Photographic fiction #1: Afterimage

Helen Humphreys' Afterimage (2000), loosely inspired by the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron, traces the inadvertent firestorm set off by the arrival of Annie Phelan, an orphaned Irish servant raised in England, at the country estate of Isabelle and Eldon Dashell.  Annie becomes an object of desire for both Isabelle and Eldon, whose marriage has slowly collapsed under the strain of Isabelle's multiple miscarriages.  The Dashells also yearn for recognition in the worlds of cartography (Eldon) and art (Isabelle), but Eldon's desire to create a true map of the world--one that would "include everything known to human existence" (41)--and Isabelle's attempt to stake her claim as a female practitioner of a new form both founder on the shoals of contempt and incomprehension.  At the same time, though, Eldon and Isabelle struggle with (but cannot escape) their anxieties about what they see as a link between representation and domination.  Annie's presence simultaneously liberates their imaginations and ensnares them in new webs of gender and class relationships.  Annie herself, the servant-as-muse (something Tracy Chevallier also invokes in the much less ambitious Girl with a Pearl Earring), explores her own identity through literature, fantasies of mapmaking, and art photography.  In the end, only she manages to survive the novel with her selfhood intact.

Humphreys divides the narrative almost entirely according to Isabelle's photographic subjects, with two Eldon-related interruptions.  Isabelle and Annie proceed from images of supplicant women (Guinevere, Ophelia) to the female artist and agent of sexual desire (Sappho) to the woman as icon of moral virtues (Grace, Humility, Faith).  At this point, Eldon intervenes and offers Annie a different route to selfhood: using travel narratives to imagine herself as a member of the Franklin expedition (Member of the Expedition), an explorer of the unknown.  But Isabelle, inspired by Annie's hands--"What is beauty without suffering?" (163)--finds in her the embodiment of the Virgin Mary, a figure "destined for greatness" yet "oblivious to her destiny" (171) (Madonna [Mortal]; Madonna [Divine]).  And yet, even though Eldon dies horribly, his narratives of mapmaking and exploration inspire Annie's departure to seek her relatives in Ireland (Cosmographia Universalis). 

For such a slim book, Afterimage certainly packs in quite a number of weighty themes.  Humphreys has clearly done her homework on the erotics of cross-class sexual relationships in the Victorian period: the attentive reader will hear echoes of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick, not to mention John Addington Symonds, Oscar Wilde, and (in the Edwardian era) E. M. Forster.  (Another servant in the novel discovers that she has been impregnated by her previous master, who raped her.)  Annie's awkward relationship to her Irishness--she loses her family in the Famine and has no actual memory of Ireland itself--provides another topical thread.  But the novel pays the most attention to the relationship between model/muse and artist.  Robert Hill, a vaguely Pre-Raphaeliteish painter, victimizes his models: "Robert Hill depends upon a muse.  The muse is invariably a young, good-looking woman.  He finds her, paints her, beds her, and then rids himself of her" (67).  This dynamic of sexual and artistic exploitation finds itself reflected in Hill's choice of subject matter, which transforms the same woman into Helen of Troy, then Medusa, and finally the drowned Ophelia.   Hill--so sexist and conservative that he becomes a caricature--exemplifies "improper" artistic practice: he traps his subjects in eroticized narratives that cater purely to masculine desires, instead of engaging in any sort of collaboration with his models.  As Eldon notes of the girl-as-Medusa, "[s]he looks toward Eldon, a startled expression on her face, as if she can't quite believe that Robert would really paint snakes in her hair, that he would want her to look crazed and monstrous, that this is how he has come to see her, as he tires of her attentions" (67).  In Eldon's interpretation of the model's own "look," he discovers something that is neither active resistance nor passive acceptance, but the model's shock clearly had no effect on the painter--after all, he promptly "drowned" her as Ophelia.  Still, this model doesn't have her own voice; it is up to Isabelle and Annie Phelan to offer a different interpretation of the model's role.

