ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance

Creative Seeing: An Analysis of the Unverifiable Photograph

The unidentified daguerreotype exists at the threshold of the speculative and the material. To explain, let us begin with the material dimension of the image, which is the same for any daguerreotype. The material daguerreotype is an artifact of a densely contextualized historical archive, in this case, one that subtends the life of Fanny Fern, her family and private life as well as her literary career as a connoisseur of affect. The speculative dimension of the image, which we shall employ in our creative seeing, derives from the conditions of possibility that enclose the subject. We can never know if this is indeed a photograph of Louisa Jacobs; nevertheless, clues in the archive invite speculation beyond the facts supported by conventional approaches to biographical evidence. Indeed, the unverifiable nature of the image complements the illegitimate status of biography's textual corpus, in which letters, diaries, and eyewitness testimony may be seen as similarly mediated and therefore just as problematic as the unfounded image. When viewed uncritically as evidence for some historical event that is at once fantastically retrievable and monolithically uncomplicated, such documents as letters and diaries narrate stories that seem to be exclusively from the past rather than also about it. Thus their fictive structures disappear. However, the daguerreotype in this case works to metaphorize the predicament of biography's textual authority. With its material instantiation of a speculative provocation kept in view, we might learn both to resist literary biography and to re-textualize it—returning it, in other words, to its polysemous origins.

Searching the record for information about the relationship between Jacobs and Fern, several intriguing details of questionable evidentiary value come forward. For instance, Harriet Jacobs shared with Fanny Fern aspects of her sexual [End Page 265] life never revealed to either Mrs. Willis (Mary and Cornelia, the models for the two Mrs. Bruces of Incidents).⁶ Such intimacy between these two women extends beyond the sharing of secrets to a shared sense of responsibility for Jacobs's daughter. Yet, diary accounts of Louisa Jacobs's sojourn in Fern's household contain conflicting and even conspiratorial indications of jealousy and protection, paternalism and exploitation. In his diary entries recording daily life in Fern's house, Thomas Butler Gunn appears to have been smitten by Louisa Jacobs. From him we learn that Louisa Matilda Jacobs was not exclusively known as the tutor or friend of the fifteen year-old Grace, but as a nubile, marriageable consort, whose African ancestry ultimately annulled whatever interests her charms and exotic beauty aroused in the bachelors Fern occasionally invited to her home.

If we are to believe the rumor, Fern's staging of Louisa's beauty backfires. One entry Gunn recorded after a falling out with Fern describes Fern's wrath toward Louisa and her belief that the governess was luring suitors away from her daughter. As a typical example of the way the "house was made a hell" for Louisa once Fern's jealousies piqued, Gunn portrays Fern's reaction to Louisa's morning salutations, given first to James Parton or Grace before acknowledging Fern: "the woman [Fern] would blaze into a rage as at a premeditated insult; remind her [Louisa] of her position &c."⁷ Fern not only "imagined Louisa a threat to her marriage to James Parton," she is said to have "abused [Louisa] like a very drab, calling her all the whores and bitches she could lay her tongue to."⁸

Seeming to stand against this scene of Clotel-inspired melodrama is the image of a possible Louisa Jacobs in the Fern archive. While the identity of the image cannot be empirically proven, a radical empiricism governs its review here (since the image seems to function as a material prompt for Fern's affect). What is inspired by the merely speculative thus bears value for understanding the conflictual grounds of affiliation that influenced white and black women writers of domestic abolitionism. Beyond matters of biography, another more generic aspect of the daguerreotype calls [End Page 266] for speculation or theorization. In some sense, all images demand a theory. After their presentational utterances, in which images simply show themselves on a pre-linguistic level of understanding, images urge for their articulation (often in language) or for their value (often measured in terms of affect). Given these fundamental questions of reference lying at the heart of any image, we may yet wonder how an unverifiable photograph and its potential referentiality may be used to intervene upon matters of literary biography and history. Here is where a semiotic theory of the photograph's affective potential may be useful to the strategy of creative seeing that we seek to adopt in this instance. Indeed, to propose that this possible image of Louisa Jacobs exists in Fern's album because it possessed some relevance to Fern is to court the etiology of Roland Barthes's notion of the punctum.⁹ That is to say, if this image is assumed to be Louisa, a woman for whom Fern reportedly had tremendous swells of feeling oscillating between sympathy and pity, admiration and outrage, we must also assume, quite naturally, that its affective value lies beyond the visible. Using Barthes's terms, we would then be groping beyond the studium of the image for its significance, beyond its conventions as a nineteenth-century image of femininity, in other words, to encompass that which pierces through the image, the punctum. There, at that theoretical pinnacle of emotional reception, the sight of Louisa Jacobs literally wounds the viewer, seizing the eye that sees it in surges of memory and emotion.

