Miscegenation in Marble: John Bell’s Octoroon

Abstract

Inspired by Hiram Powers’s successful Greek Slave, John Bell debuted The Octoroon at the 1868 Royal Academy exhibition. However, the mobilization of narrative that made Powers’s sculpture acceptable was not applicable for The Octoroon. Instead, racial difference made all the difference, prompting viewers to read the figure’s cold, white marble as hot, sensuous flesh. Bell’s sculpture reflects Victorian Britain’s fascination with the enslaved, American, mixed-race beauty and suggests provocative resonances between the antebellum South and the Orient in the popular imagination. The sculpture’s 1876 purchase by the cotton town of Blackburn also illuminates the octoroon’s significance as a trope in nineteenth-century British culture.