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

Abstract

June 21 2021 The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Erica Fretwell Erica Fretwell Erica Fretwell is assistant professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author ofSensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling(2020), and currently is working on two projects: one on prenatal ultrasounds and racial innocence, the other on haptic literacies and craft practices in the long nineteenth century. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Erica Fretwell Erica Fretwell is assistant professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author ofSensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling(2020), and currently is working on two projects: one on prenatal ultrasounds and racial innocence, the other on haptic literacies and craft practices in the long nineteenth century. Online Issn: 1937-2213 Print Issn: 0028-4866 © 2021 by The New England Quarterly2021The New England Quarterly The New England Quarterly (2021) 94 (2): 295–298. https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00896 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Erica Fretwell; The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States. The New England Quarterly 2021; 94 (2): 295–298. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00896 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAll JournalsThe New England Quarterly Search Advanced Search Why do we presume that outward appearance expresses inner depth? What ideological and cultural frameworks need to be in place for us to look to the body to better discern the soul? The answer to these questions, Sarah Blackwood argues in her radiant and revelatory book The Portrait's Subject, lies in portraiture, images of surface likeness. Between the invention of photography in 1839 and that of the X-ray in 1895, portraiture emerged as an important arena for exploring new ideas about psychological complexity. Collating a wide array of materials—from the changing figuration of a self-emancipated Black man in The North Star’s masthead and Thomas Eakins's paintings to Nathaniel Hawthorne's and Henry James's portrait fiction—Blackwood's book meticulously documents the real and imagined portraits that made it possible for Americans to understand themselves, in ways never before, as psychologically “deep.” The Portrait's Subject is about the creation and disciplining of interiority... You do not currently have access to this content.