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between individualized, more physiologically-based emotion and culturally constructed conventions of human expression, and she claims that the weakness in Pre-Raphaelite style "isdue, therefore, to the difficulty of recognising the extent of their dependence on the actions and behaviour of social life" (92). This reader was hard pressed, however, to understand how her extended reading of William Holman Hunt's TheFlightof Madelaine and Porphyro during theDrunkenness Attendingthe Revelry(TheEve of St. Agnes) (1848) was intended to prove this point. And some arguments for influence (that the Pre-Raphaelites drew ideas from contemporary handbooks on acting, for instance) are alleged rather than documented. A more demanding editing process might have made argumentative coherence more explicit, as well as eliminating a handful of minor but unnecessary errors (for instance, subject/verb agreement on pages 94 and 95, a misnumbered reference to a plate on page 161). Without more compelling argumentative control, the book cannot fully deliver on the promise that its rich subject matter offers: to provide a comprehensive account of Victorian conceptions of emotion and character that successfully bridges disciplinary boundaries. ROSEMARY JANN Mason University George

Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting, by Susan Sidlauskas;pp. xvi + 230. Cambridge and New York:Cambridge University Press, 2000, 50.00, $75.00. "The nineteenth-century, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling," Walter Benjamin remarks in his notes towards the ArcadesProject(1999). "Itconceived the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling's interior" (220). Painters of the period, as Susan Sidlauskas shows in her fascinating new book, not only recognized this social fact, but exploited its expressive possibilities. On their canvases, they explored the ways in which subjectivity could be represented through the juxtaposition of figures and space: the subjectivity at stake was at once that of artist, pictorial protagonist, and spectator. Painting makes us reconsider how we Body,Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century look at pictures of people in rooms. Importantly, Sidlauskas counteracts the critical compulsion-one which many contemporary critics at the time could not resist-to view these works as narratives, puzzling out the dynamics of relationships past, present, and future, and reading iconographic significance into items of furniture, pictures on a wall, fabric, and flowers. Instead, this book leads us to interpret not the signifying properties of things in themselves, but the spaces between them: gaps which dramatize a lack of communication, a sense of discomfort, the enactment of an identity-or, increasingly, the reluctance to offer up to the viewer any legible or coherent sense of human interiority. Drawing intelligently on recent theories of spatiality and perception, particularly those of Michel de Certeau, Anthony Vidler, and Beatriz Colomina, as well as looking back to Heinrich Wolfflin and Benjamin himself, Sidlauskas suggests how these paintings intentionally provoke an emotional, even a visceral response, rather than demanding a more deliberative decoding. The argument is developed by way of a detailed discussion of four paintings:

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Edgar Degas's Interior(1868-69), a scene notorious (especially under its popular title The Rape) for its opacity, in which a clothed man stands on one side of a sparsely furnished bedroom, a semi-clothed woman huddles on the floor opposite, with an open sewing-box center-stage on a table; John Singer Sargent's Daughters of EdwardDarley Boit (1882), where the four girls, dwarfed in a shadowy Parisian foyer, project various stages of child development without apparently making human contact with one another; Edouard Vuillard's Mother Sister theArtist(1893), the older woman sitting with a solid defiance, and of the younger curiously cramped within the pictorial space, and threatening to merge with the wallpaper in a manner uncannily proleptic of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's disturbed narrator; and Walter Sickert's gloomy depiction of emotional stasis, Ennui (1914), with its employment and evocation of what Virginia Woolf tellingly described as "agreat stretch of silent territory" (qtd. 128). These case studies are preceded by an illuminating chapter on the innovative theories of the drawing teacher Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, who, in his class at the "Petite Ecole," in Paris, encouraged his students to depict what they imagined and felt as well as what they saw, by means of understanding the ways in which one its does not merely perceive space but actively experiences effects on the body. As Sidlauskasnotes, Lecoq developed his theory at the same time that the realist playwrightVictorien Sardou started to exploit the significance of stage props, recognizinglike Honore de Balzac or, a little later, Emile Zola-the potential eloquence of furniture, both on its own and in relationship to a room's inhabitants. Other artistswhom she treats were fascinated by the suggestive powers of the stage as well: not just Degas, with his portraits of dancers, and Sickert, with his music hall studies, but Vuillard who, as we are reminded, was involved with the Theatre de l'Oeuvre, which staged not only puppet plays, but plays in which the actors performed as if they were puppets, and hence developed a repertoire of gestures which could be used to invoke the irrational and mysterious rather than traits of an individualized psychology. The analogy with the stage, however, goes far beyond this. Sidlauskas convincingly shows how, as the century progressed, the interiors treated by these artistswere increasingly interpreted as a stage onto which personality could be projected, with a correspondingly decreasing guarantee of any connection between what one sees of a person and a quintessential identity lurking beneath the surface. In other words, she reads what is going on in these paintings in relation to developing ideas concerning subjectivity and selfhood. Thus the Boit girls are seen alongside latenineteenth-century theories concerning a child's growing sense of spatial orientation, and the recognition of adolescence as a time of self-absorption; Vuillard's sister's awkward, marionette-like posture is likened to the photographs of Jean Martin Charcot's patients of reproduced in the NouvelleIconographie his institution, the Salpetriere; the open and strangely luminous sewing-box, inevitably but not reductively, is brought into dialogue with Dora's infamous reticule. Whilst persuasive, in the context of the general emergence of contemporary theories of selfhood, the psychological contexts are occasionally tendentious. Biographical information, including thoughtful commentary on the artists' uneasy senses of their own identity, is sparingly but usefully furnished. Through a close scrutiny of their compositional genealogies, as well as comparison with analogous works, Sidlauskas makes each painting simultaneously uniquely evocative, and symptomatic of the gradual obliteration of individual interiority in the art of the period. Whilst a consideration of some other works might have complicated her argument-what of GwenJohn's self-portraits, say?-

