The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype 9780812206340

Citation preview

The Camera and the Press

MATERIAL TEXTS Series Editors Roger Chartier Leah Price Joseph Farrell Peter Stallybrass Anthony Grafton Michael F. Suarez, S.J. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

The Camera and the Press American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype

Marcy J. Dinius

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation. Copyright 䉷 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress isbn 978-0-8122-4404-5

In memory of my father, and for my family

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Contents

Introduction

1

1. The Daguerreotype in Antebellum American Popular Print

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2. Daguerreian Romanticism: The House of the Seven Gables and Gabriel Harrison’s Portraits

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3. ‘‘Some ideal image of the man and his mind’’: Melville’s Pierre and Southworth & Hawes’s Daguerreian Aesthetic

86

4. Slavery in Black and White: Daguerreotypy and Uncle Tom’s Cabin

126

5. ‘‘My daguerreotype shall be a true one’’: Augustus Washington and the Liberian Colonization Movement

154

6. Seeing a Slave as a Man: Frederick Douglass, Racial Progress, and Daguerreian Portraiture

192

Epilogue. ‘‘An Old Daguerreotype’’

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Notes

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Bibliography

279

Index

295

Acknowledgments

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Introduction

In March 1839, Samuel F. B. Morse wrote to Louis-Jacques-Mande´ Daguerre with an irresistible proposition: I’ll show you my telegraph if you show me your daguerreotypes. Morse was traveling in Europe to secure patents for and promote his recent invention when Daguerre’s new image-making process was announced in Paris. An accomplished painter as well as an inventor who had experimented unsuccessfully with photochemical imaging in the early 1820s, Morse was especially eager to examine his fellow artist-inventor’s images firsthand and before they were made public.1 He exploited not only his and Daguerre’s common pursuits but also the ancient correlation of word and image to establish an instant intimacy between the men and their machines.2 He wrote about what he saw in a letter to his brother-editor Sidney E. Morse, who published an extract from the letter in the New-York Observer on April 20. The extract begins by proclaiming the daguerreotype ‘‘one of the most beautiful discoveries of the age’’ and concludes by boldly predicting that the medium will achieve ‘‘perfect representations of the human countenance’’ and ‘‘reveal the secrets of ‘microscopic nature.’ ’’3 Photography began as daguerreotypy, yet daguerreotypy is both like and unlike subsequent forms of photography.4 When we look at a daguerreian image, we recognize it as a photograph for the way that it captures a moment in space and time in fine detail through the exposure of photosensitized materials to light and chemicals rather than through the marks of an artist’s brush or an engraver’s burin. But if we look more closely, the incomparable sharpness of this type of photographic image becomes visible, even more so with a magnifying glass; to achieve such resolution using modern digital imaging technology would require a camera capable of a staggering 140,000 megapixel resolution.5 When viewed firsthand, the polished silver surface of the daguerreian image plate further distinguishes it from all other kinds of photography. Because this mirror-like surface both holds the image and reflects back the viewer in the act of looking at it, a

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Introduction

daguerreotype is viewable only in raking light; its image reverses from positive to negative and seems to disappear altogether until the viewer finds the right angle.6 Finally, unlike the mass reproducible images of negative-topositive and digital photographic processes, each daguerreotype is a unique direct-positive image, laterally reversed from the original orientation of its subject. Multiples could be made only by daguerreotyping an original daguerreotype or by using a camera with more than one lens to record simultaneous, but slightly different, exposures of the same subject. For all of these reasons, photographic reproductions of daguerreotypes, including those in this book, cannot do them justice—a material fact that is easy to overlook in our tendency to focus on the image instead of the medium. As these details only begin to suggest, daguerreotypes are extraordinarily complex images and objects. In my effort to come to terms with this complexity and its cultural implications, The Camera and the Press focuses on daguerreotypy where it was experienced, practiced, and written about most extensively—in the antebellum United States. A good deal of important work has been done on the daguerreotype in America; Robert Taft, Richard Rudisill, Beaumont Newhall, Alan Trachtenberg, John Wood, and Susan S. Williams, among others, have taken on its aesthetic and cultural significance in the antebellum period.7 The Camera and the Press distinguishes itself from these works by building its arguments on another crucial, but neglected material fact: that America’s initial encounter with daguerreotypy was textual rather than visual.8 Before most people ever saw an actual daguerreotype, they encountered this new imaging medium through written descriptions like Morse’s that were published and rapidly reprinted throughout the country. I contend that we have lost sight of this mediation and its significance to how we see photography even today because popular discourse about photography has conditioned us to think about the medium as unmediated since 1839.9 The Camera and the Press focuses on the extensive print record of the daguerreotype’s introduction and incorporation into antebellum American culture so that we are able to see this idea of photography as an unmediated form of representation under construction from the beginning. Looking closely at the scaffolding of what has become almost an instinctive way of seeing photography allows us to understand this way of seeing as a human artifact rather than as a natural process or a technological effect. Here I have in mind Michael Warner’s important warning against granting technology ‘‘an ontological status prior to culture’’: he reminds us ‘‘that the

Introduction

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practices of technology . . . are always structured, and that their meaningful structure is the dimension of culture.’’10 Recognizing language’s role in structuring the practice of photography makes the two cultures—print and visual—visible as one. Because of our own disciplinary divisions— themselves products of the nineteenth century—we have tended to consider print and visual culture separately, comparatively, or even competitively. The Camera and the Press insists on their inextricability, complicating our ideas about not only early photography and print at the beginning of their mass dissemination but also, and necessarily, about nineteenth-century culture more broadly. The first reports of a remarkable discovery in France appeared in French and British newspapers in early 1839. These reports were quickly reprinted by New York and Boston editors keeping up on the latest news from abroad. In turn, editors of newspapers published in smaller American cities reprinted these reprints, thus making the introduction of photography in the United States entirely imported, textual, and mediated to an extent that literary, art historical, and new media scholarship all have yet to examine. This mediation continued as the first Americans to view Daguerre’s images, including Morse, published their impressions of them for curious readers who could not encounter the French images otherwise. It also extended to the production of the first daguerreotypes made in the United States: using translated manuals and summaries published in periodicals, American inventors, artists, and casual experimenters quickly learned Daguerre’s complicated process and began working to improve upon it. Newly established trade publications featured news of the latest innovations, including techniques for shortening exposure times, enhancing and permanently fixing the image on the plate, and posing sitters to ensure their satisfaction with their portraits. And in popular periodicals, potential sitters encountered the process even before entering the studio by reading short stories that dramatized the daguerreian portrait’s fidelity in capturing its subject’s inner character as well as his or her appearance. Newspapers and magazines also commonly included essays that celebrated the daguerreotype as advancing American values, praising it as the first democratic form of portraiture because it could be made so much more cheaply and quickly than a painting. As this last observation suggests, recognizing the inextricability of print and visual culture in the daguerreian age introduces visual culture into conversations about the expansion of capitalism and nationalism and about the public sphere in the United States that have been dominated by print.11

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The Camera and the Press examines how writings about daguerreotypy, the industrialized manufacture of daguerreotypes and supplies to the trade, and actual daguerreian images all effectively ‘‘Americanized’’ the imported daguerreotype and used daguerreotypy to advance a national self-image based on principles of progress, industry, and democracy. The chapters that follow also introduce and consider several daguerreotypes and writings about daguerreotypy that contradict this self-image by capturing the realities of slavery, gender difference, and economic inequality in antebellum America. Thus The Camera and the Press necessarily widens its view from print and visual culture to analyze how popular discussions about daguerreotypy permeated and influenced social and political discourse in the antebellum United States. I argue that many Americans used the opportunity of coming to terms with the daguerreotype to work out their feelings, ideas, and beliefs about themselves and other people, history and progress, and time and place. Alan Liu has ‘‘hypothesized that all major changes in the socio-cultural order are channeled symbolically and/or instrumentally through narratives of media change’’ and observes that such narratives ‘‘are thus less objective accounts than speculative bargaining positions.’’12 For such narratives about daguerreotypy, The Camera and the Press looks to print, where we see a range of writers making claims about its mechanical objectivity and naturalness to negotiate such vexing political issues as nationalism, democracy, slavery, and civil rights. Daguerreotypy also comes into focus amid aesthetic concerns about what counts as art, what traits an artist should possess, and the relationship of the arts to each other and to science, as philosophers and practitioners publish revised or new theories about the arts. At the same time, the purported self-creation and selfevidence of the daguerreotype reanimates and mediates scientific and philosophical attempts to define objectivity, subjectivity, humanity, and reality in treatises written for specialists and circulating more widely.13 I examine through a series of case studies this interpenetration of public and professional discourses by discussions of daguerreotypy conducted in popular print, arguing that descriptions of and narratives about the medium offered a range of writers a different set of terms for engaging with new and old ideas and problems. In some cases, as we will see, this new medium and vocabulary opened up new ways of thinking; in others, they were invoked to defend old and obdurate habits of mind. Like the history of photography in America, The Camera and the Press begins with writings about daguerreotypy before bringing specific

Introduction

5

daguerreian images into view. Liu has proposed that we understand such ‘‘narratives of new media encounter’’ as ‘‘the elementary form of media theory—the place from which all meta-discourse about media starts’’ (5). The archive of writings about daguerreotypy assembled here from a diverse array of antebellum American print publications thus becomes the starting point for all subsequent theorizations of photography. Yet neither the structure of the book nor its analysis of more written texts than of daguerreotypes should be understood to privilege the former over the latter. Similarly, it is worth noting that the close reading of both texts and images in this book is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. And the end that I have in sight is better understanding the cycle of mediation and influence between print and daguerreotypy so that we see their relationship as mutual, not hierarchical. The case study and close reading are, of course, the dominant methodologies in literary analysis; they have been embraced as well by art history.14 Yet I adopt each deliberately rather than habitually because of their adaptability and suitability to a multidisciplinary inquiry that is as interested in the big picture as it is in the small. Lisa Gitelman points out in her important study of media as historical subjects that ‘‘[t]he advantage of offering finely grained case studies is that it allows . . . complexities to emerge.’’15 Her metaphor, when taken literally, is especially relevant to the case of daguerreotypy: powerful modern imaging technology now allows us to see that the unrivaled degree of detail possible in daguerreian images is the result of fine grains of silver concentrating in different amounts with their exposure to chemicals and light.16 In taking such a molecular-level view of either a daguerreotype or a text, we inevitably lose sight of even the small picture (the specific daguerreotype or text) until we pull back to a wider view. But we necessarily make different sense of both the small and the bigger contextual picture once we have had such a close look at their component parts. There are limitations to both micro- and macroscopic seeing and their synthesis, of course, but keeping this in mind serves as a reminder that all interpretation is, itself, a form of representation.17 My literalization of Gitelman’s metaphor also returns us to daguerreotypy’s distinguishing material properties and reminds us amid all of these descriptions of daguerreotypy that there are important reasons for seeing the daguerreotype as both an image and an object—as part of material culture—and not just as a product of its mediation through language. The Camera and the Press contends that the materiality of daguerreotypy

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matters in several ways.18 As Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart explain, ‘‘Materiality translates the abstract and representational ‘photography’ into ‘photographs’ as objects that exist in time and space.’’19 More specifically, I want to call our attention to how the simultaneously haptic and optic experience of holding and looking at an actual daguerreotype shortens the distance between past and present—and, in a daguerreian portrait, between self and other—as we register that a nineteenth-century viewer would have held and moved the very object in our hand in the same way that we must to view its image. Recognizing one’s own image reflected back on the surface that holds the image—actually seeing oneself in another’s portrait— allows for a moment of visual identification that has the potential to activate an imaginative identification with someone who might appear so distant and different at first glance or in another medium. This experience reminds us as well that this mirror has held other faces; seeing oneself both in the image of the daguerreotype’s subject and in the act of seeing makes it easier to imagine nineteenth-century viewers doing the same. Unless you happen to have a daguerreotype on hand or remember seeing one for yourself, you will have to take me at my word; the photographic reproductions of daguerreotypes that appear in this book cannot reproduce these material effects. Yet there is something to this mediation: your experience of reading my description of what a daguerreotype looks like and my claims about how looking at and holding a daguerreotype might affect the imagination structurally resemble the experience of an antebellum American reader who first encountered daguerreotypy through newspapers, magazines, poetry, and novels. I encourage you to seek out an actual daguerreotype as you read or after you have finished; encountering one is an untranslatable multisensory experience. Seeing and holding an actual daguerreotype also would provide a different sense of the ways in which being introduced to daguerreotypy by reading about it before seeing it inflects the experience of viewing a daguerreotype and of how this experience, in turn, shapes subsequent textual encounters with not only daguerreotypes but also characters, places, and moments in time that are figuratively daguerreotyped. With these suggestions I do not mean to privilege seeing over reading but rather to point up the range of experiential and imaginative possibilities for thinking about issues of reception and experience, and not just production, in the daguerreian age and in our own. The chapters that follow examine how a range of American writers contributed to popular, professional, and political conversations about

Introduction

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daguerreotypy; established, then borrowed on, its representational capacities; and engaged with its materiality. Some of the texts I examine describe these new images and objects for curious readers who could not encounter them otherwise and train potential daguerreian subjects on how and how not to behave in front of the camera. Others take daguerreotypy as an occasion to debate the importance of imitation versus imagination in art and use this new form of representation to reconsider age-old philosophical questions. And some seize on the possibility of an imagined identification between the viewing subject and the subject of the daguerreian image and attempt to approximate these material effects through fictional and figurative daguerreotypes as part of efforts to end slavery, to transform a colony into a country, and to establish the black race’s humanity. As I have suggested, as part of my analysis of these images and texts, I consider how different types of nineteenth-century Americans might have viewed and read them. I do so in the interest of understanding how their range of experiences—or at least writers’ and daguerreotypists’ ideas about these experiences—shaped the production of texts and images and to argue that production and consumption are as inextricable and mutually mediating as word and image. I also try to imagine how these experiences may have opened up other ways of experiencing the world, from understanding time and history differently and reading novels in new ways to empathizing with the suffering of slaves and recognizing blacks as human beings. Of course, it is always more difficult to recover ephemeral experiences than solid objects. And as the best of book and art history and material culture studies teaches us, we necessarily experience such objects differently than people did in the past. In the chapters that follow, I look for written representations of different kinds of experience and incorporate what I have learned from my own firsthand interactions with some of the daguerreotypes that I discuss with attention to the layers of mediation inherent in both approaches. Once again, keeping mediation in the foreground places experience within the realm of representation as well and subjects it to analysis as such. Chapter 1 begins with the first reports about the invention of daguerreotypy that were reprinted from abroad in American newspapers and magazines. It examines how their French and British authors set about making this new imaging process knowable in terms of old ones, using a strategy of analogy that Gitelman argues is typical of responses to any ‘‘new’’ medium.20 These reports and their American equivalents analogize the

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Introduction

daguerreian image with that reflected in a mirror and with paintings, drawings made with a camera obscura, and engravings. As happens with any analogy, the daguerreotype emerges as both like and unlike the things to which it is compared. In the case of daguerreotypy, I argue, its simultaneous likeness and unlikeness to existing art forms proves significant well beyond these first attempts to understand its appearance and potential uses. As we will see, two competing ways of thinking about daguerreotypy emerge from this contradiction. One contends that the fine granular detail of the daguerreian image should be understood as the result of natural rather than human agency and, thus, as mechanically objective and accurate.21 The other asserts that the material characteristics of the medium—the fine detail, the reflectivity, and the flicker of the image between positive and negative in different angles of light—produce seemingly supernatural visual effects and require significant skill in the daguerreotypist to manage.22 I contend that these competing ideas of daguerreotypy—developed and held in productive tension in the popular periodical texts that are the focus of Chapter 1—make the daguerreotype available to be put to the aesthetic and political ends that Chapters 2 through 6 explore. Chapter 2 follows daguerreotypy’s textual history in America into the most explicit and extended engagement with daguerreotypy in American literature: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. I argue that Hawthorne borrows on popular descriptions of daguerreotypy’s material characteristics not only to define romance but also to transform one of his romance’s chapters into a narrative approximation of a daguerreotype. He does so, I contend, to defend the place of the imaginative in artistic creation against the encroachment of the idea of scientific objectivity on aesthetic standards. In Hawthorne’s romantic view, to remove the artist’s imagination from any form of art, including daguerreotypy, is to destroy art, not to perfect it. Similarly—and in the same moment that the reading public is introduced to Hawthorne’s fictional daguerreotypist Holgrave— the real-life daguerreotypist Gabriel Harrison defies the popular idea that his medium’s fidelity to reality and ability to freeze time are its most significant artistic accomplishments. His daguerreotypes, as well as his romantic writings about his work as a daguerreotypist, depict ideals and unfold fantastic stories. Both Hawthorne’s and Harrison’s aesthetic experiments, I contend, make a space for artistic imagination in the daguerreian age. In doing so, their words and images expose the idea of objectivity itself as a product of the imagination.

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Chapter 3 turns to even more anxious responses to the gaining influence of scientifically inflected conversations about image making on ideas of art and the artist. I read Herman Melville’s novel Pierre as a complicated objection to the emerging idea that art and science should be working together toward realizing less subjective forms of representation like the daguerreotype. The chapter situates the novel’s ideas about what counts as art within the context of classical and eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and nineteenth-century conversations about scientific objectivity, recognizing for the first time their influence on the novel’s previously misunderstood philosophy of artistic creation. Specifically, I argue that Melville traces the idea that the sun is the ultimate source of truth from nineteenth-century conversations about daguerreotypy back to Plato and uses Pierre to dramatize the artistic, philosophical, and individual consequences of fleeing the cave and committing to Truth as the ultimate aim of art. The chapter also reads Pierre in the light of several contemporary and insistently aestheticized portraits by the self-designated daguerreian ‘‘artists’’ Albert S. Southworth and Josiah Hawes. These images bring an important visual, and specifically daguerreian, dimension to the chapter’s consideration of daguerreotypy’s influence on aesthetic theory and practice during the rise of positivism and mechanical objectivity. Like Gabriel Harrison, Southworth and Hawes defied popular expectations of their medium, creating portraits that were more expressive than the mechanical likenesses produced by most daguerreotypists. But like Melville, they paid a professional price for their contrarian aesthetic, finding more critical recognition than popular success. Chapter 4 turns the book’s focus to writers who recognized the political ends to which ideas about daguerreotypy’s mechanical objectivity and its unique material qualities could be put, particularly with respect to the issues of race and slavery. As Alan Liu has observed, the ‘‘life story of the new media encounter plays out in the key registers of human significance,’’ including ‘‘[r]acial, gender, class, age, and other social relations’’ (7–8). I argue that Harriet Beecher Stowe strategically deploys daguerreotypy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin as both a rhetorical and material figuration to create a more affectively and politically powerful representation of slavery and its consequences. To ensure that readers see Tom, recognize themselves in his image, and, thus, feel for him and act on his behalf, the novel ‘‘must daguerreotype’’ him for its readers. The narrative also daguerreotypes its angelic heroine, Eva, so that her example in life and death as an abolitionist

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Introduction

will move readers to form themselves and their actions in her image. By borrowing from written descriptions of daguerreotypy that promote its mechanical objectivity and, thus, its fidelity to a verifiable reality, Stowe’s novel suggests that its most important fictional characters are real and like them; this ‘‘real presence’’ and likeness, in turn, will inspire readers to take real actions to end slavery. A new reading of the novel’s proposed solutions to the problem of slavery leads to Chapter 5, which follows Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s remaining black characters and the Hartford daguerreotypist Augustus Washington to Liberia. A committed abolitionist and colonizationist, Washington wrote a series of essays and letters condemning slavery and promoting black immigration to Africa. After emigrating himself in 1853, Washington daguerreotyped members of the first Liberian government. I use Washington’s understudied writings and portraits to consider the role of daguerreotypy and popular writings about the medium in ‘‘realizing’’ Liberia as a viable, if problematic, alternative to racial integration. Taking seriously both Stowe’s and Washington’s arguments in support of colonization realizes a more nuanced, if complicated, picture of the range of political positions on slavery, race relations, and citizenship that were available to both blacks and whites in public culture, fiction, and early photography. Chapter 6 focuses on Frederick Douglass’s writings about the representational virtues of the daguerreotype, with particular attention to his politicization of popular writing about the medium that stressed its mechanical objectivity and inspired public faith in daguerreotypy’s representational authority. In his newspaper writings and public lectures, Douglass seizes on other writers’ representations of the daguerreotype as a ‘‘natural’’ and impartial imaging process, recognizing the medium’s potential to contradict willful misrepresentations of blacks in images drawn by racist artists’ hands. Like Stowe, he also borrows on its mirror-like quality for its potential to bridge the distance between self and other by effecting their recognizable likeness as subjects on the surface of the image plate. In a daguerreian portrait, as Douglass sees it and wants others to see it, the slave becomes a man. To weigh this claim, the chapter looks closely at a rarely discussed daguerreian portrait of Douglass in profile for its resemblance to and differences from other daguerreotypes of Douglass, illustrations in the major ethnological texts of the day, and the infamous ‘‘anthropological’’ daguerreotypes of several slaves commissioned by Louis Agassiz and taken by J. T. Zealy. In light of such opposite purposes to which daguerreian

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portraiture could be put, I conclude, these images and the stories that people told about them ultimately reflect rather than reconcile the impossible binary of race in antebellum America. The Camera and the Press closes with a brief epilogue that considers selected reflections on daguerreotypy that began circulating in print later in the photographic age, when this once-new medium and its practitioners had become old and the details of the process nearly forgotten. Nostalgia for daguerreotypy at the turn of the century made it once more a popular topic of conversation; as happened in the first conversations about the medium, contradictory ideas about its technological and cultural significance emerged. From the vantage of retrospection, some saw daguerreotypy as a necessarily crude medium and process in its infancy that was replaced by improved forms of photographic imaging in its maturity; this narrative arc makes photography part of the larger narrative of technological progress. In the same moment, others reached the opposite conclusion—that daguerreotypy was the finest form of photography ever realized and, thus, that all subsequent photographic processes and media were inferior. Positioning daguerreotypy as such disrupts the progress narrative not just for photography but also for technology in general by insisting that more is lost than gained with the forward march of both innovation and time. Both are powerful stories; they remind us that to call any medium ‘‘new,’’ ‘‘old,’’ or ‘‘improved’’ is to place it in a plot. To attend to the place of narrative in media history, then, is to move beyond the limited paradigms of literature and photography and photography in literature to recognize the history of media as a form of literature and to understand narrative and literature themselves as forms of media. Friedrich Kittler argues that an ‘‘analysis that examines both the intersections and dividing lines between writing culture and image technology within a historical context is precisely a methodical preparation for the pressing question of what the status of writing or literature can be today.’’23 It is my hope that the analysis I offer with this book also helps answer the pressing question of what the status of literary studies can be today.

Chapter 1

The Daguerreotype in Antebellum American Popular Print

On the front page of the February 23, 1839, Boston Daily Advertiser, a brief article reprinted from Paris’s Journal des De´bats appeared under what had become a common headline in an age of concentrated scientific experimentation and innovation: ‘‘Remarkable Invention.’’1 The article begins, At a session of the Academy of Sciences, held the 8th of January, M. Arago gave an account of a curious invention lately made by M. Daguerre; for making drawings. The manner in which the camera obscura produces images of objects, by means of a lens, is well known. The new invention is a method of fixing the image permanently on the paper, or making a permanent drawing, by the agency of light alone; ten or fifteen minutes being amply sufficient for taking any view, though the time varies with the intensity of the light. By this machine M. Daguerre has made accurate drawings of the gallery of the Louvre and of Notre Dame; any object indeed, or any natural appearance may be copied by it—it reproduces the freshness of morning—the brilliancy of noon—the dim twilight and the dullness of a rainy day. The colours are marked by a gradation of shades similar to aqualuita [aquatint—ed.]. By first establishing the invention’s commonality with the old (the camera obscura), the article prepares readers for what is new and different—what is inventive and remarkable—about it: the ‘‘method of fixing the image permanently on the paper, or making a permanent drawing, by the agency of light alone.’’ The article assumes that readers are familiar with the camera obscura, which projects an optically precise image onto a medium that

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is incapable of retaining it without the intervention of an artist’s hand; it also implies that an artist must replicate by tracing the otherwise ephemeral image as it is projected onto paper or canvas. In the case of Daguerre’s ‘‘machine,’’ the article emphasizes, ‘‘light alone’’ is the copyist, making ‘‘accurate drawings’’ of ‘‘any object’’ or ‘‘any natural appearance.’’ What is most remarkable about Daguerre’s invention, then, is its unprecedented achievement of a simultaneously ‘‘natural’’ and mechanical—thus, an unmediated, objective, and scientific—means of representation. With Daguerre’s method, man is replaced by a machine that allows nature to record itself without human interference as art becomes a science. What is most remarkable about America’s, and much of the world’s, first encounter with this supposedly unmediated form of representation is just how mediated it was. Before anyone in the United States saw any actual daguerreotypes, they read about them in newspaper and magazine articles, such as the one published in the Boston Daily Advertiser. These articles were translated or reprinted from French and British periodicals by metropolitan editors keeping a keen eye out for the first word of exciting news from abroad to compete with rival papers. Their British sources were translating from the French, and the original French articles described the process by summarizing Franc¸ois Arago’s January 7, 1839, announcement of Daguerre’s invention at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. And significantly, at this first public announcement of the invention of what we now call photography, Arago only described the process and the appearance of the images without exhibiting any examples as Daguerre was in continuing negotiations with the French government for payment in return for the full details of his discovery.2 Though it has become easy for us to overlook from the perspective of the image-saturated present, photography thus came into public view verbally, not visually. Despite sustained scholarly attention to the invention of photography and to its incorporation into American culture, we have yet to register fully either the extent or the effects of its linguistic and textual mediation.3 This chapter closely reads a series of early responses to the daguerreotype— specifically, articles, essays, and stories that appeared in a range of popular antebellum U.S. print publications—to attend to the different phases of daguerreotypy’s incorporation into popular culture. In doing so, it reveals how the idea of photographic objectivity was necessarily a linguistic construction, emerging over time in a diverse array of print publications. By ‘‘photographic objectivity,’’ I mean our still strong cultural tendency to see

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the photographic image as capturing its subject ‘‘as it is’’ or was and, thus, to naturalize—even in the age of digital imaging, and after much theorization—what we know is an artificial means of representing the world.4 I contend that these tendencies have their origins in the linguistic and textual mediation of the first photographic images. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison make an extensive and compelling case that the idea of ‘‘blind sight,’’ or objectively ‘‘seeing without interference, interpretation, or intelligence,’’ first emerged in mid-nineteenthcentury discussions about scientific image making (17). ‘‘Over the course of the nineteenth century,’’ they explain, ‘‘scientists, from astronomers probing the very large to bacteriologists peering at the very small . . . began questioning their own traditions of idealizing representation. . . . What had been a supremely admirable aspiration for so long, the stripping away of the accidental to find the essential, became a scientific vice’’ as the ‘‘new epistemic virtue’’ of scientific objectivity was created (16). Yet Daston and Galison surprisingly dismiss the coincidence of the invention of photography and the rise of scientific objectivity as insignificant to their study, describing the former as one of several ‘‘remotely relevant’’ factors in the latter (35–36). In this chapter, I am not interested in establishing a causeand-effect relationship between early photography and the emergence of scientific objectivity but rather in attending to the invention of photography and its mediation in print as integral components within a broader history of objectivity and of media change. As the Journal des De´bats/Boston Daily Advertiser article begins to suggest, and as the readings that follow will illustrate more fully, writers represented the daguerreotype as straddling the categories of art and science that scientists increasingly were working to separate. Whereas Daston and Galison limit their history to the idea of scientific objectivity and argue that scientific and artistic images were ‘‘diametrically opposed’’ in the mid-nineteenth century (37), this chapter examines how the extended conversations about daguerreotypy that were conducted in print brought the issue of objectivity into conversations about artistic principles and into mid-nineteenth-century public culture more broadly. I establish how one strain of scientific and popular writing about daguerreotypy insisted on mechanical objectivity as the standard for evaluating both scientific and artistic image making and began to associate mechanically objective representation with morality, democracy, and progress. In using popular representations of daguerreotypy circulating in antebellum U.S. print publications to historicize the idea of photographic

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objectivity more specifically, this chapter also broadens and complicates our understanding of the history of objectivity itself. The subject of this chapter, then, is not so much daguerreotypy itself as it is writings about daguerreotypy—articles, essays, poems, and stories that attempt to describe the new medium’s material attributes and representational work and that aim to predict or represent its cultural effects. The first section of the chapter takes us to the beginning of the daguerreian age with the first known newspaper articles announcing the daguerreotype published in early 1839, recognizing how the reprint culture of midnineteenth-century periodicals mediated America’s introduction to daguerreotypy. I argue that this practice of reprinting resulted in the consolidation of a set of rhetorical strategies for representing the daguerreotype as both an image and an object in the more widely reproducible and available medium of print. The resulting message about the medium’s distinguishing representational and material characteristics set the terms for how people subsequently saw and wrote about daguerreotypy. From here, I move to the first descriptions of daguerreotypy by Americans for other Americans. I look at one example of the several letters written by visitors to Daguerre’s Paris studio that were published in U.S. newspapers and magazines both to satisfy readers’ curiosity about the invention and to verify that it was not a publicity hoax invented to generate newspaper sales. I also examine passages from representative articles reporting on the first exhibitions of images made by Daguerre in New York and Boston. As we will see, both kinds of eyewitness accounts deploy many of the same strategies for describing images that the earliest responses developed; surprisingly, firsthand observation allows these writers to say almost nothing new.5 This repetition, I contend, further substantiates how the written word contributed to the production of photographic meaning, preparing future viewers so that they saw, understood, and valued the daguerreotype as an unmediated form of representation. Print was also the medium through which America’s first daguerreotypists learned the process; newspaper articles and instructional manuals taught them the basics with which they quickly began experimenting so that daguerreotypy could be used for portraiture. With newspaper announcements of Americans’ first successes in producing likenesses, the daguerreotype again captured national attention. Articles and essays about daguerreian portraiture also trained subjects-to-be in what to expect of sitting for the camera, suggesting how to pose and explaining what the picture

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would capture. In blending the scientific ideals of mechanical objectivity and truth-to-nature to theorize the representational work of daguerreian portraiture, these texts inspired public faith in the photographic portrait’s capacity to image one’s inner character as faithfully as one’s appearance.6 By including such texts in the chapter’s archive, this section recognizes and examines how print simultaneously fostered supply and demand and served as the space for negotiating the cultural effects of a flood of daguerreian images. Having familiarized readers with daguerreotypes as images and objects and with the process by which they were made, popular periodical writers began to use the word daguerreotype more figuratively, as both a noun and a verb; what had been ‘‘sketches’’ of people and places became ‘‘daguerreotypes,’’ with the suggestion of representational reliability and authority that the word had come to carry. At the same time, daguerreotypes and daguerreotypists began serving as the occasion for and subjects of poems and short stories about life in the daguerreian age, as conversations about early photography took an explicitly literary turn. This body of literature, I contend, extended popular ideas about daguerreotypy that had been established in print to explorations of the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity, science and art, and democracy and the masses, often coming to conservative conclusions about the implications of technological and social progress. The chapter concludes by considering how such treatments of daguerreotypy in popular newspapers and magazines made their way into the works of the authors and daguerreotypists featured in the chapters that follow. First Word Immediately noticeable in the Daily Advertiser article with which this chapter and the history of photography in America begin is the absence of a specific name for the ‘‘remarkable invention.’’ Because the word daguerreotype had not yet been widely adopted as a name for Daguerre’s ‘‘drawings,’’ the article is unable to use a name to tell readers something about them; instead, it must outline the process and attempt to describe at some length what the resulting images look like. In doing so, the article establishes what will become a familiar pattern: the oscillation between assimilating and differentiating the known and unknown, old and new, that introduces readers to this new technology before the images themselves can be seen. Such

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strategies of mediation exemplify the ‘‘accretive, gradual process’’ of media change that David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins set against ‘‘the idea that new technologies displace older systems with decisive suddenness.’’7 In this case, we see how established art forms make sense of new science and thus recognize this process as one of collaboration rather than collision. After comparing Daguerre’s method to the operations of the camera obscura, the article draws an analogy to another established form of imaging in its effort to represent the appearance of the resulting images, likening them to aquatint, the printmaking technique characterized by its ability to produce a wide range of tones between light and dark. The similarity of these new ‘‘drawings’’ to monochrome prints suggests another difference between Daguerre’s invention and the camera obscura: the latter projects images in color, whereas Daguerre’s method strips images of their original colors. As the article explains, nature’s different colors ‘‘are marked by,’’ or translated into, ‘‘a gradation of shades’’ in Daguerre’s process, allowing for a degree of detail in the image that compensates for its lack of color. In introducing what could be seen as a shortcoming in the daguerreotype’s representational capacities, this second attempt at analogy also points up the limitations of attempting to understand the new through the old by indicating that the images are ‘‘similar to’’ and, thus, not exactly like aquatint. In gaining a sense of their resemblance, the reader recognizes that this comparison, too, necessarily falls short of capturing what Daguerre’s images actually look like and is compelled to pick up imaginatively where description leaves off. The article closes by noting that after Arago’s account, Jean-Baptiste Biot—the physicist noted for his significant contributions to scientific knowledge of optics and light—‘‘expressed his admiration of the invention, which he could only justly praise by comparing it to a kind of physical retina as sensible as the retina of the eye.’’ Beyond certifying Daguerre’s work as an important scientific accomplishment, Biot’s declaration represents one last attempt to understand the still vaguely defined ‘‘invention’’ by comparing it to something that is known and understood: the retina, or the light-sensitive tissue in the eye thought to register images projected by the optic lens. Biot’s own research had shed important new light on the mysteries of the human eye and vision; yet even with this knowledge and authority, his comparison works more to praise Daguerre’s invention than to offer insight into its workings. And we see once again that the language of this analogy registers its own inadequacy: because neither scientists nor

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the public can be sure how the process works, the light-sensitive medium of his images can only be ‘‘justly praise[d],’’ but still not fully understood, as a ‘‘kind of physical retina.’’ This approximate language also suggests the limitations to knowledge that are a consequence of Daguerre’s proprietary secrecy about the details of his invention. Thus, the rough transactions of science and profit and the limitations of knowledge and description leave room for the reader to imagine just what is so remarkable about this latest invention. An article titled ‘‘Extraordinary Chemical and Optical Discovery’’ that appeared three days later in the Boston Mercantile Journal describes the process as effecting ‘‘an exact representation of light and shade of whatever object may be wished to be viewed’’ that ‘‘is obtained with the precise accuracy of nature herself.’’8 As a result, the writer decides that the images ‘‘are not paintings, they are drawings; but drawings pushed to a degree of perfection which art can never reach.’’ In attributing this perfection to ‘‘nature . . . delineat[ing] herself,’’ the article’s writer reveals his indebtedness to what Daston and Galison describe as ‘‘the insistent drive to repress the willful intervention of the artist-author, and to put in its stead a set of procedures that would, as it were, move nature to the page through a strict protocol, if not automatically’’ (121). As this article makes clear, the growing influence of mechanical objectivity in scientific image making makes its way into thinking about artistic images via discussions of daguerreotypy. Although these articles all call attention to their difficulty in describing Daguerre’s invention, we should not understand them as early expressions of a writerly anxiety about the threat posed to either the visual arts or the written word by the first photographic images, as some scholars have.9 Rather we should see these explicit acknowledgments of the limitations of man-made images and linguistic description as part of the rhetoric that is responsible for the idea of photography’s mechanical objectivity. At this point in word and photographic image relations, writers have the advantage of being in the position to tell how visually different Daguerre’s images are from any form of image making before anyone can show a curious public. They do so by borrowing the idea of mechanical objectivity emerging in the sciences as the new standard for all image making, redefining representation in the same moment as they define daguerreotypy. Despite its selfdeclared representational shortcomings, especially according to the standard of mechanical objectivity, linguistic description remains a powerful form of representation because daguerreotypes could not be easily and

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widely reproduced and circulated while print could. In articles like the ones discussed thus far, we see how linguistic descriptions of the daguerreotype and their publication and circulation in print set the terms for how to understand these ‘‘exact representation[s]’’ before they can be seen. In the process, these first accounts of daguerreotypy inaugurate an interdependence of the photographic image and the written and printed word that lasts well beyond the first days of its introduction. By March 1839, a new word for Daguerre’s new type of drawing begins appearing in print: the ‘‘Daguerotype,’’ or ‘‘Daguerrotype.’’10 Erasing any acknowledgment of his collaborator Joseph Nice´phore Nie´pce, LouisJacques-Mande´ Daguerre replaced Nie´pce’s more general term heliography by naming the product of their process after himself alone. Whereas Nie´pce’s Greek compound word for the process emphasizes the role of light in making the image—‘‘sun-writing’’ or ‘‘-drawing’’—Daguerre’s coinage displaces not only his collaborator but also the sun-as-artist in favor of himself-as-author. In doing so, he also makes the process a form of printing with the suffix -type. Although English-speaking writers were uncertain about how to spell the name in translating it from the French daguerre´otype, they reprinted articles from foreign sources that left little room for interpreting the word as anything other than a signifier of its inventor’s achievement, as we see in the March 30, 1839, Expositor from New York, which declares that Daguerre’s ‘‘name and fame . . . will be handed down to posterity as belonging to a man of transcendent genius, who, by unexampled industry, power of analyzation, and of synthetical combination has created a new art’’ (‘‘The Daguerrotype’’). Even as Daguerre’s ‘‘brilliant creation’’ would seem to become more comprehensible by acquiring a name and a function, periodical writers counterintuitively begin to represent it as an object of even greater wonder than earlier reports have suggested. An article reprinted from the Spectator in the Museum of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art in March 1839 declares that the daguerreotype ‘‘seems more like some marvel of a fairy tale or delusion of necromancy than a practical reality,’’ precisely because of nature’s apparent agency in the process: ‘‘it amounts to nothing less than making light produce permanent pictures, and engrave them at the same time, in the course of a few minutes’’ (‘‘Self-Operating Processes’’ 341). This represents one of the earliest articulations of the daguerreotype’s natural magic, or magical nature—a seemingly paradoxical way of describing daguerreotypy that a wide range of scholars have fastened on as indicative

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of the ontological and epistemological tension and confusion occasioned by the coincidence of daguerreotypy’s introduction with the rise of positivism.11 This branch of empirical philosophy, introduced in the 1840s by Auguste Comte, asserts the primacy of perceptual experience over intuition or revelation as the basis of all understanding and influenced the development of the idea of scientific objectivity.12 If we look more closely at the Spectator/Museum of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art article, though, a different dynamic emerges. After declaring the seeming ‘‘marvel of a fairy tale’’ and ‘‘delusion of necromancy’’ a ‘‘practical reality,’’ the article repeats this pattern of tentative assertion followed by contradiction in its next sentence: ‘‘The thing seems incredible, and, but for indisputable evidence, we should not at first hearing believe it; it is, however, a fact: the process and its results have been witnessed by M. Arago, who reported upon its merits to the Acade´mie des Sciences.’’ In both statements, the possibility that the daguerreotype is incredible or unreal is put forth only for it to be rejected in favor of positivistic assertion and scientific verification of its reality; it is either/or, not both/and. Yet much like court testimony that is heard but supposed to be disregarded by the jury, such repressions of daguerreotypy’s seeming numinousness nevertheless enter into popular conversation and, as we will see, return in later stages of its textual mediation. At this point, though, the daguerreotype is emphasized as a scientifically verifiable fact and its representational accuracy as an unprecedented reality. The same article also puts a finer point on declarations of the daguerreotype’s mechanical objectivity, emphasizing that ‘‘it is obvious that the views produced by these means will only be pictures of still-life, inanimate objects, buildings, mountains, rocks, and tracts of country, under settled aspects of the atmosphere.’’ As long as it is immobile, the thing or place pictured ‘‘will be pictured with an accuracy of form and a perspective, a minuteness of detail, and a force and breadth of light and shade, that artists may imitate but cannot equal’’ (‘‘Self-Operating Processes’’ 341). With this explanation of the relationship between the process and its subjects, readers learn that the daguerreotype is true to life only if what it represents is effectively lifeless—another important limitation on the claims of its representational accuracy circulating before most anyone has seen one of the images. Likely to the surprise of readers, the writer of the reprinted Spectator article acknowledges that he, too, is among the uninitiated: ‘‘We have not seen one impression of these light-created monochromes.’’ The articles we

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have seen thus far all have left it implied that their authors were writing about images they had not examined firsthand. The Spectator’s writer is unusually explicit in registering that his subsequent predictions about both the appearance and likely utility of daguerreotypy are derived entirely from ways that daguerreotypy was written about in popular periodicals. On the basis of such a mediated relationship to these images he ‘‘venture[s] to predict that they will present an appearance of shadowy insubstantiality combined with the rigidity and fixedness of a model, which will after the first blush of novelty, fall upon the eye, and render them only valuable as models for the painter’s use.’’ It becomes even clearer that these predictions are, in fact, reactions to the effects that all the talk of daguerreotypy is already having on the arts when the writer explains, ‘‘We make these remarks not to disparage the value of a discovery the most remarkable in the history of art’’ but to calm ‘‘the apprehensions of the more humble class of artists, who may fancy that their occupation’s gone’’ and to prepare ‘‘readers not to expect the beauties of Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro in the engravings produced by the Daguerotype’’ (‘‘Self-Operating Processes’’ 342). These ‘‘remarks’’ allow us to gauge the extent to which written descriptions of daguerreotypy have gone largely unregulated without access to the actual images; without such regulation, constant assertions of the medium’s representational superiority to existing art forms apparently have left artists in despair and the broader public with unrealistic expectations about what they have yet to see. The writer of the Spectator article and the editor who reprints it in Philadelphia attempt to reign in conversations about daguerreotypy and temper expectations, further mediating the already heavily mediated experience of early photography at a moment in which immediacy increasingly was valued. First Sight Samuel F. B. Morse begged to differ with the Spectator’s writer, describing what he had seen firsthand in Daguerre’s studio as ‘‘Rembrandt perfected.’’ Even so, his method and key words for describing daguerreotypes are familiar: ‘‘They are produced on a metallic surface, the principle pieces about 7 inches by 5, and they resemble aquatint engravings, for they are in simple chiaro oscuro, and not in colors. But the exquisite minuteness of the delineation cannot be conceived. No painting or engraving ever approached it.’’ As with the articles reprinted from European sources working from Arago’s

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first announcement, Morse proceeds comparatively, working to get at the appearance of the unfamiliar and unseeable daguerreotype through the familiar and more easily seen: monochrome prints and painting. This is no mere coincidence; here I mean to suggest that even at this early point in daguerreotypy’s existence, it was impossible even for Morse to see the images on their own terms. Having read about the daguerreotype before he saw an actual example of the process—an experience, I argue, that would have influenced his idea of daguerreotypy as much as, if not more than, his own experiments with photochemical imaging—he arrived at Daguerre’s studio with a mental image of the plates’ appearance that was derived from what he had read about them. It is this image that he reproduces in his description, inevitably using the very same language of the descriptions that he had read. In describing the daguerreotype as ‘‘Rembrandt perfected,’’ Morse adds to existing descriptions of the medium based on an empirical verification of its unprecedented degree of fine detail. In looking at a daguerreotype of a spider with a magnifying glass, he discovers ‘‘a minuteness of organization hitherto not seen to exist.’’ This minuteness not only convinces Morse of both the tremendous artistic and scientific significance of the imaging process but also allows him to see into the future: ‘‘The naturalist is to have a new kingdom to explore, as much beyond the microscope as the microscope is beyond the naked eye.’’ Morse’s emphasis on the advantages of mechanically aided vision for scientific research suggests his implication in the sciences’ turn from idealized representations of nature to mechanically objective techniques for image making historicized by Daston and Galison. Here again, we see that daguerreotypy is directly, not distantly, relevant to this turn; we also see that it is the point of contact for the encounter of scientific and aesthetic ideals in image making. Morse follows his bold prediction of the process’s scientific value by closing his letter with an intriguing suggestion about its aesthetic potential based on its scientific promise, explaining that if he ‘‘apprehend[s] its power correctly,’’ he is ‘‘even more impressed with the value of the invention as a means of procuring, without labor or expense . . . perfect representations of the human countenance, than with its power to reveal the secrets of ‘microscopic nature.’ ’’ ‘‘With what interest shall we visit the gallery of portraits of distinguished men of all countries, drawn, not with man’s feeble, false, and flattering pencil, but with the power of light from heaven!’’ Morse exclaims. ‘‘It may not be long before we shall witness in this city the

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exhibition . . . of such portraits.’’ Though Morse is one of the first to anticipate the daguerreotype’s utility for portraiture after empirically verifying its imaging capacities for himself, his reasons for coming to this conclusion are grounded in rhetoric that has constructed an idea of the images as mechanically objective products of natural agency rather than the subjective—and even deceptive—results of human artifice. Daston and Galison define this idea of objectivity as ‘‘the suppression of some aspect of the self, the countering of subjectivity,’’ and suggest that the ‘‘subjectivity that nineteenth-century scientists attempted to deny was, in other contexts, cultivated and celebrated’’ (36–37). In their view, ‘‘[a]rtists were exhorted to express, even flaunt their subjectivity, at the same that scientists were admonished to restrain theirs’’ (37). Yet as Morse’s letter reveals—and as he himself embodies as both an artist and a scientist—arguments for objective representation that originated in the sciences were beginning to be applied to the arts with greater regularity. In his contribution to this shift, Morse makes the daguerreian image’s minute delineation legible as the work of nature’s own hand and, thereby, daguerreotypy the achievement of ‘‘perfect representation’’ for both science and art, despite its inability to render its subjects in natural colors. Thus even before daguerreian portraiture exists —even without it being empirically verifiable—Morse is certain of its perfection. Widely circulating descriptions of the medium as a mechanically objective means of imaging ensure that it will be so. In late 1839 Franc¸ois Fauvel-Gouraud, a pupil of Daguerre’s and an agent of the French daguerreian apparatus firm Giroux, crossed the Atlantic and arrived in New York with a set of daguerreotypes for exhibition and detailed instructions about the process for sale.13 Before opening the exhibit to the public, Gouraud invited prominent New Yorkers and selected journalists to preview the images; the strategy worked perfectly for generating significant excitement in the press that, in turn, attracted curious crowds to Gouraud’s rented Broadway rooms. Yet the articles that resulted from this preview are also nearly indistinguishable from those that were written without seeing a daguerreotype. For example, a notice in the ‘‘Editors’ Table’’ in the December issue of the Knickerbocker announces, ‘‘We have seen the views taken in Paris by the ‘Daguerreotype,’ and we have no hesitation in avowing, that they are the most remarkable objects of curiosity and admiration, in the arts, that we ever beheld. . . . There is not a shadow in the whole, that is not nature itself.’’14 With this we see that the idea of scientific objectivity has become so closely connected to the daguerreotype

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and to how it is understood as an art object that a firsthand view only confirms what already has been said. After a similar inspection, an article in the December New-Yorker decides that linguistic description does not do the daguerreotype justice and that the images themselves are their own best representatives of the unprecedented achievement in image making: ‘‘These specimens must be seen to be appreciated—no description can do justice to their beauties.’’15 A notice in the New-York Observer makes the same claim now that actual daguerreian images can be seen in the United States: ‘‘We can find no language to express the charm of these pictures, painted by no mortal hand.’’16 The same article also adds a distinctly nationalist challenge to descriptions reprinted from European sources: ‘‘Our readers may suppose that, after reading the highly wrought descriptions of the new art, which we have transferred to our paper from European points, we were prepared to form something like an adequate conception of its power, but we can only say as the queen of Sheba said after examining the exhibition of the glory of Solomon, ‘The half was not told us’ ’’ (qtd. in Newhall, The Daguerreotype in America 28). In this writer’s view, all language falls short, but ‘‘highly wrought’’ European attempts to describe daguerreotypy—those that have dominated the conversation in America by being multiply reprinted and circulating widely—are deemed particularly deficient. His plainspoken and, thus, more appropriate description by an American, for an American audience, is so intently straightforward that it refuses to describe the images’ appearance at all and only implies that nature is the artist in declaring them ‘‘painted by no mortal hand.’’ In a January 1840 article for Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, Edgar Allan Poe—deeply invested in both science and aesthetics and experienced in representing the unimaginable as a journalist and an author—takes this question of linguistic failure in relation to daguerreotypy especially seriously. He begins by correcting popular misspellings and mispronunciations of the name by which the images are known: ‘‘This word is properly spelt Daguerre´otype, and pronounced as if written Dagairraioteep. The inventor’s name is Daguerre, but the French usage requires an accent on the second e, in the formation of the compound term.’’17 In Poe’s view, problems with representing the daguerreotype in writing begin at the most basic level of language. After rehearsing both the proper spelling and phonetic pronunciation of daguerreotype for readers, Poe moves on to describing the process by which a daguerreian image is produced, echoing familiar assertions of the artistic agency of chemistry and light. The resulting image, Poe

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declares, is of ‘‘the most miraculous beauty.’’ His subsequent conclusion that ‘‘[a]ll language must fall short of conveying any just idea of the truth’’ of the image’s appearance is unoriginal but surprising, given his vocational commitment to the representational power of language. To render Poe speechless, one must conclude, the daguerreotype indeed must be the ‘‘most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science’’ (‘‘The Daguerreotype’’). Even his scientific approach to language cannot realize either the truth or the beauty of the daguerreotype for readers; imagination has to fill in where description leaves off until readers can see one for themselves. Despite their self-proclaimed representational shortcomings, each of these articles suggests just how dependent daguerreotypy is on linguistic descriptions and their publication and circulation in print to attract viewers. We see this most explicitly when the Knickerbocker notice concludes ‘‘by saying to all [its] metropolitan readers, ‘Go and see the views taken by the Daguerreotype; and when M. Gouraud commences his lectures upon the art, fail not to hear him![’]’’ (‘‘Editors’ Table’’ 561). By the time of daguerreotypy’s arrival in the United States, popular periodicals have established the idea of the daguerreotype’s representational superiority so effectively in readers’ imaginations that writers can withhold descriptions of the images altogether and still succeed in conveying how powerful it is as a new form of imaging—even as they claim that readers should see the images for themselves.

Supply and Demand Even as writers were voicing uncertainty about the adequacy of description to do justice to the daguerreian image, written accounts of each step of Daguerre’s process were circulating globally in pamphlet form and in the press. In return for annuities of 6,000 and 4,000 francs, respectively, Daguerre and his new partner, Isidore Nie´pce, the son of his earlier collaborator, agreed in early 1839 to ‘‘place in the hands of the Ministry of the Interior a sealed package containing the history and most detailed and exact description of the invention,’’ which Arago presented at a joint open meeting of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris on August 19, 1839.18 Shortly after Arago’s presentation, Daguerre’s official manual was published in Paris by order of the French government and

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quickly sold out. Thereafter, countless reprints, new editions, and translations were circulating throughout the world; those, plus an untold number of pirated editions and many summaries of the necessary materials and steps in the popular press, met the demand of a multitude of scientists, artists, and other curious experimenters from a range of backgrounds. One of the earliest known daguerreotypes produced in the United States—an image of Philadelphia’s Central High School, taken by Joseph Saxton, a mechanic, instrument maker, and employee of the U.S. Mint, on September 25, 1839 (Barger and White 32)—is reported to have been made from a description of the process that appeared in the United States Gazette on the same day that the description was published.19 Around the same time in New York and Philadelphia, groups of collaborators began experimenting with what they had read about Daguerre’s camera and process. They soon succeeded in their efforts to produce the first daguerreian portraits in the United States.20 Hoping to regain some of the lucrative market for instructions in the process and to reassert the authority of the original inventor, Gouraud published a revised version of Daguerre’s manual in 1840 that added a ‘‘description of a provisory method for taking human portraits,’’ as its title page announces.21 He also published a briefer version of the new method in Boston’s Daily Advertiser and Patriot in March of the same year, where he explains that he has decided to make the revised details of the process ‘‘public, by means of the press, in order that those who may not have the opportunity of hearing [his] verbal information on the subject, may make experiments for themselves, and in fine, that by the means already made use of, they may know that [he is] able to make the portrait of any person who wishes it.’’22 As this advertisement masquerading as a public service announcement makes clear, print was crucial to fostering both the supply of and demand for daguerreotype portraits. As early adopters found success in their experiments with portraiture, American newspapers and magazines published news of their results. Once again, writers found themselves charged with describing the appearance of these images to readers who likely had yet to see a scenic or still-life daguerreotype, much less a daguerreotype portrait, and with preparing their readers to become subjects of such portraits. An article reprinted from the Philadelphia Chronicle in the May 30, 1840, Niles’ National Register is representative. Of portraits made in Philadelphia by Robert Cornelius, the article declares, ‘‘Nothing could possibly be more true than these representations of the ‘human face divine,’ for they transfer to the plate the exact

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images of the sitters, ‘living as they rise.’ ’’23 To bolster its description, the article calls on quotations from Paradise Lost and Pope’s Essay on Man to assess the quality of the daguerreian likeness, using literature to confirm the medium’s mechanical objectivity. ‘‘The mode, too, is as simple as the results are accurate,’’ the article reassures its readers; ‘‘[a]ll you have to do is to place yourself in an easy, well-cushioned chair, assume the position in which you desire to be perpetuated and look steadfastly at a given object, for the matter of half a minute, and your features, expression, every thing connected with your countenance, are caught and stamped with a vigor and similitude that are unsurpassable’’ (‘‘Daguerreotype Miniatures’’). With this, we see the process figured both as automatic and as allowing its subject some degree of agency; the sitter poses his or her body and face as he or she wishes and light does the rest. Even so, because popular descriptions of daguerreotypy have established nature as the infallible artist, the article implies that while the sitter chooses the facial expression with which he or she ‘‘desire[s] to be perpetuated,’’ sunlight is the true artist, capturing and stamping ‘‘every thing connected with [the sitter’s] countenance’’—or what theorists of painted portraiture describe as ‘‘character’’—with both ‘‘vigor and similitude.’’ In thus presenting daguerreian objectivity as both a faithful and an artistic means of representing subjectivity, this article borrows from the rhetoric of scientific objectivity and truth-to-nature during the period of their overlap as epistemic and representational virtues. It also calls on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century aesthetic theories about portraiture’s ability to manifest a sitter’s inner character. In 1801 Henry Fuseli declared that painted portraiture, when ‘‘[e]nobled by character . . . rises to dramatic dignity; destitute of that, it sinks to mere mechanic dexterity, or floats, a bubble of fashion.’’24 But as we see in the article ‘‘Daguerreotype Miniatures,’’ what Fuseli describes as ‘‘mechanic dexterity’’ has become literally mechanized and, under the influence of scientific ideas about image making, newly valorized as an ideal means of capturing both the appearance and character of a subject with unfailing precision. As increasing numbers of Americans became daguerreotypists and subjects of daguerreian portraiture in the 1840s, the periodical press was able to shift from covering the latest technical developments in the process and equipment to reflecting on the cultural work of daguerreotypy. The ‘‘daguerrian [sic] art has not received the attention which it deserves,’’ an essay first published in the Christian Watchman and reprinted in the more widely circulated Living Age could claim in 1846 before predicting that ‘‘its

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principles, when fully analyzed and developed, will fill an important place in some never-to-be surpassed encyclopedia.’’25 In his contribution to this effort, an essayist writing under the pseudonym ‘‘Bruno’’ asserts that the daguerreotype is ‘‘slowly accomplishing a great revolution in the morals of portrait painting’’ (552). As Bruno sees it, the ‘‘revolution’’ in portraiture effected by daguerreotypy is ‘‘moral’’ for two reasons: first, the sun is unwilling to flatter its subjects because it is not dependent on their patronage, as painters are; second, because of this independence, the sun does not discriminate in whom it accurately images—all are equal subjects for ‘‘likenesses that are likenesses’’ (552, original emphasis).26 We also see one of the earliest articulations of the representational politics of photography in popular writings about daguerreotypy that promote it as a democratic form of portraiture without precedent in the history of art: ‘‘Your sun is no parasite,’’ Bruno declares. ‘‘He pours his rays as freely and willingly into the cottage of the peasant, as into the palace of the peer; and he vouchsafes no brighter or purer light to the disdainful mistress than to her humble maid’’ (552). As the applications of daguerreotypy expand, so do conversations about the cultural effects of this new form of representation as print continues to serve as the space in which its uses and meanings are negotiated. In replacing the artist’s subjectivity with mechanical objectivity, daguerreotypy both reforms and re-forms portraiture into a truer and, thus, more just and democratic form of representation. A related third moral consequence of this simultaneous scientific, aesthetic, and democratic revolution, the essay continues, is ‘‘the aid which it affords to the successful study of human nature. . . . Daguerreotypes, properly regarded, are the indices of human character’’ (552). When examined using the principles of physiognomy developed in the eighteenth century by Johann Kaspar Lavater, daguerreian portraiture becomes ‘‘the grand climacteric of the science,’’ Bruno declares. ‘‘There is a peculiar and irresistible connection between one’s weaknesses and his daguerreotype; and the latter as naturally attracts the former as the magnet the needle, or toasted cheese, the rat.’’ While we would expect the essay to attribute this boon to physiognomic analysis to what it has just described as the daguerreotype’s unerring representation of its subject’s face, it suggests something more mysterious: ‘‘The ultimate causes of this relation’’ between the daguerreotype and its subject ‘‘lie deeply imbedded in the elementary principles of mental philosophy.’’ Yet lacking ‘‘sufficient space to explore’’ these causes, the essay only asserts ‘‘[t]hat such a relation exists is beyond question’’ and

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a ‘‘fixed fact’’ and concludes that ‘‘positions, attitudes, and expressions of countenance, are so many exponential signs of disposition, desire, character.’’ Thus what began as an argument about the changed character of portraiture concludes as a humorous, rather than scientific, catalog of the various character types immortalized by the daguerreotype, including those with a ‘‘literary weakness . . . usually taken with a pile of books around them’’ or ‘‘with the fore-finger gracefully interposed between the leaves of a half-closed volume, as if they consented to the interruption of their studies solely to gratify posterity with a view of their scholarlike countenances.’’ Others betray a ‘‘musical weakness which forces a variety of suffering, inoffensive flutes, guitars, and pianos to be brought forward in the company of their cruel and persecuting masters and mistresses.’’ Lastly, ‘‘those who attempt to assume a look which they have not’’—be it ‘‘dignified, haughty, mild, condescending, humorous, and grave’’ or wealthy—are said to produce some of the most ‘‘amusing caricatures’’ in daguerreian age portraiture (552). That daguerreian subjects can be grouped into such types reveals how quickly the formal characteristics of daguerreian portraiture became standardized. The essay also suggests how creatively the subjects of daguerreotype portraits repurposed the medium’s vaunted accuracy to misrepresent themselves and restore the flattery to portraiture that daguerreotypy was supposed to have made impossible. Initially an object of wonder and increasingly a part of everyday life, the daguerreotype thus enters into the cultural imagination—both despite and because of its supposed mechanical objectivity, truth-to-nature, and democratic availability. In the next section, I follow daguerreotypy from the news and the essay into popular poetry and fiction, where its relationship with print takes even more figurative and imaginative turns as writers both extend and limit the historical, sociocultural, and subjective effects of this new means of representation.27 Daguerreotype as Metaphor As some writers were discovering the advantages and limitations of using similes, metaphors, and analogies to represent daguerreotypy as accurately as possible in words, others were recognizing and developing the daguerreotype’s poetic potential as a metaphor. In March 1840, the Southern Literary Messenger printed a poem titled ‘‘Pictures by the Sun’’ by St. Leger Landon Carter, pseudonymously attributed to ‘‘Nugator.’’28 An ode to the sun

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updated for the daguerreian age, the poem contemplates in its opening stanza the possibility that, unbeknownst to humankind, the celestial body has been using its recently recognized powers to image all of existence from the beginning of time: I’ve studied thee, bright Sun, in many a lecture, And at thy power have been filled with wonder; But never dreamt that thou could’st make a picture, Without the least defect, or smallest blunder; Oh for a sight of those soft pictured pages Thou has ‘‘Daguerreotyped’’ for countless ages! The third stanza further extends the popular metaphor of the sun as the original daguerreotypist and daguerreotypes as sun pictures: When first thou look’dst upon the world, then void— When all was dark and things about were bandied— In taking sketches, wer’t thou then employ’d, And ev’ry object into form expanded?— If so, and we could make thee, Sun, obey us, We’d have that scene august, of Ancient Chaos. With this the poem imagines its conceit made real, suggesting that if humankind actually could harness the powers of the sun, it would provide us with an accurate image of the world’s creation. Extending this new conceit, the poem catalogs some of the daguerreotypes of biblical and secular figures and scenes that would follow from creation in chronological order, including Adam in the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, the parting of the Red Sea, and the temples of ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt in their original states. Acknowledging that the sun may not share all of its powers with humankind and keep its cosmic daguerreian history and, thus, the past to itself, the poem declares that henceforth, humankind will use the daguerreotype to create its own solar history, even if it is necessarily incomplete. The ninth stanza announces and commands: But if, bright orb! the past be now denied us, The present time at least is in our power,

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Since with thy secret, Genius hath supplied us;— Ye pupils of Daguerre! improve the hour— Make haste to paint the fragments which are left us, Of what stern Time and Vandals have bereft us. Interestingly, the poem’s subsequent list of scenes to be daguerreotyped immediately includes only sites important to ancient history (the ruins of Alexandria, Egyptian pyramids, the Acropolis and Coliseum) instead of places, people, or events in the ‘‘present time.’’ In urging daguerreotypists to preserve photographically what is left of these decaying sites before their disappearance is complete, the poem resists entirely relinquishing predaguerreian history to time and the sun. By borrowing the sun’s imaging powers to document accurately the monuments of ancient history even in their current state of decay, the poem assures its nineteenth-century audience, these daguerreotypes will ensure that at least part of this history will be saved from passing into total obscurity. Yet the poem’s gaze is not exclusively focused on the past; it looks forward by implying that this newly possible daguerreian history also will secure the historical significance of the nineteenth century in three important ways. First, while the physical conditions of these ancient ruins will continue to deteriorate, their daguerreotypes will preserve them exactly as they appeared in the nineteenth century, as mechanically objective scientific specimens kept for future study. Second, these images effectively will relocate the material histories of these sites to the nineteenth century in the eyes of future generations. And third, future centuries will look back gratefully to the age of Daguerre not only for devising a means for making such a faithful record of important historical sites but also for recognizing the value of their visual preservation for posterity. As the poem insists in its third-to-last stanza, ‘‘Imagination flags and falters on the rack’’ and ‘‘Description’s beggar’d’’ in the effort to produce an accurate historical record—‘‘Naught but the eye that scene can realize’’ (stanza 13). But, of course, naught but the imagination and language can make this claim. Here again, we see daguerreotypy’s representational superiority under construction, structured, in this case, by an elaborate poetic conceit. In considering more specifically the metaphoric function of daguerreotypy in the poem, we recognize that while the vehicle for the comparison (the daguerreotype) may be new, it is deployed to explore old ideas (divine omniscience, the inaccessibility of the past to humankind, and the human

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quest for God-like powers) and longstanding philosophical questions (such as the difficulty of understanding ourselves in the present moment and the effects of our present actions on the past and the future). Alan Trachtenberg has suggested that one of the most ‘‘notable, and notably overlooked’’ aspects of the early history of photography in America ‘‘is how the name of the medium entered the cultural vocabulary as a keyword linked to modernity itself—a word by which, especially in its metaphoric extensions, people attempted to comprehend the new world of steam engines, factories, and cities’’ (‘‘Photography’’ 23). Yet in ‘‘Pictures by the Sun,’’ we see a poet attempting to comprehend the old and the future worlds as much as the futuristic new world of the present by metaphorically extending the word daguerreotype. In mediating the relationship between the past and the future by defining the present moment, the daguerreotype functions like metaphor itself, which sustains identity and difference in the tension of simultaneity; to attend to modernity alone is to undermine both the structure and the function of the metaphor and metaphor itself. In popular print more broadly, daguerreotype, as both a noun and verb, came into fashionable figurative use as a metaphor for a lasting impression made by a person, place, or event on one’s memory, for a writer’s ability to bring characters, events, or scenes to life in the reader’s mind, and for a comprehensive perspective on a moment in time provided by newspapers, magazines, and histories. In such extended metaphorical usage, we again see the daguerreotype being deployed by writers to rejuvenate old ideas and things—specifically, aspects of writing itself, including tropes, genres, and different forms of print media—in the interest of making them more modern and making modernity more familiar. For example, we find a quatrain circulating in newspapers and magazines in 1843 that compares love at first sight to the new imaging process: At the famous Daguerreotype art, Sweet girl, I must own thou art clever, For, with one sunny glance, on my heart Thou hast painted thy image for ever.29 Here we see opening conceit of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 24—the heart as a tablet for inscription in the form of the beloved’s portrait, a conceit adapted from ancient pedagogical and religious texts to romantic love—updated for the daguerreian age.30 In the same year, Frances Sargent Osgood’s

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‘‘Daguerreotype Pictures, Taken on New Year’s Day’’ appeared in Graham’s Magazine; a short story about a failed seduction, it likely would have been labeled a sketch before the daguerreian age.31 And in 1841 Evert Duyckinck likened the cultural work of the newspaper to ‘‘a daguerreotype impression of the acts and thoughts of a city, more or less complete for one day’’ in a tribute to the enduring relevance of the newspaper as a medium.32 In the same spirit, a weekly magazine called The Daguerreotype was launched in Boston in 1847 with the purpose of collecting and reprinting the best writing from foreign periodicals for an American audience. Applying the idea of daguerreian accuracy to the miscellany, the introduction to the first issue explains that the magazine’s title is a metaphor for its mission statement: ‘‘The Daguerreotype is, as the name imports, designed to reflect a faithful image of what is going on abroad in the great Republic of Letters.’’33 These represent just a few of the countless possible examples of figurative uses of daguerreotypy that can be found throughout mid-nineteenth-century U.S. print publications. To reconstruct this archive is to recognize how ubiquitous the daguerreotype was in antebellum American culture, not just as a material object but also as an idea. In the texts that follow, we see how important written descriptions of the daguerreotype as unmediated, mechanically objective, natural, and permanent were to rethinking how people experienced and understood subjectivity, temporality, democracy, and art when each category was under significant cultural pressure. Sitting Stories In January 1849 a new monthly series titled ‘‘American Characteristics,’’ written by the prolific magazine writer and novelist T. S. Arthur, commenced in Godey’s Lady’s Book. Each month, Arthur’s column provided readers with an extended meditation on a scene or an event from everyday American life, accompanied by an illustrative engraving in the ornate Godey’s style that contributed to the magazine’s success.34 After being introduced to ‘‘A Rise in the Butter Market,’’ ‘‘The Sleigh Ride,’’ ‘‘The Village Horse Block,’’ and ‘‘The First Cigar,’’ Godey’s readers met ‘‘The Daguerreotypist’’ in the magazine’s May number.35 The essay begins by explaining how the daguerreotypist has become a familiar member of American society in the decade after the daguerreotype’s introduction in Paris: ‘‘In our great cities, a Daguerreotypist is to be found in almost every square; and there is scarcely a county in any state that has not one or more of these

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industrious individuals busy at work in catching ‘the shadow’ ere the ‘substance fade’ ’’ (352). In their industrious ubiquity, Arthur declares, daguerreotypists are ‘‘limning faces at a rate that promises soon to make every man’s house a Daguerrean Gallery’’ (352). Here, the daguerreotypist’s work is figured as not only prolific but also explicitly democratic, such that Arthur can imagine the day when a daguerreotype will be found in ‘‘every man’s house.’’ As Arthur sees it, the daguerreotype has effected nothing short of a revolution in portraiture in the decade of its existence: ‘‘A few years ago it was not every man who could afford a likeness of himself, his wife or his children; these were luxuries known to those only who had money to spare; now it is hard to find the man who has not gone through the ‘operator’s’ hands from once to half-a-dozen times, or who has not the shadowy faces of his wife and children done up in purple morocco and velvet, together or singly, among his household treasures. Truly the sunbeam art is a most wonderful one, and the public feel it is a great benefit!’’ (352). With this the essay affirms an idea of the medium’s political consequences that we first saw articulated in 1846 by Bruno. Whereas that writer saw ordinary Americans sitting for their portraits for the first time as a revolution in the history of art, just three years later, Arthur is able to see ordinary Americans owning multiple portraits of themselves and their family members as the extent to which this revolution has been realized. With the daguerreotype thus established as having democratized portraiture, Arthur turns to the daguerreotypist’s studio as the ideal site for taking a representative survey of American society. He explains, ‘‘If a painter’s studio is a place in which to get glimpses of human nature, how much more so the Daguerreotypist’s operating-room, where dozens come daily, and are finished off in a sitting of half a minute’’ (352). Yet the tableau that follows is populated with fictional characters who are little more than stereotypes of different segments of antebellum society, depicted less for what they reveal about human nature in general and more for what easy laughs they can evoke from readers through their awkward interactions with technology. As David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins have observed, ‘‘often the most powerful explorations of the features of a new medium occur in humor’’ (5). Sacrificing egalitarianism for just such humor, Arthur amends his explanation for his story’s setting with the observation that ‘‘[s]cenes ludicrous, amusing or pathetic, are constantly occurring [there]. People come for their portraits who have never seen the operation, and who have not the most distant conception of how the thing is done’’ (352).

