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Clover Adams's Dark Room: Photography and Writing, Exposure and Erasure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

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Marian Hooper Adams, called Clover, was one of the few American women who were serious amateur photographers before the mass marketing of the Kodak in 1889. Clover first learned her craft in 1872–73 while on her honeymoon with her husband, historian Henry Adams. Henry brought along a camera to document their journey up the Nile, and Clover took up his hobby. Henry, in the tradition of expeditionary photographers, took pictures of Egyptian monuments and landscapes, whereas Clover's only extant photograph from the honeymoon portrays interior realms: it shows Henry in the stateroom of the Isis, the dahabieh that carried the couple up the Nile (Figure 1). In the image, Henry sits within a displaced parlor, casting his gaze down and directing us inward to some subjective space. But though Henry appears before the camera, he is not the subject of the image. Clover's own interior terrain, made invisible and inaccessible, is pictured here.

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Research Article
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

Notes

Thanks to Lynn Wardley, Bryan Wolf, and Alan Trachtenberg for inspiring this project, and to Nancy Sommers and the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University for funding that enabled me to complete the research.

1. Expeditionary photographers had been photographing the Near and Middle East since the 1840s. Their motives ranged from archaeological to colonial. See Bull, Deborah and Lorimer, Donald, Up the Nile: A Photographic Expedition, Egypt 1839–1898 (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1979)Google Scholar. For a more theoretical discussion, see Ballerini, Julia, Photography Conscripted: Horace Vernet, Gerard de Nerval and Maxime du Camp in Egypt (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1987)Google Scholar.

2. Mary Louise Pratt writes of the power derived from invisibility for 19th-century male travel writers. Abstracting themselves from the landscape, they also efface the people who inhabit it, and erase the traces of their own intervention (on behalf of the state) with these people (see Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 [Autumn 1985]: 119–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Clover explores an interior landscape where invisibility works quite differently.

3. See, among others, Mulvey, Laura's influential “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Penley, Constance (New York: Routledge, 1988), 5768Google Scholar.

4. Carol Mayor discusses the ways the mother is “not there, but she is ‘not, not there’” in the photographs of Cameron, Julia Margaret (“To Make Mary,” in Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs [Durham: Duke University Press, 1995], 60)Google Scholar.

5. Letter to Mr[s?]. Hay, September 7, 1883: “I've gone in for photography and find it very absorbing” (Adams Papers, Reel 598, in the Massachusetts Historical Society. Correspondence from this collection, hereafter cited as Adams MSS). Thanks to Anne Decker for permission to quote from the Adams Papers.

6. This was communicated to me by the curator of photography at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Chris Steele. Many thanks to him for his help and advice.

7. O'Toole, Patricia, The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880–1918 (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1990), 104Google Scholar.

8. Sieberling, Grace, Amateurs, Photography, and the Mid-Victorian Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 113Google Scholar. Sieberling looks primarily at Britain.

9. From an entry dated October 9, 1883, in Marian Adams's photographic records, Hooper—Adams Correspondence, Adams Papers, Fourth Generation, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Thanks to William M. Fowler Jr. for permission to quote this document. In the notebook, Clover recorded exposure times in seconds, f-stops, position or intensity of sun, the types of lenses she used, and instructions for different printing processes.

10. Marian Adams's photographic records, November 12, 1883, Hooper—Adams Correspondence, Adams Papers, Fourth Generation, Massachusetts Historical Society.

11. On cabinet photographs, see Taft, Robert, Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839–1889 (1938; rept. New York: Dover, 1964), 311–60Google Scholar. Cabinet photograph designates the size of the image, usually 4 inches by 5½ inches, which was much larger than that of the card photograph, or carte de visite photograph of the 1860s, usually about 2 ⅛ by 3½ inches (Taft, , Photography, 139Google Scholar). The larger size produced more effective portraits and gave sitters and photographers more room in the image to experiment with poses, lighting, background, and accessories. Many of these images feature elaborate costumes and poses; by contrast, Clover once went as far as to refuse to take a sitter's portrait after he'd combed his hair until he “rumpled it all up” again (from a letter to Robert William Hooper, February 24, 1884, Adams MSS).

