Of Monsters and Mirrors: Art and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

This dissertation examines depictions of monsters in nineteenth-century British art. It defines monsters as hybrid creatures or doubles who distort human actions and ideals, often by formal or conceptual repetitions, splits, or reversals. These twin tropes, monster and monstrous double, figure in works by Joseph Mallord William Turner, Joseph Noel Paton, and George Frederic Watts, registering the contradictions—political, ethical, logistical, or otherwise—of the British Empire in the Victorian period. Monstrosity and its doublings foiled the rhetorical justifications for British imperialism by exposing the shortcomings of some of its most expedient dualisms: peace and war, avenger and insurgent, sovereign and subject, hero and monster, civilization and primitivism. British painting, in its capacity to depict monsters and to stage encounters with monstrosity, reveals that these dualisms are mutually distorting mirror images. The supposed protagonist meets not his adversary but his double, and notions of self and other, of British artists and their colonial counterparts, begin to merge.