Transatlantic Interiority and “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave”

Presaging the height and last gasp of overwhelming British abolitionist sentiment, the Great Exhibition showcased its host nation as a unified populace and the first anti-slavery empire, while capturing the fissures in its former colony’s democratic ethos: the most recognizable and lauded entry from the United States disclosed the entanglement of its cultural production with transatlantic slavery. As its fame spread, the Greek Slave stood as a contested signifier of American achievement against the fruits of British abolition, and the timely 1852 publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Britain and its subsequent proliferation in illustrated editions highlighted the pervasive problem of slavery in the United States even more stringently. As James Walvin explains, “Only slavery provided the chance for the [British] nation to unite behind a political issue, a moral crusade, the outcome of which would apparently be to everyone’s economic advantage, would be a victory for Christian virtue and humanity. Moreover, it was a campaign which purified its supporters” (177). While Stowe’s novel for the abolitionist cause would win widespread acclaim after the Exhibition’s closing, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet on Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave supplemented the literary claims of an expanding “middle-brow” periodical culture in before its opening.

The circulation of the Greek Slave around the United States and its display at London’s Crystal Palace provide specific loci from which to understand the fragmentation of the statue’s meanings within the burgeoning and intersecting exhibitions of transatlantic visual and print media at mid-century: not only its politicization as a national icon or unifying force as an aesthetic object, but also its proliferation as a multimedia sensation. Intensely white, Powers’s most famous nude looks away from the viewer with a calm, even peaceful expression on her face, although her hands are enchained in front of her. In the midst of the celebration of progress and empire that characterized the exhibition, and implicitly, their inverse and corollary, domesticity, many viewers’ later writings indicate that they not only viewed the statue in “morally sanctioned” erotic terms, but also as an emblem of the “fragility of woman’s domestic life, as well as her physical integrity” (Kasson, Marble 60-3). The statue thus created and illuminated the intersection of art and mass culture, print and visual media on a transatlantic scale at mid-century, coalescing and expanding a process that had originated with its initial American tour.

Despite the trappings of its accessories and the deference afforded its medium, the Greek Slave posed the dilemma of an unstable set of multiple signifiers so that the ever present issue of slavery, along with the absence of an established print and cultural infrastructure, especially emphasized the ethical crisis of representation of “high art” and mass culture that accompanied the exhibition of the statue around the United States before its worldwide debut at the Great Exhibition. During its American tour, the sculpture was accompanied by a pamphlet at every city at which it was shown, instructing viewers on how they should and should not comport themselves: “not as if in a place of entertainment like Barnum’s museum or a theater, but as if they were in church” (Kasson, “Mind” 81). As Joy Kasson observes, while Powers produced six copies of the statue itself, it was also replicated in busts, statuettes, and engravings. Written interpretations ranged the generic spectrum: “pamphlets, poetry, reviews, letters, [and] diary entries” (“Mind” 81).@ Along with busts and daguerreotypes of the Greek Slave, Powers produced six full-scale statues. As Donald Reynolds explains, “The last one differs from the others in that it has manacles instead of chains binding the wrists” (note 2 146). From Powers’s own story about its subject to viewers’ readings of it, the statue’s conflation of art and mass culture typified its commodity status and the narrative “reflex.”

The Greek Slave created its own democratizing phenomenon in the for art. The statuette could be bought for more well-to-do homes and art union subscribers might “win” one of the full-scale sculptures. Yet, the encasement of its viewing within proper protocols of behavior could also reflect on the cultivation, or lack thereof, of the national body. As Wendy Katz explains, the statue “offered the spectacle of the ideal female body as private even in public. For male and female viewers, the sculpture imparted a model of innate refinement transcending commerce, an opportunity to learn an ideal gaze, and a test of one’s purity and ability to sympathize with the plight of another” (xix). The pamphlet reprinted in every city at which the statue was shown universalized its representation of suffering through a process by which the hardships of slavery are sublimated onto pedestaled white womanhood through the gaze of appropriate viewership.

The realism of the Greek Slave undoubtedly contributed to the troubling reverberations of the sculpture with the material practices of slavery for many viewers. Powers’s methods narrowed the gap between representation and actuality, producing mimetic “perfection.” Art historian H. W. Janson asserts that “[m]ore than any other nineteenth-century sculptor, he was concerned with the technique of marble carving and the sensuous, fleshlike surface he sought to achieve” (82). The Greek Slave emphasized the tension between exhibition and idealism, representing “living” marble, statuesque art, as the ultimate commodity within the panoply of objects at the Great Exhibition. As the New York Observer and Chronicle reported on the proceedings of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London at Exeter Hall during the summer after the Exhibition’s opening: “[Americans] exhibited the worst taste possible by placing a Greek slave there, and, beside the figure, placing a man with a stick to turn it round, precisely as they would do were they trafficking in human sinew and bone” (“British Anti-Slavery” 258).

