Visual narratives of community: Objects in Hawthorne, James, and Wharton.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the response of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American writers to the proliferation of visual and material media in their communities. Studies in American studies and material culture address the works of these writers by focusing largely on the production or consumption of materials, while tending not to direct sufficient attention to the aesthetic dimensions of the things themselves. This work seeks to counter this trend. Relying on references to material culture and aesthetics, <italic>Visual Narratives of Community</italic> explores how writers use objects as critical mediations of shared social spaces. The first chapter establishes an interpretive model for examining objects by focusing on the narrative uses of the nineteenth-century American daguerreotype. Using the exploitation of daguerreotypes by Louis Agassiz, it considers how objects promote and destablize social agendas. The second chapter compares Hester's letter in The Scarlet Letter with the overlooked aesthetic dimensions of Oriental objects collected and displayed in Salem's museum. It draws from Hawthorne's preoccupations with the symbolic qualities of the scarlet letter to show how his efforts to recapture the sensation of the seventeenth-century object depend on associating it with Salem's nineteenth-century material culture. Henry James's unease with material objects contextualizes the discussion of narrative dependence on symbolic objects that in turn foster a portability of narratives. Through accounts of object sightings in his novels <italic> The Golden Bowl</italic> and <italic>The Wings of the Dove</italic>, the third chapter shows how a shared community at once generates and destabilizes a narrative dependence on the presence of the material object and the singular symbolic interpretation of what it signifies. Edith Wharton's numerous references to the seduction of paintings signal the richness of visual encounter. The final chapter considers how works of art in her novels <italic>The Glimpses of the Moon, The Age of Innocence</italic>, and <italic>The House of Mirth </italic> and travel writings such as <italic>Italian Backgrounds</italic> produce a virtual community that seduces and yet repels its observers. For each of these American writers, the sensation of encountering material artifacts enables a meditation on the visual realities and narrative manifestations of historical and imagined communities.