Abstract
Postmortem photography and spirit photography reveal a similar attitude toward death: namely, they share an attempt to rethink death as a social experience. Through an analysis of photography archives as well as literature spanning the 1880s–1910s—including Cyril Bennett’s “The Spirit Photograph” (1888), Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop (1888), and E. W. Hornung’s The Camera Fiend (1911)—this chapter addresses the ways both postmortem and spirit photographs represent memorialization as an ongoing, dynamic interaction with the past—a temporal challenge, in some respects, to the pastness of death.
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Notes
- 1.
Cathy N. Davidson makes a similar argument in her essay “Photographs of the Dead: Sherman, Daguerre, Hawthorne,” suggesting that “the intimate connection between early photography and the cult of remembrance (immortality in an age of mechanical reproduction) underscores the unstable status of science in the early nineteenth-century” (1990, 679–681).
- 2.
I discuss Bennett’s and Levy’s treatments of photography from another angle and to make a different argument in my book, Victorian Negatives: Literary Culture and the Dark Side of Photography in the Nineteenth Century (2019).
- 3.
In her recent Victorian Photography, Literature, and the Invention of Modern Memory, Green-Lewis similarly argues, with reference to Armstrong, that “The work of Victorian novels was, among other things, to represent a world in which photography had begun to shape the experience of being human” (2017, 93). Also like Armstrong, Novak suggests Victorian photography and literary realism were both constructions; or, as he puts it, manipulations. Focusing largely on composite photography, Novak argues that “this impossible literary and pictorial body-in-pieces” describes photography and literary realism alike during the period: “this fictional and grotesque composite is…central both to a Victorian technology of realism and to the Victorian realist novel” (2008, 1). Paradoxically, “the technology of realism produced what appears to be its opposite: the non-existent, the fictional, and the abstract” (3). In her earlier Framing the Victorians, Green-Lewis points to a relationship between nineteenth-century realism and photography, suggesting that such a relationship was acknowledged in the period: “The existence of a relationship between literary and photographic realism was in fact frequently observed throughout the nineteenth century and fostered by writers on both sides of the Atlantic who recognized in photography’s ontology a means of discoursing on literary form” (1996, 6).
- 4.
Lyle Repiton Buskey illustrates one such repetition in his article “The Photograph as Evidence,” for The Virginia Law Register in 1915: more than 50 years after the Mumler case drew international attention to the possibility of photographic fakery , Buskey writers that “the photograph is becoming an increasingly important evidential factor in modern litigation. The danger, however, of accepting the testimony of the ‘silent witnesses’” is that “evidence which can be mechanically created by man can, by him, be altered and distorted to suit his own ends” (1915, 181). Indeed, Buskey’s article reminds his audience (again), “all ordinary photographs are of questionable evidential value” (187).
- 5.
Stannard historicizes the memento mori over time, noting that “Thousands of funeral portraits, realistic paintings of the deceased on his or her bed or bier or in the coffin, were produced in all the countries of Europe from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries by artists unknown and famous alike” (1991, 80). Conversely, “By the 1870s and 1880s bourgeois fashions in death and dying began taking a new turn…Soon mortuary ritual, from the funeral to the burial to advice on mourning itself, was being subdued: the funeral was moved out of the home to the professional funeral parlor” (103–104).
- 6.
Davidson writes that “in the first decade of photography, for example, people were more willing to pay $1.50 for a daguerreotype to memorialize a loved one’s passing than to commemorate a marriage or a birth. Advertisements for the daguerreotypist’s services were often pitched at the newly bereaved (especially bereaved mothers) and the daguerreotypist attested his readiness to come to the sickbed or deathbed. Itinerant daguerreotypists traveled with the stock accessories of nineteenth-century mourning—statues of angels and cherubs, prayer books, bouquets of flowers” (1990, 678). Jennifer Green-Lewis likewise observes that “For many people in the early days of Victorian photography, its most significant potential function was to provide a visual reminder of the dead” (2017, 92).
- 7.
Indeed, as David Wanczyk notes, “Photography and the photographic way of seeing is, it seems, an emblem of the New Woman in the novel” (2015, 139).
- 8.
As Kate Flint writes, the “language of flash” became “both the language of revelation and recollection” in the 1880s (2009, 10).
- 9.
Green-Lewis makes a similar argument about the photographic style of the novel, writing “it is on Levy’s style that photography really leaves its mark, the novel’s many cultural references creating a collage of contemporary tastes and technologies” (2017, 99).
- 10.
This scene is “peculiar,” notes Wanczyk, “in that we never see Gertrude taking the picture she’s there to get, but Levy gives us examples of many pictures of ‘what her eyes encountered’” (2015, 136).
- 11.
The verb “to shoot” came to mean “to take a snapshot (of) with a camera; to photograph” in the 1890s; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first published instance of this usage appeared in 1890 (“Shoot” 2019).
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Cook, S.E. (2020). Mirrors with a Memory: Postmortem Photography and Spirit Photography in Transitional British Fiction and Culture. In: Grenier, K., Mushal, A. (eds) Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_2
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