The “Portrait of the Soul”

Photography, Painting, and Ekphrasis in J. de Alencar's Senhora (1875)

Abstract

Since the Renaissance, the window has become an important spatial device for architecture and painting, mediating different physical and metaphorical universes and becoming a “picture-window” (Lungo). From the 19th century onwards, this dialectic between inside and outside materialised in the character of the woman at the window, like a new literary topos. Filtered by the imagination and impregnated with subjectivity, the broad horizon “resonates with the interior landscape” (Lungo), opening up to unlimited perspectives. Balzac attributed an incomparable status to this topos. Later, the naturalists, exposing the ills of society, would associate it with a new type of prostitution, no longer on the streets, but inside the picture-window. Exposing oneself to the window imply a new and voyeuristic social condition, whose rich potential would be tested by fiction, culminating in the “rape of intimacy” (Milner). Senhora (1875), José de Alencar's masterpiece, critically incorporates this topos by dialoguing with a new form of representation that had just been created in Europe but was also causing a stir in Brazil: photography. One could say that this novel updates, in fictional terms, the discussion that Baudelaire had proposed a few years earlier, in his Salons of 1846 and his Salons of 1847, on photography.