Elizabeth Barrett Browning first viewed Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave in his Florentine studio in 1847 (Markus 196). Indeed, there is much evidence to believe that The Greek Slave was the most-viewed American statue in the nineteenth century.@ See Hyman, 216; Kasson, “Mind in Matter” 79, 80, and “Narratives” 46, 48; Hackenberg, 30, 33, 34; Miller, 645; Stone 132; Yellin, 100. Scholars have long discussed the statue’s sensation and popularity as it traveled the world on tours, in replicas, and even in miniatures sold for display in private residences.@ See Bracewell; Kasson, “Mind” 81, and “Narratives” 46. As Joy S. Kasson explains, “Over the course of fifteen years, Powers produced six full-length versions of the statue, numerous three-quarter-sized replicas, and scores of busts, many of which found their way into American homes and art collections” (“Narratives” 46). Perceiving the potential power of an antislavery ekphrastic sonnet showcasing the sculpture, EBB wrote and then published her poem in 1850. An inquiry into matters of work—sculptural, physical, and poetical—and the relationship of the poem’s Petrarchan sonnet form to the work of the ekphrastic re/presentation of Powers’s statue has been insufficiently explored. The formal matters of work in EBB’s Petrarchan sonnet—specifically the octave, volta, sestet, and amatory theme—that spotlights Powers’s statue of a Christian woman about to be sold as a laboring sex slave to the Turks unexpectedly re-appropriates conventional Petrarchan sonnet devices. These two creative works reveal the harsh realities of slavery and invoke a radical critique of slavery as an institution. EBB’s abolitionist message about Powers’s statue works to disrupt what her readers expect from such a sonnet and such a sculpture. The creative work of sculpture and the sonnet in both artist’s re-presentations of slavery and the Greek slave’s imagined sexual work that she imminently faces draws power from various mediations of freedom and captivity, beauty and art, and formalist concerns about why work matters in an ekphrastic antislavery protest.

When The Greek Slave toured in America, Powers provided a hypothetical but detailed narrative of the Greek Slave’s history in the pamphlet accompanying its appearances that inaugurated an outpouring of writings about the statue. Powers wrote:

This creative transference from history to representations of history via the sculpture launches the character’s story as a palimpsest. Her body is the tabula rasa of a nineteenth-century culture negotiating the specter of slavery alongside conventional white womanhood. One of the earliest inscriptions for the statue is this short prose summary of the woman’s “history.” The circulation of all kinds of texts in relation to this statue—from Powers’s narrative, to the pamphlet that accompanied the statue and instructed visitors on how to view the statue properly, to the flood of reviews, commentaries, poems, flyers, and other print matters spawned by this one statue suggests that for a silent statue, she has a lot to say. And, indeed, much was said about her. @ See Kasson, “Mind” 80, 81, and “Narratives” 70-72; Hackenberg, 34; Bracewell; Miller 646-47. Ranging from descriptions of her beauty, her demure and placid femininity, and her awe-inspiring silent white marble, reactions to the statue varied widely. If speaking and writing about the statue was plentiful, it makes sense that EBB’s sonnet deploys ekphrasis—a word whose appropriately Greek etymological origin means “to speak out” (OED). Powers’s narrative may have initiated The Greek Slave’s story and the beginning of this art object’s circulation as a text to be read and ultimately owned, but this was only one of many transcriptions that lauded, protested, and cried out to be heard and seen in the statue’s nineteenth-century lifetime.