The Housekeeper in Fern Leaves as Literary Context

A familiar canard about the difference between linguistic and pictorial forms of representation is that language has the capacity to convey complex temporal information easily while pictures can more readily convey complex spatial relationships. If one brings an expansive understanding of space to the image, however, the emphasis in the distinction on easy facilitations breaks down. There is nothing simple or easy to apprehend in the gesture of the figure's hands, [End Page 267] for example, or the implications of their arrangement in the spatial foreground of the image. To be sure, one need only recall the strong linkages between hands as symbols of agency and action and as metonyms for labor, particularly menial labor, to begin to experience the way the image prods us to question how the body within it functions. If the back of the hands are being presented, and not simply stiff due to sitting conventions, are they so in response to an expected viewing regimen for whom the hands of the domestic, and perhaps more particularly the raced domestic worker, become anxious sites of both work and propriety as well as threat? Or, we might impose a narrative of binaristic tension into the image that exceeds the two ways we can read the frontality of the hands to encompass the stiff but pleasant upturn around the mouth, that ever-so-subtle trace of a smile. Could the image have found a repeated partner smiling faintly back at it? If so, would this exchange be haunted by a more worldly exchange underwriting the relation of subject-sitter and image-viewer-possessor?

Such questions emanate from the image to frame our review of the literary context surrounding Fanny Fern's writings on labor and give rise to related questions: What happens when the racial unconscious of Northern abolitionist feminism finds material expression in the role of the domestic employer? What systems of ideological transfer take place when the pledge of sympathy and sentiment is balanced against the white female employer's expectation of black female servants? More specifically, how must the conventions of domestic fiction—a literary practice Nina Baym associates with abolitionist feminism—change in order to accommodate the perspective of a class associated with household management?

In answering these questions in relation to Jacobs, the conflicts submerged in the protections offered to Harriet Jacobs by Cornelia Willis—Jacobs's employer and wife of N.P. Willis, Fanny Fern's brother—are not the only points of interest to consider. Indeed, a different set of concerns come into view when we alter our focus to consider Jacobs's relation to Fanny Fern, biographically and in the writings of each [End Page 268] woman. According to Joyce Warren, Ruth Hall's sympathy for marginal and minority characters reflects Fern's own convictions, and the "choric" commentary from the novel's black servants "on their employer's cruelty" toward Ruth hints at a biographical basis for Fern's felt sympathy with Harriet Jacobs.¹⁰ Other evidence of Fern's sympathy for working women abounds in Warren's biography, from Fern's stint as a seamstress after being shunned by her family for leaving her second husband to various anecdotes of her compassion for domestics throughout her literary career. In one incident, Warren recounts Fern accidentally breaking a pitcher in a hotel: "Always thinking of the vulnerability of the working woman, she reported the breakage to the management, 'lest the chambermaid should suffer.'"¹¹ This sympathy carries over into her writings as well.

In one of Fern's many dramatic monologues, "Soliloquy of a Housemaid," a servant woman besieged by a never-ending series of errands to carry out interrupts her labor to comment on her condition. Treated like "a dray horse," she complains of having to spring into action upon hearing her name beckoned into readiness—"Sally do this," and "Sally do that"—so much so that her name and life alike become curses she would rather do without.¹² This momentary rejection of what Christian rhetoric would call the "gift" of life signals that poor Sally, like Stowe's Topsy and her flourishing fictional counterparts in midcentury America, is to become a trigger for the reader's Christian mercy and thereby an object of conversion. At once the victim of injustice as well as the agent of its demystification, she claims that even feigned recognition that "I am made of flesh and blood" and a "fellow-cretur....would ease the wheels of my treadmill amazingly, and wouldn't cost them anything, either" (FLFFP 85). How different from the situation of Dinah, the black maid from Ruth Hall, who says of herself in the third person, "Dinah don't care how hard she works, if she don't work to the tune of a lash; and Missis Hall goes singing about the house so that it makes time fly."¹³ However opposed in content, these accounts of domestic labor turn on a similar orientation toward the managerial class. In both cases, power [End Page 269] and its affective displays determine the laborer's attitude towards work. Moreover, Sally's rhetorical pose is a typical one for Fern: it is an appeal to the universal in a vernacular that robustly particularizes. The speaker's voice conveys the earmarks of a telltale class that simultaneously pierces through and reconfirms the presumed veil of difference that partitions the world of labor from that of leisure.

