“The universal notion of being photographed”: Memory and Medium in Harold Frederic’s Civil War Novella Marsena

Abstract

Narrating the events leading up to the death of the small-town photographer Marsena Pulford, Harold Frederic’s novella Marsena (1894) is an overlooked but important work of historical fiction set during the American Civil War. This article examines how the medium of photography serves as Marsena’s thematic underpinning, allowing Frederic to engage with the reputation of photography as a tool for recording truth and shaping historical memory. It discusses Marsena in the context of the late nineteenth-century literary response to the Civil War. Understanding the novella’s historical positioning also requires examination of the ways in which the photographic medium was imagined in the 1860s and again in the 1890s, when Frederic was writing. The process of writing a historical novel of the Civil War in the 1890s was always already shaped by the photographic record of the war, and Frederic’s choice of a profession for Marsena is not accidental. Instead, the medium of photography allows an exploration of larger thematic concerns about how the arts are used to represent and remember traumatic events of the past.