Powers modeled his marble statue after the Venus de' Medici in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality, was in turn modeled after the Greek goddess Aphrodite. This creates another layer of identity for this statue; the palimpsests seem never ending and the replication surrounding this statue is daunting: Aphrodite became Venus who became the model for Powers’s sculpture that became the centerpiece of EBB’s sonnet. The subject and object of creative labor gets re-worked, re-cast, and re-told. For Powers to model his statue after the Venus seems a curious choice from the perspective of the Greek woman’s looming enslavement. Placing her at the very bottom of any kind of social hierarchy, whether mythological or real, locates her where her beauty does not protect her from slavery’s exploitation. Such a choice seems rather to disempower a woman whose inspiration was the mighty goddess Venus. And yet, from the outpouring of people who came to see the statue as well as the conservative and liberal responses to EBB’s poem’s message, she seemed to wield plenty of power. Many observers noted her beauty, yet at the same time, her impending enslavement complicates the role of such beauty. Her history is tied up in so many layers, it is a wonder if one may ever get to the bottom of things—or if there even could be some kind of ur-text to which one could point or locate any intrinsic meaning. For an immobilized, silent statue, The Greek Slave—who is also denied her own name—riots in her protean ability to have more than just one meaning or one narrative. For a seemingly static sculpture, the grounds of her circulation constantly change, rendering her in various moral and aesthetic poses that offer a less straightforward reading of her body as/and text.

Powers’s statue undermines usual expectations of Hellenistic statuary. Enchained, looking to the side and down, and clearly exposed as an object for sale, this statue is not one to be admired for her beauty only (though she clearly is beautiful), but also for embodying demure Victorian womanhood. And yet, it is troubling to exalt modest womanhood through an image of enslavement. As Jean Fagan Yellin observes,

EBB’s poetic work and Powers’s sculptural labor stand at odds; all generic tropes of female statuary beauty are overthrown. Though modeled on the Venus, the woman in the statue is a white Christian woman from Greece remarkable for her placidity in the face of her impending enslavement. On the one hand, her sideways, downward looking gaze offers to some the picture of unassuming, honorable womanhood in the face of such exploitation or perhaps disgust and immobilized anger on the other. John MacNeill Miller has recently argued that the “nucleus” of EBB’s poem is “its recognition of the sculptor’s manipulations of conservative cultural conventions, including female passivity and the idealization of white womanhood, in ways that could promote . . . change” (648). Rather than a blatantly sexualized or eroticized woman like the Venus, Powers’s Greek Slave has work to do in the protest against slavery. In the pamphlet that accompanied the statue on its tours, Kasson explains that it “cues its readers to behave, not as if in a place of entertainment like Barnum’s museum or a theater, but as if they were going to church” (Kasson, “Mind” 81). But is worship really the most desirable response? Such reverence only cements her subjugation. The Unitarian minister from New York, Reverend Orville Dewey, contributes what is considered one of the most important (though controversial) essays to the pamphlet (Kasson, “Narrative” 58). On the relationship between The Greek Slave and the Venus he observes: “I fearlessly ask any one to look at the Venus and at the Greek Girl, and then to tell me where the highest intellectual and moral beauty is found. There cannot be a moment’s doubt. There is no sentiment in the Venus—but modesty. . . . The Greek Slave is clothed all over with sentiment, sheltered, protected by it from every profane eye” (Kasson, “Narrative” 58). In fact, Yellin observes that “Most American critics dealt with the statue’s nudity by denying it. . . . [rather] the Greek Slave—whose whiteness, too, they interpreted not as mainly aesthetic but as moral—was clothed in a ‘robe, of purity’” (108). As if enslaved in her white purity, EBB would counter such colored incarceration by having it be the means of overthrowing such an institution.

Like the image she portrays, The Greek Slave was a commodity. In “The ‘Unveiled Soul’: Hiram Powers’s Embodiment of the Ideal,” Donald M. Reynolds explains that Powers built pedestals for all his statues, including The Greek Slave; at some venues an attendant stood nearby to turn and rotate the pedestal and statue with his stick (411-12; see Figures 1 and 2).@ See Reynolds, 411-12; Bracewell.