The material mismeasure of Sally's condition sharply contrasts with that of the lavish family for whom she works. The decay of her attire, the extent of her endless work, and the squalor of her bed juxtapose "all the fine glittering things down in the drawing-room. Master's span of horses, and Miss Clara's diamond ear-rings, and mistresses rich dresses. I try to think it is all right, but it is no use" (FLFFP 86). The italicized "try" points to Sally's ongoing efforts to submit to the employer's rationale. The fact that effort is required at all indicates the implausibility of that rationale. There simply can be no justification for the material disparities that oppress her. Trying to think of any "is no use," which is to say, intellectually and economically ineffectual, since the cliché, "it is no use," conceals the curt equivocation that she can neither think of justification nor improve her lot were she able to do so. The final paragraph of the soliloquy embeds the issue of social and material inequity within an eschatological conceit typical of sentimental writing:

To-morrow is Sunday—"day of rest," I believe they call it. H-u-m-p-h! more cooking to be done—more company— more confusion than on any other day in the week. If I own a soul I have not heard how to take care of it for many a long day. Wonder if my master and mistress calculate to pay me for that, if I lose it? It is a question in my mind. Land of Goshen! I aint sure I've got a mind—there's the bell again!

(FLFFP 86)

By calling attention to her employers' hypocrisy, Sally aligns herself with Topsy whose spiritual self-knowledge likewise flounders amidst market-driven institutions. For Sally, the [End Page 270]

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Eva and Topsy. Artist: Louisa Corbaux. Printed and Published by Stannard & Dixon, circa 1852. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USZ62-13942.

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demands of interminable exertion coupled with her explicit exclusion from two systems of expanded kinship—the domestic family as well as the Christian family—threaten mind and soul. Of course, her mind functions cleverly enough to entwine the economic logics of profit, pay, and loss with that of salvation. The combination radicalizes Christianity as an alternative calculus of human value that extends even to the housemaid domestic bonds of affect and includes within the contract of labor the employer's obligation to respect her right to spiritual enrichment.

Readers of sentimental fiction would easily recognize the expansive notion of kinship underwriting this passage. As Nina Baym points out, sentimental works often locate happiness in the "fulfillment of domestic relations, by which are meant not simply spouse and parent, but the whole network of human attachments based on love, support, and mutual responsibility."¹⁴ What Sally indicts then is not so much the indolence or hypocrisy of her employers but their bad faith. They have shirked obligations espoused by sentimentalism, which, in the universe of sentimental fiction, "increasingly come to be understood in affective terms."¹⁵ Central to this indictment is an implied etiology for the disintegration of feeling, for Sally and her employers, in the face of exigencies either real or imagined. The anecdote opens, let us recall, with Sally complaining of having to retrieve objects well within the reach of her imperious masters. It closes with the bell ringing her into another flurry of unnecessary activity to satisfy their profligate whims. The off-stage scene of labor thus extinguishes the scene of cognition—"I aint sure I've got a mind—there's the bell again!" As the bell purges Sally of her mind, the abrupt stop of the soliloquy mirrors her predicament for the reader.

Passages from Harriet Jacobs's letters could easily be substituted for Fern's portrayal of the pressures of domestic work in minimizing time for reflection. Jacobs declares, "housekeeping and looking after the Children - occupy every moment..." (HJFP 237). Jacobs describes the dizzying effect of being called to serve—"I have been interrupted and called away so often - that I hardly know what I have written"—and [End Page 272] recognizes how work thwarts self-consciousness: "I am so tied down that I cannot decide on anything" (HJFP 237, 239). Fern seems to have fully understood how the world of work, the injustices it brings about and the effort to know and relay them, is finally made to happen elsewhere, on the other side of literature's parentheses. The events imagined within these vignettes therefore are always enclosed scenes, foregrounding the tragic insularity of the thinking and feeling that the subjects within them so desperately seek to evince.

