Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction Laura Saltz Novak, Daniel A. Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 151 pp. $90.00. Daniel A. Novak’s new study joins a growing body of scholarship that explores the aesthetic and cultural connections between Victorian fiction and photography. Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction places the practices of two of the most important art photographers in nineteenth-century Britain—Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson—at the center of his theorization of realism in the fiction of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde. By today’s standards [End Page 499] of photographic realism, the work of Rejlander and Robinson seems outré. Both photographers employed a method called combination printing, in which one image was obtained from combining portions of multiple negatives. It was not unusual in the work of these artists for a single figure to be composed of the head of one person and the body of another, and as Novak demonstrates, this willful violation of the body’s integrity was ubiquitous not only in the work of art photographers but in the collage-like constructions made by individuals in their private photographic albums. By giving Rejlander and Robinson their rightful place in the history of photography, Novak hopes to redefine our notion of “the photographic” as it applies to Victorian realist fiction. Pointing to the frequent manifestations of grotesque or fragmented bodies in the fiction of Dickens, Eliot, and Wilde, Novak argues that such representations ought to be considered central rather than exceptional instances of a realist aesthetic. Mr. Venus’s shop, in which body parts are exchanged for other commodities in Our Mutual Friend, is an obvious example of Dickens’s fictional deployment of grotesque bodies, but Novak shows that monstrous bodies also appear in less expected places. Little Dorrit’s Mrs. Merdle, for instance, with “her hands [that] were not a pair,” is “a collage of fragmented human parts” (78). Novak suggests that the same aesthetic that underpins Victorian art photography—an aesthetic of fragmentation—is constitutive of Victorian realist fiction. This argument offers a corrective to existing scholarship on Victorian fiction and photography, which has focused on the empirical aspects of nineteenth-century photography and the ways the medium became a model for literary realism’s increasing emphasis on the visible and knowable. Nancy Armstrong’s Fiction in the Age of Photography and Jennifer Green-Lewis’s Framing the Victorians, for example, have ably demonstrated how, as Novak observes, photography “defined what would be ‘real’ for literary fiction” (6). By contrast, Novak explores the overt fictionality of Victorian images and texts in which bodies are assembled and composed from random parts. As Novak argues, these “photographic fictions...defined and produced the impossible and the abstract” (6). Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction is divided into four chapters and an afterward. Chapters one and two use Dickens’s representations of artists’ models in “The Ghost of Art” (1850) as a touchstone for tracing what Novak calls an “aesthetic of fragmentation” through a number of Victorian contexts. These chapters are rooted in the proposition that the photographic fragmentation of bodies renders the identity of photographic subjects unrecognizable and even interchangeable. Chapter one begins within the photographic portrait studio, where devices such as head- and body-rests produce not only an experience akin, for sitters, to going to the dentist, but also images that are so similar to each other they do “violence not to particular bodies (gendered or classed), but to particularity itself” (42). Indeed, Novak cites several cases in which photographic images become interchangeable: Henry Mayhew’s photographer substituted ready-made images for sitters too impatient to have their own portraits taken; a mother sent a portrait of another woman’s baby in place of her own because it was more attractive. With this notion of identity in mind, Novak turns both to Marx’s theory of alienated labor and Dickens’s meditations on artists’ models to suggest that abstract and fragmented bodies enter Victorian discourse in a number of contexts. Chapter two examines the ways this aesthetic of fragmentation plays out in Little Dorrit. Novak’s central concern here...