Clover Adams's Dark Room: Photography And Writing, Exposure And Erasure

454 LAURA SALTZ Figure 3. Miss Silsbee (January 22,1884). Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. metaphor it poses the representational problem that Clover persistently raises with her portraits: how to reproduce images of women. In her darkroom notes, she monitors the problem of lighting her female subjects. Referring to a photograph of her friend Miss Minot (Figure 4), she writes, "Very charming - little over timed making neck and hands dead white and not enough modelling."9 And referring to three exposures she made for a photograph of Emily Beale (Figure 5): "[1] Too much light on face . . . [2] too strong sun - not good . . [and 3] less light on face - very fair."10 Like Miss Silsbee, Miss Minot and Emily Beale threaten to disappear in a way that her male subjects do not. Just as her honeymoon photograph of Henry stages Clover's absence, her photographs of women document their invisibility. Exposure and invisibility work dialectically, then, to describe not only the history of her work's reception but Clover's photographic themes and her practices as well. That Clover skillfully lights and exposes her portraits of men but not women suggests a conceptual rather than a technical difficulty per se. The relatively stable template of lighting, props, and poses she uses to represent men is clearly available but somehow unthinkable for representing women. All of Clover's images are candid and spare compared to the stagy cabinet photographs so popular in the 1870s,11 but aesthetically and iconographically, her photographs of women and men differ subtly and consistently. Out of the differences emerge two conventional 19th-century narratives about gender: one characterizes women, through settings and poses, by their plastic or decorative qualities, while the other identifies https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300000454 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 4. Miss Minot in study at Beverly Farms [Muse of American History] (October 9,1883). Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Figure 5. Emily Beale (November 12, 188 [3]). Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300000454 Published online by Cambridge University Press

456 LAURA SALTZ Figure 6. John Brown Gordon (February 23, 1884). Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. men by their station and occupation.12 Whereas these conventions help Clover produce technically successful images of men, they seem to occlude her photographic vision of her female subjects (most of whom are peers). It is these conventions, rather than the women themselves, that Clover's technically flawed images expose. Clover poses her male subjects somewhat uniformly, either working at a desk in a study (connoted by a wall of books) or seated in front of a plain background, often holding a book or newspaper. Belonging as they do to the same class of professionals, these men - whether artists, scholars, or politicians - receive similar photographic treatment. A few symbolic props are enough to characterize a sitter: H. H. Richardson, an architect, sits at a desk with a ruler and blueprint; draped behind the seated figure of Nelson Miles, later commander-in-chief of the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War,13 is a banner with a star - no doubt the U.S. flag. Simple props such as ruler and flag help establish the professions of the sitters at the same time as they delineate traits such as thoughtfulness, stability, and sense of humor: profession, class, and character are of a piece. An image of Clover's friend J. B. Gordon (Figure 6) highlights precisely the social legibility of her male subject. He holds a newspaper entitled The Country Gentleman, which provides a clear and essentially redundant caption for the image.14 Unlike "The Country Gentleman," Clover's women are not easily labeled. Though her template for men is relatively stable, Clover arranges https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300000454 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Clover Adams's Dark Room 457 her female subjects in a variety of poses; they stand, sit, recline, twist, and some even have their backs to the camera. These poses emphasize women's subjective and expressive qualities rather than their professional solidity, for upper-class women in the late 19th century are not definable by profession per se. Clover frequently aestheticizes the images by placing background screens behind her women. For instance, in nearly identical portraits of Mr. and Mrs. J. W. Field, taken on the same day, the only appreciable difference is that Mrs. Field is seated before a papered wall. Though these backgrounds create a decorative environment for Clover's women, her female subjects are not themselves simply adornments. Clover often pictures her women in moments of contemplation or repose, as in the images of Miss Silsbee and Emily Beale; not merely objects to look at, these women are subjects engaged in thought. But these women's contemplation differs from men's, for it is a sign of domestic rather than professional endeavor: where her male sitters hold books, newspapers, or tools that signal professional or intellectual engagement, her women hold props such as letters and musical instruments, props that bring writing and aesthetics into the sphere of domestic leisure. Such gendered differences reflect late-19th-century pictorial conventions for depicting upperclass women at least as much as they reflect those women's social realities. Despite the advent of the age of the New Woman, when the number of women writers, artists, and professionals was growing, women were portrayed in poses that emphasize their leisure (and implicitly their husbands' prosperity), both in painting and in the proliferating mass media.15 These conventional poses of women are what Clover's under- and overexposures question. Her repeated mistakes suggest her camera's inability to see women in the terms culturally prescribed for them. Not clearly visible as professionals, intellectual subjects, or aesthetic objects, Clover's women occupy a culturally marginal space, a space neither here nor there. Clover's technically unsuccessful images of women are thus legible - they are almost predictable - as corollaries for the contradictory social status of highly educated, nonprofessional women like Clover herself. Their indeterminate social status highlights and is highlighted by these women's uneasy relation to pictorial representation. To say Clover's images are legible is to beg the question of intentionality. As Alan Trachtenberg reminds us, the exercise of reading photographs entails understanding "the point of view of the photograph itself, the interpretation it allows its viewers to make of its subject."16 My claim is not that Clover under- or overexposes her images of women by design, but that these images register a distinct point of view: they reenvision the cultural and discursive spaces occupied by women and representable in photographs. Clover's simultaneous use and refusal of conventional postures for women is not conscious in the way that, for example, Julia Margaret Cameron's decision to photograph images out of focus is; but like Cameron's, Clover's photographic practices register a difference from typical ones. If, as Lindsay Smith has argued, "focus becomes gendered https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300000454 Published online by Cambridge University Press

