Jocasta and the Rebirth of Matriarchy: Embodied Spectatorship in Margaret Oliphant's "the Portrait" (Critical Essay‪)‬

[1] Although a prolific professional writer and perennial breadwinner for a large household, Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897) has not been easily claimed as a proto-feminist. Her tremendous industry and independence stand in contrast to the conservative critiques she sometimes published in her frequent contributions to Blackwood's Magazine, such as "The Anti-Marriage League," which railed against Thomas Hardy's treatment of marriage and sexuality in Jude the Obscure. Recent essays, however, such as those collected in Tamara Wagner's Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (2009), have begun to explore a more radical politics of the domestic in Oliphant's novels and short fiction. To further this corrective, I deploy a reading--through the lens of feminist film theory--of her fantastic tale, "The Portrait: A Story of the Seen and the Unseen" (1885) to demonstrate how Oliphant can brazenly subvert entrenched patriarchal norms of both image deployment and narrative development in her fiction. In taking full advantage of the fantastical properties of the titular painting in ways similar to those advocated for cinema a century later by scholars such as Vivian Sobchack and Teresa de Lauretis, Oliphant recasts traditional sexual and domestic roles to make the male characters in the story serve the aims and desires of the heroine, creating a refreshingly female-driven plot. [2] The titular portrait depicts Agnes, a young woman who has long been dead but whose spirit is restlessly infused within the painting and seeks deliverance into a living body. When our narrator, Philip, who is Agnes's now-adult son, encounters the portrait of the mother he never knew, he condescendingly muses upon her beauty and uncannily animate expression. But his mother soon makes clear that she wields the real power in this exchange between image and viewer. The trajectory of his scopophilic gaze reverses to become the charged path by which she induces a systemic relay of sensations within his body and mind. In this way, she handily enlists him in her cause of reincarnation without revealing its particulars to him in the process. She "masquerades" in Mary Ann Doane's sense of actively pursuing her private agenda while hiding behind the "decorative layer" of hyperbolized femininity found in her image (138), and the enamored Philip falls easy victim to her manipulation. During three distinct possessions, all of which include, to some degree, her metaphorically sexualized penetration of his body, she makes Philip confront his father about taking in a young woman (her cousin's daughter) who is identical to her in name and appearance. This summoned doppelganger serves as the new, permanent vessel of the elder Agnes's spirit, which has escaped the confines of the ostensibly dead canvas. From portrayed figure to "flesh and blood" character, Agnes proves her superior understanding of oedipal desire and the vulnerabilities of the voyeur. Philip feels heroic as well, but is comically deluded, as his mother has determined his actions and his fate, including his marriage to his cousin/mother. Oliphant empowers the "unseen" but palpably present woman through her "seen" image to play upon and subvert the patriarchal dynamics of the oedipal triangle, which Freud would not formally theorize for at least a decade.