Figure 1: The Greek Slave on display at the Düsseldorf Gallery in New York City, ca. 1848

Source: http://www1.assumption.edu/WHW/IconsFemale/TheGreekSlave.html

Figure 2: View in the East Nave (The Greek Slave, by Power [sic]). From Recollections of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (detail). Lithographed by Day & Son (London: Lloyd Brothers, 1851)

Source: http://victorianweb.org

Auctioning and rotating the statue emulates real slave auctioning, though here it does abolitionist work through consciousness-raising visions of white female enslavement. A slave for sale is always on display, at the mercy of its audience and of the auctioneer, or, as in the case with this statue, the attendant who turns it. Kasson explains, “Traveling exhibitions brought the sculpture to more than a dozen American cities, where it was viewed by more than a hundred thousand people. With great fanfare, the Cosmopolitan Art Association offered a full-length version of the sculpture in a raffle for subscribers and then bought it back again at an auction attended by five thousand spectators” (Kasson, “Narratives” 47-48). Miniatures were also sold for adorning private homes (Hackenberg 30). If her circulation as a Greek slave to the Turks was forestalled, the statue’s circulation as an art object was not. And yet, I argue that it was the very circulation of this objectified female statue that went to work as an antislavery protest through purportedly embodying the perfection of 19th-century womanhood: still, demure, beautiful, and enslaved. The commodification, sale, and auctioning of the statue itself as well as the circulation of EBB’s poem deploy the tropes of slavery to countermand and undermine this institution. Neither slavery nor a passive womanhood were what one might have expected from a Greek slave cum Venus cum respectable white womanhood. EBB would seize this image for further destabilizing by using conventional Victorian femininity against itself—mainly by connecting it to slavery.

The statue insinuates the Greek woman’s imminent enslavement; she stands on the threshold just before entering into sexualized bondage; she is not enslaved at this moment though there is the expectation that she will be in the near future. Held in a liminal space between freedom and complete captivity, she is frozen on the auction block. Her commodification presents a different kind of slavery than that occurring in the United States, in that the implication is that this Greek woman will be a sex slave in a Turkish seraglio; though African slaves were abused and exploited sexually, they also worked the plantations, doing arduous, back breaking work in fields, kitchens, and private homes. Here, the expectation is that the Greek Slave will not necessarily be expected to perform such labor, but she stands to experience a terrible, if not the worst, kind of work—sexualized labor against her will. Contemporary opinions disagreed as to whether this statue was a sensation—in fact a kind of pornography—or if she depicted the idealized nineteenth-century woman, albeit still problematic. Others questioned Powers’s adulation (and some would say EBB’s in her poem) of a white race politics that failed to address the matter of racism at the heart of slavery. EBB’s re-appropriation of conventional Petrarchan rules, however, proves otherwise.

EBB’s experimentation with the formal rules of the Petrarchan sonnet—specifically the octave, volta, and sestet—overthrows convention by deploying these constructs on behalf of the commodified female beloved rather than the usual sexual desire of the male lover. Yellin describes the poem as “a carefully constructed sonnet” in which its octave presents the problem of gender, race, and slavery that the sestet then resolves through EBB’s “vital political art” (124). I suggest one can go further in analyzing how these poetic elements subversively challenge the gender and race politics alive in the nineteenth century. The octave presents the problem of enslaving a white, Christian woman who is beautiful with her “passionless perfection” (5). However, the beloved is always/already flawed: nameless and objectified, the Greek Slave, though submissive, is white and Christian and stands in stark contrast to African slaves brought to America. She is not the wholly idealized woman one usually finds in a Petrarchan sonnet. At stake in this Petrarchan sonnet is a far greater love than that of a lover pining for his beloved: EBB addresses the entire human race in her call to stop refusing love to other human beings based on their race, what she specifically terms “man’s crimes” (7). The volta, “Art’s fiery finger!—” (9) changes the poem’s course by taking the power of change away from patriarchal politics to a very feminized political art—and one prominently phallic though wielded by a woman poet. The exclamation and dash indicate the shift in tone as well as form: a literal break in the line sets it apart from the kind of enslaving beauty discussed in the octave. A quick series of active commands follows: “break up” (9), “appeal” (10), “catch up” (12), “strike” (13), and “shame” (13)—active verbs that announce the desired annihilation of such an institution. EBB’s sonnet calls for a paradoxical union of humanity through such a break up. Moreover, it is the female’s desire that is heard and will be honored if this takes place, rather than gratifying that of the male lover. What politics, campaigns, and speeches have failed to do, this white marble statue works to achieve without saying a word.

