| If we accept Emerson's understanding of his age as one which "conceived of the camera as a powerful symbol for his age's scrutiny of character" (in Meehan 13), the question remains: what did this scrutiny imply for the conception, perception, and creation of the American Author? Upon the introduction of the photographic medium, prominent citizens were displayed, most unambiguously in Matthew Brady's Gallery of Illustrious Americans, and their frozen images stood as emblems of what the nation was to become. In examining the symbolic relationship between author and image, and its affect on their literary productions, this study examines the ways in which each author confronted the central symbol in the nineteenth and early twentieth century American mass-market - the photographic frontispiece.;Both Hawthorne and James rejected the photographic form as their own symbol of the American Author - in its stead, the two literary figures insisted on implementing the symbol of shadows. The two authors' subject and author positions were based, therefore, on self-proclaimed authoritative, voice-positions based on shadows of a narrative past. This perspective stands contrary to Douglass's and Wharton's strategic use of the medium. Both embody visual 'otherness' in the American landscape of Representative Men, and it is through their play with "Types" prevalent in publications and other literary productions that they were able to disrupt their own fixedness, offering instead a disruption of images and a fluid yet firm image of themselves as the nation's authority. By embodying 'the other', the authors were able to reflect or reveal what lay behind the mirage of a discernible American portrait. Hence, both figures managed to play with not only the image that was conveyed in their own portraits, each author also implemented the metaphors of photography in their writings in order to disrupt these public images of themselves, thereby allowing each to enter into the gallery of representative American Authors. |