The two series of Fanny Fern's Fern Leaves contain dozens of similarly enclosed scenes. Reflecting the visual logic of the daguerreotype in Fern's collection, a principle of accumulating display orchestrates the maid's appearance in a veritable gallery of sympathetic character types. Like the viewer of the apocryphal daguerreotype, readers of Fern Leaves hereby come to expect a direct encounter with social abjections in dramatic sketches that render them visible as generic types—forlorn orphans, unloved wives, self-absorbed husbands, execrable snobs, and the sanctified, long-suffering poor. Out of the characterological slice-of-life, Fern composes what Lauren Berlant defines as "her own brand of female soliloquy... a public, collective, and emancipatory form of expressivity and invention, available for any socially silenced subject."¹⁶ The profusion of these speaking types and their public moments of private self-enunciation transform the collected sketches into an encyclopedia of social grievance. Of course, the circuits of this grievance are closed, beginning within the vicarious sympathies of the very figure of sentimental authority to whom these grievances seem implicitly addressed. Where the daguerreotype diverges from the dramatic sketches in Fern Leaves is its simulated interpolation of a subject outside of the viewer, in a space—both affectively and materially apart. For whereas the Leaves do not configure the African American domestic as either character or implicit audience, the daguerreotype allows for the possibility at least of an implicit "complaint" emanating from a place beyond the viewer. Indeed, many of the subtly pedagogical writings in Fern Leaves, despite being self-enclosed on some level, fall under the category that Lauren Berlant identifies as the complaint, "which [End Page 273] involves an expression of women's social negation: it is a rich archive of patriarchal oppression, circumscribed by a sense that women's lack of legitimacy in the public sphere appears virtually inescapable" ("TFW" 433). There may be dangers lurking in the image and the impossibility of co-opting its embedded complaints that Fern's cozening Leaves avoid.

And while our review of Fern's writing produces ample evidence of her concern for labor and empathy for laboring women in particular, in order to plumb the depths of her possible affective response to Louisa Jacobs, we must also wonder about her cross-racial sympathies, professed or otherwise. We might thus be led to ask: what of Fern Leaves and race? Aside from the inevitable overlap between minoritized positions (of woman, domestic, and African American), how does Fern particularize race? In "Everybody's Vacation Except Editors" Fern rails against the myth of the hard-working newspaper editor by cataloging the many gratis invitations editors receive, among which appears one of the few references to African Americans in Fern Leaves (Series One): "Who gets tickets to all the Siamese boys, fat girls, white negroes, learned pigs, whistling canaries, circuses, concerts and theatres!" (FLFFP 357). Submerged in an inventory of mass cultural entertainments, the "white negro" attracts attention as an exceptional divergence from specular norms. In addition, this first collection of Fern's columns contains only two references to the word "slave." Like the jibe against the sensational aesthetic of editors, these references allude to white slaves of colloquial metaphor rather than albinism or miscegenation, such as the mother so devoted that "to her own child she was a willing slave!" (FLFFP 228). The other instance of a figure associable to the supposed subject of the daguerreotype tropes on the tragic mulatta, while still making only figurative reference to slavery. In the story of "Little Allie" the eponymous, recently orphaned, and quite white heroine is made to work for an unsympathetic mistress, who shears off the girl's blonde ringlets because they get in the way of the work she is forced to do. Moved by the sight of the friendless, shorn-headed girl, an old farmer takes her in as his own—a righteous corrective to the earlier travesty of [End Page 274] familial absorption, which is hereby suggested to have been exploitative. Without intentions of indenture, the farmer proudly declares at the close of the sketch: "I'll have no white slaves on my farm" (FLFFP 269). The final line and the scene of the girl's violation in having her hair cut can only but call to mind similar abuses suffered by William Wells Brown's Clotel or Harriet Wilson's Nig.

As part of the inventory of sensationalized bodies satirically rehearsed twice in the Fern Leaves, the "white negro" thus marks a productive absence. While registering patrician derision for such entertainments through their accretive absurdity, the form of the series also suggests that all the elements are in a state of equivalence. As opposed to the daguerreotype, the eruption of rare identities and bodily particularities in Leaves come with stabilizing textual labels attached, making them eminently available for viewing. This visual availability in the Leaves of strange bodies contrasts against the sheer invisibility of raced bodies, otherwise common to popular writing by women of the period.

Yet, as a whole, Fern Leaves is itself another type of Rogue's Gallery. Like the sideshow, circus act, or museum exhibit, it re-contains social deviation for the benefit and production of a particular class dominance. Likewise, while Sally's soliloquy pretends to hear subaltern vocality, to imagine, as Berlant calls it, the "socially silenced subject," it does so by way of that recurring desire in Fern Leaves to generalize slavery, submitting the racial and historical particulars of African American subjection to the abstractive powers of the female complaint ("TFW" 432). Similarly, Fern's "white negro" de particularizes slavery, voiding even while conjuring abolitionist politics and history. The African, non-white negro in such formulations remains a potentializing absence, whose removal from the scene of utterance, projection, and literary transference facilitates the agency of the author, clearing space for her own realization. But even an absence leaves traces and Fern Leaves is no exception. For in its apposition of white and black subjects Fern's imaginary relation with Harriet Jacobs's menial position within her brother's home [End Page 275] reveals surprising commonalities of complaint in Jacobs's letters to Amy Post.