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the overall achievement is an important one. By making us look at the suggestive properties of texture and shape, of color and surface, of gesture and, above all, of empty space, Sidlauskas has, most valuably, made us register the importance of these works as paintings, and not as surrogate works of literature. And yet, this is not a retreat into selfsufficient aesthetics: rather, it is a timely acknowledgment of the place of painterly style and composition within nineteenth-century cultural history. KATE FLINT New Brunswick RutgersUniversity,

Ruskin's Artists: Studies in the Victorian Visual Economy, edited by Robert Hewison; pp. xx + 244. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000, 47.50, $84.95. This collection from the Ruskin Programme at Lancaster University marks the centenary ofJohn Ruskin's death. Its twelve essays explore his "specific interventions" in the "Victorian visual economy" as art critic, adoring disciple, dogged polemicist, domineering patron, skittish friend, and devoted Protestant (1). The Victorian visual economy emerges as a complex system involving the constitution of middle-class power, a Protestant spiritualization of human and natural forms, and the force of desire moving between men and women, among men, and across classes. Hewison's introduction establishes the father-son relationship as "decisive"in Ruskin's "linkswith the artists he chose to support" from the 1830s to the mid-1860s (1). The watercolor landscapes his father bought were crucial to forming Ruskin's taste, and both aimed to move up "frommere collectors to active patrons" (5, 6).JohnJames rebuked Ruskin's "sicklonging" forJ. M. W. Turner though (qtd. 6), leaving him with "the desire for a parental love and approval alwayspotentially withheld" (7). Hewison locates a five-stage pattern both in the "quarrelsbetween father and son" as well as in Ruskin's relationships with various artists (11). "[A]dmiration" and art purchase are followed by "acquaintance" and "reinterand public praise; personal and critical "reappraisal" ensue, causing "rupture" pretation";finally, "retrospectivereconciliation" occurs (10-11). Ruskin's morally bound aesthetic agenda informs the full range of his interventions in the Victorianvisual economy, from championship of Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites to his reaction to representations of male and female bodies in art. In chapter 1, "'Candid and Earnest':The Rise of the Art Critic in the EarlyNineteenth Century,"Claire Wildsmith considers the field which Ruskin entered in the early 1840s as "anextension of the middleclass attack on traditional sources of power into the realm of the aesthetic" (16). Like his contemporaries, Ruskin sees landscape as "a moral guide," but in celebrating Turner Ruskin crosses established critics, such as George Darley, who disparages this art as "'exaggerated"' (18, 28, 19). Even William Hazlitt, who like Ruskin rejects neoclassical aesthetics, regrets Turner's "wasteof morbid strength" (qtd. 21 ). At issue is the preservation of the "aristocracy taste"in the face of increasing class antagonisms played out through of the reception of art (22, 23). In chapter 2, 'The 'Dark Clue' and the Law of Help: Ruskin, Turner, and the Alan Davies studies an instance of Ruskin's development of a spiritualLiberStudiorum," ized aesthetic focused on landscape art. His interpretations of Turner's engravings

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