458 LAURA SALTZ territory" for Cameron (by destabilizing the ideological functions of geometrical perspective and depth offield,which guarantee the distinctness of subject and object), so too does exposure for Clover.17 Clover's portraits of women raise questions both about the visibility of women and about women's vision, questions that I am tethering to a specific cultural moment. In Clover's hands, the camera becomes what Teresa de Lauretis calls a "technology of gender," for Clover's photographs construct a vision of the social and subjective states of late-19th-century women, and of the discontinuity between these states.18 As Lauretis might explain it, Clover's photographic practices help establish and define "the terms of another perspective - a view from 'elsewhere' " that, because it originates from a cultural blind spot, is not always recognizable as a point of view.19 Clover's view from "elsewhere" has been consistently obscured, not only by the selective publication of her photographs but also in the narrative accounts of her life. The obfuscation began with Henry, who elides his entire marriage to Clover from his autobiographical Education of Henry Adams. Critics have excused his omission because Clover committed suicide. Ernest Samuels, for instance, sees in Henry's silence an exaggerated form of mourning typical of late-Victorian culture, a sign of the unspeakable pain he felt at his wife's death.20 Since Adams's Education, scholars have followed Henry's lead, turning to Clover's biography to helpfillgaps in their knowledge about the Adams family and Henry's writing in particular, rather than about Clover herself. As Mrs. Adams, she has provided an apparently transparent window into her husband's world. Worse still, Adams scholars have consistently misconstrued her biography by inflecting it with Henry's interests and desires: the dynamics of her marriage to Henry are read through hisfictionalEsther, her suicide is attributed to the childlessness that troubled him at least as much as it did her; her attachment to her father is pathologized as inappropriate for a married woman, whose attentions presumably ought to be directed more unilaterally toward her husband; her personality is represented as domineering because Henry is thought to have longed for a mother-goddess to dominate him.21 Two biographies of Clover, one by Otto Friedrich and the other by Eugenia Kaledin, attempt to redress these wrongs, aiming to rescue her from the invisible status to which she was first consigned by Adams's Education.22 Kaledin in particular is one of the few critics to discuss the content of Clover's photographs. She views Clover's portraits of eminent friends and acquaintances as comprising a collection of "illustrious Americans" (similar to Mathew Brady's), embodying a version of American history in images.23 Conceived as history, however, Clover's photographs remain shadow versions of Henry's manuscripts. I want to unhinge Clover's photographic project from Henry's historical one. If Clover's photographs tell a story about American history, it is a story radically different from that told by Henry's political narratives. Clover's portraits embody a subjective history that reflects on the contradictions of women's status. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300000454 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Clover Adams's Dark Room 459 These contradictions are manifest even in the ways that Clover, as a 19th-century woman, incorporated photography into her home. Though her images are overwhelmingly domestic, picturing friends and family in their houses or hers, and though she worked at home, Clover also used photography to step partially outside her home, if not wholly into public - to negotiate a middle ground. As C. Jane Gover documents, amateur photography was highly compatible with the domestic duties of late-19th-century women. Following the widespread availability of the Kodak (and, with it, commercial film processing) in 1889, the camera became one of the few mechanical devices associated with women. Like the sewing machine, the camera was a sort of minor technology that was not seen to compromise a woman's femininity precisely because it could be operated at home and put to domestic uses. Photographs, collected in family albums, inculcated domestic sentiment. Along with needlework, embroidery, and miniature painting, photography was for most women a domestic rather than a professional or aesthetic interest. Photography was what Gover calls a "home-based art," as opposed to the fine arts of painting and sculpture.24 Clover's photographic production preceded the mass marketing of the Kodak in 1889, if only by a few years. When she was working in the early 1880s, the introduction of dry plates and smaller cameras made photography more accessible to amateurs in general and women in particular.25 Nevertheless, Clover's experiences as a woman photographer seem both more anachronistic and less cozily domestic than either this increasing accessibility or Gover's descriptions suggest. Clover notes that when she attended a demonstration of a new printing process in December 1883, her friend Clifford Richardson "smuggled me in - as the only woman."26 And she writes of her photographic work in resolutely unsentimental terms. Clover describes the morning she attended the printing demonstration as one devoted to "science pure and simple," and calls her new camera "my new machine."27 Though her photographic work unquestionably bound her tightly to domestic life - her darkroom was at home and her subjects were intimates - photography also offered Clover a kind of scientific detachment from that life.28 It must have been detached analysis that was at stake for Clover in making photographs rather than public exposure per se. Though she delighted in public recognition of her work - Clover clipped a newspaper article praising her skill and sent it to her father29 - she continued to make photographs long after deciding not to publish them. This decision, apparently made jointly by Clover and Henry, illuminates not only Clover's contradictory status as a woman photographer but the strange dynamic within her marriage that simultaneously grants and withholds her authority. This ambivalence ultimately keeps Clover's photographic work in the shadow of Henry's authorship, as the following anecdote illustrates. Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the Century magazine, wanted to publish Clover's portrait of George Bancroft (Figure 7), her cousin and a https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300000454 Published online by Cambridge University Press