The Daughter, Affect, and the Racial Dialectic of Domesticity

Patterns of unequal labor distributions inside the antebellum middle class home reflect class divisions that organize social arrangements outside of it. Fern's soliloquy promotes an ideal of domestic service founded upon the extended family by dramatizing the excruciating result of the absence of this ideal. As Barbara Ryan has argued, models of family like management and service in the nineteenth century not only "helped assuage concern about women's civic role and men's economic agency," they also depended on an increasingly unstable notion of what family had come to mean.¹⁷ Poor Sally would need no convincing of Ryan's point that this mode of articulating the servant problem at midcentury as one in need of a rightful New Testament respect for a family bond based on shared faith and mutual service is mere rhetoric and that "the ways in which people articulate relationships may not reflect all of their feelings."¹⁸ By 1900, a prize-winning essay in The Cosmopolitan would pose in straightforward language precisely what nineteenth-century sentimentalism muffled and evaded, that the "relation between mistress and maid is before anything else a money relation" governed solely by "straight business principles" rather than "poetic sentiment" or "Christian charity."¹⁹ Through satire, Fern's Sally shows herself to be ahead of the curve in understanding this, but she explodes the irrelevance of the family model as the façade for a materialist relation only by seeming to reinvest in its Christian rightfulness.

Applying a model of "creative hearing" to the letters that Jacobs writes to Amy Post reveals how the language of obligation and affection mingles with that of constraint and toil. What is most important, though, is the fact that the letter contains such a complete absence of punctuation as to be a kind of puzzle, leaving in question much more than [End Page 276]

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Sara Payson Parton, Known as Fanny Fern. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USZ62-113065.

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it answers and putting the historically-minded critic in an uncomfortable position of having to infer or invent the meanings left open by the letter's unpunctuated style. For example, in a letter dated Dec. 20, 1852, Jacobs admits to circumstances within the Willis household being so "hard" that they "burden me so heavily that my letters can afford you no pleasure" (HJFP 185). The defining implication for correspondence here is that one cannot help but to convey the affective residue of one's lived circumstances in a letter and that one ought to convey only that which will afford the reader pleasure. We need not employ the psychoanalytic precepts Jennifer Fleischner uses to read deep-seated anxieties between the lines of Jacobs's narrative regarding the all-too familiar halo of exploitation that surrounds her domestic labor in the Willis house.²⁰ Concerning her feelings about being in the home, Jacobs retreats from the admission of regret to an alternative paternalism presided over by her brother, whom she would accompany "if it were not for the many deep obligations that I am under to my kind friend Mrs Willis" (HJFP 185-86).²¹ The submerged language of burden, regret, and now subordination swells against a competing rhetoric at the surface of the letter of domestic friendship and love, culminating near the end with a significant opposition, arranged through the use of excess spacing to pair the ideal of universal kindness in dialectical, antipodal relation to an inexpressible complaint:

situated as I am my Brother and son away no home for Louisa to come to it makes me very unhappy for their sakes everybody is kind to me I ought not to complain and dear Mrs Willis has entreated me to send for Louisa to make her home with me I love her for her kindness but Louisa would not be happy to live in that way she wants to seek her own livlihood [sic] where she thinks she can be most useful

(HJFP 186)

Gratitude toward the mistress does little to mollify the sharp contrasts that the grammatical and spacing gestures of [End Page 278] opposition signify in the letter. The gap that separates such phrases as "everybody is kind to me" from "I ought not to complain" serves to call into question the very content of those statements. These gaps may articulate the unspeakable conflicts underlying the surface relations of Jacobs's domestic service. Just as kindness and complaint are set apart spatially, so too is the employer's imagined "home with me" set off from "liv[ing] in that way." The gap functions here as a situational negation, refuting without doing so directly Jacobs's pronouncement of living happily with Mrs. Willis.

Through the heavy rhetorical filter of maternal sacrifice, one may detect identification with the daughter's imputed rejection of Mrs. Willis's offer. The predicted sadness of that way of life entails a grammatical displacement from the life Jacobs was living at the time of writing as a domestic in the Willis home—a life Louisa would share in and thus one that could be phrased by Jacobs with less stress on its distance from her current condition, perhaps as life in this way. The rejected home that mother and daughter might still make together if Willis's invitation were acceded to appears a few lines down from an earlier home stated in the letter—"no home for Louisa to come to." Although Jacobs conceptualizes herself as "situated" with her mistress and "under" her mistress's kind influence, she seems here reluctant to call this subordinate situation a home in agreement with Louisa's alleged opinion. Like her narrative, Jacobs's letter locates the ex-fugitive black woman at the fault line of shifting social relations that align the violent dislocations of the southern slave family with market-driven forces in the North; she is, paradoxically, the marginalized epicenter of a sprawling network of conflicting economic self-interests. Mae Henderson's notion of the "interlocutory character of black women's writings" is illuminating in this light.²² The contradictory self-positioning of Jacobs at turns solicits, identifies with, and also distances itself from Post, as though in addition to Henderson's point that black women writers "enter simultaneously into familial, or testimonial and public, or competitive discourses," Jacobs seems to enter into a discursive [End Page 279] relationship in her letters, one that assumes surveillance that makes the seeming privacy with Post also quite public.²³