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Arthur’s story is one of several short stories set in a daguerreotypist’s studio and published in the 1840s and 1850s. These stories brought the literary tableau into the daguerreian age. Their authors often suggest, as Arthur does, that the tableau—like the daguerreotype itself—captures how the democratic ideals of the American Revolution have become reality in the nineteenth century. Yet I contend that their typical caricatures carry a more conservative message that scholars have overlooked in examining such texts.36 As Alan Liu notes, ‘‘[n]arratives of new media encounter are identity tales in which media at once projects and introjects ‘otherness’ ’’ (6). Through the negative examples of their cultural stereotypes, these daguerreian sitting stories either train people in how to carry themselves—from the way that they dress and hold their bodies in front of the camera, to how they speak and think in front of the daguerreotypist—or suggest that some people are unfit subjects for what was supposed to be a more democratic form of portraiture. Thus we see popular print establishing limits on the revolutionary political power that it originally ascribed to the daguerreian medium, its practitioners, and its subjects. Arthur’s fictional tableau features an actual daguerreotypist: Philadelphia’s M. A. Root, whom Godey’s readers would have recognized as one of the elite daguerreian artists who had established national reputations by the late 1840s.37 His first customer is described as a ‘‘well-conditioned farmer from the interior of the state’’ who ‘‘has promised, on leaving home, that he would bring back his Daguerreotype’’ for the wife and daughters he has left in the country (352). Referred to Root when ‘‘selling his produce and making his sundry purchases,’’ the farmer seeks out the ‘‘gallery of the farfamed Daguerreotypist’’ and is directed into the ‘‘operating-room’’ by the artist himself rather than by one of the operators in his firm’s employ. Fearing that he has misheard Root since, as the narrative voice explains, ‘‘the only idea he had of ‘operations’ was the cutting off of legs and arms,’’ the farmer uneasily takes his place in the designated chair of the operating room. Not knowing what to expect of the process, the uninitiated farmer grows wary of the daguerreotypist and ‘‘another man in the room’’ whom he does not recognize as Root’s assistant but fears as a potential accomplice in some ‘‘unfair play’’ that seems imminent. While the farmer initially keeps his concern to himself, the mysterious process proves too fearsome to tolerate when Root introduces the necessary equipment into the room. The narrative voice explains: ‘‘Mr. Root drew a singular-looking apparatus into the middle of the floor, and directed

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toward [the farmer] the muzzle of what seemed a small brass cannon. At the same time, the other man placed his hand upon his head and drew it back into an iron clamp, the cold touch of which made the blood in his veins curdle to his very heart’’ (353). The farmer’s fright at the camera, which he mistakes for a weapon, anticipates the now common metaphor for describing the photographic act as ‘‘shooting’’ its subject. His terror at the iron head brace commonly used to secure the sitter’s head against movement during the lengthy exposure time is also suggestive of significant changes in antebellum society and of the fears of violence that these changes raised. The story explains that the farmer ‘‘was a man who both took and read the newspapers’’ and, as such, was ‘‘acquainted with many cases of ‘mysterious disappearance’ ’’ at the hands of ‘‘robbers and murderers’’ (353). Karen Halttunen attributes such fears to another form of popular print, explaining that ‘‘[i]n the nineteenth century, the raw country youth entering the city to seek his fortune was coming to symbolize the American-onthe-make. And in the central drama of antebellum advice literature, that inexperienced young man had just set foot in the city when he was approached by a confidence man seeking to dupe and destroy him.’’38 This moment of fear inspired by the farmer’s experience of both the modern city and a new technology is illustrated in the engraving that accompanies Arthur’s story (Figure 1). The farmer succeeds in ‘‘escaping from the room,’’ thereby providing the daguerreotypist and his assistant with a ‘‘good joke to laugh over for a month’’ (353). Their laugh at his expense suggests the growing division between the rural and urban in a rapidly industrializing America. Itself a product of the industrial age, the daguerreotype is mobilized in Arthur’s story to provoke a comic reaction from the simple farmer. In the figurative daguerreotype of the cultural bumpkin that results, his stereotypical ignorance is open to ridicule by the urbane daguerreotypist, the fiction writer, and the implicitly complicit reader, aligned in their comfort with modernity. Arthur’s tableau concludes by switching its affective register from the humorous to the sentimental. The final visitors to Root’s studio are each mothers bereft of their children. The first is a woman who returns to the daguerreotypist upon receiving word that her only daughter had died in the West, hoping that he might have kept a second portrait that he made before her departure. Successful in her search through the studio’s gallery of faces, the woman is able to gaze ‘‘once more into the almost speaking

Figure 1. ‘‘The Daguerreotypist.’’ Engraving from Godey’s Lady’s Book 38 (May 1849). Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

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face of her child’’ (354). Next, we are introduced to a mother who had sat for a portrait with her young son three months before only to refuse what was a perfect likeness of her child out of comparative displeasure with her own appearance in the image. She has returned to the studio after the child’s death, desperate to discover the portrait among the daguerreotypist’s discarded plates. When the plate cannot be found, the narrator concludes, ‘‘The shadow, fixed in a wonderful and mysterious manner by a ray of light, had faded also, and the only image of the child that remained for the mother was on the tablet of her memory’’ (354). In both cases, the daguerreian portrait is coveted as a surrogate for both memory and the mortal human body. In the daguerreian age, Arthur’s story tells us, people no longer live, relate to each other, experience time, or die as they did before. Whether or not this was actually so, these changing relations must be attributed as much to literary reconfigurations of how antebellum Americans understood themselves and each other, presence and absence, life and death, and past and present in relation to the daguerreotype as to the daguerreotype itself.39 Given the political implications of such stories, one published in the (New Orleans) Daily Crescent during Walt Whitman’s tenure as exchange editor is especially interesting.40 Well-known as a frequent visitor to the daguerreotypist’s rooms through the changing photographic frontispieces of different editions of Leaves of Grass, Whitman wrote of his admiration of daguerreian portraiture as a journalist in Brooklyn.41 Like Arthur’s story and Whitman’s famous poetic catalogs of the individuals that constitute America in ‘‘Song of Myself,’’ the Daily Crescent’s ‘‘Daguerreotype Portraits’’ presents a social cross-section of antebellum society, relating each representative’s comical first visit to the daguerreotypist’s studio. The cast includes a poor mother who wishes to have a ‘‘doggertipe’’ of herself and child taken; a ‘‘Mr. See-Island (a cotton broker),’’ seeking a portrait of himself posed in ‘‘profound speculation’’ and displaying the trappings of his wealth; the ‘‘Hon. John Jones,’’ who would like a memento to present to his family before he is dispatched to Mexico by the president on secret business; a bewitching young lady; a man and his dog; and a gambler. In each instance, regardless of his or her apparent social class or level of education, the sitter expects the process to be akin to that of painted portraiture and insists that the daguerreotypist insert certain props and accessories that indicate something about his or her character or class standing into the image. In presenting these misconceptions and those who hold them as

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risible, the Crescent piece, like Arthur’s story, acknowledges the egalitarianism supposedly realized by daguerreian portraiture as a mixed blessing. Its ambiguous exclamation, ‘‘Only think that the God of Day condescends to paint in his own ardent color, the lineaments of Mrs. Jinkins!,’’ the poor mother seeking her ‘‘doggertipe,’’ seems un-Whitmanian in its humorous contempt for the type of American that ‘‘Song of Myself’’ and his other essays on daguerreian portraiture celebrate. This humorous tableau, apparently authorized for inclusion by Whitman in the Crescent, conforms to the stereotypes and class conservatism typical of its contemporaries, contradicting the democracy of portraiture that the daguerreotype was supposed to have inaugurated. Like Arthur’s story, Sarah Roberts’s ‘‘An Hour in a Daguerreian Gallery,’’ published in the 1855 annual The Amaranth, presents a series of observations made during a casual visit to a daguerreotype studio. There, the narrator amuses herself ‘‘with looking round on the numerous faces, old and young, beautiful and ugly, that decorated the walls’’ and ‘‘conjuring up the various characters they represented.’’42 This gallery of the aging and unattractive displayed alongside those of the young and beautiful inspires one more declaration of the egalitarian triumph of the daguerreotype. The narrator declares, ‘‘This is truly the democratic, the levelling age of every thing. . . . In years gone by, to procure the precious likeness of a friend was only in the power of those who had great wealth at command; but now, in the twinkling of an eye, for a single dollar, the humblest citizen can possess the treasure’’ (211). True to form, the tableau follows its declaration by introducing a series of visitors from all walks of life who initially seem to confirm daguerreotypy’s democratization of portraiture but who actually serve the conservative function of reining in conversations about daguerreotypy’s social consequences. The first is a young sailor who arrives with his blind mother; each seeks a portrait for the other before the sailor departs on a long voyage. Just as the sailor wishes to have an image of his mother’s ‘‘dear old face to take away’’ on his voyage, the elderly blind woman also desires her son’s daguerreotype as a keepsake, even though she will be unable to see his image. The sailor explains, ‘‘Though she cannot see, she says she can hold it in her hand and kiss it, and know that it is me’’ (212). In this case, the daguerreotype possesses sentimental value not so much for the image that it actually captures as for the idea of what the image is supposed to capture. Though the sailor praises the portrait for the quality of its likeness, the

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blind mother treasures the cased image as a physical vestige of her distant son. While she is entirely incapable of seeing the picture of her son, the mother is convinced that the daguerreotype bears a direct physical connection to him because of what she has been told about such images; accordingly, she cradles it in her hand and kisses its protective glass as she would her actual son, substituting touch in place of sight to confirm his presence and convey her affection. As this story makes especially clear, popular descriptions of and narratives about daguerreotypy have so effectively established popular faith in the daguerreotype as an affective surrogate for its subject’s living presence that even a blind woman—to whom the seemingly lifelike accuracy of these portraits could be of no visual use— figuratively sees it as such. Daguerreotypy Comes Alive A contemporary set of stories moves the daguerreotype, its subjects, and its beholders from the circumscribed space of the daguerreotypist’s studio into the wider world. In doing so, they simultaneously dramatize, test, and police the fungible relationship of representation and reality in the daguerreian age. In 1847 Love at First Sight: or, The Daguerreotype, written by Edward Z. C. Judson under his pseudonym Ned Buntline, was published in Boston as a six-cent pamphlet (Figure 2).43 Initially, this ‘‘Romantic Story of Real Life’’ reads like one more tableau set in a daguerreotypist’s rooms. A beautiful, working-class girl named Fannie visits the studio of a daguerreotypist named Lerow to have her portrait made as a gift for her brother who is about to go to sea. When Fannie erupts into tears upon discovering that she has lost the money for the portrait on her way to the daguerreotypist’s studio, Lerow offers to provide her with her likeness with the only charge that she sit for a second portrait for him to keep and display in his studio. Lerow’s request dramatizes the uniqueness of each daguerreian image. It also suggests a common advertising strategy among daguerreotypists: publicly displaying portraits of attractive subjects as evidence of the studio’s artistic accomplishments. Though Fannie initially declines out of instinctive modesty, she agrees to present herself to the camera’s gaze and, thus, public view as the daguerreotypist declares, ‘‘Miss, your brother shall have the likeness—pray, again take your seat before the lens’’ (14). Of the result the narrator explains, the ‘‘picture was taken, and it was indeed lifelike; it almost seemed to have the power of utterance’’ (15).

Figure 2. Front wrapper, Love at First Sight: or, The Daguerreotype. A Romantic Story of Real Life, by Ned Buntline [Edward Zane Carroll Judson] (Boston: Lerow & Co., Jones’s Publishing House, c. 1847). Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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The story itself comes to life by animating this by-then standard metaphor of the lifelike daguerreotype so that it becomes the engine of a romantic plot. The portrait’s vividness inspires a friend of the daguerreotypist—one ‘‘Harry H.,’’ described as ‘‘rich, well educated, not in any way dissipated, [and] always generous and charitable’’—to fall in love with its subject immediately upon seeing her daguerreotype (16). When Lerow refuses to sell this valuable advertisement of his skills as an artist, Harry pursues the real thing, vowing, ‘‘[I] will not rest until I have found her out, and if pure, devoted unselfish love will win her, I will marry her’’ (18). Borrowing the portrait to locate Fannie, Harry ultimately discovers the reallife object of his fascination, rescues her from the abject life of a poor seamstress, and returns to Lerow’s studio to fulfill his promise of replacing the original likeness with their marriage portrait. As a love story that endows the increasingly ordinary daguerreotype with magical attractive powers, Love at First Sight meets the generic requirements of romance. As such, it extends conversations about early photography even further into the imaginary while keeping it anchored in the daguerreotype’s material characteristics and mechanical objectivity. Upon closing the pamphlet’s back wrapper, readers discover a surprise ending to this romance that abruptly returns them to reality: an advertisement for ‘‘Lerow & Co. Daguerreotype Miniatures’’ (Figure 3). This ad transforms the story’s readers into potential customers by informing them that Lerow’s studio is located in real life, just as it was in the preceding romance, at 91 Washington Street and that it offers a ‘‘large assortment of Lockets, Breast Pins, Bracelets, &c.’’ in which ‘‘Persons wishing pictures of themselves or friends’’ can enclose their portraits. To the fictional story of two very satisfied Lerow &. Co. customers the advertisement adds, ‘‘Perfect satisfaction’’ is ‘‘guaranteed or no charge.’’ With this it becomes clear that not just the back wrapper but the entire romance functions as an advertisement. That the romance comes to life in the end both echoes its plot and realizes one of the genre’s defining themes—that narrative can endow ordinary objects with extraordinary powers. In the complicated logic of this romance-cum-advertisement, if readers feel misled in the end, then they are misleading themselves by not recognizing their own complicity with deception in choosing to read a romance in the first place. If they understand the terms of romance as a genre, then they see that the story delivers more than most on its promise to reveal something surprising about real life by casting it in a more imaginative light. Either way, then, the strategy succeeds as an advertisement of Lerow’s unusual creativity.

Figure 3. Back wrapper, Love at First Sight: or, The Daguerreotype. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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On its own, Love at First Sight is a remarkable document of the length to which one daguerreotypist went to distinguish his studio from those of his competitors by embedding what is otherwise a typical advertisement within an entertaining romance by a popular writer. Within the context of the significant body of writing on the daguerreotype circulating in antebellum America, this promotional fiction also reveals something more about how print mediated both the supply of and demand for daguerreian portraits. It shows us that daguerreotypists were keenly aware of the opportunity that the written word presented for manipulating popular ideas about the daguerreian medium, its production, and its representational powers— ideas that popular print had established—to its practitioners’ professional and financial advantage. By the late 1840s, daguerreotypists were aware of the costs of potential customers thinking of them as mere facilitators of the imaging powers of the sun. Such an inventive and concerted effort at selfpromotion seeks to tell a different story about the daguerreotypist in popular print, one that redirects the public conversation about daguerreotypy so that potential customers understand the daguerreian artist as someone capable of producing not just mechanically objective but also artistic—and, thus, truly lifelike—portraits. As Buntline’s narrator explains of Fannie’s first daguerreotype, in making an ‘‘exceedingly true and life-like’’ portrait, Lerow has succeeded in capturing an ‘‘expression so quiet, pure and dreamy as she leaned against the arm of the large French sofa in which she had been seated, that it produced an effect which few Daguerrean pictures can boast of’’ (11). To retell this story as a romance, Love at First Sight inevitably explores some of the differences between the image of daguerreotypy established by popular print and the medium’s materiality. Though they are said to be lifelike, made by the light, and permanent, actual daguerreian images are static and colorless, manually processed, and vulnerable to being damaged or disappearing from view altogether if viewed at the wrong angle. Buntline uses these contradictions to structure a romantic narrative about daguerreotypy, preceding Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables by four years. Here I do not mean to propose Love at First Sight as a source text for Hawthorne’s romance; rather, I mean to emphasize the affinity between the strain in discussions of daguerreotypy that emphasizes the medium’s more subjective, artistic aspects and its status as a man-made object and the generic hallmarks of the literary romance. Once again, we see how this new mode of representation is used to rejuvenate an older one,

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bringing the romance into the daguerreian age. And as we have just seen, this relationship is mutually beneficial in that the romance represents the daguerreotype’s connection to subjectivity and not just objectivity. One of the most imaginative daguerreian romances to appear in print takes the metaphor of the lifelike daguerreian portrait to its literal extreme in a story about images that come to life. ‘‘The Magnetic Daguerreotypes,’’ originally published in the New York Sunday Courier and reprinted in the Photographic Art-Journal in 1852, envisions a new imaging process capable of producing likenesses that breathe and move in tandem with their subjects.44 In this romance populated by allegorically named characters, the narrator, Ernest Darkman, visits the Berlin studio of the mysterious Professor Dunkelheim (‘‘dark home’’) to schedule a sitting for portraits of himself and his fiance´e, Elora (‘‘light’’). In discussing the terms for payment, Dunkelheim declares himself a ‘‘man of science, not a trader,’’ and refuses a cash transaction (354). As in Love at First Sight, Dunkelheim offers the portraits with the only charge that the subjects sit for a second set of images that he is allowed to keep as part of his ‘‘collection of specimens.’’ Ernest and Elora arrive at the studio the next day, where Dunkelheim positions them ‘‘before what appeared to be merely two plates of highly polished steel’’ and instructs them ‘‘to remain perfectly motionless, with [their] eyes fixed upon their mirrored counterparts.’’ The exposure is both invisible and immediate; the narrator explains, ‘‘Scarcely had he uttered this direction; when he relieved us from the task by the surprising assurance that the portraits were already effected.’’ In another imaginative variation on the daguerreian process, Dunkelheim explains that the magnetically produced images must be protected from light for twelve hours following the exposure. As a result, the couple leaves the studio (after sitting once more according to the terms of the arrangement) without examining the quality of their likenesses and with Dunkelheim menacingly predicting, ‘‘I know you better than you know me, and shall know you still better,’’ as he bids them adieu (354). When Ernest inspects his portrait later at home, he initially believes that he and his fiance´e have been the victims of a hoax as the plate only seems to reflect his ‘‘own features like a common mirror’’ (354). But in looking at Elora’s portrait he discovers, ‘‘It was no deception—I indeed beheld Elora—Elora in all the glow of her matchless complexion and shining hair—Elora, as the most faithful mirror alone could represent her’’ (355). To this point, it seems as if the likeness is nothing more than a fine

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daguerreotype. Yet with a closer look, Ernest sees that the likeness pictures ‘‘Elora living, breathing, moving—yes, moving, for even as I gazed the soft blue eyes which met mine, evidently unconscious of my presence, closed gently, and were hidden by their snowy lids, whilst the rose-tinted lips parted slightly in a smile of angelic innocence, and a sleeping beauty’s reflection replaced the waking image of my mistress’’ (355). Indeed, Dunkelheim the scientist has made good on his promise to ‘‘do more—do that to which the mere fixing of a reflection is a trifle’’ by adding movement to the daguerreotype’s mirror image of its subject (353). Despite frequent assertions of the daguerreian portrait’s lifelikeness, actual daguerreotypes lack two key features of real life: color and motion. Dunkelheim’s ‘‘magnetic daguerreotypes’’ do nothing to correct the former, but with respect to the latter, the narrator declares that the professor ‘‘might well claim for his invention the name of a new and unparalleled science!’’ (355). What seems at first a ‘‘glorious gift’’ from Dunkelheim quickly becomes a nightmarish experience of loss when the narrator realizes that ‘‘The Professor possessed copies’’ and ‘‘would be enabled to watch every change in [his] face, to read [his] every thought, as in an open book, to amuse his [Dunkelheim’s] leisure with the mockery of [Ernest’s] inmost emotions, and—more horrible yet—Elora’s!’’ (355, original emphasis). When he informs Elora of his discovery and its consequences, she demands, ‘‘Oh, Ernest, why—why did you subject me to this fearful experience?’’ Ernest is only able to respond, ‘‘Alas! how could I imagine all the consequences of an invention so unheard of, so portentious [sic]?’’ (356). Unable to unexpose themselves to the process once they are aware of its consequences, Ernest resolves to recover the second set of portraits from Dunkelheim or kill him if he refuses. The couple postpones their marriage until the portraits can be secured; when the search takes longer than expected, they marry and consummate the union, despite their exposure to Dunkelheim’s voyeurism. Ernest renews his vow to find the professor and the portraits, eventually locating and killing the former in Paris and purchasing the latter at an auction of his effects. Once again their ‘‘own masters, and not puppets, acting for the amusement of a detestable old necromancer,’’ Ernest and Elora live happily ever after (359). As the narrator explains of his capacity for such happiness, ‘‘It is not my fault that I am not miserable and full of remorse. Elora is so lovely that, if she were to insist upon it, I verily believe I should murder another Professor to-morrow!’’ He concludes his tale by declaring, ‘‘Nobody ever accused Ernest Darkman of pretending to be an

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exemplary person, so he does not hesitate to say that this is a story without a moral’’ (359, original emphasis). There is, of course, a moral to ‘‘The Magnetic Daguerreotypes’’: truly lifelike portraits are best left to the imagination rather than made a reality by amoral and, therefore, immoral science. In an extended close reading of this remarkable story, Shawn Michelle Smith suggests that it ‘‘plays directly upon the misgivings associated with the uncanny daguerreotype and demonstrates particularly the gendered nature of those anxieties.’’45 ‘‘In this strange story,’’ Smith continues, ‘‘daguerreotypes literally provide a window onto the world of their subjects, and private feminine interiorities are imagined as they are pried by masculine gazes’’ (15). I agree that the story transforms wonder into terror by exploiting the popular idea that the daguerreian portrait’s mechanically objective image of its subject’s appearance reveals his or her internal character. But I want to suggest that of all of the ideas about daguerreotypy circulating in popular print, the one that is most horrifying in ‘‘The Magnetic Daguerreotypes’’ is that of their likeness to life, heightened in the story by portraits that not only look but also move just like their subjects. What makes this supposed ‘‘improvement’’ on the daguerreotype so terrifying is that in unfixing its subject, it unfixes the very idea of character. No longer can a static character type be assigned to the person in the picture; rather, interiority becomes as dynamic as the body itself and, thus, a series of changeable moods displaces the idea of a defining character. In gaining magnetic daguerreotypes, the world loses its heroes, villains, and every character type in between; in their stead, the story can see only men and women whose moods and morals are as unfixed as their motile portraits. Whereas Ernest was unable to ‘‘imagine all of the consequences of an invention so unheard of, so portentous,’’ the story is able to do just that because it is a romance (356). As such, its ‘‘magnetic’’ daguerreotypes are not a new invention but a reimagining of an existing technology—despite Dunkelheim’s claim that his ‘‘invention has no more to do with Daguerre’s crude experiments, than the man in the moon with the London Bible Society!’’ (353, original emphasis)—and its sociocultural consequences. As a romance, then, ‘‘The Magnetic Daguerreotypes’’ reveals more about what is than about what might be. Thus, while Trachtenberg reads it as a premonition of ‘‘the many ways life would never again be the same after photography’’ (Lincoln’s Smile and Other Enigmas 24), I understand it as an insightful observation about its own moment. Specifically, ‘‘The Magnetic

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Daguerreotypes’’ shows its readers how describing daguerreian portraits as lifelike misrepresents both the daguerreotype and life. More implicitly, the story also argues that using likeness to life—or what Daston and Galison historicize as the idea of scientific objectivity—as the gold standard for all forms of image making demeans representation and reality alike by realizing the consequences of doing so as only fiction could. Such fictional treatments of daguerreotypy also work to transform what had become profoundly ordinary objects in the decade after their introduction into something once again marvelous, restoring some of their initial mystery. In doing so, they contribute to the conversations about daguerreotypy in print that emphasize the aspects of the medium that work on both the eye and the imagination—the seeming movement of the image as it appears and disappears from view, and the co-presence of the subject and the viewer on its mirrored surface. Liu has proposed that, over time, ‘‘[n]arratives of new media encounter emplot their identity tale as a life cycle of media change’’ (6). I read romantic narratives about daguerreotypy like ‘‘The Magnetic Daguerreotypes’’ as notes from Liu’s second phase of media change—‘‘media disenchantment’’ (7)—in which enchanted images with disturbing powers signify a growing unease with daguerreotypy and ideas about its likeness to life. Their more subjective way of seeing the daguerreotype both borrows from and challenges ideas about scientific image making and about daguerreotypy’s representational accuracy and naturalness that were established by the first responses to the medium. In the next chapter, I follow these contradictory ways of seeing daguerreotypy from popular periodicals into one of the most significant treatments of daguerreotypy in antebellum American literature—Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables—and into Gabriel Harrison’s romantic daguerreotypes and short stories, reading them as more mature narratives of antebellum America’s encounter with daguerreotypy that, accordingly, forward more complicated theories of media and aesthetics.46 In romanticizing daguerreotypy, I contend, Hawthorne and Harrison define all art as essentially subjective and defend it against the growing influence of scientific objectivity that has entered into aesthetic discourse via daguerreian image making.

Chapter 2

Daguerreian Romanticism The House of the Seven Gables and Gabriel Harrison’s Portraits

This chapter focuses on an important story within the story of antebellum Americans’ encounter with the new medium of daguerreotypy as it took shape in a range of popular and professional print publications: that of the emerging epistemic virtue of mechanical objectivity in scientific image making coming into contact with the old aesthetic value of discerning artistry in traces of the artist’s subjectivity. As we have seen, for those charged with describing the new medium (initially, scientists in France, then writers reporting on these first accounts), the scientific ideal of mechanical objectivity appealed because it provided a reason for setting the daguerreotype apart from established forms of image making, namely painting, drawing, and engraving. Thus, in promoting daguerreotypy as a superior form of representation, early responses to the new medium effectively reversed the aesthetic ideal of an artist’s subjective influence distinguishing art works from more ‘‘mechanical,’’ but still manual, images so that it more closely matched that of scientific image making, which was coming to value the automatism and objectivity of an actual machine. Such a reversal of values is characteristic of what Liu has theorized as the first phase of new media encounter: the moment of ‘‘media enchantment/colonization’’ in which, ‘‘[f]or better or for worse, media changes us’’ (6)—or, less deterministically, we change because of our excitement about a new medium. Yet such change is not universally accepted: ‘‘[m]edia enchantment entails disenchantment and, ultimately, resistance’’ (7)—the subsequent phase of the encounter. This chapter and the next focus on case studies of disenchantment and resistance: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The

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House of the Seven Gables, the writings and daguerreotypes of Gabriel Harrison and Southworth & Hawes, and Herman Melville’s Pierre. I see this collection of texts and images as dramatizing and enacting media encounter in unexpected ways—from transforming a chapter into the romantic equivalent of a daguerreian portrait, to composing allegorical daguerreian images, to fictionalizing a hostile encounter between author and editor over the matter of a daguerreotype—to theorize an alternative outcome of the encounter of literary and daguerreian representation. The alternative is nothing new; it is a return to the old standard of artistic subjectivity as best suited to all forms of art, including daguerreotypy. Put another way, I argue that these works not only defend the aesthetic value of subjectivity in art but also define art—from image making to novel writing—as essentially subjective and, thus, opposed to science and the growing influence of mechanical objectivity as an epistemic virtue. I begin with The House of the Seven Gables—the most extended fictional treatment of daguerreotypy in American literature that also advances Hawthorne’s romantic aesthetic. Romance, as Hawthorne defines it in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, is ‘‘a work of art’’ that presents ‘‘the truth of the human heart . . . under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.’’1 By contrast, ‘‘a Novel’’ must ‘‘aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience’’ (1). I argue that contemporary scientific discussions of subjectivity and objectivity that oppose them as representational values inform Hawthorne’s definition by opposition of the romance and the novel as literary genres. We also notice that Hawthorne’s characterization of the novel resonates with popular descriptions of the daguerreotype’s ‘‘very minute fidelity’’ to its subject—the representational capacity that writers have used to set it apart from all other art forms. In the previous chapter, we saw how popular periodical writers began to apply the emerging standard of scientific objectivity to the new medium of daguerreotypy. In this chapter, we will see how Hawthorne and Gabriel Harrison foreground the artistic subjectivity of daguerreian image making—the romance in both the image and the medium—to defend the place of subjectivity in art and to incorporate daguerreotypy into the fine arts. While daguerreotypy is present throughout The House of the Seven Gables and has been examined by a number of critics, I focus on the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter (chapter 28), reading it as a narrative enactment of the encounter between daguerreotypy and romance.2 I argue that the

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central narrative conceit of the chapter—that Judge Pyncheon is not dead but stubbornly sitting in a chair and missing all of his engagements as time passes him by—effectively approximates a daguerreian portrait of the Judge. Compared to previous criticism that has noticed a resemblance between Hawthornian romance and daguerreotypy, this is a rather aggressive reading in its contention that the encounter of romance and daguerreotypy transforms an entire chapter into the narrative equivalent of a daguerreotype.3 Yet this is no ordinary daguerreotype: moonlight, not sunlight, is the artist and the figurative image that results is accordingly romantic. The encounter between romance and daguerreotypy changes both as subjectivity and objectivity work to moderate, not oppose, each other— with consequences beyond Hawthorne’s literary aesthetics. I contend that the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter both theorizes and models a romantic blend of subjectivity and objectivity that Hawthorne promotes as an aesthetic ideal for not just literature but also painting, daguerreotypy, and architecture. In this chapter’s second half, I turn to Gabriel Harrison’s romantic biography, daguerreotypes, and short stories. Harrison—an actual daguerreotypist who has much in common with Hawthorne’s fictional Holgrave—also resists the encroachment of scientific objectivity into aesthetics in his theory and practice of daguerreotypy and literary romance. Like the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter of The House of the Seven Gables, Harrison’s ‘‘descriptive daguerreotypes’’ explicitly dramatize the encounter of romance and daguerreotypy as images that allegorize the medium’s relationship to time, sunlight, and the fine arts. In these images, the fine detail that characterizes the medium gives way to Harrison’s deliberate artistic composition of the scenes and his management of the image’s, and medium’s, tones. In them, we see Harrison’s subjects (both the people in the images and the themes that they dramatize) not as they are but as he sees them, as his artistic subjectivity is foregrounded and the standard for artistry in painting is applied to daguerreotypy. The House of the Seven Gables’ Sitting Story In the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne cautions readers against ‘‘expos[ing] the Romance to an inflexible and exceedingly dangerous species of criticism, by bringing [the author’s] fancy-pictures almost into positive contact with the realities of the moment’’ (3). But what

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appears, at first glance, to be a warning seems like an invitation with another, given the sincere duplicity of the persona that Hawthorne develops and performs in his prefaces.4 I take it as the latter, reading the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter as the narrative equivalent of a daguerreotype and, as such, the result of Hawthorne’s romantic experiment with bringing narrative into ‘‘positive contact’’ with daguerreotypy. ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ immediately follows ‘‘The Flight of the Two Owls’’—the chapter dedicated to Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon’s experience of the wonders of the modern world once they have fled their decaying ancestral seat. They trade their confinement in the house for the even closer quarters of a train and find the experiences of hurtling through space and being brought into intimate contact with a cross-section of modern society both wonderful and terrifying. After all of the talk about movement and its rapid narrative pace in ‘‘The Flight of the Two Owls,’’ the contrast of the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter’s thematic focus on stasis and its corresponding narrative stagnation is especially noticeable.5 It begins: ‘‘Judge Pyncheon, while his two relatives have fled away with such ill-considered haste, still sits in the old parlor, keeping house, as the familiar phrase is, in the absence of its ordinary occupants’’ (268). Although the Judge is dead, the narrative has only alluded to his passing without declaring it directly, making possible the chapter’s extended conceit that willful stubbornness, rather than rigor mortis, holds him in the same chair in which his ancestor was found dead. As the narrator puts it in establishing this conceit, ‘‘The Judge has not shifted his position for a long while, now. He has not stirred hand or foot—nor withdrawn his eyes, so much as a hair’s breadth, from their fixed gaze towards the corner of the room’’ (268). I want to suggest that in so positioning the Judge, the narrative introduces the possibility of another conceit within the larger one: that he is sitting for his daguerreian portrait, just as he has in Holgrave’s studio earlier in the narrative.6 This possibility becomes a reality two chapters later when Holgrave shows Phoebe the daguerreotype that he has taken of the Judge’s corpse seated as it is in the parlor. In the meantime, I argue, the narrative can be read to suggest that Holgrave is not the only daguerreotypist in the story. We first notice as much when the narrator insists on the Judge’s hands and feet remaining still and his eyes remaining fixed on a focal point, just as a daguerreotypist would to ensure a successful likeness. That the Judge is seated further calls to mind the procedure of ‘‘sitting’’ for a portrait.7 The chair in which he sits has been described in some detail earlier in the

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narrative as ‘‘a very antique elbow-chair, with a high back, carved elaborately in oak, and a roomy depth within its arms, that made up, by its spacious comprehensiveness, for the lack of any of those artistic curves which abound in a modern chair’’ (33). Although the armchair is an antique, its design offers an ideal balance of postural discipline and physical ease in addition to visual interest—a combination desirable in a chair used in a modern daguerreotypist’s studio. While a brace attached to such a chair would have held a sitter’s head steady in a daguerreotypist’s studio, the oak armchair keeps the Judge in his place with its comfort instead of physical restraint. The narrator proposes that the ‘‘oaken chair, to be sure, may tempt him with its roominess,’’ even though ‘‘there are better chairs than this—mahogany, black walnut, rosewood, spring-seated and damaskcushioned, with varied slopes, and innumerable artifices to make them easy, and obviate the irksomeness of too tame an ease’’ (269). These more modern, and not too easy, chairs are more typical of the kind that one would find in daguerreotypists’ public galleries than in the studio. As Richard Rudisill has observed, the furnishings ‘‘in the daguerreotype gallery are those of the upper middle-class American home of the period,’’ selected to put the customer at perfect ease before sitting for his or her portrait (202). Once in the studio, the sitter would find him- or herself in a chair more like the one in which the Judge sits—one that had been chosen as much for how it holds the body as for how it holds the eye. In further detailing the Judge’s appearance in the chair, the narrator notes that he ‘‘holds his watch in his left hand, but clutched in such a manner that you cannot see the dial-plate’’ (268). Three chapters earlier, ‘‘The Judge had taken his watch from his vest-pocket, and now held it in his hand, measuring the interval which was to ensue before the appearance of Clifford,’’ whom he had sent Hepzibah to summon for what was supposed to be a fateful confrontation (239). In addition to suggesting a common symbol in portraiture of a subject’s wealth and mortality, the Judge’s watch figures the chapter’s thematic preoccupation with different experiences and representations of time. Noting at one point that the Judge had allotted a half hour of his busy day to his call on Clifford, the narrator exclaims, ‘‘Why, Judge, it is already two hours, by your own undeviatingly accurate chronometer!’’ (270). Frustrated that the Judge ‘‘will not give himself the trouble either to bend his head, or elevate his hand, so as to bring the faithful timekeeper within his range of vision,’’ and extending the conceit that he is still alive, the narrator concludes the paragraph with a

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remarkable observation: ‘‘Time, all at once, appears to have become a matter of no moment with the Judge!’’ (270–71). Layered with figures of speech related to time, this sentence is the chapter’s most explicit acknowledgment of its experiments with narrative time and of one of its major themes. Indeed, time is a matter of great moment with the narrative for the length of this chapter, as we see in the narrator’s sustained attention not only to the Judge’s watch and schedule as events transpire without him but also to the changing light in the parlor as day changes to night and back to day. Most obviously, the chapter dramatizes the isolating and leveling nature of death through the narrator’s nearly hour-by-hour account of how time and life continue for all but the Judge, rendered powerless by death. More subtly, the possibility that the Judge is not just looking at his watch but also sitting for his portrait reminds us that all portraiture stands as a reminder of its subject’s physical mortality even as it secures for its subject a form of immortality.8 The narrative makes this point overtly in its first chapter when Colonel Pyncheon’s corpse is discovered seated (again, in the same chair that the Judge sits in) immediately beneath his own portrait. The Judge’s similar predicament, heightened by the narrator’s insistence that he is still alive but uncharacteristically allowing life to pass him by, resonates as well with the subject’s strange experience of time in sitting for a portrait. When the narrator first addresses the Judge directly in the chapter, he does so to alert him that he (the Judge) has lost track of time. In sitting for any kind of portrait, the subject similarly takes him- or herself out of time by holding the same position for a painter or by remaining as still as possible for the camera. For a daguerreian likeness especially, the sitter must restrict voluntary bodily rhythms—such as blinking and breathing—that indicate that time is passing and that he or she is alive, due to the medium’s sensitivity to motion, which causes blurring or even invisibility during the longest exposure times. In thus making the living body look like an image so that the portrait will be ‘‘true to life,’’ every subject of a portrait effectively makes him- or herself into an object. In recognizing this, we understand one reason why daguerreotypy was especially suited to making postmortem portraits: from a technical standpoint alone, a corpse is the ideal daguerreian subject because of its stasis.9 Thus, whether we see the Judge as dead or alive in the chapter, it is difficult not to picture him as sitting for a portrait that inevitably figures both life and death.10 Yet both the chapter and the conceits that the Judge is still alive and sitting for his portrait extend well beyond what is necessary to convey the

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familiar moral of how even the powerful are powerless against death and the forward march of time. The point at which the narrator seems to have gone too far is also the turning point of the chapter—the darkest hour of the night, when the Judge and all else disappear from sight. If we imagine the narrator as a daguerreotypist and the parlor as his daguerreian plate, this moment—when ‘‘infinite, inscrutable blackness’’ overwhelms all that is visible—becomes legible as the chapter’s figurative daguerreotype of Judge Pyncheon reaching overexposure (276). Gradually, the light grows ‘‘[f]ainter and fainter’’; what was gray turns ‘‘sable’’ and the lightest parts of the image—the window and the Judge’s pale face—are the last to fade to black (276). At the literal level of the chapter, the Judge is no longer visible because of too little light rather than too much, but at the figurative level, it is the narrator’s gaze—his ‘‘too long and exclusive contemplation of that figure in the chair’’—that causes this overexposure (281). Whereas a daguerreotypist would not be able to salvage an image from an overexposed plate, moonlight and the narrator’s coincident shift to a more romantic state of mind combine to realize an ideal, if still figurative, daguerreian image of the Judge. Total darkness proves transient as the sky clears and first starlight, then moonlight—which the narrator describes as ‘‘more effectual light’’—shines through the parlor window. As the town clock strikes midnight, ‘‘moonbeams fall aslant into the room,’’ ‘‘play over the Judge’s figure,’’ ‘‘follow the shadows, in changeful sport, across his unchanging features,’’ and ‘‘gleam upon his watch’’ (278). We might think of this as an ekphrastic passage, albeit one that focuses more on the material characteristics of the daguerreian medium and on how they seem to endow the static image with a sort of dynamism than on the image itself. The slanting light of the moon calls to mind how a daguerreian image is only visible as positive in raking light. In direct light, the image turns negative or into a faint trace on the mirror-like surface. The playful movement of the light across the Judge’s features—an effect of the blowing leaves of the tree outside the window— resembles the effect experienced by the viewer in tilting a daguerreotype at different angles to bring the image into better view. And finally, the Judge’s watch would gleam in a daguerreotype just as it does in the moonlight; that which reflects the most light in front of the camera also reflects the most light on the daguerreian surface such that the image of the watch would be one of the most mirror-like aspects of the silver-coated plate. Some of Hawthorne’s contemporaries considered these visual effects of the daguerreotype’s material characteristics to be defects of the medium. In

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a description of the rival photographic imaging process that William Henry Fox Talbot announced just after Daguerre’s, one writer describes the ‘‘warm brownish hue’’ of Talbot’s paper-based images as ‘‘mellow and agreeable to the eye, and much preferable to the metallic glare and livid blackness of Daguerreotype-plates.’’11 Hawthorne registers such dissatisfaction with the daguerreian medium through Phoebe, who tells Holgrave that she doesn’t ‘‘much like pictures’’ of the sort he makes because of their ‘‘dodging away from the eye, and trying to escape all together’’ (Ho7G 91). But in the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter, these are the most attractive traits of the daguerreotype—the romantic flicker and reflection, not the granular detail, that the polished silver of the image surface makes possible. In adopting this different point of view, the chapter formally shifts into romance, as Hawthorne defines its generic characteristics in ‘‘The CustomHouse’’ and in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables. In both texts, moonlight—especially moonlight reflected in a mirror—figures the imaginative potential latent in ordinary objects and everyday life. Earlier in the narrative of Seven Gables, as Holgrave reads Phoebe his hypnotic romantic short story about her ancestor Alice Pyncheon, the sun sets and the moon rises. By the end of Holgrave’s story, its ‘‘silvery beams’’ had ‘‘softened and embellished the aspect of the old house’’; with ‘‘the lapse of every moment, the garden grew more picturesque’’ (213). These ‘‘common-place characteristics,’’ the narrator announces, ‘‘were now transfigured by a charm of romance’’ (213). Similarly, following the most romantic episode in the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter—in which a procession of Pyncheon ghosts pass through the parlor to examine the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon hanging on its wall—the narrator explains that he was ‘‘betrayed into this brief extravagance by the quiver of the moonbeams; they dance hand-in-hand with shadows, and are reflected in the looking-glass, which, you are aware, is always a kind of window or door-way into the spiritual world’’ (281). Directly addressing the reader instead of Judge Pyncheon at this point, the narrator alludes to ‘‘The Custom-House,’’ the preface to Hawthorne’s previous novel, The Scarlet Letter, which introduced the moonlit looking-glass of Hawthorne’s parlor.12 In both texts, Hawthorne theorizes and models romance by borrowing from print discussions of daguerreotypy that emphasize the medium’s unusual visual effects over the mechanical objectivity of its image. In doing so, he makes daguerreotypy itself one of the ordinary objects transformed into something more artistic by the romantic artist’s subjectivity, thereby countering conversations about daguerreotypy

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that insist on its objectivity. The numinous visual effects of its material characteristics—the shifting of the image from positive to negative in different angles of light and its mirror-like surface that holds the image and reflects the viewer as he or she looks at the image—resonate with the playful and gleaming moonlight and the appearance of the mirror. According to Hawthorne’s aesthetic vision, the daguerreotype is most appealing as a form of representation when the representational precision of the image—its vaunted mechanical objectivity—is enhanced by the supernatural liveliness of the medium and its effects on the viewer’s subjectivity, and romance is most effective when it is at its most daguerreian. In this alignment of romance and daguerreotypy, moonlight is to the romance writer as sunlight is to the daguerreotypist. Whereas the earliest responses to the daguerreotype tended to displace human artistic agency and subjectivity with solar power and mechanical objectivity, Hawthorne seeks to restore agency to the romantic artist and subjectivity to art. He does so by aligning his ideas about art and artistic creation with another strain of the popular conversation about daguerreotypy—one that represents the medium as magical and the daguerreotypist as an artist with strange powers. An 1849 poem from The Ladies’ Repository is representative of this strain: Tell me, magician, tell What is the mighty secret of thy art? What is the hidden spell, Or charm mysterious, that thou dost impart? Who taught thee how to bind The sun’s bright rays to do thy bidding here? What witchery canst thou find In the transparent, cloudless atmosphere? Hast thou a demon sprite Behind the curtain’s dark, portentous fold? The pure, cerulean light Dost thou by mystic arts and magic hold? A patient underling The portrait painter toileth day by day; Thy unseen penciling Can in a moment every look portray.

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Tell me, magician, tell, What is the mighty secret of thy art? What is the hidden spell, Or charm mysterious, which thou dost impart?13 The ‘‘mighty secret’’ of the romancer’s art is his subjective imagination, yet like the daguerreotypist addressed by this ode, he is reluctant to divulge it. At the conclusion of the moonlit parlor scene in ‘‘The Custom-House,’’ as Hawthorne (in his prefatorial persona) imagines himself looking at the room’s reflection in the mirror, he declares, ‘‘Then, at such an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances’’ (SL 36). The narrator of the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter does just that in ‘‘mak[ing] a little sport with the idea’’ that ‘‘all the dead Pyncheons are bound to assemble’’ in the parlor of the House of the Seven Gables, only to apologize for having done so (Ho7G 279). Immediately after the episode concludes with the ghost of Matthew Maule laughing at the Pyncheons from a corner in the parlor, the narrator confesses that in ‘‘[i]ndulging our fancy in this freak, we have partly lost the power of restraint and guidance’’ (280). Yet this confession is just as equivocal as Holgrave’s earlier admission that he ‘‘misuse[s] Heaven’s blessed sunshine by tracing out human features, through its agency’’ (46). Both apologize for asserting their artistic agency not to restrain or relinquish it but to exert it all the more under the cover of seeming self-restraint and of compliance with a more conservative aesthetic, as Hawthorne also does in the Seven Gables’ preface.14 In the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter and in ‘‘The Custom-House’’ alike, moonlight provides the same cover for the even more transformative power of the romantic artist’s imagination to make such scenes ‘‘look like the truth.’’15 He needs this cover, I contend, because of the growing influence of the idea of mechanical objectivity on standards for not just scientific image making and daguerreian portraiture but also the novel. Like moonlight and a daguerreian image viewed from the wrong angle, this romantic mood proves evanescent and the narrator’s tone shifts accordingly. Informing the Judge that the ‘‘morning sunshine’’ and new day offer redemption for even a ‘‘subtile, worldly, selfish, iron-hearted hypocrite’’ if he chooses to accept it, the narrator implores him to ‘‘[r]ise up,

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before it be too late!’’ (283). Turning vengeful as the Judge remains unresponsive to this ‘‘last appeal,’’ the narrator observes that a fly ‘‘has smelt out Governor Pyncheon’’ (ironically retitled because he was to be nominated for the office at the dinner he missed the previous evening). The fly ‘‘alights now on his forehead, now on his chin, and now, Heaven help us, is creeping over the bridge of his nose, towards the would-be-chiefmagistrate’s wide open eyes!’’ (283). The narrator begins to taunt the corpse, ‘‘Canst thou not brush the fly away? Art thou too sluggish? Thou man, that hadst so many busy projects yesterday! Art thou too weak, that wast so powerful?’’ ‘‘Not brush away a fly! Nay, then, we give thee up!,’’ the narrator finally announces, ending the chapter without abandoning the conceit (283). Interestingly, a fly also figures prominently in one early account of the daguerreotype’s representational accuracy. In 1840 Niles’ National Register reprinted an article titled ‘‘Daguerreotype’’ from the New York Journal of Commerce describing the surprise of a ‘‘gentleman who had sat half a minute to have his miniature taken by the Daguerreotype.’’16 In looking at the resulting portrait, he notices a ‘‘spot on his cheek which he was sure did not belong to him.’’ ‘‘Daguerre would have been set down a liar at once, but for his well-established reputation of always speaking the truth,’’ the article claims. A microscope solves the mystery and preserves Daguerre’s reputation: ‘‘the spot was seen to be the well-defined miniature of a fly, who had seized that occasion to get his own likeness taken, and so had stood upon the gentleman’s cheek unobserved.’’ In the newspaper article, the fly confirms the daguerreotype’s mechanical objectivity, picturing all that comes into the camera’s view without concern for the aesthetic consequences. In the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter, the fly is the focal point for death’s and the narrator’s final and full humiliation of the prideful Judge. The narrator seems to humiliate himself here as well: if we read the chapter literally, he is exceedingly dim for not recognizing that the Judge is dead; if we read it ironically, he is excessively vicious for mocking the deceased. Yet if we return to what I am proposing as the second conceit of the chapter—that the Judge is sitting for his daguerreian portrait whether he is alive or dead—the narrator’s mock-ridiculous actions toward the motionless judge may be interpretable as implicitly ridiculing anyone who similarly confuses lifelessness with life, as popular descriptions of daguerreian portraiture do. Only in fiction do we see people taking such descriptions literally, interacting with ‘‘lifelike’’ daguerreian portraits as if they are alive. For example,

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in one of the most marvelous stories of the daguerreian age, ‘‘The Inconstant Daguerreotype,’’ published four years after The House of the Seven Gables, two daguerreotype portraits hanging across from each other fall in love.17 In the course of the narrative, the original of the female portrait is charmed by the male portrait and looks forward to meeting its subject, expecting to fall in love with him at second sight. Upon meeting in real life, she discovers that she loves his image more than the real man. After she steals the portrait, her disconsolate likeness falls to the floor; vulnerable without its beloved or protective glass, the image is so damaged that nothing is salvageable but the frame. Unlike either the character in this story or the Seven Gables’ narrator, antebellum Americans were not actually mistaking the merely lifelike for life; this is not what the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter cautions against via its narrator’s mock interactions with a corpse. Rather, I see the chapter calling attention to another, related self-delusion: the belief that reality—or what Hawthorne terms the ‘‘Actual’’ in ‘‘The Custom-House,’’ and the ‘‘Present’’ in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables—is immediately and objectively apparent, comprehensible, representable, and, therefore, reliable. From this faith comes the movement toward mechanical objectivity as the standard to which all forms of representation—not just scientific images—should be held. As the Seven Gables’ preface and the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter make clear, Hawthorne does not believe that all art must ‘‘aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience’’ (1). Rather, in defining and practicing ‘‘Romance,’’ he insists that art should maintain some degree of subjectivity, such that it represents the world as the artist sees it and so that we see the world differently as a result. This element of subjectivity is what makes art ‘‘Art’’ in Hawthorne’s works.18 With the simultaneous rise of mechanical objectivity and daguerreotypy, subjectivity has become the blemish that positivist science seeks to remove from representations of nature and that popular print is extending to art in discussions of daguerreotypy. In Hawthorne’s view, the consequences of this procedure are just as dire for art as they are for Georgiana in his story ‘‘The Birth-Mark.’’19 What I mean to suggest here is that in the Seven Gables’ preface and the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter alike, we see Hawthorne refuting the argument that all forms of representation be mechanically faithful to an objective idea of reality as one that destroys rather than perfects the very idea of art. To make mechanical objectivity the standard for artistic image making, to

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believe that daguerreotypy alone meets this requirement, and to see nothing but this objectivity in a daguerreian portrait is to be just as ridiculous as someone who expects a corpse to rise up and meet the new day. Postmortem Portraiture What, then, does a romantic daguerreotype look like and what does one see when looking at a daguerreotype from a romantic perspective? Thus far, I have focused on the romantic visual effects of the medium’s material characteristics—the flicker of the image and the glimmer of the mirrorlike silver plate—and their resemblance to moonlight reflected in a mirror, Hawthorne’s figure for how this effect affects the romantic artist’s imagination. But what of the image itself? What do we see of and in the likeness of Judge Pyncheon that results from the daguerreian process that is the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter, as I read it? We see in this figurative image what Phoebe sees in Holgrave’s ‘‘actual’’ postmortem daguerreotype of the Judge: Judge Pyncheon as dead and Judge Pyncheon as Death. The second daguerreotype that Holgrave shows Phoebe upon her return to the House of the Seven Gables, I contend, is the imaginary daguerreotype of the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter made actual. Although the daguerreotypist claims to have taken the image ‘‘within this half-hour’’ of Phoebe’s return, it is unclear how this could be so, given the dim light in the room even on the brightest day. Lara Langer Cohen puts it more absolutely: ‘‘No daguerreotypist using natural means could have produced such an image in the setting Hawthorne describes.’’20 Whereas Cohen argues that this impossibility implies that Holgrave has employed a version of wizardry that he has inherited from the Maules to produce the postmortem daguerreotype of the Judge, I contend that the magician here is Hawthorne himself. Holgrave’s ‘‘actual’’ daguerreotype and the figurative daguerreian image produced by the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter can be one and the same because the former is no less fictional than the latter. And lest we forget, this fiction is specifically a romance, even during its less explicitly romantic moments (its full title, after all, is The House of the Seven Gables, A Romance). As Hawthorne has told us in ‘‘The Custom-House,’’ romance is ‘‘where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other’’ (SL 36). Accordingly, the moonlit, not the sunlit, room is the ideal environment for creating a romantic postmortem daguerreotype in The House of the Seven Gables.

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The romantic daguerreotype produced under these circumstances functions as both a self-evident and an immediate sign of the Judge’s death and an effective means of mediating Phoebe’s encounter with death. When Phoebe returns to the house after visiting her immediate family in the country, Holgrave stops her at the door and guides her into what ‘‘had formerly been the grand reception-room’’ and, thus, away from the parlor where the Judge’s corpse still sits so that she will receive the news indirectly (300). When she begins to suspect that ‘‘something terrible has happened,’’ Holgrave confirms that her suspicions are correct, yet he cannot bring himself, any more than the narrator of the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter could, to say that the Judge is dead (301). Instead, he shows her two daguerreotypes. The first is ‘‘the same that he had shown her at their first interview, in the garden’’ (302). In only glancing quickly at it then, Phoebe mistook the daguerreotype for an altered image of the painted portrait of Colonel Pyncheon that hangs in the parlor. Holgrave assured her that with a longer look, she would have recognized it as the likeness of the modern version of the ancient Pyncheon, ‘‘sly, subtle, hard, imperious, and, withal, cold as ice,’’ but very much alive (92). The second time that he shows it to her, she is again impatient with the image, wondering what it has to do with Hepzibah and Clifford, about whom she is more concerned; even so, she sees it correctly this time. ‘‘It is Judge Pyncheon!’’ she exclaims; ‘‘You have shown it to me before!’’ (302). With this, Holgrave prepares Phoebe for viewing a second image so that she will recognize it immediately as a portrait of the Judge, but one taken more recently. ‘‘But here is the same face, taken within this half-hour,’’ he explains; ‘‘I had just finished it, when I heard you at the door’’ (302). ‘‘This is death!’’ she declares upon seeing it, shuddering and ‘‘turning very pale’’ before adding, ‘‘Judge Pyncheon dead!’’ (302). In Phoebe’s view, the daguerreotype is a portrait of death itself, embodied in the form of the Judge. Seeing it as such further mediates her encounter with the fact of the Judge’s death by making it more allegorical. In facing Death, she comes to know that her cousin has died. To Phoebe’s exclamation ‘‘Judge Pyncheon dead!’’ Holgrave replies, ‘‘Such as there represented, he sits in the next room’’ (302). In thus conflating representation and reality, Holgrave presents the daguerreotype as an unmediated, mechanically objective, and, therefore, unimpeachable record of the circumstances of the Judge’s death. As such, he assures Phoebe, the image ‘‘may be useful to Clifford’’ as ‘‘a point of evidence’’ in case Clifford is accused of having killed Judge Pyncheon, as he was with the death of his

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uncle thirty years earlier (303). Here, Holgrave relies more on the popular faith in the daguerreotype’s mechanical objectivity than on what the daguerreotype actually shows, as does the narrative, since it does not directly describe the image. In the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter, the narrator gives some hint as to what the portrait might look like when he imagines the Judge’s corpse appearing as a tardy dinner guest and terrifying the group with his ‘‘wide-open stare, at once wild and stolid’’ and the ‘‘crimson stain upon his shirt-bosom’’ (275). This is as close as the narrative comes to an ekphrastic description of the Judge’s appearance in his postmortem portrait. Yet these few details do not seem to suggest that Holgrave’s image contains enough visual information to prove that the Judge has died of natural causes. Even so, in the final chapter of the story, we are told that the ‘‘highest professional authority’’ has determined the Judge to have died a ‘‘natural, and—except for some unimportant particulars, denoting a slight idiosyncrasy—by no means an unusual form of death’’ (309). While the narrative does not specify whether this ‘‘authority’’ has examined Holgrave’s postmortem daguerreotype as part of the evidence in the case, the narrator’s dismissal of the ‘‘particulars’’ of the Judge’s death as ‘‘unimportant’’ only increases our curiosity about their importance. This ‘‘slight idiosyncrasy’’ is likely the hereditary gurgling in the throat that the narrative has told us that the Judge experienced while he was alive. By passively alluding to this condition, the narrator implies that the ‘‘authority’’ has overlooked the supernatural cause of death— Matthew Maule’s curse on the family that God give them blood to drink for their ancestor’s crime. The narrator’s mock-nonchalant comment also redirects our attention to the fact of the Judge’s death as the narrative has represented it. As the romance is structured, it is Holgrave’s postmortem daguerreotype that makes the Judge officially dead.21 This is not to say daguerreotypy is responsible for his death but rather to emphasize that it is responsible for making the fact of his death first speakable by Phoebe after Hepzibah and Clifford, the narrator, and Holgrave all have been unable to acknowledge it verbally. This supposedly unmediated image, then, ultimately mediates and manifests death as much for the narrative as it does for Phoebe. Throughout the narrative and most especially in its conclusion, daguerreotypy also mediates Holgrave’s relationship to the Pyncheons. During his first encounter with Phoebe, the daguerreotypist establishes the relationship between his occupation and his choice of residence: ‘‘I make

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pictures out of sunshine; and, not to be too much dazzled with my own trade, I . . . lodge in one of these dusky gables,’’ Holgrave explains (91). With this he produces a specimen of his work—the daguerreotype of the Judge that she mistakes for Colonel Pyncheon—and proposes that she call on him at his public rooms on ‘‘[a]ny bright day’’ with a rosebud in her hair so that he can ‘‘seize the purest ray of sunshine, and make a picture of the flower and its wearer’’ (94). But Phoebe never subjects herself to the process; as a result, we never know if one of Holgrave’s daguerreotypes ‘‘can bring out disagreeable traits on a perfectly amiable face’’ (91). The next occasion for their mutual contemplation of daguerreotypy is the Judge’s death. Without Phoebe asking why he has taken the time to take a postmortem portrait of the Judge, Holgrave volunteers that it may be useful not only as evidence but also as ‘‘a memorial valuable’’ to himself for ‘‘hereditary reasons that connect [him] strangely with that man’s fate’’ (303). Hinting here at his true identity as a descendent of Matthew Maule, Holgrave suggests that the memorial will serve less as a reminder of the Judge’s person than of his passing and, thereby, as proof that the past is truly past. In this logic, the immediacy of death in the image mediates Holgrave’s relationship to time, promising to make the present moment newly knowable on its own terms rather than in relation to the past and to ensure that the future will only move forward from this point. That he would need such a reminder, however, suggests that Holgrave has not broken entirely with the past—as does his marriage to a Pyncheon. Once again, daguerreotypy plays an important mediating role in their relationship. When Holgrave shows Phoebe the Judge’s postmortem likeness, it ‘‘separated Phoebe and himself from the world, and bound them to each other, by their exclusive knowledge of Judge Pyncheon’s mysterious death, and the counsel which they were forced to hold respecting it’’ (305). As the narrator observes, ‘‘The image of awful Death, which filled the house, held them united by his stiffened grasp’’ (305). Thus the truth of death—better understood through the daguerreotype than through the Judge’s actual corpse in the next room—gives birth to the possibility of their new life together. When the two declare their love for each other, the ‘‘dead man, so close beside them, was forgotten’’—as is daguerreotypy, which is not mentioned again in the narrative (307). Both the Judge’s death and daguerreian record of it would seem to have done their office: the Pyncheons and Maules reconcile, both are restored to wealth with their merger, and the narrative finally discovers an imaging process that captures color

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and motion in Maule’s Well ‘‘throwing up a succession of kaleidoscopic pictures’’ at the end of the story (319). Many readers have been frustrated by this ‘‘happy’’ ending, regarding it as too sudden and tidy to do justice to the rest of the narrative.22 While modern critics in particular have had trouble reconciling Holgrave’s and the narrative’s sudden conservatism with the earlier radicalism of both, I contend that this apparent contradiction is resolved when we recognize both Holgrave and the narrative as romantic.23 As Hawthorne defines it, romance is essentially hybrid in its character: it is part ‘‘Actual’’ (objective) and part ‘‘Imaginary’’ (subjective), it connects ‘‘a by-gone time with the very Present’’ (Ho7G 2), and, I would add, it is at once radical and conservative. As we have seen, under pressure from the gaining influence of scientific positivism and the epistemic virtue of mechanical objectivity, the romantic artist inevitably apologizes for exercising his imagination after having exposed us to its capacities. When he does, he redirects our attention from his subjective influence to the seemingly more objective agency of something in nature, such as sunlight. Significantly, when Holgrave seems to turn conservative in the narrative’s conclusion, he uses the same strategy. As he and the Pyncheons consider their options for relocating, Holgrave outlines his plan for a dwelling ‘‘in stone, rather than in wood’’ as best suited to the reformed Maule-Pyncheons (314). Upon hearing this, Phoebe exclaims, ‘‘Why, how wonderfully your ideas are changed!’’ (315). ‘‘Ah, Phoebe, I told you how it would be!’’ Holgrave replies; ‘‘You find me a conservative already!’’ (315). With this, Holgrave only acknowledges that Phoebe sees him as a conservative; he does not designate himself as such. Their discussion of domestic architecture itself reveals an important distance between such appearances and reality and suggests Holgrave’s more romantic politics. During one of his earlier conversations with Phoebe in the garden, Holgrave had declared that neither homes nor public buildings ‘‘ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or brick’’ and that it ‘‘were better that they should crumble to ruin, once in twenty years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and reform the institutions which they symbolize’’ (184). Once he is on the verge of owning a house built of wood, Holgrave comes to recognize how ‘‘every generation of the family might have altered the interior’’ of a stone house ‘‘to suit its own taste and convenience; while the exterior, through the lapse of years, might have been adding venerableness to its original beauty’’ (314). Doing so, Holgrave explains,

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would give ‘‘that impression of permanence, which I consider essential to the happiness of any one moment’’ (314–15). Similarly, his desire for a stone house only gives the impression that he is a conservative. With this I mean to suggest that Holgrave has become more conservative, but not entirely so, as his argument for the advantages of a stone house reveals. As he sees it, a stone house’s exterior stability and consistency mask its internal transformation with each new generation according to their different ideas about what is right. Holgrave has not given up on revolution; he has sent it underground—or, more accurately, he hides it behind a rock. Once again, we see the romantic artist concealing the transformational power of the human imagination behind a natural cover. The tradeoff for such cover is the necessary limit that it places on his imagination’s exercise. But as the preface to The House of the Seven Gables makes clear, the romancer does not seek unlimited power, only ‘‘a certain latitude’’ (1). Thus, Holgrave’s diminished radicalism (or increased conservatism) is, in fact, the more moderate pragmatism that typifies the romantic artist and that balances subjectivity and objectivity. It follows that romance also resides at the center of the political spectrum. While its restoration of power to the artist might seem subversive, it also concentrates authority in one person in a way that might be considered anti-democratic. Yet in that the romantic artist’s imagination—his restrained subjectivity—liberates us from the hegemony of the ‘‘Actual,’’ the ‘‘Present,’’ and the ‘‘ordinary course of man’s experience,’’ romance also would seem to have radical implications for the established order of things. These seemingly paradoxical qualities give romance its sustaining tension as an aesthetic.24 It is important to understand, though, that this tension does not render romance neutral on the question of the place of subjectivity in art and artistry. Romance is unquestionably in favor of art that bears traces of its creator’s subjectivity. It insists that there is a place for art in the era of mechanical objectivity’s emergence precisely because it is still produced by men, even if they work with nature and machines. Which brings us back to daguerreotypy. Some critics have attributed its sudden disappearance from the narrative to Holgrave marrying into wealth and no longer needing an occupation or to the narrator’s earlier declaration that ‘‘[h]is present phase, as a Daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the preceding ones,’’ including teaching, peddling, dentistry, and public lecturing (177).25 But if we imagine Holgrave’s life beyond the narrative’s conclusion, as the

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narrative itself invites us to do, daguerreotypy need not be necessarily absent from it.26 In fact, I contend that if we understand Holgrave’s romantic pragmatism (or pragmatic romanticism) and romance’s relationship to daguerreotypy, it is impossible to imagine his life without daguerreotypy. Like romance, the daguerreotype is generically hybrid as Hawthorne defines it: it captures the actual and the imaginary, it is immediate and mediating, objective and subjective, natural and man-made. As such, it suits Holgrave perfectly. For the kind of images that he might produce we need look no further than to the ‘‘descriptive daguerreotypes’’ of the real-life Gabriel Harrison. Gabriel Harrison, ‘‘Poet Daguerrean’’ In the same year that Hawthorne’s fictional daguerreotypist Holgrave introduced himself to the reading public as a ‘‘misuse[r] of heaven’s blessed sunshine,’’ a full-page frontispiece portrait and lengthy biography of the real-life daguerreotypist Gabriel Harrison appeared in the Photographic ArtJournal, the third in the fledgling professional journal’s series on prominent members of the field. If Harrison is familiar at all to literary historians it is most likely as the daguerreotypist whose image of Walt Whitman was engraved and reproduced as the famous frontispiece of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. While his associations with Whitman and with Edgar Allan Poe are well documented, it is difficult to confirm whether Harrison and Hawthorne might have known each other.27 In what follows, I aim less to make a case for Harrison as Holgrave’s source than to examine his romantic biography, daguerreotypes, and writings for how they resist the popular idea of daguerreotypy’s mechanical objectivity by hybridizing daguerreotypy and narrative and, thus, enact a new media encounter that reasserts the value of the subjectivity in representational art. The Photographic Art-Journal, in which Harrison’s biography appeared, was one of two main periodicals dedicated to the art and practice of daguerreotypy that began publication in the early 1850s. Founded by Henry Hunt Snelling, a practicing daguerreotypist who had published one of the first American histories of photography in 1849, the journal entered antebellum print culture as one of many new specialized publications devoted to various trades. In his introduction to the journal’s first issue, Snelling observes that as ‘‘man has been enlightened by the power of the press, each commercial, mechanical, agricultural, or political class’’ has developed ‘‘its

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own printed organ of intercommunion, for their own special benefit.’’28 With such an organ, Snelling hoped to improve the ‘‘art’’ of daguerreotypy ‘‘under the criticisms of the press’’ (1). He laments, At the present day [daguerreotypy] is viewed, too much, in the light of a mere mechanical occupation to arrive at any high degree of excellence. In too many instances men enter into it because they can get nothing else to do; without the least appreciation of its merits as an art of exquisite refinement, without the taste to guide them, and without the love and ambition to study more than its practical application, neglecting the sciences intimately connected with it, and leaving entirely out of the question those of drawing, painting, and sculpture, sister arts, a knowledge of which much tend to elevate the taste and direct the operator into the more classical and elegant walks of his profession. (1) Recognizing that the thousands who had become daguerreian ‘‘operators’’ for economic rather than artistic reasons and who lacked any training, talent, or appreciation for its aesthetic potential threatened to reduce what he sees as a promising new art to a mere trade, Snelling presents his journal as a means of advancing daguerreotypy as both a fine art and a profession.29 As part of his campaign, he published a series of biographies of model daguerreian artists, including Gabriel Harrison. Like Hawthorne’s fictional daguerreotypist, Harrison comes from humble beginnings and is variously employed in occupations that suit his needs and interests, as his biography details.30 In everything that he does—from working in his father’s print shop, to taking to the New York stage, to meeting with some success as a nationally exhibited painter—Harrison’s artistic tendencies are pronounced; he exemplifies the characteristics that Snelling sought to promote in his journal as the type of the daguerreian professional. By comparison, the career of the fictional Holgrave is much more politically, technologically, and philosophically inclined. As we have seen, in his nearly twenty-two years, Holgrave has worked as a ‘‘countryschoolmaster,’’ a ‘‘political-editor of a country-newspaper,’’ a traveling perfume salesman, a dentist, an official on a transatlantic packet ship, a practicing Fourierist, a practitioner of and lecturer on mesmerism, and a daguerreotypist (Ho7G 176). His work as a daguerreotypist, Hawthorne’s narrator explains, ‘‘was of no more importance in his own view, nor likely

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to be more permanent, than any of the preceding ones,’’ since it ‘‘had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an adventurer, who had his bread to earn; it would be thrown aside as carelessly, whenever he should choose to earn his bread by some other equally digressive means’’ (177). From this description, Holgrave would seem to embody the antitype against which Snelling’s professional journal positions Harrison. Yet Hawthorne’s narrator notes ‘‘what was most remarkable, and perhaps showed a more than common poise in the young man, was the fact, that amid all these personal vicissitudes, he had never lost his identity’’ (177). In the end, of course, Holgrave reveals himself to be a Maule. But in that ‘‘the artist’’ and the majuscular ‘‘Daguerreotypist’’ frequently stand in for his name throughout the narrative, I want to suggest that Holgrave is not only occupationally but also essentially an artist, whether he (or the narrator) recognizes it or not. The narrative’s assertions of Holgrave’s professed distinction between his exterior and interior selves (which parallels his eventual idea about the advantage of a stone house) also can be understood as a defense against likely charges of Holgrave’s untrustworthiness, immorality, and even danger to society. In an age of confidence men who assumed various identities to perpetrate all kinds of fraud, Holgrave’s ability to move fluidly between many different social positions certainly would have been suspect to Hawthorne’s readers and even to the unworldly Hepzibah who offers him lodging.31 Assuming Hepzibah’s perspective, the narrator explains her observations of the daguerreotypist and his associates and her resulting apprehension: He had the strangest companions imaginable;—men with long beards, and dressed in linen blouses, and other such new-fangled and ill-fitting garments;—reformers, temperance-lecturers, and all manner of cross-looking philanthropists;—community-men and come-outers, as Hepzibah believed, who acknowledged no law and ate no solid food, but lived on the scent of other people’s cookery, and turned up their noses at the fare. As for the Daguerreotypist, she had read a paragraph in a penny-paper, the other day, accusing him of making a speech, full of wild and disorganizing matter, at a meeting of his banditti-like associates. For her own part, she had reason to believe that he practiced animal-magnetism, and, if such

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things were in fashion now-a-days, should be apt to suspect him of studying the Black Art, up there in his lonesome chamber. (84) Missing from this list of Holgrave’s suspicious and potentially dangerous activities is his work as a daguerreotypist. Still thought of as a mysterious alchemical process more than a decade after its invention—despite the typically lucid explanations of its scientific and technical processes that we have seen published throughout popular antebellum periodicals—daguerreotypy was commonly misunderstood by even those who had visited a daguerreotypist’s studio for their portraits. When Phoebe asks, ‘‘But, dear Cousin, if the young man is so dangerous, why do you let him stay?,’’ her prediction that if ‘‘he does nothing worse, he may set the house on fire!’’ is more knowing than she likely would have realized (84). Fires in daguerreotypists’ studios were not unusual due to the volatile chemicals used in the processes for preparing and developing plates. Warnings from daguerreian ‘‘artists’’ (like Snelling and Harrison) that mere ‘‘operators’’ were charlatans seeking to take advantage of their vulnerable customers would have added to the threat that Holgrave seems to pose. Here again, the narrator’s claim that Holgrave’s work as a daguerreotypist is no more important or permanent to him than any of his other occupations or affiliations is significant. Like teaching, socialism, dentistry, and mesmerism, daguerreotypy can be easily abandoned for another occupation more advantageous to Holgrave’s needs or suitable to his interests of the moment. Yet what saves Holgrave from being a truly dangerous confidence man capable of much worse than setting the house on fire is his ability to assume and cast off each of these roles without ever betraying his identity. As the narrator assures any suspicious parties, ‘‘It was impossible to know Holgrave, without recognizing’’ that he had ‘‘never violated the innermost man’’ that constitutes his real identity (177). At once capable of maintaining an earthly or exterior shell—be it a job, a political affiliation, or a philosophical position—that is distinct from his privately held sense of identity (what Snelling identifies as the ‘‘artist’’ and Hawthorne as the ‘‘innermost man’’ and the ‘‘artist’’), Holgrave seems to balance subjectivity and objectivity as Hawthorne’s ideal romantic artist and Snelling’s ideal daguerreotypist do. Gabriel Harrison presents a real-life opportunity to understand the place of this new figure of the daguerreotypist in mid-nineteenth-century American society. Although his biography notes that he has met with some

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success as a self-taught painter—gaining praise from John Trumbull and having his first painting exhibited at the National Academy—Harrison does not attempt to learn the techniques of daguerreotypy on his own as had many new daguerreotypists who relied on widely available pamphlets. As Snelling requires of the proper aspiring daguerreotypist, Harrison seeks to apprentice under an established professional who will train him in both the art and science of daguerreotypy; accordingly, he quickly meets with success. Harrison duly applies to ‘‘Mr. John Plumbe, who was at that time at the head of the profession’’ for instruction (Burr 174); within the next year, one of Harrison’s images for Plumbe is awarded first prize in an exhibition in Washington, D.C. Despite this early accomplishment, Harrison is not professionally content; instead, he observes ‘‘that the art was capable of being greatly extended and largely improved’’ and endeavors to do so himself (175). His biographer’s narration elaborates Harrison’s qualities as the ideal daguerreian artist: ‘‘Rapt and enthusia[s]tic in his profession, the moment that he conceived the delightful idea of throwing a portrait into a finished picture’’ by artistically attending to the position of his sitters and arrangement of the background drapery, he moved ‘‘to produce decidedly those three tints positive, high lights, middle tint, and shadow; without which no painting, drawing or daguerreotype can be considered good’’ (175). As his interventions make clear, Harrison does not produce mechanically objective daguerreian images; rather, he is an artist whose subjective decisions guide the creation of an image that privileges beauty over accuracy. In a journal that seeks to promote aestheticism over mechanism, Harrison is properly recognized for these efforts; as his biographer proclaims, ‘‘his pictures have drawn the highest enco[m]iums from such men as C. C. Ingham, C. E. Elliott, Doughty, and many other distinguished artists’’ (175). Especially interesting among the encomia that Harrison draws is his designation as ‘‘the Poet Daguerrean’’ for his ability to produce ‘‘descriptive daguerreotypes’’ that ‘‘put poetry in types as well as in pictures’’ (175, original emphasis). Countering the idea of daguerreian objectivity, these images are highly subjective, composed with an eye toward not only beauty but also narrative. Harrison’s biographer notes, with characteristic hyperbole, that the public has been ‘‘so delighted . . . with his beautiful fancy sketches in daguerreotype, that he is now almost universally known as the Poet Daguerrean.’’ ‘‘Indeed,’’ we learn, ‘‘the poets have taken him into their special favor.’’ As a sign of this favor, the biography incorporates a poem by Eliza C. Hurley, who was inspired by Harrison’s image titled Youth Adoring

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the Bust of George Washington, thought to have been made in 1845 (Figure 4). The first stanza of the poem reads: Aye, cling around that pedestal, Look up thou bright eyed boy, Behold thy country’s ornament Which time will not destroy. (qtd. in Burr 176) This ‘‘bright eyed boy’’ is George Washington Harrison, the daguerreotypist’s son. As the image shows us, and the poem tells us, this is not an ordinary family portrait; it is an allegory of national paternity—a young American son looking up to the father of his country. Yet the poem’s imperative that George Washington Harrison literally and figuratively look up to the man after whom he is named is, like the ekphrastic poem itself, redundant—in this daguerreotype, he is already and always looking up to the bust. Just as the marble bust ensures that time ‘‘will not destroy’’ the ‘‘country’s ornament,’’ the daguerreotype renders permanent the boy’s adoration. In its monumental likeness with sculpture, daguerreotypy is implicitly elevated to the status of a fine art from its humbler beginnings as the product of mechanical, chemical, and optical science.32 At the same time, the image not only illustrates but also models the adoration that an accomplished monument to a heroic subject properly inspires. In looking at George Washington Harrison looking up to the bust of Washington, both the viewer and daguerreotypy itself enter into an allegory of emulation: by admiring and emulating George Washington, Harrison may live up to his example; by admiring and emulating young Harrison, we may live up to his example. And, again, at an aesthetic level, the same is true of daguerreotypy’s relationship to sculpture. In borrowing from sculpture’s permanence and choice of emulation-worthy subjects, and moreover in modeling emulation itself, the daguerreotype furthers its arguments for the medium’s representational and inspirational capacities beyond mechanical objectivity and for daguerreotypy’s place in a hierarchy of the arts from which it had been excluded because of its supposed lack of invention. In a daguerreotype created a decade later, Harrison returned to the same bust, pose, and allegory, with some important modifications: this time, Helia Harrison takes her brother’s place (Figure 5). And her namesake is not the father of the country but the mother of her father’s art: the sun.

