Immersive Words: Mass Media, Visuality, and American Literature, 1839–1893

IMMERSIVE WORDS

IMMERSIVE WORDS

Mass Media, Visuality, and American Literature, 1839–1893

Shelly Jarenski

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2015 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Century Schoolbook and Garamond

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover photograph: Stereoscope, circa 1900; courtesy of Donald E. Simanek

Cover design: Emma Sovich

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jarenski, Shelly.

   Immersive words : mass media, visuality, and American literature, 1839–1893 /

Shelly Jarenski.

        pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8173-1867-3 (cloth : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-0-8173-8816-4 (ebook)

1. American literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. National characteristics, American, in literature. 3. Aesthetics in literature. 4. Aesthetics, American. I. Title.

     PS217.A35J37 2015

     820.9’357—dc23

2014041356

To the memory of my mother, Sharon Philips Jarenski—thank you for being the strongest and smartest person I have ever known.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 - Disruptive Aesthetics: Melville’s Daguerrean Experiments

2 - Panoramic Aesthetics and African American Challenges

3 - Imagined Tourism: Hawthorne’s Virtual Rome

4 - Spectacular Display: The Politics of Exhibition Aesthetics

Coda

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Self 03 tintype by Tom DeLooza

2 Anthropometric card of Francis Galton

3 Daguerreotype portrait of a young man with cigar

4 Alphonse Bertillon’s measurement card

5 Francis Galton carte de visite portrait, standing

6 Framed family group of ten daguerreotypes

7 Daguerreotype of a sailor holding a daguerreotype of his wife

8 Ambrotype portrait of a man pouring a milk can

9 Tintype of an elegantly dressed, standing black woman

10 Self Portrait by Chuck Close

11 Detail from The Battle of Atlanta at the Atlanta Cyclorama

12 Kara Walker’s Presenting Negro Scenes

13 Kara Walker’s The End of Uncle Tom

14 Martin Parr’s The Pantheon

15 Martin Parr’s Cost of Living

16 Photographic postcard of the Torre della Scimmia

17 Photographic postcard of the Coliseum

18 Postcard of a painting of a woman with figs

19 Photographic postcard of a woman with hay

20 Photographic postcard of Roman peasants

21 Photographic postcard of Roman woman with jug

22 Samoan villagers, Columbian Exposition

23 Women sitting on a camel, Columbian Exposition

24 Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit, Columbian Exposition

25 Court of Honor, Columbian Exposition

26 Competition Too Strong, World’s Columbian Exposition

27 World’s Columbian Exposition souvenir coin purse

28 Chinese Joss House, Columbian Exposition

29 Janitors of the Columbian Guard, Columbian Exposition

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One of the great joys of academic life is the freedom and space it allows one to develop rich intellectual and personal networks, and I am so grateful to have had the support of many institutions and individuals throughout the difficult and wonderful years that it has taken me to complete this book.

At Loyola University Chicago, Christopher Castiglia’s rigorous but passionate take on American cultural studies was an invaluable inspiration for my work. I am honored to have had his unique and insightful perspective contribute to this project, and I am proud that I can now call him a friend. Jack Kerkering continues to embody the definition of mentor: he is an incisive reader, shrewd navigator of the profession, and empathetic giver of advice. I am also grateful for the support, advice, and camaraderie of Badia Ahad, Pamela Caughie, David Chinitz, Allen J. Frantzen, John Jacobs, and Paul Jay.

At the University of Michigan-Dearborn, I have benefited immensely from the mentorship of Jonathan Smith, who pushed and nurtured in equal measure my career and personal growth. The members of the English Discipline, Women’s and Gender Studies Program (especially Suzanne Bergeron), and American Studies Program have offered intellectual exchange, professional advice, and friendship that I will be forever thankful for. The members of my two writing groups provided feedback on chapters but also became a sounding board for personal and professional matters, especially for issues facing women: Pamela Aronson, Joy Beatty, Gabriella Eschrich, Pamela McAuslan, Elizabeth Rohan, and Marie Waung in one and Anne Danielson-Francois, Janet Dunn, and Lara Rusch in the other. Jacqueline VanSant also served as a fun carpool buddy and great source of Eastern Shore, Maryland, pride.

