The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype

3. ‘‘Some ideal image of the man and his mind’’: Melville’s Pierre and Southworth & Hawes’s Daguerreian Aesthetic

Chapter  ‘‘Some ideal image of the man and his mind’’ Melville’s Pierre and Southworth & Hawes’s Daguerreian Aesthetic Published the year after The House of the Seven Gables, Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities bears an unmistakable resemblance to Hawthorne ’s romance thematically, especially in its preoccupation with portraiture .1 Yet Melville’s digressive and disjointed narrative reads more like a grotesque caricature than a mirror image of Hawthorne’s House, transforming the tale of an aristocratic family’s decline into one of disgrace and taking the romancer’s creative license to almost unhinged extremes. Their shared concern for issues of identity, authority, and artistic creation comes to a head in Pierre when the title character refuses a publisher’s request that he provide a daguerreotype for engraving and publication.2 Much more than either a thinly veiled fictionalization of Melville’s frustrations as an author or an instance of resistance to or disenchantment with a new medium, this scene indexes how the introduction of new media typically provokes a broader cultural revisiting of the most profound philosophical questions about the nature of truth, perception, knowledge, and existence.3 Telescoping out from Pierre’s refusal to be daguerreotyped, this chapter examines how arguments for the daguerreotype’s superiority as an art form occasion the narrative’s extended renegotiations of epistemology and aesthetics in the daguerreian age. More specifically, I argue that daguerreotypy —as the point of contact for discussions of mechanical objectivity in scientific image making and the artist’s subjectivity in artistic image making —shadows Pierre’s preoccupation with the relationship of ‘‘Truth’’ and appearances and with the place of objectivity and subjectivity in art and understanding. In the course of Pierre’s chaotic plot, Melville frequently ‘‘Some ideal image’’ 87 invokes ancient and modern aesthetic theory to explore what relationship any form of representation—from an embroidered handkerchief to Dante’s Inferno to a painted or daguerreian portrait—has to what the novel Platonically calls ‘‘Truth.’’ The central question of Pierre; or, The Ambiguities is whether objective truth, as understood in ancient and modern times alike, is itself only another form of representation—an image, a substance-less shadow, an ambiguity. I contend that daguerreotypy and the terms of its cultural acceptance in antebellum America fundamentally structure this question and Pierre’s attempts to answer it. Along with the growing cultural significance of daguerreotypy as a means of seeing and knowing the world, questions about the place of visual artists and authors in a rapidly changing society also drive the narrative’s insistent linkage of art objects and artistic production to its protagonist’s struggles with issues of authority and his efforts to forge an identity.4 I argue that we should read Pierre as a deeply philosophical attempt to define and defend art, the artist, and subjectivity against the encroachment of scientific objectivity on aesthetic values by way of the daguerreotype.5 Consistently contrarian, the novel offers these definitions and mounts its defense through the negative example of its naı̈ve and idealistic protagonist, Pierre. More positively, Pierre also builds its case by returning to ancient Greek philosophy to revisit age-old questions about truth, representation, and perception in a new media moment, concluding that subjectivity is essential to all art and human experience. In the same year that Pierre was published, the Boston daguerreotypists Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes committed themselves to creating daguerreian ‘‘specimens worthy of the attention and criticism of any who have a cultivated taste for the ‘Fine Arts.’’’6 As fellow daguerreotypist M. A. Root observed of the partners in 1851, ‘‘Their fixed aim and undeviating rule has been to produce the finest specimens, of which they were capable,—the finest in every respect, artistic, mechanical, and chemical ; graceful, pleasing in posture and arrangement, and exact in portraiture .’’7 As we will see, this aesthetic resulted in portraits that defied the look of most daguerreotypes and, thereby, popular expectations of the medium.8 While Root found it ‘‘strange to say’’ that Southworth & Hawes’s portraits seemed ‘‘to be fully appreciated neither by the majority of Heliographers nor by the public’’ in 1851, a recent catalog of the firm’s works recognizes the ‘‘singular achievement of Southworth & Hawes as masters of the daguerreotype’’ with the benefit of hindsight and the institutional authority 88 Chapter 3 of the art museum.9 Following a similar trajectory, Pierre ‘‘is now generally recognized as...