Figure 4. Gabriel Harrison, Youth Adoring the Bust of George Washington, c. 1845. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

Figure 5. Gabriel Harrison, Girl Adoring a Bust of George Washington, c. 1855. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

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In this heliograph, the adoring, and again significantly named child, Helia, becomes all the more legible as a figure for daguerreotypy’s admirable embrace of the proper subject and aims of sculpture. And in this view, the bust becomes more visible as sculpture typified—the contrasting tones of the image have been heightened to emphasize the whiteness of the marble and we see more of its pedestal than in the previous image. At the level of both medium and message, then, daguerreotypy is aligned with the principles and accomplishments of the finest of the arts and distanced from both mechanical reproduction and objectivity. Another allegorical daguerreotype, titled Helia, or the Genius of Daguerreotyping, renders Harrison’s aesthetic argument even more visible but now in the textual shadow that remains of its former substance, as we are left only with Harrison’s description of the image’s appearance. Of this image, Harrison writes: This superb portraiture of a young lady is intended to represent the ideal character of helia as drawn by myself some time since, in a story bearing that name, and published in the columns of the Photographic Art-Journal. The tout ensemble of this picture is as near perfection as art can at this time boast of attaining. The rich, massive folds of the drapery, relieved by the brilliant star upon the bosom (emblematical of that pure hope we all seek in the bright vista of an unknown future) is worth a rigid e[x]amination. At her approach, radiant with lovelines[s], the s[e]tting sun upon her right veils its face, as though prompt to acknowledge her superhuman loveliness, while she, the gentle Helia, innocent, spotless and pure, seems an embodiment of all that is graceful and lovely—a type of that beauty that is the day-star of our hope, the realization of our brightest visions of the future.33 Unfortunately, we cannot know if the part of this allegorical Helia was played by Harrison’s daughter, in an even more unusual version of a family portrait. Given her appearance a year later in the daguerreotype with Washington’s bust, we might assume that it was; Harrison’s description, though, also suggests that this Helia might have been a slightly older ‘‘young lady,’’ as would the story to which Harrison alludes: his ‘‘Lights and Shadows of Daguerrean Life.’’

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‘‘Lights and Shadows,’’ the first installment of Harrison’s romantic short story, appeared in the same issue of the Photographic Art-Journal that contained his biography, confirming his descriptive capacities not only in his images but also in written narrative.34 The story features a fictionalized Harrison at work in John Plumbe’s studio, where the first customer of the day is an ‘‘old maid’’ (180). After being instructed to hold her breath so that the image does not blur, the woman threatens to ‘‘faint or die’’ before Plumbe resuscitates her by throwing hyposulphite, a harsh chemical developer, in her face. Upon being so doused, the elderly woman jumps out of her seat, flailing around the studio and leaving a path of destruction before chasing Plumbe downstairs, much to Harrison’s amusement. This comic episode follows the conventions of the sitting stories examined in the previous chapter and adheres to the pattern of exploring the power of a new medium through humor noted by David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins; it ridicules provincial Americans for their ignorance of how to interact properly with this new technology (5). Within the context of a professional journal, this caricature becomes legible as an inside joke that positions the daguerreotypist in an elite rank in antebellum society. With the second visitor to the studio, Harrison’s story transforms from a comic sketch into a sentimental romance that resembles Holgrave’s efforts as a magazine writer in its imaginative blend of the marvelous and the melancholy. The daguerreotypist’s client is a mournful woman who requests that Harrison visit her home to take a memorial image of her daughter who died before she could be daguerreotyped. Here the story becomes a gothic dramatization of the practice of postmortem portraiture that is missing from The House of the Seven Gables. Harrison narrates: The mother held up a white cloth to give me reflected light to subdue the shadows. All was still, I took the cap from the camera. About two minutes had elapsed, when a bright sun ray broke through the clouds, dashed its bright beams upon the reflector, and shedding, as it were, a supernatural light. I was startled—the mother rivetted [sic] with a frightful gaze, for at the same moment we beheld the muscles about the mouth of the child move, and her eyes partially open—a smile played upon her lips, a long gentle sigh heaved her bosom, and as I replaced the cap, her head fell over to one side. The mother screamed—

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‘‘She lives! she lives!’’ and fell upon her knees by the side of the couch. ‘‘No,’’ was my reply; she is dead now, the web of life is broken.’’ The camera was doing its work as the cord that bound the gentle being to earth snap[p]ed and loosened the spirit for another and better world. If the earth lost a flower, Heaven gained an angel. (181) Harrison’s literary flair is evident in his blending of the mundane details of his work as a daguerreotypist with the supernatural dramatics of a romantic writer. While memorializing the deceased was one of the several services that the daguerreotypist offered an eager public—as I have suggested, Holgrave’s postmortem daguerreotype of Judge Pyncheon is a romantic variation on this common practice—fictionalizing these experiences is an exception rather than the rule because of both the solemnity of the occasion and the detached objectivity required by the procedure. Harrison’s story suggests that the daguerreotypist can never be fully objective and, moreover, that his subjectivity is as valuable to his customer as his mechanical skill on such occasions. The second installment of the story, published a month later in April 1851, features Harrison’s prose Helia. It begins near the end of a long day in Harrison’s studio. When he thinks that he has seen his last customer, an ‘‘Indian girl’’ appears, offering a bracelet in exchange for her portrait. The daguerreotypist shakes off his fatigue at the first sight of her beauty and the narrator offers her ekphrastic portrait in place of the image that cannot be made due to the lack of adequate light left in the studio: There she stood, so modest in her attire, so perfectly graceful in her attitude—her form so luxuriantly rounded and commanding—yet gently bending as unassuming as a lily. No attempt, by dress, adornments, or perfumes, to captivate the senses—her hair plain—and, oh! that silken hair! black as the raven’s plumage, flowing abundantly over her soft round shoulders of a golden hue, and her eyes of a deep hazel bright, but more beautiful than the stars of heaven. What a language they speak! What a soul they portray! Her forehead, too; looked like the abode of sweetest poetry; and her ruby lips, so expressive! A settled smile was on them, as if they could not wear any other expression, but would at once melt chill sorrow into warmest gladness. Her arms so delicately rounded—unadorned save

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by the large pearl beads that loosely encircled the exquisitely curved wrists; and her orange colored drapery rudely trimmed about its hem with red and white beads, beautifully relieved her finely shaped ankle and foot. (229–30) Resolved not to lose sight of the girl who says she is unable to return the next day, Harrison follows her from his Brooklyn studio to the ferry to Hoboken and out to Weehawken, where, of all places, the entrance to a mystical world of ‘‘eternal light’’ can be found in a ‘‘deep dark cavity in the earth’’ (230). Offering herself as the daguerreotypist’s guide, the mysterious girl reveals her name to be Helia. She takes him through a ‘‘mighty vault of the numberless dead’’ (those who ‘‘would not feel Religion, nor Music, nor Painting, nor Poetry’’ [230]). From there, they travel to ‘‘Posterity,’’ where they encounter a pantheon of great artists that resembles ‘‘The Hall of Fantasy’’ in Hawthorne’s so-titled 1846 short story. Harrison’s pantheon includes Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, and among the Americans, Franklin, Washington, the painter Washington Allston, and Harrison’s recently deceased friend Poe.35 Finally, they arrive ‘‘in the midst of that eternal day’’ that Helia had promised the daguerreotypist, where he takes her picture with a camera that rises up before him, ‘‘inlaid with costly gems, tubes of gold, lenses clear as air, and beautiful plate holders.’’ His camera stand is a water lily; for image plates, he uses silvery leaves; and his developing chemicals are the ‘‘prismatic drops from yon rainbow now over head’’ (232, original emphasis). Similarly, in Hawthorne’s ‘‘The Hall of Fantasy,’’ the narrator is shown a ‘‘scheme for fixing the reflections of objects in a pool of water, and thus taking the most life-like portraits imaginable’’—a process that resembles Maule’s Well at the conclusion of The House of the Seven Gables.36 In Harrison’s story, the result of Helia’s magical imaging process is truly a daguerreotypist’s dream: an image produced not in silver and black but in the natural colors that were impossible to achieve at this point in photographic history.37 Upon declaring, ‘‘This is indeed the perfection of my art!,’’ Harrison awakens and the story concludes with a poem about the power of dreams (232). Here again, the artistic tendencies of the real-life Harrison exceed their confinement in the practice of any one art; the romantic artist-poet-daguerreotypist puts his multimedia artistic capabilities on display for his professional peers coming to appreciate the value of emphasizing themselves as talented artists instead of as mechanically objective technicians.

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As this story also makes clear, the prose of a man who spent most of his time making chiaroscuro images has a decidedly purple tint. His narratives are no less romantic; they make even his most elaborate portraits seem almost minimalist by comparison. We could take such writing as evidence of Harrison’s artistic vanity, which would not be an unfair assessment. In all of his artistic undertakings, he was self-taught and, as a result, was a tireless self-promoter who regularly sought official recognition and validation of his work. But Harrison’s narrative tendencies, as they found expression both in his daguerreotypes and in the short stories that he wrote for the Photographic Art-Journal, also should be understood as arguments for daguerreotypy’s worthiness to be ranked among the fine arts. As such, they also read as arguments against representations of daguerreotypy in popular print that borrowed from scientific discourse to promote it as a mechanically objective means of image making stripped of artistic subjectivity. Harrison advanced such arguments not only through his ‘‘descriptive daguerreotypes’’ and short stories but also in his overtly polemical writings on his vision of the present and for the future of daguerreotypy in the Photographic Art-Journal. The first issue of the journal features a letter from Harrison congratulating its editor and publisher for their contribution to the profession and assuring his fellow daguerreotypists of their medium’s increasing recognition as an art. ‘‘Most happily,’’ he observes, ‘‘the artists, (I mean those who work with the brush,) begin to think and speak of our art as it deserves, acknowledging that it does require some merit, taste, and a little genius to produce a Daguerreotype, fine in tone, position and expression; for a Daguerreotype can possess these as well as a painting.’’38 ‘‘To arrange the folds of the drapery gracefully and boldly, so that the lights and shadows may coincide with the character of the face and make it appear to the best advantage,’’ Harrison contends, ‘‘is not the work of mere mechanical skill or accident. A harsh, a mellow, or a cold tone picture may be produced according to the taste and skill of the operator, as well as a graceful line drawn by the hand of the painter’’ (original emphasis). Yet in turning the conversation from mechanical objectivity back to subjective artistry, Harrison is careful to check his ambition for the art: ‘‘I would not be understood as placing the Daguerrian on a par with the painter or sculptor,’’ he claims; instead, he sees daguerreotypy as ‘‘the hand-maid to those higher branches of the fine arts.’’ But immediately following this seeming retreat, Harrison demands, ‘‘who will dare to say, we cannot compose and put poetry in our types as well as a painter in his

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sketch book; or that we cannot have our representatives of Faith, Hope, and Charity, as well as Sir J. Reynolds; a Holy Family as well as Murillo; or the Infant Saviour, with cross and lamb, as well as Raphael.’’ ‘‘To show that this can be done,’’ he offers, ‘‘I shall be most happy, Mr. Editor, to present you, for some future number of your work, a sketch from an original Daguerreotype of three young ladies, representing, Past, Present and Future, now in the gallery of M. M. Lawrence, Esq.’’ As I have noted, Harrison promoted his own art works as much as he promoted his art, and in this letter, he does both. His Infant Saviour Bearing the Cross and his Past, Present, Future, both created in 1850, are two of the ‘‘types’’ that Harrison proposes as equaling painting in their composition and poetry (Figures 6 and 7). Playing the role of the Infant Saviour is Harrison’s son, George Washington Harrison, in an image that draws on the style of Renaissance narrative paintings of Christ and John the Baptist. The image Past, Present, Future now exists only as a chrystalotype copy of the original daguerreotype that Harrison made while working as an operator in the studio of M. M. Lawrence; it is with this image and its story (or stories) that I want to conclude. Harrison’s offer of a sketch of this daguerreotype is meant to confirm not only the artistic potential of daguerreotypy but also that this artistry is specifically Harrison’s and not his former employer’s. In 1851 Past, Present, Future was a well-known image; it was on prominent display at Lawrence’s studio and was widely written about as one of America’s award-winning daguerreotypes displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851, where judges voted to award the medal to Lawrence as the daguerreotype was entered as one of his studio’s submissions with no indication that Harrison had made it.39 This was common practice in the days of large daguerreian studios; Lawrence, Plumbe, Mathew Brady, and other daguerreotypists who operated significant studios in New York, Washington, and other metropolitan centers employed a number of men as operators who were responsible for creating most of the portraits produced under their more prominent names. In reasserting himself as the author/artist of Past, Present, Future, Harrison reinserts himself into the image and the image into the narrative of his contribution to the advancement of the art. Within the image itself, there are two stories to tell. First, Harrison may have created Past, Present, Future, but the idea for a static image that captures, or at least alludes to, the passing of time did not originate with him. The daguerreotype is Harrison’s daguerreian interpretation of Edward

Figure 6. Gabriel Harrison, Infant Saviour Bearing the Cross, c. 1850. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

Figure 7. Calotype copy of Gabriel Harrison, Past, Present, Future, c. 1850. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

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Figure 8. Edward Greene Malbone, The Hours, 1801. Providence Athenaeum.

Greene Malbone’s miniature The Hours, itself inspired by Samuel Shelley’s miniature, also titled The Hours (Figure 8).40 And, of course, the idea of making the passing of time the subject of a static image did not originate with Malbone (to whom Hawthorne attributes the fictional miniature of Clifford that Hepzibah admires in The House of the Seven Gables); it is one

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of the oldest conceits in painting. In Harrison’s time, this conceit was one of the most respected in all of art, as narrative or ‘‘history’’ painting—which included religious and allegorical paintings, such as the ones Harrison was most inclined to imitate or duplicate—occupied the highest rank in the hierarchy of genres in painting. This brings us to the second story within Past, Present, Future: that of the photographic image’s seemingly unique relationship to time—a story that not only Hawthorne but also Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and Roland Barthes, among many others, have variously told.41 This daguerreotype—Harrison’s most narrative and allegorical image, created just over a decade into photography’s existence—pushes the ages-old philosophical question of painting’s ability as a static medium to represent the passage of time a step further into the daguerreian age. With Past, Present, Future, Harrison attempts to achieve the seemingly impossible: recording the progressive stages of life in a single photographic image and capturing an idea of duration in a medium that is thought to record only a single instant. Though the daguerreotype features three different women imaged together in one exposure, their similar appearance allows the viewer to imagine that a single daguerreotype has succeeded in capturing one woman as she appears in youth, maturity, and old age. Even if the viewer recognizes that they are three different women, the image nonetheless emphasizes duration over a single moment in time. In doing so, Harrison’s daguerreotype appears to defy two of the medium’s defining characteristics: its ability to fix a single moment in time and its celebrated veracity. A decade after Harrison’s daguerreotype, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote of the changing idea of subjectivity in the photographic age, ‘‘This new art is old enough already to have given us the portraits of infants who are now growing into adolescence.’’42 ‘‘By-and-by,’’ Holmes predicted, ‘‘it will show every aspect of life in the same individual, from the earliest week to the last year of senility’’ (14). This narrative that Holmes imagines as assembled from a multitude of photographic portraits taken over a subject’s lifetime Harrison captured and compressed in Past, Present, Future. As the ‘‘Poet Daguerrean’’ understood, if the popular idea of daguerreotypy’s unique relationship to time threatened to estrange it all the more from the fine arts, then creating an image that captured the passage of time in the most static and instantaneous of media would be an unquestionable representational triumph that secured its status as a fine art—and, not incidentally, his status as the finest of daguerreian artists.

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Hawthorne’s ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter is the narrative mirror image of Harrison’s daguerreian feat, taking an art form predicated on the representation of duration, of change over time, in language and reducing it to a static image. This reversal of expectations, I contend, is the essence of romantic artistry: it marks the emergence of a subjective eye and, thus, an individuated will from collectively defined convention. In going against the grain of his chosen medium, Hawthorne’s and Harrison’s ideal artist claims that some version of his hand must always be visible in the picture; in disrupting revised expectations of art in the era of scientific objectivity’s and photography’s emergence, he ensures that we see them differently too.

Chapter 3

‘‘Some ideal image of the man and his mind’’ Melville’s Pierre and Southworth & Hawes’s Daguerreian Aesthetic

Published the year after The House of the Seven Gables, Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities bears an unmistakable resemblance to Hawthorne’s romance thematically, especially in its preoccupation with portraiture.1 Yet Melville’s digressive and disjointed narrative reads more like a grotesque caricature than a mirror image of Hawthorne’s House, transforming the tale of an aristocratic family’s decline into one of disgrace and taking the romancer’s creative license to almost unhinged extremes. Their shared concern for issues of identity, authority, and artistic creation comes to a head in Pierre when the title character refuses a publisher’s request that he provide a daguerreotype for engraving and publication.2 Much more than either a thinly veiled fictionalization of Melville’s frustrations as an author or an instance of resistance to or disenchantment with a new medium, this scene indexes how the introduction of new media typically provokes a broader cultural revisiting of the most profound philosophical questions about the nature of truth, perception, knowledge, and existence.3 Telescoping out from Pierre’s refusal to be daguerreotyped, this chapter examines how arguments for the daguerreotype’s superiority as an art form occasion the narrative’s extended renegotiations of epistemology and aesthetics in the daguerreian age. More specifically, I argue that daguerreotypy—as the point of contact for discussions of mechanical objectivity in scientific image making and the artist’s subjectivity in artistic image making—shadows Pierre’s preoccupation with the relationship of ‘‘Truth’’ and appearances and with the place of objectivity and subjectivity in art and understanding. In the course of Pierre’s chaotic plot, Melville frequently

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invokes ancient and modern aesthetic theory to explore what relationship any form of representation—from an embroidered handkerchief to Dante’s Inferno to a painted or daguerreian portrait—has to what the novel Platonically calls ‘‘Truth.’’ The central question of Pierre; or, The Ambiguities is whether objective truth, as understood in ancient and modern times alike, is itself only another form of representation—an image, a substance-less shadow, an ambiguity. I contend that daguerreotypy and the terms of its cultural acceptance in antebellum America fundamentally structure this question and Pierre’s attempts to answer it. Along with the growing cultural significance of daguerreotypy as a means of seeing and knowing the world, questions about the place of visual artists and authors in a rapidly changing society also drive the narrative’s insistent linkage of art objects and artistic production to its protagonist’s struggles with issues of authority and his efforts to forge an identity.4 I argue that we should read Pierre as a deeply philosophical attempt to define and defend art, the artist, and subjectivity against the encroachment of scientific objectivity on aesthetic values by way of the daguerreotype.5 Consistently contrarian, the novel offers these definitions and mounts its defense through the negative example of its naı¨ve and idealistic protagonist, Pierre. More positively, Pierre also builds its case by returning to ancient Greek philosophy to revisit age-old questions about truth, representation, and perception in a new media moment, concluding that subjectivity is essential to all art and human experience. In the same year that Pierre was published, the Boston daguerreotypists Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes committed themselves to creating daguerreian ‘‘specimens worthy of the attention and criticism of any who have a cultivated taste for the ‘Fine Arts.’ ’’6 As fellow daguerreotypist M. A. Root observed of the partners in 1851, ‘‘Their fixed aim and undeviating rule has been to produce the finest specimens, of which they were capable,—the finest in every respect, artistic, mechanical, and chemical; graceful, pleasing in posture and arrangement, and exact in portraiture.’’7 As we will see, this aesthetic resulted in portraits that defied the look of most daguerreotypes and, thereby, popular expectations of the medium.8 While Root found it ‘‘strange to say’’ that Southworth & Hawes’s portraits seemed ‘‘to be fully appreciated neither by the majority of Heliographers nor by the public’’ in 1851, a recent catalog of the firm’s works recognizes the ‘‘singular achievement of Southworth & Hawes as masters of the daguerreotype’’ with the benefit of hindsight and the institutional authority

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of the art museum.9 Following a similar trajectory, Pierre ‘‘is now generally recognized as one of Melville’s most significant works’’ after having been dismissed as ‘‘[o]ne long brain-muddling, soul-bewildering ambiguity’’ in its own time and well into the twentieth century.10 I do not seek to add one more voice to the chorus belatedly recognizing these misunderstood works. Rather, I bring Pierre and Southworth & Hawes’s portraits together as contemporary works of art in different media that go against the grain in resisting the growing influence of mechanical objectivity on aesthetics and reasserting subjectivity as fundamental to anything understood as art. Both do so, I contend, less romantically and allegorically than The House of the Seven Gables or Gabriel Harrison’s daguerreotypes and writings but more theoretically and implicitly, as becomes visible when they are viewed together and in the context of larger cultural conversations about aesthetic values inflected by daguerreian representation. ‘‘To the devil with you and your Daguerreotype!’’ In Book XVII of Pierre, the narrative abruptly halts to flesh out an earlier passing intimation that its protagonist ‘‘Pierre was not only a reader of the poets and other fine writers’’ but also a poet himself.11 Before we see writing become only hard and unrewarding labor for Pierre when he must work out of necessity, the narrative returns us to his carefree days of writing for pleasure—when he was courted by publishers but ‘‘conscientiously and respectfully declined all polite overtures of this sort’’ out of gentlemanly disinterest (252). Along with the elaborate offers that the young author daily receives for the publication of his collected works come regular requests for his portrait. His suitors promise not only fine paper and elaborate bindings but also a likeness of the author as material signifiers of Pierre’s literary accomplishment. Most write to ask ‘‘for the loan of his portrait in oil, in order to take an engraving therefrom, for a frontispiece’’ (253). The sole request for Pierre’s daguerreotype is distinguished from the rest not only by the difference in the medium of the portrait but also by the brusqueness of its solicitor, as we see in the retrospectively narrated confrontation: Upon one occasion, happening suddenly to encounter a literary acquaintance—a joint editor of the ‘‘Captain Kidd Monthly’’—who suddenly popped upon him round a corner, Pierre was startled by a rapid—‘‘Good-morning, good-morning;—just the man I wanted:

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—come, step round now with me, and have your Daguerreotype taken;—get it engraved then in no time;—want it for the next issue.’’ So saying, this chief mate of Captain Kidd seized Pierre’s arm, and in the most vigorous manner was walking him off, like an officer a pickpocket, when Pierre civilly said—‘‘Pray, sir, hold, if you please, I shall do no such thing.’’—‘‘Pooh, pooh—must have it— public property—come along—only a door or two now.’’—‘‘Public property!’’ rejoined Pierre, ‘‘that may do very well for the ‘Captain Kidd Monthly;’—it’s very Captain Kiddish to say so. But I beg to repeat that I do not intend to accede.’’—‘‘Don’t? Really?’’ cried the other, amazedly staring Pierre full in the countenance;—‘‘why bless your soul, my portrait is published—long ago published!’’—‘‘Can’t help that, sir’’—said Pierre. ‘‘Oh! come along, come along,’’ and the chief mate seized him again with the most uncompunctious familiarity by the arm. Though the sweetest-tempered youth in the world when but decently treated, Pierre had an ugly devil in him sometimes, very apt to be evoked by the personal profaneness of gentlemen of the Captain Kidd school of literature. ‘‘Look you, my good fellow,’’ said he, submitting to his impartial inspection a determinately double fist,—‘‘drop my arm now—or I’ll drop you. To the devil with you and your Daguerreotype!’’ (253–54) This scene itself reads much like a daguerreotype in its uncanny resemblance to real life. In early February 1851, Evert Duyckinck, Melville’s friend and one of the editors and publishers of Holden’s Dollar Magazine, wrote to Melville to request a story and a daguerreotype for a planned series on emerging young American writers. Melville’s February 12 reply is a rhetorically complicated refusal of Duyckinck’s requests that eventuates in Melville declaring, ‘‘I respectfully decline being oblivionated by a Daguerretype (what a devel of an unspellable word!).’’12 A number of critics have used the several parallels between this letter and the similar scene in Pierre as the foundation for reading the novel as an unsubtle allegory of Melville’s relationship with his publishers and the antebellum publishing industry.13 Variations on this theme include reading the letter and its fictional analog as indexes of Melville’s thoughts about publicity and property and of his anxieties as a writer toward a new, popular, and threatening form of representation.14 As we have seen, the most

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exuberant initial responses to daguerreotypy insisted on it lessening the distance between representation and reality, as well as between exteriority and interiority; so, too, all such biographically based criticism of Pierre. All such criticism sees the author’s life as the key to understanding the representation, whether it focuses on Melville’s correspondence with Duyckinck as the key to understanding Pierre’s frustrations as a writer or considers the changing dynamics of antebellum authorship, celebrity, and mass culture to derive Melville’s motivations for apparently twice damning daguerreotypy. When we shift our focus from Melville to the text and its broader historical context, Pierre’s encounter on the street with the Captain Kidd’s editor becomes legible as a ‘‘scene of ‘new media encounter’ ’’ (Liu 3). Alan Liu proposes that we understand such encounters as ‘‘a proxy wrestle for the soul of the person and the civilization,’’ in that ‘‘all major changes in the socio-cultural order are channeled symbolically and/or instrumentally through narratives of media change’’ (5). Pierre’s encounter with his editor not only embodies literature’s encounter with daguerreotypy in the figure of a popular author confronted by his portrait-demanding editor who seeks his image to promote his words. It also theatricalizes the threat that scientific objectivity and daguerreotypy had begun to pose to the defining characteristics and roles of the fine arts and the artist as they were theorized in the eighteenth century and refined in the early nineteenth. In the mideighteenth century, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music came to be consolidated in the category of the fine arts, distinguished from the emerging sciences and the humanities as well as from craft. The ‘‘polite classes’’ cultivated their education in and enjoyment of the fine arts, and philosophers devoted significant attention to understanding aesthetic pleasure as a sensual and intellectual activity.15 In the early nineteenth century, the fine arts were ‘‘reified [as] ‘Art,’ an independent and privileged realm of spirit, truth, and creativity,’’ and ‘‘the concept of the artist, which had been defined separately from that of the artisan in the eighteenth century, was now sanctified as one of humanity’s highest spiritual callings’’ (Silver 187). As Pierre both recognizes and dramatizes, determining where or whether daguerreotypy and daguerreotypists fit into these categories and society at large would require some negotiation. While Samuel Morse proclaimed the daguerreotype to be ‘‘Rembrandt perfected’’ and others promoted its mechanical objectivity, many artists and art theorists saw it as little more than a crude blend of craft and

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mechanics elbowing its way into the fine arts—or worse, as a form of scientific image making that threatened to impose the increasingly influential standard of mechanical objectivity on all forms of image making.16 As Thomas Cole wrote to a fellow painter in 1840, ‘‘If you believe everything the newspapers say, (which, by-the-by, would require an enormous bump of marvellousness,) you would be led to suppose that the poor craft of painting was knocked in the head by this new machinery for making Nature take her own likeness, and we [artists have] nothing to do but to give up the ghost.’’ In painting’s defense, he argues that it ‘‘is a creative, as well as imitative art, and is in no danger of being superseded by any mechanical contrivance.’’17 Yet as we have seen in popular accounts of daguerreotypy that deemed it mechanically objective and promoted it as superior to any other form of image making, as well as in the popular demand for daguerreian portraiture, painters certainly had a rival in Daguerre’s ‘‘contrivance.’’ Pierre’s encounter with daguerreotypy and the narrative’s subsequent thoughts about the medium explore the sociocultural implications of applying the standards of fine art to daguerreotypy, rather than vice versa. The editor who demands Pierre’s daguerreian portrait embodies the rudeness of mass machine-produced print and portraiture. The narrator devotes significant attention to the editor’s lack of civility—the ‘‘uncompunctious familiarity’’ with which he physically accosts Pierre and his ‘‘personal profaneness’’ (254). This uncouthness is not unique to the editor, the narrator notes, but characteristic of the class of men from which he comes: ‘‘gentlemen of the Captain Kidd school of literature’’ (254). The label ‘‘Captain Kidd school of literature’’ designates the growing body of popular literary magazines sold, like daguerreotypes, at lower price points to maximize readership and profits. It also alludes to the unscrupulous practices of their editors seeking material for their pages at low or no cost.18 Painters and professionalized daguerreian ‘‘artists’’ alike similarly accused daguerreian ‘‘operators’’ of taking advantage of their sitters by promising premium portraits at lower prices only to produce what Gabriel Harrison dismissed as ‘‘abortions.’’19 Whether Pierre understands such business to have reduced the Captain Kidd’s editor and his ilk to such incivility or whether he sees the editor as always having been so is unclear. But Pierre’s explicit contempt for him implies an equal scorn for the vulgarity of the mass audience whom the editor represents and of literature and portraiture made immediately, widely, and cheaply available by means of mechanical reproduction.20

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Pierre’s behavior and his aesthetics alike are determined by his social class: what is decorous, beautiful, and good is necessarily refined, expensive, and exclusive in the eyes of a member of the landed gentry. From this perspective, the editor’s behavior and, by association, the daguerreotype that he requests and the purposes for which he seeks it (copying by engraving and publication in the next issue) possess none of these essential qualities. Thus, after Pierre instinctively declares that he ‘‘shall do no such thing’’ as be daguerreotyped, he continues to resist all of the arguments that the editor subsequently makes, as well as the physical force that he uses to sway Pierre. Reduced to communicating on the editor’s level, Pierre finally responds with the threat of using physical force himself by showing the editor his ‘‘determinately double fist’’ and with the actual verbal violence of damning both the editor and his daguerreotype (254). What Pierre sees as damnable in daguerreotypy the editor sees as its virtues. Daguerreian portraits are readily available (a studio is ‘‘only a door or two’’ away, producing pictures in under an hour), quickly and easily copied (‘‘get it engraved . . . in no time’’), and in demand (‘‘must have it—public property,’’ the editor claims) (254). When Pierre reiterates his refusal after the editor has cited these print-derived ideas about daguerreian portraiture to persuade him, the editor is uncomprehending. Incapable of imagining why Pierre would continue to resist, he can only respond, ‘‘Don’t? Really?’’ while ‘‘amazedly staring Pierre full in the countenance’’ (254). Informed by ideas about physiognomy that were generated in the eighteenth century and applied in the nineteenth to daguerreian portraiture, the editor believes that faces reveal inner motivations.21 When Pierre’s face reveals nothing more, the editor cites his own published portrait as a reason that Pierre should submit to having his made and published, physically pulling Pierre toward the daguerreotypist in his unwillingness to drop his case. In that the confrontation concludes with Pierre’s threat and curse, we are left to assume that the editor understands only the threat of force and not Pierre’s reasons for refusing him in the end. Their aesthetics and interests remain mutually incomprehensible and, thus, irreconcilable. The narrative sheds more light on Pierre’s thoughts about daguerreotypy after he has had time to contemplate his seemingly instinctive resistance to the editor and his demands: This incident, suggestive as it was at the time, in the sequel had a surprising effect upon Pierre. For he considered with what infinite

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readiness now, the most faithful portrait of any one could be taken by the Daguerreotype, whereas in former times a faithful portrait was only within the power of the moneyed, or mental aristocrats of the earth. How natural then the inference, that instead of, as in old times, immortalizing a genius, a portrait now only dayalized a dunce. Besides, when every body has his portrait published, true distinction lies in not having yours published at all. For if you are published along with Tom, Dick, and Harry, and wear a coat of their cut, how are you distinct from Tom, Dick, and Harry? Therefore, even so miserable a motive as downright personal vanity helped to operate in this matter with Pierre. (254) Here, the social implications of daguerreotypy seem to concern Pierre more than its artistic qualifications. Before the daguerreian age, portraiture was available only to the wealthy or other social elites. Because daguerreotype portraits of so many kinds of people can be made so frequently and in such number, Pierre concludes, portraiture no longer immortalizes great subjects. Now, it only captures those foolish enough to desire an almost instant and cheap likeness of themselves and to believe that any kind of portrait automatically would confer distinction and immortality upon them. Pierre’s encounter with daguerreotypy captures aristocratic resentment of the rise of the middle class and its accompanying adoption of patrician markers of social distinction, including portraiture. Almost thirty-five years before the introduction of daguerreotypy, the eighteenth-century painter and aesthetic theorist Henry Fuseli had expressed the same concerns about painted portraiture’s increasing availability to the middle class and its consequentially compromised representational work in a lecture at England’s Royal Academy of Art. He explains, ‘‘Since liberty and commerce have more levelled the ranks of society, and more equally diffused opulence, private importance has been increased, family connexions and attachments have been more numerously formed, and hence portrait-painting, which formerly was the exclusive property of princes, or a tribute to beauty, prowess, genius, talent, and distinguished character, is now become a kind of family calendar, engrossed by the mutual charities of parents, children, brothers, nephews, cousins, and relatives of all colours.’’22 Fuseli is similarly anxious about the loss of its exclusivity and the concomitant end of its function in distinguishing social elites, but his concerns

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respecting portraiture’s commodification are more specific than Pierre’s. Now that portraiture is used to image every member of every middle-class family, it only registers likeness to other members of the subject’s family and to others in the same social class. In Fuseli’s eyes, the portrait has been reduced to ‘‘the remembrancer of insignificance, [to] mere human resemblance, in attitude without action, features without meaning, dress without drapery, and situation without propriety’’ (‘‘Lecture IV’’ 448). ‘‘The aim of the artist and the sitter’s wish are confined to external likeness,’’ he laments (448). Because middle-class sitters only desire mechanical fidelity in their portraits (at this point, a mimetic fidelity that was still achieved by an artist’s hand, not an actual machine), the work of the ‘‘better artist’’ is only distinguishable from that of ‘‘his duller brother’’ by the skill of execution that is visible in everything surrounding the subject (448). The trained eye, according to Fuseli, should sense the artist’s pain in these details; this pathos, in turn, renders the nominal subject of the portrait utterly invisible as the viewer focuses on traces of the artist’s subjectivity in the image. In Melville’s time, what Fuseli saw as the increasingly mechanical and bourgeois tendencies of painted portraiture have become even more exaggerated with daguerreotypy’s use for portraiture. Even worse (from a Fuselian perspective), popular periodical writers are crediting the daguerreotype with capturing not only its subject’s likeness but also his or her character more perfectly than any human and, thus, fallible artist could. As we remember one magazine essay declaring in 1846, ‘‘Daguerreotypes, properly regarded, are the indices of human character’’ (‘‘Bruno,’’ ‘‘Picture Pausings.—No. II’’). Whereas only the ‘‘better artist’’ in Fuseli’s time was capable of such insight, in Melville’s time, an actual machine (the daguerreian camera)—or, in the popular metonym used to naturalize such mechanization, the sun—has become the best possible artist when mechanical fidelity to the subject has become an aesthetic value. And because the sun ‘‘pours his rays as freely and willingly into the cottage of the peasant, as into the palace of the peer’’ (as the same 1846 essay observes), everyone, from geniuses to dunces, has subjected themselves to its supposed insight (552). As we have seen, such ideas about daguerreotypy resulted from writers applying the emergent standard of mechanical objectivity in scientific image making to the daguerreotype in their efforts to distinguish it as a new medium. As all other forms of image making are rendered inferior to daguerreotypy in such discussions, the epistemic virtue of mechanical

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objectivity, borrowed from the sciences, is transformed into an aesthetic value. In this context, Pierre the character’s refusal to be daguerreotyped becomes legible as the focal point of Pierre the narrative’s resistance to making mechanical objectivity the standard for all types of image making and image makers. Pierre concludes his reflections on portraiture in the age of mechanical objectivity by deciding that ‘‘when every body has his portrait published, true distinction lies in not having yours published at all’’ (254). With this, his answer to the many questions raised by daguerreian portraiture is, in effect, a reiteration of his original, instinctive refusal to subject himself to the process. By withholding this unrealized portrait from copying by engraving and publication, Pierre believes that he is protecting himself as both a ‘‘moneyed’’ and ‘‘mental’’ aristocrat from being rendered indistinguishable from the masses. As the logic of the rest of the narrative reveals, Pierre has the right idea in refusing to submit to daguerreotypy but the wrong reasons for doing so. The narrator attributes Pierre’s ‘‘miserable motive’’ to ‘‘downright personal vanity’’—phrasing that hints at some distance between the narrative’s logic and that of its protagonist (254). More implicitly, and likely without recognizing that he is doing so, Pierre defends his Fuselian principles of subjective artistry against the encroachment of mechanical objectivity from scientific image making and applies them to daguerreian portraiture. Indeed, the narrative’s reasons for its own skepticism toward daguerreotypy and any form of representation thought to be objective turn out to be more theoretically grounded than mere egotism, elitism, or the anti-market bias that some critics have suggested.23 Pierre’s encounter with daguerreotypy brings into sharp focus the narrative’s insistent denial of objective truth and its eventual conclusion that everything— from daguerreotypes to thoughts to reality itself—is representation. ‘‘It’s a strange image you’re describing, and strange prisoners’’ Whereas daguerreotypy is invoked only as an absent presence in Pierre, Plato is mentioned on multiple occasions and references to the Republic— especially the sun analogy of Book VI and Book VII’s allegory of the cave— abound in Pierre. This is no random comparison; rather, I want to suggest that the popular concept of daguerreotypes as ‘‘pictures [made] by the sun’’ shadows Pierre’s preoccupation with a specifically Platonic idea of ‘‘Truth’’ when reading Pierre as an allegory of new media encounter.24 Put another

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way, while Holgrave borrows from popular descriptions of daguerreotypy to attribute the daguerreian portrait’s ‘‘wonderful insight’’ to ‘‘heaven’s broad and simple sunshine’’ in Hawthorne’s romantic treatment of daguerreotypy, Melville returns to Plato’s Republic as the philosophical source of this idea of the sun’s revelatory capacity (Ho7G 91). I argue that its sun analogy and allegory of the cave shed new light not only on the philosophies of art and perception that emerge over the course of the narrative but also on the novel’s plot—or, at least, on Pierre’s seeming enlightenment. The theory of truth, perception, and representation that gradually emerges from the negative example of Pierre’s story and from the narrator’s philosophical digressions and disagreements with Pierre, I contend, fundamentally contradicts both the ideal of mechanical objectivity and of Platonic truth to defend subjectivity, variability, and ambiguity as essential to creating and experiencing art, identity, and one’s sense of the world.25 In Book VII of the Republic, Plato (via Socrates) introduces the allegory of the cave as an analogy for understanding ‘‘the effect of [philosophical] education and of the lack of it on our nature’’ (514a). In a continuation of his dialogue with Glaucon, Socrates asks his interlocutor to [i]magine human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling, with an entrance a long way up, which is both open to the light and as wide as the cave itself. They’ve been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them, because their bonds prevent them from turning their heads around. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Also behind them, but on higher ground, there is a path stretching between them and the fire. Imagine that along this path a low wall has been built, like the screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets. (514a–b) While Saddle Meadows, the Glendenning family estate, is not literally a ‘‘cavelike dwelling,’’ Pierre has been fixed in this same place since childhood and it defines the extent of his knowledge; his youth, family tradition, his mother’s and fiance´e’s love, and his eventual inheritance are the figurative ties that bind him to the estate and the surrounding countryside. They are effective fetters: Pierre has little, if any idea of life beyond Saddle Meadows and accepts his world unquestioningly.

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Socrates continues his description of the cave, asking Glaucon to ‘‘also imagine that there are people along the wall, carrying all kinds of artifacts that project above it—statues of people and other animals, made out of stone, wood and every material’’ (514c). Glaucon responds, ‘‘It’s a strange image you’re describing, and strange prisoners’’; Socrates only replies, ‘‘They’re like us,’’ allowing the comparison to speak for itself (515a). Following a set of questions and responses specifying the limits of the prisoners’ perception and experience, Socrates concludes that in their imprisonment and, thus, ignorance, the ‘‘prisoners would in every way believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts’’ (515c). In Pierre’s world, two painted portraits of his deceased father are the artifacts that cast the longest shadows. The larger of the two hangs in the ‘‘most conspicuous and honorable place on the wall’’ in the drawing room of Saddle Meadows (72). It depicts Pierre’s father ‘‘in the prime of life’’ and ‘‘during the best and rosiest days’’ of his marriage, as his son remembers him and as his mother wants to remember him (82). The smaller portrait, hidden away in Pierre’s closet because his mother believes it to ‘‘signally belie her husband,’’ captures his unmarried father in early adulthood, appearing so ‘‘bright, and so cheerful then; so trim, and so young; so singularly healthful, and handsome’’ (72). Exposed most regularly to the more public of the two portraits, which features his father’s ‘‘truest, and finest, and noblest’’ expression, Pierre would hardly seem to require verbal reminders of his father’s value as a model and his lasting authority over his family, especially his namesake (72). Even so, his mother, Mary, instructs her son, ‘‘always think of him and you can never err; yes, always think of your dear perfect father, Pierre’’ (19). Yet as Pierre soon discovers, his ‘‘perfect’’ father may be little more than a shadow. After catching a glimpse of a woman who may be his illegitimate half sister while attending a sewing circle with his mother, Pierre is haunted by the mysterious woman’s uncannily familiar face. He becomes profoundly disoriented as a result. The narrator sheds light on Pierre’s condition: Hitherto I have ever held but lightly, thought Pierre, all stories of ghostly mysticalness in man; my creed of this world leads me to believe in visible, beautiful flesh, and audible breath, however sweet and scented; but only in visible flesh, and audible breath, have I

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hitherto believed. But now!—now!—and again he would lose himself in the most surprising and preternatural ponderings, which baffled all the introspective cunning of his mind. Himself was too much for himself. He felt that what he had always before considered the solid land of veritable reality, was now being audaciously encroached upon by bannered armies of hooded phantoms, disembarking in his soul, as from flotillas of specter-boats. (49) Such fundamental confusion is precisely the cave prisoner’s initial experience upon ‘‘being released from [his] bonds and cured of [his] ignorance’’ (Plato 515c). ‘‘When one of them was freed and suddenly compelled to stand up, turn his head, walk, and look up toward the light, he’d be pained and dazzled and unable to see the things whose shadows he’d seen before,’’ Socrates explains (515c–d). Pierre is thrust into the full daylight of the truth about his father and the lie of his own life modeled on an illusion when he receives a letter from the mysterious woman, who signs her name as Isabel, announcing, ‘‘Pierre Glendenning, thou art not the only child of thy father; in the eye of the sun, the hand that traces this is thy sister’s’’ (Pierre 63, emphasis added). As I have indicated, the illusions that the prisoner in Plato’s allegory and Pierre both have mistaken for the truth are works of art—statues of people and animals in the Republic and portraits of Pierre’s father in Pierre. Pierre recognizes that these portraits are representations of his father and not actually him, but like Plato’s prisoners, he does think that by looking at them, he will discover some essential truth (his father’s true character). With his father’s death and his mother’s encouragement, the drawing room portrait has become a kind of surrogate for his father—a literal father figure after whom Pierre models himself. Following the world-shaking revelation in Isabel’s letter, Pierre is drawn to the second portrait of his father that has been hidden away in Pierre’s closet. As he looks to this image to make sense of Isabel’s letter, the narrative recalls the story of the portrait’s creation that Pierre’s aunt Dorothea shared with him in his boyhood. In presenting the inquisitive young Pierre with the chair portrait and its story, Dorothea explains that it was painted by his father’s and her cousin Ralph Winwood under unusual circumstances. Ralph asked Pierre, pe`re, for permission to paint his portrait; Pierre refused out of both youthful impatience with the time required to sit for one’s portrait and his seeming preoccupation with a young French immigrant woman whom Ralph assumes is

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his lover. Stung by Pierre’s refusal, as well as by his apparent interest in a woman beneath his social rank, Ralph decides to paint the portrait without his subject’s permission, capturing an image of Pierre after his visits to the immigrant woman while keeping him distracted with conversation about her and her family. As Dorothea puts it, Ralph ‘‘was stealing his portrait’’ (77). When Pierre, fils, strenuously objects to this wrongdoing—modeling a precocious understanding of the fundamental significance of property to his aristocratic family—his aunt puts it slightly more gently, explaining that Ralph ‘‘slyly picked [Pierre’s father’s] portrait’’ (77). In this story of portraiture and theft that so clearly resonates with the account of Pierre’s rough treatment by the Captain Kidd editor, it is the victimizer instead of the victim who is compared to the pickpocket. In the daguerreotype debacle, although Pierre is the victim, his editor detains him like a criminal (‘‘like an officer a pickpocket’’) for withholding his image that, as his editor informs him, is ‘‘public property’’ (254). In the case of the chair portrait, that the elder Pierre is the victim of Ralph’s crime of stealing his image and, thus, his private property is undisputed. What is open to debate, though, is the severity of the crime. Dorothea tempers her original charge by explaining that the portrait has been of great comfort to her and encourages him to ‘‘heartily forgive cousin Ralph, for what he then did’’ (77). Although she deplores Ralph’s methods, she dearly values his results, cherishing the portrait and her ‘‘memory of Pierre’s father, with all that wonderful amaranthine devotion which an advanced maiden sister ever feels for the idea of a beloved younger brother, now dead and irrevocably gone’’ (73).26 Dorothea subsequently explains to the young Pierre that Ralph originally had intended to surprise the elder Pierre by revealing his portrait after adding it to the collection of images on the walls of his studio. But before he could do so, Pierre accuses Ralph of ‘‘playing tricks with him’’ and demands that he destroy the portrait that he suspects him of secretly making (78). The artist is loath to give up his ill-gotten gains; instead, he gives the portrait to Dorothea for safekeeping. When young Pierre asks his aunt why his father would have reacted so violently to the portrait, she explains that Ralph had discovered a book on physiognomy—likely a volume from Henry Fuseli’s English edition of Johann Kaspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy—in Pierre’s room and concluded that ‘‘the wonderful work on Physiognomy had, as it were, indirectly warned him [Pierre] against running that risk’’ of having ‘‘his secret published in a portrait’’ (79).27

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Having offered this explanation, Dorothea subsequently dismisses it by declaring that she doesn’t ‘‘believe [Pierre’s father] ever had any such ridiculous ideas on the subject’’ (79). But instead of offering her own opinion on why the elder Pierre did not want his portrait painted, Dorothea more ambiguously concludes that ‘‘even the best of us, at times, is apt to act very queerly and unaccountably’’ and tells Pierre that he ‘‘will know all about these strange matters by and by’’ (79). With this, Pierre gives up on his father’s possible motivations for not wanting his portrait painted and asks his aunt about the quality of the likeness. Because the portrait represents Pierre’s father before he was Pierre’s father, Pierre is unable to assess its accuracy for himself; he pointedly asks, ‘‘Now, aunt, did papa really look exactly like that?’’ (79). Whereas Dorothea has resisted speculating about her brother’s reasons for not wanting the portrait painted, she unambiguously declares the portrait to be ‘‘an excellent likeness . . . as he looked at that time’’ (79). Thus what begins as a story of origins becomes an extended meditation on the inherent subjectivity of an artwork’s production and reception. As such, the story of the so-called chair portrait first introduces Pierre to the idea that representational art is inflected by the artist’s subjectivity and that a single art object can inspire multiple and differing responses. As Dorothea tells it, the artist, the portrait’s subject, and its owner all have their own views of the portrait that seem to conflict significantly with each other; Pierre’s and his mother’s differing ideas about the image further complicate this story. No one perspective, though, outweighs the others, leaving the possibility for multiple interpretations of the same subject, and the same art object, open. Yet Pierre is too young to understand the variability among different subjectivities and to deal with the ambiguities that result and his aunt does not insist; rather, she assures him that the portrait ‘‘really [does] look exactly like’’ Pierre’s father did when Pierre seeks the shelter of a single, authoritative interpretation of the painting in terms of its mechanical fidelity to its subject. As Pierre ages, he occasionally ponders the more mysterious aspects of Dorothea’s story and comes to question whether the chair and drawing room portraits could both be accurate representations of his father. In such moments, Pierre explains, ‘‘ever new conceits come vaporing up in me, as I look on the strange chair-portrait’’ (83). In a passage that articulates the narrative’s argument about inseparability of art and subjectivity both explicitly and indirectly, Pierre imagines the portrait speaking to him, saying,

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Pierre, believe not the drawing-room painting; that is not thy father; or, at least, is not all of thy father. . . . Look again, I am thy father as he more truly was. In mature life, the world overlays and varnishes us, Pierre; the thousand proprieties and polished finenesses and grimaces intervene, Pierre; then, we, as it were, abdicate ourselves, and take unto us another self, Pierre; in youth we are, Pierre, but in age we seem. Look again. I am thy real father, so much the more truly, as thou thinkest thou recognizest me not, Pierre. . . . Consider this strange, ambiguous smile, Pierre; more narrowly regard this mouth. Behold, what is this too ardent, and as it were, unchastened light in these eyes, Pierre? I am thy real father, boy. . . . Probe a little, Pierre. Never fear, never fear. . . . Oh, a strange sort of story, that, thy dear old Aunt Dorothea once told thee, Pierre. I once knew a credulous old soul, Pierre. Probe, probe a little—see— there seems one little crack there, Pierre—a wedge, a wedge. Something ever comes of all persistent inquiry; we are not so continually curious for nothing. (83–84) In thus interpellating Pierre, the portrait confronts him with extremely unsettling ideas about representation and his idea of reality and about the divided nature of the self that is inherent in subjectivity. Though the image declares that it is Pierre’s ‘‘real’’ father, it/he does not offer any details about this identity, only suggesting that one’s public and private selves, as they emerge in the course of life experience, are as much representations— ‘‘overla[id]’’ and varnish[ed]’’ like a painting—as one’s portrait. In calling attention to his father’s ‘‘ambiguous smile’’ and eyes in the portrait, it/ he suggests there is more to the image than meets the eye while leaving indeterminate what that might be. And just as the portrait is about to offer its closing ‘‘word to the wise,’’ the narrator interrupts, signaling that the portrait’s spell over Pierre has been broken (84). Rather than reflecting on what the portrait has told him in such ‘‘reveries and trances’’ and allowing certainty to shade into ambiguity, Pierre ‘‘upbraid[s] himself for his self-indulgent infatuation’’ and ‘‘promise[s] never again to fall into a midnight revery before the chair-portrait of his father’’ (84–85). It becomes apparent—to the reader and not to Pierre, following the pattern of other such turning points in the narrative—that Pierre’s self-correction is exactly wrong when we recognize that the portrait’s observation that ‘‘[s]omething ever comes of all persistent inquiry;

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we are not so continually curious for nothing’’ is, in fact, its ‘‘word to the wise.’’ With this, we understand that Pierre is supposed to persist in his curious inquiries and indulge in his midnight reveries and that persistent, unending inquiry is the only truth, not the path to ‘‘Truth.’’ The narrator subsequently confirms the error of Pierre’s way, the extent of his denial, and his retreat to certainty: ‘‘Nor did the streams of these reveries seem to leave any conscious sediment in his mind; they were so light and so rapid, that they rolled their own alluvial along; and seemed to leave all Pierre’s thought-channels as clean and dry as though never any alluvial stream had rolled there at all.’’ As a result, ‘‘his father’s beatification remained untouched’’—that is, until it is shattered by the revelation in Isabel’s letter (85). Upon reading the letter, the narrator tells us, Pierre’s freed prisoner-like enlightenment is as ‘‘swift as the first light that slides from the sun’’ and he sees ‘‘all preceding ambiguities, all mysteries ripped open as if with a keen sword’’ (85). Both the chair portrait and the haunting vision of Isabel’s face become newly and mutually legible to him as his inherited eighteenth-century aesthetic theory of art’s essential subjectivity is overtaken by his newly intuited Platonic moral and aesthetic philosophy of ‘‘Truth.’’ Yet as the narrator describes Pierre’s transformation, it seems that it is only partial, in that Pierre now sees truth in his previous intuitions rather than the portrait’s essential ambiguity: ‘‘And now, by irresistible intuitions, all that had been inexplicably mysterious to him in the portrait, and all that had been inexplicably familiar to him in the face, most magically these now coincided; the merriness of the one not inharmonious with the mournfulness of the other, but by some ineffable correlativeness, they reciprocally identified each other’’ (85). In the Republic’s allegory of the cave, the freed prisoner’s enlightenment is not so instantaneous and the truth is not immediately visible; his eyes adjust more gradually to the bright sunlight after having seen only the dim and reflected firelight in the cave. At first, he is unable to see anything; only with time does he come to ‘‘see shadows most easily, then images of men and other things in water, then the things themselves’’ (516a). ‘‘Finally,’’ Socrates posits, the freed prisoner becomes ‘‘able to see the sun, not images of it in water or some alien place, but the sun itself, in its own place, and be able to study it’’ (516b, emphasis added). Earlier in his dialogue with Glaucon, Socrates has established the sun as ‘‘the one whose light causes our sight to see in the best way and the visible things to be seen’’ and, thus,

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‘‘that what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower’’ (508a, 508e). This is the Republic’s well-known sun analogy, which figures the sun as the equivalent of philosophical truth, which, in turn, makes all other kinds of knowledge possible. As I have begun to suggest, in antebellum popular culture, this analogy had been reduced to a metonym for understanding daguerreotypes as pictures made by the sun. This popular metonym, I contend, derives from the ideal of mechanical objectivity—or ‘‘blind sight, seeing without interference, interpretation, or intelligence’’—that began to dominate scientific image making in the mid-nineteenth century (Daston and Galison 17). Pierre restores the sun to its divinity as the ultimate ‘‘cause and controller’’ of all knowledge and ways of knowing—to both representing and embodying all that is true and good (Plato 508a). Once Pierre thinks he has seen the light, he commits himself henceforth to knowing ‘‘nothing but Truth; glad Truth, or sad Truth; I will know what is, and do what my deepest angel dictates’’ (Pierre 65, original emphasis). Yet his qualifications of Plato’s singular and all-encompassing truth as ‘‘glad’’ and ‘‘sad’’ and his reliance on his ‘‘deepest angel’’—thus, his subjective sense of what is right and wrong—reveal Pierre’s continuing self-delusion. Because he has progressed from his previous state of almost total ignorance and dependence, Pierre is convinced that he is his own best guide in his quest for ‘‘Truth,’’ even though his enlightenment is not yet complete. Although this newfound zeal for truth is not connected directly to Pierre’s encounter with daguerreotypy, his faith that it exists and is knowable resonates with discussions of representational accuracy and misrepresentation in popular comparisons of daguerreotypy to other forms of image making, as well as with positivism and mechanical objectivity in the sciences. The instantaneity of both his enlightenment and his conversion would seem to suggest that Pierre is still mistaking mere shadows for the sun itself and, therefore, that the actions he takes on the basis of what he believes to be true are fundamentally misguided. His decision to marry Isabel—so that she can gain formal entry into the family without tarnishing his father’s reputation—adds to this suspicion; his conviction that she is his sister is based largely on what he sees, imagines, and has been told about the chair portrait of his father. And his ‘‘burning desire to deliver what he thought to be new, or at least miserably neglected Truth to the world,’’ by writing a book that is also meant to earn him and his new family a living

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further suggests that Pierre is neither seeing nor thinking clearly (283). To gauge the extent of this delusion, I turn to another moment in the novel that dramatizes Pierre’s coming to awareness of Plato’s theory of the relationship of truth, perception, and representation. Art as Truth/Art and Truth In Book X of the Republic, Socrates and Glaucon come to consider the place of art and artists in the ideal republic that they are theorizing in the course of their dialogues. They begin with the painter and painting; Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine three beds: one made by the god (the ‘‘form’’ or ‘‘the being of a bed’’ [Plato 597a]), a second made by a carpenter, and a third in a painting. In Pierre, this exercise is dramatized with Pierre’s visit to Lucy’s bedroom, where he ‘‘caught the snow-white bed reflected in the toiletglass’’ (39). ‘‘This rooted him,’’ the narrator states. ‘‘For one swift instant, he seemed to see in that one glance the two separate beds—the real one and the reflected one—and an unbidden, most miserable presentiment thereupon stole into him’’ (39). What Pierre senses but does not understand is the essential deception of representation that Glaucon recognizes in imagining three beds. For making a bed that conforms to the ideal of a bed, the carpenter is deemed a craftsman by Glaucon and the carpenter’s bed one degree removed from truth (or the form). The painter, though, Glaucon designates as an ‘‘imitator’’ (Plato 597e) because his painting of a bed is ‘‘an imitation of appearances’’ rather than of the Form; thus, painting is determined to be ‘‘far removed from the truth’’ (598b). At this point, Socrates introduces the poet into the dialogue as likewise an imitator and not a craftsman and declares poetry to be at the same remove from the truth as painting. Significantly, Pierre sees only two of the three beds that Glaucon describes: the carpenter’s bed and its reflection (the equivalent of the painter’s bed). The Form, or the Platonic ideal bed, is missing entirely from his experience and his understanding is thus limited. For the painter and poet alike, Socrates asserts, ‘‘imitation is a kind of game and not to be taken seriously’’ because of its remove from truth (602b). These games are not harmless; rather, ‘‘trompe l’oeil painting, conjuring, and other forms of trickery have powers that are little short of magical’’ (602d). Thus Socrates concludes that he and Glaucon are ‘‘right not to admit [the painter] into a city that is to be well-governed, for he arouses, nourishes, and strengthens [the inferior] part of the soul and so destroys

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the rational one, in just the way that someone destroys the better sort of citizens when he strengthens the vicious ones and surrenders the city to them. Similarly, we’ll say that an imitative poet puts a bad constitution in the soul of each individual by making images that are far removed from truth and by gratifying the irrational part’’ (605b–c). As others have observed, this dialogue in the Republic offers an important precedent for the longstanding suspicion of painting (and writing) in America that began with Calvinism and was amplified, as we have seen, with the introduction of daguerreotypy.28 We remember that even Samuel Morse, who was himself a painter and one of the first Americans to see an actual daguerreotype, described the daguerreian image as ‘‘drawn, not with man’s feeble, false, and flattering pencil, but with the power and the truth of light from heaven!’’ Morse’s remarks are an amalgamation of Platonism, Deism, and mechanical objectivity, all of which characterize human perception and representation as distorting or deceptive. Again, Pierre does not directly examine or challenge such popular claims that daguerreotypes were more truthful because they were supposedly made by the action of the sun and, therefore, without the mediating influence of the artist’s hand. But I want to suggest that like Morse’s remarks about daguerreotypy, Pierre’s dedication to writing a ‘‘thoughtful thing of absolute Truth’’ borrows on Platonism and relates to contemporary discussions of daguerreian representation and mechanical objectivity, which the narrative ultimately means to challenge (283). The title of the first part of Book XXI, ‘‘Pierre Immaturely Attempts a Mature Work,’’ resolves for readers any lingering questions about whether his enlightenment is complete and about his fitness to write such a work. Though he has emerged from the cave of his ignorance and is committed to a life of philosophical inquiry, he is not yet a philosopher. ‘‘While Pierre was thinking that he was entirely transplanted into a new and wonderful element of Beauty and Power,’’ the narrator explains, ‘‘he was, in fact, but in one of the stages of the transition’’ (283). In this stage, Pierre reads voraciously, thinking he ‘‘would climb Parnassus with a pile of folios on his back’’ (283). From the narrator’s more enlightened perspective, Pierre’s attitude toward the works he reads is definitive proof of his immaturity: He did not see, that it was nothing at all to him, what other men had written; that though Plato was indeed a transcendently great man in himself, yet Plato must not be transcendently great to him

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(Pierre), so long as he (Pierre himself) would also do something transcendently great. He did not see that there is no such thing as a standard for the creative spirit; that no one great book must ever be separately regarded, and permitted to domineer with its own uniqueness upon the creative mind; but that all existing great works must be federated in the fancy; and so regarded as a miscellaneous and Pantheistic whole, and then,—without at all dictating to his own mind, or unduly biasing it any way,—thus combined, they would prove simply an exhilarative and provocative to him. (283–84) I want to suggest that in this self-reflexive passage about what can be learned from great thinkers and great books, we learn as much about how we should read Pierre as we do about how Pierre should be reading. Whether it is itself a great book for taking on philosophy from Plato through Emerson or a failed novel modeled on Hawthorne, Pierre should prove ‘‘exhilarative and provocative’’ to readers, just as the great books (and even the ‘‘sleazy’’ pamphlets) that Pierre reads should affect him and be productively combined in his imagination (206).29 For as the narrator asserts, the truly perceptive reader will recognize that ‘‘all the great books in the world are but the mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied images in the soul’’ (284). In this view—which I understand as not just the narrator’s but also Melville’s—truth only can be found within and, thus, is entirely subjective; it cannot be expressed or be rendered objectively and completely, in any form.30 Thus, we see that Pierre is not only unequal to the task he has set for himself (writing ‘‘a thoughtful thing of absolute Truth’’) but also mistaken in his ultimate aim (‘‘absolute Truth’’), which is unachievable in a book—or, in the novel’s logic, in any form of representation. Even the greatest books are ‘‘but the mirrors, distortedly reflecting to us our own things,’’ the narrator asserts (284). ‘‘[N]ever mind what the mirror may be,’’ the passage most Platonically concludes (while notably calling to mind the mirror-like daguerreian medium), ‘‘if we would see the object, we must look at the object itself and not at its reflection’’ (284). With this last claim, Melville would seem to agree with Plato that all representation is subjectively mediated and to emphasize the distorting effects of such mediation; it is a variation on the moment in the Republic when Socrates asks Glaucon, ‘‘And isn’t it also true that if there are images

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of letters reflected in mirrors or water, we won’t know them until we know the letters themselves, for both abilities are part of the same craft and discipline’’ (402b). Yet I contend that in significantly replacing Socrates’ ‘‘letters’’ (of the alphabet) with the more general ‘‘object,’’ Melville makes a broader, and crucial, claim about representation in line with the rest of the narrative: that we are dangerous to ourselves in holding any form of representation—be it a novel or a daguerreian or painted portrait—to the ideal of truth. We are to blame—not representation—for misleading ourselves. This passage, in the context of the rest of the narrative, argues that to hold oneself or any form of art to the standard of one objective truth is fundamentally to misunderstand oneself, art, and truth. Novels, paintings, and even daguerreotypes should be understood as Art; none is ‘‘Truth,’’ in the logic of Pierre. By the same reasoning, great books are only ‘‘mutilated shadowings-forth’’ if they are judged by the standard of their distance from ‘‘Truth,’’ and truths are only discoverable by looking inward—not as Pierre does but in a more prescribed way that requires some degree of guidance and a continuing education. Both this passage and the narrative as a whole argue that if we see all representations—even the ones that are supposed to be completely objective and reliable—as representations, if we look to them with the expectation that they will show us something about representation rather than something about ourselves or truth, then we do not deceive ourselves. When we understand art as art, then mediation—in the form of representation and subjectivity—becomes something to be valued instead of shunned. In the aesthetic theory that emerges from this passage and the novel as a whole, art’s inherent subjectivity—its distance from an internal, enlightened sense of truth—becomes the space for artistry and imagination. As we will see in the next section, Pierre finally comes to recognize his selfdelusion. But rather than embracing the ambiguities that are inherent in both art and life as the narrative itself ultimately models and requires, Pierre retreats to the certainty that death alone can provide for him. The Ambiguities After tedious months of incessantly thinking about, writing, discarding, and rewriting his book of ‘‘Truth,’’ Pierre emerges from his room, suggesting that he, Isabel, and his ex-fiance´e, Lucy (who has come to live with them in their rooms at an artists’ commune), indulge in a day of rest by taking a walk outside. After walking a short while, the trio discovers a ‘‘gallery of

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paintings, recently imported from Europe’’ (349). ‘‘It seemed plain,’’ the narrator remarks, ‘‘that the whole must be a collection of those wretched imported daubs, with which the incredible effrontery peculiar to some of the foreign picture-dealers in America, were christened by the loftiest names known to Art’’—Rubens, Raphael, Angelo, Domenichino, and da Vinci (349–50). Pierre, Isabel, and Lucy have wandered into an exhibit of copies of great paintings by great artists advertised as the real things. To Pierre, who is looking for ‘‘Truth’’ instead of Art, not only the gallery but also ‘‘[a]ll the walls of the world seemed thickly hung with the empty and impotent scope of pictures, grandly outlined, but miserably filled.’’ As a result, he does not notice the ‘‘smaller and humbler pictures’’ in the gallery, ‘‘representing little familiar things,’’ which the narrator deems ‘‘by far the best executed.’’ For Pierre, these artistically accomplished but small and humble images ‘‘awoke no dormant majesties in his soul, and therefore, upon the whole, were contemptibly inadequate and unsatisfactory’’ (350). Pierre ‘‘capriciously’’ seeks out the one painting in the exhibition for which neither the artist nor the subject is identified—‘‘No. 99. A stranger’s head, by an unknown hand’’ (349). Despite these ambiguities—or, rather, because of them—the painting awakens not only Pierre but also Isabel. Immediately upon looking at it, Isabel exclaims, ‘‘My God! see! see! only my mirror has ever shown me that look before! See! see!’’ (350). ‘‘Is it? Is it? Can it be?’’ she demands (352). Whereas the portrait prompts Isabel to speak, Pierre contemplates it in silence. The narrator presents this object of their mutual attention to the reader via ekphrasis, describing the portrait as ‘‘a dark, comely, youthful man’s head, portentously looking out of a dark, shaded ground, and ambiguously smiling. There was no discoverable drapery; the dark head, with its crisp, curly, jetty hair, seemed just disentangling itself out of curtains and clouds’’ (351). With this we see—or, more accurately, imagine—a portrait that would seem to meet most of Fuseli’s requirements for an artistic, rather than mechanical, portrait that were invoked during Pierre’s consideration of daguerreotypy. While ‘‘The Stranger’’ excludes any details that communicate its subject’s social status or his identity, it captures its subject’s expression in a way that suggests something of both his character and the painter’s artistry. The narrator confirms its quality, declaring that ‘‘a real Italian gem of art had found its way into this most hybrid collection of impostures’’ (350). Without knowing who the subject is, there is no possibility of judging the fidelity of its likeness; we see instead only how he looks rather than how much it looks

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like the subject. And without knowing the identity of the artist, we see his artistry rather than assume it. Thus, subjectivity is restored to the subject of the portrait and the artist alike, and mechanical objectivity is ruled out as a possible standard for judging the quality of the representation. In her naı¨vete´, Isabel is only able capable of responding to the portrait in terms of its resemblance to real life; she finds ‘‘in the eye and on the brow’’ of the portrait ‘‘certain shadowy traces of her own unmistakable likeness’’ (351). She also sees the mysterious man she remembers as her father in the portrait. In the same moment, Pierre sees the portrait as ‘‘the resurrection of the one he had burnt at the Inn’’—the chair portrait of his father, which Pierre removed from Saddle Meadows only to destroy after marrying Isabel (351). Yet Pierre makes this identification on the basis of the impression the two portraits make on him rather than on the portraits’ resemblance to each other. ‘‘Not that the separate features were the same’’ as those of the chair portrait, ‘‘but the pervading look of it, the subtler interior keeping of the entirety, was almost identical’’ with the image of Pierre’s father, the narrator explains of Pierre’s subjective response (351). Because Pierre does not share his thoughts with Isabel and because Isabel’s exclamations about the portrait’s identity do not specify who she thinks is its subject, ‘‘here came to pass a not unremarkable thing,’’ as the narrator puts it: ‘‘for though both were intensely excited by one object, yet their two minds and memories were thereby directed to entirely different contemplations; while still each, for the time—however unreasonably— might have vaguely supposed the other occupied by one and the same contemplation’’ (352). In other words, one painting produces two different responses, two distinct mental images, in two different viewers, as we have seen dramatized with Dorothea’s story of the chair portrait, as well as in the confrontation over Pierre’s unrealized daguerreotype. This scene—another turning point in the narrative—specifically dramatizes the inevitable variability and, thus, the essential subjectivity of different people’s responses to a single art object. In the case of Pierre’s and Isabel’s verbal responses to the stranger’s portrait, they are generally similar enough that the different thoughts behind them seem to be the same. Only the omniscient narrator is able to see that ‘‘Pierre was thinking of the chair-portrait’’ and ‘‘Isabel, of the living face’’ and that ‘‘Isabel’s fervid exclamations having reference to the living face, were now, as it were, mechanically responded to by Pierre, in syllables having reference to the chair-portrait’’ (352). When Isabel again asks, ‘‘Is it? is it? can it be?’’ Pierre responds, ‘‘No, it can not be, it is not,’’

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dismissing what he sees as the resemblance of the stranger’s portrait to the chair portrait as ‘‘one of the wonderful coincidences, nothing more,’’ and fleeing with her and Lucy (352). Yet he has not answered Isabel’s question about whether it is a portrait of the man she remembers as her father—he cannot, because he does not realize that this is the question she is asking and because he cannot see her mental image of her father as she remembers him. As ever, Pierre is right to understand the moment as a coincidence but wrong about what is coincident. As with his instinctive refusal to be daguerreotyped, he requires some reflection to arrive at his reasoning behind this conclusion. The narrator subsequently tells us that ‘‘Pierre was silent’’ as he, Isabel, and Lucy flee from the gallery, ‘‘but wild thoughts were hurrying and shouting in his heart’’ (353). He is not reflecting on the two portraits but thinking of Isabel, questioning for the first time how he knows that she is his sister. Viewing ‘‘The Stranger’’ has caused Pierre to look at Isabel in a different light—that of reason rather than ‘‘enthusiasm’’—only to recognize that ‘‘[n]othing that he saw in her face could he remember as having seen in his father’s’’ (353). ‘‘The chair-portrait,’’ Pierre realizes, ‘‘that was the entire sum and substance of all possible, rakable, downright presumptive evidence, which peculiarly appealed to his own separate self’’ (353). Thus Pierre finally recognizes that he has mistaken a shadow cast by an artifact for truth; significantly, it is another artifact that brings him to this realization—‘‘another portrait of a complete stranger’’ that ‘‘is just as strong an evidence as the other’’ (353). In the light of the portrait of the stranger, Pierre rethinks his assumptions based on the chair portrait, reasoning that ‘‘the original of this second portrait was as much the father of Isabel as the original of the chair-portrait’’ (353). Only with this comparison does it finally occur to Pierre that another man who resembled his father in his youth, but who was not his father, and whose name sounded like Glendenning, but was not Glendenning, may have been Isabel’s father. But Pierre’s deductive reasoning does not stop here; he goes a step further to think that ‘‘perhaps there was no original at all to this second portrait; it might have been a pure fancy piece’’ (353). In realizing that Isabel’s memories of her father are but representations themselves and unstable ones at that, Pierre’s thoughts become a hall of mirrors. He is bewildered by the mise en abyme nature of the truth about his father and of ‘‘Truth’’ itself, infinitely regressing and impossible to access without the mediation of some form of representation, including his own thoughts and perception.

