The Portraiture of Modern Life: Dioramas, Phantasmagorias, Daguerreotypes and the Unweaving of Narrative and Textuality in Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables

The coexistence in the narrative of Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables of different modes of representing and copying reality, through several and at time conflicting forms of portraiture and mechanical, pre-cinematic spectacles of a dazzling variety (daguerreotypes, phantasmagorias, dioramas, kaleidoscopes, proto-cinematographic modalities of vision, mesmeric apparitions, as well as female sketches and print culture artefacts), constitutes a significant reflection on the changing nature of mimesis in relation to the challenges posed by the culture of industrial modernity and by the discursive forces that manage or resist the new order. The chapter charts a complex system of textual and visual synergies that offer important evidence of two distinct aesthetic modes, i.e. a fixed, perspectival reproduction, such as the painted portrait, and a mobile one, such as the panorama, the phantasmagoria, or the kaleidoscope, and the impressionistic female sketch. In highlighting alternative, uncharted modes of perception, i.e. what lies at the margins of figurative representation, the alternative aesthetics prompted by the experience of the pre-cinematic spectacle anticipates modernist sensitivities that at the time were not circulating as fully formalised discursive formations through the institutions and disciplines that validate them.