictures at least a dozen times. Sometimes called Austen-mania, the phenomenon has brought her work into focus for a whole new generation of readers.
Among the best-known films is Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice from 2005, with Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet. In my University Forum lecture, I’ll suggest that each of the novels already knows how it wants to be seen, and that film sometimes captures those moments well. Late in the novel Pride and Prejudice, for example, Austen invites readers to look over Lizzy's shoulder at Darcy's portraits. She is visiting Pemberley, his stately home. He has proposed to her, and she has refused. Something in his painted gaze reminds her of how he used to look at her, however, and it changes her feelings for him. Austen used the word “regard” in this scene. It recalls both his attraction to her intelligent and knowing gaze, and also the care that he has taken for her family’s interest.
In the film, the picture gallery at Pemberley has been transformed into a sculpture gallery, and a bust of Darcy is placed amid a group of classical marbles. The change from portraiture to sculpture involves what Linda Hutcheon calls a meme. Like a human gene mutating from one human generation to another, these units of meaning change form as they move from one medium to another.
Now, in this case, the change may simply be a matter of convenience; the Chatsworth House shooting location offered a real sculpture gallery as a substitute for the imagined portraits hanging at Pemberley. Rather than fill a long hallway with pictures, the director had only to add a bust of Fitzwilliam Darcy, or rather of Matthew Macfayden, the actor who plays Darcy, to a roomful of classical marbles already in place.
However, I like to think that the turn to the plastic arts reflects a desire to place Darcy securely within the iconography of virtue. Classical sculpture represents ancient codes of admirable conduct. A book like Andrew Tooke’s Pantheum Mythicum, a guide to the Greek and Roman gods, went through a dozen editions in Austen’s time. It taught that the muse of history was named Clio, meaning glory, for example, because her task is to recount the glorious deeds of the past. Placing Darcy in a sculpture gallery, his modest gaze angled downward, also places his past conduct in an admirable light. It makes him an example of loving generosity — a meme so apropos, it might teach logocentrism itself to bite its tongue.