Readers at the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College consistently provided useful feedback on this project at every stage. I am particularly grateful for the friendship, professional insight, and generosity of Michael Chaney. At the University of Alabama Press, Dan Waterman has been an enthusiastic champion and a rigorous editorial shepherd. His solicitation of two incredibly tough but fair anonymous reviews improved this book beyond measure. I am also fortunate to have worked with faculty at Wheaton College and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as I have made my journey through academia, in particular Alex Bloom, Beverly Clark, and Mike Drout at Wheaton and Jane Gallop, Kristie Hamilton, Greg Jay, and Mark Netzloff at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

I received research grants from the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan and the Princeton University Library (thanks especially to Stephen Ferguson and Annalee Pauls) as I completed this project. Portions of the coda have been previously published in issue 35, volume 4 of MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (2010: 85–110) and portions of Chapter 2 have been previously published in American Quarterly, and I appreciate their permission to reprint here. I also thank the staff members of the Atlanta Cyclorama, Skinner Auctioneers, the Chicago History Museum, Special Collections at University College London, Pace Gallery, Sikkema Jenkins and Company, Magnum Photos, Alexander Gray Associates LLC, and Tom DeLooza.

The friendships I have developed while writing this book have been some of the most important personal and intellectual relationships I could have ever imagined. Michelle Coghlan, Zach Lamm, Tory Pearman, and most of all Stephanie Lundeen and Ann Mattis made this book possible on every level: reading drafts, writing with me in coffee shops, and holding my hand when the work didn’t seem good enough. Every time I wanted to give up, their encouragement, insight, editorial suggestions, and kindness ensured I would keep going. In addition, I have always been lucky to have the most supportive family imaginable. Richard Jarenski, my father, has nurtured my inner life in a way most parents just don’t get to, and I have been fortunate to have a sister, Aishley, and an extended family of aunts, cousins, and uncles who have celebrated me, challenged me intellectually, and inspired me to think, write, and live to the fullest. My lifelong friends Steve Griffes, Amy Lydon, Jasmine Sewell, and Keith Sandler have always kept my spirits high. Finally, I cannot thank Zak Moen enough: for being my partner, for taking care of me, and for growing up with me. I love you always.

INTRODUCTION

Writing Visually: Pictorial Composition and the Aesthetics of Possibility

This is a book about the pioneering aesthetics of nineteenth-century America. It traces the emergence of new visual technologies in the middle of the century, such as daguerreotypy, mechanized tourism, and immersive exhibition spaces (panoramas, world’s fairs), and argues that the virtualized experience of vision produced by these technologies influenced a significant shift in American literary aesthetics. I argue that writers attempted to replicate the experiences produced by technological visual forms, and in doing so they created narrative structures that engaged visuality beyond ekphrasis. Rather than incorporating visual technologies into their texts through description, writers such as Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Crafts, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Sarah Orne Jewett went further, using innovative narrative techniques to create aesthetic experiences in their texts that felt cognitively similar to the experiences readers were having with visual technologies. These narrative experiments explored the edges of the liminal spaces of the visual/verbal binary. Furthermore, these authors mined the uncanny registers that were already buried at the heart of these new technologies, crafting those registers into a counteraesthetic discourse. The significance of this counteraesthetic is most clear when we consider that the technological advances in visuality and the aesthetic transformations that occurred in narrative structures in response to these advances were not rarefied phenomena. Rather, these dramatic aesthetic shifts had important social consequences, as demonstrated by the ethnographic intersections of photography’s supposed objectivity and of exhibition culture’s evolutionary narratives. While this study examines aesthetic innovations, it will also attempt to make sense of the social consequences that followed these changes, especially the consequences these new aesthetic experiences had for emerging narratives of race and nation, and how certain authors challenged these narratives by producing a counteraesthetic based on the same raw material being used to construct these narratives.