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At the end of this train of thoughts, Pierre arrives at the ‘‘apparent anomaly of a mind, which by becoming really profound in itself, grew skeptical of all tendered profundities; whereas, the contrary is generally supposed’’ (354)—something like an objective view of subjectivity. In yet another of the narrator’s observations at a turning point in the narrative—this time about the paradox of profound thought, after previous observations about the paradoxes of profound viewing and reading—we recognize that the narrative’s argument about subjectivity extends beyond arguing that it is essential to not just art but also thought. Put another way, the true philosopher is not only skeptical of truth but also self-reflexively aware of thinking skeptically. Thus the mediating quality of subjectivity becomes the essence of understanding rather than something that interferes with or limits it. Ultimately unable to sustain such radical skepticism or to embrace the inevitable ambiguity, contingency, and mediation of either subjectivity or representation, Pierre nihilistically recognizes death as the only means of attaining fixity and certainty. In a fit of rage, he kills his cousin, thereby ‘‘extinguish[ing] his house in slaughtering the only unoutlawed human being by the name of Glendenning,’’ as well as Lucy’s brother, which leads to his confinement ‘‘in a low dungeon of the city prison’’ (360). Pierre thus becomes a literal prisoner in a cave at the narrative’s conclusion. The final scenes of the novel bring both Pierre the character and the novel to a Hamletesque conclusion—foreseeing his imminent death, Pierre declares, ‘‘Here, then, is the untimely, timely end;—Life’s last chapter well stitched into the middle! Nor book, nor author of the book, hath any sequel, though each hath its last lettering!’’ (360). If Pierre’s mind and words finally match up here—if he both speaks the truth and recognizes that he is doing so—his enlightenment has come too late, both for himself and for those dependent upon him. In quick succession, Lucy shrinks ‘‘up like a scroll, and noiselessly [falls] at the feet of Pierre’’ (360), Pierre dies next, and Isabel takes a final fatal drink of poison upon exclaiming, ‘‘All’s o’er, and ye know him not!’’ to end the narrative (362). As with Pierre’s dying words, Isabel speaks the truth about both Pierre the character and the novel: we cannot know the real Pierre because he is a fictional character, not an actual person. And as the chair portrait has told us, the same would be no less true if he were an actual person; all’s representation, including identity and reality. Though Pierre has sought permanent refuge from ambiguity in the final certainty of death, both Isabel and the narrative ultimately deny it to him. Again, Isabel’s last words and the narrative’s silence about whether Pierre

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has committed suicide by drinking the poison from Isabel’s ‘‘secret vial’’ or whether Isabel has surreptitiously poisoned him and Lucy insist on uncertainty and ambiguity. And in his last moments, even Pierre seems to recognize that he will not achieve clarity in either life or death; comparing his life to a book, he concludes that ‘‘[i]t is ambiguous still,’’ even with its last chapter (360). But if his final pronouncement is, for once, knowingly wise, it is also belated; Pierre dies in darkness, even though he may have seen the light.31 Whereas Pierre the protagonist only eventually and reluctantly arrives at the inevitability of contingency and ambiguity, Pierre the novel consistently embraces and embodies both in its theory and practice of art. With this, I mean to emphasize that what Melville seeks to reestablish as the virtues of subjectivity—including variability, uncertainty, unknowability, and transience—in both life and art are especially visible not just at the novel’s conclusion but also and most especially in its portraits, which we, like Pierre, would do well to reconsider. All of the portraits in the narrative are not only fictional but also ‘‘verbal representation[s] of graphic representation[s],’’ as James Heffernan defines ekphrasis.32 When we consider the several layers of the imaginary necessarily at work in these ekphrastic fictional images—most noticeable when the narrative describes portraits of fictional characters, like those of Pierre’s father, as if they actually existed— the regressive quality of the real, or what Plato and Pierre call truth, and the multiple layers of representation through which we subjectively experience and understand the world become strikingly apparent. This mise en abyme effect is most evident in the daguerreian portrait of Pierre that the narrative raises as a possibility only to leave it unrealized— or, more accurately, unfictionalized. By excluding a daguerreotype from its gallery of fictional portraits, the narrative does more than remain faithful to the real-life episode that inspired its brief and singular mention of what was supposed to be the most truthful form of representation ever available. Restricting daguerreian portraiture’s presence in the narrative to Pierre’s refusal to be so imaged creates the opportunity to contemplate the broader philosophical implications of the medium—to question what it means for art and for human understanding to see any form of representation as objective and, thus, as capturing reality or truth itself. What would such art look like, then? We begin to see when we again recall that Pierre’s unrealized daguerreotype is not the only nonexistent portrait in Pierre: all of the narrative’s portraits are fictional; as such, they

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can only be described rather than viewed firsthand. Because of this, each reader must form mental images for all of the portraits to ‘‘see’’ them. Consequently, even when the narrative provides a detailed description of one of its portraits, that portrait’s appearance is ultimately as variable and multiple—as subjective and, thus, artistic—as the imaginations of its different readers.33 While painted portraiture is supposed to immortalize its subjects and daguerreian portraiture capture them precisely as they appear in life, the novel’s ekphrastic portraiture ephemeralizes both its subjects and their likenesses. Because every ekphrastic portrait only exists as an image in each reader’s mind’s eye, all that is certain about this image is its transience; it exists only as long as it holds the reader’s attention. Pierre significantly transforms this potential liability into a powerful argument for the social value of subjectivity in artistry—of what we might call, more basically, representation—against Plato and his daguerreian age equivalents—those promoting the idea of mechanical objectivity as the new standard for all image making. It is in Pierre’s ambiguities, I conclude, that Melville both creates a space for and mounts a defense of subjectivity in the art and artistry in the era of daguerreotypy’s and mechanical objectivity’s emergence. By explicitly and repeatedly dramatizing the multiplicity and variety of its characters’ responses to painted portraiture, the narrative implicitly compels its readers to recognize the subjectivity of their own responses to its verbal portraits and, by extension, to any representational work. By effectively making its readers into artists, Pierre also implicates its audience in the kind of creative work that daguerreotypy and mechanical objectivity were supposed to do away with and, ideally, brings each reader to rediscover the value of subjective imagination and invention in the process. Given the overwhelmingly negative critical response to the novel and its subsequently slow sales, Melville’s ambitious strategy had little chance to succeed.34 In fact, the novel’s insistence on contingency and indeterminacy was precisely what inspired some of the most hostile reactions from critics; the New York Herald declared it ‘‘[o]ne long brain-muddling, soulbewildering ambiguity . . . without beginning or end—a labyrinth without a clue.’’35 One British reviewer condemned the novel precisely on the grounds that it engaged its readers too actively, compromising the aesthetic pleasure of reading: ‘‘We take up novels to be amused—not bewildered,—in search of pleasure for the mind—not in pursuit of cloudy metaphysics; and it is no refreshment after the daily toils and troubles of life, for

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a reader to be soused into a torrent rhapsody uttered in defiance of taste and sense.’’36 The novel’s radical self-consciousness as a theory of art and a defense of subjectivity in both epistemology and art, along with its strategies for heightening its audience’s sense of the art of reading, made Pierre seem an aesthetic failure instead of a triumph to even critics who likely would have been sympathetic to its rather conservative aesthetics and philosophy. In the same moment, the Boston daguerreotype firm of Southworth & Hawes was promoting and practicing almost painterly full-plate portraits featuring some of the most notable figures of the nineteenth century while failing to attract broad popular or critical acclaim. In what follows, I consider selections from Southworth & Hawes’s oeuvre and from the writings of Albert Sands Southworth for their resemblance to Pierre in contradicting dominant popular ideas about daguerreotypy and mechanical objectivity and in maintaining eighteenth-century standards of fine art, even at the cost of wider success. ‘‘We blend, artistically, our lights and shadows’’: The Portraits of Southworth & Hawes In 1843 the daguerreotype firm of A. S. Southworth & Co. advertised their services in the Boston Courier with a remarkable advertisement that embraces the popular understanding of daguerreotypes as pictures made by the sun while emphasizing the firm’s commitment to artistry in its portraits. Below a striking image of the sun painting a portrait of the earth, the ad copy announces, ‘‘For distinctness of outline and delicate shading, for natural and pleasing expression of the features, especially the eyes, for beautiful and picturesque effect, we cheerfully submit [our daguerreotypes] to the severest comparisons and criticisms. We will warrant, if desired, a better likeness than can be obtained elsewhere, and if an impartial decision by artists is against us, we will pay all expenses.’’37 Still in the early days of using daguerreotypy for portraiture, Southworth & Co., like many daguerreian studios at the time, refers to its portraits as ‘‘miniatures’’ and advertises its skill at adding color to the otherwise black and white images, suggesting daguerreian portraiture’s connections to the miniature painted portraits that preceded it and the inevitable overlap of old and new media. Yet Southworth & Co.’s advertisement is unusual for emphasizing the artistry of their portraits over their mechanical accuracy, which other daguerreotypists had begun promoting in print to distinguish their services

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from those of the miniaturist. The money-back guarantee that the studio offers in its ad is not based on a comparison of its portraits against those made by other daguerreotypists but on their evaluation by portrait painters best able to critique the pictures’ lines and shading, the subjects’ expressions, and their overall ‘‘beautiful and picturesque effect.’’ Portraits by Southworth & Co., the ad makes clear, were to be understood as art, regardless of the medium. When the firm came to be known as Southworth & Hawes in 1843, the partners continued using the image of the sun painting the globe’s portrait in its advertisements, making it the firm’s hallmark (Figure 9). Their business cards advertised their services for not only ‘‘daguerreotype likenesses’’ but also ‘‘copies from portraits, miniatures, paintings, engravings, or statuary.’’ In copying works of art and in creating them alike, their cards declare, the daguerreotypists ‘‘aim at the highest perfection possible’’ in the ‘‘style of execution and picturesque effect—in boldness of character and beauty of expression—in variety of size and delicacy of lights and shadows.’’38 As the partners make clear, even the daguerreotype’s celebrated accuracy of detail benefits from an artistic sensibility when it is put to the purpose of copying paintings. With respect to the quality of the firm’s original portraits, one of its broadside ads emphasizes the significance of such attention to artistry: ‘‘The superiority of our Likenesses is the result of our care in the arrangement throughout, particularly of the Light. . . . We blend, artistically, our lights and shadows.’’39 Their portrait of Nancy Southworth Hawes—Albert Southworth’s sister and Josiah Hawes’s wife—seated next to her own painted portrait illustrates the partners’ skill at both copying a painting and creating an original portrait (Figure 10). The sharpness of both the portrait’s and the sitter’s faces would have been difficult to achieve, given the limited focal range of the lenses in daguerreian cameras. The ‘‘lights and shadows’’ of the daguerreotype are also quite defined, especially the shadowing on the face of the painted portrait, which almost suggests three-dimensionality. Perhaps most significantly, as a portrait of a portrait and its original, the image achieves a theoretical complexity beyond its artistic accomplishment. Its mise en abyme effect is only heightened when we remember that its mirror-like surface would have reflected yet another image of Nancy Southworth Hawes’s face as she looked at her likenesses in both painted and daguerreian form. In this moment, she would have seen herself seeing herself in three different registers: the painting in the daguerreotype appears as if it is

Figure 9. Southworth & Hawes advertising broadside. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

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Figure 10. Southworth & Hawes, Nancy Southworth Hawes with her painted portrait, c. 1842–43. Collection Matthew Isenburg.

looking at her as she is seated next to it; she looks at neither the portrait nor the book but rather out of the daguerreotype at the viewer; and in looking at the daguerreotype, she sees a reflection of herself looking at its surface. Like Pierre, this image revels in its many layers of representation while hinting, Ahab-like, that ‘‘all visible objects’’ may be but ‘‘pasteboard masks’’ that challenge the categories of original and copy, reality and representation, and subjectivity and objectivity.40 As both an image and a material object, then, this daguerreotype dramatizes the new media encounter

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between painting and daguerreotypy and how this encounter both destabilizes and reaffirms existing ideas about art, identity, and perception. Southworth & Hawes’s commitment to creating such challenging daguerreian portraits, worthy of the designation of fine art—and to creating them themselves without the assistance of unnamed operators—was at odds with what popular print had trained their customers to expect of the medium. In the interest of retraining the public in how it thought about both daguerreotypy and fine art, Albert Southworth also turned to print, publishing a series of essays titled ‘‘Daguerreotype Likenesses’’ in the Boston Daily Evening Transcript, beginning in March 1852. In the first installment, Southworth addresses himself to sitters ‘‘who would have good likenesses, and specimens worthy of the attention and criticism of any who have cultivated a taste for the ‘Fine Arts’ ’’ (S., ‘‘Daguerreotype Likenesses’’). Speaking directly to his reader, he begins: ‘‘In the first place accustom yourself to the study of Daguerreotypes until you have fixed distinctly in your mind the differences between an ordinary specimen and the best, and can determine their relative merits.’’ Through such ‘‘careful attention’’ and comparative examinations, the reader will become ‘‘convinced of the error of the common sayings’’ that daguerreotypes ‘‘ ‘must be likenesses, of course, and can be nothing else,’—that ‘they are all the same thing, and the less they cost the more economical the expenditure.’ ’’ Here, the financial motive behind Southworth’s interest in training his potential customers becomes apparent. In contrast to Melville, he is not preparing his audience to appreciate art simply for art’s sake at the cost of his own success; readers who come to appreciate the ‘‘best’’ kinds of daguerreotypes also will become his studio’s best customers. Ideally, those able to discriminate between portraits and mere mechanical ‘‘likenesses’’ will seek out artists like Southworth & Hawes over their competitors who let the camera do all of the work. Recognizing that many of his readers likely have been disappointed by daguerreian portraiture, finding their own appearance unpleasant or even distorted when they have been conditioned by periodical writers and daguerreotypists alike to equate mechanical objectivity with an aesthetically rewarding image, Southworth seeks to reassure all of his readers about the medium’s suitability for portraiture. ‘‘Every face,’’ he declares, ‘‘may have justice done it; and be shown in its best view and its best light, whether a handsome or a plain one. You may have a likeness without any distortion of the features.’’ Here, the essay takes a surprising turn: instead of directing his audience to a daguerreian artist such as himself to acquire such a pleasing

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portrait, Southworth emphasizes the sitter’s significant role—that of the subject—in determining the appearance of his or her expression. ‘‘As it is supposed your picture is for your relatives and intimate friends, and that they desire a social and pleasant expression,’’ he advises, ‘‘be sure before you attempt to sit that you can wear such as is desirable.’’ If the reader is not able to judge for him- or herself the suitability of his or her own expression, he instructs, ‘‘practice before a mirror, or with a friend to prompt with the light of a window falling full on the face.’’ ‘‘At first thought this may seem childish or silly,’’ Southworth acknowledges, ‘‘but a little reflection will show you that the artist might with as much propriety attempt a series of experiments with untried apparatus and chemicals whilst you are sitting, as that you should occupy his time and subject him to expense of labor and material, in learning to do what belongs to yourself alone.’’ Once again, we see that Southworth’s motives are at least as pecuniary as they are artistic. Even so, his advice registers the subject’s unprecedented degree of agency—his or her subjectivity—in daguerreian portraiture, something that writers often overlooked in favor of promoting the medium’s mechanical objectivity. More than in any other medium, the daguerreian subject’s actions affected the outcome of the portrait in ways that even the most artistically minded daguerreotypist could not control. If the subject moved, the image would be distorted or blurred; if he or she slouched or smiled weakly, the daguerreotypist could not give the pose or expression a more flattering appearance. While the medium and the daguerreotypist might be capable of some picturesque effects, its subjects might not be able to effect the same without proper preparation learned from the daguerreotypist’s equivalent of a conduct manual. Thus Southworth suggests in his column that the sitter should ‘‘choose a favorable opportunity for sitting, and devote sufficient time to accomplish [one’s] object thoroughly’’ once one has ‘‘learned and familiarized [one]self with the duties devolving on [one] in aid of the production of a good and agreeable daguerreotype.’’ In contrast to all reports otherwise, Southworth tells his potential customers that one’s expression in a daguerreotype reveals one’s mood in the moment that it was taken more than one’s essential character. ‘‘Let the cares and anxieties of business be laid aside for the time, and the trials and perplexities of life be forgotten. . . . With a sprightly, buoyant, happy feeling, the expression cannot fail of being agreeable,’’ he advises. With this we see that even with the work required of the daguerreian subject, sitting for a daguerreotype is a decidedly genteel and leisurely

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activity, as Southworth presents it. With the daguerreian subject at ease in mind and body alike, his or her appearance corresponds with his or her mood at the moment of being imaged to create an aesthetically pleasing portrait. By contrast, Southworth asserts, the artist’s ‘‘task is one of labor and anxiety, of difficulty and of uncertainty.’’ Because of this, he tells his readers that their ‘‘sympathy should be with him [the daguerreotypist], not his with you.’’ Such patience and sympathy result in a daguerreian artist who is ‘‘more gratified with furnishing a fine specimen, than with the remuneration for it,’’ Southworth concludes—though not without advertising ‘‘Artists’ Daguerreotype Rooms, 51/2 Tremont Row, Boston’’ at the end of the column. In Southworth’s ceding of a considerable degree of artistic agency to the daguerreian subject, we also see a parallel with the reader’s significant role in realizing the ekphrastic portraits in Pierre. Both Southworth and Melville recognize that they are not producing works of art only for their own sakes but for sitters and readers who are themselves implicated in the literal work of art, yet who do not realize their agency. They have become blind to their own involvement, I contend, because of the encroachment of the increasingly influential scientific standard of mechanical objectivity into aesthetic discourse, which has rendered artists, sitters, and readers alike almost entirely passive and ceded their agency to technologies including daguerreotypy. So that these customers better understand their roles as co-creators and appreciate the works that result, Southworth and Melville seek to educate them in the rules of art. As we have seen, Pierre does so through the negative example of its protagonist and his refusal to be daguerreotyped, the narrator’s invocations of eighteenth-century art theory, and ekphrastic descriptions of its fictional portraits that guide readers’ imaginations while allowing their subjectivity some play. Southworth is more direct, giving readers specific suggestions for what they should and should not do in looking at daguerreotypes and in sitting for the camera. Despite these different tactics, the goal is the same: to regain some degree of control over one’s work as an artist by ceding some of this creative control to a powerful, yet sympathetic audience and to gain this sympathy by fostering a shared understanding of the subjective agency that is essential to the production and consumption of fine art. In the second essay of his Daily Evening Transcript series, Southworth addresses the ‘‘many of the multitude who have daguerreotypes [and] can at once, and at first sight, determine whether a picture is satisfactory.’’41 His

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purpose in this essay is to refine such immediate reactions, encouraged by other newspaper and magazine writers’ representations of daguerreotypy as mechanically objective likenesses, into more critical aesthetic evaluations. Before one can be considered a ‘‘competent judge’’ of daguerreotypy, Southworth argues, ‘‘one must of necessity be familiar with, and understand, to a certain extent, the ‘fine arts,’ of drawing, painting, and sculpture’’ (S., ‘‘Daguerreotype Likenesses: No. II’’). In Southworth’s view, the lack of competent judges of daguerreotypy reveals a more significant national deficiency: ‘‘In this country,’’ he writes, ‘‘a taste for the fine arts has been cultivated by comparatively a small number. . . . Even in the cities there are few familiar with the best paintings and statues, and not only are standard works on art not read, but their author’s names are scarcely known.’’ As Grant B. Romer notes, M. A. Root recommended the writings of the British Royal Academicians (Joshua Reynolds, James Barry, John Opie, and Fuseli) to ‘‘artistically minded photographers’’ and likely discussed their ‘‘theories with Southworth during their visits to each other’s studios.’’42 Southworth attributes the public’s unfamiliarity with such theorists and the fine arts to ‘‘want of opportunity and time, chiefly,’’ deficiencies that he sees the daguerreotype as helping to remedy. ‘‘A dozen years since,’’ he observes, ‘‘there were few who had likenesses of any description; now the daguerreotype has placed them within the reach of all.’’ In contrast to Pierre and Fuseli, Southworth considers the greater availability of portraiture as an opportunity to introduce more people to the ideals of art rather than as the death of these ideals. In this ‘‘new era,’’ Southworth observes, ‘‘a friend’s miniature, the first picture perhaps ever observed with interest, becomes the first lesson in art.’’ From there, ‘‘[g]alleries are visited, specimens are examined and studied, and additional lessons are learned.’’ Rather than democratizing art, the daguerreotype, as Southworth sees it, cultivates the masses in the ideals of fine art and artistry. The increasing demand for more than one daguerreotype of oneself also serves as evidence for Southworth of the public’s improving tastes—and, I would add, of the continuing tension between the rival ideals of ‘‘truth-tonature’’ and mechanical objectivity in scientific image making that influenced popular representations of daguerreotypy in print. ‘‘Those which pleased as curiosities at first,’’ he writes, ‘‘must be retaken because there have been improvements. The fact that these improvements are sought and demanded by the public is proof of progress in the cultivation of a taste for art.’’ Faults that once were accepted as intrinsic to the new medium during

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the stage of the public’s initial enchantment with it are now rejected as this aesthetic progress—and the idea of artistry over mechanical objectivity— spreads, Southworth claims: ‘‘Miserable caricatures, faces as flat as white paper, with eyes like gimlet-holes filled with putty, and hands resembling the paws of a seahorse, can no longer pass even in the country. Shadows as well as lights are required to represent forms—not in patches of black on white, but transparent, gradually softening and blending with lights in a warm, mellow tone, giving forms and features in proper proportions.’’ One of the studio’s portraits of a now unidentified woman seated in partial profile exemplifies the virtues that Southworth describes (Figure 11). The daguerreian artist’s attention to how the light falls on her face, and especially her silk skirt, gives the image significant dimension. The soft focus of the lens blurs the image’s lines and moderates its contrasts, as we see most clearly by looking at her necklace; the focus is soft enough to lessen the strong contrast between the white necklace and her dark dress but just sharp enough to make the necklace’s beads distinguishable as pearls. Her hands are perfectly proportioned but also slightly blurred to call more attention to the elaborate cuffs of her undoubtedly expensive dress. This is an image that requires a viewer who is as aesthetically sophisticated as its subject and its creator—precisely the kind of viewer, and potential customer, that Southworth seeks to cultivate with his essays. Southworth’s final essay assesses the daguerreotype’s progress ‘‘from the announcement of its discovery’’ to 1852, during which time it has ‘‘steadily increased in value, and its use [has been] extended to almost every habitable part of the world.’’43 In Southworth’s decidedly partial estimation, daguerreotypy’s ‘‘progress towards perfection has by far exceeded any other discovery ever made, in the same period of time,’’ such that it has ‘‘attained an importance which its discoverers, in their wildest visions of fancy, never dreamed, and which its earliest and most devoted artists never anticipated’’ (S., ‘‘Daguerreotype Likenesses: No. IV’’). Himself one of these artists, Southworth declares daguerreotypy to have ‘‘proved itself worthy of a place beside the most elaborate and richest works of art.’’ Lest he convince his readers that they have arrived at the medium’s culmination, Southworth is quick to add that ‘‘[t]here is yet ample scope for the exercises of the inventive powers, mechanical skill and artistic genius of its professors.’’ The scope for such invention, skill, and artistry is so ample, in fact, that he predicts that only ‘‘a very small number of the daguerreotypes now daily made will be deemed worthy of commendation or preservation.’’ His

Figure 11. Southworth & Hawes, unidentified woman, c. 1850. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

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prediction is based in large part on his own firm’s experiments with producing stereoscopic images—two daguerreotypes that were simultaneously exposed and viewed through an apparatus to create the effect of threedimensionality. Southworth also has in mind controversial experiments by Levi Hill, who claimed to have discovered a technique for capturing images in color.44 Such experiments promised to make the daguerreotype both more lifelike and more artistic by adding depth and color to the twodimensional, monochrome images. Yet Southworth’s prediction is also based on his sense that the vast majority of daguerreotypes that had been produced in America up to that time were not made according to any artistic principles. Like the painted portraits of the middle class that Fuseli had criticized, most daguerreian portraits were made for family members or loved ones who desired a mechanically accurate likeness more than an artistic rendering of the subject as an affective surrogate for the actual person or as a corrective for fallible memory. As it turns out, most daguerreian portraits that remain today were kept not necessarily because they were evaluated to be great works of art but because they were sentimentally treasured as lifelike images of people now passed—because their seeming mechanical objectivity allowed them to be endowed with subjective meaning. We have many of Southworth & Hawes’s portraits today for the same reason; the prominent families who were their customers were just as interested in obtaining and preserving images of their loved ones as the ordinary Americans whose relatives were imaged by mere daguerreian ‘‘operators.’’ The expense of a Southworth & Hawes portrait only added to their sentimental value. The typically larger size and substantially higher cost of the studio’s portraits also helped with their preservation, as they were less likely to be handled and more likely to be treated with the same care as similarly valuable objects.45 We are able to identify Southworth & Hawes’s portraits as an oeuvre today not because the studio was highly successful and produced many thousands of portraits from which hundreds have survived in private collections but because Southworth, Hawes, and their own families preserved them as evidence of the partners’ artistic achievement.46 This deliberate strategy for ensuring their own self-definition, -recognition, and -preservation as artists, even at the expense of greater financial success and popularity, resembles the motivations of Pierre. And as I have mentioned, both Pierre and the portraits of Southworth & Hawes seem to have found their

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ideal audiences in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This is no coincidence, I conclude. We have been prepared to recognize and appreciate these works not only by their artists and the works themselves but also by our critical training in schools of thought that value selfreferentiality and high degrees of self-consciousness and self-theorization in art and that treat the possibility of objectivity and the idea of truth skeptically. This is not to suggest that Pierre and Southworth & Hawes’s portraits are postmodern but rather to call attention to how our own aesthetics necessarily color our view of their aesthetics. While Hawthorne, Melville, Harrison, and Southworth & Hawes all insisted on the lasting value of art and artistry in the daguerreian age and defended the value of subjectivity against the rise of mechanical objectivity, some of their more explicitly politically minded contemporaries saw significant aesthetic and political opportunities in popular discussions of the medium’s representational objectivity. The next three chapters examine how this way of seeing daguerreotypy was put to practical use in advancing arguments against slavery and for African colonization and the personhood of people of African descent, as daguerreian objectivity becomes a black and white issue in the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Augustus Washington, Frederick Douglass, and J. T. Zealy.

Chapter 4

Slavery in Black and White Daguerreotypy and Uncle Tom’s Cabin

While Hawthorne and Melville were concerned about the artistic implications of the rise of mechanical objectivity and daguerreian aesthetics, Harriet Beecher Stowe and other writers interested in slavery recognized in popular discussions of objectivity and daguerreian accuracy both artistic and political opportunity. Given the high stakes of debates about race and slavery, the question of representational accuracy took on special urgency in science, politics, and art related to the issues.1 In this chapter and the two that follow, I examine how daguerreotypy was put to use by writers and daguerreotypists on both sides to mediate these debates. Although my focus is on those who borrowed on popular faith in the medium’s representational authority and its unique material characteristics to argue against racism and slavery, I also consider instances in which daguerreotypy was called on to advance and defend arguments in favor of racial difference and human bondage, in the interest of showing how the ‘‘socio-politics of new media cut both ways’’ (Liu 13). Attending to the complexities and contradictions of how daguerreotypy was used to negotiate race and slavery (and vice versa), I contend, results in a more detailed picture of the cultural work of antebellum America’s encounter with the new medium.2 This chapter focuses on Stowe’s attraction to the daguerreotype as the visual art form most peculiarly suited to her literary representation of the ‘‘peculiar institution’’ of slavery. I examine how daguerreotypy—presented as both a rhetorical and material figuration in Uncle Tom’s Cabin—works to mitigate possible accusations of the novel’s unreliability. As such, daguerreotypy also plays a crucial role in bringing the novel’s key characters, Tom and Eva, to life so that readers ‘‘feel right’’ toward them.3 It does

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so, I contend, by trading on written descriptions of the daguerreotype as both a mechanically objective form of representation and a sentimental fetish object and by evoking the optical and affective effects of the medium’s unique material characteristics. Recently scholars have paid increasing attention to Stowe’s novel in relation to visual culture, attending to the illustrations that accompanied the text when it was published as a novel, to unauthorized images of the novel’s characters and scenes that circulated throughout nineteenthcentury popular culture, and to Stowe’s attraction to the authority of pictures to ground her fictional treatment of race and slavery.4 While this chapter contributes to such scholarship by focusing on daguerreotypy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it also takes a wider view, examining the novel as a case study of how race and politics figure in a moment of new media encounter that coincided with a tumultuous reconfiguration of social relations. It considers as well the novel’s adoption and adaptation of daguerreian portraiture in the context of the gaining influence of mechanical objectivity as a representational ideal, examining how the narrative appeals to such objectivity to activate its characters’ and readers’ subjectivities. In doing so, one of the aims of this chapter is to incorporate sentimentality into conversations about the histories of media and objectivity in the nineteenth century. Types of Slaves: The Hero, the Runaway, and the Martyr Readers first encounter the title character of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the novel’s fourth chapter via a racially stylized ekphrastic image of a man whose imposing physical appearance would seem, at first glance, to belie his gentle character. Following a detailed description of the appearance and culinary talents of Tom’s wife, Chloe, and a visual survey of their cabin and its scant but tidy contents, the narrative’s gaze comes to focus on Tom. Since he ‘‘is to be the hero of our story,’’ the narrator declares, ‘‘we must daguerreotype [him] for our readers’’ (68). The daguerreotype-in-text reads: ‘‘He was a large, broad-chested, powerfully-made man, of a full glossy black, and a face whose truly African features were characterized by an expression of grave and steady good sense, united with much kindliness and benevolence. There was something about his whole air self-respecting and dignified, yet united with a confiding and humble simplicity’’ (68). As we saw in Chapter 1, newspaper and magazine writers encouraged people to see the daguerreotype not only as a mechanically objective form of representation but also

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as uncannily capable of seeing into and imaging the depths of its subjects’ characters. We have also seen how writers began figuratively using daguerreotype as a verb, borrowing from the representational authority and material characteristics of the medium to establish the fidelity of their written descriptions of places and people.5 That Stowe would introduce Tom in her novel specifically by daguerreotyping him is at once typical and exceptional. What sets this figurative daguerreotype apart from previous representations and rhetorical figurations of daguerreian portraiture is its subject—an enslaved man with the legal status of an object—and the consequences of associating Tom with daguerreotypy when readers first encounter him in the narrative. If we read the text closely, we notice that the narrative says it ‘‘must daguerreotype’’ Tom. Most obviously, this reads as Stowe acknowledging that the narrative has come to the appropriate point for introducing its protagonist. I also understand it to mean something more: that daguerreotypy is the only proper medium for bringing Tom into view for readers— that it must be a specifically daguerreian portrait. As Tom is the ‘‘hero’’ of this story of slavery, he is also the representative slave—the type. To present a daguerreotype of the type of the slave, then, is to provide readers with what would have been understood as a detailed, lifelike, and accurate representation of both the experience of slavery and the slave’s identity as a man, even if this representation was known to be a politically motivated fictional composite rather than a unique likeness of an actual person. By daguerreotyping him—even figuratively—the narrative borrows from other writers’ influential descriptions of the medium’s representational authority to authorize Tom as its hero. This figurative daguerreian portrait of Tom stands in marked contrast to more common visual renderings of slaves with which readers would have been immediately familiar. Here I have in mind what the narrative describes as ‘‘the image of a little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and bundle with ‘Ran away from the subscriber’ under it’’—the type of image that reduced runaway slaves to a literal piece of type (155–56). Significantly, this picture is evoked in chapter 9, ‘‘In Which It Appears That a Senator Is But a Man,’’ to relate how Senator Bird’s limited conceptions of a fugitive slave have permitted him to endorse the Fugitive Slave Act. As the narrative voice explains, the senator’s ‘‘idea of a fugitive was only an idea of the letters that spell the word,’’ or, ‘‘at the most’’ of the typographical image typically printed in advertisements for runaway slaves (155).

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Marcus Wood explains that the image of the runaway slave was ‘‘standardised to the extent that it was quite simply a typographic character’’ (87). Made infinitely reproducible and widely available through printers’ ‘‘stock books which came out in the big Northern cities, from the 1830s right up until the eve of abolition,’’ the dark figure with a stick and bundle was ubiquitous in northern and southern newspaper advertisements alike (87). In A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe herself catalogues and reprints examples of the runaway icon in announcements of rewards for escaped slaves, ‘‘cash for negroes,’’ and slaves available for sale (Figure 12). Constant exposure to such advertisements, she declares, ‘‘must tend, even in the bestconstituted minds, to produce a certain obtuseness with regard to the interests, sufferings and affections’’ of the slave.6 By abstracting individual living beings into a single, reiterated typographical icon, the visual form of these ads ensured that the runaway slave could be seen only as a thing. With the fictional example in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, we see that Senator Bird’s resulting inability to imagine an actual person in the act of attempting to escape slavery suggests a central contradiction, one that Wood describes as inherent in the standard advertising formula: ‘‘The texts of the runaway advertisements challenged the abstraction of slave into property because they foregrounded the personal peculiarities of slaves. Consequently the legal and economic anonymity of the slave needed to be reasserted. The icon of the runaway provided the solution’’ (87). In this formulation, these hybrid image-texts work against themselves, distinguishing and, at the same time, typing the person in flight. By calling up the conventions of runaway advertisements to illustrate the limitations of Senator Bird’s sympathy, the narrative explicitly posits both textual and visual types as potentially dangerous inhibitors of the genuine affective response that a firsthand encounter with a real person in need would evoke. As the narrative voice explains of the senator, ‘‘the magic of the real presence of distress,—the imploring human eye, the frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony,— these he had never tried’’ (UTC 156). As Bird is soon to discover, the ‘‘real presence’’ of Eliza Harris in need of shelter is the previously abstract representation of the fugitive slave made real at his doorstep. Accordingly, Bird is called to take action as a man moved to defy the Fugitive Slave Act that he supported as an Ohio state senator. His transformation foregrounds the explicitly political stakes of the relationship between representation and real people. As an elected representative of the people in his

Figure 12. Reprinted newspaper advertisements, from Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., 1853), 138. Courtesy of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library.

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district, the senator both represents an abstraction—the ‘‘people’’—and is himself abstracted as a disinterested agent of the people who, ideally, puts aside his personal beliefs and concerns to represent those of his constituents. Eliza’s arrival at his family’s home brings Bird back to the ‘‘real world’’ of his and his family’s (as well as Eliza’s) immediate interests, and he acts as an interested individual (as ‘‘[b]ut a man,’’ as the chapter title sardonically labels him) instead of as a senator. The narrative, though, backgrounds how these transitions from representation into something more ‘‘real’’ are transacted through representation itself—Eliza and Senator Bird, of course, remain fictional characters who can only be realized imaginatively. And as we have seen with Senator Bird and the runaway ads, the imaginations of some are more limited than others’. Given the narrative’s profound mistrust of both language and images that have been generalized into empty types and marked concern for the personal and political effects of such generalizations, its figurative use of daguerreian portraiture to introduce Tom becomes especially relevant to the issue of ‘‘real presence.’’ Descriptions of daguerreotypy that encouraged people to understand it as the least mediated form of representation available also fostered the idea that daguerreian portraiture provided almost unmediated access to its subjects. As we have seen, in numerous newspaper articles, magazine essays, poems, and short stories, daguerreotype portraits went from being described as lifelike to being represented as virtual proxies for their subjects with real effects on the people who interacted with them. While the most gothic of such tales take this idea to an imaginative extreme by depicting daguerreian portraits that come to life, the more sentimental stories instead feature lifelike portraits affecting their loved ones in ways that we can imagine happening in everyday life. We recall a particularly memorable example: the story of the blind mother whom we are told will cherish her sailor son’s daguerreotype while he is out to sea, for its powerful suggestion of just how convincing the first descriptions of daguerreian portraiture in popular periodicals must have been for this story to be credible—and moving (S. Roberts 211–12). ‘‘Though she cannot see,’’ the sailor tells the daguerreotypist, ‘‘she says that she can hold it in her hand and kiss it, and know that it is me’’ (212). In the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a narrative committed to approximating as fully as possible the ‘‘real presence’’ of a fictional slave for its readers, I want to suggest that simply substituting the word daguerreotype in place of describe to introduce Tom becomes a potent and timely narrative strategy

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for lessening the mediation that is inevitable in literary representation. Little more than a decade into daguerreotypy’s existence, the idea of an indexical relationship between the daguerreotype portrait and its subject would have been so firmly established in readers’ minds that deploying daguerreotype as a verb would conjure a subconscious, if not conscious, idea of Tom being a real person rather than a fictional character. Through this rhetorical sleight of hand, I contend, the narrative’s verbal description of Tom gains authenticity by appropriating arguments for the daguerreotype’s indexical status as a material vestige of an otherwise fictional character’s ‘‘actual’’ existence, thereby working against the possibility that Uncle Tom’s Cabin will be dismissed as mere fiction. By expressly, if figuratively, daguerreotyping Tom, the narrative brings its readers closer to Tom’s imagined body to ground their sympathetic response to him as an actual thinking and feeling individual.7 As we have seen, the narrative’s daguerreotype begins by focusing on the size and power of Tom’s physique and the appearance of his skin. As Marianne Noble explains of the narrative’s general strategy to inspire sympathy between its central characters and the reader, ‘‘[p]roximity to another person’s body enables an interpreter to evaluate that person holistically, as a complex nexus of physically grounded cognitive processes and emotional attachments.’’8 Yet this strategy carries a distinct risk: that readers— typically white, northern, middle class, and female—would be put off by even the mental image of a brawny black male slave’s body and, thus, fail to recognize his complexity. To deflect this possibility, the narrative does not linger long on his form and moves quickly to his face and to interpreting its features as a legible index of his moral and spiritual character. In doing so, the narrative—like popular descriptions of daguerreian portraiture in antebellum newspapers and magazines—collapses physiognomy and daguerreian representation to reassure readers that Tom is someone whom they need not fear and might even admire. Moreover, by locating his deep sensitivity in the very contours of his face, the narrative’s daguerreotype portrait of Tom also reunites affect and embodiment and, thus, contradicts the codes and practices of slavery that effected the ‘‘social death’’ of living chattel—the regulatory machinery that vigorously dissociated interiority from embodiment and emotions from such bodily activities as work and reproduction.9 In representing Tom as a fully integrated subject, his daguerreotype realizes him in readers’ minds as a man who could never be mistaken for a thing.10

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But what of the ‘‘thingness’’ of the daguerreotype—its materiality as an object that holds an image—that is necessarily missing from this figurative daguerreian portrait? As I have emphasized in the previous chapters, daguerreotypy differs from all other forms of photography in that it not only records the subject before the camera’s lens but also reflects the viewer’s image on its mirror-like surface. With subtle alterations in the relative angles between the daguerreotype, its viewer, and a light source, the image suddenly reverses from positive to negative or seems to disappear entirely, leaving only the mirrored surface returning the viewer’s gaze. In an affective approximation of these optical effects of an actual daguerreotype, then, the narrative’s figurative daguerreian portrait reflects back to the reader an image of Tom’s moral character that, ideally, looks much like her (or his) own—despite the obvious contrast of their physical appearances. Yet this reflection is, like the image of Tom, also a rhetorical effect—an image of the reader as she or he ideally should feel, rather than as she or he actually is. Responsiveness to the kind and gentle nature of this fictional slave, which even anti-slavery readers might have difficulty imagining beneath his dark, brawny exterior, thus is facilitated not only by the daguerreotype’s purported ability to image both the surfaces and depths of character but also by its material effect of reflecting its viewer’s image within that of its subject. Throughout the narrative, the reader is called upon to know the emotions of slaves by reflecting on her or his own experiences of the loss of a child, struggles with faith and doubt, and dilemmas of feeling and action.11 In this fictional photographic portrait the narrative invites its readers to recognize Tom by imaginatively seeing her or his own ideal image reflected from the page. While both images exist only in the imaginary, I argue that their association with daguerreotypy confers upon them a reality effect that is vital to the narrative’s political aims. I see Stowe’s attraction to daguerreotypy as the most realistic of representational media as directly related to her belief in the affective and political potential of the ‘‘real presence of distress.’’ If her novel could bring Tom to life through some representational means in the imagination of her readers, then political agitation on his and other slaves’ behalf would surely follow.12 In an 1852 review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Frederick Douglass emphasizes the narrative’s strategy for representing Tom as a form of portraiture and predicts its success in moving readers to action. The ‘‘touching portraiture she has given us of ‘poor Uncle Tom,’ ’’ the review states, ‘‘will, of itself, enlist the kindly sympathies, of numbers, in behalf of the oppressed

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African race, and will raise up a host of enemies against the fearful system of slavery.’’13 Given the affective power of daguerreotypy’s relationship with its subjects, a daguerreian portrait would have been the most touching form of portraiture available. But because neither printing nor photographic technology of the time could accommodate the reproduction of an actual daguerreotype in the text and, more important, because no daguerreotype of a fictional character could exist, Tom’s image—derived from the narrative’s approximation of a daguerreian portrait—inevitably becomes as multiple and various as the imaginations of the novel’s readers. Once illustrations were introduced into the text—when John P. Jewett published it as a two-volume novel in 1852 as its serial publication in the National Era was concluding—readers would have encountered the first image of Tom twenty pages after meeting him via the figurative daguerreotype and, thus, well after they had formed a mental image of him.14 This narrative strategy of engaging the reader through a kind of ekphrastic portraiture resembles that of Melville’s Pierre, yet it is deployed in Uncle Tom’s Cabin with specific political ends. Ultimately, Stowe had to trust her readers to envision Tom in the most favorable light possible to gain their individual sympathies. I want to suggest that we see the fruits of this strategy in the countless stories of ‘‘Tom’’ sightings that followed the novel’s publication. As Stowe explains in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: ‘‘The character of Uncle Tom has been objected to as improbable; and yet the writer has received more confirmations of that character, and from a greater variety of sources, than of any other in the book. . . . All the histories of this kind which have thus been related to her would of themselves, if collected, make a small volume’’ (23).15 Proslavery critics of the novel also accepted its claims of Tom’s reality in readings that alternately pointed to him as an example of the positive influence of slavery on the Negro or of the poverty that awaited freed slaves in the North. Reviewing Stowe’s Key in the July 1853 Southern Quarterly Review, William Gilmore Simms declared, ‘‘The North has no such characters. We shall not deny Uncle Tom. . . . We have many Uncle Toms.’’16 Tom’s numerous incarnations in folk songs and minstrel shows popular through the early twentieth century are further evidence of the lasting presence of this fictional character in the American imaginary—a presence that, I argue, can be correlated with Tom’s specifically and powerfully daguerreian introduction. Attempting to account for the wild success of Stowe’s novel shortly after its publication, an anonymous reviewer in the January 1853 Putnam’s

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Monthly offered an alternate ‘‘key’’ to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, declaring, ‘‘[t]his is the secret of the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; it is a live book, and it talks to readers as if it were alive. It first awakens their attention, arrests their thoughts, touches their sympathies, rouses their curiosity, and creates such an interest in the story it is telling, that they cannot let it drop until the whole story is told.’’17 This assessment credits the narrative with achieving the ‘‘real presence’’ that Stowe saw as so vital to inspiring both sympathy and indignation in her readers. In asserting that the book ‘‘talks to readers as if it were alive,’’ this response likely has in mind the frequent direct addresses to the reader made by the narrative voice. To this claim I would add that the narrative’s daguerreian description of Tom pictures him as if he were alive. This textual approximation of the likeness of a ‘‘live’’ man contributes significantly to readers’ being so awakened, arrested, touched, and interested in Tom’s story that they responded to his death with real tears, as if mourning the loss of a friend or loved one.18 By exploiting the daguerreotype as a narrative technique both for validating the novel’s representation of slavery and for developing this powerful affective attachment, Stowe creates a realistic sentimental portrait of a ‘‘lived’’ experience of slavery that gives the novel its political force. Yet if Tom lives, he is also mortal. As we have seen, the daguerreian portrait was popularly celebrated as a means of preserving a detailed image of its subject’s appearance at a certain moment in time. Implicit in all portraiture is a claim of its permanence over an always aging and mortal body—a claim heightened by the daguerreotype’s seeming likeness to life (and dramatized, as we have seen, in The House of the Seven Gables, Pierre, and popular fiction). With this in mind, the descriptive daguerreotype with which the narrative introduces Tom also can be understood to function as a proleptic memorial to the inevitable end that he must meet in order to realize the affective and political potential of his role as a martyr. Famously, Stowe claimed that Uncle Tom’s Cabin began in her imagination with a vision of Tom’s death.19 If taken at its word, then, Stowe’s first narrative description of Tom imaginatively contains both his birth in the reader’s mind and his imminent death in the writer’s. In this reading, Tom’s daguerreotype and typological identity as a Christ figure are consolidated in a rhetorical device that attempts to suppress the mediating operations of narrative by using language, paradoxically, to create a more proximate, vivid, and, thus, sympathetic image of its characters. Through a complex set of operations, the narrative must bring Tom to life in order to gain

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readers’ sympathies while fulfilling his mortality by making him a martyr to a system that must be overthrown. The textual daguerreotype of Tom, I argue, furthers both narrative requirements by sustaining this tension in the necessarily imagined picture it conjures for readers. The effect of this daguerreotype-in-words as a lifelike and sympathyinspiring memento mori anticipates the effect of another daguerreotype that Stowe incorporates into the story of the St. Clare family—an equally fictional image that captures the likeness of Eva and her father shortly before their respective deaths. This second introduction of daguerreotypy into the narrative—this time as a narrative prop rather than a rhetorical technique—vividly figures the degenerative and ultimately destructive effects of slavery on a southern household. Portrait of a Family In The Camera and the Pencil, M. A. Root’s 1864 history of photography, Root lists several artistic, practical, and sentimental uses of photography in establishing it as one of the most important inventions of the century. The exigencies of life, in most cases, necessitate the dispersion of relatives, born and reared under the same roof, towards various points of the compass, and often to remote distances, and by this means the primal household affection almost inevitably becomes impaired, and is frequently transformed into comparative indifference, if not absolute coldness. How great are the loss and injury thus inflicted on those concerned, it were impossible to measure. . . . And the photographs of parents, brothers, and sisters, now within the universal reach, constitute the most effectual means of keeping freshly alive the memories of the dear absentees, long associated with us round the same fireside, and of those young days, when the world before us, under the golden rays of imagination and hope, seemed to us one vast realm of brightness and beauty and gladness. (413–14) Here Root proposes the benefits of one technological advance to counter the negative effects of another. As train travel made a growing distance between home and work not only possible but often necessary in the midnineteenth century, the ‘‘household affection’’ among tightly knit family

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members that was once ensured by their physical proximity was threatened: hundreds (if not thousands) of miles could come between husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister. To stand in for these absent family members, Root proffers the photographic portrait as a means of ‘‘keeping freshly alive’’ their memories in the minds of those left at home. Like Stowe, Root emphasizes the fundamental importance of physical presence to proper sentiment, yet he acknowledges that material exigencies may make this relationship difficult or impossible. He also grounds proper sentiment—similar to the idea of ‘‘right’’ feeling with which Uncle Tom’s Cabin concludes—in familial affection. And like Stowe, he finds a representational surrogate for ‘‘real presence’’ in the photographic portrait. As a professional photographer who began as a daguerreotypist, Root recognizes the vast market for these lifelike images and, accordingly, is interested in promoting their effectiveness as a sort of affective prosthesis for dismembered American families. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe presents her readers with just such a customer in Augustine St. Clare, who sits with his daughter, Eva, in a New York studio for a daguerreotype that he will present to his wife, Marie, at home in New Orleans.20 In chapter 15, ‘‘Of Tom’s New Master, and Various Other Matters,’’ among the ‘‘other matters’’ described are the master’s wife and the unstable dynamics of the St. Clare household that result from her familial inadequacy and, by extension, from the presence of slavery in this home. An unrelentingly petty woman who manipulates her family and servants to center herself in the household’s attentions, Marie St. Clare refuses her affective and managerial responsibilities as a mother and wife; instead, she redirects all domestic affairs and relations to gratify her physical and emotional needs. The narrative voice attributes Marie’s condition to a ‘‘life of constant inaction, bodily and mental,’’ that in the ‘‘course of a few years changed the blooming young belle into a yellow faded, sickly woman, whose time was divided among a variety of fanciful diseases, and who considered herself, in every sense, the most ill-used and suffering person in existence’’ (243). Although slavery, not travel, is responsible in this situation for impairing the St. Clares’ ‘‘household affection’’ and for transforming Marie into ‘‘comparative indifference, if not absolute coldness’’ (to return to Root’s words), Marie exploits the opportunity of her husband and daughter’s extended absence to elicit their sympathy for their supposed neglect. Upon their return, Augustine anticipates Marie’s discontent by presenting the gift

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of Tom as her new coachman, declaring, ‘‘Now, don’t say I never think about you when I’m gone’’ (257–58). A pouting Marie complains the two had extended their trip ‘‘a fortnight beyond the time’’ and that the letters she received during their absence were ‘‘short’’ and ‘‘cold’’ (258). Refusing Augustine’s attempts to explain the reasons for both, Marie bemoans, ‘‘That’s just the way . . . always something to make your journeys long, and letters short’’ (258). In conciliation, Augustine offers Marie a second remarkable gift: the daguerreotype portrait of himself and Eva as a surrogate for their presence in the household. Here again, the narrative offers both living presence and photographic image as supplements for the written word that is charged with inadequate feeling by an unreliable reader. Marie finds fault with both gifts, claiming that Tom will prove as intemperate as her previous drivers and that she cannot bear to look at the daguerreotype with her ‘‘sick-head-ache.’’ For readers, the image clearly shows the deformation of familial affection in a slave-owning household—the ‘‘loss and injury,’’ to borrow Root’s phrase, that chattel slavery ‘‘inflict[s] on those concerned.’’21 By presenting Marie’s and Augustine’s different reactions to the portrait, this scene of the failed emotional transaction between husband and wife captures the character, philosophy, and motivations of each with neardaguerreian fidelity. Augustine draws the ‘‘elegant velvet case out of his pocket’’ and opens it for Marie: It was a daguerreotype, clear and soft as an engraving, representing Eva and her father sitting hand in hand. Marie looked at it with a dissatisfied air. ‘‘What made you sit in such an awkward position?’’ she said. ‘‘Well, the position may be a matter of opinion; but what do you think of the likeness?’’ ‘‘If you don’t think anything of my opinion in one case, I suppose you wouldn’t in another,’’ said the lady, shutting the daguerreotype. ‘‘Hang the woman!’’ said St. Clare, mentally; but aloud he added, ‘‘Come, now, Marie, what do you think of the likeness? Don’t be nonsensical, now.’’ ‘‘It’s very inconsiderate of you, St. Clare,’’ said the lady, ‘‘to insist on my talking and looking at things. You know I’ve been lying all

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day with the sick-head-ache; and there’s been such a tumult made ever since you came, I’m half dead.’’ (258) Marie’s immediate reaction to the ‘‘awkward position’’ in which Augustine has been captured reveals the limitations of her experience beyond the confines of her sick room. By 1852, an American woman in Marie St. Clare’s social position most likely would have been imaged in a daguerreian portrait and almost certainly would have read about the experience of sitting for one in stories like those surveyed in this book’s first chapter. A common complaint was that the sitter needed to hold him- or herself in a difficult and often uncomfortable position during the exposure time to ensure the clarity of the result.22 Sitters who moved would produce a blurred or partial image; to counter this effect, as I have mentioned, iron headrests were introduced to aid subjects in holding their heads immobile.23 With this solution, professional daguerreotypists transferred the shortcomings of their representational medium to the human body itself, developing and applying an apparatus to fix the body after reaching the technological limits of chemical and optical science.24 While these braces were placed so as to be invisible in the final image, their presence in the daguerreian studio had become a commonplace in the ritual of having one’s picture taken. Marie’s apparent ignorance of this standard practice exposes the extent of her selfimposed confinement. Marie’s focus on the body in the portrait also indicates the primacy of physicality as the organizing principle of her world. All of Marie’s actions, interests, and concerns are determined by how she feels. This type of feeling, though, directly contrasts with the narrative’s ideal that every reader must ‘‘feel right’’; because Marie is capable of feeling only at the level of her own body, she becomes incapable of understanding how others feel either emotionally or physically. As a result, whether her ‘‘sick-head-aches’’ and other physical ailments are actual or imagined makes no difference to either Marie’s or her family’s and servants’ experiences of her condition. Her putatively pain-wracked body and its physical and emotional needs are at the center of the household. All attention must first be devoted to comforting a body and mind that refuse comfort; all others’ needs must be met with whatever time and resources remain. Accordingly, Marie’s satisfaction with Augustine’s body and its appearance in the daguerreotype portrait is necessarily impossible since she is continually dissatisfied with her own

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experience of embodiment, existing in the ‘‘awkward position’’ of seemingly permanent infirmity. While it is her own body that precludes the possibility of her presence to complete the family portrait, Marie effectively transfers her anxieties about the resulting awkwardness of her absence from the image onto her husband’s body in withholding any judgment as to its likeness. Because of her physical and mental condition, Marie exists in the ‘‘awkward position’’ of titular mother and wife in the St. Clare family. Again, it is indeterminate whether Marie imagines or actually suffers a physical disability that precludes her from performing the domestic duties and experiencing the emotional connection to her family that the narrative presents as typical; in either case, the household employs slaves (and St. Clare’s cousin Ophelia from Vermont) to take the place of its ‘‘proper’’ female head. Marie’s failure to fill the positions of wife and mother is represented by her significant absence from the daguerreian family portrait of the St. Clares. In a narrative replete with ‘‘living’’ examples of the ideal woman, Marie stands in stark contrast: she is pictured not in a negative rendering but more condemningly by negative space in the field of representation. While traditional portraits of the family would lead the viewer to expect to see a father, mother, and child, or at least a mother and child, Stowe’s daguerreotype of the St. Clare family conspicuously depicts maternal lack. By including this daguerreian portrait among the visual props in the background of her narrative, Stowe brings to view the damage that slavery does not only to families who are enslaved but also to those that hold slaves.25 Marie’s absence from the family portrait is only heightened as she insistently withholds her aesthetic judgment. Yet her stubborn refusal to assess the likeness is, it seems, an implicit condemnation of the portrait precisely on the grounds of the portrait’s status as an all-too-faithful likeness, imaging the parent-child bond of which she is no longer a part by having delegated her maternal duties to a slave. While a bereft mother, according to Root’s scenario, would gratefully accept the gift as an affective surrogate for her husband and daughter’s presence, Marie literally closes the daguerreotype, enacting her separation from the loving family relationship that the portrait represents. As he insists on Marie’s assessment of the ‘‘likeness’’ of the portrait, Augustine’s concern resonates with how the issue of fidelity has defined both his past experiences and his present circumstances. Earlier in the same chapter, the reader is told the story of Augustine’s youthful engagement to

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a ‘‘high-minded and beautiful woman’’ from ‘‘one of the northern states’’ that abruptly ended with the interference of the woman’s guardians who wanted her to marry their own son. Believing himself betrayed by his fiance´e rather than by her family, Augustine ‘‘threw himself at once into a whirl of fashionable society, and in a fortnight from the time of the fatal letter was the accepted lover of the reigning belle of the season.’’ As the narrative voice caustically remarks, Augustine thus found himself the ‘‘husband of a fine figure, a pair of bright dark eyes, and a hundred thousand dollars; and, of course, everybody thought him a happy fellow’’ (240). Yet after Augustine receives the belated letter of explanation from his former fiance´e and true love, this apparent happiness actually masks his despair at discovering the difference between what the narrative significantly terms as ‘‘romance’’ and the ‘‘real.’’ Following Augustine’s reply to the northern woman that explains his marriage and melodramatically declares ‘‘all is over,’’ the narrative announces, ‘‘And thus ended the whole romance and ideal of life for Augustine St. Clare. But the real remained,—the real, like the flat, bare, oozy tidemud, when the blue sparkling wave, with all its company of gliding boats and white-winged ships, its music of oars and chiming waters, has gone down, and there it lies, flat, slimy, bare,—exceedingly real’’ (241, original emphasis).26 In this particular dramatization of the intersection of literary and sentimental romance, and of the difference between both forms of romance and reality, the narrative initially figures Augustine as the hero of a romantic novel that has abruptly switched genres, precipitating his descent into a flat, slimy, and bare realism. Yet as the narrative voice interrupts to observe, this fall is not fatal, since ‘‘in a novel, people’s hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it,’’ but in ‘‘real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us’’ (241). In a rhetorical move similar to one of Hawthorne’s in ‘‘The Custom-House,’’ Stowe distinguishes not only between literary romance and reality but also between her own novel and ‘‘real life,’’ as the narrative explicitly positions Augustine alongside the reader as an actual person rather than a fictional character. Given the unromantic circumstances of his marriage to a woman who is anything but the ideal wife or mother, Augustine’s situation is thus more representative of the flat, bare, and muddy experiences of ‘‘real life’’ than of the clear, sparking, idealized life that is possible only in a novel. The narrative explicitly foregrounds the essential generic hybridity of lived existence when compared to literary representations of ‘‘real life.’’ Since any

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one life inevitably will contain elements of the romantic, the sentimental, and harsh reality, fiction that attempts to represent life ‘‘as it is’’ must be written in a manner that includes elements of each literary genre. Accordingly, the narrative that results not only achieves a truer and, thus, more compelling representation of ‘‘real life’’ but also exposes all other novels that conform strictly to any one set of generic standards as necessarily and even dangerously misrepresentational. Having been deceived by the appearances of Marie before their marriage and more broadly by the prospects of marital life as represented in romantic novels, Augustine’s concern for the realism of the daguerreotype portrait can be understood to indicate the profound mistrust of representation that has resulted from his initiation into ‘‘real life.’’ As the narrative explains of Augustine’s youth, ‘‘his mind showed a preference always for the ideal and the aesthetic’’ (239). Yet the disillusioned adult Augustine, unhappily married and passively managing a slaveholding estate, fixates on the quality of the likeness that the daguerreotype images on its surface to make an aesthetic evaluation based on the representational fidelity rather than the affective potential of the portrait. Just as the earlier narrative daguerreotype of Tom faithfully represents his exterior appearance as a sign of his interior character, the daguerreotype of Augustine and Eva must be an unmistakable image of their loving relationship beneath the visual convention of the family portrait. Augustine’s concern for the daguerreotype’s likeness is also rooted in another aspect of the innocence of his youth. Contrasting Marie’s selfinterest with the ‘‘uncommon elevation and purity of character’’ of Augustine’s mother, the narrative explains that Augustine gave his newborn daughter ‘‘his mother’s name [Evangeline], fondly fancying that she would prove a reproduction of her image’’ and not of her mother’s (243). Though Marie is the namesake of Mary, the narrative insists on her distance from this maternal ideal in contrast to Augustine’s mother. While Marie provides the physical labor necessary for reproduction, the ‘‘ordinary weakness which attended the period of maternity’’ seems to have become for her a permanent physical disability in a household in which a woman’s work is done by slaves. Consequently, Augustine’s mother serves as the feminine ideal, or original image, that Eva ideally reproduces. Marie, unable to see past the pains of her labors, delegates the postpartum work—in this case, the literal slave labor—of caring for Eva to Mammy and leaves Eva’s spiritual development to heredity. Eva proves to be an

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‘‘exceedingly delicate’’ reproduction, however, and Augustine begins to fear that ‘‘her health and life might yet fall a sacrifice to her mother’s inefficiency,’’ regretting his own poor judgment in selecting Marie as copyist of his mother’s image (243–44). His insistence on the success of the daguerreian reproduction thus can be read as a sign of sensitivity to reproductive failure. While the daguerreotype was itself an ‘‘exceedingly delicate’’ medium of reproduction, requiring both protective casing to prevent damage to its fragile surface and appropriate lighting to bring forth the image on its mirror, it provided the most permanent means available for preserving a lifelike image of the human figure. By fixing an image of Eva and himself together in a daguerreotype, Augustine realizes a lasting reproduction of his physically vulnerable daughter, who is herself both a surrogate for the wife who has abdicated her place as head of the household and a reproduction of the mother he has already lost.27 By directly presenting Eva as a reembodiment of Augustine’s mother and again centralizing the idealized mother-figure in the novel, the narrative implicitly asks its reader to understand this daguerreotype as a figurative mother-and-child portrait. In this reading, Eva would stand as the absent mother-figure and Augustine the child in an imaginative reversal of their visible relationship in the portrait. Thus, an earthly ‘‘reunion’’ between Augustine and his mother is made possible not only through Eva as a living reproduction of this feminine ideal but also through the art historical tradition in which this daguerreian portrait can be located.28 Moreover, this figurative reunion anticipates Augustine’s ultimate return to his mother with his death at the end of chapter 28, titled ‘‘Reunion,’’ where, eyes lit with ‘‘joy and recognition,’’ he declares that his mind is ‘‘coming home, at last!’’ and exclaims ‘‘Mother!’’ (456). Though we can imaginatively see Augustine as the child in this image, the family picture of the St. Clare household created by the narrative figures him in the ordinarily feminine roles that have been vacated by Marie. Not surprisingly, this makeshift domestic arrangement falls far short of the ideal home that is represented elsewhere in the narrative. While some critics have suggested that the gender roles dictated by conventional sentimentalism necessarily preclude the narrative possibility of a male-headed household, I would observe that Augustine’s shortcomings in fulfilling these domestic responsibilities can no more be attributed to gender alone than can Marie’s outright failure.29 Just as Marie has consciously chosen personal selfishness over maternal and spousal selflessness, Augustine willfully prefers leisurely

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inattention to vigilant participation in the details of household management. In his parental affection for Eva, though, Augustine achieves an emotional connection to his daughter that most nearly realizes the parent-child relationship that the narrative repeatedly idealizes.30 Though Marie merely acknowledges rather than reciprocates Eva’s affection, she is nonetheless jealous of the relationship between Eva and her father. As the narrator explains of Marie’s resentful reaction to the newborn, ‘‘The thing had been remarked with petulant jealousy by [Marie], and she regarded her husband’s absorbing devotion to the child with suspicion and dislike; all that was given to her seemed so much taken from herself’’ (243). The opposite reactions of Marie and Mammy to Eva’s return home further emphasize the contrast between Marie and the ideal mother: whereas Marie pushes Eva away after she ‘‘languidly’’ kisses her, again claiming exemption from her maternal role due to ‘‘sick-head-ache,’’ Mammy warmly receives Eva into her arms with laughter and tears. As the narrator pointedly remarks, ‘‘This woman did not tell her that she made her head ache’’ (255). But despite Augustine, Mammy, and even Tom acting as affective surrogates for the absent Marie, her maternal role is not entirely filled. Accordingly, Augustine introduces his cousin Ophelia into the household, with the hope that Eva’s life can be saved from becoming ‘‘a sacrifice to her mother’s inefficiency’’ and his own domestic shortcomings by Ophelia’s exacting efficiency (244). Ultimately the New Englander’s iron-fisted rule over the household proves as unsuitable as Marie’s indifference, leaving the delicate Eva vulnerable to either extreme. Here the narrative implicitly invites its reader—who earlier is directly addressed as ‘‘mother’’—to serve as the ideal foster mother for Eva and thus live the social agenda that the novel proposes.31 The daguerreian metaphor provides still another opportunity for the reader to imagine this relation: again, we remember that the reflective quality of the daguerreian medium shows the viewer’s face on the surface of the image. Just as the imagined mirror-like surface of the narrative’s previous daguerreotype would allow the reader to see herself with Tom’s image to effect their striking (if ideal) resemblance, this fictional daguerreotype places its ideal mother-reader in the picture to supply Marie’s absence and thus restore the ideal family unit—if only in the reader’s imagination. Like the evanescent figures on a daguerreian plate that disappear when viewed at the wrong angle, this image of the picture-perfect family proves fleeting. When Marie effectively disowns the daguerreotype of her husband

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and daughter, she reasserts her distance from all familial responsibilities and once again leaves Augustine and Eva to fend for themselves. While the narrative makes apparent that Augustine’s concern for Eva’s fragile physical condition far exceeds Marie’s, it leaves unclear whether his ultimate inadequacy in caring for Eva is inevitable because he is her father (and not a mother) or because he is accustomed to delegating work as a slave master rather than taking direct action. In several scenes in which Augustine, Marie, and Ophelia debate the topics of slavery and religion, the narrative repeatedly emphasizes Augustine’s preference for talk over action. This moral and spiritual lassitude that dominates Augustine’s character is also figured by his daguerreian portrait—if not through his physical appearance in the image then through the characteristic stillness of the daguerreian image. While Augustine does not see Marie’s criticism of his ‘‘awkward position’’ in the image as an evaluation of its likeness, I would argue that his noticeable, if not exaggerated, stillness is in fact a perfect likeness of his character. Given the daguerreotype’s purported fidelity to both surfaces and depths, readers can understand the uncomfortable position of Augustine’s body, held stiff and still against the daguerreotypist’s braces, as an accurate reflection of an internal moral and spiritual discomfort at being the head of a slave-owning household that belies the affected ease of his habitual comportment. In both the textualized daguerreotype and the narrative, Augustine’s awkwardness directly results from his physical inaction. In the daguerreotype, his body is held immobile to fix a clear image; in his life as a slaveholder, fixed in the tension between feeling right and doing wrong, empty talk is the only possible and always insufficient action. Such physical immobility, as Karen Sa´nchez-Eppler has observed, is akin to death, as the photographic image ‘‘not only imitates death,’’ in removing the body from the passage of time, ‘‘but requires a deathlike stillness to make that replication possible’’ (69). As luck—or rather the narrative—would have it for Augustine, his eventual attempt to cast off this deathlike stillness in favor of active intervention directly results in his death. Attempting to separate two ‘‘gentlemen’’ who have begun a barroom fight in the cafe´ where he has stopped to read the evening newspaper, Augustine ‘‘receive[s] a fatal stab in the side with a bowie-knife’’ that he is trying ‘‘to wrest from one of them’’ (UTC 454). Like the earlier daguerreotype of Tom, the fictional daguerreian portrait of Augustine can be read as a proleptic memento mori. And once more, death and its foreshadowing in a daguerreotype serve as the proof of

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this fictional character’s life. A self-made martyr to the moral and spiritual dilemma of living in a slaveholding society, Augustine finds salvation only in reunion with the second coming of his mother in his own personal millennium. Yet those left living under slavery in the St. Clare household are not assured the emancipation that Augustine had intended to provide them before his death; instead, ‘‘The Unprotected,’’ as Stowe names them in her title for chapter 29, are sent to the auction house by Marie to await their fates in the market. Although the narrative offers little description of Eva’s appearance in the father-daughter daguerreotype and excludes her from the conversation that it inspires, her mere presence in the image draws attention to important aspects of her character and role. The lifelike image endows Eva with a semblance of lasting vitality that the ethereality of her ‘‘real presence’’ cannot ensure for those around her. Her father’s insistence on the realism of the likeness can be read, then, as an effect of his desire to achieve a lasting image of this ideal little girl whose precarious health threatens to prove her as mortal as her namesake. Eva’s introduction earlier provides a simultaneous description and interpretation of her appearance, much as if the narrative voice were seeing Eva in the portrait rather than through Tom’s eyes as he observes what seems to be an angelic vision. As the narrative explains, Eva’s ideal image is initially difficult to capture, as she ‘‘can no more be contained in one place than a sunbeam or a summer breeze’’— but once a glimpse of her has been had, she is not ‘‘easily forgotten’’ (230). In this scene, as in her daguerreian portrait, a sunbeam both contains and produces an image of Eva that will endure long after her earthly presence has disappeared. The narrative itself also succeeds in fixing a picture of this ideal child, offering the following portrait for the reader: ‘‘Her form was the perfection of childish beauty, without its usual chubbiness and squareness of outline. There was about it an undulating and ae¨rial grace, such as one might dream of for some mythic and allegorical being. Her face was remarkable less for its perfect beauty of feature than for a singular and dreamy earnestness of expression, which made the ideal start when they looked at her, and by which the dullest and most literal were impressed, without exactly knowing why’’ (230). This passage presents Eva as the aesthetically and formally perfect child only to heighten her perfection by endowing her with a preternatural grace and earnestness that are noticeable to all. But before Eva becomes too far removed from reality, the narrative is careful to qualify the effects

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of this physical perfection on the child’s character: ‘‘the little one was not what you would have called either a grave child or a sad one. On the contrary, an airy and innocent playfulness seemed to flicker like the shadow of summer leaves over her childish face, and around her buoyant figure’’ (230). Resisting a representation of Eva that renders her a static ideal, the narrative places her in constant motion and again images this motion in terms of light and the ever-changing shadows it casts. Such a comparison of Eva’s movements to flickering light especially resonates with the popular descriptions that we have read of the daguerreian image and its appearance and disappearance with changes in light or in the viewer’s perspective.32 The narrative’s similar oscillation between fixing an image of Eva for the reader and ensuring her evanescence suggests a central contradiction in the experience of viewing—and preserving—a daguerreotype portrait. Though the daguerreotype was supposed to promise an authentic and lasting image of the human figure, its mirror-like silver plate proved both fragile and difficult to view. Necessarily enclosed behind glass within book-like leather, brass, and velvet cases, these portraits became precious objects for intimate study. And as I have described, each viewing experience was a struggle to catch a glimpse of the flickering image in just the right light. Similarly, in depicting Eva as simultaneously a real breathing and moving child and an evanescent idea, this passage suggests an inherent tension in Eva’s character and her function in the narrative: Eva’s physical attributes, actions, and beliefs all etherealize her as the ideal Christian guided by the pure faith of a child and as a martyr to the fallen world’s sin of slavery. Yet to invite readers’ sympathy, she must also appear in a realistic light, as a living child whose early death would evoke the affective response of tragedy. This realism, tinged with a portentous pathos, was available to Stowe in previous writers’ representations of daguerreian portraiture and in its popular function as a means of assuring parents that their vulnerable children would survive the vicissitudes of youthful health, if only photographically.33 Again, although Eva’s appearance in the fictional father-daughter daguerreian portrait goes undetailed, the mere suggestion of her presence in the daguerreotype endows this most unreal of the narrative’s characters with an insistent reality. In fact, paradoxically, the lack of physical detail supports the effect. Even more than in the case of the descriptive daguerreotype of Tom, Eva’s ‘‘real presence’’ is essential to producing the material, if still fictional, object that her parents exchange. As a physical trace of one

