Transatlantic Interiority and “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave”
Endnotes
1 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).
2 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)
3 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).
4 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.
Links
No links
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 United States License.