The daguerreotype was invented in 1839, at the end of a tumultuous decade that included such events as the signing of the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, the organization of the New England Anti-Slavery Society and the Underground Railroad, and the secession of Texas from Mexico and Santa Anna’s raid on the Alamo.¹ The moment of the daguerreotype’s invention has been understood by many scholars to mark an age of intense technological visuality and mass visual culture. For many, these emergent visualities signal the beginning of modernism and postmoderinism.² During the epoch that followed the daguerreotype’s invention, increasing technological and formal innovations changed the ways many Americans experienced their world and the ways they constructed cultural meaning. These innovations included the reproducibility of the photograph, the scale of the panorama, and the simulacra of the Chicago World’s Fair. Photography is only the most symbolic example of this mass-media visuality that emerged during the era, and it has been the most studied, but other forms deserve similar attention. In the context of these technological advancements after 1839, in many of America’s cultural spaces, the cognitive experience of visuality changed, and visual experience began to feel radically new, multiple and multiplying, and ubiquitous, even if the number of Americans encountering mass visual experiences was somewhat limited to those living in, or with access to, urban environments. The new emotional and cognitive reactions many felt in the face of mass-media visuality resulted in certain aesthetic environments marked by convergence, immersion, illusion, and virtuality—the key concepts that ground this study. By convergence, I mean the way that the simultaneous emergence of multiple visual practices resulted in a representational interdependence of various forms. Examples of this convergence include panoramic daguerreotypes, shop windows influenced by museum displays, ethnographic photographs and advertisements, as well as narrative sketches, ekphrasis, and textual portraits. Convergence was a new visual mode in the nineteenth century, made possible by technological advancement. Virtuality and its most palpable effects—immersion, the feeling of being overwhelmed by an image, and illusion, when that overwhelming response to an artificial stimulus begins to feel like reality—were innovative aesthetic experiences and the result of convergence. Jonathan Crary addresses this sense of virtuality in his foundational study of mass-media visuality in the decades leading up to the invention of photography: what occurs is a new valuation of visual experience: it is given an unprecedented mobility and exchangeability, abstracted from any founding site or referent (14). The mobility of the gaze and the disconnect between what is perceived as real and the actual environment of the observer are two defining characteristics of the virtual.

This study argues that writers quickly attempted to harness the power and immediacy of these new aesthetic experiences of virtuality, which were based in visual technologies. This attempt resulted in significant, and often startling and oppositional, narrative experiments, such as Herman Melville’s disruptive chronologies, erratic genre play, and unusual use of point of view; Frederick Douglass’s iterative revision of his autobiography; and Sarah Orne Jewett’s anti-teleological materialism. These experiments were in part possible because the aesthetic power of new visual technologies—the power these nineteenth-century writers captured in their emergent literary techniques—was perceived as nonlinguistic and immediate, as effective precisely because it could not be completely described in language. The perception that visual aesthetics were ephemeral and indescribable led to the belief that visuality was a more efficient way to communicate meaning, and often these forms were used to communicate narratives of racial and national supremacy. Nineteenth-century American writers produced often bold and challenging prose because they were incorporating aesthetic effects into their works that were beyond narrative, or at least perceived to go beyond narrative. However, rather than producing the sense of seamless narratives of progress that were often communicated by the forms I study, the novels analyzed here used the uncanny aesthetic effects inherent within visual technologies to produce counternarratives that disrupted this sense of seamlessness by producing feelings of discomfort and distance in their readers. I argue that the writers in this study began to write visually, and thus significantly altered the aesthetic and formal qualities of the century’s literature, but that their visual experiments and the aesthetics they created challenged the racial narratives that were being woven within nineteenth-century spectacle culture.