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moment in Eva’s fleeting existence, her daguerreian portrait substantiates the sunbeam-like girl in an almost living image that ‘‘once seen’’ will not be ‘‘easily forgotten’’ by sympathetic readers (230). Given that the narrative already has provided a highly idealized portrait of Eva with her initial introduction to Tom and the rest of her shipboard audience, any visual detail would risk contradicting the realistic image that this narrative prop seeks to call up in the reader’s imagination.34 For the rhetorical purposes of the novel, it matters not as much that the daguerreotype looks like Eva but that it exists because of her, as a material vestige of her earthly existence. With Eva’s eventual death, her daguerreian image, along with all other material traces of her existence, becomes a sort of sacred relic. Through such objects, the ‘‘dead Eva becomes available as a site around which Stowe grafts a community of those touched by her ‘remembrances,’ ’’ as Mary Louise Kete has observed.35 Though the daguerreotype portrait of Eva and her father does not reappear in the narrative, the reader can imagine it serving a consolatory function similar to that of the preserved clothes and toys of the Birds’ departed Henry. Even so, Augustine St. Clare reacts to his daughter’s death with a profoundly interior grief that Marie is able to understand only as unfeeling indifference; he seeks solace not in tangible reminders of Eva but in the ‘‘real presence’’ of the other living being who most nearly approximates her in spirit and character. Significantly, Augustine finds the most adequate surrogate for his small, fair, angelic daughter in the person of Tom—her inverted physical image yet her nearest spiritual likeness: ‘‘In all the wide world, there was nothing that seemed to remind [Augustine] so much of Eva; and he would insist on keeping [Tom] constantly about him’’ (440). In this spiritual co-identification of Eva and Tom, consolidated by their self-sacrifices for faith and principle against the evils of slavery, both the little white heiress to a slaveholding estate and the muscular black slave shed their corporeal manifestations to become typologically consolidated as Christ figures. In moving from the daguerreotype to biblical typology to image Eva and Tom in the mind’s eye of the reader, the narrative endows its heroine and hero both with a lifelikeness that is compelling enough to evoke readers’ sympathy and with a spiritual perfection that readers could aspire to imitate. In contrast to the similar dynamic of distinction and abstraction that we saw in runaway slave advertisements that dangerously inhibit readers’ sympathies and memories, the daguerreian and typological apotheoses of Eva and Tom leave readers with portraits and stories that ‘‘once seen’’—or read—would not be ‘‘easily forgotten.’’36

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In not forgetting Tom or Eva after closing the book, readers ideally would remember to take action against the system that brought about their untimely deaths and the novel thus would realize its ultimate political aim. ‘‘Concluding Remarks’’ Reflecting on her aims in writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin and on reactions to the novel, Stowe once declared, ‘‘If there had been a grand preparatory blast of trumpets or had it been announced that Mrs. Stowe would do this or that, I think it likely I could not have written; but nobody expected anything, nobody said anything, so I wrote freely.’’37 Of the heightened expectations that she inevitably faced following the novel’s unprecedented success, Stowe further explains, ‘‘Now what embarrasses me is to be announced as an attraction,—to have eyes fixed on me, and people all waiting’’ (qtd. in Fields 327). Stowe here understands herself, instead of her novel, to be the focus of the public gaze, the spectacle or attraction on which all eyes are fixed in anticipation of her next artistic feat. Southern critics immediately responded to the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin with a hostile glare. In one negative example that strikingly realizes Stowe’s concern for her own vulnerability as the center of attention, William Gilmore Simms calls on daguerreotypy in a rhetorical move similar to Stowe’s own to produce a portrait meant to evoke a strong emotional response from the reader. In his vehement condemnation of A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, rife with personal attacks on its author, Simms declares that Stowe’s ‘‘daguerreotype . . . is such as to damage the reputation of any female writer under the sun’’ (221). Such attacks, invited by Stowe’s participation in the traditionally masculine sphere of political debate, were not unusual; neither were judgments of her distance from any standard of beauty.38 This particular assault on Stowe’s photographic image is especially striking given her novel’s purposeful deployment of the affective power of the daguerreian portrait. Simms evokes an unsightly, because unfeminine, image of Stowe in his readers’ imaginations to provoke their condemnation of both the author and her novel as aesthetic and rhetorical failures. Given the extraordinary attention that the novel drew to Stowe, northern and southern audiences alike would have been familiar with either photographic portraits or engravings made from daguerreotypes of the famous author, reproduced in periodicals, and displayed and sold in photographers’ studios—precisely the kind of daguerreian age authorial visibility that Pierre

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rejects. Yet just as Stowe was able to call up affectively potent images of Tom, Eva, and Augustine in words without having to produce actual daguerreotypes, Simms is able to evoke an unflattering, but lasting, imagined picture of Stowe through the same power of words—and to the opposite effect. As Simms’s attack begins to suggest, borrowing on the daguerreotype’s authority could not guarantee Stowe’s novel the last word—or image—on slavery. An advertisement for Mary H. Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or, Southern Life as It Is (one of the numerous novels published both to counter Uncle Tom’s Cabin and feed off its success) calls on daguerreotypy’s representational authority that print had established to promote the veracity of Eastman’s picture of slavery over Stowe’s. The ad concludes with the pointed declaration that ‘‘the public at the North, as well as at the South, will find in ‘Aunt Phillis’ Cabin’ not the distorted picture of an interested painter, but the faithful transcription of a Daguerreotypist’’ (Figure 13).39 Yet even a specifically daguerreian challenge to the accuracy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a literary picture of slavery could not preclude the novel’s political efficacy; in fact, the very possibility of such differing visions of the characters and their situations is central to its narrative strategy. As with the ekphrastic portraits in Pierre, each picture of Tom and Eva that the narrative evokes in individual readers’ minds generates one more possibility of some kind of affective and, ideally, political response. Once her narrative had realized these images of its most sympathetic characters, Stowe could only trust in her readers’ capacity for right feeling toward them and to act on their behalf so that their real-seeming martyrdom to slavery not be in vain. As the narrative voice famously concludes, ‘‘There is one thing that every individual can do,—they can see to it that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race. See, then, to your sympathies in this matter!’’ (UTC 624). In recovering the political efficacy of feeling, Philip Fisher has argued that ‘‘from roughly 1740 to 1860 sentimentality was a crucial tactic of politically radical representation throughout western culture.’’40 And as Walter Benjamin has observed, ‘‘All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.’’41 In these lights, the sentimental aesthetic of Stowe’s representation of slavery—one she characterized as closer to reality than representation and as politically preferable to leaving its violence unrepresented—would seem to have earned her the

Figure 13. Lippincott, Grambo & Co. advertisement, Bizarre for the Fireside and Wayside 1 (September 4, 1852): 379. Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

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designation (apocryphal or not) as the ‘‘little woman’’ who made the ‘‘great war.’’42 In analyzing the range of solutions—from right feeling to prayer to African emigration—that the narrative offers to the problems of slavery in its conclusion, a number of nineteenth- through twenty-first century critics have focused on Stowe’s feelings and condemned them as wrong. As Martin Delany wrote to Frederick Douglass in 1853, ‘‘although Mrs. Stowe has ably, eloquently and pathetically portrayed some of the sufferings of the slave, is it any evidence that she has any sympathy for his thrice-morally crucified, semi-free brethren any where, or for the African race at all . . . ?’’43 And as Douglass wrote to Stowe about her colonizationist conclusion, despite otherwise defending and promoting the novel, ‘‘The truth is, dear madam, we are here, and here we are likely to remain. Individuals emigrate—nations never.’’44 Following the novel’s incorporation into the canon with the recuperation of right feeling as a form of cultural work, critics have returned to the Liberia question, arguing that Stowe’s prompt shipment of all of the novel’s remaining black characters off to Africa in the end fundamentally challenges our critical revaluing of the sentimental. As Elizabeth Ammons concludes, ‘‘antislavery perspectives, mainstream white racism, Christian evangelicalism, and unwavering belief in the righteousness of Western imperialism come together in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to create a narrative conclusion that at best compromises and at worst undercuts the novel’s liberatory claims.’’45 George Harris’s letter promoting Liberia as both the destination and destiny for America’s free blacks that Stowe included in the novel’s conclusion has received significant critical attention; the most hostile readings condemn it as a kind of ‘‘literary minstrel show, a blackface rendition of the ideology of the American Colonization Society.’’46 Rather than reading Harris’s letter and the exportation of the novel’s black characters as contributing to a politically contradictory and/or literarily inelegant conclusion, some critics have argued that the idea of colonization logically, if troublingly, accords with the novel’s sentiments and politics. Amy Kaplan contends that the ‘‘idea of African colonization does not simply emerge at the end as a racist failure of Stowe’s political imagination; rather, colonization underwrites the racial politics of the domestic imagination.’’47 Similarly, Michelle Burnham considers ‘‘its colonizing gesture as central to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and, moreover, a gesture compatible with its politics of sympathy.’’48 With specific respect to George Harris’s controversial letter, Timothy B. Powell favors reading it ‘‘not simply as a

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reflection of Stowe’s ideology, but as a historical referent’’ (127). ‘‘What this hermeneutic shift reveals,’’ Powell suggests, ‘‘is that George Harris’s views constitute a historically accurate depiction of nineteenth-century black nationalism’’ (127). In the next chapter, I want to push Powell’s hermeneutic shift further, beyond justifying the colonizationist position of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s conclusion as historically accurate, to press again on the issue of representational accuracy itself—in Stowe’s repeated claims for her novel’s verisimilitude, as a desideratum of advocates of the Liberian colonization movement, and as a critical hermeneutic. Once more, daguerreotypy is the site on which all three converge. Aspects of George Harris’s letter bear a striking resemblance to a letter that Augustus Washington, a prominent black daguerreotypist from Hartford, Connecticut, wrote and published as Stowe was writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In his post-emigration letters to America, Washington promises actual and written daguerreotypes of Liberia ‘‘delineating truly all the lights and shades’’ of the colonial venture.49 What follows examines Washington’s writings and images for their authorization of the colonizationist viewpoint in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and for their cultural work in establishing the reality and viability of Liberia, its government, and its settlers in the minds of supporters and detractors alike in the United States. Daguerreotypy, I argue, not only made a thing into a man in Uncle Tom’s Cabin but also a colony into a nation in Liberia.50

Chapter 5

‘‘My daguerreotype shall be a true one’’ Augustus Washington and the Liberian Colonization Movement

Augustus Washington was one of the relatively few American blacks who not only supported African colonization but actually emigrated from the United States to Liberia.1 He was also a successful daguerreotypist in Hartford, Connecticut, who imaged black and white sitters alike in his well-appointed rooms. In 1846 or 1847, John Brown was among those who faced Washington’s camera, perhaps because of Washington’s involvement in advocating the rights of blacks or possibly because Brown saw his patronage as a political statement in itself. The sitting produced one of the most iconic images of the anti-slavery movement (Figure 14). Washington was born free in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1820 or 1821 and raised by his formerly enslaved father and stepmother; he came to both daguerreotypy and the colonization movement in seeking to further his education. He attended the Oneida Institute, headed by the anti-slavery and anti-colonization activist Beriah Green, in upstate New York and Kimball Union Academy and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in the late 1830s and early 1840s; unable to see his studies through at each school because of their significant cost and his lack of means, he left to work as a teacher.2 During one of the breaks in his studies, Washington was ‘‘favored in learning the Daguerrean Art.’’ 3 At the same time, he became active in the anti-slavery and temperance movements of Brooklyn and Hartford, working as a subscription agent and writing occasionally for the Colored American, one of the earliest black-edited newspapers, published in New York from 1837 through 1841.

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Figure 14. Augustus Washington, John Brown, c. 1846–47. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Purchased with major acquisition funds and with funds donated by Betty Adler Schermer in honor of her great-grandfather, August M. Bondi.

In a letter published in the Colored American in the final year of its publication, Washington announced his position on missionary efforts in Africa and on the colonization movement, expressing an interest in emigrating himself but for different motives: ‘‘I am not one of those, who, because I abhor with intense hatred the motives, the scheme, and the spirit of colonization, (but not its deceived abettors,) have no sympathy for my

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brethren in those far sunny climes. No; with all their faults, their ignorance, their wretchedness, I love them still. And when I read the glowing description of their wrongs, by authors too who are reluctant to tell the truth, I feel ready to go there myself, and live and labor and die with them.’’4 What troubled Washington about colonization at this point was not the imposition of Christian and Western values and culture on Africa but rather the insistence that free and manumitted blacks should be exported along with these values and culture to Africa. Ten years later, Washington had come to see the need and means for blacks in America to relocate themselves and Liberia had gained national sovereignty, becoming an independent republic in 1847. In a controversial letter written to Horace Greeley at the New-York Daily Tribune, Washington explains the development of his position in favor of colonization: Ever since the annexation of Texas, and the success and triumph of American arms on the plains of Mexico, I have been looking in vain for some home for Afric-Americans more congenial for their feelings and prejudice than Liberia. The Canadas, the West Indies, Mexico, British Guiana, and other parts of South America, have all been brought under review. And yet I have been unable to get rid of a conviction long since entertained and often expressed, that if the colored people of this country ever find a home on earth for the development of their manhood and intellect, it will first be in Liberia or some other part of Africa.5 His research on immigration to a more congenial home for ‘‘AfricAmericans’’ coincides with the expansion of the American empire, intensifying debates about slavery, and the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, as well as with his growing renown and financial success as a daguerreotypist. An 1851 broadside for Washington’s Hartford gallery advertises his commitment ‘‘to tak[ing] as good, or better likenesses than any one in this State, at prices cheaper than any one in this city—prices as cheap as they can be for such work as will give credit to his skill as an Artist, and satisfaction to his Patrons’’ (Figure 15).6 Seeking to appeal to clients of different means and races, Washington announces that his ‘‘knowledge of this Art, during seven years, and his daily experience, and constant and extensive practice the past five years, have been such that he can, at almost any time, produce Likenesses equal to his premium daguerreotypes!’’ While the broadside

Figure 15. Broadside advertisement for Washington & Co. Daguerrean Gallery, 1851. The Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut.

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does not mention Washington’s race, it puts the standard populist celebration of the daguerreian art in the context of the day’s slavery-related politics: ‘‘Why should not the Daguerreotype be within the reach of every body? Why may not, every man delight to ‘view his shadow,’ traced by the sun and descant on his own perfections? While others are advocating every man a house, free soil and free speech, it remains for Washington to advocate and furnish free Daguerreotypes, for the next 60 days.’’ Presenting daguerreian portraiture as a universal right—and adding daguerreotypy to the list in the Free Soil Party’s slogan ‘‘Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men’’—Washington offers his services in his well-established gallery to provide ‘‘every body’’ with a likeness. Such egalitarianism is possible because of the gallery’s economy of scale; as the broadside explains, Washington ‘‘hopes by an increase of patronage to be able to continue his system of large sales and small profits.’’ Expanding his daguerreian democracy/empire, in turn, funds Washington’s and his family’s emigration to Liberia through the gradual accumulation of these small profits. In 1852 he opens a second gallery in Hartford; in early 1853 he places an advertisement in the Hartford Daily Courant announcing his plans to ‘‘retire from business’’ later that year, ‘‘not from a want of any further success or patronage but for the purpose of foreign travel, and to mingle in other scenes of activity and usefulness.’’7 For Washington, I contend, daguerreotypy, Liberian emigration, liberty, and nationalism become inseparable in his particular amalgamation of the personal, the professional, and the political. As we will see, his writings and images make visible the potential political stakes and the real-world effects of popular conversations about daguerreotypy and actual daguerreian images when both are positioned at the intersection of aesthetic and political representation. The unusual combination of Washington’s work as a daguerreotypist and his support for colonization also makes him an especially compelling candidate as a source for Stowe’s development of George Harris’s politics in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Recognizing him as such reveals another aspect of Stowe’s efforts to ground her novel in reality by borrowing from the representational authority of daguerreotypy, supplemented in this case by the experiential authority of one of its rare black practitioners. Washington’s 1851 New-York Daily Tribune letter on Liberia appeared in print as Stowe was writing and publishing Uncle Tom’s Cabin in serial form. Joe Webb has noted the ‘‘remarkable likeness’’ of this letter and George Harris’s fictional

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letter promoting emigration to Africa.8 Yet Webb considers Washington’s letter as it was republished in the African Repository, the journal of the American Colonization Society, which ‘‘predates the serial publication of Harris’s letter in the forty-third chapter of [Uncle Tom’s Cabin] by almost seven months’’ (31). In fact, its original July publication in Greeley’s Tribune precedes Harris’s letter by nine months, appearing as Stowe likely was writing chapter 11, ‘‘In Which Property Gets into an Improper State of Mind,’’ which appeared in the National Era on August 14, 1851. In this ironically titled chapter, Harris first articulates his sense of nationlessness while explaining his politics of resistance to a sympathetic white man who has recognized the disguised runaway. Similarly, Washington explains his desire for a nation to call home in his letter written to Horace Greeley, the Tribune’s founder and editor, whom Washington praises for his sympathy for blacks’ plight and the cause of colonization: ‘‘I do not wish to be thought extravagant, when I affirm what I believe to be true, that I have seen no act in your public career as an editor, statesman and philanthropist, more noble and praiseworthy than that of turning your pen and influence to African colonization and civilization, after finding that you could not secure for the black man in America those inalienable rights to which he, with other oppressed nations, is entitled, and for which you have heretofore labored’’ (‘‘African Colonization’’ 259). After acknowledging Greeley’s efforts, Washington describes his own toward ‘‘seek[ing] liberty on a foreign shore’’ (259). His tone is much more conciliatory than Harris’s, who declares to Mr. Wilson, ‘‘I don’t want anything of your country, except to be let alone,—to go peaceably out of it. . . . But if any man tries to stop me, let him take care, for I am desperate. I’ll fight for my liberty to the last breath I breathe’’ (UTC 187). Even so, Washington is no less decisive about his ‘‘conclusion that the friendly and mutual separation of the two races is not only necessary to the peace, happiness and prosperity of both, but indispensable to the preservation of the one and the glory of the other’’ (‘‘African Colonization’’ 263). This conclusion attracted the attention of Frederick Douglass, who published a brief but biting response to Washington’s letter in the July 31, 1851, issue of Frederick Douglass’ Paper. It reads in part, ‘‘Mr. Augustus Washington, a colored man of more than ordinary talents, has, in the agony of despair, written a long article in the New York Tribune commending the whole infernal scheme which at present is filling the whole Colonization ranks with rejoicing. Oh! when will our people learn that they have the

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power to crush this viper which is stinging our very life away?’’9 And in September 1851, Douglass reprinted from the Christian Statesman a response to his response that directly compares Douglass with Washington and declares that the latter’s letter to the Tribune ‘‘is sufficient to establish his character as a man of superior ability and wisdom.’’10 ‘‘In that single article,’’ the Christian Statesman continues, Washington ‘‘has done more to advance the welfare and elevate the character of his race than Douglass, with perhaps equal ability, but without judgment and temper, has accomplished in ten years of mad declamation upon the present heart-broken condition of the colored brethren.’’ The response closes by ‘‘respectfully commend[ing] the example of Mr. Washington to [Douglass’s] imitation.’’ While Douglass respectfully declined the invitation to such imitation, it would seem that Stowe took it up, especially in developing George Harris’s pro-emigration politics in his letter published in the April 1, 1852, installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.11 In A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she cites the narratives of Lewis Clarke, Josiah Henson, and Douglass, as well as runaway slave advertisements’ descriptions of different runaways’ traits and characters, as her sources for Harris (13–21). No free blacks, including Washington, are mentioned as contributing to Harris’s development. While Washington cannot offer a personal narrative of the experience of slavery to authorize Harris’s position on Liberia, he does offer the popularly recognized authority of his experience as a daguerreotypist—an identity that Stowe herself assumes, if only figuratively, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin for its suggestion of a commitment to truth in representation. The resemblance of Washington’s and Harris’s letters points up how Stowe calls on different kinds of authority to verify different, even contradictory, aspects of her story: for her representations of slaves and of the experiences and practices of slavery, she turns to narratives written by people who were enslaved. Yet when a former slave such as Douglass argues against Liberia as a solution to the problem of slavery, Stowe turns to a free black daguerreotypist to voice and authorize George Harris’s argument for emigration to Africa.12 In their respective letters, Washington and Harris each recognize with similar language and logic that their support for colonization will meet with skepticism, if not hostility, from fellow black activists. Washington acknowledges, ‘‘I am aware that nothing except the Fugitive Slave Law can be more startling to the free colored citizens of the Northern States, than the fact that any man among them, whom they have regarded as intelligent and sound in faith, should declare his convictions and influence in favor of

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African Colonization.’’ He continues, ‘‘I cannot notice the misrepresentations, slander, and anathemas, which I must, for a while, endure, even from those whose approbation and good will I would gladly retain’’ (‘‘African Colonization’’ 260). Harris similarly, but more succinctly, declares, ‘‘I am aware, now, that I shall have you all against me; but, before you strike, hear me’’ (UTC 609). Each is especially concerned that his position will be misrepresented and, thus, dismissed by those who should be most sympathetic. Both Washington’s and Harris’s letters represent Africa as an unexploited land and people wanting cultivation. Washington proclaims: ‘‘A continent larger than North America is lying waste for want of the hand of science and industry. A land whose bowels are filled with mineral and agricultural wealth, and on whose bosom reposes in exuberance and wild extravagance all the fruits and productions of a tropical clime. The providence of God will not permit a land so rich in all the elements of wealth and greatness to remain much longer without civilized inhabitants’’ (‘‘African Colonization’’ 260). Stowe translates this celebration of the natural resources of Africa into Harris’s metaphor for cultivating Christian republics in Africa: ‘‘In these days, a nation is born a day. A nation starts, now, with all the great problems of republican life and civilization wrought out to its hand;—it has not to discover, but only to apply. Let us, then, all take hold together, with all our might, and see what we can do with this new enterprise, and the whole splendid continent of Africa opens before us and our children. Our nation shall roll the tide of civilization and Christianity along its shores, and plant there mighty republics, that, growing with the rapidity of tropical vegetation, shall be for all coming ages’’ (UTC 609). In the actual letter, the daguerreotypist expresses his faith in Western science, industry, and civilization and his desire to import them to, and impose them upon, Africa; in the fictional letter, the runaway translates these ideals into national virtues that will characterize the new African republic that he envisions. As Webb has noted, Stowe borrows most explicitly from Washington for Harris’s language and ideas in expressing his hope that the United States one day will right its great wrong of slavery and fulfill the ideals of its founding (33). In his letter, Washington anticipates the moment ‘‘when, by the progress of free thought and the full development of her free institutions, our country shall have removed from her national escutcheon that plague-spot of the nation, she will do more than all others in sending the

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light of liberty and everlasting love into every portion of the habitable globe’’ (‘‘African Colonization’’ 261). Using the same metaphor of a coat of arms, Harris expects the United States to follow Europe when the latter is united as a ‘‘grand council of free nations,’’ declaring, ‘‘it cannot be that free, enlightened America will not then desire to wipe from her escutcheon that bar sinister which disgraces her among nations, and is as truly a curse to her as to the enslaved’’ (UTC 610). As Webb observes, Harris and Washington both understand the United States as ‘‘the perfect example of a democratic nation’’ and share ‘‘a strong sympathy for the country of their birth and its theoretical constitutional emphasis on equality’’ while despising the ‘‘appalling continuation of slavery’’ that contradicts its political ideals (33). I am most interested in how both letters specifically imagine this contradiction as an aesthetic flaw in a visual representation of the nation and its ideals. Like a daguerreotypist discovering a scratch or a smudge on a finished plate, each ultimately sees slavery as an imperfection marring what should be a flawless representation and, thus, a real-world manifestation of the ideal nation. Both are unwilling to wait for this wrong to be righted in the United States and, as a result, commit to establishing Liberia as a new republic that finally and fully realizes the ideals of the founding for black Americans—in Africa. Lights and Shadows of Liberian Life The fierce debate over colonization, along with America’s physical distance from and limited communication with Liberia, made those on both sides of the issue alert to the potential for misrepresentation. In his response to Washington’s 1851 New-York Tribune letter, Douglass counts Washington as an impressionable black man who has understandably, but wrongly, fallen for pro-colonizationists’ misrepresentations of both Liberia and their motives: Taking advantage of the depressed, disheartened and anguishsmitten state of our people, our inveterate persecutors and destroyers are vigorously plying all their hellish enginery for our removal and expatriation from our rightful homes, to the inhospitable shores of Liberia, and it is sad to think that their exertions are not powerless. In the present heart-broken condition of the colored people, when danger seems to threaten on every hand, it is not strange that

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any offer of succor, however unsubstantial and delusive it may be, should meet with favorable consideration. (‘‘African Colonization’’) Douglass lays blame on both sides: colonizationists are determined to rid the United States of all blacks and Liberia presents an opportunity to realize this aim; they misrepresent Liberia most immediately as a paradisical alternative to America and as founded on the interests of Africans and people of African descent rather than of racist whites seeking their destruction. Blacks are susceptible to these misrepresentations and schemes because of the depression, hopelessness, and vulnerability that they experience as consequences of living in a racist and slaveholding society. More specifically, the recently passed Fugitive Slave Law exposes runaways in the North, as well as free blacks who could be captured illegally and rendered unable to document their freedom, to being taken into slavery. Liberia, as colonizationists represent it, entices them with promises of a safe haven, citizenship with full rights, and prosperity. Accused by Douglass of being both a victim and an agent of the colonizationists’ misrepresentations, Washington was acutely aware of the scrutiny that his firsthand reports from Liberia would face in America. In writing to John Orcutt a few months after his, his family’s, and forty-nine other emigrants’ arrival there in late 1853, Washington pointedly resists the temptation to promote only the positive aspects of emigration and, thus, the advancement of colonization on the basis of a partial representation. He explains his intention to show the good and the bad of the young republic, and the advantage that Liberia and its supporters stand to gain from such balanced representations: ‘‘There is no use in covering up the dark parts of the picture. More men will come to this country when they know the whole truth than will ever come, when you show them nothing but good.’’13 The daguerreotypist’s metaphor here is the same as Stowe’s in describing her envisioned novel to the National Era’s Gamaliel Bailey as a ‘‘series of sketches which give the lights and shadows of the ‘patriarchal institution,’ ’’ intended to ‘‘show the best side of the thing, and something faintly approaching the worst.’’14 In the novel’s ‘‘Concluding Remarks,’’ she repeats that she ‘‘has endeavored to show [slavery] fairly, in its best and its worst phases,’’ believing that the full picture will activate northern Christians to end slavery (UTC 622). Washington both shares and repeatedly preaches this faith in the motivating justice of an ostensibly impartial representation and the senses of fuller knowledge and confidence that it produces. Neither Washington’s nor Stowe’s commitment to showing the good

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and the bad arises from their disinterest; rather, it is the opposite: both believe that the bad can do as much as, if not more than, the good to bring about the changes they seek.15 Washington’s first such ‘‘picture’’/letter begins by briefly describing his experience of the ‘‘acclimating fever’’ (most likely malaria) that emigrants from America typically experience upon their arrival. He acknowledges that he was ill but explains that the ‘‘most disagreeable part’’ was ‘‘taking medicines so often during the day to break the fever’’ (Letter to Rev. John Orcutt 185). Of the difficult voyage to Liberia, he notes that the ship ‘‘encountered three severe storms, and on two occasions many of the company thought we would go to the bottom.’’ For such trials, though, they are rewarded with the ‘‘beautiful sight’’ of the ‘‘sunny hills and verdant plains of the only land in which we can feel ourselves truly free’’ (186). Once ashore, Washington declares that he ‘‘soon saw that the people here live in a style of ease, comfort and independence, at which they can never expect to arrive in the States.’’ After setting up his daguerreian studio, he takes ‘‘some 20, 30, or 40 dollars worth of pictures in a day’’—plentiful work that affords him a ‘‘very fine house with a good store under it.’’ Even so, he flatly declares, ‘‘I cannot encourage any body to come here who has not something of his own to depend on, aside from the aid he gets from the Society. Because every thing here is very dear for poor people.’’ Liberia, Washington both advertises and cautions, ‘‘is a country in which enterprising and industrious men can soon become rich. . . . Thus a man needs only a little capital, and that in goods, and he can get along very well. But if he does not have something to do with of his own it will go hard with him’’ (186). The note accompanying Washington’s letter in its publication in the African Repository describes the author as ‘‘evidently a man of clear intellect and good sense’’; as proof that he possesses such traits, it notes that Washington was ‘‘engaged in the Daguerreotype business for some years’’ (187). ‘‘We fully agree with him,’’ the note continues, ‘‘that the best way is to expose ‘the dark parts of the parts of the picture,’ in our representations of Liberia, as well as the bright side, that all may ‘know the whole truth.’ We believe that it is neither necessary nor proper to resort to the slightest misrepresentation of the true state of things.’’ That said, the editor goes on to challenge the accuracy of the daguerreotypist’s figurative picture, seeking to shed more light on the dark view he gives of emigrating if one is not self-sufficient:

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In one thing, however, we think Mr. Washington’s conclusion is rather hasty—that is, in not encouraging anybody to emigrate to Liberia without a [sic] capital. While we think it is very desirable that every person emigrating to a distant country, should have ‘something of his own to depend on;’ yet, in view of the fact, that emigrants to Liberia, in indigent circumstances, are supported six months after their arrival, and are furnished sufficient land for their support, if properly cultivated . . . and also in view of the fact, that many of the most prosperous citizens of Liberia arrived there with no other dependence than the aid they received from the Society; we would not discourage any person from emigrating simply because he might not have money in his pocket or goods to sell. (187–88) After retouching Washington’s picture with promises that emigrants ‘‘will be able to live in ease, comfort and independence’’ if they ‘‘go work,’’ the note closes by returning to Washington: ‘‘We are glad to hear of the temporal prosperity of Mr. Washington, as also of his prospect of enjoying health in his new home. And we hope that he may live long to be a useful citizen of the New Republic’’ (188). In daguerreotypy, Washington sought both prosperity and utility as a Liberian citizen. Upon arriving in Monrovia, his capital consisted of supplies remaining from his closed Hartford galleries, which he used to establish the successful studio he describes in his letter. His prosperity attracted the notice of supporters of the colonization cause back in the United States, who specifically advertised his practice of daguerreotypy in Africa as irrefutable proof of the justice and progress of the colonial project. The article titled ‘‘Daguerre in Africa,’’ published in the Friends’ Review of June 3, 1854, is worth quoting in full: Science and art are taking hold in long benighted Africa. The Liberian Republic is gradually and permanently spreading its powerful influence for good, and the higher attendants of civilization are extending their refining and ennobling qualities over the hearts and minds of the formerly untutored native, and his more advanced brethren from the United States. A friend has submitted to our view, several daguerreotypes taken in January last, at Monrovia, in the

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Republic of Liberia. They purport to be the faces of President Roberts and his lady, and of Vice President Benson, and are said by competent judges to be excellent likenesses. As works of art, they will favorably compare with specimens of American skill, chemical knowledge and artistic arrangement. The artist, Augustus Washington, was formerly located at Hartford, Connecticut, where he was eminently successful in his profession, but a desire to be free, and become a citizen of that country, where alone his race have already risen to and are maintaining their nationality, induced him to emigrate to the Independent Republic of Liberia. We learn that he has there met with large success, and himself and family are in good health, and well pleased with their new homes and happy land.16 Positioned here as both a science and an art and thus invested with the cultural authority of each, daguerreotypy and its successful practice in Liberia are uniquely able to confirm the viability and justice of enlightening ‘‘long benighted Africa’’ for those particularly interested in making arguments on such terms. The Friends’ Review thus offers up both the daguerreotypist and his daguerreian likenesses as mechanically objective and aesthetically accomplished indexes of the real success of Liberia. In addition to making portraits of prominent and prosperous Liberians in his studio, Washington attempted several daguerreian views of the capital, Monrovia, as part of a commission from the American Colonization Society, which sought images to be copied by engraving and circulated widely via its journal, as the society continued its colonization efforts well beyond Liberian sovereignty. Despite reintroducing the artist’s hand into the picture, these images would have been understood nonetheless to offer compelling proof of the former colony’s viability as a nation; in working from a daguerreotype, the engraver was bound to mechanical objectivity and reality such that his mediating presence became negligible. In the interest of providing more originals for engraving and dissemination, Washington also ‘‘intended to take five views of Monrovia for Rev. John Orcutt, an agent of the American Colonization Society and corresponding secretary of [its] Connecticut chapter. Both the New York and Massachusetts Colonization Society had requested one view, and Benjamin Coates, a Philadelphia Quaker and long-time supporter of the Colonization Society, had commissioned two additional views.’’17 Thus Washington plied his trade in Liberia not just for profit but as a civic duty to help realize the republic—to make it visible as an accomplished goal—for

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both those supporting and disputing its existence in America, even after the colony had become an independent nation in 1847.18 By summer 1854, Washington had produced a view of Monrovia taken from the harbor lighthouse and another of the Liberian presidential mansion that he mailed to Dr. J. W. Lugenbeel, the recording secretary of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in Washington, D.C. Although Washington sent the images, he was unsatisfied with their quality; in the accompanying letter to Lugenbeel he writes, ‘‘I hope you will wait a month for another picture before you get any one engraved’’ (qtd. in Shumard 12). Lugenbeel shared Washington’s disappointment, writing back with the society’s thoughts about how the next image might be best composed to highlight the most significant features of the capital: ‘‘We should like exceedingly to get a good, clear, view, of Monrovia from the mouth of the river, or some point near, so that the warehouses on the wharf may be well represented. Perhaps one of the little islands might be the best position. Of this you can best judge. But unless you can get a good clear picture it will not answer our purpose’’ (qtd. in Johnson 270). Lugenbeel’s demands make clear just how deliberately the ACS sought to put the popular idea of the daguerreotype’s precision and mechanical objectivity to subjective political purposes, borrowing from the idea of its representational authority that the first responses to the new medium had established to solidify a specific view of Liberia’s state of development and, thus, realize the colonial project. As Carol Johnson has observed, such images were intended to provide ‘‘proof to the supporters of the American Colonization Society that their funds were going to a useful cause’’ and to show ‘‘the progress of the new nation’’ (270). Unimpeachable visible proof of the latter was meant not only for ACS supporters but also, and most especially, I would add, for its detractors. As we have seen, written descriptions of daguerreotypy had invested it with an unrivaled evidentiary authority by promoting it as a mechanically objective form of representation. As such, a ‘‘good clear [daguerreian] picture’’ of Liberia’s fully built, fully functional structures offered Liberia’s partisans a trump card in debates about the young nation’s viability: ocular proof that the experiment was working. Though the daguerreotypes that Washington produced in response to Lugenbeel’s request for clarification have been lost, engravings made from them were published in the New-York Colonization Journal and in the Twenty-Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the New-York State Colonization Society (Figures 16 and 17). The image in the January

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Figure 16. Unidentified artist, wood engraving after daguerreotype by Augustus Washington, View of Monrovia from the Anchorage, TwentyFourth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the New-York State Colonization Society (New York, 1856). The Library Company of Philadelphia.

issue of the New-York Colonization Journal (View of Monrovia from the Anchorage) is accompanied by a significant caption: ‘‘We have another of [Washington’s] plates, giving a view of a large portion of Monrovia as observed from the lighthouse at the highest point of the Cape. . . . If any of our readers will furnish the $20 to defray the expenses, this shall appear in a future number of the Journal’’ (qtd. in Shumard 12). With this caption, additional layers of the ACS’s mediation of these supposedly impartial images (beyond their translation into engravings) come into view: the society dictates not only what aspects of the capital the daguerreian views show but also under what circumstances the images—or, more accurately, their engraved surrogates—will be shown; anyone interested in seeing more will have to pay for a second view and, thus, contribute funds to advancing the society’s mission of bringing more emigrants to Liberia. The ploy seems to have worked: View of Monrovia and the Mesurado River, from the Lighthouse on the Summit of Cape Mesurado, engraved from a daguerreotype by Washington, appeared in the June 1856 New-York Colonization Journal and both images were published in the society’s 1856 annual report.

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Figure 17. Unidentified artist, wood engraving after daguerreotype by Augustus Washington, View of Monrovia and the Mesurado River, from the Lighthouse on the Summit of Cape Mesurado, Twenty-Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the New-York State Colonization Society (New York, 1856). The Library Company of Philadelphia.

Liberia ‘‘as It Is’’ Perhaps it was because of such mediation that Washington was not content to let his daguerreotypes stand as his only efforts toward accurately representing Liberia to the United States. Or perhaps it was because Washington himself came to rethink the justice of representing the ACS’s mission as accomplished. From March through June 1854, he drafted a series of three letters for the New-York Tribune describing his experiences and impressions of Liberia and its government, people, and prospects at that point in their development; the pictures are not flattering. Greeley published them in the Tribune in July and November 1854 under the title ‘‘Liberia as It Is.’’19 During the antebellum period, the phrase ‘‘as it is’’ became shorthand for a claim of indisputable representational accuracy derived from firsthand experience and eyewitness observation.20 Theodore Dwight Weld’s 1839 American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses—published in

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the same year that Daguerre made his and Nie´pce’s discovery public—was one of the first texts in the slavery debates to use the phrase in its title; it was certainly the most widely known and influential. Of Weld’s book and its reliability as a source for her representation of slavery, Stowe writes in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘‘A mass of facts and statistics were gathered, which were authenticated with the most unquestionable accuracy’’ (21). But just as pro-slavery partisans deployed the ‘‘unquestionable accuracy’’ of daguerreotypy against Stowe and the anti-slavery movement, so with ‘‘as it is’’: in 1852, Mary H. Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’s Cabin carried the subtitle Southern Life as It Is and W. L. G. Smith published the anti-Tom novel Life at the South; or, Uncle Tom’s Cabin as It Is. From these examples, we see that the observation-based authority signified by this phrase was not at issue for either side; rather, they were opposed only on the political ends to which such authority was put. In his first ‘‘Liberia as It Is,’’ Washington is acutely interested in establishing the accuracy of his account compared to those that have preceded his. Specifically emphasizing the visual grounding of his letter’s authority, he declares, ‘‘as I do not wish to relate much that does not come under my own observation, I cannot follow in the wake of some other letter-writers, who have related many things of this country not confirmed by their own observation and experience.’’ He credits the ACS’s Lugenbeel for producing ‘‘the most truthful and reliable account’’ that he has ‘‘ever met with about Liberia’’ preceding his own; returning to one of his previous metaphors, Washington commends the society’s recording secretary for having ‘‘given the light side, and a darker side to his description than could have been expected from one in his position.’’ The implication here, of course, is that Washington is even freer to produce a picture with greater contrasts since he is not an agent of the ACS. The daguerreotypist begins his account by describing the thirty-eight-day passage from New York to Monrovia, noting that it was mostly unexceptional. On deck for a first view of their new home, Washington says that for the emigrants, ‘‘nothing could surpass the beauty of Cape Mesurado, as it appeared robed in forests of deepest green.’’ On shore, they ‘‘were exceedingly delighted and happily surprised to find the appearance of the houses and town better than we had anticipated, and the trees along the streets and in the gardens laden with ripe oranges, cocoa-nuts, pine-apples, tamarinds, citrons and many other fruits.’’ Lest his readers think he is offering only one more edenic and, thus, unrealistic view of Liberia, Washington continues:

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‘‘But yet on every side we could not avoid seeing, amid this beauty of prospect, the marks of decay and shameful neglect, and the almost entire absence of enterprise and industry.’’ He details problems with the cost of labor and goods, then describes his own success as a daguerreotypist, but reiterates his previous warning that emigrants should not come to Liberia without any capital: ‘‘Ninety-five per cent of all who come here with nothing endure suffering and death to an extent almost incredible.’’ ‘‘The elements of power and wealth are here,’’ Washington declares, ‘‘but no science, education nor capital to develop them.’’ Because Liberians ‘‘are a people entirely without manufactures, with no considerable commerce, with little development of agricultural, and none of mineral resources’’ and are ‘‘often distracted by border and intestine difficulties with the natives, and with no revenue by which the Government can make internal improvements,’’ they depend entirely on America and Europe for survival. Without significant additional support from America, which Washington calls ‘‘our mother,’’ Liberian emigrants will be left ‘‘unloved, unguarded and uncared for’’ in ‘‘this dark and starless wilderness, which the hand of science and the arts, and European civilization have toiled in vain to conquer.’’21 With this beseeching critique, Washington exposes the dark side not of colonialism—for he remains committed to his belief that Africa should be Christianized and ‘‘enlightened’’—but of an unfinished and underfunded colonial project. He ideally envisions Liberia as America’s exact likeness but with slavery removed from the picture—as a perfect, if edited, copy rather than as its own original.22 But as Washington sees it, Liberia ‘‘as it is’’ is more like an unflattering daguerreotype, developing into a mirror image of the United States that all too faithfully reproduces its blemishes. Committed himself to producing an uncompromising likeness of this likeness, he promises a second letter that will focus on Liberian society that includes an account of ‘‘the oppression of the natives and the poor Americans.’’ ‘‘My daguerreotype shall be a true one,’’ he declares, ‘‘delineating truly all the lights and shades.’’ Here again, Washington calls on his preferred metaphor for an accurate representation but does so in this case, seemingly inevitably, by borrowing on his trade and deploying one of the era’s dominant metaphors to designate his chiaroscuro picture of Liberia’s failings as specifically daguerreian and, thus, truthful. In ‘‘showing the shaded parts of the landscape, as well as [its] sunny founts and rippling streams, and fruits, and flowers, and dew-drops,’’ Washington concludes, he ‘‘shall do a thousand times more good for Africa and add to

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our force intelligent men sooner.’’ Again, his goal in correcting previous misrepresentations of Liberia with an accurate—and specifically daguerreian—representation is to improve, not condemn, the colonial project; he seeks to expose with his ‘‘daguerreotype’’ what work remains rather than what should not have been done in the first place. His second letter—his true ‘‘daguerreotype’’—fulfills Washington’s promise to detail the different groups that compose Liberian society. ‘‘As far as I am able to learn in my short experience of six months,’’ he writes, ‘‘society may be divided into three classes: the intelligent, respectable, wealthy and refined; the poor respectable laboring class, into which on account of circumstances an inferior class link themselves, and the native population consisting of several tribes.’’ The ‘‘first class of citizens,’’ Washington explains, ‘‘have more of the spirit of reform and progress than is exhibited in the other classes.’’ ‘‘But this,’’ he continues, ‘‘is only because the other classes have felt themselves oppressed and discouraged, and until lately no one has dared to lead them, and thus have slumbered a will unexercised and daring thoughts suppressed.’’ Some in the middle class ‘‘have no capital to farm with, and many if they had the means would be too lazy,’’ while others are engaged in ‘‘honest pursuits of industry’’ but for subsistence. Despite their struggles, Washington judges this second class to be ‘‘generally a moral, religious and peaceable community,’’ balancing dark and light in his picture of the community. ‘‘The natives,’’ Washington continues, ‘‘are a very interesting class, but are not regarded as a part of the common people.’’ Here he heightens the contrasts in his daguerreotype of Liberian society, describing this third class as ‘‘separated by a caste as great as that which divides the whites and colored peoples in America.’’ Liberia’s resemblance to the United States only grows stronger in the details that Washington calls attention to in his picture: These natives are humble, subdued and servile creatures. They are employed in all families as domestics, drudges. . . . Some few families allow them wages, and thus their servants are decently clothed. But nearly all . . . wear nothing but a filthy rag, the size of a common cotton handkerchief, about their loins, or occasionally a dirty, greasy shirt; and in this state they perform all duties about houses. In some families they are allowed per day a quart of rice, some palm oil, and otherwise well fed. In other families they are poorly fed from mere scraps of rice and cassada [sic]. In others again they are not only

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worked nearly naked, but half starved. And in nearly all families it is customary to keep a rawhide or cat-o’-nine-tails handy, to flog them when they please. And this flogging, kicking and cuffing is done to a shameful extent by upstart boys, scolding, brainless women, and gentlemen of rank and standing, calling themselves Christians. . . . Such a state of things appears strange to a newcomer; but, when we become accustomed to seeing these things, we soon learn to think it no wrong, but a necessary evil. While the ‘‘we’’ of this last sentence would seem to include Washington among those who have turned a blind eye to the situation, his exposure of the shadowiest part of the Liberian experiment to the light of publicity works to set him apart. And lest this shade overshadow all light in his picture, he offers a solution: ‘‘One hundred families only need to set a different example’’ of how to treat the natives, ‘‘and an independent press advocate their education and civilization.’’ For such well-meaning suggestions, though, Washington is ‘‘censured by many persons here, who claim that [he] wish[es] to make the natives impudent, restless and discontented in their present condition.’’ ‘‘All this I can bear and much more,’’ he decides, ‘‘for I may expect a heavier shaft from America for disclosing these facts.’’ The repercussions he will suffer from the ACS for exposing such failings, he anticipates, will be much worse than any criticism he has faced in Liberia. Even so—or, perhaps, as a result—he renews his commitment to producing an accurate and, thus, righteous representation of Liberia by declaring that he ‘‘shall oppose error and oppression in high or low places’’ by ‘‘example and whatever influence [he] can lawfully command.’’ As his written ‘‘daguerreotypes’’ illustrate, exposing Liberia’s faults, despite the personal cost of doing so, is Washington’s preferred means of lawfully commanding influence in and on this fledgling society that he seeks to improve. In his third and final Tribune letter, published in late November 1854 and reprinted in Frederick Douglass’ Paper the next month, Washington seems only able to produce a picture that is entirely dark, as if he has been overexposed to the many hardships in the colony. ‘‘In a residence of six months in Liberia,’’ he writes, ‘‘I have met with nothing so ‘passing strange’ as the fact that no one has made known to the American public the sufferings of Southern emigrants after their arrival here, the paucity of physicians, and in some instances their shameful neglect of duty.’’ The quoted phrase

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‘‘passing strange’’ comes from Othello, where Othello describes Desdemona’s response to his story: She swore in faith ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange, ’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful. She wished she had not heard it, yet she wished That heaven had made her such a man (Othello 1.3.159–62) Washington had borrowed this phrase once before to capture another surprising truth: the remarkably low cost of a daguerreian portrait at his Hartford studio, advertised by his 1851 broadside. Below the ornamental trade cut depicting a daguerreotypist imaging a sitter in his rooms, the bold head reads ‘‘Strange! Passing Strange, Yet True!’’ immediately followed by ‘‘a daguerreotype miniature, case included, for 50 cents, at the washington daguerrean gallery.’’ While his potential clients would have been the ones astonished by such a revelation in the broadside, in the case of Washington’s letter from Liberia, it is he who finds it almost incredible that such essential truths have not yet been revealed about the emigrant experience. As a result, he seeks to spread his knowledge of actual conditions in Liberia to a broader audience, just as he sought to bring his services as a daguerreotypist to a wider public back in America (if for profit as much as for democratizing portraiture). In the case of Liberia, he does so with the hope that knowledge will help right some of the wrongs that he observes and reports with daguerreian fidelity. Washington returns to another aspect of his past by recalling his preemigration letter to Greeley that promoted colonization; he concedes, ‘‘When I published in The Tribune in 1851 my views in favor of African colonization, I could not believe that the opponents of the scheme had uttered so much truth.’’ In uttering truths derived from his experience— this time, accounting for the attrition of emigrants without adequate health care—he acknowledges once again that he faces the ‘‘displeasure’’ of the ACS but has ‘‘strong consolation in knowing that here I have the hearts and sympathies of the common people with me—the masses who are poor, whose letters of complaint have been unnoticed and kept from the public, and whose wrongs have never been redressed.’’ Here Washington’s populist motivation in figuratively daguerreotyping Liberia resembles the message of the broadside advertising his mission as an actual daguerreotypist: providing common people with likenesses as good as those of the upper classes

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at an affordable price. Yet this time Washington also advertises the personal cost of such justice in representation: ‘‘I know that, by a different course, I could soon grow rich by the suffering and death of these poor people.’’ He swears off such ill-gotten gains, as well as sanctioned institutional support, declaring, ‘‘But if I have health and the same amount of brains, I can become wealthy (if that be a virtue) without aid from the Colonization Society, this feeble government, or the men who see their daguerreotypes in the group I have pictured.’’ While Washington’s projected profit is uncertain despite such confidence, it is apparent that he is convinced that more immediate moral gain will result from telling the truth, regardless of the actual expense—or, more likely, precisely because such loss will buy him credibility with those more interested in actual Liberians than in the cause of Liberia. For Washington, insistently creating unflattering daguerreotypes of Liberia may cost him the support of the ACS, but it is almost certain to gain him credibility in the eyes of those whose condition he brings to light and, ideally, of those in America who oppose the idea of Liberia but not their brothers and sisters suffering there. On Representing a Representative Government Washington’s written ‘‘daguerreotypes’’ of Liberia do not seem to have cost him business as a daguerreotypist from the Liberian government, despite his having declared it ‘‘feeble’’ in his third Tribune letter. Approximately two years after the publication of his three letters to Greeley’s paper, Washington seems to have produced a series of individual portraits of various members of the Liberian government.23 According to Carol Johnson, ‘‘six identified senators, the Vice-President, clerk, chaplain, secretary and sergeant at arms of the Legislature’’ all sat for Washington’s camera (266; Figures 18–28). Johnson notes that ‘‘these images differ from conventional portraits of the period. While the subjects are well-dressed, wearing western jackets, vests, and ties, some of the daguerreotypes look more like studies for a painting than formal portraits in themselves. The sitters are posed as if they are working in the Senate chamber although, given the constraints of the daguerreotype process, the portraits were probably taken in the photographer’s studio. All of the sitters have been placed in front of a cloth backdrop and many are seated at a desk’’ (266). ‘‘Given these irregularities,’’ Johnson suggests, ‘‘the daguerreotypes may have been intended to serve a purpose beyond the mere recording of the likenesses of the subjects’’ given the ‘‘existence of a roughly contemporaneous watercolor of the Liberian

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Figure 18. Augustus Washington, James Skivring Smith, Liberian Senator, c. 1856–60. Daguerreotype Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ6-1923.

Senate in session, by Robert K. Griffin’’ (266; Figure 29). From her reading of the images and this coincidence, Johnson compellingly concludes that the portraits ‘‘may in fact have been part of a larger scheme on the part of the American Colonization Society to memorialize the early legislative body of the young African republic’’ through engraved or lithographed prints to be made from the daguerreotypes and watercolor (266).24

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Figure 19. Augustus Washington, John Hanson, Liberian Senator, c. 1856–60. Daguerreotype Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ6-1924.

Given Washington’s desire to expose and improve upon the shortcomings of the Liberian experiment, I would suggest that for him, these daguerreotypes were part of his larger scheme to realize, rather than ‘‘memorialize,’’ the government of the young republic. In his work as a daguerreotypist and an advocate for Liberia, we see Washington’s deep

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Figure 20. Augustus Washington, Edward Morris, Liberian Senator, c. 1856–60. Daguerreotype Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ6-1926.

investment in the popular idea of daguerreotypy as capable of representing people and places objectively through an unprecedented degree of lifelike, mechanically derived detail. He also represents daguerreotypy as able to make the actual existence—the ‘‘reality’’—of these people and places indisputably apparent to viewers. Thus, I contend that if we take

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Figure 21. Augustus Washington, James M. Priest, Liberian Senator, c. 1856–60. Daguerreotype Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ6-1930.

them on their own terms, Washington’s images of this ‘‘feeble’’ government were meant to strengthen it by means of the popular idea of daguerreian portraiture’s representational power to make its subjects ‘‘real’’—not only to viewers (if there were any aside from the proposed engraver/lithographer) but also and especially to the subjects themselves

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Figure 22. Augustus Washington, Alfred Francis Russell, Liberian Senator, c. 1856–60. Daguerreotype Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ6-1932.

and even to the daguerreotypist himself, who harbored significant doubts about the government’s efficacy.25 As Frederick Douglass wrote of the experience of being a daguerreian subject approximately five years after these images were taken, ‘‘Men of all conditions may see themselves as others see them.’’26 Some of the men in

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Figure 23. Augustus Washington, Edward J. Roye, Liberian Senator, c. 1856–60. Daguerreotype Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ6-1933.

Washington’s images had come to Liberia directly from bondage. Their election to and service in the highest offices in their new land—which strikingly resembled those of their old land, in that the bicameral government essentially mirrored that of the United States—must have made for a complicated sense of identity. For example, John Hanson (Figure 19) had

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Figure 24. Augustus Washington, Beverly Page Yates, Liberian Vice President, c. 1856–60. Daguerreotype Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ6-1927.

bought himself out of slavery and emigrated to Liberia from Baltimore at age thirty-six. Chancy Brown (Figure 28), the Senate’s sergeant at arms, came to Liberia with his mother, younger brother, aunt, and six other members of his family from North Carolina after being freed in their late master’s will. Similarly, Alfred Francis Russell (Figure 22), his mother,

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Figure 25. Augustus Washington, C. H. Hicks, Clerk of the Liberian House of Representatives, c. 1856–60. Daguerreotype Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ6-1928.

and four siblings were emancipated when Russell was fifteen and sent to Liberia from Kentucky as a condition of their emancipation.27 For Hanson, Brown, and Russell, seeing themselves posed and dressed as members of the government must have been an experience that made all the more real not only their status as their society’s leaders but also and especially

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Figure 26. Augustus Washington, Philip Coker, Liberian Senate Chaplain, c. 1856–60. Daguerreotype Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ6-1931.

the contrast between their pasts in a land of slavery and their present in one of freedom. Moreover, for many of these men, their experiences of sitting in front of Washington’s camera and seeing themselves in the plates that resulted likely were their first encounters with daguerreotypy. Those who were

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Figure 27. Augustus Washington, James B. Yates, Liberian Senate Secretary, c. 1856–60. Daguerreotype Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ6-1929.

freeborn but from the South, such as James Skivring Smith (Figure 18) and Beverly Page Yates (Figure 24), would not have found many, if any, daguerreotypists—all of whom would have been white—who welcomed them into their rooms. As a northerner, Edward J. Roye (Figure 23) might have been imaged in America by one of the few black daguerreotypists,

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Figure 28. Augustus Washington, Chancy Brown, Liberian Senate Sergeant at Arms, c. 1856–60. Daguerreotype Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ6-1925.

such as James Presley Ball, who operated a major studio in Roye’s native Ohio, or by a white operator to whom payment mattered more than skin color. But despite the supposed democracy of portraiture effected by the process, daguerreotypy largely remained a luxury for most African Americans. Washington’s prices at his Monrovian studio (his ‘‘cheapest price

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Figure 29. Robert K. Griffin, The Liberian Senate, c. 1856. Watercolor and graphite on paper. Marian S. Carson Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-117300.

being $3 for a common picture’’) made daguerreian portraiture even more remote for most emigrant and native Liberians (‘‘Liberia as It Is,’’ June 26, 1854). Thus, the simple fact of the government members’ appearance in these images is enough to indicate their elite status in Liberian society; their formal dress of neckties, satin vests, and coats only reconfirms as much. But as with any representative government, such distinction is derived directly from the role of being a representative of the people.28 And as is true of all portraits of elected officials in a representative democracy, aesthetic and political representation intersect to produce images of individuals that stand for them standing for many other unseen individuals.29 In 1776, amid debates about the U.S. Constitution and the idea of a representative government,

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John Adams influentially reasoned that an ideal representative assembly ‘‘should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large.’’30 Similarly, in 1788, Melancton Smith argued the Anti-Federalist position that these representatives ideally should ‘‘resemble those they represent; they should be a true picture of the people.’’31 In the unusual case of the Liberian government— meant to realize the ideal of a separate but equal nation for African Americans, whether they chose to emigrate or not—the senators and representatives pictured also can be understood to represent not only their emigrant and native Liberian constituents but also all American blacks, who necessarily lacked political representation in the United States because they were legally denied citizenship. Even if the government was feeble in its early days, Washington’s specifically daguerreian images of its members give them the appearance of being not just faithful but also enduring representatives of the people. The form of the political portrait and the medium of daguerreotypy work in tandem to effect the sitters’ recognition as real, live, black representatives, senators, and officials in a full-fledged republic headed by a black president and vice president. Thus Washington’s state portraits effectively realize the ideal of Liberia as it should be as ‘‘Liberia as it is.’’ Augustus Washington, as He Was Though Washington found it difficult to restock his daguerreian supplies in Liberia, he not only continued working in Monrovia but also eventually expanded his small daguerreian empire to Sierra Leone, The Gambia, and Senegal. He used his accumulated profits to develop what became one of the largest and most profitable sugar plantations in Liberia, apparently leaving behind daguerreotypy as it waned in practice worldwide in the late 1850s in favor of farming and trade (Shumard 14–15). Washington also shifted his energies from aesthetic to political representation: after having daguerreotyped members of the government, he became one himself in 1858 as a judge appointed by President Stephen Benson. In 1863 he was elected to the Liberian House of Representatives as one of four representatives from Montserrado County; he was reelected in 1865 and 1867, when he also served as Speaker of the House. And in 1871, he was elected to a term in the Senate (Shumard 16). In October 1875, among other news ‘‘late from Liberia,’’ the African Repository published a notice of Washington’s death.32 ‘‘His death is justly mentioned,’’ the Repository observes, ‘‘as a calamitous event for his family

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and a severe loss to Western Africa generally’’ (‘‘Late from Liberia’’ 118). The notice continues: ‘‘Mr. Washington was favorably known in the New England States, where he was prominently identified with various schemes for the elevation of his race. He acquired a high reputation as a skillful daguerreotypist at Hartford, Conn., from which city he removed to Liberia in 1853. Nothing could induce him to return to this country, having acquired a handsome property and freedom and a home in his ancestral land. He served several terms in the National Legislature as a Senator from Montserrado county’’ (118). By 1875 daguerreotypy had been an obsolete technology for almost twenty years. Yet it figures as prominently in Washington’s obituary as his service in the Liberian government. Even after daguerreotypy was succeeded by subsequent photographic processes, it maintained its close association with truth in representation that had been so thoroughly established in print and visual culture in the first half of the century. Thus, to those still supporting the colonization movement—even after emancipation and citizenship and voting rights for African Americans had been achieved with the civil rights amendments to the U.S. Constitution—Washington’s work as a daguerreotypist signified not just an unusual accomplishment for an African American but also a commitment to science and art, objectivity and fidelity, and rationalism and feeling that made him the ideal Liberian emigrant—the type, even. In this chapter, I have considered Washington as a representative of the minority of blacks in favor of emigration to Africa. Recognizing him as such and taking seriously his arguments in support of colonization accomplishes a more nuanced, if complicated, picture of the range of political positions on slavery, race relations, and citizenship that were available to both blacks and whites in real life, fiction, and portraiture. For if we critically discount or condemn Stowe’s endorsement of colonization at the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as personally racist or artistically compromised, then what do we make of Washington’s substantial body of writings and his daguerreotypes in support of colonization? Yet if we take seriously the missionary, colonizationist, and nationalist aims of both Stowe’s and Washington’s works in the interest of attending to the complexities of antebellum understandings of race, slavery, and citizenship, as I have attempted to do, then our critical practice would seem, at first glance, to mirror their shared representational strategy. This resemblance is concerning in that they sought to bring out both the shadows and the lights in their pictures to advance their shared political agenda, including its most ethically troubling

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aspects. Yet neither Stowe nor Washington insists on the inevitable interimplication of dark and light; rather, both seek to resolve this binary in favor of the light. Readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Washington’s letters are supposed to pass through rather than linger on the worst of slavery and of Liberia and emerge into the bright light of freedom and Western faith, knowledge, and values. A criticism that privileges complexity over such resolution is no less motivated, yet its means and end differ significantly from Stowe’s and Washington’s. In seeing only irresolvable shades of gray in the picture, instead of distinguishable lights and darks, and in its concern for moral choices and the question of justice in representation, we are able to deconstruct Stowe’s and Washington’s binary thinking about the question of justice. As Keith Jenkins explains of Derrida’s ‘‘irreducible’’ idea of justice, ‘‘[w]e can never say what exactly absolute justice is’’ because ‘‘[s]uch a notion of justice defies closure, staying one step ahead of our finest grained analyses.’’33 Yet the impossibility of an absolute definition of justice does not make taking a moral stand impossible; rather, as Jenkins helpfully explains, this impossibility ‘‘is precisely the condition of possibility which makes moral positions both possible in the first place—they try to embody what they think justice is—and subject always to the possibility of critique in that ‘for all we know’ our best attempts at expressing justice always fall short’’ (36). Consequently, ‘‘[w]hat we experience when we make a moral choice/decision is the experience of having no unproblematic foundations (and thus excuses for) whatever choice we make’’ (36). In attempting to make a moral choice/decision about Stowe’s and Washington’s advocacy of colonization and colonialist nationalism, we find we have no unproblematic foundations for whatever choices we make. Thus I conclude this chapter with the suggestion that if we try to analyze how Stowe’s and Washington’s works ‘‘try to embody what they think justice is’’ instead of evaluating their morality of their senses of justice, then we practice a more moral criticism. To Frederick Douglass—who remained committed to the justice of extending constitutional rights to blacks within the United States and opposed to African emigration as a means of achieving these rights through a new nation and constitution—Washington partially redeemed himself with his ‘‘daguerreotype’’ of Liberian society in his third letter of his series for the New-York Tribune. In the May 18, 1855, issue of his Paper, Douglass defended Washington’s representation as truthful and verified it via the

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testimony of others who had seen the divisions within society and the violent mistreatment of natives with their own eyes.34 And despite its use to further the colonizationist project, daguerreotypy appealed to Douglass as a powerful means of advancing arguments for blacks’ basic humanity and their right to equal rights in the United States. The chapter that follows shifts our view from one of the best-known black daguerreotypists to Douglass—the most recognized, and one of the most frequently imaged, black subjects of daguerreian portraiture—to continue considering the place of race and politics in early photography and vice versa.

Chapter 6

Seeing a Slave as a Man Frederick Douglass, Racial Progress, and Daguerreian Portraiture

Daguerreian Visions In the February 12, 1852, issue of Gamaliel Bailey’s National Era, a brief ‘‘Anecdote of Daguerre’’ immediately follows the thirty-fourth installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (the continuation of chapter 32 and all of chapter 33), in which Tom is beaten for refusing to whip a female slave and is ministered to by a faithless Cassy. It reads: M. Dumas, a short time since, related the following anecdote of Daguerre. In 1825 he was lecturing in the theatre of the Sorbonne, on chemistry. At the close of the lecture, a lady came up to him and said: ‘‘Monsieur Dumas, as a man of science I have a question of no small moment to me to ask you. I am the wife of Daguerre, the painter. For some time he has let the idea seize upon him, that he can fix the image of the camera. Do you think it is possible? He is always at the thought; he can’t sleep at night for it; I am afraid he is out of his mind. Do you, as a man of science, think it can be done, or is he mad?’’ ‘‘In the present state of knowledge,’’ said Dumas, ‘‘it cannot be done; but I cannot say it will always remain impossible, nor set the man down as mad who seeks to do it.’’ This was twelve years before Daguerre worked his idea out, and fixed his images; but many a man, so haunted by a possibility, has been tormented into a mad house.1

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Two weeks later, a significantly abbreviated version of the same article appears in Frederick Douglass’ Paper.2 Douglass’s version leaves out both the anxious wife’s question about the feasibility of her husband’s goal and the narrative voice’s concluding suggestion that such seemingly impossible dreams result in madness more often than success, ending instead with Mme Daguerre’s announcement that her husband has had the idea to ‘‘fix the image of the camera.’’ This shared anecdote not only illustrates daguerreotypy’s ubiquity in antebellum popular periodicals, as well as anti-slavery newspapers’ participation in what Meredith McGill has termed the ‘‘culture of reprinting’’; it also indexes with daguerreian clarity significant differences in the two papers’ visions.3 The National Era’s account emphasizes Mme Daguerre’s concern that her husband may never realize his idea, the many years it took Daguerre to achieve the goal of permanency, and the torture of such an extended process. Frederick Douglass’ Paper focuses exclusively on Daguerre’s commitment to his objective, leaving Mme Daguerre’s question ‘‘of no small moment’’ unasked and, thus, doubts about its realization unexpressed. This editing removes any suggestion that torment and madness are the ends of such visionaries; all that remains is the statement that Daguerre ‘‘has let the idea seize upon him that he can fix the image of the camera.’’4 The first issue of Frederick Douglass’ Paper announces its (and, thereby, Douglass’s) similar dedication to a seemingly impossible goal: ‘‘all rights for all.’’5 This insistence on universal rights, like the name of his new newspaper, marks Douglass’s definitive break from the Garrisonians and the Liberty Party and from their narrow focus on ending slavery. As the first issue of the National Era declares of the Liberty Party, ‘‘[i]ts power consists in single-eyed devotion to the one idea. It is not a universal-reform party. The principles it advocates are all comprehensive in their scope, and must exert an expansive influence on the minds of its members, disposing them to regard with favor all movements designed to advance the interests of the many, and abate the pretensions of the few; but its great duty is to apply these principles to the one evil.’’6 Douglass’s slogan, like his version of the anecdote about Daguerre, expresses a resolute clarity about his ambitious ends and stops short of discussing any means by which they will be realized—or potentially frustrated. Bailey’s paper is also clear about its much more narrow ambition, but its preferred Uncle Tom’s Cabin–like means of exerting influence and disposing favorable regard could lead one

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to conclude, like Dumas in the anecdote, that ‘‘in the present state’’ of political polarization, ‘‘it cannot be done.’’ The connection between Douglass’s political philosophy and daguerreotypy is even more substantial than either this anecdote or previous scholarship on Douglass and photography suggests. In his newspaper writings, speeches, and one work of fiction, Douglass specifically adopts the popular idea of the medium as both a natural and mechanically objective form of representation to figure some of his most important arguments about personhood, race relations, and material and moral progress. And in front of the daguerreian camera, Douglass takes unique advantage of the daguerreotype’s exceptional material characteristics to refigure not only himself but also visual representation as a means of liberation instead of oppression for African Americans. In recent years, some Douglass criticism has taken a distinctly binaristic anti-visual, pro-oral (and -aural) turn, especially when scholars set his writings against the rhetoric of Garrisonian abolitionists and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For example, Jeannine DeLombard has argued that Douglass needed ‘‘to dissociate himself from the visual and identify with the verbal’’ to ‘‘exchange his embodied subjectivity as an ‘American slave’ for the more universal one of American citizen’’ in his autobiographical writings.7 The verbal, according to DeLombard, provided a compelling alternative to the visual—particularly eyewitnessing, which was so prominent in the rhetoric of the abolitionist movement—as ‘‘optical science was undermining the reliability and authority of such observation’’ (256). Similarly, Marianne Noble has claimed that ‘‘[i]n his writings, Douglass indicates that sympathy gained through listening and speaking is superior to sympathy grounded in visual signs of physical suffering’’ (‘‘Sympathetic Listening’’ 54). I want to suggest that such arguments not only unnecessarily oppose the verbal and the visual, forcing a false choice between the two, but also make the visual entirely oppressive and, thus, wholly unavailable to Douglass as a means of gaining self-knowledge, generating sympathy, and achieving human rights. As a black man and former slave, Douglass was acutely aware of the pressures on and stakes of seeing as a means of knowing and feeling; more specifically, he was both an observer of and participant in discussions about daguerreotypy as egalitarian truth in representation.8 What follows focuses on his daguerreian writings and lectures and on his images, analyzing how they both exploit and trouble these powerful linkages of visuality, epistemology, and subjectivity in the interest of realizing his vision of ‘‘all rights for all.’’

