“Making Darkness Visible—Capturing the Criminal and
Observing the Law in Victorian Photography and Detective Fiction” by Ronald
Thomas
-
Connection between the onset of photography and
the detective, seen through
Bleak House and Sherlock Holmes
-
[the first several paragraphs lay out the role
of the detective in Bleak House:
similarities between the camera and the detective’s mind]
-
The picture as incriminating evidence
o
Lady Dedlock’s portrait
§
More threatening than letters
§
Connects Guppy to “unreachable upperclass”
-
Decline of portraiture
-
[portraiture’s history and how it defined
status; relevance in BH]
o
Once a status symbol
§
Middle class accessibility disruptive to
aristocratic position shown through portraits
§
Becomes criminal evidence
-
Photography
-
[main argument emerges here]
o
Questions of authenticity
§
Complicated by ability to mass produce
-
Detective as reproducer
-
[the detective role is examined in the next few
pages – as a literal detector as well as in the hypothetical sense. This is the
meat of Thomas’ argument]
o
Stands in for the picture of what is revealed
o
“authenticates ancient court and traditional oil
portrait are no longer empowered to authenticate”
-
Detective as seer
o
Clarifies for others
§
Hands
·
Uses finger gestures
·
Enables Jo to see clearly (rings)
§
Disciplinarian
§
Shows Esther her dead mother who she does not
recognize
-
Detective paradox
o
Contradicts the ideological implications of the
camera that he inhabits
o
Reproduction of pictures diminishes class
differences
§
Bucket’s inability to recognize the “signs”
(clothing) of aristocracy reinforces distinctions
o
Ultimately, pictures and detection both can be
affected by changing the lens
-
Vision projects national guilt upon the foreign
o
Bucket sees the criminality in Hortense
§
Forms that he should go to use
·
Visual evidence
-
Dicken’s view of detection
-
[shift away from BH and SH and supports argument
through Dicken’s work outside of novel]
o
“the eye is the great detector”
o
evidence that he integrates this into his work
o
Correlates with emergence of photography
o
Discussion in Household Worlds
§
“mysterious designs”- negotiates this concept
§
resembles his detective
-
Photograph’s reception
-
[last part of article moves from
literature/photography to the role of photography on criminality and
profiling]
o
Seen as silencers and killers
§
Photographees have no say once photographed
§
Marked as “dead”
o
Photographer is a threat
-
The camera as detective
o
Marketed in Sherlock Holmes periodical
§
Sneaky factor
-
Camera as intrusion
o
Development of technology
o
Flash – instantaneous
o
Lack of permission
§
Ability to assume possession and authority
-
Detective’s authority through class
o
Legitimacy
o
Professional status allows for new position in
society
§
Power gained through abilities rather than birth
-
Photography as police evidence
o
Mugshot becomes dependable source
-
Galton’s composites
o
Combines multiple pictures of criminals into one
picture
o
Reinforced (or introduced) idea of what a
criminal might look like
o
Makes “truths” of the face visible
-
Eugenics
o
Racialized criminal profiles
o
Pictures were made to distort and highlight
certain aspects while disguising others
It's really interesting to see how everyone's outlines are different. I've been looking few of these, and I like the way that you hone in on a few key terms, and center your outline around keywords. This is super distilled, and it creates a sort of ideological skeletal structure. I'd organized my post around the way that the article I'd been reading had been broken into sections and tried to look at them as discrete units, so this is a completely different way of thinking about a text.
ReplyDeleteHI Maggie- I really like how you've set up your outline. Going into this as someone who knows very little about Victorian lit, I think you did a good job just immediately highlighting the big points and getting straight to "the point." I also love what Leanna said, calling it a "sort of ideological skeletal structure." That concept seems so helpful when trying to figure out how you can use someone else's work in your own work.
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