The Socio-Cultural Influence of the Daguerreotype
and its Representation in Hawthorne′s
The House of the Seven Gables

by: Kerstin Müller

Table of contents

1 Introduction 

2 The daguerreotype and its cultural rise 

2.1 The invention 
2.2 Daguerreotypy’s popularization in the United States 
2.3 Portraiture 
2.4 Portability and Celebrity Cult 
2.5 The Significance of physiognomy for the daguerreotype 

3 Daguerreotypy in The House of the Seven Gables 

3.1 Display of physiognomic aspects in the novel 
3.2 Hypocrisy, daguerreotypy and deception 
3.3 Relevance of Light and Sunshine 

4 Conclusion 

5 Works Consulted 

1 Introduction

Delicate pencillings of imprisoned light!
Tracings imprinted with the finest care,
Revealing to the eye an image bright
Of that which seems to it most pure and fair.
The softened graces of the lines that speak
The gentle beauty of the rounded cheek;
The faithful transcript of the thoughts that rise
From the life′s motion of deep-shaded eyes;
A copy taken with a hand as slight
As the smooth coloring of a floweret′s light;—
Yet true and real, as when the flowerets look
Down the smooth margin to the crystal brook.
That this should be, and no trained flexile finger
Guide the soft lines where Beauty′s grace is placed;
And the fair traits where mind and soul do linger
Shine pencilled not by genius or by taste:—
′Tis strange, indeed, that human art and skill
Can bind the sunbeam to perform their will!

The subject of this anonymous poem, published in the Boston Daily Evening Transcript in 1850, is the daguerreotype, and early form of photography from the middle of the nineteenth century. The very fact that a technology received this form of attention, being the subject of a poem, clearly states that it was of some importance and lingered in people’s minds. The invention itself and its enormous popularity took place around the same decades that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote and published many of his major works, including The House of the Seven Gables. “Etching his text with strokes of ambiguity and dubiety, Hawthorne draws widely on figural terms from the popular discourse of the daguerreotype circulating in the print culture of the 1840s and early 1850s” (Trachtenberg 33). In the course of this paper the development of the daguerreotype, its influence on the American culture and its obvious manifestation in The House of the Seven Gables shall be analysed. Hawthorne used the character of Holgrave, the daguerreotypist, not only to solve the old mystery surrounding the Pyncheon family, but also to point at the art’s relevance for his contemporary culture. “Sharing features of both ‘Novel’ and ‘Romance’, of science and magic, of modernity and tradition, the daguerreotype plays a strategic role in the narrative as an emblem of the ambiguity that the tale will affirm as the superior mark of ‘Romance’” (Trachtenberg 31).

In the sixteenth century, the camera obscura was the first invention to project images onto surfaces, yet not fixing it. The only way of creating a lasting image was the art of drawing and painting. Towards the middle of the eighteenth century the invention of Louis- Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) revolutionized the existing world if iconography. The so-called daguerreotype marked out the possibilities and represented an entirely new perspective of portraiture. The new technique appeared first in 1839 and it was “to extend the field of representation and to wrest an important iconographical role from drawing, in particular in the area if documentation and illustration“ (Lemagny 20).¹

Up till then, fixation and reproduction were the two large challenges. As traditional paintings were very time-consuming and costly, there were numerous attempts to use the technique of the camera obscura in order to produce images in some sort of fixed form. During the first quarter of the nineteenth century several individuals were working on the challenge, “experimenting with papers or plates prepared with light-sensitive chemicals” (Nelson).

2 The daguerreotype and its cultural rise

2.1 The invention

Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833) came upon the idea of fixing the camera obscura image, probably around 1796, but it was not until 1816 that he started a number of experiments on his estate near Chalon-sur-Saône, France. He and his brother Claude used chloride and silver nitrate on paper, but the results turned out to be negatives, the light and dark shades reversed. In addition to that, they were disappointed with the precarious nature of the fixation. After that they decided to look out for other substances, and in 1820 discovered bitumen of Judea for their means. They first used it on a glass plate and then on polished tin. These tin plates were turned into printing plates, due to the fact that they could be etched with acid. The exposure time of these images was up to several hours. In 1827 Niépce, after having reproduced some old engravings, he managed to photograph the landscape outside his window. The process he had invented was referred to as the heliography (Lemagny 269).

[...]

1 William Fox Talbot, an Englishman, engaged in photographic experiments before Louis Daguerre exhibited his pictures in 1839. Talbot communicated the results of his experiments to the Royal Society after Daguerre′s discoveries became known. In 1841 he made known his discovery of the calotype or talbotype process. This shows that the overall technique was not something particularly new, and that Daguerre was certainly not the only one who invented it. Yet, Daguerre is generally awarded credit for the invention and therefore processes as the calotype are omitted in this paper.