If unrequited love is a central motif in Petrarchan sonnets, EBB’s re-appropriation of this theme expertly showcases the glaring darkness of slavery in a poem whose amatory theme calls for a love of greater humanity through its paradoxical raw objectification of the Greek female slave. Additionally, one might read her poem as a condemnation of the sexual politics of the Petrarchan lover—his feelings can often be more lustful than loving and with a great desire to own or possess the beloved, much like a slave owner. EBB’s poetic project destabilizes what one might expect from a Petrarchan sonnet about a beautiful woman, overthrowing and breaking up some poetic serfdom on her own terms. EBB’s creative labor is central to the power of her poem. By re-appropriating the precepts of the Petrarchan sonnet, her piece offers liberation at the level of formalist concerns—which also echoes the formalist concerns of viewing the statue and its circulation. Addressing the race and gender politics at stake in slavery, EBB incisively re-presents the Petrarchan theme of unrequited love by recasting the usual male lover/female beloved duo with white society at large and the objectified female Greek slave. By using the Italian sonnet form, EBB deploys not only a poetic form first created in Italy but also one that calls attention to her own expatriate status as an Italian resident and supporter of the Risorgimento. This is a voice raised in Italy against both domestic and public slavery that deploys a specifically Italian art form as an anti-slavery critique. It is a feminine, supposedly silenced and enslaved woman pleading to the rest of humanity “To, so, confront man’s crimes in different lands/ With man’s ideal sense” (7-8). This is not the amorous lover pleading to his beloved, but rather a devastated woman on the brink of slavery imploring, significantly with her body and through EBB’s poem, for liberty. EBB gives the voice to the female beloved rather than the usual adoring male suitor. Reversing this convention gives this slave a voice, rescuing her from the chains of silence and powerlessness. EBB reverses the male/female duo with one woman and all of humanity—men and women alike—and, according to the picture from the Dusseldorf museum, children as well. (See Figure 1). Deriving from the Italian “sonetto” meaning sound, this sonnet as a piece of ekphrastic art is doubly sounded: in word and in image (OED). Wielding “Art’s fiery finger!” (9), critics identify this move as EBB seizing this masculine phallic trope of power to wrest and reclaim racial and gender norms presented by the statue as well as the Petrarchan art form itself. This is no easy lover. A female poet advocates on behalf of another woman against a patriarchal institution that would frustrate or deny such a voice. It will require breaking up the serfdom of the whole world—“not alone/ East griefs but west” (12-13)—legitimated by the Christian God’s divine supremacy. This is quite a lot of work for one statue and one poem, but they do it brilliantly.

Ultimately, this sonnet denies passage over the threshold into either domestic or public slavery. Whereas a typical Petrarchan sonnet pleads for the beloved’s sympathy in the lover’s dire state of unrequited love and uninvited entrance into her heart, EBB’s sonnet revels in keeping its liminal thresholds. Not to be welcomed into the institution of slavery is this beloved’s greatest desire—a desire that EBB upends by posing it as the preferred condition rather than the longed-for entrance into the lover’s arms. The poem asserts that “Ideal beauty cannot enter/ the house of anguish” (1-2)—and EBB’s Petrarchan sonnet does not allow it. Indeed her sonnet places “Ideal beauty” and “house of anguish” on different lines, never to converge. Ending the first line with “enter,” this claim hovers on the border between the two lines, establishing formally the threshold that the poem suggests. Critics have widely discussed the many thresholds in this poem as well as the statue itself.@ See Kasson, “Narratives” 55; Stone, 132-34; Yellin 124; Miller 645. And yet, it is through this “ideal sense”—her beauty—that EBB aims to get the attention primarily of her male readers. The statue’s own being, her presence, the very body that marks her as enslaved, overthrows, or has the potential to overthrow, a worldwide institution. That which enslaves her can/will be, EBB advocates, that which will liberate her. The statue seeks to accomplish this with, paradoxically, “thunders of white silence” (14), with no speech at all and yet with a message clearly heard.

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