Dressing the Part: Mark Twain's White Suit, Copyright Reform, and the Camera

Abstract

In a photographic portrait of 1906, a seventyone-year-old poses assuredly for the camera in his signature white suit (Figure 1). A half-length portrait, the composition frames dynamically, his seated body angled slightly to the right while his head faces left and his eyes look both up and outwards. As viewers, we cannot meet his gaze straight on, yet the tangible twinkle in his eye provides us with an exterior trace of the author's inner pathos. While we fail to gain access to his thoughts, the rather intimate composition nonetheless invites us to share in a quiet moment of contemplation alongside Twain. There is something familiar about this photograph, even during our first moments of its inspection. Taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston, a successful and prolific professional photographer, in her Washington, DC, studio in December 1906, the print offers up with seeming ease an iconic portrait of (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Donning layers of white, from shirt and tie to three-piece suit and hair, presents Johnston with a friendly challenge, formally speakinghow to capture the man in white in photographic shades of gray. Johnston responds splendidly with a sensitively composed portrait that captures Twain's material presence as well as his intellectual authority. Silhouetted against a backdrop of dark drapery, a fluffy mane of white hair crowns Twain's visage, his dense mustache and expressive eyebrows tempering the gleaming white with a touch of gray. A gentle light filters into the frame from the left, highlighting the texture and folds of his creamy serge suit. wears the suit jacket unbuttoned, revealing the puckered fabric of his waistcoat beneath. He rests his hands in his lap at the bottom edge of the composition. Johnston employs a shallow depth of field, rendering Twain's face and torso in sharp focus while letting his hands, closest to the viewer, softly fade out of focus. Blurry yet discernible in Twain's left hand is the stub of a cigar, another hallmark prop of the septuagenarian. Undoubtedly, the unwieldy locks of hair and half-smoked cigar play supporting roles in Twain's pictorial staging of celebrity; it is the twilled white suit, filling almost half of the frame, which visually signifies Mark Twain for us as viewers. Slightly disheveled in coiffure and dress, America's humorist nevertheless commands our attention with his sturdy pose and photogenic bravura. Today, nearing the centennial of his death, the iconic in white endures. While the name conjures up visions of Middle America and the Mississippi, Tom and Huck, and prospecting out West, it also signals a specific image of the man himself. Fashioning this white suited persona in the late years of his life, the author carefully prepared his afterimage for pos- terity. America has embraced this image ever since, especially in forms of popular culture. A snowy has appeared in numerous adver- tisements, selling tomato soup, for example, in a Campbell's ad that ran in the Saturday Evening Post in 1934 (Budd, Mark as an American Icon 21). elderly author in his white suit also figured prominently in a 1925 magazine ad for Lux laundry flakes, wherein touts Lux as his choice for washing his signature whites (Figure 2). Moreover, Twain's most successful im- personator, Hal Holbrook, has faithfully worn white during his performances, beginning in 1959 on Broadway. And today at Disney World's Epcot, a white-suited along with Benjamin Franklin are the animatronic hosts of a theatrical event called The American Adventure. Just one of a wealth of images of made during his lifetime, Johnston's portrait resonates with meaning quite effortlessly in terms of its visual information alone- here is the icon. Yet a more nuanced understanding of the photograph emerges once we consider both the historical circumstances and the cultural stakes of its production. …