Picturing Sympathy: Felicia Hemans’s Portraits and Portrait Poems

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article situates Felicia Hemans’s portrait poems in the context of the sentimental portrait poem genre and the conditions of reception created by the literary annuals. By suggesting that all images are subject to interpretation and that all interpretations are expressions of the viewer’s desires, Hemans challenges the sentimental portrait poems’ insistence that portraits transparently reveal the minds, hearts, and souls of their subjects. In recasting the ekphrastic conflict between the verbal and visual arts, between poem and portrait, as a struggle between the woman artist and the viewer over her reception and interpretation, Hemans critiques the literary annuals’ use of author portraits to foster a sympathetic connection between authors and readers. While Hemans sought to manage her image by withholding her portraits from circulation, after her death, engravings of these portraits became widely available and were used by the similarly proliferating memoirs and biographies to represent competing versions of “Mrs. Hemans”. The posthumous use of portraits to shape Hemans’s persona has tended to overwrite both her own self-fashioning and her critique of the annuals and sentimental portrait rhetoric.