12. On the tradition of representing men and their professions, see Rudisill, Richard, Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971)Google Scholar. Rudisill writes of hunters portrayed with guns, professionals with clocks, military men with swords (159–60); somewhat more abstractly, Mathew Brady hoped to portray national character in his portraits of individual statesmen in his “Photographic Pantheon” (181). By contrast, P. T. Barnum's contest for the “American Gallery for Female Beauty” focused solely and explicitly on women's aesthetic qualities (156). See also Alan Trachtenberg on the association of male sitters with their social roles as lawyers, orators, preachers, poets, etc., and on Brady, 's Gallery of Illustrious Americans, in Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 28, 3352Google Scholar.

13. See Cater, Harold Dean, Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 474Google Scholar.

14. The reproduction here, which was made from a negative that was in turn made from Clover's positive, is considerably less clear than the image as it appears in the View Album.

15. Martha Banta has noted the preponderance of images of women in postures of meditation and repose in late-19th-century painting (see Imaging American Women: Ideas and Ideals in Cultural History [New York: Columbia University Press, 1987], 345 ffGoogle Scholar). On the emergence of the New Woman in the 1880s, see for example Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, “Bourgeois Discourse and the Progressive Era,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 167–81Google Scholar.

16. Trachtenberg, , Reading American Photographs, xiiiGoogle Scholar.

17. See Smith, Lindsay, “The Politics of Focus: Feminism and Photography Theory,” in New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Armstrong, Isobel (London: Routledge, 1992), 248Google Scholar. Smith argues that Cameron's choice to use soft focus destabilizes the ideological functions of photography by refusing a vanishing point, and with it the “literal and figurative hearths” that are connoted etymologically by the word focus (which comes from the Latin for “hearth”) (242).

18. de Lauretis, Teresa, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Clover's vision of femininity is, of course, a distinctly white, upper-class vision.

19. Lauretis, , Technologies of Gender, 25Google Scholar.

20. Samuels, Ernest, Henry Adams: The Middle Years (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 286Google Scholar. Even Clover's feminist biographer Eugenia Kaledin, who questions the omission, views it as silent testimony to the part that Adams's marriage to Clover played in his education, as a sign of Education's artistry (its literary rather than historical construction), and as a marker of the personal transformation by which Adams absorbed and internalized “‘femininity’ into the system of values that embodied his real education” (6). See Kaledin, Eugenia, The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams, 2nd ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 38Google Scholar.

21. On Esther, see for example Samuels, (Middle Years, 24)Google Scholar and Decker, William Merrill's sympathetic biographical criticism in The Literary Vocation of Henry Adams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 206–7Google Scholar. Kaledin, Eugenia wonders whether Clover's childlessness might have made her more susceptible to suicide (Education, 236)Google Scholar, and Friedrich, Otto, in Clover (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979)Google Scholar, reports that Clover's contemporaries believed her childlessness to be one of the main sources of her unhappiness (18). However, in No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar, T. J. Jackson Lears makes clear that the obsession with generativity must have been primarily Henry's (267). Yet both Lears and Samuels implicitly pin Henry's jealousy of Dr. Hooper on Clover rather than on Henry himself (see Lears, , No Place of Grace, 268Google Scholar; and Samuels, , Middle Years, 23, 249Google Scholar), and Lears repeats Samuels's undocumented assertions on the subject of Clover's domination over Henry (Lears, , No Place of Grace, 268Google Scholar; and Samuels, , Middle Years, 23Google Scholar).

22. See Friedrich, , Clover, 354Google Scholar; and Kaledin, , Education, xi, xvxx, 38Google Scholar. Despite its explicitly feminist leanings, even Kaledin's Education of Mrs. Henry Adams occasionally, as is illustrated by the title, reinscribes Clover into the narrative of Adams family history, though much less so than does Friedrich's Clover.

23. See Kaledin, , Education, 188–89Google Scholar. She compares Clover's photographs to Mathew Brady's Gallery of Illustrious Americans.

