What's Wrong with This Picture?: Daguerreotypy and Magic in The House of the Seven Gables

LARA LANGER COHEN What's Wrong with This Picture? Daguerreotypy and Magic in The House of the Seven Gables There is also a sort of unnaturalness in his world. It is not seen by the noon-day sun, so often as by moonbeams, and by auroral or volcanic lights. AU that he describes may and does actually happen, but something else happens, by the omission ofwhich we fail sometimes to acknowledge the reality of his delineation. "The Works ofNathaniel Hawthorne," Universalist Quarterly, July 1851 In the final pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gabks, the daguerreotypist Holgrave presents Phoebe Pyncheon with a disturbing object: a miniature of her uncle's corpse, taken moments before in the house's gloomy parlor. Although modern critics almost invariably chafe at the improbable turn of events that concludes the novel, concurring with F. O. Matthiesson's charge that the "final pages drift away into unreal complacence" (334), none has singled out this concluding image as particularly unsatisfactory. What makes the omission surprising is that of all the unrealistic aspects of the conclusion , the production of the daguerreotype may qualify as the most unrealistic . Holgrave chooses to lodge in the House of the Seven Gables precisely because its darkness prevents him from becoming "too much dazzled with my own trade"; as he explains to Phoebe, "It is like a bandage over one's eyes to come into it'Xçi).1 The parlor in particular, Hawthorne persistently reminds us, is shrouded in constant shadow. Yet Holgrave employs his "sunbeam art" there to create a portrait of Judge Pyncheon clear enough to serve as evidence of his cause of death. Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number i, Spring 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 40 Lara Langer Cohen No daguerreotypist using natural means could have produced such an image in the setting Hawthorne describes. But what about supernatural means? Holgrave, after all, is "the descendent of the legendary wizard," Matthew Maule (House of the Seven Gables 319). His photographs possess a mysterious divinatory faculty that reveals their subjects' secret characters, he has already demonstrated his mesmeric skills, and Hepzibah suspects that he may be equally adept at other forms of "the Black Art" (84). Given this evidence —Hawthorne's frequent references to the sunless parlor; HoIgrave 's equally frequent invocation ofthe agency ofthe sun in his work; Holgrave's remarkable powers, both manifest and rumored—we can begin to piece together both a mystery and the uncanny solution Hawthorne offers us. If hypothesizing about such seemingly recondite intentions might seem unwarranted, we should remember that our speculations concern the man who, when proposing to his editor that he title his forthcoming novel The Seven Gables, deemed it "rather the best" of several possibilities because it "has the great advantage that it would puzzle the devil to tell what it means" (Letters 369-70). Gratified as Hawthorne might have been simply to "puzzle" his readers, however, Holgrave's mysterious photographic methods yield more than an absorbing red herring. Investigating them in light of contemporary responses to the new technology reveals shifting, contradictory dimensions to Holgrave's work within the novel and, ultimately, disquieting possibilities amidst the "unrealistic complacence" of its conclusion. THE "SUNBEAM ART" AND THE "DARK OLD PARLOR" From the time Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre announced the invention ofpractical photography in 1839 to the height ofAmericans' appetite for daguerreotypy in the 1850s, the figure of the sun was ubiquitous in the medium's rhetoric. T. S. Arthur, writing in Godey's Lady's Book in 1849, dubbed it "the sunbeam art" (352) while Philadelphia daguerreotypist Marcus Aurelius Root preferred the term "sun-linings" (264); and the scientist Dominique François Arago, in a 1839 report endorsing a proposal that the French government buy the daguerreotype process, praised "these images drawn by nature's most subtle pencil, the light ray" (18). The renowned Boston daguerreotypists Southworth and Hawes, who counted Hawthorne among their earliest customers, adver- Daguerreotypy and Magic 41 tised their establishment with an image of the sun painting a portrait of the earth (rpt. in Rinhart and Rinhart 78). Holgrave's own description of his profession takes...