The Portrait's Subject
Inventing Inner Life in Nineteenth-Century America
Sarah Blackwood, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of English
Book under contract with
University of North Carolina Press
Examines portraiture between the invention of
photography (1839) and the X-ray (1898) to show
how changing visual representations of the human
body altered common understandings of inner life.
C19 portraiture invented ideas about selfhood– that
it is "deep" and ready to be "revealed"—with which
we still live today.
I look at the obsessive interest in portraiture in c19
works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass,
Thomas Eakins, Henry James, early photographers,
and writings by early psychologists.
• Explore links between visual
representation and beliefs about human
subjectivity
• Identifies centrality of the imagination in
inventing selfhood
• Traces transition "from body to mind" in
the study of psychology across the era
• Studies the importance of the invention of
photography to ideas about human
interiority
• A "pre-history" of the selfie.
