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Speaking pictures: Visual art and allusion in the novels of Samuel Richardson
Abstract
Richardson's greatest achievement is thought to be his ability to represent psychological states; the epistolary form of his novels--the presentation of a mind in reflection upon itself--combined with "writing to the minute," lends these novels a psychological verisimilitude unsurpassed in the period. Perhaps as a consequence of this praise, the visual qualities of Richardson's fictions were largely overlooked. Richardson's novels are an especially interesting case for emblem study because of the prominence of the emblem and emblematic in seventeenth-century meditative literatures with which he was certainly familiar. Richardson's characters often employ emblematic locution, a kind of visual ornamentation upon their narratives. In some cases, these emblematic allusions merely serve the moment; they do, however, serve often. They guide the text; moreover, they often accumulate to considerable effect. I will discuss the emblem in its ornamental or "naive" usages, which supposes a "lack of art," because it provides evidence of how Richardson divided rhetoric from reality. To make such distinctions is to come closer, for example, to an understanding of what has always been the central critical point in Pamela: is she an artless innocent, or a machinating intriguer? We must know, therefore, what of Pamela is genuine; that is, we must learn the extent of her art. I trace a group of visual elements through Richardson's novels; and my object is to demonstrate that the author's keen visual sense, his unswerving iconographical intention, can be discovered working even in the most verisimilar passages. What he earlier expresses in purely allegorical terms he later reduces to particles and disperses, not according to a probable reality, but according to a providential reality which this authoritative symbology informs.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
Recommended Citation
Brown, Murray L, "Speaking pictures: Visual art and allusion in the novels of Samuel Richardson" (1990). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9034272.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9034272