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Daguerreotypy in Douglass’s Newspapers Douglass’s work as a newspaper editor kept him up-to-date on the latest technological advances as they circulated through the periodical press, including innovations in the daguerreian process and their anticipated contributions to the medium’s already impressive accuracy and affordability. The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper both feature occasional news about daguerreotypy among the exchange articles and notices that extend the papers’ contents beyond the subject of slavery. As the North Star indicates in its first issue, such articles were included to ‘‘promote the moral and intellectual improvement of the colored people.’’ The interests of Douglass’s Paper were even broader: in the range of news and opinion it published, it aimed (quoting Philippians 4:8) to ‘‘be the advocate of ‘whatsoever things are true—whatsoever things are honest—whatsoever things are just—whatsoever things are pure—whatsoever things are lovely— whatsoever things are of good report.’ ’’9 On two occasions in his Paper, Douglass reprinted articles from other newspapers featuring the accomplishments of African American daguerreotypists. One taken from the New-York Tribune cites Augustus Washington as ‘‘a colored man, who takes good likenesses and enjoys a very liberal patronage from the white citizens’’ of Hartford, Connecticut.10 More prominently, J. P. Ball’s ‘‘Great Daguerrian Gallery of the West’’ is featured in an illustration and article that dominate the front page of the May 5, 1854, issue of the Paper.11 The article—essentially an extended advertisement for Ball’s luxurious studios and gallery, reprinted from Gleason’s Pictorial Magazine—foregrounds the daguerreotypist’s artistry over his race, emphasizing that he is ‘‘[p]ossessed of the best materials and the finest instruments’’ and capable of portraits ‘‘with an accuracy and a softness of expression unsurpassed by any establishment in the Union’’ (‘‘Selections’’ 1). Local Rochester daguerreotypists also were among the advertisers (and subscribers) who helped support Frederick Douglass’ Paper. I. N. Bloodgood’s substantial advertisement in the June 24, 1852, issue is notable for its appeal to potential customers’ sentiments, filled with tropes now familiar from popular publications and other daguerreotypists’ slogans, as well as from Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The value of these Keepsakes is not appreciated until we are deprived of the society of those we love. How many have lost Father,

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or Mother, or a little child, without a shadow of resemblance to recall their features. After the separation, some little toy, or trifling article of apparel is often preserved and cherished for years as a token of remembrance. How much more valuable would be a wellexecuted Daguerreotype of the loved and lost! Should you reach the years of maturity, what would you not give for a true likeness of yourself, taken when a child? It would show the effects of time, and call up many pleasant recollections. This satisfaction you can now afford your children. And should they be snatched from your embrace by the cold hand of Death, your possession of their Daguerreotype Likeness, if taken by a good artist, will afford a sweet consolation.12 Bloodgood offers such consolation for one to ten dollars, ‘‘according to the value of the case’’ that his patrons choose for their images. Two months later, his local competitor C. J. Dietrich less dramatically advertises ‘‘perfect likenesses, which, for beauty, brilliancy of love and life-like appearance, are unsurpassed in this city’’ enclosed ‘‘in good morocco cases for one dollar.’’13 These articles and advertisements feature several characteristics and themes common in early writings about the medium that Douglass, like his contemporaries, incorporates into his own writings—themes and traits of truthfulness, accuracy, artistry, affordability, and affective power that we recognize daguerreotype, as both a noun and verb, metonymically as having come to contain by the early 1850s. The first instance of Douglass’s figurative deployment of daguerreotypy that I have found occurs—significantly and not coincidentally, I want to suggest—in an article about Douglass’s visit with Harriet Beecher Stowe in her Andover, Massachusetts, home that had come to be known as ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’’ In this article, Douglass expresses his initial reluctance to detail the well-known author’s appearance with specific reference to daguerreian portraiture: ‘‘So much has been said and written about Mrs. Stowe, that it is hardly worth while for us to give our daguerreotype impression of her.’’14 That said, he offers just such an impression—one that resembles a daguerreotype less for the sharpness of its image than for the lack of flattery of its subject’s features and for figuring Stowe as visually indistinguishable from ‘‘ordinary ladies’’: ‘‘Well, in respect to Mrs. Stowe, as might be supposed, she has a way and a manner of her own; having more points of resemblance, perhaps, with the sisterhood of American women than most persons; yet, peculiar, marked, original. Sitting

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at the window of a milliner’s shop, no one would ever suspect her of being the splendid genius that she is! She would be passed and repassed, attracting no more attention than ordinary ladies. She would appear simply as a thoughtful, industrious manager of household affairs; nothing more’’ (‘‘A Day and a Night’’). Lest his readers think that he found Stowe wholly unremarkable in this encounter, Douglass tilts his ‘‘daguerreotype’’ so that the impression she has left comes into better view. He shifts his focus from her countenance to her character, as if working from the model of Stowe’s own daguerreian rendering of Tom: ‘‘It is only when in conversation with the authoress of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ that she would be suspected of possessing that deep insight into human character, that melting pathos, keen and quiet wit, powers of argumentation, exalted sense of justice, and enlightened and comprehensive philosophy, so eminently exemplified in the master book of the nineteenth century’’ (original emphasis). At first glance, as with our first introduction to Tom, Stowe’s appearance would seem to belie her depth of character. In looking more closely, however, we see that even Stowe’s ‘‘real presence,’’ whether she is merely seen or engaged with in conversation, only begins to suggest the more appealing and truly impressive character of her book. What Douglass’s ‘‘daguerreotype’’ of Stowe reveals—potentially to the disappointment of its subject, in a now familiar daguerreian scenario—is that Uncle Tom’s Cabin possesses the insight, pathos, wit, argumentative power, sense of justice, and compelling philosophy—possibly more than Stowe herself, who is only ‘‘suspected of possessing’’ them. According to Robert S. Levine, Douglass was ‘‘[c]onvinced that Stowe’s novel had the power and the vision’’ to ‘‘mobilize Americans to support the causes of both the free and enslaved blacks’’ and to ‘‘spawn specific antislavery and antiracist reforms’’ (Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass 72). Levine counts this article on Douglass’s visit to Stowe among the ‘‘numerous columns in Frederick Douglass’ Paper’’ set aside ‘‘to publicize, promote, and shape the reception of Stowe’s novel’’ (72). That its ‘‘daguerreotype’’ of Stowe reveals more about the character of the novel than of its author, then, brings into even sharper focus how Douglass sees the power and significance of the individual as limited when compared to that of ‘‘the word,’’ which is ‘‘bounded by no national lines, despises the limits of Sectarian sympathy, and thrills the universal heart’’ (‘‘A Day and a Night’’). This ‘‘word’’ of truth and liberty, Douglass declares, the ‘‘slave in his chains shall hear . . . gladly, and the slave-holder shall hear it’’; thus, ‘‘both shall rejoice

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in’’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin—not in Stowe or her image—‘‘and by its light and love learn lessons of liberty and brotherhood.’’ While Douglass privileges Stowe’s words over her image in this article, he elsewhere embraces the power of images over words for bringing wider attention to the problem of slavery, calling for the public display of slave owners’ and overseers’ actual (rather than textual) daguerreotypes as objects of open ridicule and scorn. The February 24, 1854, issue of his Paper reprinted a story from the Richmond (Virginia) Dispatch titled ‘‘Shooting a Negro’’ about an instance of slave resistance; several aspects of the story resemble Douglass’s fight with his overseer Edward Covey as represented in his 1845 Narrative. But whereas Douglass defeats Covey in that encounter—the ‘‘turning-point’’ in his ‘‘career as a slave’’—and is never whipped again, the defiant, unnamed slave in the newspaper story is shot by his overseer at the end of their struggle (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 54). We learn that because he is ‘‘properly cared for,’’ the wounded slave is expected to recover. Yet the Dispatch story concludes with the regret that ‘‘it is really a pity that Patmon [the overseer] ceased pulling his trigger until he had planted his six bales in the assassin’s body,’’ given that ‘‘it is generally believed that it was the intention of the Negro to kill his overseer.’’15 In his editorial comment on the story, Douglass offers several familiar defenses for the rebellious slave’s actions, beginning with the argument that violent resistance is a reasonable response to the theft of the slave’s rightful property: his labor. ‘‘What white man,’’ Douglass demands, ‘‘would not have struck down Patmon, the overseer, and Crenshaw the owner also? The case is simply this: The owner is a robber, and his overseer is his assistant, in villainy’’ (‘‘Shooting a Negro’’). Turning to the American Revolution for further cross-racial justification, he cites Patrick Henry, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams as examples of white rebels who ‘‘killed thousands upon thousands of those who undertook to enslave them, and in a much milder form than this poor Negro was enslaved.’’ Finally, in switching from defense to offense, Douglass concludes that ‘‘[t]wo such monsters as this owner and overseer ought to be daguerreotyped and placed where the scorn of the whole world should be pointed at them.’’ This fantasy of a specifically photographic spectacle is more than the daguerreian age equivalent of placing ‘‘such monsters’’ on the scaffold in the town square; it offers Douglass the possibility of imagining the entire world judging against slavery as the court of public opinion, in the courtroom of visual culture.16 Not only Patmon and Crenshaw but every slaveholder and

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overseer could be daguerreotyped quickly and cheaply, and their likenesses displayed in daguerreotypists’ windows alongside those of the day’s icons for popular scorn instead of admiration. As daguerreotypists often made copy images of celebrities’ portraits, allowing for their wider circulation, the same could be done with pictures of the infamous, Douglass imagines. And given the well-established popular faith in the daguerreotype’s accuracy in imaging both appearance and character, there would be no mistaking slave owners and overseers for either famous or ordinary Americans. For all of these reasons Douglass recognizes the possibility of daguerreotyping of such infamous men as not only a relatively new but also an exceptionally reliable form of justice. Douglass’s most striking rhetorical deployment of daguerreotypy in his newspaper writings occurs in another editorial response to a piece that he reprints in his Paper—in this case, a letter from a Cleveland hotel clerk seeking to defend the proprietor’s insistence that Douglass, during a recent visit, leave one of the public dining tables to finish his meal alone in his guestroom. The clerk, J. B. Clarke, claims that Douglass had been notified upon his arrival that he would be permitted to dine in his room only and that ‘‘his occupation of a seat at the public table was in direct violation of such stipulation.’’17 Douglass begins his rebuttal with a remarkable simile: ‘‘This statement of Mr. J. B. Clarke would much surprise me, were I less acquainted than I am with American ethics in all matters where color is concerned.—Like the glasses used in daguerreotyping, the face of the black man inverts all the white man’s principles of honor and veracity. To tell the truth of a negro is, in this country, deemed superrogatory [sic] virtue by the larger part of our white fellow-citizens.’’18 From here he vehemently denies that he was informed of any stipulations with respect to his stay and goes on to refute point by point Clarke’s logic. Douglass’s comparison of the black face to a daguerreian plate for its effects on whites’ principles is both figuratively and materially significant. He refers to the plates as glasses, meaning ‘‘mirrors’’ (and not the actual glass plates subsequently used in ambrotypy, the form of photography that was beginning to eclipse daguerreotypy in the 1850s). As I have noted, one of the essential features of the daguerreotype that distinguishes it from subsequent forms of photography is its lateral reversal of the subject’s original orientation, as in a mirror. And we also remember that unlike any other form of photography, and unlike a mirror, the daguerreian image additionally reverses from positive to negative when viewed at an angle, turning

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light to dark and vice versa. Douglass likens the results of whites’ unmediated contact with blacks to these unique effects, themselves consequences of the unmediated exposure of the image on the daguerreian plate instead of on a negative, as in later forms of photography: when exposed to a black man, a white man’s ‘‘honor and veracity’’ will ‘‘invert,’’ or reverse and negate, into overt dishonesty. Specifically, it is the blackness of the black man’s face that Douglass says occasions this inversion of the white man’s principles. Again we see the significance of the polished silver surface of the daguerreian plate not only capturing a mirror image of its subject but also reflecting the face of its viewer like a mirror and reversing the dark and light tones of the image so that it looks like a film negative when viewed from different angles. Just as the daguerreotype’s silver surface is the cause of these effects, so the black skin of the black man’s face, according to Douglass—looking at a black man, the white man sees not himself but his dark opposite; with this opposition comes the negation of his principles so that his treatment of the black man accords with how he sees and, thus, understands him in relation to himself. Such ‘‘[c]olorphobia must have its day,’’ Douglass concludes; ‘‘[u]ntil then,’’ he says, he ‘‘shall pity’’ those like the hotel clerk ‘‘who, against all the feelings of their better nature, have to insult and abuse one part of their fellow-men to ‘accommodate themselves to the wishes and tastes’ of another’’ (‘‘A Card,’’ original emphasis). Neither the ‘‘colorphobia’’ nor the discrimination that Douglass describes is new, of course, but the simile he uses to figure them so precisely is. The daguerreotype’s unique material and representational characteristics and popular discussions of these characteristics in print facilitate Douglass’s development of a rhetorical likeness between two familiar causes and effects; as a result, his readers not only immediately recognize but also are persuaded by his version of the story in dispute. If whites inevitably will react negatively to blacks in face-to-face encounters so long as racial discrimination persists, then Douglass can only imagine a time in which such confrontations inspire positive impressions. Thus ‘‘The Heroic Slave’’—Douglass’s only work of fiction—becomes the time and space for just such a post-colorphobic encounter and for its revolutionary consequences for both parties.19 It does so by relying on both daguerreotypy and popular ideas of the medium shaped in print to realize this vision.

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The Heroic Portrait: Daguerreotypy in Douglass’s Fiction The fictionalized story of Madison Washington, an actual slave, and his escapes and the rebellion he led, ‘‘The Heroic Slave’’ begins with a blackwhite encounter from which the rest of the plot unfolds. A ‘‘Northern traveller [sic] through the State of Virginia,’’ appositely named Listwell (he both listens well and sympathetically inclines toward Washington), pauses in the woods to water his horse and overhears an apparently spontaneous soliloquy by Washington, lamenting his enslavement and resolving to achieve freedom.20 After listening attentively to the eloquent slave, Listwell looks out ‘‘from his hiding place’’ to catch a glimpse of him; he is rewarded with the sight of a ‘‘smile of satisfaction [that] rippled upon [Washington’s] expressive countenance, like that which plays upon the face of one who has but just solved a difficult problem, or vanquished a malignant foe’’ (179). Moving from contemplation to conversion immediately after his encounter with Washington, Listwell declares, ‘‘From this hour I am an abolitionist. I have seen enough and heard enough, and I shall to my home in Ohio resolved to atone for my past indifference to this ill-starred race, by making such exertions as I shall be able to do for the speedy emancipation of every slave in the land’’ (182). Five years later, Listwell is able to make good on his pledge when the now fugitive Washington arrives, Eliza-like, on his Ohio doorstep. With this second encounter—this time, a true facing scene, as both Washington and Listwell see each other—‘‘the recollection of the Virginia forest scene flash[es] upon’’ Listwell’s mind; he exclaims to an astonished and wary but desperate Washington, ‘‘I have seen your face, and heard your voice before. I am glad to see you. I know all’’ (185, original emphasis).21 Once the abolitionist has sheltered the fugitive in his home, Washington presses Listwell on these claims; Listwell explains, ‘‘Ever since that morning, you have seldom been absent from my mind, and though now I did not dare to hope that I should ever see you again, I have often wished that such might be my fortune; for, from that hour, your face seemed to be daguerreotyped on my memory’’ (188). Douglass’s novella frequently has been read as a sort of positive print from the negative of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—its enslaved protagonist ultimately resists his white oppressors with physical force instead of faith in leading the rebellion aboard the Creole at the story’s culmination.22 In closely comparing the similarities and differences between the two narratives, critics have overlooked the significance of both daguerreotypy and

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ideas about the medium that were forged in popular print to how both texts depict their heroes and their capacity to affect others.23 I want to suggest that Douglass adopts the rhetorical strategy of daguerreotyping Madison Washington from Uncle Tom’s Cabin but critically adapts it. Listwell’s mental daguerreotype of Washington, I contend, plays a crucial role in his and, ideally, the reader’s progression from seeing and sympathizing with a black person to taking specific actions to atone for past indifference and help speed emancipation. With Washington daguerreotyped on Listwell’s memory, Douglass realizes his hero, and Listwell begins to activate Douglass’s activist message within the narrative. As we will remember of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the reader first encounters Tom through what the narrative voice announces must be a daguerreotype, as befits the hero of the story. Here again is that daguerreotype-in-text: ‘‘He was a large, broad-chested, powerfully-made man, of a full glossy black, and a face whose truly African features were characterized by an expression of grave and steady good sense, united with much kindliness and benevolence. There was something about his whole air self-respecting and dignified, yet united with a confiding and humble simplicity’’ (UTC 68). In ‘‘The Heroic Slave,’’ the narrative voice similarly offers the first description of Washington’s appearance but without explicitly comparing it to any form of portraiture. Here I mean to suggest that Douglass consciously and pointedly does not daguerreotype his story’s hero. Instead, his narrative frames it so that Washington first comes into view for the reader when and as he does for Listwell (as seen from Listwell’s hiding place but as voiced by the narrator), thus staging a white man’s encounter with a black man that positively affects the former’s principles. Madison was of manly form. Tall, symmetrical, round, and strong. In his movements he seemed to combine, with the strength of a lion, a lion’s elasticity. His torn sleeves disclosed arms like polished iron. His face was ‘‘black, but comely.’’ His eye, lit with emotion, kept guard under a brow as dark and as glossy as the raven’s wing. His whole appearance betokened Herculean strength; yet there was nothing savage or forbidding in his aspect. A child might play in his arms, or dance on his shoulders. A giant’s strength, but not a giant’s heart was in him. His broad mouth and nose spoke only of good nature and kindness. But his voice, that unfailing index of the soul, though full and melodious, had that in it which could terrify as well

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as charm. He was just the man you would choose when hardships were to be endured, or danger to be encountered,—intelligent and brave. He had the head to conceive, and the hand to execute. In a word, he was one to be sought as a friend, but to be dreaded as an enemy. (179) As several critics have noted, these heroes and their introductions bear a strong resemblance to each other, and this likeness emphasizes important differences in the texts and their title characters.24 Both Tom and Madison Washington are powerful yet kind men; the two descriptions foreground physical features that confirm the great strength of each yet assure readers that these bodies are governed by minds of good nature and sense. But whereas Tom’s portrait manifests the ‘‘truly African features’’ of his face, we see Washington’s ‘‘manly form’’ and only implicit reference to its racial features. And Douglass’s description privileges Washington’s voice over his face and, implicitly—given the text’s engagement with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Douglass’s previous readings and writings on daguerreotypy and its capacities—over his daguerreian portrait as the ‘‘unfailing index’’ of his soul.25 This claim about Washington’s voice initially reads as further evidence of Douglass’s revision of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its apparent challenge to daguerreotypy—or at least Stowe’s reliance on the popular idea of daguerreotypy—as a means of revealing a ‘‘soul’’ seemingly belied by one’s appearance and, thus, of establishing grounds for sympathy between blacks and whites. Yet as we know from Listwell’s second confrontation with Washington, Douglass specifically invokes daguerreotypy. He does so, I want to suggest, in a way that makes it crucial to the sympathy that Listwell feels for Washington and that, thereby, makes it an implicit factor in the actions that the white man is willing to take on behalf of the black man. In Douglass’s novella, the reader does not see a figurative daguerreotype of a slave but how an image actually (if still fictionally) affects a white person much like him- or herself, and what one can do to help a slave escape and lead others to freedom. Whereas Uncle Tom’s Cabin gives us Tom’s daguerreotype without representing what readers should do with it, ‘‘The Heroic Slave’’ shows us how Listwell’s mental daguerreotype of Washington affects his thoughts, feelings, and actions. In this sense, then, ‘‘The Heroic Slave’’ could be said to figuratively daguerreotype both its black and white heroes. It does so, I argue, so that both characters come alive to the reader

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and so that, ideally, Douglass’s white reader remakes him- or herself in Listwell’s image in both principles and actions. Significantly, it is Listwell, not the narrator, who speaks of Washington’s daguerreian portrait in Douglass’s text—he says directly to Washington, ‘‘your face seemed to be daguerreotyped on my memory’’ (188). If we read closely his comparison of a distinct memory to a daguerreian portrait, what was by then a standard analogy takes on additional significance in Douglass’s story, particularly to its development of its characters and how the reader relates to them. Whereas Stowe’s narrative voice says Tom ‘‘must’’ be daguerreotyped, Listwell says that Washington only seems to be daguerreotyped, making the latter’s rhetorical adaptation of the visual medium more explicitly figurative than in Stowe’s narrative—more simile than metaphor. The comparison as comparison becomes more apparent when we note that Listwell first sees Washington in 1835 and that they encounter each other again in 1840. In that daguerreotypy was introduced in 1839, Listwell’s comparison of his memory to a daguerreian portrait is necessarily retrospective. While these details would seem to remind the reader that he or she is in the realm of the fictional rather than the actual, in Douglass’s deployment of daguerreotypy, the focus is on Listwell describing how his first encounter with Washington has affected him rather than on the narrative commenting on the most suitable means of constructing its hero. Whereas Uncle Tom’s Cabin calls attention to its own representational work even as it approximates a mode capable of making Tom seem real, ‘‘The Heroic Slave’’ instead shows a fictional character who, much like an actual person, is capable of reflecting on the representational work of his own memory. The reader sees Listwell as he realizes that even the most vivid image inspired by an actual person can only keep that person virtually present and, thus, add to a desire for real presence. Yet Listwell’s mental daguerreotype has kept both Washington and the pledge that Washington inspired alive to him for five years until he sees Washington again, which activates Listwell to make ‘‘such exertions’’ as he is ‘‘able to do’’ for Washington’s ‘‘speedy emancipation’’ (182). Thus fiction allows Douglass to realize a white-black, face-to-face encounter—once again, mediated linguistically with a simile that involves daguerreotypy—that does not invert the northern white man’s principles but rather strengthens and directs them toward recognizing injustice and helping liberate the black man. In ‘‘The Heroic Slave,’’ seeing and remembering visually (or thinking of memory as visual

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and, specifically, daguerreian) and acting from sight and memory, as Listwell does, can be equalizing and liberating, not just dominating and discriminating.

Daguerreotypy: The Picture of Progress The linkages of the visual arts, imagination, humanity, and progress toward liberty and justice were so interesting and significant to Douglass that he wrote, revised, and delivered a set of lectures on the subject between 1861 and 1865. As their titles indicate, the manuscript speeches and fragments ‘‘Lecture on Pictures,’’ ‘‘The Age of Pictures,’’ ‘‘Life Pictures,’’ and ‘‘Pictures and Progress’’ are about pictures, which Douglass defines broadly enough to include hieroglyphics, photographic and painted portraits, literary characterization, and imaginative thought.26 At the beginning of his ‘‘Lecture on Pictures’’—the most complete version of the speech— Douglass at once acknowledges and claims the freedom of inquiry that such a title and, thus, topic affords him: ‘‘The title of my lecture has the excellent merit of indefiniteness. It confines me nowhere and leaves me free to present anything from which may be derived either instruction or amusement’’ (1). At equal liberty to commence his wide-ranging exploration of pictures at any point in the history of human image making, Douglass significantly begins both the 1861 and the 1865 versions of his pictures lecture with an extended consideration of the daguerreotype. Because he is writing after daguerreotypy had largely been supplanted by subsequent photographic processes, he also is free to use the term photography and its ‘‘indefiniteness’’ to refer generally to all existing types of such pictures. Yet in both lectures, Douglass specifically focuses on the ‘‘wonderful discovery and invention by Daguerre’’ not only as the starting point for his thoughts on pictures but also as the key figure and word for representing the greatest achievements of the age, their consequences, and the distance still to go (2). He does so, I contend, because the democracy of daguerreian portraiture had become so firmly established in earlier discussions of the medium that Douglass is able to put forward the global ‘‘picture gallery’’ that Daguerre and the sun have created as the achievement of a racially egalitarian democracy in images, if not in reality.27 From Douglass’s vantage, writing and speaking in the 1860s after being daguerreotyped multiply in the 1840s and 1850s, the slave has become a man in his daguerreian portrait. His pictures

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lectures suggest that if his audiences look at his or any other African American’s image and reflect on its likeness to their own, the daguerreotype will show them the reality of blacks’ humanity and awaken them to their own. The occasion for Douglass’s ‘‘Lecture on Pictures’’ was an invitation to speak on December 3, 1861, as part of the fourth annual series of Parker Fraternity Lectures at the Tremont Temple in Boston.28 Other speakers that season included Charles Sumner, who gave a lecture titled ‘‘The Rebellion and Its Main-Spring’’; Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘‘American Nationality’’; Henry Ward Beecher, ‘‘Camp and Country’’; and Wendell Phillips, ‘‘The War.’’29 Given both the venue’s and series’ concern with slavery and the Civil War, Douglass’s choice of topics for his lecture is particularly striking for its apparently tangential connection to his usual subjects of slavery, abolition, racial equality, and rights. In acknowledging to his audience the unusualness of his choice and his presence as the sole black speaker in the series, Douglass declares himself to be ‘‘profoundly grateful for the honor of being called to lecture’’: ‘‘I take it as a compliment to my whole enslaved race: that while summoning men before you from the highest seats of learning[,] philosophy and statesmanship—you have also summoned one from the slave plantation.’’30 In doing so, Douglass affirms, ‘‘the committee of management have, in one act, labelled their course both philanthropic and cosmopolitan’’ (1). His speech is no less ‘‘cosmopolitan,’’ forging a chain of associative reflections ranging from history, innovation, democracy, and beauty to epistemology, war, reform, and material and moral progress. He begins: ‘‘Our age gets very little credit either for poetry or for song. It is generally condemned to wear the cold metalic [sic] stamp of a passionless utilitarianism. It is certainly remarkable for many things achievements, small and great, which accord with this popular description—and yet, for nothing is it more remarkable, than for the multitude, variety, perfection and cheapness of its pictures’’ (2). Seeking to credit both the age and the source of these pictures for this most remarkable achievement, Douglass adds Daguerre to the pantheon of great inventors that includes ‘‘Archwright [sic], Watt, Franklin, Fulton, and Morse,’’ announcing, ‘‘Daguerre by the simple, but all abounding sunlight has converted the planet into a picture gallery.’’ He credits the sun as well, naturalizing the technology as writers had since 1839: ‘‘As munificent in the exalted arena of art, as in the radiation of light and heat, the God of day not only decks the earth with rich fruits and beautiful flowers—but studs the world with pictures’’ (2).

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In these introductory remarks, three main reasons for Douglass’s particular interest in daguerreotypy emerge. First, he finds in its inventor a man of great achievement who has been unfairly excluded from the historical record. The ‘‘great father of our modern pictures,’’ he objects, ‘‘is seldom mentioned, though as worthy as the foremost’’ inventors. In a canceled line that is still legible in the manuscript, Douglass has written that ‘‘Daguerre might have been forgotten but for incorporating his name with his wonderful discovery’’ (2). Once before he expressed this same concern for the accomplishments of great men rendered anonymous by the historical record. At the beginning of ‘‘The Heroic Slave,’’ Douglass notes, ‘‘History has not been sparing in recording’’ the names of Virginia’s statesmen and heroes ‘‘or in blazoning their deeds.’’ ‘‘Yet not all the great ones of the Old Dominion have, by the fact of their birth-place, escaped undeserved obscurity,’’ Douglass continues. ‘‘By some strange neglect, one of the truest, manliest, and bravest of her children,—one who, in after years, will, I think, command the pen of genius to set his merits forth, holds now no higher place in the records of that grand old Commonwealth than is held by a horse or an ox’’ (174–75, original emphasis). The daguerreian portrait, like the ‘‘pen of genius,’’ is capable of setting the record right for both Madison Washington and Louis Daguerre. As Douglass observes in his lecture, ‘‘That Daguerre, has supplied a great want, is seen less in Eulogys [sic] bestowed upon his name, than in the rapidity and universality, with which his invention has been adopted’’ (3). In ‘‘The Heroic Slave,’’ we have seen that daguerreotypy has become so pervasive that Douglass adopts and adapts the word as a metaphor for Listwell’s lasting memory of Washington. Yet this ubiquity and the common experience of being a daguerreian subject conspire to render Daguerre himself anonymous. Whereas racism has excluded Madison Washington from historical distinction, the near universal acceptance of Daguerre’s own invention threatens to erase him from history. Second, even though it may cost Daguerre his just recognition, Douglass recognizes that this universality is his invention’s greatest virtue. In the sun’s ‘‘picture gallery,’’ Douglass declares, ‘‘[m]en of all conditions may see themselves as others see them. What was once the exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now within reach of all. The humbled servant girl whose income is but a few shillings per week may now possess a more perfect likeness of herself than noble ladies and even royalty, with all its precious

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treasures could purchase fifty years ago’’ (2). The ‘‘ease and cheapness with which we get our pictures has brought us all within range of the daguerrian apparatus’’ (3). With these observations, Douglass offers what was by 1861 a standard tribute to the democracy of portraiture effected by the daguerreotype, echoing T. S. Arthur, who wrote twelve years earlier: ‘‘A few years ago it was not every man who could afford a likeness of himself, his wife or his children; these were luxuries known to those only who had money to spare’’ (352). Yet Douglass’s celebration is unusual for its suggestion that the daguerreotype allows people of ‘‘all conditions’’ to ‘‘see themselves as others see them.’’ In that race would be one of the ‘‘conditions’’ that Douglass had in mind as equally welcome in this daguerreian democracy, he might seem to be suggesting an effect akin to Du Boisian double-consciousness. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois describes the experience of black subjectivity in America in similarly visual terms, as ‘‘a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.’’31 Yet a more immediate source for Douglass’s observation is Robert Burns’s 1786 poem ‘‘To a Louse,’’ particularly the first two lines of its oft-quoted final stanza, ‘‘O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!’’32 Adapted versions of these lines were featured in daguerreotypists’ advertisements, such as one for Mr. Ellsworth’s studio in Portsmouth, New Hampshire: ‘‘The discovery of this wonderful and curious art has answered to the letter, so far as the outer man is concerned, the wish expressed by Burns: ‘O that the gift dame nature’d gie us, / To see ourselves as others see us.’ ’’33 Beyond such commonplaces, a compelling philosophical parallel for this sense of self-awareness that Douglass describes as more unifying—or at least co-present—than dividing (in contrast with Du Bois) can be found in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘‘Fate,’’ delivered as a lecture in 1851 and published as an essay in 1860. Emerson compares the experience of what he also terms ‘‘double consciousness’’ to one ‘‘rid[ing] alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one, and the other foot on the back of the other.’’34 As Douglass sees the daguerreian portrait and represents it in his lecture, its visual, cognitive, and cultural effects are much like those of the mirror: mirrors were once luxuries for the wealthy that have become widely available over time. Both

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mirrors and daguerreotypes allow people of ‘‘all conditions’’ the experience of full subjectivity by complementing one’s internal self-awareness (what Emerson describes as one’s ‘‘private nature’’) with an embodied view of one’s self as it appears to others (one’s ‘‘public nature’’). Given the material characteristics of the polished daguerreotype plate, this view itself is also double: one is able to see oneself in the moment of seeing oneself as a portrait on the mirror-like surface of the image. In Douglass’s view, then, the democracy realized by daguerreian portraiture is not just attributable to its affordability but to its making a full experience of subjectivity available to all. In emphasizing that the daguerreotype ‘‘is now within reach’’ of people of ‘‘all conditions,’’ including those who live outside a major city, Douglass describes a common sight in rural antebellum America: ‘‘The smallest town now has its Daguerreian Gallery, and even at the cross roads—where stood but a solitary Blacksmiths shop and what was once a country Tavern but now in the last stages of delapidation [sic]—you will find the inevitable Daguerreian Gallery, shaped like a baggage car, with a hot house window at the top—adorned with red curtains, resting on Guttapurchia [sic] springs and wooden wheels painted yellow. The farmer boy gets an iron shoe for his horse, and a metalic [sic] picture for himself at the same time, and at the same price’’ (3). This ekphrastic description of the scene of a smalltown itinerant daguerreotypist’s mobile studio creates for Douglass’s Boston audience a vivid picture of an otherwise unfamiliar setting for having one’s portrait made. Accustomed to the luxurious studios of the city’s most prominent daguerreian ‘‘artists’’ such as Southworth & Hawes (whose rooms were located on the same street as the church in which Douglass was speaking), Douglass’s audience would have experienced the process of being daguerreotyped in more permanent and comfortable surroundings and the services of skilled artists catering to their clients’ aesthetic preferences—all for a price, as we have seen. But as we also have seen, and as Douglass again shows us, many Americans sat for the camera in much humbler circumstances, as areas without an established daguerreian studio were served by itinerant daguerreotypists who picked up the lucrative trade and traveled with their equipment from town to town, much as miniature portrait painters had before them. Yet for elite urbanites, rural farmer boys, and servant girls alike, Douglass notes, the medium of these ‘‘metalic [sic] picture[s]’’ is the same, regardless of the pictures’ cost, the setting in which they are recorded, and the artistry (or lack thereof) with which they are

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produced. These polished metal plates indiscriminately provide rich and poor, urban and rural, white and black, and everyone in between not only with lasting portraits of themselves but also with images of unprecedented verisimilitude—what Douglass calls ‘‘more perfect likeness[es].’’ Third, then, Douglass recognizes in his lecture, as he has in his newspaper writing, that the unique material characteristics of the daguerreian medium are not simply different from any other form of photography but also differently consequential: in his view, shaped by discussions of daguerreotypy in popular print, the daguerreian medium is the message of democracy. The ‘‘Lecture on Pictures’’ broadens from daguerreotypy and the reasons for Douglass’s interest in this one form of pictures to a series of extended reflections on the powers of pictures in general. He proposes the universality of picture making as the capacity that distinguishes ‘‘the lowest man from the highest animal.’’ ‘‘[M]an is everywhere, a picture making animal,’’ Douglass observes, noting that this is a rule ‘‘without an exception’’ that ‘‘may be safely commended’’ to American ethnologists such as Louis Agassiz, Josiah C. Nott, and George R. Gliddon ‘‘who are just now puzzled with the question as to whether the African slave should be treated as a man or an ox’’ (9–10).35 From this pointed assertion, the lecture becomes more abstract as Douglass recognizes the ‘‘whole soul of man’’ as a ‘‘sort of picture gallery[,] a grand panorama, in which all the great facts of the universe, in tracing things of time and things of eternity are painted’’ (10). In a further Emersonian turn, he extends his idea of picture making to include the ‘‘process by which man is able to invert his own subjective consciousness, into the objective form’’—much like a daguerreotype plate inverts its subject in the image, as Douglass has observed in his newspaper writing, and much as Listwell is able to reflect on his own memory as a daguerreotype in ‘‘The Heroic Slave.’’ Douglass reasons that this capacity to think about (or ‘‘picture’’) the act of thinking itself is ‘‘the highest attribute of man[’]s nature’’ (13). He extends this attribute to include the human ability to imagine what does not yet exist—another form of picture making36 —and moves to conclude his speech with a consideration of the nation as such an ideal realized only to be threatened with its own undoing because slavery is still in the picture. The alternative to the seemingly intransigent present that Douglass ultimately ‘‘pictures’’ is progress, which he represents as a consequence of both natural and human agency: ‘‘Nothing stands to day where it stood yesterday. The choice which life presents, is ever more, between growth and

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decay, perfection and deterioration. There is no standing still, nor can be. Advance or recede, occupy or give place—are the stern and imperative alternatives’’ (26). Such forward motion is not without ethical implications: ‘‘[m]aterial progress,’’ Douglass asserts, ‘‘may for a time be separated from moral progress. But the two cannot be permanently divorced’’ (28).37 With such faith in this inevitable reconciliation, he predicts that ‘‘[t]he Increased facilities of locommotion [sic], the growing inter communication of distant nations, the rapid transmission of intelligence over the globe—the world wide ramifications of commerce—bringing together the knowledge, the skill, and the mental power of the world—cannot but dispel prejudice[,] dissolve the granite barriers of arbitrary power, bring the world into, peace and unity, and at last crown the world with just[ice,] Liberty, and brotherly kindness’’ (28–29). He presses this point by concluding the lecture with a series of metaphors linking material and moral progress, as well as celebration and caution: ‘‘In every lightening [sic] wire may be recognized a reformer; In every bar of rail road iron a missionary—In every locommotive [sic] a herald of progress—the startling scream of the Engine—and the small ticking sound of the telegraph are a like phrophecies [sic] of hope to the philanthropist, and warnings to the systems of slavery, superstition and oppression to get themselves away to the mirky [sic] shades of barbarism’’ (29). Notably missing from this list is daguerreotypy. We can read its absence from the lecture’s culmination as attributable to the form of the lecture according with its content: to include the daguerreotype here would be to return to an example of material progress that Douglass has finished discussing and to an argument he has already made about the specific form of moral progress that it has effected. In this reading, daguerreotypy is the picture of progress from which the rest of the ‘‘Lecture on Pictures’’—and, thus, Douglass’s idea of progress itself—progresses. The daguerreotype and how people have come to see it, then, are the beginning of the end for slavery in Douglass’s view—it faithfully prefigures his eventual argument about the relationship of material and moral advances that must make such barbarous systems things of the past. Despite the friendly setting of the lecture, not everyone in Douglass’s 1861 audience was receptive to his attempt to expand beyond his usual lecture topics or to his argument about the relationship of pictures and progress. In the column ‘‘From Boston’’ in the Springfield Weekly Republican, published four days after the lecture, a correspondent named Warrington reviews Douglass’s performance:

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Frederick Douglas [sic] gave the Fraternity lecture on Tuesday night. It came near being a total failure; the speaker only saved himself by switching off suddenly from his subject, and pitching in on the great question of the day. An abolition friend who sat near me, and who was thoroughly bored by his first half hour’s discourse on pictures and daguerreotype saloons, despondingly remarked, ‘‘A nigger ain’t much better than a white man after all!’’ The closing part of the address, though necessarily disjointed and rambling, gave evidence of Douglas’s old power, and the audience applauded heartily, glad, probably, to be relieved from what they feared would be a journey, a jam and an evening without result.38 Transferring his own frustration at Douglass’s speech to his perhaps fictional ‘‘abolition friend’’ and the rest of the audience, the reviewer reveals his bias against Douglass as a speaker out of his element and past his prime. Like the ‘‘daguerreotype saloons’’ in the first half of the lecture, Douglass is an artifact of the recent past; from Warrington’s perspective, neither fully belongs in the urgent present. Even the reviewer for the Liberator seems unable, or unwilling, to engage with the lecture on Douglass’s terms when summarizing its content. ‘‘A. F. R.’’ asserts that its ‘‘chief excellence consisted in a manly and fearless utterance of the great truths which underlie all poetry, and constitute the very essence of all that is heroic and beautiful in humanity.’’39 Even so, A. F. R. concludes, like the Springfield Weekly Republican’s Warrington, that Douglass’s lecture must be about slavery: ‘‘He claimed for his race equal rights with their white brothers, and showed conclusively that as slavery is the cause of the war, so only freedom can put an end to the war. His logic was irresistible.’’ Yet if this sympathetic reviewer was reluctant or unable to acknowledge the actual subject of Douglass’s lecture, his or her description of Douglass’s oratorical presence implicitly does so in its strikingly daguerreian language: ‘‘as Frederick Douglass stood there, his form dilating with conscious power, his eye flashing, and his whole face glowing with enthusiasm, while his clear silver tones rang like a trumpet, all who saw and heard him must have felt that he was not an object of indulgence, but of admiration.’’ In this virtual daguerreian portrait, Douglass’s eye flashes, his face glows, and his voice is silver toned like the reflective surface of the daguerreotype plate. Yet troublingly, the reviewer’s language renders Douglass as an object rather than a subject—as something (some thing) to

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be looked at and admired, like the daguerreotype itself, and not as someone seen in person or in a daguerreian portrait and, thus, realized and recognized as a full-fledged person. Douglass reprints the Liberator’s review in the January 1862 of Douglass’ Monthly. In place of an editorial response, Douglass immediately follows the review with another reprint that counters both Warrington and A. F. R. with the perspective of an audience member who was willing to engage with Douglass’s lecture on its own terms. This review from the Pine and Palm, a pro-Haitian immigration newspaper published by James Redpath in Boston, begins with an expression of relief that Douglass has spoken about something other than slavery: ‘‘We are always glad to hear colored speakers select topics outside of the slavery question; not that we would have that important subject ignored, but we would have the negro haters of our country to know that the man of color, though once a slave, has a reflective mind, and can make himself master of other phases of thought.’’40 After drawing this implicit comparison between the slave’s mind and the reflective daguerreian plate, reviewer ‘‘B.’’ praises the lecture for its ‘‘deep research’’ that ‘‘satisfied every listener that Mr. Douglass looks upon pictures with the eye of an artist. There was an originality in his description of the progress of picture-making, especially as modernized, which was indeed refreshing, as well as amusing. Every phase of the art, and its effect upon the age, from Raphael, Rubens, and Michael Angelo, down to the daguerreotypist who may be found at almost every village cross-road, was brought out with all its light and shade’’ (589). In contrast to the Liberator’s review, that from the Pine and Palm recognizes not only the subject of Douglass’s lecture but also the argument of the lecture for how it constructs Douglass as a subject. Specifically, the review presents Douglass as a picture maker in his own right and, thus, as a member the highest order of beings, according to the logic of his own lecture. In capturing the ‘‘light and shade’’ of Douglass’s topic and argument about pictures and progress, the Pine and the Palm achieves almost daguerreian clarity when juxtaposed with the misrepresentations of the lecture in the other reviews. ‘‘Shadows as Well as Sunbeams’’: Douglass in Daguerreian Portraiture The ongoing expansion of the literary canon, a coincident increase in scholarly attention to visual culture and to images as ‘‘texts,’’ and the continuing

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effort to produce a clearer picture of Frederick Douglass in all of his complexity have resulted in a recent critical focus on Douglass’s writings about visual representation and his several portraits. Most such scholarship situates these visual texts in relation to Douglass’s autobiographies, reading the portraits as autobiography, arguing that they tell us as much about Douglass as his narrative self-representations—if not more.41 This persistent, if implicit, faith in the revelatory power of portraits—especially photographic ones—even when read as ‘‘texts’’ is, I contend, rooted in the nineteenthcentury response to the daguerreotype, to which Douglass’s writings about pictures and his portraits themselves contribute. Of course, any portrait—be it painted, drawn, photographic, or otherwise imaged—does tell us something about its subject: at the very least, it allows us to see what he or she looks (or looked) like. Beyond this, a portrait also can give us clues—in theory, if not in practice—about its subject’s social status and, through his or her facial expression, some suggestion of the subject’s emotions at a given moment. But in the case of Frederick Douglass, if we resist the temptation to read his photographic portraits for what more they seem to reveal about him as an individual, we are better able to see Douglass— not as he essentially was but for how he contributed to, and exploited, the consolidation of such faith in photography’s revelatory powers in both theory (in his writings about daguerreotypy) and in practice (in his daguerreian portraits). When his identity was a subject of such intense debate (given his legal status as a fugitive slave at the beginning of his public life and because of his eloquence and learnedness as a lecturer and writer) and when the very definition of ‘‘personhood’’ was so much under construction (in the slavery question, in mid-century theories of polygenesis, and in the rough ‘‘science’’ of ethnology), no clear picture of Douglass could possibly emerge—not even in a daguerreian portrait. As Arthur Riss has compellingly argued of the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, even as Douglass grounds the story of his life on a fixed, a priori idea of personhood, his autobiography contains a counternarrative that suggests ‘‘ ‘personhood’ is produced rather than reflected, an identity that must be enacted rather than a brute fact to be cited’’ (167). The same, I contend, is true of his daguerreian portraits: at first glance, Douglass is visible as a full-fledged ‘‘person’’—as a liberal, individual, and even bourgeois subject—in these images. But by looking more closely, we see how these fixed yet flickering images actively produce and enact his personhood, much like Augustus Washington’s portraits of the members of

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the Liberian government. Douglass’s daguerreotypes do so not only through his dress, postures, and facial expressions, as is the case in portraiture generally, but also and most exceptionally through the medium’s unique material characteristics and the popular beliefs that were discursively attached to them. In Douglass’s daguerreian portraits, his seemingly ‘‘reflected’’ personhood is, I argue, produced and enacted through the medium’s unique reflectivity and popular discussions of its visual effects. As I have suggested of the imagined daguerreian portrait of Stowe’s fictional Tom, and as is actually visible in the daguerreotypes of Douglass, the viewer sees him- or herself reflected on the mirror-like surface of the daguerreotype plate along with Douglass’s image. Through this co-presence on the image surface that is only possible when viewing a daguerreian portrait firsthand (as it necessarily would have been seen in the nineteenth century), sympathetic identification based on the recognition of a likeness becomes possible—not inevitable, but possible. Yet this visual effect and its potential affective consequences become invisible in even the highestquality reproductions of Douglass’s daguerreian portraits that capture the image but not the characteristics of the medium. Even if a relatively small number of people would have had direct access to Douglass’s portraits in the nineteenth century, this crucial material difference in how we encounter and experience them has gone unacknowledged. An even more striking visual effect of the daguerreian image surface is impossible to experience in reproductions of Douglass’s portraits: when a viewer tilts or looks at the original of one of Douglass’s daguerreian portraits at an angle, his image reverses from positive to negative and what was dark becomes light (and vice versa). Through this uncanny effect that is exclusive to the daguerreian medium, Douglass can be seen as ‘‘white’’—if only for a moment, and only if racial identity is based on the color of one’s skin, as many understood it to be in the nineteenth century. From this perspective that is possible only in viewing a daguerreotype, Douglass’s daguerreian portraits both represent and enact the dual racial identity that Douglass embodied and experienced as his slave mother’s and white master’s son. More provocatively, they also allow Douglass’s white viewers to see Douglass literally as they see themselves, with their faces’ reflected copresence with Douglass’s and with the negative of Douglass’s image appearing light like their own. As I have suggested, these dynamic optical effects cannot be experienced in Douglass’s extant daguerreotype portraits as they are reproduced here

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Figure 30. Unknown daguerreotypist, portrait of Frederick Douglass, unknown date. Collection of Greg French.

(Figures 30–35). They must be imagined, through the creation of what Douglass calls ‘‘thought pictures,’’ no less than for the fictional daguerreotypes that we have ‘‘seen’’ in the many short stories of daguerreian-era print publications, The House of the Seven Gables, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (‘‘Lecture’’ 9). Aware of this difference in the phenomenology of viewing

Figure 31. Unknown daguerreotypist, portrait of Frederick Douglass, c. 1848. Chester County Historical Society, West Chester, Pennsylvania.

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Figure 32. Unknown daguerreotypist, portrait of Frederick Douglass, c. 1850. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.

the original portraits and their print surrogates, we also understand them with the sort of double consciousness that Douglass praises in his lecture as ‘‘the highest attribute of man[’]s nature’’—the ‘‘process by which man is able to invert his own subjective consciousness into the objective form’’ (13). This imaginative awareness serves as an important check against our

Figure 33. Samuel J. Miller, Frederick Douglass, 1847–52. Cased half-plate daguerreotype, 6 x 91/2 x 3/4 in. Major Acquisitions Centennial Endowment, 1996.433, The Art Institute of Chicago.

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Figure 34. Unidentified artist, Frederick Douglass, c. 1850 after c. 1847 daguerreotype. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

nineteenth-century-derived faith in the photographic archive—and especially in just such collections of portraits of a subject from several phases of his life—to provide a composite and, thus, even more accurate picture of a subject.42 We know of six extant daguerreotype portraits of Douglass; they are collected and reproduced together for the first time here.43 I bring them together to emphasize less their likeness than their differences, for what

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Figure 35. Frederick Douglass, c. 1855. Daguerreotype, 7.0 x 5.6 cm (23/4 x 23/16 in.). The Rubel Collection, Partial and Promised Gift of William Rubel, 2001 (2001.756). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y., U.S.A. Image 䉷 The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, N.Y.

their distinguishing characteristics, made more visible through comparison, contribute to our critical conversation about Douglass, visual representation, and nineteenth-century American politics. Specifically, in what follows, I want to focus on the most noticeably different and understudied portrait in the collection: the profile of

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Douglass, made by an unknown daguerreotypist circa 1850 (Figure 32). This portrait, so unlike Douglass’s others and the vast majority of daguerreotypes as a true profile, has yet to receive any critical attention. Its formal resemblance with some of the daguerreian era’s most controversial images, the ways in which its material characteristics interact with these formal characteristics, and its relevance to Douglass’s linkage of material and moral progress make this portrait especially worthy of an extended close look. As I have begun to suggest, true profiles are relatively uncommon in daguerreian portraiture. Even in the very first photographic portrait—a daguerreian self-portrait by Robert Cornelius made in 1839—the subject faces the camera so that his full face is visible. This rarity may be attributable, in part, to the desire to understand daguerreotypy as a decided break with or a dramatic improvement upon previous modes of mechanically aided portraiture. The silhouette and the profile, created by means of physiognotraces, pantographs, and other drawing devices, were considered to be the most accurate forms of likenesses before the introduction of the daguerreotype; the profile view in daguerreian portraiture may have been mostly avoided for its association with such outmoded technologies.44 Even so, in eighteenth-century painted portraits, the profile is a relatively rare form.45 According to John Gage, this ‘‘rarity was precisely what commended the profile so much to [Johann Kasper] Lavater,’’ the eighteenth-century father of physiognomy, in that ‘‘it offered the head for objective study, undisturbed by the mobility of features so expressive of social interaction’’ (122). For Lavater, the profile ‘‘revealed those features most salient for the interpretation of character, the brow, the nose and the chin, whose size, angle and shape could be measured against an ideal scale’’ (121). Indeed, Douglass’s daguerreian profile does image these features and other aspects of his physiognomy clearly, as we can see by looking at it on its own and in comparison with his other portraits. Yet the profile conceals as much information as it reveals for understanding both Douglass and the image itself. As with many daguerreotypes, including five out of Douglass’s six other known portraits, nothing about the image tells us who took it, nor precisely when, where, or why it was taken.46 Such information could aid in determining whether it was created at Douglass’s or someone else’s request, as well as whether Douglass, someone else, or the daguerreotypist decided that Douglass should be positioned in profile.47 Douglass’s writings reveal that he knew profiles were the preferred form for the ethnological portrait, as scientists seeking to establish meaningful physical differences

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between the races appropriated both the form and the methodologies of physiognomy for their arguments. In 1849 he reviewed Wilson Armistead’s A Tribute for the Negro for the North Star. The review includes a sharp critique of white artists’ inability to create ‘‘impartial portraits’’ of black subjects, which Douglass attributes to the influence of such physiognomic ethnology: It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features. And the reason is obvious. Artists, like all other white persons have adopted a theory respecting the distinctive features of negro physiognomy. . . . They associate with the negro face, high cheek bones, distended nostril, depressed nose, thick lips, and retreating foreheads. This theory impressed strongly upon the mind of an artist exercises a powerful influence over his pencil, and very naturally leads him to distort and exaggerate those peculiarities, even when they scarcely exist in the original. The temptation to make the likeness of the negro, rather than of the man, is very strong, and often leads the artist, as well as the player, ‘‘to overstep the modesty of nature.’’48 The influential exaggerations that Douglass describes come from Samuel George Morton’s Crania Americana, published in the same year that the daguerreotype was introduced and still circulating when Douglass reviewed Armistead’s book (Figure 36).49 They are also visible in continuing ‘‘American School’’ ethnological research inspired by Morton, including the series of daguerreotypes of seven South Carolina slaves taken in 1850 by the daguerreotypist J. T. Zealy in his studio under the direction of the South Carolina paleontologist Dr. Robert W. Gibbes and at the request of Harvard’s Louis Agassiz (Figures 37–41). From his research, Agassiz prepared an introductory ‘‘Sketch of the Natural Provinces of the Animal World and Their Relations to the Different Types of Man,’’ accompanied by a tableau featuring profile examples of the different ‘‘types’’ of man, for Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon’s 1854 Types of Mankind (Figure 42). Given Douglass’s critique, the possibility that most, if not all, of these images were circulating around the time that Douglass’s profile portrait was made, and the discursively established popular faith in the daguerreotype’s representational objectivity, it is quite tempting to read Douglass’s profile daguerreotype as a deliberate rebuttal to the American School ethnologists, white

Figure 36. Plates 20 and 37 from Samuel George Morton, Crania Americana; or, A Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America (Philadelphia, 1839). Courtesy of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library.

Figure 37. J. T. Zealy, Renty, Frontal, 1850. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Figure 38. J. T. Zealy, Delia, Frontal, 1850. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Figure 39. J. T. Zealy, Drana, Frontal, 1850. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Figure 40. J. T. Zealy, Jack, Frontal, 1850. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

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Figure 41. J. T. Zealy, Fassena, Frontal, 1850. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

artists, and anyone else who doubted Douglass’s or any other black person’s humanity. As John Stauffer has argued, ‘‘Douglass’s criticism of white artists helps to explain why he was so taken with photography: he thought that the veracity of the daguerreotype . . . prevented distortions of blacks that came from the hands of white artists’’ (‘‘Creating an Image’’ 260). Yet as Brian Wallis explains of the Harvard slave daguerreotypes, ‘‘Agassiz hoped to use the photographs as evidence to prove his theory of ‘separate creation’ ’’; the images that resulted, Wallis argues, ‘‘discredit the very notion of objectivity and call into question the supposed transparency of the photographic record.’’50 A direct comparative analysis of Douglass’s profile daguerreotype with these images sheds further light on Douglass’s and daguerreotypy’s positions in this apparent and fundamental contradiction. When viewed through the lens of the ‘‘European’’ and ‘‘Negro’’ types in Types of Mankind, Douglass’s facial features and clothes in his daguerreian profile resemble the European’s more than the Negro’s (Figure 43). The shape of his nose, jaw line, and forehead, the style (but not the texture) of his hair, and the quality and style of his shirt, coat, and tie are legible as

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Figure 42. Detail of the tableau accompanying Louis Agassiz’s ‘‘Sketch of the Natural Provinces of the Animal World and Their Relations to the Different Types of Man,’’ in Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia, 1854). Courtesy of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library.

European and, thus, white in Agassiz’s scheme. The light that is concentrated on the upper two-thirds of his face, almost giving it the appearance of a mask, throws these features into sharp relief against the dark background of the portrait, further emphasizing their shape as well as Douglass’s already light coloring.51 When compared with Douglass’s other daguerreotypes, the profile form that this image shares with Agassiz’s ethnographic ‘‘types’’ makes his nose appear narrower and his skin whiter; in this portrait, Douglass could to be said to resemble the European type more than even himself. When viewed in comparison with the daguerreotype profiles of Renty, taken from the Congo tribe; Jack, a slave driver of Guinean origin; and

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Figure 43. ‘‘European’’ and ‘‘Negro’’ types, details from tableau accompanying Agassiz’s ‘‘Sketch of the Natural Provinces of the Animal World and Their Relations to the Different Types of Man,’’ in Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia, 1854), compared with Douglass’s profile, courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.

Fassena, a Mandingo enslaved carpenter (as they are identified by Gibbes in the written records that he sent to Agassiz with the images), Douglass’s profile similarly manifests several marked differences, both despite and because of their shared medium and orientation (Figure 44). The halo of light around the slaves’ faces against the dark background and the angle at which the light strikes their faces emphasize the darkness of their skin tones

Figure 44. J. T. Zealy, Renty, Jack, and Fassena, Profiles, 1850. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. Douglass’s profile, courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.

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in comparison to that of Douglass. Although their skin likely was darker— according to Gibbes, Renty, Jack, and Fassena were ‘‘pure’’ Africans and as slaves in America they were forced to work outside, whereas Douglass was racially mixed and no longer worked in the fields or on the docks— differences in the daguerreotypists’ studio lighting heighten the differences in skin tone and features derived from their varying ancestries. Their facial features differ from Douglass’s, but they also vary among the slaves. (In letters to Morton, Gibbes wrote that Agassiz ‘‘found enough’’ in Renty, Jack, Fassena, and the other slaves that he selected to be daguerreotyped ‘‘to satisfy him that they have differences from the other races.’’)52 The texture of Douglass’s hair reads as African in its similarity to that of the slaves, yet unlike theirs, it is not close-cropped for utilitarian purposes. Rather, Douglass’s hair is longer and styled much more like the European’s in the Types of Mankind tableau. That Renty’s, Jack’s, and Fassena’s shirts have been stripped to their waists to reveal their torsos clearly differentiates not only their images but also their legal status from Douglass’s—they are clearly slaves. Their partial nudity was likely no more voluntary than either their presence or their profile orientation in the daguerreotypes. Again, although we cannot know if Douglass’s daguerreotype was taken for him or if he requested to be imaged in profile, we can be certain that his presence in front of the camera was voluntary. And while we cannot see much of the slaves’ clothing, we also know that it must have been very basic. What little of their clothes is visible signifies their very different legal and economic status from the then-free, and well-dressed, Douglass. When compared with Renty’s, Jack’s, and Fassena’s daguerreian profiles, then, Douglass begins to look like himself again in his profile—his clothes, manner, and voluntary presence in the image reunite this portrait with the others despite its different aspect(s). In his critical remarks on race, portraiture, and physiognomy, Douglass charges white artists with ‘‘most grossly exaggerating’’ the ‘‘distinctive features’’ of black men and with ‘‘adopt[ing] a theory respecting the distinctive features of negro physiognomy’’ (review of A Tribute for the Negro). Here, Douglass seems to challenge not the idea that people of African descent share distinctive facial features but the exaggeration of these features by racist artists and theories like polygenesis that ethnologists including Morton, Agassiz, Nott, and Gliddon base on them. Yet in the same review, Douglass also says that he has ‘‘heard many white persons say, that ‘negroes all look alike,’ and that they could not distinguish between the old and the

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young.’’ ‘‘There is the greatest variety of form and feature among us,’’ he counters, ‘‘and there is seldom one face to be found, which has all the features, usually attributed to the negro.’’ Then, in a remarkable statement that combines these seemingly opposite ideas of racial resemblance and variety, Douglass observes, ‘‘there are those, from which these marks of African descent (while their color remains unchanged,) have disappeared entirely.’’ This description would seem to apply to Douglass himself as he is pictured in the profile daguerreotype portrait, especially when viewed in comparison with Agassiz’s ‘‘types.’’ But in the context of Douglass’s other daguerreotype portraits, it becomes apparent that Douglass’s ‘‘marks of African descent’’ have ‘‘disappeared entirely’’ only from the representation of the man, not from the man himself. From this comparative perspective, the profile daguerreotype, like the representations of whites by black artists that Douglass imagines being made in response to their misrepresentations, could be said to picture his ‘‘lips too thin,’’ his nose ‘‘too sharp and pinched up,’’ his ‘‘cheeks too lantern-like,’’ his ‘‘hair too lank and lifeless,’’ and his face ‘‘altogether too cadaverous.’’ But as a portrait understood to be made by the sun rather than by men, the daguerreotype is culturally invested with a representational authority that supposedly ensures that the likeness is true. Accordingly, the ‘‘temptation to make [it] the likeness’’ of the man ‘‘is very strong.’’ As is especially visible in this case, though, the medium of portraiture is anything but impartial—even in daguerreotypy. Our perception and understanding of the image are structured by its formal features: there is nothing neutral or objective about Douglass’s position in profile, the manner in which his face and features are lighted, or the composition’s resemblance to utterly subjective representations of human ‘‘types.’’ Douglass’s identity, then, in his daguerreian profile, is profoundly conflicted: it appears both to exaggerate and understate his racial identities, it seems at once objective and subjective. As such, this image makes especially visible how everything that we have been taught by popular print—including Douglass’s own writings and speeches—to see in and believe about daguerreotypes comes as much from written descriptions of the medium and its representational capacities as from daguerreotypy itself. Douglass’s daguerreian profile—like all daguerreotypes—ultimately works in shades of gray, reflecting rather than reconciling the impossible binaries of subjectivity and objectivity and black and white in antebellum America.

Epilogue

‘‘An Old Daguerreotype’’

By the time Frederick Douglass was delivering his lectures on pictures in the early 1860s, daguerreotypy was an outmoded technology. By the end of the century, the once-new medium, its first practitioners, and the subjects in its images had all grown old and become oddities to the always modern eye, as we see in the poem and essay with which I conclude this study. When new media and technologies become old and unfamiliar, just as when they were new and strange, we turn to more familiar media to make sense of them. Thus, this book ends as it began by looking to writings about daguerreotypy published in nineteenth-century periodicals for the stories they tell about the life cycle of not just daguerreotypy but also media and technology more generally. Anna M. Tuttle’s 1898 poem ‘‘An Old Daguerreotype’’ is one of several so-titled poems published at the end of the century as part of a broader cultural look back at the past from the cusp of the future.1 Of these poems, Tuttle’s is the most interesting because it insistently represents the daguerreotype as both an image and an object—as belonging to both the visual and material culture of earlier days. It begins, It has a somewhat bygone look, This little black, thick-covered book, Whose velvet welt, whose slender hook, Some tarnish shows. The ‘‘little black, thick-covered book’’ is, of course, the protective and decorative case in which the daguerreotype has been enclosed and preserved. As photographic images came to be printed on paper, such cases were no longer needed and became material indexes of the technology in a more

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primitive stage. In noting the case’s resemblance to an old book, the poem reproduces the same strategy of mediation that we saw with the daguerreotype’s introduction: using a familiar medium to make an unfamiliar one knowable. Yet as we see in this case (both the poem and the little black book), the daguerreotype is strange because it is old instead of new. When the book-like case is opened to reveal its contents, we do not encounter the image immediately but meet with more mediation: a description of the viewer’s difficulty in discerning the image because of the unique visual effects of the mirror-like medium. But though elusive to the sight, Propitious turnings to the light Will, scarcely dimmed by time’s still flight, A face disclose, The poem explains of the unique experience of encountering a daguerreotype. For most readers—who were encountering this poem in a magazine filled with newly possible halftone reproductions of photographs—the process of tilting the case to find the right angle of light in which to view a daguerreian image would have been either a dim memory or something never experienced. Although the poem does not mention the mirror-like plate reflecting the viewer’s image along with the subject’s as another effect of this process, I want to suggest that once again, we see a text activate the possibility of its reader seeing him- or herself in the poetic speaker’s experience of viewing a daguerreian portrait, using identification as a means of bridging the distance and difference between people and technologies. While the poem notes that time has not affected the quality of the image, it devotes an ekphrastic stanza to elaborating its effects on the appearance of the image’s subject: A stiff, old man, with features dressed To match his suit of Sunday best; The high-cut broadcloth, satin vest In wrinkled sheen. The thick stock tied with wifely care ’Neath flapping tabs of linen fair, The high-brushed peak of his thin gray hair, All plainly seen.

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What we ‘‘plainly’’ see is how ridiculous the ‘‘stiff, old man’’ looks to the speaker in the poem; his posture and especially his outmoded clothes clearly mark both him and the daguerreotype as from another time. Such distancing heightens the rhetorical effect of the poem’s abrupt turn from unfamiliarity to familiarity in its fifth stanza when its speaker announces of the old man in the image, My ancestor in direct line, His blood flows in these veins of mine, His faults and virtues intertwine To tint my own. Whereas the daguerreotype’s material characteristics estrange it from the kinds of photographs with which the poem’s speaker and readers would have been more familiar, blood materially connects past and present in the poem, making the unfamiliar subject of the portrait literally familiar to the speaker. This physical connection results in the speaker’s affective link to subject, image, and medium alike as she carefully ‘‘close[s] the little faded case, / And lay[s] it in its wonted place.’’ Having grown to ‘‘like the solemn, shadowy face’’ in the image, she declares, ‘‘Let it rest near / The Bible’’ and other sentimental heirlooms associated with her ancestor—his ‘‘huge chapeau’’ and ‘‘sword and cane that yearly grow / More quaint and queer.’’ As the poem closes, the oldness of the daguerreian portrait, its subject, and his things makes them valuable—sacred, even. The poem suggests that they are precious things of wonder not only because they have been preserved against the loss that inevitably comes with the passage of time but also because that past has eventuated in the present of the poem: neither the poetic speaker nor photography would exist as they do without the old man in the image or daguerreotypy as their ancestors. Thus the poem’s ‘‘old daguerreotype’’ simultaneously indexes the distance and mediates the connection between then and now and old and new at the end of the century. Similarly, members of the ‘‘family’’ of professional photographers nostalgically began looking back at the medium’s earliest days and practitioners, calling upon a generation that they realized would soon be lost—even as their daguerreotypes remained—to publish their recollections for the present generation and, thereby, to preserve them for future generations. Here again, we see the written word mediating how the daguerreotype is seen; popular periodicals circulate and record the stories behind the

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first daguerreian images and their production and, thereby, the story of photography in the first stage of its life cycle. James Wallace Black’s reminiscences were published under the title ‘‘Days Gone By’’ in the St. Louis Practical Photographer in mid-1877.2 Black had come to public and professional prominence as a daguerreotypist in partnership with John Adams Whipple in Boston in the 1850s; their studio competed with Southworth & Hawes for the patronage of Boston’s most prominent citizens while experimenting to improve technical and artistic aspects of the daguerreian process.3 Black addresses his remarks to the journal’s editor, J. H. Fitzgibbon, and begins by noting that he has put off his friend’s request because he is ‘‘not used to putting [his] thoughts in writing’’ and because his ‘‘experience would be a reproduction of what [Fitzgibbon] and many others have been through, as old Daguerreotypers’’ (220). In what follows, we see that Black deals with his concern that he has nothing new to say about an old medium, and about working in a different medium (words) than the one to which he is accustomed (images), by placing daguerreotypy in the context of other emerging technologies. In doing so, he inserts daguerreotypy and his story into the larger narrative of technological progress. Black describes how he learned the process in 1845 ‘‘at the same time [that] experiments were being made on the sewing machine—since a great success, but at that time thought an impossibility’’ (220). Daguerreotypy and the sewing machine are not just contemporary technologies in Black’s account, they are co-present in his training to be a daguerreotypist; experiments with both were undertaken in the same room, he notes—a detail that suggests how early adopters distributed the risk of their investments across a range of promising technologies. From the vantage of retrospection, Black recognizes the limitations of his own entrepreneurial and technological imagination at the time: ‘‘I remember thinking how impossible it must be to sew by machinery, and I as little thought of the wide range that photography would eventually take,’’ he explains. Yet he also notes that with subsequent innovation, much of the technical knowledge and original wonder of daguerreotypy have been lost: ‘‘At the present day, few know of the manual labor and pains bestowed to produce’’ successful daguerreotypes. ‘‘At that time they were wonderful, and the fact of being able to secure a reflection of light was almost as incredible as the telephone of the present day,’’ Black recollects. Here again we see a more familiar technology being used to mediate how the writer’s audience understands another. But Black’s comparison reverses the usual dynamic of such comparisons in that

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the mediating technology (the telephone) is at once the new, wondrous, and more familiar one because it is more immediate than the now old and distant daguerreotype. And as in Tuttle’s poem, we see that what was once the new medium in need of a mediating comparison to a more familiar old one has become not just the old medium but an almost forgotten one. As such, daguerreotypy must be mediated through something better known (telephony) so that it—and its practitioners’ initial enchantment with it— becomes knowable by comparison. Although Black attributes the loss of both the charm and knowledge of the process to the forward march of time and innovation, his narrative of technological progress reverses course when he declares that daguerreotypy ‘‘is one of the best types of sun pictures ever made’’ and that ‘‘if we were practicing it now, with our present knowledge, meagre as it is, [we] would produce magnificent results’’ (220). While his praise of daguerreotypy is qualified—it is only ‘‘one of the best,’’ not the best type of photography— Black emphasizes that even the results of the imperfectly replicated process would still stun the modern eye, suggesting that the technology in its current state has lost ground to its supposedly primitive ancestor, at least with respect to the degree of detail possible in photographic imaging.4 As I noted in the introduction, recent research on daguerreotypy has estimated that a digital camera capable of a resolution of 140,000 megapixels would be required to achieve the molecular-level clarity of the daguerreian imagery (Rehmeyer). And as Black wrote, photographs printed on paper were sharper than the images printed from most modern digital cameras. Thus we see that the narrative of technological change and media transition, when told from a slightly different perspective—be it the nostalgic view of an aging daguerreotypist or our own, informed by a humbling revelation about digital photography that came from taking a closer look at daguerreotypy—just as easily becomes one of degradation and loss as of constant improvement. In seeing finally that the story of daguerreotypy can be told in opposite directions, we recognize once again the mediating work done by narratives of technological change (there is no one way to understand daguerreotypy), the inevitable multiplicity of these narratives (there is no one daguerreotypy to understand), and their proliferation long after the introduction of new media and technologies (every encounter with daguerreotypy is an attempt to come to terms with it). This book is another of those narratives, another effort to come to terms. Fittingly, its closing readings—Tuttle’s poem and

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Black’s essay—necessarily disallow closure. They continue the cycle of mediation between old and new, between print and visual culture, even as they insist on their inseparability. Yet even without closure, it is possible to come to conclusions. First, media are never isolable; as we have seen throughout this book, there can be no visual culture without print culture and vice versa. Motivating them together compels us to rethink the status of not just the visual arts and the literary but the entire field of cultural production in the daguerreian era and, ideally, in any era—including our own. Second, while understanding print and visual culture as inextricable does greater justice to the complexities of any era, it cannot allow us to recover the past exactly as it was, or with daguerreian fidelity, one might say. Our relationship to the past—and to the present—is always necessarily mediated. Yet we can do more than acknowledge this as a fact—we can foreground our own experience of mediation and compare it to that of previous people and times as they variously theorized and recorded it—as they mediated their own experiences of mediation. But, then, if we are never outside mediation, where to begin and end our narratives of this experience? John Guillory recently, and reasonably, has observed that an ‘‘exhaustive history of media and mediation’’ is only hypothetically possible and proposed in its place ‘‘data points’’ or ‘‘a series of exempla.’’5 I close by offering the narratives of antebellum Americans’ encounter with daguerreotypy that this book has examined as just such a series of exempla and this book itself as one of the data points in an ever-expanding but never exhaustive history of media and mediation. Much work remains, then; as long as it does, it will be the responsibility of all of the disciplines known as the humanities, which we might think of as currently being remediated as media studies.