The protestations about the poor “taste” of the statue’s subject and its presentation here accentuate how the Greek Slave, especially within the highly charged collection of material display at the Crystal Palace and its organization by nation, elicited a sort of conglomerate discourse that could be understood within many contexts: the synecdochal revulsion for the dehumanizing practices of slave exchange and their continuation within the United States intermixes with the discourses of art criticism and “manners.” Many assessments of the figure, for example, were apparently simply celebrity worship; the extent of the relation of the statue to contemporary events was often expressed as its aura of fame. A correspondent for the short-lived Home Journal described the Greek Slave as the most intriguing sight confronting viewers as they traversed the nave of the Crystal Palace, pointing out that the statue “is continually surrounded by a throng of admiring gazers,” including “the Queen and her little train” (J. A. 1). ’s appreciative gaze prefigures any other explanation about the value of the statue; leading her diminutive circle, she stands in as another “admiring gazer,” a royal corroboration of the middle-class performance of looking at art, and further validation of the Greek Slave as a suitable work upon which to direct one’s attention.

The American display of the Greek Slave epitomized the stark disjunction between “universal brotherhood” undergirding the spectacle of cosmopolitanism at the Great Exhibition and the championing of republican principles in the . Though apparently without the author’s permission or knowledge, Household Words boasted the first print appearance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetic tribute to the Greek Slave in October 1850. With the closing injunction to Power’s statue not only to “Catch up, in thy divine face, not alone / East griefs, but west” (ln 12-13), this sonnet, penned by Britain’s beloved expatriate poetess, reaffirmed the sculpture as cosmopolitan and intensely anti-slavery, a combination of principles that resounded with the print mission of Household Words: bringing together reform and enjoyment to the home, metonymic of the “English drawing-room.” Although Dickens, as Sabine Clemm points out, had a “personal distaste for the Great Exhibition” (210), she rightly traces the confluence of the periodical and the Great Exhibition in London, in particular the rhetoric that Dickens employs in his Address. Dickens’s two-penny weekley constructed a sphere in print of the ordinary discourse of the nation, one founded on uniting the British populace through content acknowledging the rationality and tolerance of its readership at the forefront of a potentially global utopian project of progress:

We aspire to live in the Household affections, and to be numbered among the

Household thoughts, of our readers. […] We seek to bring into innumerable

With its inclusion in Household Words, “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave” became a hybrid form, textually and paratextually. Though just as, if not more, pointed than the publication’s satires, Barrett Browning’s text assumes a compact and compelling earnestness within the oftentimes rambling diversions and countercurrents of the periodical; the article by Dickens preceding it is a case in point. As Michael Goldberg argues, Dickens’s “radicalism sprang as much from reactionary disgust as from the impulse to liberal reform” (76); such a view coincides with the novelist’s caricature of an idiotic Mr. Snoady: “I am not in the Church, but it may be that I hold a little place of some sort. […] It may, or it may not, be a sinecure. I don’t choose to say. I never enlightened my brother on these subjects, and I consider all men my brothers. The Negro is a man and a brother—should I hold myself accountable for my position in life, to him? Certainly not” (“Lively” 97). The abolitionist motto, affixed most famously to the Wedgewood cameo, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” here becomes an absurdist conflation, poking fun not only at this fictionalized self-indulgent dullard, but also perhaps at Exeter Hall.

