Head

This chapter explores the cultural significance of portraiture for nineteenth-century Black American writers. It argues that many Black writers engaged with portraiture in their texts to both question and reframe the new connections being made between portraiture and personhood. They championed the power of portraiture to assert and document a sitter’s humanity while also expressing skepticism toward the idea of portraiture as revelatory about the “deep” truths of a sitter’s personhood. Many Black writers toyed with the question of “likeness” in their texts, holding out for what Douglass called “a more perfect likeness.” This chapter makes these arguments through close readings of a series of Douglass speeches about visual culture, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, and Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and their Friends, as well as original archival research on runaway slave advertisements, The North Star, and mid-century newspaper practices.

Limbs

This chapter traces a new visual genealogy of inner life as it appears in canonical late-nineteenth-century painter and portraitist Thomas Eakins’s work. It situates Eakins’s lauded portraits alongside the complex political and racialized questions about mind and body that emerged in the U.S. after the Civil War. It centers a reading of a marginal Eakins painting—Whistling for Plover—that Eakins gave as a gift to neurologist S. Weir Mitchell. This painting is a part of a web of inventive thinking about mind and body in the postbellum U.S., evincing the deep anxiety felt nationally over the bodily scars left by the Civil War’s racial violence, an anxiety that is essential to the development of the New Psychology as a discipline.

Introduction

This chapter sketches the main argument of the book, namely that after the invention of photography, portraiture’s changing symbolic and aesthetic practices helped produce new ideas about human inner life. Portraiture’s proliferating representational images of the human body began to characterize inner life as “deep.” Through brief readings of the appearance of portraits in the work of Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Edith Wharton, this introduction situates the changing visual technologies and aesthetic conventions alongside the development of psychology as a discipline. The chapter also introduces the political valences of portraiture’s new cultural function as index of depth, discussing how this function had different meanings for Black Americans as well as for white women.

Bones

In 1895, a radical new visual technology was invented. This chapter explores X-ray imagery of the human body as an important coda to the story of portraiture’s changing representations of subjectivity and soma. X-ray imagery was a major aesthetic development, making manifest and somewhat literal much of nineteenth-century art’s imaginative drive inward. Here I explore the first few years of X-ray imagery and practices, focusing on how scientists, reporters, and writers figured the X-ray in writing. In particular, this chapter explores how in those first experimental years, writers were disturbed by the X-ray’s ability to alter human surfaces, particularly the skin.

Face

This chapter offers a brief account of the appearance—in the sense of coming into view—of psychology in American culture in the 1840s. It offers an overview of the shifting subjects of both psychology and portraiture at mid-century. To illustrate its arguments, it offers a series of readings on both Nathaniel Hawthorne’s experiences having his portrait taken (in oil, engraving, and by camera), as well as a selection of his many portrait stories. Hawthorne’s short portrait fiction explore the unique power of discourses of legibility and visual access as they were increasingly applied to ideas about selfhood.

Mind/Brain

This chapter explores Henry James’s career-long fascination with portraiture as foundational to his fiction’s ability to imagine new forms of inner life. His portrait fiction dramatizes shifting ideas about human psychology at the turn of the century, especially as those ideas found expression in the debates surrounding materialism, physiological psychology, and the “stream” of consciousness. James’s fiction is more attuned to the body as a cognitive system than most critics acknowledge. James’s portrait fiction plays a central part in the larger reimagination of human subjectivity, psychology, and inner life taking place at the turn of the century, as the physiological psychologies of the nineteenth century gave way to a return of the metaphysical in the form of psychoanalysis.

Epilogue

There are ample connections between the period this book studies (1839-1895) and our contemporary moment, which has also witnessed rapid technological changes in visual representations of selfhood. Portraits—selfies, snapshots, more—continue to be a site of active production of the possibilities of selfhood.