The incorporation of the aesthetics of visual technologies into literature created particular effects that were experientially similar to their corollary visual experiences. Furthermore, as writers incorporated visual aesthetics into their narratives, they drew from the more complex, often disturbing registers of these experiences, which produced both narratives and aesthetics that served to counteract the nationalist, racialized narratives of progress that were often being produced by visual culture. For example, reading Herman Melville’s Pierre could approximate the experience of viewing a daguerreotype. However, the novel’s uncanny aesthetic shifts produce a reading experience that is similar to the cognitive experience of viewing a daguerreotype’s unstable and destabilizing constantly changing mirrored surface. The convergence of Melville’s narrative strategy with the counteraesthetic effects of daguerreotypes is the subject of Chapter 1. In Chapter 2, I argue that reading Frederick Douglass’s spatially oriented slave narrative could approximate the immersive, virtual experience of the panorama. However, the immersion that readers experience within his narrative does not produce the pleasurable sensation of a linear narrative of space and time characteristic of landscape and battle panoramas. Rather, Douglass draws on the overwhelming and unnerving sensations that these spectacles also produced, enacting a sense of disorientation and discomfort in his narrative structure that interrupts the pedagogy of panoramic spaces. In Chapter 3, I trace the more explicit emergence of virtuality by considering Nathaniel Hawthorne’s self-aware metanarrative in the intermedial text The Marble Faun. This book has an interesting publication history because it failed as a novel but gained popularity as a travel guide to Rome. Roman merchants took advantage of these market conditions, and the availability of mass-market editions of the novels published by the Bernhard Tauchnitz company, and offered tourists the opportunity to buy personalized, extra-illustrated editions of the text. In this way, travelers could turn their copies of The Marble Faun into scrapbooks. By examining this novel in the context of these popular practices, I reveal the way that Hawthorne’s text challenges the emerging visual technologies of travel and the way these technologies produced narratives of race and nation for tourists. Often the mediated nature of nineteenth-century travel allowed tourists to fit their experiences abroad into preexisting narratives of travel, which ultimately united tourists around their own sense of national, class, and racial identities because travel was a shared experience for homogenous members of these groups. Hawthorne’s metanarrative reveals the sameness and then challenges the sameness inherent in these technologies of mediation. In Chapter 4, I examine the way Sarah Orne Jewett’s episodically structured sketches could approximate exhibition experiences like the Columbian Exposition. Rather than reproducing the pedagogical teleology of these experiences, however, Jewett’s novel engages the participatory nature of these exhibits and the complex interplay of agency these spaces produced between spectators and performers. As such, Jewett’s text, like each of the texts I analyze, used aesthetic facets of a visual technology that challenged that technology’s dominant, more explicit, and narrative function.

As these chapter descriptions indicate, Immersive Words combines analysis of the formal features of literary texts with exciting archival evidence such as nineteenth-century daguerreotypes, African American artist J. P. Ball’s antislavery panorama, race scientist George Gliddon’s pamphlet to the American Panorama of the Nile, extra-illustrated, souvenir editions of The Marble Faun, and photographs from Chicago’s Columbian Exposition. To emphasize the continuity of specific aesthetic technologies, each chapter of this study begins with a reading of a contemporary artist engaged with a nineteenth-century form: Chuck Close and the daguerreotype, Kara Walker and the panorama, Martin Parr and tourism, and Coco Fusco and exhibition practices.

