Excerpt from Book II Chapter 19:

‘Language is a finer medium ... gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere colored superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment.—This woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice, pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of her.’ (191)

Question:

What differences between printed text and the visual arts in representing human experience does this passage suggest, and how are these potential differences illustrated in Middlemarch?

Answer:

The quoted passage is an amalgamation of what is said by Casaubon’s young cousin, Will Ladislaw, during the latter’s argument with the German artist Adolf Naumann with regards to representing Dorothea. Naumann wishes to paint her, but Ladislaw is against this, asserting language to be the superior way of representing women. He goes on to point out what is missing when one attempts to portray people through the visual arts medium: personal ‘movement and tone,’ such as breathing and voice (191). In fact, he is revealing the sensory limitation of the pictorial format, more directly so as he challenges Naumann with the powerfully succinct question of how he would ‘paint [a woman’s] voice’ (191). After all, one’s voice is intangible and cannot be seen. It can only be heard or indirectly conveyed through verbal descriptions. There is no way to represent a voice, not to mention different ones, solely through image.

A distinction between the textual and pictorial form lies in nuance. Given the higher level of abstraction inherent to language, texts contain more subtle and complex portrayals than pictures. A few moments before Ladislaw states that ‘[l]anguage is a finer medium,’ he also claims that Naumann overreaches the expressive capability of paintings (191). In Ladislaw’s view, words can elevate one’s ideas of someone or something, whereas paintings unsettle and dampen those ideas. A potential reason may be that the expressiveness of art is restricted by the traditional and popular use of religious imagery. Evidence of this is Ladislaw’s own susceptibility to such influences as he confesses that he will probably depict a female character as heavily Christian. Paintings of this kind, with their adherence to rigid conventions of religious art which have persisted through the ages, thus stare at the viewers ‘with an insistent imperfection’ produced by generalising and over-simplifying individuals (191). When the author, George Eliot, describes Dorothea as being a picture of Santa Barbara, Eliot is aware that this image conveys little besides tranquility, which may explain her quickness to mention the character’s energetic speech and emotion. As we see Eliot proposing and herself using a variety of approaches to represent and understand human consciousness and character, we discover that words may be more effective in communicating the multifacetedness of human nature.

In other words, although information from printed text and paintings are both absorbed by sight, the resulting mental representation of people and objects seem to be more exclusively visual and thus ‘flatter’ in the visual arts medium. Compared to pictures, words are generally better able to convey the whole of someone’s character. Corresponding this is Ladislaw’s belief that ‘the true seeing is within’: this statement may refer to how knowledge about a person’s internal world is essential to understanding that person accurately. For example, after Dorothea replies arrogantly to Mr. Casaubon in an earlier discussion concerning her possible companions in Rome, readers learn that an immediate fear of being wrong prompts her to move and put her hand on his, besides changing her tone and manner of speech to sound more appreciative of his thoughtfulness. She then simultaneously experiences feelings of gladness at leaving Mr. Casaubon and of shame for being inexplicably annoyed by him. As Dorothea’s moment-by-moment psychological state and motivations behind her actions are revealed via a textual medium, she is closer to people in society who carry on daily interactions. Thus being far more than her outward appearance, she is the opposite of ‘a mere colored superficies’ (191). Indeed, Eliot’s description of Dorothea in the scene even coincides with the elements of voice, ‘movement and tone’ as mentioned by Ladislaw (191).

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