Abstract
In Suburban Sketches (1871), one of William Dean Howells’ earliest publications, the Sallie family take a boat trip down Boston’s Charles River and along the East Coast. Like an increasing number of bourgeois American families of the 1870s, they memorialise their ‘Day’s Pleasure’ by having a picture taken.1 Waiting for the exposure, they arrange themselves into ‘striking and characteristic attitudes’ for a ‘brief space of time that seems so long’ (Suburban Sketches, p. 150). The photographer turns his back during the exposure ‘as photographers always do, with that air of hiding their tears’ (p. 150). The resulting image, which the reader never sees, may be realistic in the sense of recording what was in front of the lens, but it will be unrealistic in that what it records are the ‘characteristic attitudes’ known as posing. Like Levy and Stevenson, Howells concerned himself with the social implications of posing, though, unlike them, he felt it to be something of a moral and political danger.
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Notes
William Dean Howells, Suburban Sketches (New York; Cambridge: Hurd and Houghton; Riverside Press, 1871), p. 150. Subsequent references to this text are given in parenthesis. There is a similar scene in Howells’ first novel, written a year later. See William Dean Howells, Their Wedding Journey (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1892), pp. 138–9.
Daniel Novak, ‘Sexuality in the Age of Technological Reproduction: Oscar Wilde, Photography and Identity’ in Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend, ed. Joseph Bristow (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2009), pp. 63–95 (p. 64).
Michael Meyer, ‘Wilde’s Lectures and Trials: The Imitation, Reproduction, and Simulation of Poses’ in The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde During the Last 100 Years, ed. Uwe Böker, Richard Corballis, and Julie Hibbard (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 103–10 (p. 104).
Wilde asked the Marquis of Queensbury if he was accusing him of being a sodomite. The Marquis replied: ‘I do not say you are it, but you look it … and you pose at it, which is just as bad’. He would later leave a note at Wilde’s club signed ‘To Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic]’, which prompted Wilde’s disastrous libel suit. See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), pp. 412–21.
William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1891), p. 15.
William Dean Howells, ‘The Man of Letters as a Man of Business’ in Literature and Life (New York; London: Harper and Brothers, 1902), pp. 1–35 (p. 29).
Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York; London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 158–77.
Mark Twain, ‘William Dean Howells’, in What Is Man? and Other Essays (New York; London: Harper & Brother, 1917), pp. 228–39 (p. 235).
For more on Howells’ class position, see Andrew Lawson, Downwardly Mobile: the Changing Fortunes of American Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 62–85.
See Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 279–84.
Lance Rubin, William Dean Howells and the American Memory Crisis (Amherst; New York: Cambria Press, 2008).
‘Wm. D. Howells at Home. A Visit to the Novelist’s Pretty House in Boston’ (1886) cited in Carolyn Kuchera, ‘W. D. Howells at Home and On Home: A Recovered 1886 Interview’ in American Literary Realism, 44:1 (2011), 74–9 (p. 77).
Augusta Rohrbach, Truth Stranger than Fiction: Race, Realism, and the U.S. Literary Marketplace (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 73–98.
Ralph F. Bogardus, ‘A Literary Realist and the Camera: W. D. Howells and the Uses of Photography’ in American Literary Realism, 1870–1910, 10:3 (1977), 231–41 (p. 233).
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1975).
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), p. 108. Subsequent references to this text are given in parentheses.
Carol Shloss, In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer: 1840–1940 (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 26.
Susan Goodman, William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life (Berkley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2005), p. 56.
Richard H. Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 84.
William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance: A Novel (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1881), p. 33. Subsequent references to this text are given in parenthesis.
Marcy J. Dinius, The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), pp. 51–77.
Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. xv.
Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 24.
William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), pp. 8–9. Subsequent references to this text are given in parentheses.
Bernard Edward Jones, Cassell’s Cyclopaedia of Photography (London; New York: Ayer Publishing, 1973, originally published 1911), p. 65.
Jeanette H. Walworth, ‘Introductory’ in Southern Silhouettes (New York: Henry Holt, 1887).
Phillip Barrish, American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 17.
Charles Dudley Warner, Their Pilgrimage (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1890), p. 56.
Daniel H. Borus, Writing Realism (Chapel Hill; London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 107.
John Fagg, On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, George Bellows, and Modernism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), p. 80.
See Megan Rowley Williams, Through the Negative: The Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), p. 180.
For a discussion of the title as referring to fog, see George Arms, ‘Howells’ English Travel Books: Problems in Technique’, in PMLA, 82 (1967), 104–16 (pp. 113–14).
William Dean Howells, ‘The Personality of Hawthorne’ in North American Review, 177:565 (1903), 872–82 (p. 879).
William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York: Dover Publications, 2003), pp. 109–22.
Howells, ‘Editor’s Easy Chair’, in Harper’s Monthly, 107 (June 1903), cited in Charles L. Crow, ‘Howells and William James: “A Case of Metaphantasmia” Solved’ in American Quarterly, 27:2 (1975), pp. 170–1.
Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 10.
Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ in Across the Plains with other Memories and Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1892), pp. 229–52 (p. 252).
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© 2015 Owen Clayton
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Clayton, O. (2015). ‘We do the rest’: Photography, Labour, and Howellsian Realism. In: Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137471505_5
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