460 LAURA SALTZ Figure 7. George Bancroft (November 28,1883). Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. noted historian. Gilder also asked that Henry write a short piece to accompany the photograph, but the couple turned down the offer. Clover reports the incident to her father this way: "I've just written to decline telling [Mr. Gilder that] Mr. Adams does not fancy the prevailing literary vivisection: the way in which Howells butters Harry James and Harry James Daudet and Daudet someone else is not pleasant. The mutual admiration game is about played out or ought to be."30 Clover, without overtly expressing her own wishes, suggests her tacit approval of a decision she represents as her husband's. Perhaps she allows Henry to speak for her because in doing so he really only speaks about himself. As Clover quotes him, Henry subtly shifts the focus from her photograph, which all but disappears from his deliberations, to a game of "literary vivisection" in which Clover, who is not a writer, cannot be a player. What "Mr. Adams does not fancy" is the publication of his as yet unwritten text, next to which Clover's photograph becomes incidental. Henry's own letters express a similarly complex reaction to Gilder's invitation. Clover's letter to her father defers to Henry, but Henry defers back to Clover by redirecting attention once again onto her photographs and away from his writing. He reports the episode to his friend John Hay in this way: "We . . . have declined Mr. Gilder's pleasing offer. You know our modesty. Nothing in the world would induce us to acknowledge having written the 'Bread Winners.' As for flaunting our photographs in the 'Century,' we should expect to experience the curses of all our unphotographed friends."31 Henry fails to mention Gilder's request for the short biography of Bancroft and instead jokingly mentions The https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300000454 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Clover Adams's Dark Room 461 Bread Winners, a novel published anonymously by Hay but misattributed to Adams. To mention the biography would be to accept implicitly its subordinate status to Clover's photograph - in Gilder's request, the photograph precedes and gives rise to the biographical sketch, however much the sketch might ultimately authorize the picture. Henry's silence regarding the biography reiterates his sense that it is secondary. He achieves some measure of compensation for the unintended slight when, under cover of a joke, Henry modestly disowns authorship of The Bread Winners, a book he did not write, and covertly assumes partial ownership of Clover's photographs - they become "our photographs." When he appropriates Clover's photographs, Henry invests them with a social power beyond that of his writing. The "mutual admiration game" in which Henry alone might play is restricted to an elite class of writers (Howells, James, Daudet), but the "curses" of "all our unphotographed friends" represent a larger, more general threat from sources too various to enumerate. Henry's vision of social exclusivity would be overturned by the public recognition of Clover's work. More importantly, by inflating the authority of the photograph and expanding its reach to "all our unphotographed friends," Henry correspondingly expands the reach of his own power, which he exercises by refusing to publish the image. The inverted hierarchy in which Henry's writing might have become an appendage to Clover's photograph is never realized, and the equilibrium in their marriage is preserved. Where Clover performs an act of selferasure in her letter by deferring to her husband, Henry's analogous self-diminishment, contained within the structure of a joke and exaggerated in its costs, ultimately reinforces his authority. As if by mutual agreement, Clover's work remains secondary to Henry's within the domestic economy of their marriage: he is the professional, she is the amateur; his work is publishable, hers is for private consumption. By withholding her photograph from the market, Clover consolidates her class position but also upholds a domestic hierarchy that subtly devalues her labor. Eugenia Kaledin has wondered whether Clover was "pulled apart" by the contradictory social forces her photographic career enacts.32 With the sanction of neither her husband nor any other person or institution to legitimize her pursuits, Clover worked largely alone.33 Photography may have helped her pose questions, but it did not offer many answers. It kept Clover suspended between a life both inside and outside domestic boundaries. Caught in this contradiction, it is not surprising that, a few months before taking her life, Clover wrote to her sister Ellen, "Ellen I'm not real - oh make me real - you are all of you real!"34 As if looking to photography either to confirm or end her unreality, Clove

Clover Adams's Dark Room: Photography and Writing, Exposure and Erasure LAURA SALTZ MARIAN HOOPE ADAMSR CALLE, D CLOVER wa, s one of the few American women who were serious amateur photographers before the mass marketing of the Kodak in 1889. Clover first learned her craft in 1872-73 while on her honeymoon with her husband, historian Henry Adams.