confounding images: photography and portraiture in antebellum american fictionby susan s. williams

Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

Confounding Images: Photography and Portraiture in Antebellum American Fiction by SusanS. WilliamsReview by: Shirley Teresa WajdaJournal of the Early Republic, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 164-166Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the EarlyAmerican RepublicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3124947 .

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JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC

To the degree that the book poses authorship against labor and biographical interests, its approach can be labeled "New Historicism" though it seems wise to avoid labels here. The work needs hard primary source data. Given its absence, Newbury can only "situate" his thesis, an imaginative exercise-like so many in the last decade-that often dazzles but seldom contributes to literary history.

Rosemary Mims Fisk is associate professor of history at Samford University and has published in Legacy, Studies in the American Renais- sance, and Resources for American Literary Studies. She is at work on a book about Hawthorne and his publisher, James T. Fields.

Confounding Images: Photography and Portraiture in Antebellum American Fiction. By Susan S. Williams. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Pp. xiv, 245. Illustrations. $38.95.)

"A picture is worth ten thousand words," the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius wrote, but review limitations allow only one thousand words to describe Susan S. Williams's masterful word-picture of the intersection of the verbal and visual arts in antebellum America. Photography's invention in 1839 may have threatened the traditional painter's craft, but this new form of "light writing" also challenged the writer's conception of the pictorial function of narrative. In particular, antebellum fiction writers employed the device of the photographic portrait in their novels and short stories to pose, contemplate, and debate the "confounding" of word and image, and to explore the somewhat contradictory meanings of portrait. Is a portrait a physiographic representation, a mere "map of the face," for example? Or is a portrait a revelatory agent, drawing forth hidden characteristics of the portrayed? Through these writers' efforts, abetted by the contemporaneous revolution in book and magazine publishing, the reception of photography by the American public was shaped. Thus, Williams's work is more than literary criticism and history. With its perceptive attention to the technological limitations and material aspects of early photography and publishing, to the historical conditions of the printing, distribution, and reading of fiction, and to the larger issues of aesthetic theory, Confounding Images is in itself revelatory analysis of the complexities of an historical cultural moment.

The history of portraiture in the antebellum period constitutes the

subject of the brief first chapter, "The Portrait and the Social Construction of Ekphrasis." Artists and critics alike debated the purpose of art in the early republic, and the portrait form itself, denigrated by some for its

To the degree that the book poses authorship against labor and biographical interests, its approach can be labeled "New Historicism" though it seems wise to avoid labels here. The work needs hard primary source data. Given its absence, Newbury can only "situate" his thesis, an imaginative exercise-like so many in the last decade-that often dazzles but seldom contributes to literary history.

Rosemary Mims Fisk is associate professor of history at Samford University and has published in Legacy, Studies in the American Renais- sance, and Resources for American Literary Studies. She is at work on a book about Hawthorne and his publisher, James T. Fields.

Confounding Images: Photography and Portraiture in Antebellum American Fiction. By Susan S. Williams. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Pp. xiv, 245. Illustrations. $38.95.)

"A picture is worth ten thousand words," the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius wrote, but review limitations allow only one thousand words to describe Susan S. Williams's masterful word-picture of the intersection of the verbal and visual arts in antebellum America. Photography's invention in 1839 may have threatened the traditional painter's craft, but this new form of "light writing" also challenged the writer's conception of the pictorial function of narrative. In particular, antebellum fiction writers employed the device of the photographic portrait in their novels and short stories to pose, contemplate, and debate the "confounding" of word and image, and to explore the somewhat contradictory meanings of portrait. Is a portrait a physiographic representation, a mere "map of the face," for example? Or is a portrait a revelatory agent, drawing forth hidden characteristics of the portrayed? Through these writers' efforts, abetted by the contemporaneous revolution in book and magazine publishing, the reception of photography by the American public was shaped. Thus, Williams's work is more than literary criticism and history. With its perceptive attention to the technological limitations and material aspects of early photography and publishing, to the historical conditions of the printing, distribution, and reading of fiction, and to the larger issues of aesthetic theory, Confounding Images is in itself revelatory analysis of the complexities of an historical cultural moment.

The history of portraiture in the antebellum period constitutes the

subject of the brief first chapter, "The Portrait and the Social Construction of Ekphrasis." Artists and critics alike debated the purpose of art in the early republic, and the portrait form itself, denigrated by some for its

164 164

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necessary reliance on imitation and lauded by others for that very same characteristic, served as a catalyst for these debates. Yet portraits were popular in America, and popularly displayed portraits of statesmen and heroes-from Peale's pantheon of Revolutionary War heroes to printed collections of the American presidents and other distinguished personages, to, of course, Mathew Brady's "Gallery of Illustrious Americans" (42)- meant that the portraits painted in words (the meaning of ekphrasis) in antebellum novels depicted, in the main, men. Not that women were exempt from these pantheons of virtuous individuals, but as framed in short-story fiction (and not, interestingly, in book-length treatments) port- raits of women "supported masculine subjectivity through their status as silent objects of desire" (26). Too, fictional portraits of women served as "protective talismans" (26), circulating among and influencing their owners' actions and destinies. Fictional portraits of women, by mirroring the seductive power of circulating images, threatened the writer's power. Photographic images in particular were meant to be exchanged and could quickly become objects of speculation. In turn, writers sought through plot and narrative to contain the portrait's power. The irony of antebellum authors' use of portraits in their fiction-more widely circulating because of innovations in print production and distribution-is that writers' efforts to contain or suppress images advertised the very power and appeal of those images.