24. See Gover, C. Jane, The Positive Image: Women Photographers in Turn of the Century America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 5Google Scholar; see also 1–16.

25. See Gover, , Positive Image, 67Google Scholar. Taft, Robert, in Photography and the American Scene (367–77)Google Scholar, discusses these advancements in detail, but only with reference to male photographers. For example, “The amateur of wet plate days had to develop a hide as thick as a rhinoceros, if he happened to be married, as there were almost certain to be silver stains on the housewife's linen and rugs, not to mention those on the enthusiast's hand” (374–75).

26. Letter to Robert Hooper, December 31, 1883, Adams MSS.

27. Letter to Robert Hooper, December 31, 1883, Adams MSS; and letter to Robert Hooper, May 20, 1883, The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 1865–1883, ed. Thoron, Ward (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936), 451Google Scholar, hereafter cited as LMHA.

28. Kaledin similarly hypothesizes that Clover turned to photography as an escape from domestic and social activities, so that she might engage in a meaningful form of work analogous to Henry's (see Education, 186–88).

29. The clipping reads, “Two of the most successful of the amateurs are Dr. Griffiths and Paymaster Reed, of the Navy. Mrs. Henry Adams is also very skillful” (from a letter to Robert Hooper, November 11, 1883, Adams MSS).

30. Letter to Robert Hooper, January 6, 1884, Adams MSS.

31. Letter to John Hay, January 6, 1884, The Letters of Henry Adams, 6 vols., ed. Levenson, J. C., Samuels, Ernest, Vandersee, Charles, and Winter, Viola Hopkins (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988), 2: 527Google Scholar.

32. Kaledin, , Education, 234Google Scholar.

33. “Henry Adams protested that his wife was doing nothing but taking photographs” (Kaledin, , Education, 187Google Scholar).

34. Kaledin, , Education, 224Google Scholar.

35. On the frequency of such deaths, see Jay, Bill, “Death in the Darkroom: Poisonings of Nineteenth-Century Photographers,” Phoebus 3 (1981): 8599Google Scholar. Potassium cyanide was used in place of hypo (as a fixer for negatives), and to remove silver nitrate stains from hands.

36. Higonnet, Margaret, “Speaking Silences: Women's Suicide,” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Suleiman, Susan Rubin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 68Google Scholar.

37. Clover's melancholia and suicide have been read as reactions to the death of her father in April 1885. Both Friedrich and Kaledin argue against this explanation by citing the wide range of factors involved.

38. See LMHA. For example, in letters to sister Ellen, September 5, 1872, “My letter was so stupid that I tore it up” (30); to Robert Hooper, October 6, 1872, “Another rainy Sunday morning, which I must brighten up by writing you. I may as well give you a little sketch of our life for the last ten days, though it has been so utterly lazy and uneventful that I can hardly hope to write a readable letter” (45); to brother Ned, October 12, 1872, “somehow or other my letters to Father were so stupid and took all that I had to say” (47); to Ellen, October 27, “This letter writing is such unsatisfactory work” (54); to Robert Hooper, December 5, 1872, “You know how feeble my powers of writing are at best, and for a long time past I have found it impossible to get my ideas straightened out at all” (60); and to Robert Hooper, December 21, 1872, “I am at a loss as to filling a letter. One day is so like another” (63).

39. Letter to Robert Hooper, January 1, 1873, LMHA, 66.

40. Clover writes as a privileged insider, recording the true but unofficial story. On one occasion, she corrects the “infamous lie” in an Evening Star version of the resignation of Attorney-General MacVeagh from the Cabinet. She tells her father that “as a special correspondent I think it only fair to give you an ‘Extra!’…My facts are facts, too, which all the special correspondents' are not” (November 13, 1881, LMHA, 299–301). Aware of the press as a mechanism of exposure, Clover takes private measures to correct and counteract it. In another case, she declines an invitation to receive the guests of Lord George Montagu's party, among whom Oscar Wilde is included, because she fears the press coverage (January 18, 1882, LMHA, 328–29).