Isabelle's first session with Annie already hints at the potential tension between model and photographer: while Isabelle believes that Annie perfectly inhabits the role of Guinevere, thereby incorporating Isabelle's vision, Annie actually sees the pose as herself reaching for Jesus (33).  It is only after Annie views the completed photograph that she can objectify the image as something other than "her" story (36).  The finished photograph, then, conceals some rather vast discrepancies at the level of original intention.  Their next session, "Ophelia," prefigures Robert Hill's vengeful painting, but Isabelle and Annie choose to rewrite the original text; as Isabelle muses, "Maybe, as a woman, she should resist these stories, not embrace them?" (59)  While this moment seems to have leapt directly out of someone's stereotype of feminist art history--women's art as resistance to patriarchal texts!--Isabelle's own class privilege and as-yet-unspoken desires nevertheless haunt the occasion.  In fact, Isabelle's interest in Annie repeats her childhood fascination with Ellen, the daughter of the family cook; her growing obsession with Annie thus rests on Annie's ability to stand in--pose, in other words--for the lost love of her youth.  The moment that triggers Isabelle's explicit awareness of her desire for her maid, however, involves a reversal of the model's relationship to the artist: while Isabelle initially wants to photograph Annie as Sappho, it is instead Annie who photographs Isabelle.  As she does so, Annie "invents" the soft-focus technique that Cameron made famous.  Not only does the model reverse the artist's gaze, she also innovates in her own right; as Robert Hill notes later, with considerable disapproval, the new technology enables creative expression well outside the confines of traditional academic training.  But Isabelle's class consciousness prompts her to resent this manifestation of Annie's agency: "What if this maid suddenly had illusions about herself as a photographer?" (112).  While Isabelle feels comfortable granting the model a degree of control in the photograph's making, in the end it is her own will that must come first:

He [Robert Hill] was passed, hand to hand, from one great man to another.  He never had to doubt his place among them.  His confidence and sense of his own genius were so strong that when he used live models he didn't need to feel their energy.  He didn't even need to see them.  What he saw was himself, painting them.  He wouldn't understand that Isabelle needed Annie Phelan to look how she looked, to be herself, and also that Isabelle needed to be projecting a quality onto her.  To control what was happening.  To let it happen.  (114)

Isabelle imagines Hill's relationship to the Victorian art world in the passive voice; while his masculinity guarantees him access to the elite circles of the Royal Academy, it also reduces him, paradoxically enough, to an object.  Robert's painterly self-awareness is entirely narcissistic, reflecting the all-male society in which he works.  As Isabelle understands it, Robert's closed-circuit awareness of himself as a Painter (with a capital P) renders him impervious to the call of the model's own consciousness.  For Isabelle, however, the photograph emerges from the interplay of the model's subjectivity and the photographer's "control"; ideally, the final image contains both the traces of the model's identity and the photographer's "projection."  But while this certainly sounds like a more collaborative vision of art than Robert Hill's, it's worth remembering that Isabelle insists that the photographer still retains primary control of both the process and the finished product--even in the act of "let[ting] it happen."  Hence Isabelle's anxiety about Annie's own possible skills as a photographer, which threaten to undermine her own claims to artistry.  Indeed, Isabelle simply appropriates the soft-focus technique without giving Annie the credit.

While this exploration of the artist-muse relationship is certainly interesting, it is also where the novel loses its balance.  Afterimage purportedly offers us a "love triangle," as per the dustjacket, but the triangle tilts heavily towards Isabelle's end--in both form and content.  Humphreys spends the most time constructing parallels between Isabelle and Annie, ranging from the scenes that bookend the novel to moments of anaphoristic reflection ("Because...Because...Because...").  The sickly Eldon Dashell, never so interesting as his wife, offers Annie a different model of selfhood through mapmaking and the literature of exploration.  As Eldon explains,

"...Isabelle is right: The future is the photograph.  And a photograph is always a destination, not concerned with getting there but being there...A photograph," he says, "is always about arrival."  (106)

In Eldon's play with the concept of futurity, the photograph may be the promised outcome of a historical process--one that threatens to do away with cartography altogether--but it also does away with historical process itself.  Cartography is the art of discovery, travel, and, by extension, self-development; photography is the art of dehistoricized presence.  For Annie, whose parents died working on a literal road to nowhere during the Famine, the cartographic imagination offers an important alternative to the meaninglessness of her parents' existence.  It also prompts her to imagine Ireland as a potential destination, even though she has no memory of it (and, in fact, initially thinks of it as blank space).  Annie's last pose for Isabelle slightly revises Eldon's position, in that she understands that final photograph as a departure rather than an arrival--but it also anticipates Isabelle's final epiphany, that "what she does is not really about life, about living.  It is about holding on to something long after it has already left" (240).

Afterimage's off-kilter approach to its love triangle also surfaces in its significant but often submerged relationship to Jane Eyre.  Annie explicitly invokes Bronte's novel right at the beginning--she expects the Dashells' home to look rather like Thornfield (5)--and she occasionally appropriates Bronte's language to shape her own experiences.  Moreover, Afterimage's abrupt and catastrophic conclusion makes far more sense as a return to Jane Eyre than it does as a logical outcome to Humphreys' own novel; Isabelle even acts like Mrs. Reed at a significant moment.  But since Jane Eyre has largely vanished by this point, the effect proves jarring instead of thematically or structurally satisfying.  While this is in many ways a thought-provoking novel, its myriad threads unravel noticeably at the end.