Instead of supplementing anti-slavery as a staple of middle-class values and imperial expansion in mid-century periodicals, as in Britain, by mid-century, the exhibition of the Greek Slave in the United States intersected the increasingly divisive politics accompanying continental imperialism.@ The expansion of the United States was violent and slavery was the root cause of much of the divisiveness; the border-states were the site of bloodshed, but the strife was played out in Congress when Preston Brooks caned Charles Sumner in 1856. As Stanley Harrold explains: Each side perceived the other as the offender. As the 1850s progressed, the impression spread in the North that an “aggressive slaveocracy” or “slave power” controlled the federal government. Millions of northerners believed slaveholders used aristocratic, corrupt, and antidemocratic methods to threaten the rights and undermine the interests of the North and free labor. The effort to expand slavery into the southwestern territories, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 opening the region west of Missouri to slavery appeared to be southern attacks on northern freedom. So did a diplomatic initiative undertaken in 1854 to make Cuba a slaveholding state and the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision legalizing slavery in all U.S. territories. (161) In the years leading up to the Civil War, the exhibition of the statue presented a site around which fantasies of cultural progress and national unification were constructed. Yet the tasteful gaze constituting the appropriate middle-class reaction to the statue neither positioned the onlooker as complicit with the optics of economic and desiring spectatorship, nor as attentive to the distress of the enslaved “at home.” For instance, in April 1851, The Western Journal touted the statue as an icon of national unity, an object of fine art to be viewed within the sanctums of public galleries and a fond ornament for every home: “And in thus making a name the heritage of an entire people, there is a reflex influence, which blends the national sentiment. Binding with united hand the wreath, quickens the pulse of fraternal sympathy. A kindlier feeling is nurtured, when we are reminded of our unity by the oneness of our interest and admiration” (G 63).

Like much of the print coverage of the sculpture in the United States, that in the Cosmopolitan Art Journal publicized the circulation of the statue as an agent of national unification; the statue also served to generate interest for its mission of “uplift” through art. Extant from 1854-1861, the Cosmopolitan Art Association (CAA) formed the only national art union during this time and was a commercial incarnation of its predecessors, such as the relatively long-lived American Art-Union (1842-51). In addition, unlike previous art unions, the Cosmopolitan Art Journal emphasized the publication of literature, along with the dissemination and discussion of visual art (Hewes 2). It offered subscribers an assortment of written and visual enticements: “prints were offered in lieu of a magazine subscription, so for the three-dollar fee, individuals received either the engraving or a magazine subscription [such as Godey’s Lady’s Book, Harper’s, and Household Words], a chance to win a work of art in the lottery, and a subscription to the Association’s new quarterly journal” (Hewes 4). In giving subscribers more prints for their membership, the Journal revealed how much it patterned itself after the London Art Journal, not only in its format, but in these “extras”: “This feature is added in answer to the urgent demand for such illustration, as well as to give to our ‘Journal’ the worth, and something of the character of the celebrated ‘London Art Journal’” (“New Volume” 134). The CAA and its “direct medium of communication to subscribers and the reading public” (“The Cosmopolitan” 32), the Journal, were positioned as the central media for all things visual and artistic in the United States. The CAA not only commissioned the architect of New York’s Crystal Palace to fashion plans for its proposed gallery, it also claimed credit for the most lavish catalogue of the 1853 fair: “The London Art Journal shows the perfection to which wood engraving has been brought in England, and our own New York Illustrated Catalogue of the World’s Fair, published by Putnam, shows specimens nearly, if not quite, as satisfactory” (“The Cosmopolitan” 32; “Wood” 54).

It would not be an overstatement to attribute much of the success of this commercially-oriented organization to the Greek Slave and its print and popular incarnations. Besides producing the engraving of the statue, the CAA raffled off the third copy of Hiram Powers’s most famous work not once, but twice, in 1855 and 58, while the Journal printed features on its sculptor, reassessments of his work, and poems about the statue. With its multimedia offerings, the Association supplied its audience with the possibility of a range of visual and textual experiences of “art,” but the figurative and literal barriers to the function of “art elevation” are evident throughout the pages of the Journal. The editors apologized continually for delayed or unfulfilled subscriptions and prints and cajoled “The ‘Women of America’” to recruit new subscribers: “In the family circle the Journal will be a welcomed visitor—let the daughter or mother use it as a means to introduce the Association to her circle of friends” (44). As Lauren Hewes explains, “The comments in the Journal clarify the very real challenges of publishing large engravings in the United States before the Civil War—a lack of skilled printers, no national postal delivery service, and never enough paper or time to pull a high volume of quality prints” (10). One of the most popular images of the Greek Slave was an engraving of its display at the Düsseldorf Gallery in New York, distributed by the Cosmopolitan Art Association in 1857. As Kasson observes, the statue looms above viewers out of scale with its actual size, while the emphasis on reverence in this print and the reviews of the statue in the Düsseldorf “were prescriptive, informing readers of the attitude and decorum that would be expected of them in the art gallery” (Marble 70-2).

