Composing and contesting the space of visibility: Literary and visual portraiture in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture

This dissertation examines literary and visual portraiture in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture. I argue portraiture helped establish the forms of visibility through which people became recognized as self-possessed, self-determining participants in American culture. In the cultural landscapes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, increasingly characterized by flux, fragmentation, and alienation, American portraits and their long-standing associations with mimesis, as well as their role establishing and solidifying familial resemblances, racial categories, and national identities, functioned as arguments for the portrayed subjects' recognized and valued place as representatives of American personhood. Who would represent the national body, who could emblematize the shape and appearance of national personhood, and therefore who could claim the space of the nation as their own: these were pressing questions with far-reaching consequences, and the portrait, I argue, subtly contributed to their formulations and outcomes.;This dissertation grapples with the problem of ideology's inscription on visual perception and in turn, the materialization of visual perceptions in bodily forms. Reading visual and literary texts together is crucial for this exploration, as I argue that American literary narratives reveal the complicated stories of opportunity and exclusion densely coiled within visual portraits. The textures of literary language moving in narrative time can work against the supposed transparency of vision. In turn, when used as lenses to interpret literary narratives, visual portraits help to highlight their themes of perception, visibility, and embodiment. I chronicle the development of this relationship between literary narratives and visual depictions in order to show how American writers and artists responded to changing ideas about who could shape images for themselves and whose lives were occluded by entrenched definitions of how American personhood should appear. To that end, this interdisciplinary project analyzes the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen, all of whom engaged with the paintings, photographs, and visual practices of their times with the hopes of defamiliarizing the modes of perception through which forms of American personhood became recognizable.