Notes

Introduction 1. Geoffrey Batchen deduces the likely years of Morse’s early photographic experiments in Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 39–42. 2. For a revised history of the relationship of word and image from antiquity through the iconophobia and logocentrism of the Protestant Reformation and eighteenth-century German aesthetic theory, see Michael Squire, Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 3. Immediately following this proclamation, Morse recalls his photochemical experiments and describes his arrangement with Daguerre: ‘‘A few days ago I addressed a note to Mr. D. requesting, as a stranger, the favor to see his results, and inviting him in turn to see my Telegraph. I was politely invited to see them under these circumstances’’ (Samuel F. B. Morse, ‘‘The Daguerrotipe,’’ New-York Observer 17:16 [April 20, 1839]: 62; published from a letter dated March 9, 1839). 4. Batchen takes a long view of the invention of photography that describes the number of people experimenting with photochemical imaging before the announcement of daguerreotypy. In England in 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot was keenly interested in news of the daguerreotype as he had discovered a means of fixing a photographic image in 1835. As Keith F. Davis and Jane Aspinwall explain, ‘‘Talbot continued to refine his process after 1835, but without urgency. In fact, he only returned seriously to his photographic work in November 1838, with the intention of summarizing his findings for an upcoming meeting of the Royal Society. The events in Paris of January 7 came as a genuine shock to him. . . . The race for historical priority and prestige was on—a race between nations as much as individuals. Confident of the superiority of the daguerreotype, [Franc¸ois] Arago invited leading British scientists to come to Paris to view Daguerre’s plates.’’ The group concluded that ‘‘[b]y every meaningful measure—precision, tonal range, beauty, and speed—the French process was clearly superior to the British one’’ (The Origins of American Photography, 1839–1885: From Daguerreotype to Dry Plate [Kansas City: Hall Family Foundation and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007], 15). 5. As I write, most the resolution of digital cameras ranges from 6 to 12.1 megapixels. The estimate of a comparable resolution comes from Julie Rehmeyer, ‘‘1848

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Daguerreotypes Bring Middle America’s Past to Life,’’ Wired Magazine, August 2010, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_daguerrotype_panorama/. 6. M. Susan Barger and William B. White explain the daguerreian image as ‘‘made up of discrete image particles of varying chemical composition and varying sizes’’ that are ‘‘dispersed on a polished silver substrate, and their distribution is directly related to the amount of light exposure in the original scene—that is, the different image areas are distinguished by difference in image particle number and spacing and, in some cases, image particle size’’ (The Daguerreotype: Nineteenth-Century Technology and Modern Science [1991; reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000], 122). 7. Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene (1938; reprint, New York: Dover, 1964), chapters 1–5; Richard Rudisill, Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971); Beaumont Newhall, The Daguerreotype in America, 3rd ed. (New York: Dover, 1976); Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989); Alan Trachtenberg, ‘‘Photography: The Emergence of a Keyword,’’ Photography in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Martha A. Sandweiss (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1991), 16–47; Alan Trachtenberg, Lincoln’s Smile and Other Enigmas (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), part 1; John Wood, ed., America and the Daguerreotype (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991); Susan S. Williams, Confounding Images: Photography and Portraiture in Antebellum American Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). See also Davis and Aspinwall. 8. Franc¸ois Brunet has paid the most attention to the significance that written texts played in the introduction of photography in France, England, and America, observing that ‘‘it happened by way of telling, rather than showing’’ and arguing that ‘‘the invention of photography must be envisioned squarely in its written condition’’ (Photography and Literature [London: Reaktion, 2009], 14). The Camera and the Press does just that, specifically focusing on daguerreotypy and taking its introduction in the United States as a case study of this moment of new media encounter. 9. I describe antebellum America’s introduction to daguerreotypy as mediated rather than remediated—Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s influential term for the inevitable ‘‘representation of one medium in another’’ that is part of the introduction of any new medium—to signal that this is only the first step in a cycle of mediation between print and daguerreotypy, a process that I will elaborate later in this introduction and the subsequent chapters. See Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 45. 10. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 9–10. 11. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (1983; London: Verso, 2006); Ju¨rgen Habermas, The

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Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (1972; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989); and Warner. Trish Loughran disaggregates Warner’s idea of early national print culture in favor of plural print cultures while also considering visual culture to some degree, yet print remains her focus; see The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). For a recent consideration of the place of visual culture in the public sphere, see Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 12. Alan Liu, ‘‘Imagining the New Media Encounter,’’ in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), 5. 13. Interestingly, in their ambitious and important effort to historicize the concept of scientific objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison dismiss the invention of photography as ‘‘only remotely relevant’’ to the ‘‘advent of objectivity.’’ Chapter 1 will argue that daguerreotypy was directly relevant to discussions about the ideas of objectivity and subjectivity in not only the sciences but also art and everyday life. See Daston and Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 35–36. 14. Franco Moretti is the most prominent voice against close reading, proposing what he calls ‘‘distant reading’’ in its place, as distance incorporates ‘‘fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall connection’’ (Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History [London: Verso, 2005], 1). See also Moretti’s ‘‘Conjectures on World Literature,’’ New Left Review 1 (January–February 2000): 54–68. But as Gayatri Spivak points out, Moretti’s methodology relies on ‘‘close reading from the periphery’’ (Death of a Discipline [New York: Columbia University Press, 2003], 108n1). For an extended reconsideration of close reading’s utility to art history, see James Elkins, Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (New York: Routledge, 2000). In the introduction to a special issue of Critical Inquiry on the case study, Lauren Berlant defines the case study as a ‘‘genre that organizes singularities into exemplary, intelligible patterns, enmeshing realist claims (x is really exemplary in this way) with analytic aims (if we make a pattern from x set of singularities we can derive y conclusions) and make claims why it should be such)’’ (‘‘On the Case,’’ Critical Inquiry 33 [Summer 2007]: 670). In that The Camera and the Press is tasked in part with historicizing the idea of realism, Berlant’s claim stands as a reminder of the concept’s constructedness. 15. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 11. 16. I learned about recent advanced imaging technologies used to analyze the physical structure of the daguerreotype from Ralph Wiegandt and Patrick Ravines’s lecture, ‘‘Recent Research on Daguerreotypes at George Eastman House,’’ Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., October 23, 2008. 17. Of the relationship between interpretation and representation, W. J. T. Mitchell explains, ‘‘Our responsibility towards representation’’—as ‘‘scholars, critics, and

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theorists of culture’’—‘‘is relatively well defined. We know it to be interpretation: attentive, careful, loving readings of texts and images; learned, critical responsiveness to their meanings; and eloquent testimony to their power. . . . We make professional statements—that is, representations about representations’’ (Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994], 422–23). 18. In suggesting that the material qualities of the daguerreotype matter, I allude to Gitelman’s important observation that ‘‘[a]t certain levels, media are very influential, and their material properties do (literally and figuratively) matter, determining some of the local conditions of communication amid the broader circulations that at once express and constitute social relations’’ (10). Conversations and e-mail exchanges with Gitelman and with Christopher Hager have helped tremendously to clarify my thinking and my argument about the materiality of daguerreotypy in relation to discourse; I thank both for their generosity and take full responsibility for any lingering obscurity. 19. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, ‘‘Introduction: Photographs as Objects,’’ in Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, ed. Edwards and Hart (London: Routledge, 2004), 2. 20. Gitelman makes this point based on her case study of the introduction of recorded sound in the United States in the late nineteenth century. ‘‘Like any new medium,’’ she argues, ‘‘recorded sound could not but emerge according to the practices of older media’’ (25). 21. Daston and Galison locate the rise of the idea of mechanical objectivity in the nineteenth century and define it as ‘‘the insistent drive to repress the willful intervention of the artist-author, and to put in its stead a set of procedures that would, as it were, move nature to the page [or other medium] through a strict protocol, if not automatically’’ (121). Whereas Daston and Galison focus on scientific atlases for studying the historical development of the concept of scientific objectivity, Chapter 1 will consider the place of daguerreotypy in the nineteenth-century transition from an idea of truth-to-nature to mechanical objectivity and will examine the influence of scientific discussions of objectivity on aesthetic theory. 22. Brunet similarly distinguishes between these two ways of thinking about early photography as ‘‘oscillat[ing] between the language of science and that of poetry, or fiction, and fantasy’’ (17–18). His broad yet compact survey of written descriptions of early photography offers brief examples of each way of thinking in Europe and America; mine takes an extended and close look at daguerreotypy in a number of American texts from popular print and literature. 23. Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 27. Chapter 1 1. ‘‘Remarkable Invention,’’ Boston Daily Advertiser (February 23, 1839): 1. Gary W. Ewer notes, ‘‘[i]t may be that this text is indeed the first notice published in

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America’’ (Editor’s Notes for ‘‘ ‘Remarkable Invention,’ 23 February 1839,’’ in The Daguerreotype: An Archive of Source Texts, Graphics, and Ephemera, ed. Gary W. Ewer, http://www.daguerreotypearchive.org/texts/N8390007_BOST_DAILY_ADVERT_183902-23.pdf). 2. For the print record of Arago’s report, see ‘‘Fixation des images que se forment au foyer d’une chambre obscure,’’ Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Se´ances de l’Acade´mie des Sciences 8 (1839): 4–7. 3. Joel Snyder briefly considers the discursive mediation of daguerreotypy’s introduction in his essay ‘‘Res Ipsa Loquitur,’’ in Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, ed. Lorraine Daston (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 195–221. 4. Daston and Galison examine the shift from ‘‘truth-to-nature’’ as an epistemic virtue in nineteenth-century scientific image making to that of mechanical objectivity, noting that the ‘‘emergence of objectivity as a new epistemic virtue in the midnineteenth century did not abolish truth-to-nature. . . . Instead of the analogy of a succession of political regimes or scientific theories, each triumphing on the ruins of its predecessor, imagine new stars winking into existence, not replacing old ones but changing the geography of the heavens’’ (18). I want to suggest that these conversations spilled into popular descriptions of daguerreian image making and its representational capacities. These descriptions promoted the daguerreotype as both true to nature and mechanically objective and, in doing so, shaped how we think about photographic representation to this day. 5. Snyder has noticed the same of the first European reports produced from firsthand viewings of daguerreotypy: ‘‘It is stunning that the written reports of the first exhibitions of daguerreotypes, in July 1839, and, a month later, of the official announcement of the details of the process did not significantly differ from earlier articles based entirely on hearsay’’ (203). 6. Daston and Galison describe the epistemic virtue of truth-to-nature in scientific image making as ‘‘a way of seeing . . . that saw past the surfaces of plants, bones, or crystals to underlying forms.’’ Choosing ‘‘images that best represented ‘what truly is’ engaged scientific atlas makers in ontological and aesthetic judgments that mechanical objectivity later forbade’’ (60). I want to suggest that writers blended the ideals of truth-to-nature and mechanical objectivity in their discussions of daguerreian portraiture, claiming that its mechanically objective representation of its subjects surfaced inner truths about their characters. Such borrowing from both schools of scientific image making reflects the gradual, and never complete, transition from truth-tonature to mechanical objectivity in the sciences noted by Daston and Galison. 7. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, ‘‘Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of Transition,’’ in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, ed. Thorburn and Jenkins (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 2. With respect to the introduction of daguerreotypy specifically, Snyder notes how the first reports of the medium, ‘‘based primarily on hearsay, described difficult-to-imagine marvels, ‘incredible’ pictures that were hidden from the view of the writers. Despite the absence of direct evidence, the

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authors described things they had not seen and simultaneously attempted to locate daguerreotypy within the customary vocabulary and categorical schemes routinely used by picture makers and critics of visual art’’ (197–98). 8. ‘‘Extraordinary Chemical and Optical Discovery,’’ Boston Mercantile Journal 4:441 (February 26, 1839), in The Daguerreotype: An Archive of Source Texts, Graphics, and Ephemera, ed. Gary W. Ewer, http://www.daguerreotypearchive.org/texts/N8390 006_BOST_MERC_JOURN_1839-02-26.pdf. 9. For example, Nicholas Mirzoeff includes a section in his Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999) titled ‘‘The Death of Painting’’ in which photography is understood as the inevitable successor to painting. He declares, ‘‘Just as oil painting on canvas had prevailed over the wood panel in the fifteenth century for its ease of mobility and greater truth of imitation, so had painting now been superseded by photography’’ (70). With the death of painting, according to Mirzoeff, comes photographic vision. In her study of early photography, Susan S. Williams claims that the ‘‘very ability of the photograph to create faithful representations also made it speak more loudly than words’’ (3). While Williams focuses on popular fiction more than on newspaper and magazine reporting, she argues that the introduction of photography in the United States occasioned a representational rivalry between the daguerreian image and the written word. As she puts it, ‘‘the daguerreotype and other reproductive technologies challenged the pictorial power of writers’’ (3). 10. ‘‘Self-Operating Processes of Fine Art: The Daguerotype,’’ Museum of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art 7:35 (March 1839): 341–43, reprinted from Spectator 12:553 (February 2, 1839): 17–18; ‘‘The Daguerrotype’’ [sic], Expositor 1:15 (March 30, 1839): 179. 11. See, for example, Trachtenberg (Reading American Photographs 12–15) and Batchen (137–43). As further evidence of the extent of America’s mediated encounter with daguerreotypy, it is worth noting that the most exuberant and, therefore, frequently cited declarations of early photography’s natural magic has been wrongly attributed to N. P. Willis because of its publication in a magazine that he edited (Corsair 1:5 [April 13, 1839]: 70–72). As Gary Ewer has discovered, the source is, in fact, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (‘‘New Discovery—Engraving, and Burnet’s Cartoons,’’ 44:281 [March 1839]: 382–91). Ewer also has determined that substantial portions of the Blackwood’s article come from an article titled ‘‘The New Art’’ that appeared in London’s Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c. (February 2, 1839): 72–74 and from other sources that he has not yet identified. He notes as well that a version of the same article was published in the New-Yorker and Willis’s Corsair on the same day. See Gary W. Ewer, Editor’s Notes for ‘‘‘The Pencil of Nature—A New Discovery,’ 13 April 1839,’’ in The Daguerreotype: An Archive of Source Texts, Graphics, and Ephemera, ed. Ewer, http://www.daguerreotypearchive.org/texts/ P8390015_PENCIL_CORSAIR_1839-04-13.pdf. 12. On the relationship of Comtean positivism and scientific objectivity, see Daston and Galison 213–14.

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13. Gouraud has been described as Daguerre’s agent in America in many histories of photography; Ron Polito corrects this in his article ‘‘The Emergence of Commercial Photography in Boston: 1840–1841,’’ in Daguerreian Annual, ed. Mark S. Johnson (Pittsburgh: Daguerreian Society, 2006), 154–73. 14. ‘‘Editors’ Table: The ‘Daguerreotype,’ ’’ Knickerbocker 14 (December 1839): 560–61. 15. ‘‘The Daguerreotype,’’ New-Yorker 8:13 (December 14, 1839): 205. 16. New-York Observer (November 30, 1839), qtd. in Newhall (The Daguerreotype in America 28). In criticizing prior descriptions of the daguerreotype, an article in the New Hampshire Sentinel takes a regionalist swipe at New Yorkers’ efforts to represent the images in words: ‘‘Not the half has been said of them, by the New-Yorkers; and we incline to the opinion that their best qualities will be first discovered and most fully appreciated in Boston.’’ ‘‘The Daguerreotype,’’ New Hampshire Sentinel 42:12 (March 18, 1840): 1. 17. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘‘The Daguerreotype,’’ Alexander’s Weekly Messenger (January 15, 1840): 2. 18. Language from the French Chamber of Deputies and Chamber of Peers bill is quoted in translation in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, from 1839 to the Present Day, rev. ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), 17. 19. The description of the process is contained in a letter to the United States Gazette’s editor from Alexander Dallas Bache, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson. See Kenneth Finkel, Legacy in Light: Photographic Treasures from Philadelphia Area Public Collections (Philadelphia: Photography Sesquicentennial Project, 1990), 22. 20. Barger and White note that the New York instrument maker Alexander S. Wolcott and his partner John Johnson developed a new camera that allowed them to open ‘‘the first American daguerreotype portrait studio in the spring of 1840’’ (30). Robert Cornelius, a Philadelphian and ‘‘practical metallurgist,’’ experimented with the daguerreotype process along with Saxton and Dr. Paul Beck Goddard, and by late 1839 they were able to succeed in making portraits (33). 21. Franc¸ois Fauvel-Gouraud, Description of the Daguerreotype Process, or a Summary of M. Gouraud’s Public Lectures, according to the Principles of M. Daguerre (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth’s Print, 1840), reprinted in The Daguerreotype Process: Three Treatises, 1840–1849, ed. Robert A. Sobieszek (New York: Arno, 1973). 22. ‘‘Manner of Making Portraits by the Daguerreotype,’’ Boston Daily Advertiser and Patriot 45:14964 (March 26, 1840): 2 (original emphasis), reprinted in Sobieszek. 23. ‘‘Daguerreotype Miniatures,’’ Niles’ National Register (May 30, 1840): 208. 24. Henry Fuseli, ‘‘Lecture III.—Invention’’ (1801), reprinted in Lectures on Painting by the Royal Academicians: Barry, Opie, and Fuseli, ed. Ralph N. Wornum (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1848), 427. 25. ‘‘Bruno,’’ ‘‘Picture Pausings.—No. II: Daguerreotypes,’’ Christian Watchman 27:20 (May 15, 1846): 77, reprinted as ‘‘Daguerreotypes,’’ Living Age 9:110 (June 20, 1846): 551–53.

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26. Daston and Galison note that ‘‘[u]nderstanding the history of scientific objectivity as part and parcel of the history of the scientific self has an unexpected payoff: what had originally struck us as an oddly moralizing tone in the scientific atlas makers’ accounts of how they had met the challenge of producing the most faithful images now made sense’’ (39). Recognizing the influence of scientific objectivity on aesthetics helps us understand Bruno’s moralizing tone in the Christian Watchman/Living Age essay. 27. I borrow these categories from Liu as the ‘‘key registers of human significance’’ in which new media encounters play out (7). 28. Nugator [St. Leger Landon Carter], ‘‘Pictures by the Sun,’’ Southern Literary Messenger 6 (March 1840): 193. 29. M. J. B., ‘‘The Daguerreotype. To——,’’ Dublin University Magazine (American edition) 21 (March 1843): 306, reprinted in Salem Gazette 62:29 (April 10, 1843): 1, in The Daguerreotype: An Archive of Source Texts, Graphics, and Ephemera, ed. Gary W. Ewer, http://www.daguerreotypearchive.org/texts/P8430001_DUBLIN_UNIV_MAG_ 1843-03.pdf. 30. ‘‘Mine eye hath played the painter, and hath steeled / Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart’’ (William Shakespeare, Sonnet 24, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus [New York: W. W. Norton, 1997], 1931). For the long history of the conceit of the heart as a tablet for inscription, see David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scriptures and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 31. Frances S. Osgood, ‘‘Daguerreotype Pictures, Taken on New Year’s Day,’’ Graham’s Magazine 23 (November 1843): 255–57. 32. ‘‘D.’’ [Evert A. Duyckinck], ‘‘Newspapers,’’ Arcturus 1:2 (January 1841): 69. 33. ‘‘Introduction,’’ The Daguerreotype: A Magazine of Foreign Literature and Science 1 (1847): 5. 34. Of Godey’s celebrated illustrations, Frank Luther Mott instructs, ‘‘Do not call them illustrations. They did not illustrate the text; the text illustrated them. The editor was wont to refer to some story or sketch as ‘the illustration of the plate’ ’’ (A History of American Magazines: 1741–1850 [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966], 591). In the case of Arthur’s story ‘‘The Daguerreotypist’’ and the engraving of the first wary sitter described in it, Mott’s assertion of the illustrations’ primacy may be correct. Arthur subsequently reprinted this same engraving with only the caption ‘‘Sitting for a Daguerreotype’’ in his own Arthur’s Home Magazine (3:3 [March 1854]). 35. T. S. Arthur, ‘‘American Characteristics. No. V: The Daguerreotypist,’’ Godey’s Lady’s Book 38 (May 1849): 352–55. The ‘‘American Characteristics’’ series ran in Godey’s between January and June 1849 and was collected and reprinted in Arthur’s Sketches of Life and Character (Boston: L. P. Crown, 1852). 36. See especially Trachtenberg (‘‘Photography’’) and Williams, chapter 2. 37. Root is also the author of The Camera and the Pencil; or, The Heliographic Art (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott; New York: D. Appleton, 1864; reprint, Pawlet, Vt.:

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Helios, 1971), one of the first histories of photography and an argument for the medium’s recognition as a fine art, from which the title of this book is adapted. 38. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of MiddleClass Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 3. As to the ubiquity of runaway slave advertisements in American newspapers, beginning in the colonial period and lasting until emancipation, see ‘‘Rhetoric and the Runaway: The Iconography of Slave Escape in England and America’’ in Marcus Wood’s Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780– 1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 78–142. The conventions of newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 4. 39. Richard Rudisill most explicitly represents the daguerreotype as an agent of such changes, even though he builds his argument about its significance in antebellum America on a wide range of readings drawn from print culture in his influential Mirror Image. In his broadest statement of this argument he contends, ‘‘Americans were searching for ways to define themselves as cultural nationals. In their search they utilized the abstract means of language—as in nationally oriented literature or natively developed philosophical systems—but they needed objects, or, better, symbolic representations of objects, to respond to in order to be able to attain adequate insight for self-definition. The daguerreotype ideally answered their need’’ (31). 40. ‘‘Daguerreotype Portraits,’’ (New Orleans) Daily Crescent (March 6, 1848): 2. 41. See Walt Whitman, ‘‘A Brooklyn Daguerreotypist and His Pictures at the Crystal Palace,’’ in Whitman as Editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, ed. Thomas L. Brasher (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970); Walt Whitman, ‘‘Scenes and Sights of Broadway—Thursday, February 19,’’ Brooklyn Evening Star (February 20, 1846): 4; and Walt Whitman, ‘‘A Visit to Plumbe’s Gallery,’’ in The Gathering of the Forces, vol. 2, ed. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1920), 113–17. 42. Sarah Roberts, ‘‘An Hour in a Daguerreian Gallery,’’ in The Amaranth, ed. Emily Percival (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co., 1855), 211. The story implies that the narrator is a woman in a scene in which she pauses to predict the fates of a group of young girls visiting the studio and mournfully yet sympathetically foresees a variety of miserable feminine destinies, including an early death in childbirth and a ‘‘long life of toil and care’’ (219–20). 43. Ned Buntline [Edward Zane Carroll Judson], Love at First Sight: or, The Daguerreotype: A Romantic Story of Real Life (Boston: Lerow & Co., Jones’s Publishing House, c. 1847). 44. ‘‘The Magnetic Daguerreotypes,’’ Photographic Art-Journal 3:6 (June 1852): 353–59. 45. Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 15. 46. Here I allude to Liu’s claim that ‘‘narratives of new media encounter are the elementary form of media theory,’’ extending this relationship of narrative and theory into a later phase of media contact (5).

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Chapter 2 1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, vol. 2, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965), 1 (hereafter cited as Ho7G). 2. See especially Cathy N. Davidson, ‘‘Photographs of the Dead: Sherman, Daguerre, Hawthorne,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 89:4 (Fall 1990): 667–701; Williams 96–119; Alan Trachtenberg, ‘‘Seeing and Believing: Hawthorne’s Reflections on the Daguerreotype in The House of the Seven Gables,’’ American Literary History 9:3 (1997): 460–81; Paul Gilmore, The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 125–50; and Peter West, The Arbiters of Reality: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Rise of Mass Information Culture (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2008). By contrast, Meredith L. McGill reads the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter as ‘‘anti-romantic’’ (American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003], 267)—as ‘‘a version of authorial power as a form of suspended animation’’ (267) and ‘‘a privileged lifting of the constraints imposed on ordinary speech, producing the author as a figure of exemption from a culture it nonetheless is empowered to critique’’ (269). 3. Davidson suggests that ‘‘perhaps the best way to look at’’ the narrative is ‘‘as a daguerreotype’’ (697). Williams suggests more generally that the ‘‘narrative assume[s] some of the properties of portraits’’ as ‘‘Hawthorne frequently stops the forward progression of his narrative in the text’’ and depicts its characters (98). Alan Trachtenberg qualifies somewhat Davidson’s conflation of the narrative and the daguerreotype, observing that ‘‘the daguerreotype plays a strategic role in the narrative as an emblem of the ambiguity that the tale will affirm as the superior mark of ‘Romance’—if not exactly ‘Romance’ itself, at least a major narrative resource for defining and apprehending what that term means’’ (‘‘Seeing’’ 460). All of the conclusions reached from reading it as such seem uneasy with the resulting indeterminacy of the narrative. Davidson concludes that as an ‘‘unstable contradictory representation, simultaneously positive and negative, always reflecting back the image of the reflecting and reflexive viewer, Hawthorne’s daguerrean [sic] romance represents but cannot solve midcentury anxieties over the technology of reproduction, the eugenics of the representational act’’ (697). Similarly, Trachtenberg decides that ‘‘The House of the Seven Gables leaves its largest questions unsettled’’ and ‘‘its complexities and complications aborted by the quick fix of a hastily arranged fairy-tale ending’’ that abandons daguerreotypy altogether (‘‘Seeing’’ 463). 4. On Hawthorne’s deceptive persona in the prefaces, see Michael Davitt Bell, ‘‘Arts of Deception: Hawthorne, ‘Romance,’ and The Scarlet Letter,’’ in Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation: Selected Essays on American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 32–53. 5. McGill reads the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter as a ‘‘revision and extension of the sketch form’’ that ‘‘seeks to produce sensation without narrative action’’ and as

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‘‘an extended critique of Jacksonian society’’ (268). My interest in how the novel offers a romantic alternative to the increasing influence of mechanical objectivity in representation should not be understood to rule out the possibility of political critique. As I argue throughout The Camera and the Press, aesthetic and political representation inevitably intersect in daguerreian-age discourse and social practices. 6. The narrative does not include the scene of the Judge sitting in Holgrave’s rooms, presenting instead the result of the session when Holgrave shows the Judge’s portrait to Phoebe in the sixth chapter. 7. McGill sees the chapter’s focus on the chair in which the Judge is seated as a connection to Hawthorne’s writing for children, in which ‘‘grandfather’s chair represents historical and narrative continuity, serving as a point of transfer between the great events of public history and more humble, domestic concerns’’ (248). Both the Colonel’s and the Judge’s portraits, I would add, are intended to serve a similar function. Yet McGill notes that in The House of the Seven Gables, ‘‘the old oaken chair is transformed into a site of deathly stasis and narrative paralysis’’ (248). I contend that such stasis is precisely what allows a portrait to ensure historical and narrative continuity and to serve as a point of transfer between public and family history. 8. For an overview of the long history of associating portraiture with immortality and mortality, see Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), especially chapter 5. 9. For an important consideration of postmortem daguerreotypy in a literary context, see Karen Sa´nchez-Eppler, ‘‘Then When We Clutch the Hardest: On the Death of a Child and the Replication of an Image,’’ in Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 10. It is unclear whether the painted portrait of Colonel Pyncheon figures him sitting and, therefore, whether his and Judge Pyncheon’s seated corpses effectively become copies of the portrait. The narrative’s brief ekphrastic description of the Colonel’s portrait only mentions that he is pictured ‘‘at two thirds length,’’ wearing a ‘‘scull-cap [sic], with a laced band and a grizzly beard; holding a Bible with one hand, and in the other uplifting an iron sword-hilt’’ (33). It is also unclear whether Judge Pyncheon was seated in Holgrave’s premortem daguerreotype portrait; in that Phoebe confuses the portraits of the Colonel and the Judge, it is logical that they both would be in the same position, be it sitting or standing. 11. ‘‘The Pencil of Nature,’’ the Spectator, reprinted in the Living Age 2:18 (September 14, 1844): 337. 12. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, vol. 1, The Centenary Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962) (hereafter cited as SL). The narrator also may be referring to a moment in the Seven Gables’ first chapter that discusses the ‘‘large, dim looking-glass [that] used to hang’’ in the house and ‘‘was fabled to contain within its depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected there.’’ In that chapter, the narrator remarks, ‘‘Had we the

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secret of that mirror, we would gladly sit down before it, and transfer its revelations to our page’’ (Ho7G 20). Foreshadowing Holgrave’s work as a daguerreotypist and membership in the Maule family as well as the romantic episode in the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter, the narrator volunteers that ‘‘the posterity of Matthew Maule had some connection with the mystery of the looking-glass, and that—by what appears to have been some sort of mesmeric process—they could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons’’ (20–21). 13. Mrs. H. C. Gardiner, ‘‘The Daguerreotype,’’ The Ladies’ Repository (December 1849): 366. 14. Bell argues that the preface of The House of the Seven Gables contains a similar and ‘‘truly remarkable performance.’’ According to Bell, ‘‘Hawthorne was fascinated with the antisocial and abnormal, but he never openly identified himself with them. Thus, in the preface, Hawthorne, or the persona he adopts, openly announces that his book is a romance; yet this persona manages to seem wholly ignorant, as Hawthorne himself surely was not, of the subversive implications of such an announcement.’’ Bell explains that the preface ‘‘makes it sound perfectly safe, straightforward, morally neutral; the ‘superficial skimmer of pages’ would see no reason to be alarmed.’’ ‘‘Still,’’ Bell argues, ‘‘the careful reader would notice that although Hawthorne ignores the conventional sense of the subversive authority of romance, he does not specifically reject it, and he puts nothing else in its place’’ (39–40). McGill reads Hawthorne’s assertion of authority in the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter more aggressively, arguing that the narrator’s humiliations of the Judge ‘‘give voice to corrupt ambitions that cannot be achieved and to indulge a desire to punish that cannot be felt by its object’’ (269). 15. Evidence for the success of this strategy can be found within the Seven Gables’ narrative as well. Phoebe, who had turned away looking at Holgrave’s daguerreotype of the Judge in her resistance to the medium’s most moonlight-like qualities, has a newfound appreciation for the effects of moonlight after her transformative experience of listening to Holgrave’s story. She notes that she is ‘‘sensible of a great charm in this brightening moonlight’’ even though she ‘‘never cared much about moonlight before’’ (214). ‘‘What is there, I wonder, so beautiful in it to-night?’’ she asks the daguerreotypist. Confirming to himself the power of his imagination in altering her perception, he asks, ‘‘And you have never felt it before?’’ to which Phoebe replies, ‘‘Never’’ (214). When Phoebe senses that she has lost something in this transformation, Holgrave declares, ‘‘You have lost nothing, Phoebe, worth keeping, nor which it was possible to keep,’’ since what she has lost is her faith in the transparency of reality in favor of a more romantic and, thus, mature view of the world (215). 16. ‘‘Daguerreotype,’’ Niles’ National Register 8:17 (June 27, 1840): 272. 17. ‘‘The Inconstant Daguerreotype,’’ Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 10 (May 1855): 820–26. 18. In the Seven Gables’ preface, Hawthorne more specifically theorizes ‘‘Romance’’ in opposition to the ‘‘Novel,’’ ‘‘claim[ing] a certain latitude, both as to its

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fashion and material,’’ yet I contend that his aesthetic vision extends to art more broadly (1). Trachtenberg argues that ‘‘[w]hat the sun reveals’’ in the Seven Gables ‘‘is not just something to be glimpsed beneath a facade, something merely visible, but something to be interpreted’’ (‘‘Seeing’’ 468). This need for interpretation is what I understand as the space for subjectivity and artistry in Hawthorne’s defense of art. 19. Significantly, an imaging process similar to daguerreotypy is among the distractions that Aylmer provides for Georgiana in ‘‘The Birth-Mark’’ (Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches [New York: Library of America, 1996], 771–72). 20. Lara Langer Cohen, ‘‘What’s Wrong with This Picture? Daguerreotypy and Magic in The House of the Seven Gables,’’ Arizona Quarterly 59:1 (Spring 2004): 40. 21. As Trachtenberg puts it, the Judge is ‘‘ritually slain by the camera’’ (‘‘Seeing’’ 471). I argue more precisely that it is the ‘‘Governor Pyncheon’’ chapter as the romantic narrative equivalent of a daguerreotype—and not the camera—that verifies the Judge as dead. 22. In his introduction to the Norton Critical Edition of The House of the Seven Gables, Robert S. Levine observes that ‘‘the question of the novel’s ending has for years been central to critical discussions of the novel.’’ ‘‘Though some critics continue to complain about it,’’ Levine suggests that ‘‘there is an increasing critical consensus that The House of the Seven Gables is not so easily reduced to its ending’’; even so, he predicts that ‘‘the ending will no doubt remain central to critical debate on the novel’’ (Introduction to The House of the Seven Gables, ed. Robert S. Levine [New York: W. W. Norton, 2006], xiv–xv). Davidson (‘‘Photographs’’) and Trachtenberg (‘‘Seeing’’) are among those dissatisfied with the narrative’s conclusion particularly with respect to daguerreotypy; Davidson goes so far as to call it a ‘‘failure’’ (692). 23. Peter J. Bellis offers one of the more balanced readings of the narrative’s conclusion, suggesting that it ‘‘resists a fully conservative, repetitive closure’’ without offering ‘‘a commitment to, or even a basis for, any thoroughgoing or radical change’’ (Writing Revolution: Aesthetics and Politics in Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003], 50). 24. I argue that these qualities, also noted by Trachtenberg (‘‘Seeing’’ 473), bring Hawthornian romance closer to what Daston and Galison describe as the epistemic virtue of ‘‘truth-to-nature,’’ which ‘‘conceived of fidelity in terms of the exercise of informed judgment in the selection of ‘typical,’ ‘characteristic,’ ‘ideal,’ or ‘average,’ ’’ and that persisted in some forms of scientific image making even during the ascendance of mechanical objectivity in the mid-nineteenth century (66). 25. Davidson attributes daguerreotypy’s disappearance from the narrative to Holgrave’s turn away from non-biological reproduction to biological reproduction with the romance’s conclusion (694–95). Trachtenberg claims that the ‘‘marriage of Maule and Pyncheon accomplishes what the daguerreotype itself cannot: it wishes away the nemesis of the modern market, a monied class of investors, speculators, and manipulators’’ and concludes that, as a result, ‘‘Hawthorne’s view of the daguerreotype seems in the end as equivocal as the political vision of the text as a whole’’ (‘‘Seeing’’ 478). I

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argue that this seeming equivocalness is, in fact, the essential hybridity or sustaining tension of Hawthorne’s romantic aesthetic. 26. The last paragraph of The House of the Seven Gables suggests that ‘‘a gifted eye’’ might see ‘‘fore-shadowed’’ in the kaleidoscopic pictures produced by Maule’s Well ‘‘the coming fortunes of Hepzibah, and Clifford, and the descendant of the legendary wizard, and the village-maiden’’ (319). 27. For a discussion of Whitman and Harrison’s friendship, see Ed Folsom’s chapters on Whitman and photography in Walt Whitman’s Native Representations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Harrison might also be familiar as a friend of Poe who seems to have collaborated with Poe on a campaign song (see Poe, ‘‘Fragment of a Campaign Song,’’ in Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Poems, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000], 340–42) and who offered his memories of Poe near the end of his own life (Harrison, ‘‘Edgar A. Poe, Reminiscences of Gabriel Harrison, an Actor, Still Living in Brooklyn,’’ New York Times Saturday Review [March 4, 1899]: 144). 28. Henry Hunt Snelling, ‘‘The Art of Photography,’’ Photographic Art-Journal 1:1 (January 1851): 1. 29. Here I use the terms daguerreian operator and artist to distinguish between the two types of daguerreotypists that Snelling establishes in his editorial. While Snelling does not explicitly make this semantic distinction, one result of this professional drive for the daguerreotypist’s popular recognition as an artist can be found in Hawthorne’s alternate appellations of Holgrave as ‘‘The Artist’’ and ‘‘The Daguerreotypist.’’ 30. The beginning of Harrison’s biography in the Photographic Art-Journal, however, is anything but humble. Written by Samuel Jones Burr, the sketch begins panegyrically, ‘‘Gabriel Harrison! How the heart leaps within the bosom at the mere mention of the name! And yet Gabriel Harrison is neither a soldier nor a statesman. Though but a young man unscarred by the warrior’s sword, he is a hero—to all intents and purposes, an American hero.’’ Never attempting to pass itself off as an objective account of Harrison’s life, Burr’s biography provides a detailed, if at times embellished portrait of the daguerreian artist as a young man. See Burr, ‘‘Gabriel Harrison and the Daguerrean Art,’’ Photographic Art-Journal 1:3 (March 1851): 169–77. 31. For a still influential history of the confidence man, see Halttunen. 32. Laura Wexler offers a reading of this image in her essay ‘‘Techniques of the Imagination: Engendering Family Photography,’’ in Race and the Production of Modern American Nationalism, ed. Reynolds J. Scott-Childress (New York: Garland, 1999), 359– 81, reprinted in Looking for America: The Visual Production of Nation and People, ed. Ardis Cameron (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 94–117. 33. ‘‘Mr. Harrison’s Process,’’ Photographic and Fine Art Journal 7:1 (January 1854): 8–9. 34. Gabriel Harrison, ‘‘Lights and Shadows of Daguerrean Life,’’ nos. 1 and 2, Photographic Art-Journal 1:4 and 1:5 (March and April 1851): 179–81, 229–32.

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35. An acquaintance of Harrison’s (as noted above), Poe receives a lengthier tribute than that of most other artists. Contradicting Rufus Griswold’s famous slander of Poe upon his death, Helia declares of Poe’s talent and his poem ‘‘The Bells,’’ ‘‘How beautiful was his genius! How divinely sweet were the tones of his poetic harp! Hear ye not his silver bells? How tenderly soft they jingle on the ear!’’ (‘‘Lights and Shadows’’ no. 2, 231). 36. Hawthorne, ‘‘The Hall of Fantasy,’’ in Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1996), 738. 37. To provide their clients with the option of color images, daguerreotypists hand-tinted their images. In 1850 the daguerreotypist Levi L. Hill announced that he had perfected a color exposure process for daguerreotypy. According to M. Susan Barger and William B. White, after Hill’s announcement, ‘‘the daguerreotype business dwindled; people waited for Hill’s new process rather than have regular daguerreotypes made.’’ But controversy erupted when Hill would not publicly produce his color ‘‘hillotypes.’’ For an account of attempts at color daguerreotypy and the Hill controversy, see Barger and White 38–42. 38. Gabriel Harrison to H. Hunt Snelling and W. B. Smith, Photographic ArtJournal 1:1 (January 1851): 64. 39. Interestingly, James Glaisher does not mention Past, Present, Future in his discussion of Lawrence’s daguerreotypes in his juror’s report for the Great Exhibition. Also, the American press celebrated Lawrence for having brought home a medal, but Glaisher indicates that the Class X jury awarded him a Council Medal but that the medal was not confirmed by the jury of the larger group within which daguerreotypy was classed. See Glaisher, ‘‘Class X: Philosophical Instruments and Processes Depending upon Their Use,’’ in Reports by the Juries on the Subjects in the Thirty Classes into Which the Exhibition Was Divided (London: Clowes and Sons, 1852), 277. 40. On Malbone’s and Shelley’s miniatures, see Andrew J. Haslit, ‘‘Edward Greene Malbone,’’ in Perfect Likeness: European and American Portrait Miniatures from the Cincinnati Art Museum, ed. Julie Aronson and Marjorie E. Wieseman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 231n1. It is worth noting that the subjects in Harrison’s image would have been standing in the same position as those in Malbone’s and Shelley’s paintings when they were daguerreotyped; daguerreian images are reversed from right to left from their subjects’ original orientation. 41. See Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Little History of Photography,’’ in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 507–30; Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977; reprint, New York: Anchor, 1990); and Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 42. Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘‘Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture,’’ Atlantic Monthly 8:45 (July 1861): 14. See Chapter 6, note 42 for a longer analysis of this essay.

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Chapter 3 1. For a concise overview of readings of Pierre as a response to The House of the Seven Gables (as well as an important new take on their relationship with respect to the issue of race), see Robert S. Levine, ‘‘Genealogical Fictions: Race in The House of the Seven Gables and Pierre,’’ in Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship, ed. Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 227–47. 2. Previous readings of Pierre that have been drawn to this striking scene have tried to make sense of it as an index of Melville’s anxieties about authorship and originality in the industrial age. Gillian Brown and Susan S. Williams have examined the relationship of painted and daguerreian portraiture in the novel and its significance to the narrative’s meditations on authorship, originality, and literary property. Both conclude that Pierre understands painted portraiture as a site for authorizing identity and abruptly dismiss daguerreian portraiture as a medium that effaces individuality: a painted portrait of Pierre’s father provides a patrician identity for the son to emulate; Pierre’s own daguerreian likeness, on the other hand, promises not to distinguish him as an aristocrat but to assimilate him into the daguerreotyped masses. These readings understand the narrative’s hostility toward daguerreotypy as a reaction to the unprecedented pressure put on both painted portraiture and the written word by the affordable, instantaneous, and lifelike images available from the daguerreian studio—a claim that I seek to complicate, if not contradict, not only in this chapter but throughout The Camera and the Press. See chapter 5 of Gillian Brown’s Domestic Individualism: Imaging Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) and Williams, chapter 5. Calling on an actual letter that Melville wrote to his editor Evert Duyckinck denying his request for a daguerreian portrait, some critics have emphasized Melville’s simultaneous desire for critical and financial success and distrust of literary celebrity in Pierre’s refusal. See, for example, Elizabeth Renker, Strike Through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, Reading Melville’s ‘‘Pierre; or, The Ambiguities’’ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); John Evelev, Tolerable Entertainment: Herman Melville and Professionalism in Antebellum New York (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 153; Kevin J. Hayes, The Cambridge Introduction to Herman Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 17, 71; Susan M. Ryan, ‘‘Douglass, Melville, and the Moral Economies of American Authorship,’’ in Frederick Douglass & Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, ed. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), especially 92–93; and Williams. On the relationship of authorship and the visual arts more broadly in Pierre, see Christopher Sten, ed., Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991); Douglas Robilliard, Melville and the Visual Arts (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997); Jean Ashton, ‘‘Imagining Pierre: Reading the Extra-Illustrated Melville,’’ in Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays, ed. John Bryant and Robert Milder (Kent, Ohio: Kent

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State University Press, 1997), 321–31; Elizabeth Schultz, ‘‘The Invisible Made Visible: Maurice Sendak’s Pierre Illustrations,’’ Melville Society Extracts (December 1997): 17–21; and John Taggart, ‘‘Mere Illustrations: Maurice Sendak and Melville,’’ Arizona Quarterly 56:2 (Summer 2000): 111–56. 3. Alan Liu posits that the ‘‘life story of the new media encounter plays out in the key registers of human significance’’ (5). Whereas Liu designates the historical, the sociocultural, and the subjective as these registers, I want to suggest that the categories are even broader—resembling less academic disciplines than the major categories of modern philosophical inquiry. 4. I resist reading Pierre as an anxious and confounded personal reaction to a new and wildly popular mode of representation, as some critics have. For example, Williams reads Pierre as an allegory of the rivalry between the verbal and visual arts as it intensified during the daguerreian age, arguing that ‘‘Melville defines literary authenticity and authority in part by juxtaposing it against portraits that are inauthentic likenesses’’ (123). 5. Here again, I allude to Daston and Galison’s history of scientific objectivity and their claim that the ‘‘scientific self of the mid-nineteenth century was perceived by contemporaries as diametrically opposed to the artistic self, just as scientific images were routinely contrasted to artistic ones’’ (37). As I have argued in the previous chapters, artistic and scientific standards and identities intersect in discussions of daguerreotypy. For a concise overview of the increasing significance of science and the scientist in nineteenth-century America, see Nina Baym, American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences: Styles of Affiliation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002). On the institutionalization of efforts to establish the cultural authority of science in the antebellum United States, see Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, ‘‘Creating a Forum for Science: AAAS in the Nineteenth Century,’’ in The Establishment of Science in America: 150 Years of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ed. Kohlstedt, Michael M. Sokal, and Bruce V. Lewenstein (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 7–49. 6. S. [Albert Sands Southworth], ‘‘Daguerreotype Likenesses,’’ Boston Daily Evening Transcript (March 2, 1852): 4. 7. Quoted in Grant B. Romer and Brian Wallis, eds., Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes (New York: International Center of Photography; Rochester, N.Y.: George Eastman House; Go¨ttingen: Steidl, 2005), 10. 8. As curators of a recent exhibit of Southworth & Hawes’s portraits describe their aesthetic, ‘‘Against the grain of the daguerreotype’s unremitting verisimilitude, Southworth & Hawes deliberately and self-consciously created an artistic, pictorialist style typified by what Root called ‘a wonderful softness or mellowness’ ’’ (Romer and Wallis 10). 9. Root, qtd. in Romer and Wallis 10; Anthony Bannon and Willis E. Hartshorn, ‘‘Director’s Foreword,’’ in Romer and Wallis, Young America 8. 10. Higgins and Parker, Reading Melville’s ‘‘Pierre’’ vii; unsigned review of Pierre, by Herman Melville, New York Herald (September 18, 1852), reprinted in Herman

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Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Higgins and Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 437. 11. Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 244. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker have argued that the sudden revelation that Pierre is an author resulted from Melville’s anger at negative reviews of Moby-Dick and that the sections about authorship were inserted into an already completed version of the novel. My reading of Pierre sees the question of authorship as inseparable from issues of artistic creation and production that permeate the text. See Higgins and Parker, ‘‘The Flawed Grandeur of Melville’s Pierre,’’ in New Perspectives on Melville, ed. Faith Pullin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978), 162–96, reprinted in Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s ‘‘Pierre; or, The Ambiguities,’’ ed. Higgins and Parker (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), 240–66; and Reading Melville’s ‘‘Pierre.’’ 12. Melville to Duyckinck, February 12, 1851, in The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 14, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle, et al. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1993), 178–81. 13. The most insistent of such readings can be found in all of Higgins and Parker’s work on the novel. See Reading Melville’s ‘‘Pierre’’ for the most recent and concise iteration of their argument (especially 151–53). 14. See Brown 142; and Williams 130–33. 15. Larry E. Silver, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 80–81, 140–41. 16. For an examination of antebellum arguments about daguerreotypy’s place in the hierarchy of the fine arts, see chapter 2 of Dolores Ann Kilgo’s ‘‘The Sharp-Focus Vision: The Daguerreotype and the American Painter’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1982). 17. Thomas Cole to William Althorpe Adams,’’ February 26, 1840, in The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, N. A., 3rd ed., ed. Rev. Louis L. Noble (New York: Sheldon, Blakeman, 1856), 282. 18. On such reprinting and the debates over copyright, see McGill 105–6. 19. Gabriel Harrison, ‘‘The Dignity of Our Art,’’ Photographic Art-Journal 3:4 (April 1852): 230. 20. As Wendy Wick Reaves and Sally Pierce note, ‘‘The demand for likenesses of notable Americans had been fed and encouraged by the print industry. Public figure, artist, and audience all assumed the necessity of readily available portraiture’’ (‘‘Translations from the Plate: The Marketplace of Public Portraiture,’’ in Romer and Wallis, Young America 89). Their essay offers a concise but thorough consideration of the translation of daguerreian portraiture into print-friendly media and the growing practice’s effects on celebrity. 21. For more on this connection, see Chapter 1. 22. Henry Fuseli, ‘‘Lecture IV.—Invention (continued),’’ Lectures on Painting by the Royal Academicians. Barry, Opie, and Fuseli, ed. Ralph N. Wornum (London: Bohn,

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1848), 449. Douglas Robilliard suggests that ‘‘Melville may well have seen this volume’’ (118). 23. See especially Brown 142; Williams, chapter 5; and Evelev 153. 24. In the edition of Plato’s Republic translated by G. M. A. Grube and revised by C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), the ‘‘truth’’ and the sun are used interchangeably in the allegory of the cave to describe what the freed prisoner is ultimately en route to seeing once he is no longer in the cave. In the sun analogy of the preceding book, the sun represents the good and the truth as one of the intermediate stages of knowledge on the way to understanding the good. As Socrates explains, ‘‘In the visible realm, light and sight are rightly considered sunlike, but it is wrong to think that they are the sun, so here it is right to think of knowledge and truth as goodlike but wrong to think that either of them is the good—for the good is yet more prized’’ (508e–509a). Pierre tends to speak of ‘‘Truth’’ as this object of understanding that is most prized, perhaps because truth is not necessarily good; as the narrative voice apostrophizes to Pierre after the image of his perfect father is revealed to be more shadow than substance, ‘‘Truth rolls a black billow through thy soul! Ah, miserable thou, to whom Truth, in her first tides, bears nothing but wrecks!’’ (Pierre 65). 25. By including ambiguity as an essential component of individual and artistic perception, Melville also contradicts what Daston and Galison historicize as the scientific virtue of ‘‘truth-to-nature,’’ which sees the scientist’s informed subjective observations as resolving both variability and ambiguity to arrive at truth. 26. Dorothea’s idolization of her brother and his portrait resembles Hepzibah’s in The House of the Seven Gables; there, Clifford is not dead but imprisoned, and the portrait is a more intimate miniature. 27. Williams contends that from this point on in the narrative, portraiture ‘‘is allied with publicity’’ in Pierre’s mind (126). She further asserts that Pierre learns from his own experience with daguerreian portraiture that publicity results in a loss of power or, to return to Brown’s argument, the loss of exclusive title to oneself (Brown 142). 28. As William A. Dyrness explains, ‘‘In many ways, [the Protestants] did not differ greatly from Plato who believed that making images had to do with shadows rather than reality and therefore was inherently illusory. They further shared his suspicion that the faculty of ‘imaging’ fed and watered passions, which are wild and unruly unless kept in check by reason’’ (Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 7). 29. Here I allude to the pamphlet by Plotinus Plinlimmon that Pierre discovers on his trip from Saddle Meadows into the city, which the narrator describes as ‘‘a thin, tattered, dried-fish-like thing; printed with blurred ink upon mean, sleazy paper’’ (Pierre 206) and as ‘‘more the excellently illustrated re-statement of a problem, than the solution of the problem itself’’ (210). 30. Throughout my reading of Pierre, I have purposefully identified the narrative voice as belonging to the narrator, not Melville, in the interest of recognizing the

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narrator as an important character in the text who is not simply reducible to Melville. But in this moment of meta-reflection and theorization, I want to suggest that the narrator as a character recedes in the text—as does the plot—as Melville’s critical voice and the narrative’s arguments become prominent. 31. When Lucy’s brother Fred Tartan enters the cell, he calls repeatedly for a light and he and Pierre’s childhood friend Charlie Millthorpe, who has also come to the cell, ‘‘wildly’’ and ‘‘blindly’’ grope ‘‘about the cell, stumbling over each other and the corpses before a light is ‘‘thrust in’’ (Pierre 361–62). 32. The near exception to this claim is the painting that Lucy studies in the exhibition that she, Pierre, and Isabel visit near the narrative’s conclusion. It is a copy of The Cenci, by Guido Reni. Although the image that Lucy views is based on this actual portrait, it is a copy and, thus, as fictional as all of the other portraits in the narrative. Heffernan’s definition comes from his essay ‘‘Ekphrasis and Representation,’’ New Literary History 22:2 (Spring 1991): 297–316. 33. Williams’s chapter on Pierre positions the verbal and visual arts as rivals, with Melville attempting to assert the power of the word over that of portraits that threaten to overwhelm Pierre and writers in general. In her reading of Melville’s essay ‘‘Hawthorne and His Mosses,’’ though, she suggests that ‘‘[e]ven as Melville makes particular claims for the work of the writer’’ over that of visual artists making authors visible for readers, ‘‘he also privileges an idealization based on reader response over any objective facsimile.’’ ‘‘Rather than passively looking at a picture,’’ she concludes, ‘‘he encourages his readers to construct one for themselves’’ (Williams 145). I see Pierre encouraging the same but on a much larger scale and with more significant consequences for the narrative’s theories about art and artistic creation. Christopher J. Lukasik argues in Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) that Pierre ‘‘is an antivisual novel in nineteenthcentury terms’’ (191)—that it refuses both ‘‘pictorialism and distinct characterization’’ that was typical of nineteenth-century novels and Melville’s own works (190). Lukasik concludes that ‘‘[w]hat Pierre offers its readers . . . is more metapicture than picture’’ (191) and focuses more on what this metapicture suggests about the relationship of faces and looks to understanding character. My reading understands the novel’s metapicture as a rethinking of the broader categories of subjectivity, objectivity, art, and truth occasioned by daguerreotypy and at least as indebted to Plato as to the postrevolutionary novel. 34. Hershel Parker discusses the novel’s slow sales and its critical reception in the second section of the historical note to the Northwestern-Newberry edition (Pierre 379–92). 35. New York Herald, September 18, 1852, qtd. in Leon Howard and Hershel Parker’s ‘‘Historical Note’’ to Pierre (382). 36. Athenaeum, November 20, 1852, qtd. in ‘‘Historical Note’’ (382). 37. A. S. Southworth & Co, advertisement, (Boston) Courier 16:1987 (May 15, 1843): 3.

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38. Southworth & Hawes business card, George Eastman House Collection, reprinted in Romer and Wallis 31, fig. 10. 39. Southworth & Hawes advertising broadside, George Eastman House Collection, reprinted in Romer and Wallis 44, fig. 16. 40. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1988), 164. 41. S. [Albert S. Southworth], ‘‘Daguerreotype Likenesses: No. II,’’ Boston Daily Evening Transcript (March 24, 1852): 1. 42. Grant B. Romer, ‘‘ ‘A High Reputation with All True Artists and Connoisseurs’: The Daguerreian Careers of A. S. Southworth and J. J. Hawes,’’ in Romer and Wallis, Young America 44. 43. S. [Albert S. Southworth], ‘‘Daguerreotype Likenesses: No. IV,’’ Boston Daily Evening Transcript (May 7, 1852): 1. 44. Southworth notes that the ‘‘Hillotype,’’ or Hill’s purportedly color daguerreotypes, will be the subject of his next essay in the series; that essay was never published. For more on Hill’s experiments, see Michelle Delaney, ‘‘Celebration Delayed: Hillotypes, Early Experiments in Color Photography,’’ Material Matters 57 (January 2009): 6–7. 45. John Stauffer notes that whereas ‘‘other daguerreian studios boasted of taking hundreds of portraits daily and advertised images for as low as 25 cents, Southworth & Hawes charged on average $15 for one daguerreotype, more than most laborers earned in a week, and their lowest price was $5 for a sixth-plate image’’ (‘‘Daguerreotyping the National Soul: The Portraits of Southworth & Hawes, 1843–1860,’’ in Romer and Wallis, Young America 59.) 46. As Romer and Wallis put it, the ‘‘survival of more than 2,000 of their daguerreotypes is due to the true familial nature of their partnership. After the death of Josiah Hawes, his children preserved the legacy of their father, mother, and uncle by putting the studio contents into storage. Near the end of their lives, all three, unmarried and childless, transferred caretakership of the studio legacy to a small community of prescient individuals and institutions that recognized a duty to preserve it for future study’’ (11). Chapter 4 1. Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839) offers perhaps the most influential example of anti-slavery claims to representational accuracy in both its title and introduction. Published in the same year that daguerreotypy was introduced, Weld’s book establishes the ‘‘facts’’ of slavery ‘‘by the testimony of scores and hundreds of eye witnesses’’ and ‘‘of slaveholders in all parts of the slave states’’ that Weld had collected from newspapers published throughout the South (9). Though he used

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slaveholders’ own descriptions of the system and their practices to make his case, Weld still anticipated accusations of misrepresentation: ‘‘We know, full well,’’ he declares, ‘‘the outcry that will be made by multitudes, at these declarations; the multiform cavils, the flat denials, the charges of ‘exaggeration’ and ‘falsehood’ so often bandied, the sneers of affected contempt at the credulity that can believe such things, and the rage and imprecations against those who give them currency’’ (9). Borrowing from Weld’s title in the preface to Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, William Lloyd Garrison is compelled to declare his confidence that Douglass’s text ‘‘is essentially true in all its statements; that nothing has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing drawn from the imagination; that it comes short of the reality, rather than overstates a single fact in regard to slavery as it is’’ (Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave Written by Himself, ed. John W. Blassingame, John R. McKivigan, and Peter P. Hinks [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001], 6). In one of his lectures arguing for the idea of polygenesis that was used in defenses of slavery, Josiah C. Nott similarly declares, ‘‘My object is truth, and I care not which way the question is decided, provided the decision is a correct one. I have accumulated a number of curious and interesting facts, some of which are new, and I have interpreted them dispassionately. My conclusions may be disputed, but they cannot be disproved in the present state of the science of Natural History.—New facts must be brought to light before certain conclusions to the contrary are arrived at’’ (‘‘Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races,’’ in The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860, ed. Drew Gilpin Faust [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981], 209). 2. Here I allude to the subtitle of Jane Tompkins’s influential book that effectively inserted Uncle Tom’s Cabin into the American literary canon: Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 3. Famously, in the ‘‘Concluding Remarks’’ to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe responds to her readers’ potential question about ending slavery, ‘‘But what can any individual do?’’ with the imperative, ‘‘they can see to it that they feel right.’’ See Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly, ed. Ann Douglas (1852; New York: Penguin, 1981), 684 (hereafter cited as UTC). 4. See, for example, Jo-Ann Morgan, ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’’ as Visual Culture (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007); Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); Barbara Hochman, ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era: An Essay in Generic Norms and the Contexts of Reading,’’ Book History 7 (2004): 143–69; and Ellen J. Goldner, ‘‘Arguing with Pictures: Race, Class, and the Formation of Popular Abolitionism Through Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’’ Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 24:1–2 (Spring/Summer 2001): 71–84. 5. One of countless possible examples of using daguerreotype as a synonym for a description that captures the subject’s essence can be found in an 1849 National Era notice expressing frustration at writers’ attempts to represent the eloquence of the

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abolitionist speaker and writer William Elder: ‘‘Having never heard him speak, we have lain in wait for reports of his famous speeches, but reporters have failed to daguerreotype him, simply remarking that the Doctor spoke in his usual ‘eloquent,’ or ‘brilliant,’ or ‘unrivalled’ manner, or something of the sort’’ (‘‘Dr. William Elder,’’ National Era 3:30 [July 26, 1849]: 118). Interestingly, this notice appears in an issue that contains not only an account of one of Elder’s speeches but also an installment of Stowe’s series ‘‘Sketches of Modern Reforms and Reformers in Great Britain and Ireland’’ (as well as an essay titled ‘‘Fiction—Its Abuses’’)—all just less than two years before the first chapter of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was printed in the same newspaper. 6. Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story is Founded; Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work (1853; reprint, Bedford, Mass.: Applewood Books, 1998), 133. Employing a distancing strategy common to humanitarian reform writings, Stowe justifies her numerous reprintings of runaway slave advertisements in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin by declaring that they have been included ‘‘not to weary the reader with [their] painful details, but that, by running his eye over the dates of the papers quoted, and the places of their publication, he may form a fair estimate of the extent to which this atrocity was publicly practised’’ (21). 7. Arthur Riss’s important corrective to arguments about sentimentalism that are premised on the abstraction of differences into likeness is relevant here. I see the narrative’s figurative daguerreotype of Tom working to make him more ‘‘real’’ to the reader as a distinct individual even as it reassures readers that his character is much like theirs. This resemblance, however, does not necessarily result in identity: the narrative’s strategy brings Tom closer to the reader so that she or he and Tom can relate on a person-to-person level, yet in this relationship each person continues to embody and maintain significant differences, including race. These differences, however, do not preclude sympathy and equality; I see this simultaneous proximity and distance, then, resulting in the simultaneous racialism and liberal pluralism that Riss argues are at the heart of the novel’s politics (Riss, Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in NineteenthCentury American Literature [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 59). 8. Marianne Noble, ‘‘The Ecstacies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’’ Yale Journal of Criticism 10:2 (Fall 1997): 301. 9. Here I allude to Orlando Patterson’s landmark Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). Uncle Tom’s Cabin dramatizes the forcible (and, as the dialogue intimates, unnatural) dissociation of maternal affection from the slave child in the course of Haley’s deal with Shelby for Harry Harris. Haley touts his careful isolation of mother from child at the point of sale, explaining to Shelby, ‘‘I takes a leetle care about the onpleasant parts, like selling young uns and that,—get the gals out of the way—out of sight, out of mind, you know,—and when it’s clean done, and can’t be helped, they naturally gets used to it. ’Tan’t, you know, as if it was white folks, that’s brought up in the way of ’spectin’ to keep their children and wives, and all that’’ (UTC 49).

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10. The original subtitle of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘‘The Man That Was a Thing,’’ was planned for its serial publication in the National Era. In suggesting that the narrative works to establish Tom as a fully integrated subject, I am influenced by Riss’s important example of tracing the ‘‘historical work needed to make the Negro into a person’’ (8). With respect to the work done by Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its claims of realism, Riss argues, ‘‘That pro-slavery advocates so quickly attempted both to counter and capture the cultural power of Stowe’s novel suggests how centrally literature participated in adjucating the ‘personhood’ of the slave. The literary texture of this political debate consolidates the representational paradox underlying the antebellum debate over race-based slavery: these literary texts (whether pro- or anti-slavery) claim to be realistically representing the very object that they are ultimately helping to determine. It is precisely this process of positing the object of representation as prior to the act of representation at the same time that this object is being constituted that literature so powerfully foregrounds’’ (16). Following Riss’s larger arguments against the ‘‘liberal impulse to decontextualize the ‘person’ ’’ and for the importance of ‘‘question[ing] what effects a particular definition of the ‘person’ has in a particular context’’ (20), I do not seek to abstract Tom into a liberalist transhistorical, universal ‘‘person’’ but rather to analyze the role that the narrative’s appropriation of daguerreian portraiture plays in representing Tom for readers as a specific, individual, black man worthy of equal rights. In doing so, I do not mean to assert that Tom does not exist as a ‘‘person’’ or that there is no such thing as a ‘‘person’’ but instead am interested in what kind of historically specific person the narrative, especially its figurative daguerreian portrait, represents Tom as being to argue for his rights. 11. Robyn R. Warhol reads the narrative’s direct address to the reader as a real person rather than an abstract ideal as one of Stowe’s uniquely realist strategies for evoking sympathy (‘‘Poetics and Persuasion: Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a Realist Novel,’’ Essays in Literature 13:2 [Fall 1986]: 283–97). 12. Noble argues that the ‘‘real presence of distress’’ only effects a false, temporary conversion to the cause versus the ‘‘true sympathy’’ of hearing in a further evolution of her theory of the relationship of embodiment and sympathy (‘‘Sympathetic Listening in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave’ and My Bondage and My Freedom,’’ Studies in American Fiction 34:1 [Spring 2006]: 53–68). 13. ‘‘Literary Notices,’’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper (April 8, 1852): 2. Robert S. Levine suggests that this review ‘‘may have been written by Douglass but more likely was the work of his English comrade, financial supporter, and managing editor, Julia Griffiths, who wrote most of the reviews in the weekly ‘Literary Notices’ section’’ (Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Representative Identity [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997], 73). In discussing the legibility of Douglass’s ‘‘strong personal stamp’’ on the reprinted articles in his paper, Levine leaves room for Douglass’s influence on the message, even if he did not write the articles himself; I want to allow for the same with respect to this review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—even if they are not his words, there is good reason to read the review as according with Douglass’s ideas about the book and its significance.

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14. The figurative daguerreotype of Tom begins on page 41 and continues onto page 42 and the full-page illustration captioned ‘‘Eliza comes to tell Uncle Tom that he is sold, and that she is running away to save her child’’ is on page 62 in the first edition. See Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 15. Stowe relates some of these stories in Key (23–30). Among her own list of reallife influences on the development of Tom, she includes a lengthy synopsis of the autobiography of Josiah Henson. A former slave who had become a minister in Canada, Henson reprinted his autobiography after the publication of both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Key with the addition of an introduction written by Stowe that, as E. Bruce Kirkham notes, ‘‘highly recommended the book but gave no indication that Henson was the model for Uncle Tom’’ (The Building of ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’’ [Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977], 90). Henson went on to claim that other characters in the novel, including George and Eliza Harris, Topsy, and Eva and Augustine St. Clare, were either his ‘‘particular friends’’ (92) or people whom he had known during his life. As a result of such claims, Henson was ‘‘very successful in palming himself off as the original Uncle Tom’’ (88). 16. William Gilmore Simms, review of A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Southern Quarterly Review 8:15 (July 1853): 234. As Richard Yarborough also notes, one southern novelist, John W. Page, went so far as to assure readers that Tom had not died under Legree’s lash but instead survived as an impoverished and homeless freeman in the North in his 1853 novel Uncle Robin in His Cabin in Virginia and Tom Without One in Boston (‘‘Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel,’’ in New Essays on ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’’ ed. Eric J. Sundquist [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 58). 17. ‘‘Uncle Tomitudes,’’ Putnam’s Monthly 1 (January 1853): 100. The reviewer borrows Jonathan Swift’s conceit in Thoughts on Various Subjects (1711) that his experience of reading any book is like it coming to life and talking to him. 18. For example, Annie Fields includes among her testimonies to the profound effects of Uncle Tom’s Cabin a letter from ‘‘an intimate friend’’: ‘‘I sat up last night until long after one o’clock, reading and finishing ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ I could not leave it any more than I could have left a dying child; nor could I restrain an almost hysterical sobbing for an hour after I laid my head upon my pillow’’ (Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898], 149–50). 19. In Stowe’s best-known such declaration of divine inspiration, she claims that from the moment of her communion vision of Tom being beaten to death, ‘‘the story can less be said to have been composed by her than imposed upon her. . . . The book insisted upon getting itself into being, and would take no denial’’ (Fields 147). 20. Stowe found this entire scene of the daguerreotype exchange significant enough to include almost verbatim in The Christian Slave, her dramatic adaptation of the novel. See Act II of The Christian Slave (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1855). 21. In analyzing the daguerreotype of Augustine and Eva St. Clare as visual evidence of the destructive influence of slavery on the traditional structure and sentiments of the family, I am indebted to Cindy Weinstein’s observation that sentimental

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texts including Uncle Tom’s Cabin ‘‘often imagine their disfigured families in relation to the institution of slavery, whose donne´e is the fracturing of domestic order’’ and, more broadly, to her arguments about slavery’s disintegration of both black and white families in the antebellum period and its literature. See Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1. 22. Of the experience of sitting for a daguerreian portrait, Beaumont Newhall explains, ‘‘It was hard work to be daguerreotyped; you had to cooperate with the operator, forcing yourself not only to sit still for at least half a minute, but also to assume a natural expression. If you moved, the picture was ruined; if you could not put yourself at ease in spite of the discomfort, the result was so forced that it was a failure’’ (The History of Photography 22). 23. In clarifying the function of these braces, Newhall asserts that iron headrests used by daguerreotypists ‘‘were not clamps; the head was not held rigid; they were rests against which one could lean’’ (The Daguerreotype in America 76). As such, the headrest was more an instrument of discipline than of punishment as opposed to the iron restraints used in the same historical moment to hold slaves’ bodies in painful positions. 24. For a historical discussion of improvements in chemistry and lens making and their effects on the daguerreotype portrait, see Taft 22–45; and Barger and White. 25. The disintegration of the black family is the driving force of several plot lines in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In focusing on the motherless daguerreian portrait of the St. Clare family, I mean to suggest the significance of this narrative prop as unimpeachable evidence of the inevitable disintegration of white families that are organized around slavery. 26. In first describing the Mississippi River in chapter 14, the narrative voice begins with an allusion to Chateaubriand’s description of it ‘‘as a river of mighty, unbroken solitudes, rolling amid undreamed wonders of vegetable and animal existence.’’ Though it establishes an expectation that this idealized image will be contradicted, the passage surprisingly confirms this romantic scene and the reality of the river’s appearance: ‘‘But as in an hour, this river of dreams and wild romance has emerged to a reality scarcely less visionary and splendid’’ (226). When paired with the above-cited passage, the text can be seen here as reveling in its status as a novel and, thus, in the exemption from reality afforded by the idealizing powers of fiction. 27. In offering their services for photographing children, daguerreotypists’ advertisements frequently and poetically urged parents to ‘‘Secure the Shadow, Ere the Substance Fade’’ and ‘‘Let Nature imitate what Nature made.’’ Jay Ruby takes part of this slogan for his book Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). 28. Julia Hirsch has observed that family portraiture as a genre in the visual arts conventionally ‘‘promotes mothers and children or siblings together as appealing family subjects and excludes fathers’’ in a tradition related to portraits of the holy family

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from which the father is visibly absent (Family Photographs: Content, Meaning, and Effect [New York: Oxford University Press, 1981], 95). 29. For two critical assertions of the gender and ultimately narrative binds that Stowe inadvertently but inevitably places the novel in, see Amy Schrager Lang, ‘‘Slavery and Sentimentalism: The Strange Career of Augustine St. Clare,’’ in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 128–42; and Jennifer L. Jenkins, ‘‘Failed Mothers and Fallen Houses: The Crisis of Domesticity in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’’ ESQ 38:2 (1992): 161. 30. From the moment that Eliza is threatened with the sale of her son to the recovery of Cassy’s son near the conclusion of the novel, Stowe deploys the affective bond of parent-child, and especially mother-child, relationships as the primary point of sympathetic identification for readers. For competing analyses of the political motives behind this rhetorical strategy and its relationship to traditions of sentimentalism and the domestic novel, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon, 1978); Tompkins; and Brown 13–18. 31. In the chapter titled ‘‘The Mother’s Struggle,’’ which begins with an explanation of Eliza’s maternal instinct to protect her son from being sold, the narrative voice directly addresses the reader as a mother to align her sympathetically with the tormented slave mother: ‘‘If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, tomorrow morning . . . how fast could you walk?’’ (UTC 105). 32. As we have seen in Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, Phoebe Pyncheon remarks to the daguerreotypist Holgrave that the products of his craft seem to be ‘‘dodging away from the eye, and trying to escape altogether’’ (91). 33. Stowe participated in the ritual of photographically memorializing one’s own children three years before the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the case of her son Samuel Charles (known as ‘‘Charley’’), who died in July 1849, the daguerreotype was made postmortem in what was not an unusual tradition for antebellum parents grieving the loss of a child (Sa´nchez-Eppler 66–69). 34. As I have mentioned, John P. Jewett commissioned eight engravings from the illustrator Charles Howland Hammatt Billings for the initial publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in book form in 1852. One of Billings’s images appears on the cover and another on the title page; the remaining six depict, and are inserted proximate to, various scenes in the narrative. Three of these illustrations feature Tom (being told by Eliza he is to be sold, read to by Eva, and ministered to by Cassy after his beating by Legree) as slighter and older than the narrative describes him, and one shows Eva with what appears to be blond hair (in contrast to both Tom’s dark and graying hair in the same engraving and the brown ringlets Eva offers as mementoes in the narrative). While Billings’s illustrations might seem to foreclose the imagined portraiture that I see the narrative as encouraging, they also could be understood to draw additional attention to readers’ inevitable mental images of the characters, occasioning comparisons between how the illustrator and the reader picture them. Such comparisons,

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moreover, implicitly would point up the inherent subjectivity of the manual arts in contrast to the objectivity of daguerreotypy—the essential difference that, I argue, Stowe seeks to exploit in specifically ‘‘daguerreotyping’’ Tom. For more on Billings’s illustrations and the afterlife of the novel’s characters in visual culture, see Morgan 20–63. 35. Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 87. 36. Here I have adapted the narrative voice’s declaration ‘‘nor was [Eva] one that, once seen, could be easily forgotten’’ (230) to assert the affective power of the narrative in fixing a sympathetic picture of Eva and Tom in the reader’s mind. 37. Stowe, quoted from a collection of letters from 1870 to John T. Howard (Fields 327). 38. As George F. Holmes declared in reviewing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘‘But where a writer of the softer sex manifests, in her productions, a shameless disregard of truth and of those amenities which so peculiarly belong to her sphere of life, we hold that she has forfeited the claim to be considered a lady, and with that claim all exemption from the utmost stringency of critical punishment’’ (Southern Literary Messenger 18:10 [October 1852]: 630). Stowe’s friend Annie Fields explicitly defends Stowe’s appearance, acknowledging that she was ‘‘seldom seen to be beautiful by the great world’’ (205–6). Explaining why portraits of Stowe, as well as those of George Sand and George Eliot, were sometimes unflattering, Fields asserts that occasionally a ‘‘strange heaviness, a lack-lustre visage was common to [all three], and the portraits taken in such moments . . . are painful, untrue, plain sometimes beyond words. Their faces become almost like stone masks, not etherealized as in death, but weighted with the heavier tasks of life’’ (205–6). Diane Roberts undertakes a thorough analysis of the figure of ‘‘The Man Harriet’’ in southern criticism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region (London: Routledge, 1994), 58–71. 39. While Eastman’s publishers Lippincott, Grambo & Co. advertise the daguerreian fidelity of Aunt Phillis’s Cabin’s representation of slavery, Eastman decidedly does not daguerreotype her title character. Upon first introducing Aunt Phillis, the narrative voice declares (in contrast to Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s specifically daguerreian introduction of Tom), ‘‘We must bring Uncle Bacchus’s wife before our readers’’ (Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or, Southern Life as It Is [Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1852], 102). 40. Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 92. 41. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 241. Earlier in the essay, Benjamin also argues that photography is capable of bringing out ‘‘those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens’’ (220), uncannily echoing the earliest American responses (such as Poe’s) to the daguerreotype.

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42. A number of critics and historians have unquestioningly reproduced Lincoln’s supposed introductory question to Stowe, ‘‘Is this the little woman who made this great war?’’ to discuss the political and historical impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In Life and Letters, Fields is more careful: ‘‘It was left for others to speak of Mrs. Stowe’s interview with President Lincoln. Her daughter was told that when the President heard her name he seized her hand, saying, ‘Is this the little woman who made this great war?’ He then led her to a seat in the window, where they were withdrawn, and undisturbed by other guests. No one but those two souls will ever know what waves of thought and feeling swept over them in that brief hour’’ (268–69). 43. Martin R. Delany, ‘‘Mrs. Stowe’s Position,’’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper 6:20 (May 6, 1853): 3. 44. Douglass to Stowe, March 8, 1853, reprinted in The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass in Douglass: Autobiographies (New York: Library of America, 1994), 730. 45. Elizabeth Ammons, ‘‘Freeing the Slaves and Vanishing the Blacks: Racism, Empire, and Africa in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’’ in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’’: A Casebook, ed. Ammons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 227–46. 46. Timothy B. Powell, Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural Interpretation of the American Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 123. The reading of Harris’s letter as blackface minstrelsy is not Powell’s but rather his summary of one of the more extreme critical positions taken in the debate over Stowe’s colonizationist politics. 47. Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 48. 48. Michelle Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682–1861 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997), 121. 49. Augustus Washington, ‘‘Liberia as It Is,’’ New-York Daily Tribune (July 26, 1854): 3. 50. While Liberia declared its independence as a nation in 1847, the United States did not officially recognize it as an independent republic until 1862. Given its continued close relationship with, and even dependence upon, the American Colonization Society in this time period (and into the twentieth century), I want to suggest that Washington’s actual and written daguerreotypes of Liberia contribute to its lengthy— ongoing, even—process of establishing an independent national identity. Chapter 5 1. According to Eric Burin, between 1820 and 1860, a total of only 10,939 people immigrated to Liberia via the American Colonization Society. Of this total, 4,095 were free blacks, compared to 6,043 manumittees (slaves freed on the condition that they emigrate to Liberia). See table 2 in Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005). 2. Ann Shumard, A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist (Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery, 1999), 2–3.

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3. Washington, qtd. in ibid., 3. 4. Washington to J. W. C. Pennington and Augustus W. Hanson, July 10, 1841, Colored American 2:22 (July 31, 1841): 1. 5. Washington, ‘‘African Colonization,’’ New-York Daily Tribune (July 9, 1851): 6, reprinted in African Repository 9:27 (September 1851): 259–65. 6. Broadside ad, ‘‘The Washington Daguerrean Gallery,’’ reprinted in Shumard 7. 7. Advertisement, Hartford Daily Courant (March 29, 1853), reprinted in Shumard 8. 8. Joe Webb, ‘‘The George Harris Letter and African Repository: New Sources for Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’’ ANQ 21:4 (Fall 2008): 30–34. 9. Frederick Douglass, ‘‘African Colonization,’’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper (July 31, 1851): 1. 10. ‘‘Frederick Douglass and Augustus Washington,’’ Christian Statesman, reprinted in Frederick Douglass’ Paper (September 4, 1851): 1. 11. Levine suggests that Stowe would have been a subscriber to Frederick Douglass’ Paper at this time and analyzes Stowe’s and Douglass’s continuing interest in and influence on each other through their correspondence and publications (Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass 149). 12. Much like Stowe in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Sarah Josepha Hale calls on texts written by blacks who have experienced in real life what her 1853 novel Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton’s Experiments represents; she attached a Key-like appendix to the novel that contains ‘‘documents for the most part written by colored persons from and about Liberia, showing the estimation in which that country is held by those who have the best opportunity of judging concerning it’’ (Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton’s Experiments [New York: Harper, 1853], 247). Hale’s novel was published in the same year that Washington and his family immigrated to Liberia; his letters are not among those included in the appendix to Hale’s novel. 13. Washington to Rev. John Orcutt, February 8, 1854, reprinted as ‘‘Letter from Augustus Washington,’’ African Repository 6:30 (June 1854): 186. 14. Harriet Beecher Stowe to Gamaliel Bailey, March 9, 1851, in The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader, ed. Joan D. Hedrick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 66. 15. Washington’s commitment to depicting the successes and the failures of the new Liberian nation bears some resemblance to Hale’s Liberia. Etsuko Taketani argues that Hale’s novel stages ‘‘the difficulties and contradictions of post-independence Liberia’’ and ‘‘articulates the inherent contradictions of postcolonial nationhood while exploring the possibilities of African agency and independence’’ (U.S. Women Writers and the Discourses of Colonialism, 1825–1861 [Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003], 153). 16. ‘‘Daguerre in Africa,’’ Friends’ Review 7:38 (June 3, 1854): 599–60. 17. Carol Johnson, ‘‘Faces of Freedom: Portraits from the American Colonization Society Collection,’’ in Daguerreian Annual (Pittsburgh: Daguerreian Society, 1996), 270.

