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The Face as Legible Text: Gazing at the Portraits of George Eliot

Susan Sontag, in On Photography, presents this fantasy choice: which would people prefer?that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted a portrait of Shakespeare, or that the camera had been invented early enough to have a photograph of him? People would all want the latter, she claims, not simply because the photograph would be a more accurate representation, but also because "having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross" (154). Unlike the painted portrait, the photograph seems not to be an interpretation. It seems a relic of the real thing, a tracing, like a footprint or a death mask.1 Elizabeth Bar rett Browning, writing about the daguerreotype to a friend in 1843, asked her to "think of a man sitting down in the sun and leaving his facsimile in all its completion of outline and shadow." She wanted a portrait of everyone she loved, she said, because "It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such cases but the association, and the sense of nearness involved in the thing ... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever!" (Rabb xxxvi). For such a relic of the real thing George Eliot's fervid worshipers prayed, all of them disappointed by a camera-resistant woman who would not be appropriated, "photo-possessed." She was not alone. The popular Victorian novelist Marie Corelli was like-minded, but they were in a small minority among Victorian