41. T. J. Jackson Lears discusses Orientalism as a response of Victorian men to their ambivalence about the “feminization” of American culture. In Lears's analysis, encounters with the feminized Orient helped such men (including Henry) affirm or repudiate the premodern, “feminine” aspects of their personalities (see “From Patriarchy to Nirvana,” in No Place of Grace, 218–60Google Scholar).

42. Letter to Robert Hooper, November 17, 1872, LMHA, 58.

43. See LMHA, where, for example, she writes to Robert Hooper on July 12, 1872, that she is “homesick…for Beverly” (14); July 19, 1872, “often think of Beverly and long to hear how you are faring” (16); July 26, “Tell Betsy…I shall often miss her good care” (20); August 7, “Beverly is certainly nicer than any other place and I am always homesick for it” (24); September 5, “I'd like to skip back every night.…Do write soon again and tell me…every scrap of gossip and small detail” (35); November 5, “If you have the Thanksgiving dinner don't forget to drink to ‘absent friends’; we will remember to toast you on board of our dahabieh” (56); and to brother Ned, October 12, “We often talk over our home life as if Italy and Egypt were very secondary matters” (47–48).

44. Letter to Robert Hooper, August 23, 1872, LMHA, 29.

45. Letter to Robert Hooper, November 17, 1872, LMHA, 58; and September 8, 1872, LMHA, 38.

46. See Kaledin, , Education, 7173Google Scholar. Kaledin quotes a letter from Charles Francis Adams Jr., in which he notes that he “trod all over Clover, offending her in every way.” Charles Francis Sr. was distant, and Mrs. Adams intimidated Clover.

47. See Kaledin, , Education, 56Google Scholar.

48. November 5, 1872, LMHA, 56. And when expressing that she is “utterly demoralised about writing,” Clover completes the thought by admitting that “I know Mrs. Adams and Mary must think it very strange, but I cannot write except to you who are used to my stupidity and shortcomings” (letter to Robert Hooper, January 1, 1873, LMHA, 66).

49. October 20, 1872, LMHA, 52.

50. September 26, 1872, LMHA, 44–45; and October 20, 1872, LMHA, 52. “Murray” most likely refers to Murray's Hand Book for Travellers, of which there are editions for a vast number of European and Asian countries and regions.

51. See Kaledin, , Education, 224Google Scholar; and Smith-Rosenberg, , “Bourgeois Discourse,” 167–81Google Scholar. While, for example, physicians explicitly proclaimed the unsuitability of women's constitutions to work, subtler forces mitigated against their success in spheres of public production (see Burns, Sarah, “The ‘Earnest and Untiring Worker’ and the Magician of the Brush: Gender Politics in the Criticism of Cecilia Beaux and John Singer Sargent,” Oxford Art Journal 15, no. 1 [1992]: 3653CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Burns also shows the ways the media caricatured women with serious artistic intentions. Similarly, in “Secluded Vision: Images of Feminine Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” Anne Higonnet documents the ways that pedagogic curricula emphasized the fine arts for women but banked on their amateur status (in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Broude, Norma and Garrard, Mary D. [New York: HarperCollins, 1992], 171–85Google Scholar). Kelley, Mary documents the ways that best-selling 19th-century American women writers disguised their literary ambitions under the cloak of anonymity or domestic duty in Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

52. Letter to Robert Hooper, September 9, 1872, LMHA, 38.

53. Letter to Robert Hooper, December 5, 1872, LMHA, 62.

54. Letter to Robert Hooper, September 9, 1872, LMHA, 38.

55. Letter to Henry Cabot Lodge, 01 2, 1873, Letters of Henry Adams, 2: 156Google Scholar. Adams continues, speculating confidently, “Perhaps I could fix a legal landmark in history; but I have too much on my hands and must let the Cheopses and the Ramses alone.”