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18. Taketani examines how Hale’s Liberia attempts to do the same—to confirm Liberia’s status as a nation instead of a colony—and concludes that the novel ultimately depicts its identity as hybrid as a result of Hale’s ‘‘unique (if crude) postcolonial vision’’ (173). Interestingly, daguerreotypy is entirely absent from Hale’s novel, despite the influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on its composition and Hale’s recognition that her fiction would benefit from some form of verification. 19. Washington to the New-York Daily Tribune, March 1854, published as ‘‘Liberia as It Is’’; Washington to the Tribune, June 20, 1854, published as ‘‘Liberia as It Is. . . . II,’’ New-York Daily Tribune (November 14, 1854): 6, reprinted in Friends’ Intelligencer 3:11 (December 2, 1854): 86–89; and ‘‘Liberia as It Is. . . . III,’’ New-York Daily Tribune (November 22, 1854): 6. 20. As Dalila Scruggs has noted with respect to textual and visual representations of Liberia, ‘‘In this polemic debate about colonization, assertions such as ‘as it is’ and ‘on the spot’ point to a rhetoric about Liberia in mass print media that based claims to truth and legitimacy on direct observation and transparent representation of what had been seen. This rhetorical strategy resonates with the discourse about photography in the nineteenth century.’’ See Scruggs, ‘‘Colonization Pictures as Primary Documents: Virginians’ Contributions,’’ Virginia Emigrants to Liberia (Charlottesville: Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia), http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/ liberia/pages/scruggs.html. 21. Taketani discusses the prevalence of familial metaphors in colonizationist discourse, especially in the publications of the ACS (159). 22. In her reading of Hale’s Liberia, Amy Kaplan (‘‘Manifest Domesticity,’’ American Literature 70:3 [September 1998]: 581–606) similarly considers how the novel represents the young nation as ‘‘an imitation of America’’ and, in doing so, ‘‘colonizes Liberia’’ through storytelling (596). 23. My tentativeness here is due to uncertainty about the dates of the images and their attribution to Washington. According to Carol Johnson, curator of photography at the Library of Congress, which houses the ACS collection, the collection includes thirty portraits, at least five of which were taken by Washington (265). ‘‘The sitters include Steven Allen Benson, the second President of Liberia; Urias A. McGill, a shipping merchant . . . ; Alfred Francis Russell, Senator from Montserrado County; and an unidentified man’’ (265–66). Johnson also describes an ‘‘additional eleven laterally reversed sixth-plate daguerreotypes of members of the Liberian Senate, housed in identical brass mats, [which] were also most likely taken by Augustus Washington’’ (266). The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Catalog dates these images as ‘‘between 1856 and 1860.’’ 24. The caption accompanying Griffin’s watercolor on the Web site for the exhibition ‘‘A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist’’ notes that ‘‘[w]hile it would have been impossible to successfully daguerreotype the full Senate group within the Senate chamber, an artist’s rendering of the scene’’ such as Griffin’s watercolor, ‘‘as well as individual daguerreotypes of the

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senators and their colleagues, would have provided much of the visual information needed by a printmaker to produce a Liberian Senate image.’’ See ‘‘Liberian Senate,’’ A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist (Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery), http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/awash/sen ate2.htm. 25. In her essay ‘‘The Legislative Body: Print Portraits of the National Assembly, 1789–1791’’ (Eighteenth Century Studies 41:3 [Spring 2008]: 337–58), Amy Freund examines ‘‘several series of print portraits of the deputies to the [French] Estates General’’ that were ‘‘launched in Paris and sold at modest prices to viewers eager for images of the new legislative body.’’ These portraits, Freund contends, ‘‘both consecrated the deputies as worthy successors to the great men of antiquity and of French history, and constituted the legislative body as the representation of France itself’’ (337–38). I argue that the discursively established evidentiary power of the daguerreotype portrait works to do the same, but with even greater authority, in Washington’s portraits of the Liberian government. On the history and functions of the state portrait as a genre, see Marianna Jenkins’s still influential The State Portrait: Its Origin and Evolution (New York: College Art Association, 1947). 26. ‘‘Lecture on Pictures’’ manuscript in The Frederick Douglass Papers, part of the Library of Congress’s online archive American Memory (http://memory.loc.gov/ ammem/doughtml/dougFolder5.html). This lecture has been transcribed and published as ‘‘Pictures and Progress: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on 3 December 1861,’’ in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Volume 3: 1855–63, ed. John W. Blassingame (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 452–73. 27. Biographical information for Hanson, Brown, and Russell comes from the captions accompanying their images on the ‘‘Durable Memento’’ exhibition Web site; see http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/awash/hanson.htm; http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/awash/ cbrown2.htm and http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/awash/russell.htm. Of the motives for slaveholders emancipating their slaves and shipping them to Liberia, Burin explains: ‘‘Born during the Revolutionary era and reared amid the Second Great Awakening, most would-be ACS manumitters [from 1820 to 1840, the time during which Russell was manumitted] regarded slavery as both a secular and moral problem. Though troubled by black bondage, few liberators freed their slaves gratis. Instead, they concocted time-consuming manumission programs. The incipient emancipators announced that these schemes would prepare slaves for freedom in Liberia, but they also assumed that the projects would serve their own interests, that the lure of freedom would coax obedience and loyalty from bondpersons while simultaneously molding them into devout, temperate, and literate emigrants. ACS liberators saw themselves not as radical visionaries but as enlightened moderates, and they regarded their endeavors not as reckless risk-taking but as cautious trials in emancipatory experimentalism’’ (35). 28. Similarly, of the print portraits of the post-Revolution French assembly, Freund argues that they ‘‘aspired to an entirely new genre of portraiture—the

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representation of some 1,200 living men, distinguished not by their fame or virtues but by the mere fact of their election as the representatives of the French people’’ (337). 29. Eric Slauter works through the complications of discursive conflations of aesthetic and political representation during the U.S. founding, specifically attending to comparisons of the ideal representative government to portraiture in The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), especially chapter 3. 30. John Adams, Thoughts on Government, Applicable to the Present State of the American Colonies: In a Letter from a Gentleman to a Friend (Philadelphia and Boston, 1776), qtd. in Slauter 128. 31. Melancton Smith, speech at the Ratifying Convention of New York (June 1788), qtd. in Slauter 132–33. 32. ‘‘Late from Liberia,’’ African Repository 51:4 (October 1875): 117–20. 33. Keith Jenkins, Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1999), 36. 34. ‘‘The Corrector Corrected,’’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper 8:22 (May 18, 1855): 2. Chapter 6 1. ‘‘Anecdote of Daguerre,’’ National Era 6:267 (February 12, 1852): 25. 2. ‘‘Anecdote of Daguerre,’’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper 5:10 (February 26, 1852): unnumbered page 4. 3. McGill briefly mentions that ‘‘[r]eprinting also played a critical role in supporting the fledgling black press’’ (41), deferring to Elizabeth McHenry’s Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African-American Literary Societies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). See especially McHenry, chapter 2. 4. Robert S. Levine addresses Douglass’s role in reprinting materials from other newspapers and contends, with specific respect to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that his ‘‘selection process needs to be considered as a central part of his efforts to shape a particular way of reading and using Stowe’s novel’’ (Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass 73), building on Benjamin Quarles’s observation that Frederick Douglass’ Paper ‘‘was to an unusual degree the product of one man’s thinking’’ (Frederick Douglass [Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1948], 83). From these arguments, I infer that the abridgment of the ‘‘Anecdote of Daguerre’’ is most likely attributable to Douglass as well and, thus, that its emphasis on the inevitability rather than the futility of one man’s vision indexes Douglass’s refocused vision for his paper and his life’s work. 5. ‘‘To the Subscribers of the Liberty Party Paper,’’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper 1:1 (June 26, 1851). The notice refers to the motto that also appears in the paper’s masthead. 6. ‘‘Introductory,’’ National Era 1:1 (January 7, 1847): unnumbered page 2. 7. Jeannine DeLombard, ‘‘ ‘Eye-Witness to the Cruelty’: Southern Violence and Northern Testimony in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative,’’ American Literature 73:2 (June 2001): 253.

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8. With respect to visuality and photography as sites for identity formation and resistance, bell hooks argues that ‘‘[c]ameras gave to black folks, irrespective of our class, a means by which we could participate fully in the production of images. . . . Access and mass appeal have historically made photography a powerful location for the construction of an oppositional black aesthetic. In the world before racial integration, there was a constant struggle on the part of black folks to create a counterhegemonic world of images that would stand as visual resistance, challenging racist images’’ (45–46). In both the images and writings of Frederick Douglass, I want to suggest that Douglass saw, produced, and theorized the earliest photographs as an unprecedented opportunity for visual resistance rather than oppression. For hooks’s full argument, see ‘‘In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,’’ in Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, ed. Deborah Willis (New York: New Press, 1994), 42–53. 9. ‘‘Notice to Readers,’’ North Star (December 3, 1847): 1; ‘‘To the Subscribers of ‘The Liberty Party Paper.’ ’’ 10. ‘‘Colored Artists,’’ New-York Daily Tribune, reprinted in Frederick Douglass’ Paper 5:17 (April 15, 1852): 3. 11. ‘‘Selections: Daguerrian Gallery of the West,’’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper 7:20 (May 5, 1854): 1, reprinted from Gleason’s Pictorial Magazine (April 1, 1854) and in Provincial Freeman (June 3, 1854). 12. I. N. Bloodgood, ‘‘Daguerreotypes’’ [advertisement], Frederick Douglass’ Paper 5:27 (June 24, 1852): 4. 13. C. J. Dietrich, ‘‘Dietrich’s Daguerreian Rooms’’ [advertisement], Frederick Douglass’ Paper 5:35 (August 20, 1852): 4 and 5:35 (August 27, 1852): 3. 14. Frederick Douglass, ‘‘A Day and a Night in ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ ’’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper 6:11 (March 4, 1853): 2. Notably, this issue also contains the first installment of Douglass’s novella The Heroic Slave, published in the anti-slavery gift book Autographs for Freedom. 15. Douglass, comment on ‘‘Shooting a Negro,’’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper 7:10 (February 24, 1854): 3. Garrison also reprinted the Dispatch article under the heading ‘‘The Bloody and Oppressive South: Another Chapter of Atrocities,’’ in the Liberator 24:14 (April 7, 1854): 56. 16. For abolitionists’ reliance on the court of public opinion, see Jeannine DeLombard, Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), especially her introduction. 17. ‘‘A Card,’’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper 5:23 (May 27, 1852): 2. 18. Douglass, response to ‘‘A Card,’’ Frederick Douglass’ Paper 5:23 (May 27, 1852): 2. 19. Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Carla L. Peterson (‘‘ ‘We Hold These Truths to Be Self Evident’: The Rhetoric of Frederick Douglass’s Journalism,’’ in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 189–204) similarly have noted that in ‘‘fictionalizing [Madison]

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Washington’s story in ‘The Heroic Slave,’ ’’ versus only reporting on it in his newspapers, ‘‘Douglass took full advantage of the freedom that fiction allowed him further to point out the contradictions inherent in the slave system and to press home the abolitionists’ cause’’ (198). 20. Douglass, ‘‘The Heroic Slave,’’ in Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Cleveland: J. P. Jewett & Company, 1853), 177. 21. Here it is worth noting that Douglass pairs, rather than opposes, vision and hearing as ways that Listwell has come to know Washington. This moment would seem to contradict DeLombard’s and Noble’s arguments that Douglass privileges sound over sight as means of recognizing and realizing black subjectivity. 22. Robert S. Levine describes ‘‘The Heroic Slave’’ as a revision of Stowe’s novel (‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Frederick Douglass’ Paper: An Analysis of Reception,’’ American Literature 64:1 [March 1992]: 71–93), whereas Robert B. Stepto sees both appropriation and critique in the similarities and differences between the novella and novel (‘‘Sharing the Thunder: The Literary Exchanges of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass,’’ in New Essays on ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’’ ed. Eric J. Sundquist [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 135–53). Richard Yarborough reads Madison Washington not as a rewriting of Tom but rather as fitted to another ‘‘white bourgeois paradigm of manhood’’ (‘‘Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in ‘The Heroic Slave,’ ’’ in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 166–88). Most recently, Marianne Noble argues that the ‘‘sentimental representational strategies’’ of ‘‘The Heroic Slave’’ should be understood as a critical response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (‘‘Sympathetic Listening’’). 23. John Stauffer observes that daguerreotypy is a trope shared by Douglass and Stowe and briefly considers its significance to Listwell’s and Washington’s relationship (‘‘Creating an Image in Black: The Power of Abolition Pictures,’’ in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and Stauffer [New York: New Press, 2006], 256–67). The same analysis can also be found in Stauffer’s The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 51; his ‘‘Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom,’’ Raritan 25:1 (Summer 2005): 114–36; and his ‘‘Interracial Friendship and the Aesthetics of Freedom,’’ in Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, ed. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 134–58. Sean Ross Meehan also acknowledges, but does not analyze, the significance of daguerreotypy in ‘‘The Heroic Slave’’ in Mediating American Autobiography: Photography in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008). 24. See, for example, Stepto; Levine, ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Frederick Douglass’ Paper’’; and McHenry 127. 25. Noble argues that Douglass’s novella ‘‘distinguishes itself from sentimental precursors’’ by rejecting ‘‘the visual/corporeal model of persuasion popularized in

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Uncle Tom’s Cabin and promot[ing] instead a complex idea of sympathy grounded in listening.’’ Even so, she is compelled to describe the story that results in surprisingly visual language: ‘‘Douglass paints an optimistic portrait of interracial sympathy in ‘The Heroic Slave,’ ’’ she writes (‘‘Sympathetic Listening’’ 59). 26. While the ‘‘Lecture on Pictures’’ speech has been transcribed and published as ‘‘Pictures and Progress,’’ I work from the first version of the speech in Douglass’s manuscript titled ‘‘Lecture on Pictures’’ to maintain a sense of the development of his ideas in the process of drafting the speech. Thus, all of the in-text citations refer to the image numbers of the digitally reproduced manuscript pages. The ‘‘Lecture on Pictures’’ manuscript also contains alternate fragment draft versions of the speech titled ‘‘The Age of Pictures’’ and ‘‘Life Pictures.’’ In the Library of Congress’s online version of The Frederick Douglass Papers, ‘‘The Age of Pictures’’ begins at image 30 and ‘‘Life Pictures’’ at image 63 within a larger manuscript titled ‘‘Life Pictures,’’ in the ‘‘Speech, Article, and Book File,’’ http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/doughtml/dougFolder5.html. 27. In his reading of Douglass’s pictures speeches, Meehan notes Douglass’s specific discussion of daguerreotypy instead of photography but suggests that Douglass uses the former when he really means the latter: ‘‘Douglass is thinking of photographic processes, but nevertheless continues to refer to them, at least in name, in terms of what he calls ‘the daguerreian apparatus’ ’’ (139n7). I contend that Douglass does not confuse his terms but rather means to speak of the daguerreotype as a separate, distinct form of photography and consider it on its own terms. 28. As Blassingame notes in ‘‘Lectures on Pictures,’’ ‘‘The ‘Fraternity of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society’ ’’ began sponsoring a fall series of public lectures in Boston’s Tremont Temple in 1858. The series was often described in the press as the Parker Fraternity Lectures, after Theodore Parker, the minister of the TwentyEighth Congregational Society until his death in 1860’’ (452n1). As Dean Grodzins notes, Parker and his congregation became especially active in the anti-slavery movement after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 (American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002], 53). The headnote to ‘‘Pictures and Progress’’ indicates that Douglass had delivered an earlier version of the speech, titled ‘‘Life Pictures,’’ at Wieting Hall in Syracuse, New York, on November 15, 1861. 29. ‘‘Fraternity Lectures’’ [advertisement], Liberator 31:42 (October 18, 1861): 167. 30. The word whole is struck through in the manuscript version of ‘‘Lecture on Pictures.’’ I have transcribed such moments in the manuscript as a means of representing Douglass’s compositional practices and in recognition of the lack of any definitive record of the speech(es) that Douglass actually delivered. 31. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1986), 364. 32. Robert Burns, ‘‘To a Louse: On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church’’ (1786), reprinted in Poems and Songs (New York: Dover, 1991), 38–40. 33. ‘‘Daguerreotype Miniatures,’’ Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics 52:37 (September 11, 1841): 2.

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34. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘‘Fate,’’ in Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1996), 792. 35. Stauffer offers a reading of Douglass’s concept of man as derived from Aristotle’s Poetics and used to challenge Aristotle’s Politics as the foundation for pro-slavery thought (‘‘Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom’’ 116). 36. In the 1865 version of the lecture, ‘‘Pictures and Progress,’’ Douglass refines and rearticulates this idea in relation to social critique: ‘‘It is the picture of life contrasted with the fact of life, the ideal contrasted with the real, which makes criticism possible. Where there is no criticism, there is no progress, for the want of progress is not felt where such want is not made visible by criticism. It is by looking upon this picture and upon that which enables us to point out the defects of the one and the perfections of the other’’ (image 18). 37. Douglass positions reformers as the crucial link in the causal chain of material and moral progress in the 1865 version of the lecture: ‘‘Poets, prophets and reformers are all picture makers—and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what ought to be is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction’’ (‘‘Pictures and Progress’’ image 18). 38. Warrington, ‘‘From Boston,’’ Springfield Weekly Republican (December 7, 1861): 1. 39. ‘‘A. F. R.,’’ ‘‘Frederick Douglass in Boston,’’ Liberator 31:50 (December 13, 1861): 198, reprinted in Douglass’ Monthly 4:8 (January 1862): 589. 40. ‘‘Frederick Douglass in Boston,’’ Douglass’ Monthly 4:8 (January 1862): 589. 41. See especially Meehan, chapter 4; Stauffer, ‘‘Creating an Image’’ 258–63; Frederick S. Voss, Majestic in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of Frederick Douglass (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1995); and Ed Folsom, ‘‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Slave: Douglass’s Frontispiece Engravings,’’ in Approaches to Teaching ‘‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,’’ ed. James Hall (New York: Modern Language Association, 1999), 55–65. 42. Again, we recall Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1861 essay ‘‘Sun-Painting and SunSculpture,’’ which offers remarkable analysis of early photography’s unique ability to contain the history of an entire human life within a series of portraits taken at various stages of life. ‘‘This new art is old enough already to have given us the portraits of infants who are now growing into adolescence,’’ Holmes writes. ‘‘By-and-by it will show every aspect of life in the same individual, from the earliest week to the last year of senility’’ (14). With this, Holmes emphasizes not only the significance of a visual record to understanding a person’s life history but also the importance of having a varied archive of visual documents to developing a more accurate composite, rather than singular portrait, of this individual. Both the variety of the subject’s expressions and photographic techniques used to image him or her are important to constructing an accurate narrative. In Holmes’s view, while an early portrait would have captured the blush of innocent youth, later photographs taken of the subject in middle and old age would be necessary to drawing any well-informed conclusions about that person’s

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life. And as Holmes also acknowledges, even the much-celebrated truth of the photograph can, in fact, misrepresent a person if, for example, one portrait images the subject in a particular mood or light that might appear differently in another. Only an archive of images can be trusted to represent the inherent variations in both life and the photograph. For an influential poststructuralist reconsideration of the presumed legibility of identity in such photographic archives, see Alan Sekula, ‘‘The Body and the Archive,’’ October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64. 43. Colin L. Westerbeck collected and reproduced four of the five daguerreian portraits then known to exist throughout his essay ‘‘Frederick Douglass Chooses His Moment,’’ published after the Art Institute of Chicago’s acquisition of the Douglass portrait made by Samuel J. Miller (Museum Studies 24:2 [1999]: 144–61). Westerbeck also includes a daguerreotype taken by Ezra Greenleaf Weld at an abolitionist meeting in Cazenovia, New York, in 1850; while the image features Douglass seated among other prominent abolitionists, and is a daguerreotype, it is not formally a portrait. 44. On the silhouette, profile, physiognotrace, and pantograph as pre-photographic technologies of portraiture, and the differences between the silhouette, see Barger and White 6, 219–20n7. 45. John Gage, ‘‘Photographic Likeness,’’ in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 119–30. 46. The only daguerreian portrait of Douglass for which a maker has been identified is the one in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collections (Westerbeck 151–53). 47. Westerbeck notes of another Douglass daguerreotype portrait, ‘‘Despite being of him, the portrait may not have been made for him’’ (151). 48. Frederick Douglass, review, A Tribute for the Negro, North Star 2:15 (April 7, 1849): 2. Stauffer describes Douglass’s unhappiness with his own portrait that appeared in Armistead’s book as the result of an engraver adding a smile to the image that was taken from a painted portrait (‘‘Creating an Image’’ 258). Meehan also mentions this review in his consideration of ethnological illustrations and J. T. Zealy’s 1850 daguerreotypes in relation to Douglass’s views on images of race (148–54). 49. Ann Fabian offers a reading of Douglass’s direct response to Morton’s Crania Americana within her superb extended study of Morton’s research and its consequences in The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 116–19. 50. Brian Wallis, ‘‘Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,’’ American Art 9:2 (Summer 1995): 40. 51. William McFeely describes Douglass’s skin as ‘‘light-colored’’ in his biography Frederick Douglass (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 29. 52. Robert W. Gibbes to Samuel G. Morton (March 31 and June 1850), qtd. in Wallis 45. Epilogue 1. Anna M. Tuttle, ‘‘An Old Daguerreotype,’’ Connecticut Magazine 4:3 (July– September 1898): 315. Ewer collects two other poems with the same title in his archive:

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Ernest McGaffey, ‘‘An Old Daguerreotype,’’ San Francisco Call 79:91 (February 29, 1896): 6, reprinted in Poems (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1896), 96–97; and Roy Farrell Greene, ‘‘An Old Daguerreotype,’’ Munsey’s Magazine 19:1 (April 1898): 159–60. 2. J. W. Black, ‘‘Days Gone By,’’ St. Louis Practical Photographer 1:7 (July 1877): 220–21. 3. Sally Pierce’s Whipple and Black: Commercial Photographers in Boston (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1987) remains the definitive survey of Black’s work as a daguerreotypist. 4. Black’s account significantly emphasizes artistic progress in the practice of the medium over time, from the days when daguerreotypes were made ‘‘without any pretentions to artistic merit’’ to the ‘‘exquisite’’ images made by Southworth & Hawes, who ‘‘devote[d] days to producing what they considered a good likeness’’ with attention to ‘‘composition and light and shade.’’ Black also notes, though, that ‘‘the profession had not the cultivation to appreciate’’ their images. 5. John Guillory, ‘‘Genesis of the Media Concept,’’ Critical Inquiry 36 (Winter 2010): 326n12.

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Index

Adams, John, 188, 198 ‘‘A. F. R.,’’ 212–13 African colonization, 125. See also American Colonization Society; Douglass, Frederick; Liberia; Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton’s Experiments; Stowe, Harriet Beecher; Washington, Augustus ‘‘African Colonization’’ (Douglass), 162–63 African Repository, 159, 164, 188–89 Agassiz, Louis, 10, 210, 223, 227–29, 231–32 ‘‘Age of Pictures, The’’ (Douglass), 205, 274n26 Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, 24–25 Allston, Washington, 78 Amaranth, The, 39 ambrotypy, 199 ‘‘American Characteristics. No. V: The Daguerreotypist’’ (Arthur), 33–38, 208, 246nn34–35 American Colonization Society, 152, 159, 166, 167–70, 173–76, 267n50, 269n21, 269n23, 270n27. See also Liberia; Lugenbeel, J. W.; Washington, Augustus American Slavery as It Is (Weld), 169–70, 259n1 Ammons, Elizabeth, 152 anti-slavery movement. See American Slavery as It Is; Autographs for Freedom; Brown, John; Douglass, Frederick; Free Soil Party; Garrison, William Lloyd; Garrisonian abolitionists; Green, Beriah; Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton’s Experiments; National Era; Parker Fraternity Lectures; race; slavery; Stowe, Harriet Beecher; Washington, Augustus; Weld, Ezra Greenleaf Arago, Franc¸ois, 12, 13, 17, 20, 25, 230n4, 243n2 Aristotle, 275n35

Arkwright, Richard, 206 Armistead, Wilson. See A Tribute for the Negro art: hierarchy of genres, 84, 256n16; influence of daguerreotypy on idea of, 4, 14, 90–95, 256n16; influence of scientific objectivity on, 9, 18, 49, 60, 66, 85, 90–91, 94–95, 109, 112, 120–22, 125, 127, 249n5, 255n5; as subjective, 8, 9, 12–14, 18, 21–23, 27–28, 44, 94, 119–20, 125, 166, 210, 232, 242n21, 251n18, 266n34. See also Cole, Thomas; daguerreotype; daguerreotypist; Douglass, Frederick; ekphrasis; Fuseli, Henry; Harrison, Gabriel; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; The House of the Seven Gables; Melville, Herman; Morse, Samuel F. B.; objectivity; photography; Pierre; portraiture; Republic; Root, M. A.; Southworth, Albert S.; Southworth & Hawes; Stowe, Harriet Beecher; sun Arthur, T. S., 33–38, 208. See also ‘‘American Characteristics’’; Arthur’s Home Magazine Arthur’s Home Magazine, 246n34 Art Institute of Chicago, The, 276n43 ‘‘Art of Photography, The’’ (Snelling), 67–68 Ashton, Jean, 254n2 Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or, Southern Life as It Is (Eastman), 150–51, 170, 266n39 Autographs for Freedom, 272n14 Bache, Alexander Dallas, 245n19 Bailey, Gamaliel, 163, 192–93. See also National Era Ball, James Presley, 186, 195 Barry, James, 121 Barthes, Roland, 84 Beecher, Henry Ward, 206 Benjamin, Walter, 84, 150, 266n41 Benson, Stephen Allen, 166, 188, 269n23

296

Index

Billings, Charles Howland Hammatt, 265n34 Biot, Jean-Baptiste, 17 ‘‘Birth-Mark, The’’ (Hawthorne), 60, 251n19 Black, James Wallace, 236–38, 277nn3–4 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 244n11 Blassingame, John W., 274n28 Bloodgood, I. N., 195–96 Boston Daily Advertiser, 12–14, 16, 242n1 Boston Daily Advertiser and Patriot, 26 Boston Daily Evening Transcript, 118, 120 Boston Mercantile Journal, 18 Brady, Mathew, 80 Brown, Chancy, 182–83, 186, 270n27 Brown, John, 154–55 ‘‘Bruno,’’ 28–29, 34, 94 Buntline, Ned (Edward Z. C. Judson), 40 Burnham, Michelle, 152 Burns, Robert, 208 Camera and the Pencil, The (Root), 136–37, 246n37 Carter, St. Leger Landon (pseud. Nugator), 29. See also ‘‘Pictures by the Sun’’ case study, 5, 241n14 Cenci, The (Reni), 258n32 Christian Slave, The (Stowe), 263n20 Christian Statesman, 160 Christian Watchman, 27 Chronicle (Philadelphia), 26 Civil War, 152, 206, 267n42 Clarke, J. B., 199–200 Clarke, Lewis, 160 close reading, 5, 241n14 Coates, Benjamin, 166 Cohen, Lara Langer, 61 Coker, Philip, 184 Cole, Thomas, 91 Colored American, 154–55 Comte, Auguste, 20, 244n12. See also positivism Cornelius, Robert, 26, 222, 245n20 Corsair, 244n11 Courier (Boston), 114 Crania Americana (Morton), 223, 224 fig. 36, 276n49 ‘‘Custom-House, The.’’ See The Scarlet Letter Daguerre, Louise Georgina Arrow-Smith, 192–93

Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mande´: daguerreotype as namesake of, 19; as inventor of daguerreotype, 1, 3, 12, 13, 15, 16–19, 21–26, 31, 47, 56, 59, 91, 165, 170, 192–93, 205–7, 239nn3–4, 245n13 ‘‘Daguerre in Africa,’’ 165–66 daguerreotype: Americanization of, 3–4, 26, 247n39; announcement of, 1, 3, 12, 13, 22, 25, 170; braces and headrests, 36–37, 53, 139, 145, 264n23; clarity/sharpness/visual detail of, 1, 5, 8, 17, 20, 22, 50, 51, 56, 115, 122, 128, 135, 138, 145, 167, 178, 193, 196, 213, 237; coined as name, 16, 19; connection to politics, 4, 6–10, 28, 34–35, 38–39, 66–70, 125, 126–36, 148–53, 154–55, 158, 165–91, 194, 198–205, 207–32, 249n5, 251n25; connection to reality, 4, 8, 10, 14, 40, 45–48, 59–60, 62, 89–90, 95, 112, 117, 131–35, 137, 146–49, 150, 153, 158, 166–67, 177–80, 183, 188, 197, 200, 202–5, 206, 213, 261n7, 262n10; connection to romance, 8, 42, 44–45, 47–48, 50–51, 56– 58, 61–62; 66–67, 76–79, 248nn2–3; as democratic, 3, 4, 14, 16, 28–29, 33–39, 121, 158, 174, 186–87, 205, 207–10; experience and representations of sitting for a, 3, 15– 16, 27–29, 33–40, 42, 44, 45, 51–55, 58–60, 76, 91, 118–22, 139, 174, 175, 184–87, 246n34, 249n6, 249n10, 264n22; experience of viewing, 2–3, 6–8, 15, 21–25, 47, 55–59, 62, 72, 84, 115, 117, 120–22, 133, 138, 140, 144, 147, 180, 183–84, 197, 199–200, 209, 215–16, 218, 227–32, 233–35, 243n5, 248n3, 250n15, 265n32, 276n42; as fine art, 68, 71–72, 75, 79, 84, 86, 90–91, 114–15, 118, 120–25, 256n16, 277n4; insight into subjects’ characters, 3, 16, 28–29, 45–48, 94, 119, 128, 132– 33, 145, 199, 203, 243n6; as lifelike, 40, 42, 44–48, 59–60, 124, 126, 128, 131, 133–37, 142– 43, 146–48, 178, 196–97, 199, 203–4, 222, 243n6, 254n2, 258n33, 261n7; as magic, 8, 19–20, 42, 45–48, 57–58, 61, 70, 76–78, 244n11; material properties and effects of, 1–2, 5–6, 8, 10, 48, 55–57, 61, 106, 115, 117, 126–27, 133, 143–44, 147, 194, 199–200, 209– 10, 214–16, 222, 234–35, 240n6, 241n16, 265n32; mechanical objectivity of, 4, 8–10, 13–14, 16, 18, 20, 22–23, 27–31, 42, 48, 49–50, 56–57, 59–63, 66–68, 71–72, 79, 86–88, 90– 91, 94–95, 103, 105, 113–14, 118–22, 124–25, 126–28, 142, 150, 166–67, 171–72, 174, 178,

Index 189, 196, 199, 210, 222–23, 227, 232, 241n13, 242n21, 243n4, 243n6, 249n5, 266n34; as natural process, 2, 4, 8, 10, 12–14, 18–19, 23– 24, 27–31, 33, 48, 57–58, 64–67, 78, 91, 94, 103, 114, 194, 206, 208, 232, 236–37, 242n21, 243n4, 243n6, 244n11; postmortem, 50–64, 76–77, 196, 249nn9–10, 265n33; print mediation of, 1–8, 11, 12–29, 32–48, 49, 56, 59, 60, 67–72, 75–80, 92, 114, 118, 121, 127, 139, 147, 150, 167, 189, 193, 195, 200, 202, 205, 210, 215–16, 218, 223, 232, 233, 235–36, 240nn8–9, 242n22, 243nn2–5, 243n7, 244n11, 247n39, 256n20; and race, 9, 125, 126–36, 153, 154–56, 158, 164, 171–75, 180–88, 191, 195, 198–232, 256n20, 275n42; relationship to history, 4, 7, 29–32, 206–8, 275n42; as rhetorical figure, 6, 7, 9–10, 16, 29–33, 36, 50–61, 126–28, 131–36, 142, 144, 150, 171– 75, 196–200, 202–4, 207, 251n21, 260n5, 261n7, 262n10, 263n14, 266n34, 266n39; as sentimental memento, 9, 36, 38–40, 42, 60, 76–78, 124, 127, 131, 133–38, 140, 142, 145, 147, 149–50, 195–96, 215, 234–35, 264n27, 266n36; shortcomings of, 17, 44, 46–47, 55– 56, 77–78, 119, 121–22, 124, 139, 143, 144, 145, 147, 265n32; superiority of as a form of image making, 11, 21–23, 25, 31, 49, 86, 91, 94, 112, 122, 237, 239n4, 244n9. See also art; Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mande´; daguerreotypist; Douglass, Frederick; Harrison, Gabriel; The House of the Seven Gables; Pierre; slavery; Southworth & Hawes; mirror; painting; Stowe, Harriet Beecher; Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Washington, Augustus Daguerreotype, The, 33 ‘‘Daguerreotype, The’’ (New Hampshire Sentinel), 245n16 ‘‘Daguerreotype, The’’ (New-Yorker), 24 ‘‘Daguerreotype’’ (Niles’), 59 ‘‘Daguerreotype, The’’ (poem), 57–58 ‘‘Daguerreotype Likenesses’’ (Southworth), 87, 118–22, 124 ‘‘Daguerreotype Miniatures,’’ 26–27 ‘‘Daguerreotype Pictures, Taken on New Year’s Day,’’ 32–33 ‘‘Daguerreotype Portraits,’’ 38–39 ‘‘Daguerreotype. To——, The’’ (M. J. B.), 32 daguerreotypist: advertisements, 26, 42–44, 114–15, 156–58, 174, 195–96, 208, 259n45,

297

264n27; as artist, 8, 9, 35, 40, 42, 44, 50, 51, 57–58, 68–75, 77–80, 84–85, 87, 91, 114–25, 166, 195–96, 209, 236, 252nn29–30, 255n8, 277n4; itinerant, 209; as a literary character, 8, 33, 51–52, 56–58, 61–70, 76–78, 96, 249n6, 249n10, 250n12, 250n15, 251n25, 252n29, 265n32; as operator, 44, 68–70, 77– 80, 91, 118, 122, 124, 252n29, 277n4; studio, 3, 34–45, 53, 76–78, 139, 149, 209, 245n20; ubiquity of, 33–34 ‘‘The Daguerreotypist, The,’’ 37 fig. 1 ‘‘Daguerrotype, The,’’ 19 Daily Crescent (New Orleans), 38–39 Dante, 78, 87 Daston, Lorraine, 14, 18, 22–23, 48, 103, 241n13, 242n21, 243n4, 243n6, 244n12, 246n26, 251n24, 255n5, 257n25 da Vinci, Leonardo, 108 ‘‘Day and a Night in ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ A’’ (Douglass), 196–98 ‘‘Days Gone By’’ (Black), 236–38 Delany, Martin, 152 Delia, 225 DeLombard, Jeannine, 194, 272n16, 273n21 Derrida, Jacques, 190 Description of the Daguerreotype Process, or a Summary of M. Gouraud’s Public Lectures, according to the Principles of M. Daguerre (Fauvel-Gouraud), 26 Dietrich, C. J., 196 ‘‘Dignity of Our Art, The’’ (Harrison), 91 Domenichino, 108 double-consciousness, 180, 207–9, 218 Douglass, Frederick: and daguerreotypy, 10, 125, 180, 191, 194–200, 201–32, 233, 271n4, 272n8, 273n23, 274n27, 276n43, 276nn46–47; idea of art, 205–7, 210, 218, 223, 231–32; idea of progress, 194, 205–11, 213–14, 222, 275nn36–37; as lecturer, 205–13; and Liberian colonization, 159–60, 162–63, 173, 190; as newspaper editor, 195, 262n13, 271n4, 273n19; response to Morton’s Crania Americana, 276n49; response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 133–34, 152, 201–4, 262n13, 271n4, 273nn22–25; skin color of, 215, 228, 231, 276n51; as source for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 160; on visual representations of black subjects, 10, 180, 207–9, 222– 23, 227, 231–32, 276n48. See also ‘‘The Age of Pictures’’; ‘‘A Day and a Night in ‘Uncle

298

Index

Douglass, Frederick (continued ) Tom’s Cabin’ ’’; Douglass’ Monthly; Frederick Douglass’ Paper; ‘‘The Heroic Slave’’; ‘‘Lecture on Pictures’’; ‘‘Life Pictures’’; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; North Star; personhood; ‘‘Pictures and Progress’’ Douglass’ Monthly, 213 Drana, 226 Du Bois, W. E. B., 208 Dumas, Jean-Baptiste, 192 ‘‘Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist,’’ 269n24, 270n27 Duyckinck, Evert A., 33, 89–90, 254n2 Eastman, Mary H., 150–51, 170, 266n39 ‘‘Editors’ Table: The ‘Daguerreotype,’ ’’ 23–24 Edwards, Elizabeth, 6 ekphrasis: definition of, 112, 258n32; instances of, 55, 63, 75, 108, 112–13, 120, 127–28, 134, 146–47, 150, 202–3, 209, 249n10 Elder, William, 261 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 106, 206, 210. See also ‘‘Fate’’ Essay on Man (Pope), 27 Essays on Physiognomy (Lavater), 28, 99, 222 ethnology, 10, 210, 214, 222–32, 276n48 Expositor (New York), 19 ‘‘Extraordinary Chemical and Optical Discovery,’’ 18 Fassena, 227, 229–31 ‘‘Fate’’ (Emerson), 208–9 Fauvel-Gouraud, Franc¸ois, 23–24, 25, 26, 245n13 Fisher, Philip, 150 Fitzgibbon, J. H., 236 Franklin, Benjamin, 78, 198, 206, 245n19 ‘‘Frederick Douglass in Boston’’ (A. F. R.), 212–13 Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 159–60, 173, 190, 193, 195–200, 262n13, 268n11, 271nn4–5, 272n14 Free Soil Party, 158 Friends’ Review, 165–66 ‘‘From Boston,’’ 211–12 Fugitive Slave Law, 128–29, 156, 160, 163, 274n28

Fulton, Robert, 206 Fuseli, Henry, 27, 93–95, 99, 108, 121, 124 ‘‘Gabriel Harrison and the Daguerrean Art,’’ 67–68, 70–72, 252n30 Galison, Peter, 14, 18, 22–23, 48, 103, 241n13, 242n21, 243n4, 243n6, 244n12, 246n26, 251n24, 255n5, 257n25 Garrison, William Lloyd, 260n1, 272n15. See also Liberator Garrisonian abolitionists, 193–94 Gibbes, Robert W., 223, 229, 231, 276n52 Girl Adoring a Bust of George Washington (Harrison), 72, 74 fig. 5, 75 Gitelman, Lisa, 5, 7, 242n18, 242n20 Gleason’s Pictorial Magazine, 195 Gliddon, George R., 210, 223, 228–29, 231 Goddard, Paul Beck, Dr., 245n20 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 33, 35, 37, 246nn34–35 Great Exhibition of 1851, 80, 253n39 Greeley, Horace, 156, 159, 169, 174–75 Green, Beriah, 154 Greene, Roy Farrell, 277n1 Griffin, Robert K., 176, 187 fig. 29, 269n24 Griswold, Rufus, 253n35 Guillory, John, 238 Hale, Sara Josepha, 268n12, 269n18. See also Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton’s Experiments ‘‘Hall of Fantasy, The’’ (Hawthorne), 78 Halttunen, Karen, 36, 252n31 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 111 Hanson, John, 177, 181–83, 270n27 Hariman, Robert, 241n11 Harrison, Gabriel: biography of, 67–72, 76, 252n30; as daguerreotypist, 8, 9, 48–51, 67– 85, 88; idea of art, 8, 9, 50–51, 67, 70–72, 75, 78–80, 84–85, 91; literary friendships, 67, 78, 252n27, 253n35; as writer, 8, 48, 51, 75– 80, 88. See also ‘‘The Dignity of Our Art’’; Girl Adoring a Bust of George Washington; Helia, or the Genius of Daguerreotyping; Infant Saviour Bearing the Cross; ‘‘Lights and Shadows of Daguerrean Life’’; ‘‘Mr. Harrison’s Process’’; Past, Present, Future; Youth Adoring the Bust of George Washington Harrison, George Washington, 72, 73 fig. 4, 80 Harrison, Helia, 72, 74 fig. 5, 75

Index Hart, Janice, 6 Hartford Daily Courant, 158 Hawes, Josiah Johnson, 9, 87, 115. See also Southworth & Hawes Hawes, Nancy Southworth, 115, 117, 117 fig. 10 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 126, 248n4, 250n14; idea of art, 8, 48, 51, 60, 85; theory of romance, 8, 48, 50–52, 56–58, 60–61, 65– 67, 248n3, 250n14, 250n18, 251n24. See also ‘‘The Birth-Mark’’; ‘‘The Hall of Fantasy’’; ‘‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’’; The House of the Seven Gables; The Scarlet Letter ‘‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’’ (Melville), 258n33 Heffernan, James, 112, 258n32 Helia, or the Genius of Daguerreotyping, 75 Henry, Patrick, 198 Henson, Josiah, 160, 263n15 ‘‘Heroic Slave, The’’ (Douglass), 200–205, 207, 210, 272n8, 272n14, 272n19; as response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 273nn22–25 Hill, Levi L., 124, 253n37, 259n44 hillotype. See Hill, Levi L. Holden’s Dollar Magazine, 89 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 84, 253n42, 275n42 ‘‘Hour in a Daguerreian Gallery, An’’ (Roberts), 39–40, 131, 247n42 Hours, The (S. Malbone), 83, 83 fig. 8, 253n40 House of the Seven Gables, The (Hawthorne), 44, 49–70, 83, 88, 248nn4–5, 249n7, 250nn14–15; and daguerreotypy, 8, 48, 50– 67, 76–77, 85, 96, 135, 216, 248nn2–3, 249n6, 249n10, 249n12, 251n21, 251nn24–25, 252n29, 265n32; ‘‘happy ending’’ of, 65–67, 248n3, 251nn22–23; idea of time in, 53–56; and painted portraiture, 54, 56, 62, 64, 249n10, 257n26; and race, 254n1; resemblance to Pierre, 86, 106, 254n1, 257n26; subjectivity of art in, 48–50, 57–58, 65–67, 71, 79, 85. See also art: as subjective; Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hurley, Eliza C., 71 ‘‘Inconstant Daguerreotype, The,’’ 60 Infant Saviour Bearing the Cross (Harrison), 80, 81 fig. 6 Inferno, The (Dante), 87 Jack, 226 fig. 40, 228–29, 230 fig. 44, 231 Jenkins, Henry, 17, 34, 76

299

Jenkins, Keith, 190 Jenkins, Marianna, 270n25 Jewett, John P., 134, 265n34 Johnson, Carol, 167, 175–76, 269n23 Journal des De´bats, 12, 14 Kaplan, Amy, 152, 269n22 Kete, Mary Louise, 148 Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, A (Stowe), 134, 160, 170, 263nn15–16, 268n12; negative reviews of, 149; runaway slave advertisements in, 129, 130 fig. 12, 261n6 Kittler, Friedrich, 11 Knickerbocker, 23, 25 Ladies’ Repository, The, 57 ‘‘Late from Liberia,’’ 188–89 Lawrence, M. M., 80, 253n39 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 28, 99, 222 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 38, 67 ‘‘Lecture on Pictures’’ (Douglass), 205–13, 270n26, 274n26, 274n28, 274n30 ‘‘Lecture III.—Invention’’ (Fuseli), 27 ‘‘Lecture IV.—Invention (continued)’’ (Fuseli), 93–94 Lerow, John A., 40–44 Levine, Robert S., 197, 251n22, 254n1, 262n13, 268n11, 271n4, 273n22, 273n24 Liberator, 212–13, 272n15 Liberia: government of, 10, 169, 175–89, 269n24, 270n25; manumission and immigration to, 267n1, 270n27; representations of, 10, 152–53, 158–91, 268n12, 269n20, 269n22; as sovereign nation, 156, 166, 267n50, 268n15, 269n18, 269n23. See also African colonization; African Repository; American Colonization Society; Douglass, Frederick; ‘‘Late from Liberia’’; ‘‘Liberia as It Is’’; Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton’s Experiments; Massachusetts Colonization Society; New-York Colonization Journal; New York Colonization Society; Stowe, Harriet Beecher; Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Washington, Augustus ‘‘Liberia as It Is’’ (Washington), 169–75, 186–87 Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton’s Experiments (Hale), 268n12, 268n15, 269n18, 269n22 Liberty Party, 193 Library of Congress, 269n23, 274n26

300

Index

Life at the South; or, Uncle Tom’s Cabin as It Is (W. L. G. Smith), 170 ‘‘Life Pictures,’’ 205, 274n26, 274n28 ‘‘Lights and Shadows of Daguerrean Life’’ (Harrison), 75–79 Lincoln, Abraham, 267n42 Lippincott, Grambo, & Co., 266n39 Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c. (London), 244n11 Liu, Alan: on media change/encounter, 4, 5, 48, 49, 90, 246n27, 255n3; on media theory, 5, 247n46; on sociopolitics of new media, 9, 35, 126 Living Age, 27 Love at First Sight; or, The Daguerreotype, 40–45 Lugenbeel, J. W., 167, 170. See also American Colonization Society ‘‘Magnetic Daguerreotypes, The,’’ 45–48 Malbone, Edward Greene, 83, 253n40 ‘‘Manner of Making Portraits by the Daguerreotype,’’ 26 Massachusetts Colonization Society, 166 McGill, Meredith, 193, 248n2, 249n5, 249n7, 250n14, 256n18, 271n3 media: change/encounter, 11, 14, 17, 50, 67, 76, 86, 95, 114, 117–18, 121–22, 126–27, 233, 236– 38, 242n20, 247n46; history, 11, 127, 235–38. See also Liu, Alan Melville, Herman: idea of art, 9, 89, 106–7, 112, 118, 120, 124–25, 126, 255n4, 258n33; idea of authorship, 86–90, 111, 254n2, 255n4, 256n11, 258n33; idea of originality, 105–7, 254n2; idea of truth, 9, 107; refusal to be daguerreotyped, 89–90, 254n2. See also ‘‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’’; MobyDick; Pierre Michelangelo, 108, 213 Miller, Samuel J., 219 fig. 33 Milton, John, 78. See also Paradise Lost mirror, 8, 45; as figure for romantic imagination, 56–58, 61, 249n12; as a former luxury good, 208–9; resemblance of daguerreian plate to, 1, 6, 10, 45–46, 48, 55, 57, 61, 106, 115, 133, 143–44, 147, 199–200, 209, 215, 234; as rhetorical figure, 106–7, 199; used to practice posing for a daguerreotype, 119 M. J. B., 32 Moby-Dick (Melville), 117, 256n11

Morris, Edward, 178 fig. 20 Morse, Samuel F. B., 1–3, 21–23, 90, 105, 206, 239n1, 239n3 Morse, Sidney E., 1 Morton, Samuel George, 223–24, 231, 276n49, 276n52 ‘‘Mr. Harrison’s Process,’’ 75 Murillo, Bartolome´ Esteban, 80 Museum of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, 19–20 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass), 198, 214, 260n1, 275n41 National Era, 134, 159, 163, 192–93, 260n5, 262n10. See also Uncle Tom’s Cabin Newhall, Beaumont, 2, 240n7, 245n18, 264nn22–23 New Hampshire Sentinel, 245n16 ‘‘Newspapers,’’ 33 New-York Colonization Journal, 167 New York Colonization Society, 166–69 New-York Daily Tribune, 156, 158, 159–60, 162, 169, 173–75, 190, 195 New-Yorker, 24, 244n11 New York Herald, 113 New York Journal of Commerce, 59 New-York Observer, 1, 24, 239n3, 245n16 Nie´pce, Isidore, 25 Nie´pce, Joseph Nice´phore, 19, 25, 170 Niles’ National Register, 26, 59 Noble, Marianne, 132, 194, 262n12, 273nn21– 22, 273n25 North Star, 195, 223 Nott, Josiah C., 210, 223, 260n1 objectivity: definition of, 4, 8, 23, 103; history of, 15, 48, 125, 127, 241n13, 242n21, 243n4, 246n26, 255n5; mechanical, 4, 9, 16, 18, 49, 50, 58, 60–61, 65–66, 75, 79, 86, 88, 91, 94– 96, 103, 105, 109, 113–14, 118, 120–22, 125, 126–27, 166, 189, 227, 241n21, 243n4, 243n6, 249n5, 251n24; scientific, 8–9, 14, 20, 23, 27, 48–51, 58, 60, 85, 87, 90, 241n13, 242n21, 244n12, 246n26, 255n5; and subjectivity, 16, 23, 45, 50–51, 57, 58, 66, 70, 77, 86, 117, 124– 25, 167, 232, 258n33. See also art; daguerreotype; truth-to-nature ‘‘Old Daguerreotype, An’’ (Greene), 277n1 ‘‘Old Daguerreotype, An’’ (McGaffey), 277n1

Index ‘‘Old Daguerreotype, An’’ (Tuttle), 233–35, 237 Opie, John, 121 Orcutt, John, 163, 166 Osgood, Frances Sargent, 32 Othello (Shakespeare), 174 Page, John W., 263 painting: in relation to daguerreotypy, 3, 8, 18, 21–22, 24, 27–28, 32, 34, 39, 57, 68, 71, 79–80, 91, 113, 114–15, 118, 121, 124, 175, 205, 210, 244n9, 254n2, 256n16; as subjective, 24, 28, 51, 105, 150. See also art; The House of the Seven Gables; Pierre; portraiture; Republic pantograph, 222, 276n44 Paradise Lost (Milton), 27 Parker Fraternity Lectures, 206, 212–13, 274n28 Past, Present, Future (Harrison), 80, 82 fig. 7, 84, 253nn39–40 ‘‘Pencil of Nature, The,’’ 56 ‘‘Pencil of Nature—A New Discovery, The,’’ 244n11 personhood, concepts of: 10, 125, 213, 214, 227; for Frederick Douglass, 194, 200, 202–5, 210, 214–15, 223, 275n35; in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 127–28, 132, 135, 153, 262n10 Phillips, Wendell, 206 Photographic Art-Journal, 45, 67, 75–76, 79 photographic seeing, 266n41, 275n42. See also daguerreotype; photography photography, 1, 5, 6, 133, 205, 214, 237, 239n4, 266n41; objectivity of, 13–15, 18; and portraiture, 84, 275n42; relationship to time, 6, 84, 220, 275n42; as a site of identity formation, 272n8, 275n42. See also ambrotypy; daguerreotype; photographic seeing physiognomy, 28, 132, 222–23, 231. See also Pierre physiognotrace, 222, 276n44 ‘‘Pictures and Progress’’ (Douglass), 205, 270n25, 274n26, 274n28, 275nn36–37 ‘‘Pictures by the Sun,’’ 29–32 ‘‘Picture Pausings,—No. II: Daguerreotypes,’’ 27–29, 34, 94, 246n36 Pierre (Melville), 9, 86–114, 117, 124–25, 134, 150; and aesthetic theory, 86–88, 90–96, 102, 105–14, 120, 125, 258n33; and authorship, 105–6, 256n11; autobiographical elements of, 89–90, 254n2, 255n4, 256n11,

301

257n30; and class, 91–94, 254n2; and daguerreotypy, 86–96, 99, 103, 105, 107–10, 112–14, 135, 254n2, 257n27; illustrated edition, 255n2; and literary celebrity, 88–90, 254n2; and literary property, 254n2; and painted portraiture, 86–87, 93–95, 97–103, 107–13, 254n2, 255n4, 257nn26–27, 258nn32–33; and physiognomy, 92, 99–100, 258n33; and Plato, 87, 95–96, 98, 102–6, 112–13, 258n33; and Plotinus Plinlimmon’s pamphlet, 257n29; resemblance to The House of the Seven Gables, 86, 106, 254n1, 257n26; and subjectivity, 86–88, 95–96, 100–103, 106–7, 109, 111–14, 117, 120, 125, 258n33; and truth, 86–87, 90, 95–98, 102–8, 110–12, 125, 257n24, 258n31, 258n33; unpopularity of, 88, 112–13, 258n34. See also Republic Pine and Palm, 213 Plato, 9, 78, 95, 102, 105–6, 112–13. See also Pierre; Republic Plumbe, John, 71, 76, 80 Poe, Edgar Allan, 24–25, 67, 78, 252n27, 253n35 polygenesis, 214, 231, 260n1 Pope, Alexander, 27 portraiture: dagerreotypy and, 3, 6, 9, 10–11, 15–16, 22–23, 26–29, 32, 34–42, 44–48, 50– 55, 57–64, 67, 70–82, 84, 87–96, 107, 112, 114–25, 126–28, 131–40, 142–50, 156, 158, 166, 174–89, 191, 195–205, 207–10, 212–32, 234–35, 243n6, 245n20, 248n3, 249n6, 249n10, 254n,2, 255n5, 255n8, 256n20, 257n27, 259n45, 262n10, 264n22, 264nn24– 25, 269n23, 269n25, 275n42, 276n43, 276nn46–47, 277n4; family, 72, 75, 80, 140, 142, 264n28; state, 153, 175–88, 269n24, 270n25, 270n28, 271n29. See also The House of the Seven Gables: and painted portraiture; pantograph; photography: and portraiture; physiognotrace; Pierre: and painted portraiture; profile; silhouette positivism, 9, 20, 60, 65, 103, 244n12 Powell, Timothy B., 152–53, 267n46 Priest, James M., 179 fig. 21 print culture: antebellum expansion of, 3, 91; inseparability from visual culture, 3, 15–16, 238; reprinting practices in antebellum, 2–3, 7, 12–13, 15, 19–21, 24, 26, 27, 33, 45, 59, 129, 160, 173, 193, 195, 198, 199, 213, 256n18, 271nn3–4

302

Index

profile, 10, 122, 221–23, 227–32, 276n44 Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, 134–35 race, 7, 9–11, 154, 158, 160, 163, 183–86, 188, 189, 191, 194–95, 199–205, 206, 210, 222–32, 254n1; and visuality, 194, 272n8, 273n21, 273n25. See also Crania Americana; daguerreotype: and race; double-consciousness; Douglass, Frederick; ethnology; ‘‘Sketches of the Natural Provinces of the Animal World and Their Relations to the Different Types of Mankind’’; slavery; Types of Mankind; Uncle Tom’s Cabin Raphael, 80, 108, 213 Redpath, James, 213 ‘‘Remarkable Invention,’’ 12–13, 16, 241n1 Rembrandt, 21–22, 90 remediation, 238, 240n9 Reni, Guido, 258n32 Renty, 225, 228–31 representational accuracy: claims to, 126, 153, 169–70, 259n1, 269n20. See also daguerreotype; objectivity Republic (Plato), 95–98, 102–7; allegory of the cave, 96–98, 102, 111, 257n24; idea of art and artists in, 104–7; sun analogy, 96, 102–4, 257n24; theory of forms, 104–5 Reynolds, Joshua, 80, 121 Richmond (Virginia) Dispatch, 198 Riss, Arthur, 214, 246n34, 261n7, 262n10 Roberts, Joseph Jenkins, 166 Roberts, Sarah, 39, 131 Romer, Grant B., 121 Root, M. A., 35–36, 87, 121, 136–37, 140, 255n8 Roye, Edward J., 181 fig. 23, 186 Rubens, Peter Paul, 108, 213 Rudisill, Richard, 2, 53, 240n7, 247n39 runaway slave advertisements, 128–31, 160, 247n38, 261n6 Russell, Alfred Francis, 180 fig. 22, 182–83, 269n23, 270n27 Sa´nchez-Eppler, Karen, 145, 249n9, 265n33 Saxton, Joseph, 26, 245n20 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 56, 58, 60– 61, 141 science, 126, 139, 161, 171, 189, 194, 242n22, 260n1, 276n49; and art, 4, 9, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 50, 90, 165–66, 192 ; growing cultural authority of in the United States,

255n5; morality of, 47. See also daguerreotype; ethnology; objectivity; physiognomy Sekula, Alan, 276n42 ‘‘Self-Operating Processes of Fine Art: The Daguerreotype,’’ 19–21 sentimentalism, 36, 38, 76–77, 127, 131–32, 135–38, 143–44, 147–50, 152, 203–4, 261n7, 264n21, 265n30, 273n22, 273n25. See also daguerreotype; Uncle Tom’s Cabin sewing machine, 236 Shakespeare, William, 32, 78, 246n30. See also Hamlet; Othello Shelley, Samuel, 83, 253n40 ‘‘Shooting a Negro,’’ 198–99 silhouette, 222, 276n44 Silver, Larry E., 90, 256n15 Simms, William Gilmore, 134, 149–50 ‘‘Sketches of Modern Reforms and Reformers in Great Britain and Ireland’’ (Stowe), 261n5 ‘‘Sketches of the Natural Provinces of the Animal World and Their Relations to the Different Types of Mankind’’ (Agassiz), 223, 227–29, 231–32 slavery: negotiated through daguerreotypy, 9–10, 126–28, 131–36, 140, 145–46, 148–51, 153. See also American Slavery as It Is; Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or, Southern Life as It Is; Douglass, Frederick; A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Liberia; Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton’s Experiments; race; runaway slave advertisements; Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Washington, Augustus Smith, James Skivring, 176 fig. 18, 185 Smith, Melancton, 188 Smith, Shawn Michelle, 47 Smith, W. L. G., 170 Snelling, Henry Hunt, 67, 252n29 Snyder, Joel, 243n3, 243n5, 243n7 ‘‘Song of Myself’’ (Whitman), 39 Sonnet 24 (Shakespeare), 32 Sontag, Susan, 84 Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 208 Southern Literary Messenger, 29 Southern Quarterly Review, 134 Southworth, Albert Sands, 9, 87, 114–15, 118– 22, 124. See also Southworth & Co., A. S.; Southworth & Hawes Southworth & Co., A. S. (daguerreian firm), 114–15

Index Southworth & Hawes (daguerreian firm), 9, 50, 87–88, 114–18, 123–25, 209, 236, 255n8, 277n4; legacy of, 124, 259n46; studio prices, 259n45 Spectator, 19–20 Springfield Weekly Republican, 211–12 Squire, Michael, 239n2 Stauffer, John, 227, 259n45, 273n23, 275n35, 275n41, 276n48 St. Louis Practical Photographer, 236 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 125, 149, 150, 158–61, 163, 170, 189–90, 196–98, 265n29; and African colonization, 152–53, 267n42; as cause of Civil War, 151–52, 267n42; connections to Frederick Douglass, 196–98, 268n11, 271n4, 273n23; daguerreotypes of, 149–50; personal attacks on, 149–50, 266n38; and postmortem daguerreotype of son Charley, 265n33. See also The Christian Slave; Douglass, Frederick; A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; ‘‘Sketches of Modern Reforms and Reformers in Great Britain and Ireland’’; Uncle Tom’s Cabin subjectivity. See art; The House of the Seven Gables; objectivity; painting; Pierre Sumner, Charles, 206 sun: as daguerreian artist, 19, 27, 34, 44, 51, 58, 61, 64, 65, 67, 72, 75, 94–96, 103, 105, 114–15, 146, 205–7, 232, 237, 253n42, 275n42; as egalitarian in representation, 28, 94; as enlightening, 102, 251n18; as objective in representation, 28; as supernatural, 76; as truth, 103. See also ‘‘The Daguerreotype’’ (poem); ‘‘Pictures by the Sun’’; Plato; Republic Sunday Courier (New York), 45 ‘‘Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture’’ (Holmes), 84, 275n42 Taft, Robert, 2, 240n7, 264n24 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 56, 239n4 telegraph, 1 telephone, 236–37 Thorburn, David, 17, 34, 76 ‘‘To a Louse’’ (Burns), 208 Trachtenberg, Alan, 2, 32, 47, 240n7, 244n11, 246n36, 248nn2–3, 251n18, 251n21, 251nn24–25 Tribute for the Negro, A (Armistead), 223; Douglass’s review of, 227, 231–32, 276n48

303

Trumbull, John, 71 truth-to-nature, 16, 27, 29, 121, 242n21, 243n4, 243n6, 251n24, 257n25 Tuttle, Anna, 233–35, 237 Types of Mankind (Nott and Gliddon), 223, 227–29, 231 ‘‘Uncle Tomitudes,’’ 134–35 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 9–10, 126–53, 158–63, 192–95, 197–98, 201–4; daguerreotypy in, 126–28, 131–49, 202–4, 261n7, 262n10, 263n14, 263nn20–21, 265n25, 266n34; dialectic of proximity and distance in, 261n7; illustrations in, 127, 134, 263n14, 265n34; influence on other anti-slavery writings, 269n18, 273n22; readers’ mental images of characters in, 132, 134, 136, 143– 44, 148–49, 265n34, 266n36; realist aesthetic of, 133–35, 141–42, 147–48, 261n7, 262nn10–11, 263nn15–18; and real presence, 10, 129–37, 146–48, 262n12; and right feeling, 126, 133–34, 137, 139, 150, 152, 260n3; serial publication of, 134, 158–59, 261n5, 262n10; troubling aspects of, 152–53, 189– 90, 261nn7–8, 262n12, 265n29, 267nn45–48; and visual culture, 127, 260n4. See also The Christian Slave; Douglass, Frederick; ‘‘The Heroic Slave’’; A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Life at the South; or, Uncle Tom’s Cabin as It Is; personhood; sentimentalism United States Gazette, 26, 245n19 View of Monrovia and the Mesurado River, from the Lighthouse on the Summit of Cape Mesurado, 168, 169 fig. 17 View of Monrovia from the Anchorage, 168, 168 fig. 16 visual culture: inseparability from print culture, 3, 15–16, 238; and the public sphere, 241n11; scholarly attention to, 213, 244n9, 257n28, 260n4, 266n34 Wallis, Brian, 227, 255n8, 259n46 Warner, Michael, 2, 241n11 Washington, Augustus, 10, 125; as anti-slavery activist, 154; as daguerreotypist, 10, 154, 156–58, 160, 164–69, 171–72, 174, 175–89, 195, 214–15, 267n50, 269n23; and Frederick Douglass, 159–60, 162–63, 173, 190–91; as likely model for George Harris in Uncle

304

Index

Washington, Augustus (continued ) Tom’s Cabin, 158–62; as member of Liberian government, 188–89; as opponent of Liberian colonization, 155–56; as promoter of Liberian colonization and Liberian emigrant, 153, 154, 156, 159–91, 257n50, 268n12, 268n15; as sugar plantation owner, 188 Washington, George, 72, 78, 198 Washington, Madison, 201, 207 Watt, James, 206 Webb, Joe, 158–59, 161–62 Weld, Ezra Greenleaf, 276n43 Weld, Theodore Dwight. See American Slavery as It Is Whipple, John Adams, 236 White, William B., 240n6, 245n20, 253n37, 264n24 Whitman, Walt, 38–39, 67, 247n41, 252n27

Williams, Susan S., 2, 240n7, 244n9, 246n36, 248nn2–3, 254n2, 255n4, 256n14, 257n23, 257n27, 258n33 Willis, N. P., 244n11 Wolcott, Alexander S., 245n20 Wood, John, 2 Wood, Marcus, 129, 247n38 word-image relations, 1, 7, 239n2, 258n33. See also print culture; visual culture Yates, Beverly Page, 182 fig. 24, 185 Yates, James B., 185 fig. 27 Youth Adoring the Bust of George Washington (Harrison), 71–72, 73 fig. 4 Zealy, J. T., 10, 125, 223, 225–27 figs. 37–41, 230 fig. 44, 276n48

Acknowledgments

Much like a daguerreotype, this book developed gradually and involved more collaboration than meets the eye. I am tremendously grateful for the mentorship and friendship of Betsy Erkkila¨, Jay Grossman, Jeffrey Masten, and Julia Stern from this project’s earliest days. In the years since, many friends and colleagues in the field have offered provocative prompts to further thought, invaluable insights, and their careful reading of my work in progress. For such generosity, I am especially indebted to Alan Braddock, Matt Brown, Lara Cohen, Pete Coviello, Ann Fabian, Ezra Greenspan, Sandra Gustafson, Glenn Hendler, Katie Henry, Kendall Johnson, Cathy Kelly, Chris Lukasik, Meredith McGill, Lily Milroy, Chris Phillips, Yvette Piggush, Tanya Sheehan, Eric Slauter, Jordan Stein, Megan Walsh, Ed Whitley, and Wendy Woloson. I am thankful as well to all of my interlocutors at the many conferences and seminars at which I presented portions of the work in progress. A version of Chapter 4 appeared in ESQ 52:3 (2007): 157–91; I appreciate the editors allowing me to reproduce many of its words and ideas here. Special thanks are due to Jana Argersinger for her editorial contributions to that essay and for her strong support and friendship through my early career. Bob Levine and Lisa Gitelman kindly revealed themselves to me as the readers of my manuscript for the University of Pennsylvania Press and most generously extended our conversations about the project beyond their valuable initial reports; to both, I am deeply grateful. Lisa especially has pushed me to do my best thinking on this project; it is a much better book for such generous engagement with it and me and I can’t thank her enough. And I am very fortunate to count Jerry Singerman as both a tremendous editor and friend; his enthusiasm and support have sustained me and the project alike. Generous funding and archival access have come in various forms and at just the right time in the project’s development. I was fortunate to participate in an Andrew W. Mellon Summer Interpretive Seminar in the

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Humanities directed by Cindy Weinstein and Cathy Jurca at the California Institute of Technology and the Huntington Library and in a National Endowment for the Humanities teaching and research seminar on literature and the visual arts directed by Richard Wendorf at the Boston Athenaeum; my thanks to the directors and fellow seminar participants for their insights. A Mellon fellowship at the Penn Humanities Forum (PHF) allowed for an especially rich year of immersion in all things word and image. Many thanks to Peter Stallybrass, Wendy Steiner, Catriona Macleod, Liliane Weissberg, Karen Beckman, Nancy Shawcross, and Jennifer Conway for the many conversations and forms of support. Regular writing group meetings and coffees with fellow PHF fellows Alexandra Pappas, Marlis Schweitzer, and Lynn Ransom were especially helpful to thinking interdisciplinarily. The University of Pennsylvania’s Seminar in the History of Material Texts, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and Americanist Colloquium also have significantly shaped my thinking about this project and about literature, material texts, and history more broadly; my thanks to their graduate and faculty participants, especially Nancy Bentley, Max Cavitch, and Dan Richter. A John W. Kluge fellowship at the Library of Congress provided me with much-needed time and seemingly infinite resources at a crucial moment. Many thanks to Carolyn Brown and Mary Lou Reker at the Kluge Center and special thanks to Carol Johnson in the Prints and Photographs Division for her generosity with her time and extensive knowledge about Augustus Washington and daguerreotypy and for introducing me to Dalila Scruggs, with whom it has been a pleasure to exchange research on Augustus Washington and early Liberian visual culture. My time as a Kluge Fellow—especially with Johanna Bockman, Monica Dominguez Torres, Zachary Schrag, and Srividhya Swaminathan, and with the Brits Matt Adams, Adam Burns, Mat Francis, Nichola Hunt, Sam James, Sergio Lussana, Bohdan Piasecki, Natalie Sappleton, Keir Strickland, and Daniel Wilson—could not have been more pleasurably or productively passed. My research has taken me to a number of other institutions and archives that have been most generous with their staff and resources. At the Library Company of Philadelphia, many thanks go to Jim Green, Connie King, Phil Lapsansky, and Nicole Joniec. At Howard University, I was fortunate to work with Donna Wells before her passing; I appreciate Dr. Thomas C. Battle, director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, and Joellen ElBashir for allowing me to continue working with the profile

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portrait of Frederick Douglass. My thanks also go to the American Antiquarian Society, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chester County Historical Society, the Connecticut Historical Society, the George Eastman House, Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, the National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Northwestern University’s McCormick Library of Special Collections, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. My gratitude goes to Gary Ewer for generously sharing his ongoing research on early materials related to daguerreotypy with me and for his tremendous online resource, The Daguerreotype: An Archive of Source Texts, Graphics, and Ephemera. I also especially appreciate Greg French’s and Matthew Isenburg’s willingness to allow me to reproduce images from their private collections of daguerreotypes as part of this book’s archive. During my time at the University of Delaware, I was especially fortunate to have Wendy Bellion, Martin Bru¨ckner, Monica Dominguez Torres, Ritchie Garrison, Matt Kinservik, and Ed Larkin as colleagues, mentors, and friends. My thanks as well to Ann Ardis, Steve Bernhardt, Jae Gutierrez, Deborah Hess Norris, my colleagues in the Winterthur Program for American Material Culture, Tim Murray and the Morris Library’s special collections department, and the university for a General University Research Grant for supporting this project as it progressed. I am also very grateful to the university and my colleagues for their support during my father’s illness. I have learned a great deal from my undergraduate and graduate students at Delaware, especially Jackie Criscuolo and Kristina Huff (both of whom contributed important research to this book), Ginny Garnett, Meg Meiman, Greg Specter, and Rita Williams. At my new home at DePaul, my thanks go to Anne Clark Bartlett, Lucy Rinehart, the Dean’s Office of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, and Adam Schreiber for their strong and generous support of this project in its final stages and for the warm welcome. I cannot imagine better colleagues or friends than Sarah Blackwood, Katy Chiles, Joanne Diaz, Peter Jaros, Chris Hager, Hunt Howell, Cole Hutchison, Jenny Mann, John Martin, and Sarah Mesle, who have inspired, encouraged, and sustained me with a generosity that I can only hope to return over a lifetime. Extended conversations with Brian and Charlotte Artese, Dana Bilsky Asher, Ashley Byock, Matt Frankel, Ruth and Ryan Friedman, Deana Greenfield, Leah Guenther, Hyun-Jung Lee, Joe Mills, Melvin Pen˜a, Erin Redfern, Gayle Rogers, Liz Fekete Trubey, and Carrie

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Wasinger also contributed significantly to shaping my thinking and to making our time together at Northwestern such a pleasure. For their friendship over the years, and for seeing me through the last stretch, I especially appreciate Sharada Chidambaram, Joanne Diaz, Abel Dolby, Dana Lamparello, Melissa Mertz, Lynn Ransom, Jason Reblando, and Jessica Rosenfeld. My thanks to Windy and Carl for providing the soundtrack for my thinking and writing. In the last couple of years, two families have warmly welcomed me into their lives; all love and thanks to the Gibbons family and to Nathalie Shapiro and Jon, Lydia, Lewis, and Smith Shaw. Like the writers charged with first introducing the world to daguerreotypy, I find my gratitude to and love for Alex Pappas nearly impossible to put into words. It is pure joy to think with her; she has read every word of this book in most of its stages of development and has shaped it and my thinking immeasurably. For that, inseparable from such a meaningful and sustaining friendship, I could not be more thankful. And for much enthusiasm and kindness at the project’s conclusion, I am deeply grateful to Asa Osborne. Finally, this book is for my parents, Mark and Barbara, my sister Courtney, and my grandparents. They taught me that thinking and teaching are the best kinds of hard work, and for that lesson, and for all of their love and support, mere thanks are not enough. I wish that I could have finished this book in time for my father to see it. I would not have been able to finish it without my mother’s incredible strength; I look forward to moving on to the next chapter with her.