Despite its aims to champion American authors, Elizabeth Barrett Browning featured prominently as one of the darlings of the Journal. In 1857, she was presented as the literature part of “Masters of Art and Literature,” an editorial decision that arguably traded on the poet’s beloved stature with the popular reading public and her cosmopolitanism, as well as her culture cachet as a British writer. Interestingly, the article on EBB begins by satisfying readers’ ostensible curiosity about her appearance through a “medallion portrait”: “The cast literally ‘speaks for itself’—it is the head and outline of one of the noblest minds of the age” (“Elizabeth” 124). Offering praise for Casa Guidi Windows, the reviewer notes that “she shows how her heart is with the popular cause in poor, oppressed Italy,” condoning the poem’s “purpose of stigmatizing tyranny and upholding liberty” (“Elizabeth” 126). Notably, however, the essay mentions neither Barrett Browning’s abolitionist publications in the United States, nor her poetic response to the Greek Slave.@ By 1857, two unmistakably abolitionist poems targeting American slavery had appeared in the publication of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, the Liberty Bell, which was sold as a fund-raiser at its annual bazaar. “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” was published in the 1848 issue, available at the December 1847 bazaar, and “A Curse for a Nation” followed in the 1856 issue (Stone 34, 55). Marjorie Stone points out that Barrett Browning addressed both the oppression of working-class children in Britain and enslaved peoples in the U. S. by juxtaposing “The Cry of the Children” next to “The Runaway Slave” in the 1850 Poems (47). Though the magazine featured quite a few columns devoted exclusively to the poet and her work, including her “Tears” in one of its issues, the omission of the sonnet on Hiram Powers’s statue throughout its run is quite remarkable.@ The Journal featured a review of Aurora Leigh (entitled, “Mrs. Browning,” March 1857) chastising its author for “vulgar and inartistic” diction in “something very good” (88). “Tears” appeared in the Sept. 1858 issue. In “The Author of Aurora Leigh” for December 1857, a “letter writer” describes a visit to the poet at Casa Guidi, “a small, slight figure,” amidst the grandeur of an “old palace drawing-room, hung with faded arms, furnished with black oak, carved furniture, bookcases of the same, […] and weighed down with ancient-looking books, many of them bound in parchment. Cinque Cento pictures, Giottos, with gold backgrounds, look down from the walls, and the whole air of the room is shady, dreamy, and poetic” (21). In a truly bizarre comparison for “Editorial Etchings” (June 1857), the courtship of the Brownings and a “negro preacher’s account of the way he ‘fotched’ a sinner” are sketched out as two instances of “wooing and winning” (136).Works Cited “The Author of Aurora Leigh.” Cosmopolitan Art Journal 2.1 (1857): 21. JSTOR. Web. 27 Apr. 2012.“British Anti-Slavery Society.” New York Observer and Chronicle 14 Aug. 1851: 258. American Periodicals Series II. ProQuest. Web. 12 Feb. 2012. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. 18 November 1851. Letter 73. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Her Sister Arabella. Ed. Scott Lewis. 2 Vols. Waco, TX: Wedgestone P, 2002. 425-31. Print._____ Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems. Ed. Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor. Peterborough, Can.: Broadview P, 2009. Print. _____ “Hiram Power’s Greek Slave.” Household Words 26 Oct. 1850: 99. Dickens Journals Online. Web. 12 Apr. 2012. . _____ “Tears.” Cosmopolitan Art Journal 2.4 (1858): 191. JSTOR. Web. 27 Apr. 2012.Clemm, Sabine. “‘Amidst the Heterogeneous Masses’: Charles Dickens’s Household Words and the Great Exhibition of 1851.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 27.3 (2005): 207-230. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 2 May 2012.“The Cosmopolitan.” Cosmopolitan Art Journal 1.2 (1856): 29-33. JSTOR. Web. 27 Apr. 2012.Dickens, Charles. “Lively Turtle.” Household Words 26 Oct. 1850: 97-9. Dickens Journals Online. Web. 12 Apr. 2012. . _____ “A Preliminary Word.” Household Words 30 Mar. 1850: 1-2. Dickens Journals Online. Web. 12 Apr. 2012. . “Editorial Etchings.” Cosmopolitan Art Journal 1.5 (1857): 166-67. JSTOR. Web. 27 Apr. 2012. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” Cosmopolitan Art Journal 1.4 (1857): 124-26. JSTOR. Web. 27 Apr. 2012.G. “Visit to a ‘Gallery of Art.’” The Western Journal of Agriculture, Manufactures, Mechanic Arts, Internal Improvement, Commerce, and General Literature Apr. 1851: 62-7. American Periodicals Series II. ProQuest. Web. 12 Feb. 2012. Goldberg, Michael. “From Bentham to Carlyle: Dickens’ Political Development.” Journal of the History of Ideas 33.1 (1972): 61-76. JSTOR. Web. 2 May 2012.Harrold, Stanley. Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 2010. Print.Hewes, Lauren. “‘Dedicated to the Lovers of Art and Literature’: The Cosmopolitan Art Association Engravings.” Imprint 31.2 (2006): 2-10. Print.J. A. “The Great Exhibition.” Home Journal 2 Aug. 1851: 1. American Periodicals Series II. ProQuest. Web. 12 Feb. 2012. Janson, H. W. 19th-Century Sculpture. New York: Abrams, 1985. Print.Kasson, Joy S. Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Print._____ “Mind in Matter in History: Viewing the Greek Slave.” Yale Journal of Criticism 11.1 (1998): 79-83. Academic Search Complete. Web. 25 Apr. 2012.Katz, Wendy Jean. Regionalism and Reform: Art and Class Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2002. Print. “Mrs. Browning.” Cosmopolitan Art Journal 1.3 (1857): 88. JSTOR. Web. 27 Apr. 2012. “New Volume! New Features!” Cosmopolitan Art Journal 1.4 (1857): 134-35. JSTOR. Web. 27 Apr. 2012.Reynolds, Donald Martin. Hiram Powers and His Ideal Sculpture. New York: Garland, 1977. Print.Stone, Marjorie.“Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Garrisonians: ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,’ the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, and the Abolitionist Discourse in the Liberty Bell.” Victorian Women Poets. Ed. Alison Chapman. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2003. 33-55. Print.Stone, Marjorie and Beverly Taylor, eds. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems. Peterborough, Can.: Broadview P, 2009. Print. Walvin, James. England, Slaves and Freedom, 1776–1838. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1986. Print. “The ‘Women of America’ and the ‘Cosmopolitan.’” Cosmopolitan Art Journal 2.1 (1857): 44-5. JSTOR. Web. 27 Apr. 2012.“Wood Engraving.” Cosmopolitan Art Journal 1.2 (1856): 29-33. JSTOR. Web. 27 Apr. 2012.