Writers’ appropriation of visual strategies into textual forms enabled the aesthetic experience of reading to be informed by, and in fact reproduce, visual experiences. Thus, as this book outlines, the aesthetic and formal qualities of the century’s literature replicated and experientially became the visual.³ This practice of writing visually blurs the neat distinction critics and theorists have traditionally drawn between text and image. By writing visually, I mean specific techniques and strategies drawn from visual forms. To think of authors as writing visually moves us beyond a comparative approach to the relationship between the verbal and the visual, which challenges us to reconceptualize a dynamic that is more dialectical and interrelational than coexistent or mutually influential. In other words, studying the interplay of the verbal/visual in an era of intense technological visuality requires us to think beyond the influence of one representational form over the other in order to more accurately assess the way these forms can converge to create new kinds of communication. Crary describes nineteenth-century painting as inherently embedded in a broader field of mass-media visuality: The observer of paintings in the nineteenth century was surrounded by a proliferating range of optical and sensory experiences . . . an expanding chaos of images, commodities, and stimulation (20). Literary representation also evolved in this aesthetic epoch of convergence. As mass-media visual technologies proliferated in nineteenth-century America, they created representational experiences that surprised, delighted, and unsettled viewers. The verbal strategies that emerged in response did not merely respond to these new sensations but were new, surprising, delightful, and unsettling themselves. The authors I cover in this study drew on the unsettling aspects of these new forms in particular and used the raw aesthetic material of visual technologies to tell stories that ran counter to the emerging narratives of racial and national supremacy that many visual technologies were producing.

The rhetorical engagement with visual technologies that I study in this book illustrates a moment of representational transformation when language was not only influenced by visuality but became a new representational form in and of itself through its interaction with visuality. W. J. T. Mitchell’s concept of the imagetext is useful to explain these new representational strategies because this concept moves us beyond what he calls the unsatisfactory concept of a sister-arts approach (word and image) to connote the way that these forms are not just related but conjoined. Mitchell suggests that this representational imbrication of language and visuality, conceived as imagetext, can be used to explore representational strategies that are either a composite, synthetic form or [a] gap or fissure in representation (83). The imagetext approach to studying the word-image relationship challenges the sister-arts method conceptually, but it also engages the social consequences that are promoted by the comparative method.⁴ The first of these social consequences is that comparative methods rely on unifying, homogenous concept(s), which in turn make the cultures they represent seem equally homogenous and the comparative method seem inevitable instead of one possibility (87). The second, related problem is the whole strategy of systematic comparison/contrast that ignores other forms of relationship, eliminating the possibility of metonymic juxtapositions, of incommensurability, and of unmediated or non-negotiable forms of alterity (87). Not only does the sister-arts method make other approaches seem unwarranted, it forecloses experiences with alterity, encounters with otherness, that allow for contact that is not differentiated and productive of binaries but that is based on empathy, recognition, and change. The third social consequence of the sister-arts method, according to Mitchell, is that it is based in a historicism that conforms to a canonical master-narrative leading to the present moment, and which seems incapable of registering alternate histories, counter-memories, or resistant practices (87). This reliance on a narrative of teleology that Mitchell traces is key to the pedagogical power that the image has always claimed, and that is one of the reasons this study is concerned with moments of nonlinearity produced by the conjunction of word and image.

In Immersive Words, I examine literary texts that circumvent the inevitability of the comparative approach and, at times, offer this empathic, unmediated experience with alterity. Since the gaps and fissures Mitchell claims can be produced by imagetext are responsible for this experience, I focus on rupture in this study. Rupture allows me to consider the alternative ways nineteenth-century American authors imagined belonging in a context that posited citizenship as white, middle-class, heterosexual, and often male.

My study is preceded by other recent theorizations of the word/image binary in American literary studies that seek to excavate the representational and social possibilities that emerge when we explore these convergences and fissures, in other words, the spaces where image and text intersect and diverge.⁵ Michael Chaney describes these spaces as the instabilities that erupt around ephemeral moments of verbal and visual collision (Fugitive Vision 9). Daphne Brooks reads a number of black abolitionist spectacle modes in the nineteenth century as effective precisely because they relied on neither text nor image but on a fusion of the two. She reads spectacles like Henry Box Brown’s moving panorama as multimedia events, alternative forms of intertextual expression in the battle to end slavery (68). The intertextual fusion of text and image produced an increase [in] spectacular and creative means to attack slavery that was not possible in either medium alone (68). Nancy Bentley explores the frantic panoramas of modern life in the public