Portrait Miniatures: Fictionality, Visual Culture, and the Scene of Recognition in Early National America

Abstract

This essay seeks to expand the geographical and formal scope of the concept of fictionality by examining the self-conscious presentation of fictional beings' nonreferentiality in early American visual culture. Its principal case study is a portrait of Susanna Rowson's popular heroine Charlotte Temple by the New York engraver Cornelius Tiebout, which appeared in an 1809 edition of Rowson's novel. Unpacking this image's dense web of allusions to the painterly tradition of the portrait miniature, and its distinct articulation of the viewer's intimacy with a physically absent subject, the essay argues that Tiebout used these perceptual dynamics to foreground and interrogate the ontological vacancy of Rowson's character. Adopting an intermedial approach to the theorization of fictionality, the essay begins by assessing the long-standing critical neglect of portraits of fictional characters among art historians, before suggesting that Tiebout's image of Charlotte offers a way to connect the operations of visual and literary fictionality through the concept of "recognition"—which, in denoting both the process through which a picture's subject is understood and the reconciliation of separated individuals in anagnoristic plotlines, draws our attention to questions about the nature of personal identity. Extending the investigation of this epistemological intersection between picture-making and narrative-building, the essay goes on to consider word/image relations in Tiebout's Charlotte Temple as they pertain to the logic of "reverse ekphrasis," the instantiation of desire and grief in portrait miniatures, and the wider culture of frontispiece engraving in early America.