Portrait Stories

What makes stories about portraits so gripping and unsettling? Portrait Stories argues that it is the ways they problematize the relation between subjectivity and representation. As a representation of a particular individual, the portrait is often considered a mere token of identity a notion that g [...]
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What makes stories about portraits so gripping and unsettling? Portrait Stories argues that it is the ways they problematize the relation between subjectivity and representation. As a representation of a particular individual, the portrait is often considered a mere token of identity a notion that gets complicated in the stories by the presence of the painter-producer whose "vision" is inscribed in the portrait. At the same time, the painter's, subject's and viewer's worldly interests and their involvement with monetary transactions show representation to be a social practice inflected by particular interests and power relations, often determined by class and gender. It is thus in relation to representations shaped by social differences and conflicting interests that the subjectivity of sitter, painter, and viewer are produced in these stories.Through close readings of nineteenth-century short stories and novellas by Poe, James, Hoffmann, Gautier, Nerval, Balzac, Kleist, Hardy, Wilde, Storm, Sand, and Gogol, I analyze the way the interests of the painter, subject, and viewer(s) are inscribed in the portrait so that it becomes the site where intersubjective relations of desire, identification, rivalry, imitation, projection, aggression, guilt, idealization, misrecognition, get organized. My analysis focuses on the power that can accrue to the painter from the act of representation (often at the expense of the portrait's subject) while also showing how this act can threaten the portrait painter's sense of self. Analyzing the viewer's relation to the portrait I show how portrait stories problematize the very act of seeing and with it the way subjectivity is constructed in the field of vision. Above all I take the portrait's task of representing the "mere individual" (for which it has been routinely devalued) as a model for interpretation, practicing a close reading that refuses to sacrifice the difference between and within texts for the sake of general truths.