To be sure, none of these interpretations veer from the standard reading of Jacobs's semi-tragic admissions of regret for failing to secure a home of her own at the end of her narrative. Yet this second example of her articulation of that regret demonstrates how Louisa becomes a rhetorical tool of displacement in that process. She mediates the filial alienations of southern slavery and northern service in relation to herself so that neither engenders for the daughter obligations incurred by the mother. But the private maternal burden of speaking for the daughter yet materializes as a textual predicament. Uttering Louisa's desires, Jacobs stands at a remove from them, located ambiguously among their grammatical slippages. However advantageous for her to assume, Jacobs rejects the unhappy pose of Fern's Sally and her unfulfilled acknowledgement of universal humanism.

The lack of punctuation in the letter, with its suggestion of muted elaborations and gaps in expression, lines up with the lack of attribution in the photograph. In relation to both, the critic must negotiate the apocryphal. In both cases we must find meaning, inferring it and at times imposing or inventing it, in the open spaces of the unstable artifact, relying upon the coded biographical archive for contextual solid ground. And as there is more to any social analysis of photography's inspired affect than can be ascertained through biographical investigation, I would like to return to an expanded version of biography to examine the case of Louisa Jacobs's service as governess in the home of Fanny Fern. In so doing, we might notice the complex comparison that arises between several narrative strands circulating around our hypothetical photo of Louisa Jacobs in Fern's collection, replaying variations of the same theme of mothers sacrificing themselves for daughters, or sacrificing daughters for something greater than themselves; of employers performing privilege via a domestic service relationship that allows them to exploit and sanctify laborers veiled as extended family members. More specifically, these relations include Mrs. [End Page 280] Bruce, the white bourgeois mother who lends her infant to the care of the fugitive Linda Brent; Harriet Jacobs and her refusal of Cornelia Willis's offer to absorb Louisa Jacobs into her home; and poor Sally bereft of human recognition within her busy work environment, wanting only for those aspects other than mere physicality to be acknowledged by her employers.

The contrast to this latter piece of the puzzle comes in that snippet of hearsay recorded in the Gunn diary in which Fern is said to have called Louisa, in a fit of jealous rage, "all the whores and bitches she could lay her tongue to." From one angle, the misery of Louisa's position in the Fern home recorded here inverts the predicament that Sally laments. Rather than being the overworked and underappreciated physical extension of her master's whims, a surrogate body without a mind or soul, Louisa becomes the body that is over-appreciated by her master's whims, a surface receptacle in which the employer's own imagined lack may be deposited. From another angle, however, the two domestics occupy the same extremity of the mind-body divide: both are figured as mere bodies, fetish objects for the master class to exercise its own infinite powers of mental abstraction, subtracting or adding to the convenient blank spaces of the objects' mentality as a means of emphasizing not only the power to do so, but also the powerful capacities of bourgeois feeling as it feeds off of or is driven by its supposed antithesis in classed, raced, or gendered others.

A similar relationship underwrites the scene of Fern's imagined scrutiny of Louisa's picture as Fern's affective labor gets recorded in a material image that, like any nineteenth century photograph, "inspires a fantasy of ownership and an imaginary proximity between viewer and viewed" (AA 18). Indeed, the figure's immobility before the camera eye restages for the white gaze the domestic's body (Louisa's invisible black body) as an object of white agency, the trigger for bourgeois feeling and perhaps the very means by which the blackness of Louisa's body materializes. To make Louisa black, in other words, involves the very same social [End Page 281] practices used to make Fanny Fern feel: for Sally, who needs her humanity recognized, or for Harriet, whose educated daughter needed a job that did not reproduce the burdens of that life, her mother's service. A telling aside in one of Harriet Jacobs's letters implies Louisa's inability to circumvent those burdens. After being in Fern's household for a year, Louisa is described by Harriet during a visit as "not well but looking miserably thin-" (HJFP 237). Could this observation suggest a mother's awareness of the toll that labor (and perhaps more) may have had on her daughter, burdens that may connect to a larger cultural discourse surrounding the bodily vicissitudes endured by light-skinned Black women, North and South?

