Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (review)

Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. By Laura Wexler. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xiii+363. $49.95/$24.95.

Laura Wexler takes her title from Samuel Chapman Armstrong, founder of Hampton Institute, whose phrase described how to educate ex-slaves and Native Americans. This historic institution (now Hampton University) is still known through photographs made by Frances Benjamin Johnston and exhibited in 1900 at the Paris Exposition, part of the display on American Negro life. In her clear, complex, insightful book, Wexler explores the ideology that linked imperialism and domestic life at the turn of the century by studying documentary photographs by Johnston and four other studios run by middle-class women who worked in the public sphere--Gertrude Kasebier, Alice Austen, the Gerhard sisters, and Jessie Tarbox Beals. These women have attracted several generations of scholars interested in the connections among feminism, photography, and American culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Joining the work of photographic historians trained in the field of American studies with that of international theoreticians informed by cultural studies, Wexler's book is an especially welcome demonstration of the way in which complex ideas, informed by theory, can be supported by careful references to the images at hand and expressed in clear, eloquent prose.

As a prolific and successful journalist, Frances Benjamin Johnston provides Wexler with rich material, and the essays that focus on her are the best in this book. Looking at Johnston's work at Hampton and at other schools for Native Americans and African Americans, on board a ship with Admiral Dewey at the time of his victory in the Phillipines, and elsewhere, Wexler introduces a new term, the "innocent eye," to describe the agency through which Johnston could see and record political ideology at work without conscious or deliberate knowledge of her own power. On that important premise Wexler builds her argument, to show how photographs can give visible shape to abstract national ideals.

In the 1930s, Gisele Freund began discussing the relationship between photographic documents and national ideals. Many others have followed her. Before Wexler, however, none had so thoroughly examined the dense historical fabric that supports the ways photographs function. Most importantly, Wexler shows how the photographs reveal the interlocking relationship between the imperial nation and the domestic sphere--so that Johnston (and other female journalists, like Beals and the Gerhards) became the ideal bearers of an ideology that necessarily conceals its own construction. As Wexler explains: "It is not only what the women portrayed, therefore, but how they traded on their gender privilege not to portray that gave--and still gives--their photography its particular evidentiary value. In their work we can see that the constitutive sentimental functions of the innocent eye masked and distorted what otherwise must have been more apparent: hatred, fear, collusion resistance and mimicry on the part of the subaltern; compulsion, presumption, confusion, brutality and soul murder on the part of the colonial agent" (p. 7).

Within this theoretical framework, Wexler offers careful, formal readings of individual images, showing precisely how and where she sees their political function. And she generously trains readers to assemble evidence to support arguments that may even challenge Wexler's own. Although I do not agree with every interpretation, Wexler's always-valuable method shows how to cut through the sentiment (whether that of the maker or of the scholar) that has long clouded criticism of these women and their pictures of American society in the Victorian era.

Wexler shows any careful reader (or viewer) of primary resource materials, especially photographs, how to look for the motivation that informed their making. In naming the "innocent eye," she insures that scholars need no longer be blinded by representations of social struggle and change through images that show a world where such struggle does not exist and change cannot...