56. On the growing intellectual, professional, and institutional interest in Egypt and the Near East toward the end of the 19th century, see Kuklick, Bruce, Puritans in Babylon: The Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life, 1880–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar. Thanks to Steve Biel for bringing this source to my attention. See also Wilson, John A., Signs and Wonders Upon Pharaoh: A History of American Egyptology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

57. Letter to Robert Hooper, January 3, 1873, LMHA, 66.

58. Letter to Robert Hooper, January 1, 1873, LMHA, 65.

59. William W. Stowe writes of the principles that inform guidebooks: “Reducing public places, work, lives, and national customs and institutions to figures and ‘objective’ descriptions is one way of turning them into information, of coming to ‘know’ and, presumably, to ‘master’ them” (50) (see Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century America [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994]Google Scholar). As I am arguing, though, the appearance of objectivity in these descriptions deauthorizes Clover rather than giving her a sense of mastery.

60. Letter to Robert Hooper, January 1, 1873, LMHA, 65.

61. See Allen, Gay Wilson, Waldo Emerson (New York: Viking, 1981), 661Google Scholar; quoted in O'Toole, , Five of Hearts, 20Google Scholar.

62. Letter to Robert Hooper, February 16, 1873, LMHA, 75.

63. Letter to Robert Hooper, March 1, 1873, LMHA, 77.

64. Letter to Robert Hooper, December 21, 1872, LMHA, 64.

65. Letter to Robert Hooper, February 16, 1873, LMHA, 75.

66. John Irwin also documents popular interest in Egypt after the 1820s, when Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta stone (see Irwin, , American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980]Google Scholar).

67. Irwin, John writes that Emerson “deplores those students who stop at the surface of historical fact.…As a metaphysical interpreter, Emerson identifies the simple and the necessary with the hidden” (American Hieroglyphics, 10)Google Scholar. For Clover, to render the world in images is to present a surface under which lies hidden meaning. The flip side of this sense of the photographic image as hieroglyph understands the collapse of sign with referent not as hiding meaning but as making it more accessible. Oliver Wendell Holmes suggests as much when, writing about the stereograph, he advocates, “Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you please…. We have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core” (“The Stereoscope and the Stereograph” [1859], reprinted in Photography: Essays and Images, ed. Newhall, Beaumont [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980], 60Google Scholar). After the invention of cinema at the turn of the century, the sense that film images might provide a universal hieroglyphic language seems to have been fairly common. See, for example, Lindsay, Vachel's chapter on hieroglyphics in The Art of the Moving Picture (1915, 1922; rept. New York: Liveright, 1970), 199216Google Scholar. And, as D. W. Griffith said of cinema, “We've gone beyond Babel, beyond words. We've found a universal language — a power that can make men brothers and end war forever” (quoted in Gish, Lillian, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me [San Francisco: Mercury House, 1988], 130Google Scholar). For an analysis of this belief, see Hansen, Miriam, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 173–87Google Scholar.

68. Freud defines women as a “problem,” invoking lines from a poem by Heinrich Heine to illustrate the ways men have “knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity” (Freud, Sigmund, “Femininity” [1933], reprinted in Dialogues on Psychoanalytic Views of Femininity: Women and Analysis, ed. Strouse, Jean [New York: Grossman, 1974], 74Google Scholar). For an interesting critique of “Femininity,” see Doane, Mary Ann, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” Screen 23, no. 3–4 (0910 1982): 7487CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69. Letter to Charles Milnes Gaskell, 02 8, 1872, Letters of Henry Adams, 2: 130Google Scholar.

70. Letter to Robert Hooper, November 23, 1872, LMHA, 59.

71. Letter to Robert Hooper, December 5, 1872, LMHA, 61; and February 16, 1873, LMHA, 75.

72. By contrast, Clover admires the relatively undressed young girls who come to the river to fill water jars that they balance “most gracefully” on their heads: “They wear one garment only, a long dark blue cotton mantle which covers their head and falls to the ankles, but in spite of their dirt and squalor they all wear silver bracelets, and I quite envy some of them, they are so becoming” (letter to Robert Hooper, January 1, 1873, LMHA, 64).

73. Thanks to Lynn Wardley for helping me articulate this point, and for her insights about honeymoons more generally.

74. Letter to Sir Robert Cunliffe, 07 25, 1872, Letters of Henry Adams, 2: 145Google Scholar. Clover also writes of the dangers to her father (see letters to Robert Hooper, August 7 and November 23, 1872, LMHA, 24 and 60).