Discussing the suffering and defilement endured by tragic mulattas, Nancy Bentley argues that the topos of corporal violation in domestic ideology helps to confirm "the value of the soul in a spiritual realm wholly distinct from the body."²⁴ Gazing upon the photographed mulatta subject, however, complicates the easy dissociation of the vulnerable body from the inviolate soul. For the viewer, any hint of the latter would necessarily depend upon a close inspection of the former, collapsing those rigid distinctions that domestic fiction so ardently erects between them. And yet it would be wrong to assume this collapse to be complete or the distinction irrevocable during the scene of photographic scrutiny. Whatever the relation between the subject's bodily markings and imagined interiority, it is always available in a condition of suspended relay for gazers aware of a miscegenated genealogy despite the absence of any expected clues of African ancestry. Here again, as the mulatta threatens to untie the bonds of nature and culture, so too are knowledge and truth unmoored from their empirical foundation in visual perception. This is the imagined threat of the mulatta—the violence she is imagined to inflict upon her white middle class beholders—and the emphasis placed on her physical violation in the domestic fiction of the day also indelibly marks the scene of her inspection. For the viewer who looks upon a body that does not bare its essence of interiority (so crucial [End Page 282] to establishing middle-class superiority at midcentury), a figurative violation restores that body to a culture of subjection. To imagine blackness is to inflict its marks where none appear, to constitute it as inflicted mark. If the daguerreotype was thought to be "a visual map of interior essence" (AA 48), then it is only through a repetition of slavery's mortifications that the inscrutable body under Fern's presumed optic review is made to divulge its secret.

This mortification of mulatta flesh is rooted in an optics of suffering, a blindness to black pain which Saidiya Hartman defines in relation to the slave body's legal fungibility as a commodity. "If the black body is the vehicle of the other's power, pleasure, and profit," Hartman contends, "then it is no less true that it is the white or near-white body that makes the captive's suffering visible and discernible."²⁵ Possessing the photograph of Louisa may therefore enact a regressive transformation, eradicating Harriet Jacobs's triumphal sacrifices to safeguard her children's freedom and assigning the girl, qua image, a commodity status whose sentimental exchange value depends upon physical mutability. According to Hartman, "the fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others' feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master's body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion."²⁶ In her possessive scrutiny of the mulatta, Fern simultaneously occupies and displaces this masculine agency. As P. Gabrielle Foreman demonstrates, underlying preoccupations with the law of the father pervade tragic mulatta fiction, or what she calls "white mulatto/a genealogies," with their "identification with and projection of white desire that continually revisits the paternal and the patriarchal, the phallic and juridical Law of the (white) Father."²⁷ Foreman's observations support the possibility of imagining how Fern may have taken pleasure in looking at the image. In doing so she would not only occupy the juridical space of authority that could ascribe and annul the one-drop rule to the sitter [End Page 283] (if the sitter were Louisa Jacobs)—doing so by turns—but she could also experience the sitter's gendered body from the perspective of this phallic position—not as a threat but as a passive object of scopophilic desire.

Like the slave woman on the auction block, the alleged image of Louisa becomes an objectified property when captured as a photograph, "trapped...in a public sphere... ever vulnerable to aggressive masculine gazes, to probing touches, and ultimately to purchase" (AA 46). Her outward resemblances of middle-class femininity only exacerbate the underlying threat lurking beneath the spectacle—the threat to the privacy of respectable white women. If the sitter of the photograph were Louisa, which it has been the burden of this essay to consider, then we may take notice of certain similarities between this image and that of the archetypical slave woman. As with the spectacle of the slave woman, the object Louisa becomes in the photograph eternally binds her to a public sphere swelling with commodities that ultimately annex her. Rather than instigating violence upon the female body, the threat of the photograph enacts a violation of an assumed privacy constitutive of the privilege of whiteness, rendering a permanent, public visibility. Thus, an optics and a logic of slavery organize the scene of gazing upon Louisa's image, even though she is not legally a slave, as it restores her through the mythology of photography to a condition of possessive negativity, and in turn elevates her beholder to a status commensurate with patriarchal mastery. In this state, the mulatta is at once dispossessed and possession, the negated vessel and the paradoxical vehicle of her possessor's agentive becoming. But what makes this fruition of agency most paradoxical is not that a well-to-do woman of principle and feeling shadows into the masculine brute of slavocratic power, but that such transformations in the beholder can only be achieved through an imaginary identification with the subject whose interior must be evacuated. [End Page 284]

