Doubling the vision. Women and narrative stereography: The United States, 1870--1910.
Item
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Title
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Doubling the vision. Women and narrative stereography: The United States, 1870--1910.
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Identifier
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AAI3189026
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identifier
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3189026
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Creator
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Davis, Melody D.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Rose-Carol Washton Long
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Date
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2004
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Women's Studies | American Studies
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Abstract
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Stereography, the quantitatively dominant form of photography in the nineteenth century, has received scant attention from twentieth century scholars. Redirecting scrutiny to an historically critical medium, this study examines the narrative stereograph and its relation with women's culture in the United States from 1870-1910. The narrative stereograph, also known as the "genre" or "comic and sentimental" scene, was a hybrid of linguistic conception, photographic naturalism, and theatrical presentation. It presented a play-act in a composed setting with actors, which was photographed with two separate negatives that, when printed, mounted adjacently upon a card, and seen through a stereoviewer, would produce the replication of an environment in three dimensions. These tremendously popular scenes were owned by nearly every American in the 1890s and were sold most frequently to women and their families. From advertising, marketing, collector's inscriptions, and the social history of topics and media directed at women, I show that the field of the narrative stereograph in the United States was one where women's tastes, prerogatives, and values were foremost, determining the topics, style, and meanings of this photographic history.;The Introduction discusses the exclusion of stereography from the canon of photography history, where the dominant trend in the United States has been toward the monocular photograph, replicating the values of modernist painting, museum wall and the deluxe book. The environments presented by narrative stereography were commercial products appealing to a wide market and catering to women's perceptions. The second chapter discusses stereoscopes and theories of stereoscopic vision, observing that they forced an awareness of the natural as constructed, becoming, for narratives, an analogue of gender. The third chapter presents the social history of the stereograph, the fourth its marketing to women. The remaining chapters discuss the various topics of the narrative stereograph---childhood, courtship, brides, wives, the erotic, the New Woman, and other gendered roles. The Conclusion contrasts the narrative stereograph's exclusions with its middle-class inclusiveness, and its dual dynamic of naturalizing and de-naturalizing.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
