Scholarship > The Arts of Reproducing

Preface

The Arts of Reproducing:

Photographers, Sculptors, and American Literary Realism

Studies of literary realism seldom arrive at a conclusive definition of the term, but more often take on the plural form as they examine various and competing realisms. This study in turn will not offer a final definition, but the subjects that it explores provide a nuanced sense of the signifiers that some Americans of the latter half of the nineteenth century associated with literary realism. More specifically, I trace four American writers' attempts to understand their own vocation as realist writers in light of so-called photographic realism. Some American novelists began to remark on the daguerreotype, the earliest form of photography, as early as 1839, the year of its invention in France and its first appearance in America. But many of their novels refer more frequently to sculpture, an art form that was already centuries old. I generate a dialogue between instances in which writers adopt the analogy of photography to explain and understand their own modes of realism, and instances in which they explain or represent literary realism with recourse to sculpture. Modern readers may sometimes divide technological history into distinct epochs from "before" and "after" photography's invention. But nineteenth- and even early twentieth-century realist writers embraced photography ambivalently, and at times seem to have retreated to the most solid and ancient art form they could find.

Critical treatments of early encounters with photography tend to neglect the persistence of literary metaphors drawn from established art forms such as sculpture.¹ They theorize the camera too exclusively and at times neglect the older technologies that continued to produce art and to influence realist writers as photography advanced in technology and gained prominence in the imaginations of nineteenth-century Americans. Critical readings of early American photography have begun to account for American writers' adoption of photography as literary motifs, particularly in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1852) and Whitman's Leaves of Grass (first published in 1855).² Studies of the many images of photographers in American literature encourage us to understand the photographer's role in helping to define individual, interior identities according to outward appearances.³ But many of these works necessarily treat photographers as radically original artists, figures who in these readings bear little resemblance to their contemporaries who worked in more conventional media. Critical histories of nineteenth century sculpture, on the other hand, trace the medium's power to contain the sexuality of depicted feminine figures, and record the developing aesthetic theories of memorials to "common soldiers" and blue-collar workers.⁴ But these studies do not try to profit from comparing the ways in which contemporary photographers and sculptors respond to similar demands of representation. This project, then, considers the degree to which realist writers felt that their work corresponded with existing and familiar visual technologies such as sculpture, as well as the degree to which they felt it departed from these technologies, and found a greater affinity to photography. It does not treat the camera exclusively, but tries to capture the ambivalence of the first two generations of Americans who found themselves deciding whether to fashion literary art after the camera's unprecedented "realism," or to cling instead to an idealizing, iconographic art form inherited from the ancients. While others have explored the ways antebellum and reconstruction-era writers represented photography in their novels, I intervene at a slightly earlier stage in the decision-making process, asking, what were the politics of initially deciding to liken the written word to the early photographic image? What were the politics, conversely, of naming a literary romance after an ancient monument, as Hawthorne does in The Marble Faun (1860), when he could have mimicked a more modern technology? This dual attention to photographic and sculptural images dramatizes American writers' ambivalent shift between two differing modes of representing reality. As they adopted photography to their own purposes of realism, or adopted a more euphemistic or elliptical language that mimicked a more mediated art form, they decided what the rise of photography meant for the novel, a medium that also had to respond to the advancement of photography.

But what, exactly, did it mean for Americans in the mid-nineteenth century to picture a subject "like a photographer"? As these chapters demonstrate, most photographers laid claim to complete objectivity in capturing a subject's unmediated appearance. Photographs supposedly functioned as forensic "proof" of a person's existence or a perpetrator's guilt, and provided an irrefutable index of the "actual" character of the subject. Some early commentators saw photographs as exact replications, natural and organic copies, that matched the monetary and societal value of the original image. Photographs supposedly reproduced natural subjects faithfully and "realistically," denying the photographer's agency in shaping those subjects, preventing any possible intimacy between artists and subjects, and allowing subjects to see themselves reproduced "as they really were." Photographs documented the sitter's appearance, tacitly claiming that the photographer had not influenced that appearance in any way. Nineteenth-century commentators debated photography's status as an art form, and this means of seeing gained currency and aided in providing identification, separating the supposedly foreign from the familiar, and distinguishing between "us" and "them." The portrait exhibited the photographer's skill, but it made it clear that the artist was separate from the subject. The artist had skillfully presented and conjured the sitter's essential and identifying qualities.

What did it mean, in contrast, to render a figure "like a sculptor"? In terms that have reentered our language as clichés, the sculptor placed the depicted subject on a pedestal, and made a bronze or marble monument out of a figure that assumed symbolic and heroic dimensions. The sculptor handled the very clay of the model, subjectively rendering the figure's features and actively shaping his or her appearance. Not every artist was physically strong enough to work in this medium, influential enough to have a public square or art museum at her disposal, or wealthy enough to set the process in motion. The art's colossal proportions demanded a great deal of physical space for subjects who represented, and for artists who sought to represent, civic ideals. Sculptures became part of the landscape of town squares and public spaces as the figures they represented supposedly embodied or allegorized the civic virtues the public revered most.

In the nineteenth century novelists likened literature to sculpture or to photography, they chose between the idealizing or "realistic" media, and between artists who claimed agency in shaping the appearance of their subjects, and artists who disowned agency in doing so. Novelists could see a subject's identity as predetermined, and merely perceived by the rendering artist, or they could perceive of identity as constructed and sculpted by the artist as he or she rendered. The photographer seemed to be a passive medium by which what was thought to be the subject's essential and natural character emerged in a supposedly objective depiction. The sculptor by contrast seemed to be a mediator actively shaping the image to arrive somewhere in between the subject's "real" appearance and the physical ideal that the artist pictures in his or her mind. If sculpture and photography provided opposed models for reproducing the human figure, this project asks, how did writers choose to depict a subject's body, "like a sculptor," or "like a photographer"? Were writers more akin to sculptors, whose art to some observers seemed to be fading into antiquity as it idealized its subjects in ways that seemed increasingly impractical? Or were they more closely related to photographers, who seemed to reproduce unprecedented levels of detail and verisimilitude, and to bolster distinctions between "us" and "them"?

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