Towards a Mulatta Aura

Hints of identification in Fanny Fern's re-configurations of blackness are at once the byproduct and purpose of sentimentalism. In so far as sentimentalism convenes a forum for women expelled from the public sphere, identification functions as its political coefficient. For Lauren Berlant, "this periodic point of identification [in Fern's writing] is itself the site of value and exchange, far more important and vitalizing than the content of any given column, whether sentimental or sarcastic" ("TFW" 445). Perhaps, then, it is the triumphant shedding of periodicity that the photograph makes possible for this point of identification. Of course, the specificity of Louisa Jacobs's domestic history in the Fern home militates against her absorption into any category that would subsume her and Fern as equals. But it is also this historical ground of specific difference (itself the site of Fern's own reported manipulation to appear less fraught with class difference) that makes the abstractions inherent to identification desirable in the first place. Berlant ventriloquizes the logic of this fantasy of woman's abstracted value, which sentimentalism helped to perpetuate in the following way: "No matter what my race/class, if I address you as 'woman,' your other social positions, and even your particular domestic activity and sexual practice, dissolve in the simulacrum of generic gendered experience" ("TFW" 434). This is finally the potential secret of the hypothetical daguerreotype, its aura: to function as a form of reciprocal address, inverting the mode of Fern's soliloquies to achieve a complementary effect.

That the photographic portrait subject is allegedly mixed-race complicates any simple understanding of its capacity to emit what Benjamin referred to as aura. For Benjamin, aura is the quintessence of subjectivity which mechanical art begins to diminish by the late nineteenth [End Page 285] century. This wholesale dismantling of authenticity enables photography to cut ties with those reverential cults that originate Western art—a step in the right direction for Benjamin, who celebrates the dissolution of aura as a precondition for art to be able to engender political and social change.²⁸ The one last and enduring tincture of aura in photography for Benjamin surrounds the "cult of remembrance" that sanctified and sentimentalized portraits. As Shawn Michelle Smith explains: "Locating the aura that surrounds the early photographic portrait in a 'cult of remembrance,' a privatized worship of missing loved ones, Benjamin defines this particular (and he thought ultimate) aura as an associative link relating representation to referent, a bond of love tying a material signifier to an absent signified" (AA 53). In the case of a photographic subject whose exterior refuses the indexical relationship between body and soul which auratic perception mandates, the material signifier functions rather to unify and suspend the very antinomies that the fetish of the aura promises to polarize between presence and absence, flesh (particularly the face) and interiorized essence, body and soul, whiteness and the purity of Anglo America. As Smith makes clear, this disruption of the binary logics of antebellum body politics was readily ascribed to "passing, performance, and play" (AA 55), but I want to close by suggesting that for Fern, at least, there may have been value in this photograph by virtue of its rare ability to produce aura (that which exceeds resemblance to indicate an essence reserved primarily for middle-class whites) from a subject thought to eradicate those conditions of racial polarity that make aura possible. The result is a subject whose aura offers a glimpse into the sincerity of essential impermanence, an authenticity of ontological flicker that would perhaps appeal to a woman who sought out opportunities to shock emergent middle class sensibilities with her trenchant cynicism, masculine attire, and fierce economic independence.²⁹

Apart from the mesmeric pleasures of stepping neurotically into and out of the past and the present—and doing so with, through, and even as, the mulatta—what would motivate Fern to activate mulatta aura? If we return to the background [End Page 286] details of the daguerreotype, we will notice subtle indications of a bourgeois interior, jockeying in its own small way to share in the sitter's status as the subject of the photograph. Rather than an image solely of a young woman, this is an image of her in place: an image of her and the space she inhabits, the place that frames her. A tension in the nature of subjectivity is thereby reflected, as we glimpse the mid-nineteenth century's anxiety over the shift from sovereign identity toward the self as commodification. Shierry Nicholsen summarizes this shift aptly: "Precisely at the point when bourgeois subjectivity as inwardness was flourishing, the uniqueness of the individual person was disappearing, replaced by the commodification of the living space—in the interior—and the face as image."³⁰ In joining Lauren Berlant and Shawn Michelle Smith to demonstrate Fanny Fern's awareness of this shift, I have attempted to further demonstrate how Fern Leaves relies upon a logic that inverts classed and domestic positions to displace a racial relation, producing an awareness of being in relation to race and raced subjects. To imagine Fern's awareness forged in acts of racial spectatorship is to affirm how the mulatta holds these tensions of subjectivity at bay, suspending their agon at the level of skin and surface, where dermal indexicality of ancestry diminishes, being replaced by a specular value that is redeemable by the externalized viewer alone.