The Violence of Reform

Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. By Laura Wexler. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 363 pages. $49.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper).

Laura Wexler's new book, Tender Violence: Domestic Images in the Age of American Imperialism, sets out to explore and substantiate the claim with which it concludes, namely that "[p]hotography has always been a constitutive force, not merely reflecting but actively determining the social spaces in which lives are lived" (299). Her specific project is to make visible the oft-obscured link between photographic images of domesticity and American aggression in all its imperial and reform-minded disguises. To do so, she peers through the apertures of turn-of-the-century women photographers, with a particular focus on the work of Francis Benjamin Johnston, Gertrude Käsebier, Alice Austin, and Jessie Tarbox Beals. She contends that these photographers, whether they pictured sailors relaxing on the deck of Admiral Dewey's Olympia, black school children in a classroom at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, or the ships at the entrance to New York harbor, all engaged domestic sentiment, knowingly or unknowingly, as an imperial instrument. Put another way, their domestic images served to misrepresent the violence of imperialism and reform so that wars of aggression and/or conformity could pose as peace.

To articulate this link and to have both sides of the linkage—domestic images and imperial aggression—appear at the same time, Wexler traces the diffuse and complex ideology of domestic sentiment or sentimentality. Although its literary form had reached its apex by mid-century, Wexler effectively argues that sentimental power continued to flourish well past its literary popularity to influence late-nineteenth-century debates in domestic politics, foreign policy, education reform, reconstruction and immigration. ¹ Moreover, sentimentality extended far beyond white, middle-class women readers to include non-readers and those outside its supposed claim. In fact, the Ann Douglas-Jane Tompkins debate, so influential in the secondary literature, inadvertently confined the cultural reach of sentimentality to its literary form by imagining the "sentimental encounter" primarily "as a private, contained, bookish, house-bound space" (125). ² Wexler's amplified vision brings into view the far-reaching imperial aspect and intent of domestic sentiment, revealing how it provided a "rationale for raw intolerance" aimed at people of different races and classes, casting them as "human scenery before which the melodrama of middle-class redemption could be enacted" (105, 101).

For instance, Frances Benjamin Johnston took one hundred fifty photographs aboard Admiral George Dewey's ship, the Olympia, while the ship was anchored at Naples Bay in the late summer of 1899, the year after Dewey's wildly successful strike against the Spanish in Manila Bay. Wexler early on acknowledges that photographs taken aboard a naval ship would not appear to qualify as domestic images. Yet what is domestic about domestic images is not always obvious because domesticity as an ideology did not govern simply the private, familial sphere to which it most obviously referred. Instead, domesticity shaped that which appeared to be its opposite, shaping it in such a way, in fact, that a warship could appear peaceful. Public speech, social reform, aggression against peoples both here and abroad were formulated according to what might be productive for and protective of a white, middle-class way of life, defined at its heart as fundamentally domestic. Against the un-pictured backdrop of aggression, Johnston's photographs of sailors eating in the mess, getting haircuts, relaxing on the ship's deck, playing with a kitten all compose a "routine decency of life," so that what "is logically the furthest thing from the ideal of domestic peace—imperial aggression—is represented in Johnston's photography as a peace that keeps the peace" (32, 33).

In this way, Wexler unfurls the domestic image so that what remained outside the frame might come into view. Domestic sentiment, moreover, produced what Wexler terms the "innocent eye" or a...