| "The Portrait's Subject" reevaluates the cultural significance of the nineteenth-century portrait as it appeared in the literature, fine art, photography, and popular media of the era. After the invention of photography in 1839, portraits quickly became one of the most common aesthetic forms middle-class Americans encountered. While others have noted portraiture's role in reflecting dominant social ideals, no study has adequately explored portraiture's centrality to the imagination of inner life in the nineteenth century. "The Portrait's Subject" argues that writers' and artists' fascination with portraits spurred an aesthetic redefinition of the human interior as psychological, or found in the mind. I read works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Thomas Eakins, and Henry James, alongside author portraits, newspaper mastheads, and illustrations, in the context of the emergence of the discipline of psychology. This dissertation significantly revises the origins of what has been called "the inward turn" of early-twentieth-century American literature by tracing it to literature and visual culture well before 1900. By investigating the vital transactions between portrait representations of the mind and rarely examined nineteenth-century American ideas about psychology, I offer a new theory of interiority in a range of specific, material, contexts. |
