Portraits of the Lady: Imagining Women in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

Harvard University Press, 1989 The three books under review here deal with images generated by the idea of woman from the mid-nineteenth century into the early years of the twentieth century, not only in literature, but within the wider popular imagination and the scientific community. Martha Banta looks at all levels of the visual representation of women, from elite portraiture through popular magazine illustrations to cartoons and advertisements. Cynthia Eagle Russett investigates scientific accounts of women's physiological and intellectual nature. And Frances B. Cogan looks at didactic literature and popular fiction. These studies deal variously with the idea of woman as distinguished from the fact of woman. Although the investigations are disparate, one note sounds through all three: those who define the nature and role of women in our culture represent them prescriptively rather than descriptively. To this end, images of women in the predominating discourse present themselves in distinct and purposeful imaginative constellations, rather than as the variegated tapestry one would find in mimetic representation. These texts taken together provide fascinating evidence--across the social and intellectual spectrum--of the intersections of cultural politics and the American dream-life.