As the close alliance of the sculpture and texts surrounding it for the CAA demonstrated, the cosmopolitanism of its mission to democratize art-taste only went as far as was palatable to those unsympathetic to the cause of anti-slavery: “The end and aim of effort ought to be to introduce some new element which shall be like oil on troubled waters, to soothe antagonisms, and restore a loving peace among men. What is that element—does the reader say? Disseminate a love for Art and Literature, and you have the instrument of reform” (“Women” 45). In “The ‘Women of America’ and ‘The Cosmopolitan,’” the Journal portrayed women as the civilizers of the nation through an idyll of a Western outpost of ornamented cottages with pianos and tasteful grounds, peopled by settlers “from all sections of the country.” This tale of the cultured town, “with a Woman for its warden,” weaves a vision of the supreme importance of female readers who will help with art dissemination to the nation—culling subscriptions for the CAJ (44-5). In its purpose to unify the nation through the medium of art, the Journal could well afford to highlight Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s profile, signifying her artistry, her use of classical literature, and her defense of liberty in Italy. The Journal could also feature her marriage and her presence at the center of a happy domestic circle, yet her abolitionist poetry, even the “laudatory” sonnet to the Greek Slave, inflected another mission for “woman” and art, a universalist ethics with national consequences for the hearth and home: “Pierce to the centre, / Art’s fiery finger!—and break up ere long / The serfdom of the world!” (ln 8-9).

Combining the cherished ideals of religion, refinement, and transcendent purity, the Greek Slave validated transatlantic cultural ideals and stood as an indication of American artistic progress and as an unjustifiable sign of national appropriation for abolitionists and British cultural critics alike, for totally divergent reasons. While representing the ability of Americans to transcend commerce in art achievement, the Greek Slave intersected a print and cultural milieu that both exposed the abysmal economics of slavery and covered them with the parlor manners of the (inter)national home. Viewed in the sanctified public space as high art or within the confines of the domestic space, the statue provided an event and focal point around which the populace could display their appropriately genteel and measured responses to art, yet as the literature and visual prints of the Greek Slave divulged, this construction of a unified viewing audience at London’s Crystal Palace, and stateside, especially, was a fantasy fabrication. Not naming American slavery explicitly, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet drew on the force of the conventional signifying power of the statue, especially the female as a moral compass, both as goddess and angel in the house, to call attention to international injustice. Even so, her text did not appear in the pages of the Cosmopolitan Art Journal, though her likeness was “cast” in Greek coinage for its readers as an art object of refinement and genteel creativity. For members of the Cosmopolitan Art Association and viewers across the country, the statue did in fact sound “thunders of white silence.”