The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Sarah Blackwood

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Sarah Blackwood E. Thomas Finan Sarah Blackwood. The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States. U of North Carolina P, 2019. xi + 201 pp. $27.95 (Paperback). Sarah Blackwood'sThe Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States is a study of tensions—between invention and discovery, between inner and outer, and between mind and body. Blackwood surveys how various modes of portraiture (broadly understood) both responded to and influenced evolving notions of selfhood in the United States during the nineteenth century. This cross-disciplinary volume attends to a number of types of portraits: the literary portrait, the printed icon, the photograph, the painted picture, and the X-ray. As Blackwood notes, the relationship between photography and the self has preoccupied many critics, including Walter Benjamin in the twentieth century and the photographer and scholar Shawn Michelle Smith today. Smith's work also explores the role of narratives of gender and race for portraiture, a major theme of Blackwood's own study. Blackwood's expansive approach to portraiture—considering it as a mode across genres—illuminates the stakes of portraiture in the nineteenth century. Incorporating multiple genres strengthens her argument about the intellectual-historical stakes of portraiture. One of the conceptual motifs of The Portrait's Subject is the historical contingency of the "psychological." Rather than taking "psychology" as a timeless given, Blackwood instead offers it as an invented "form of inner life" drawing from trends in literature, art, philosophy, and science in the nineteenth century (10). In examining evolving accounts of inner life, Blackwood discusses a variety of writers and artists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Thomas Eakins, and Henry James. For a book about the anatomy of inner life, it is perhaps appropriate that the chapters themselves should trace an anatomy of a person, with each chapter organized around a different part (face, head, limbs, mind/brain, and bones, respectively). In a brief introduction, Blackwood outlines the importance of historical and aesthetic analysis. The historical contingency of the inner life runs throughout this book, but the aesthetic also plays a role; the subjects of this book "believed that selves, like [End Page E-1] E-2 portraits, are aesthetic objects" (15). Examining the historical inflections of certain concepts is a popular scholarly method in contemporary literary studies, as seen in Christopher Castiglia's historical interrogation of interiority in Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States. Blackwood complements this mode of analysis by continually returning to aesthetic texture. Historical narrative and attention to form reinforce each other. The first chapter uses Hawthorne as a "case study" for revealing the evolving notions of portraiture and selfhood in the 1840s and 1850s. Blackwood observes that these years saw an explosion in portrait technologies, to which Hawthorne's work responded. Examining actual portraits of Hawthorne as well as his reflections on portraits in his works, Blackwood offers Hawthorne as a key pioneer for imagining literary portraiture as a mode of exploring the "inner life" of a subject. Hawthorne's portrayals of these portraits are conflicted, befitting fraught narratives of portraiture during this time period: "these tales that indulge dramas about finding a true, inner self are always … also engaged in making the sorts of selves they purport to find" (42). The second chapter further complicates the tensions of portraiture by turning to the intersection of race and portraiture. African American writers faced a powerful duality for portraiture, which could be a vehicle for situating black Americans within an oppressive racial hierarchy but could also be a vehicle for expressing self-ownership and inner depths. Thus portraiture could both reinforce derogatory racial stereotypes and afford a means of rebuking reductionist racial narratives. To explore these complexities, Blackwood examines nineteenth-century newspapers, Frederick Douglass's reflections on portraiture, and works by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, and Frank J. Webb. Blackwood notes the pervasiveness of portraiture in nineteenth-century texts by African Americans, and she reveals how portraiture in these texts can serve multiple (and sometimes competing) purposes. For...