75. Letter to Robert Hooper, November 23, 1872, LMHA, 60.

76. Letter to Robert Hooper, March 16, 1873, LMHA, 86.

77. Letter to Robert Hooper, August 17, 1879, LMHA, 166.

78. Homans, Margaret, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 20Google Scholar.

79. Letter to Robert Hooper, December 31, 1882, LMHA, 412. Clover sped through twenty volumes of Histoire de Ma Vie and recommended the collection to her father.

80. Clover quotes Henry in a letter to her father (December 28, 1879, LMHA, 224).

81. Letter to Robert Hooper, June 8, 1879, LMHA, 137–38.

82. Letter to Robert Hooper, November 20, 1881, LMHA, 301.

83. Letter to Robert Hooper, November 9, 1879, LMHA, 199.

84. Letter to Robert Hooper, November 9, 1879, LMHA, 199.

85. Letter to Robert Hooper, October 12, 1879, LMHA, 189; Clover writes, “You keep your stylographic too dry and scratchy.”

86. O'Toole, , Five of Hearts, 73Google Scholar.

87. See O'Toole, , Five of Hearts, 74Google Scholar.

88. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Strachey, James (New York: Norton, 1960)Google Scholar, Freud posits the dirty joke as a triangular structure involving a male teller, a female who is the butt or (desired) object of the joke, and a third witness, inevitably male. For two good critiques of this formulation, see Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade,” and Jacobus, Mary, “Is There a Woman in This Text?,” in Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 83109Google Scholar.

89. Samuels, , Middle Years, 181Google Scholar. On Henry's productivity during this period, see pages 181–217 and 424.

90. The only exceptions are portraits of Clover's dogs (who even more than her women are excluded from language). Documenting the use of white reflectors, Richard Rudisill quotes the recommendation of Gouraud, Francois in his Provisory Method of Taking Human Portraits (1840)Google Scholar for enhancing the light in a room: “Those who cannot dispose a room in this manner [with maximum exposure to the sun and plastered white walls], fix the sides of the room with sheets or other cloth of perfect whiteness. The focus of the room must be covered with a tapestry of white cotton, with knotted or raised figures, which is designed to form the drapery. These are always agreeable to the eye, and should be shown in interior views” (see Rudisill, , Mirror Image, 6364Google Scholar).

91. Thanks to Stephen Donatelli for helping me formulate the oppositions between text and textile, fabric and fabrication.

92. Banta, , Imaging American Women, 345Google Scholar. Banta is quoting Hills, Patricia, “Turn-of-the-Century America,” American Art Review 4, no. 4 (01 1978): 74Google Scholar.

93. In Imaging American Women, Banta, explains that “contemplation and repose provide conditions for asserting the reality of our needs” (353)Google Scholar; “Dewey's ‘art as experience’ mediates between this world … and the world of thought” (354).

94. Quoted in Lauretis, , Technologies of Gender, 43Google Scholar. She cites Lotman, Jurij, “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology,” trans. Graffy, Julian, Poetics Today 1, no. 1–2: 167–68Google Scholar.

95. Lauretis, , Technologies of Gender, 44Google Scholar.

96. Lauretis, , Technologies of Gender, 45Google Scholar.

97. Clover borrowed the drapes from her artist friend Frank Millett, who was visiting with his wife. Clover writes to her father that Millett draped his wife and Rebecca Dodge “in different poses as statuary — he having some stuffs in his trunk. I may send you one of each — the light was very bad and in three they moved but still tho' not as good as I hoped they are quite nice.” Inspired by her success, she continues, “I am going to buy a portrait lens when I can decide which one I want” (February 10, 1884, Adams MSS).

98. Letter to Richard Watson Gilder, 10 14, 1896, Letters of Henry Adams, 4: 430Google Scholar.

99. See Kaledin's Education. Banta, Martha, in Imaging American Women, also implicitly accepts Adams's explanation of the figure as an appropriately silent form (504)Google Scholar.