The next two chapters explore these issues by analyzing the variety of responses to photographic portraits by antebellum authors and readers. Chapter two, "'The Inconstant Daguerreotype': The Narrative of Early Photography," explores the American reception of this first form of photographic image-a silvercoated copper plate appearing to be both a mirror of the viewer and a container for a lifelike portrait. It is the daguerreotype's fluctuating form that in early stories allowed the reader "to see themselves in the mirror of the daguerreotype, encouraging them not only to think about the implications of a new technology, but also to place themselves in fictions that, like the daguerreotype, were looking for ever- increasing circulation" (63). "The Haunted Portrait and Models of Authorship in Periodicals and Gift Books" (Chapter three) further this discussion about circulation and competition by exploring two genres found in the popular reading matter of the day: the Gothic and the sentimental. Gothic "haunted portraits," especially in the hands of Nathaniel Hawthorne or Edgar Allan Poe, undermined domestic stability, while sentimental authors' fictional portraits assured or restored family order. Such stories, reprinted and thus more widely circulated in gift annuals and magazines, became promiscuous in that readers could be men or women, working class or genteel-and no longer legible to the author.

BOOK REVIEWS 165

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JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC

Case studies of authors and their works comprise the last three chapters. The encompassing role of the market concerns Hawthorne and his very successful domestic romance, The House of the Seven Gables (1851), in which public portraits may mask truth and private portraits reveal it. (How would this apply to Hawthorne's 1852 campaign biography of his friend and public man Franklin Pierce?) Herman Melville's own failed domestic novel Pierre (1852), in which portraits are seen as "images that conflate original and copy and thereby erase an authentic sense of self' (122), indicative of the market forces weakening the concept of originality and thus the author's power of creation. The Marble Faun, Hawthorne's work of 1860, is the topic of the last chapter. In this novel, which often served as a guidebook to English-speaking travelers in Italy, Hawthorne's employment of incomplete descriptions of artworks and an ambiguous ending demanded a certain type of "gentle reader" to "finish" the narrative. One must think here of the American abroad (but not Mark Twain) who, Hawthorne's novel in hand, had been prepared to see the sights sketched but not fully delineated. Indeed, throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century tourists purchased this work and photographic images to insert on blank pages for that express purpose-a fascinating body of evidence of how historical readers read. A short Afterword carries forward the analysis of photography and portraiture into the later nineteenth century.

Although written primarily for scholars of American literature, Confounding Images offers historians a complex portrait of American culture in the antebellum era. Unlike other studies that fight to assign static, binary categories to experience-highbrow/lowbrow, mascu- line/feminine, plebeian/genteel-this work measures historical exigencies in their moment rather than by their eventualities, and in so doing offers readers rich insights about representation, both visual and textual.

Shirley Teresa Wajda is assistant professor of history and American studies at Kent State University. She is currently completing work on nineteenth- century commercial portrait photography and the fashioning of the American middle class.

Rioting in America. By Paul A. Gilje. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xi, 240. $39.95.)

Paul A. Gilje's Rioting in America fulfills its title's promise as an encyclopedic study of over four thousand discreet events that Gilje classifies as riots. These range from Culpepper's rebellion in 1677 to rioting in Chicago following the Bulls' National Basketball Association

Case studies of authors and their works comprise the last three chapters. The encompassing role of the market concerns Hawthorne and his very successful domestic romance, The House of the Seven Gables (1851), in which public portraits may mask truth and private portraits reveal it. (How would this apply to Hawthorne's 1852 campaign biography of his friend and public man Franklin Pierce?) Herman Melville's own failed domestic novel Pierre (1852), in which portraits are seen as "images that conflate original and copy and thereby erase an authentic sense of self' (122), indicative of the market forces weakening the concept of originality and thus the author's power of creation. The Marble Faun, Hawthorne's work of 1860, is the topic of the last chapter. In this novel, which often served as a guidebook to English-speaking travelers in Italy, Hawthorne's employment of incomplete descriptions of artworks and an ambiguous ending demanded a certain type of "gentle reader" to "finish" the narrative. One must think here of the American abroad (but not Mark Twain) who, Hawthorne's novel in hand, had been prepared to see the sights sketched but not fully delineated. Indeed, throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century tourists purchased this work and photographic images to insert on blank pages for that express purpose-a fascinating body of evidence of how historical readers read. A short Afterword carries forward the analysis of photography and portraiture into the later nineteenth century.

Although written primarily for scholars of American literature, Confounding Images offers historians a complex portrait of American culture in the antebellum era. Unlike other studies that fight to assign static, binary categories to experience-highbrow/lowbrow, mascu- line/feminine, plebeian/genteel-this work measures historical exigencies in their moment rather than by their eventualities, and in so doing offers readers rich insights about representation, both visual and textual.

Shirley Teresa Wajda is assistant professor of history and American studies at Kent State University. She is currently completing work on nineteenth- century commercial portrait photography and the fashioning of the American middle class.

Rioting in America. By Paul A. Gilje. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xi, 240. $39.95.)

Paul A. Gilje's Rioting in America fulfills its title's promise as an encyclopedic study of over four thousand discreet events that Gilje classifies as riots. These range from Culpepper's rebellion in 1677 to rioting in Chicago following the Bulls' National Basketball Association

166 166

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