ABSTRACT
National icons are complex signs, combining iconic, indexical, and symbolic functions. Taking these categories in the sense adumbrated by Charles Sanders Peirce (1960: 156–73), Britannia, as an icon, may be said to be iconic in that she resembles her object, the state of Great Britain (the way in which she does this will be discussed further); as an index, she points to the country or to those aspects of it (its constitution, economic status, naval or colonial power, etc.) that are relevant in a given context; as a symbol, she becomes a conventional sign, on par with other conventional signs (the Crown, the Royal Coat of Arms, etc.), which are read by their interpretants as referring unproblematically to their immediate objects. Like all signs, national icons such as Britannia are susceptible to two sorts of semiotic manipulation. In their official capacity, as controlled by government or other approved agencies, they aspire to a certain fixity and stasis, one that ensures both their immediate recognition (as signs referring to what Peirce describes as an “immediate object”) and the control of their meaning. To help ensure this relative monovalence and fixity, their agreed attributes are closely guarded and rigorously observed. Furthermore, the icon itself is embodied in forms – coins, seals, statues and monuments, printed images such as postage stamps – that are officially commissioned or approved, and that cannot legally be tampered with. However, the potential multivalence and versatility of any icon immediately becomes 136released when it is removed from a controlled context and inserted in a field of wider reference. In such a situation, the dynamic potential of the icon is unleashed, particularly in association with other images with which it may come into contact in its unofficial context. This is especially true in posters, caricatures, or other satirical images, whose prime function is precisely to multiply the suggestive connotations of the icon, to humorous, subversive, or parodic effect. The corpus of images of Britannia that will be studied in this chapter will be largely divided into these two domains: official or conventional images – coins, stamps, sculpture – and satirical or subversive images – caricatures and cartoons. But before moving on to examine this corpus in detail, I make here a few more remarks on the semiotic complexity of the icon.
