Narratives of the Female Body: The Greek Slave

Abstract

Abstract Viewers of art objects in nidnineteenth-century America brought to their encounter with painting or sculpture a set of expectations very foreign to twentieth-century aesthetic values. The gulf had already opened in 1903, when Henry James looked back on the career of sculptor William Wetmore Story a half century earlier and commented that works of art in Story’s generation did not appeal to what he considered the aesthetic sense, but rather to “the sense of the romantic, the anecdotic, the supposedly historic, the explicitly pathetic. It was still the age in which an image had, before anything else, to tell a story.”1 The stories that art objects told their audiences sometimes affirmed and sometimes subverted their ostensible meaning. Some were poorly articulated and may be recovered only in indirect ways, while others were recorded in letters between artists and patrons, in descriptions of art objects that were published in newspapers and magazines, and in printed catalogues of art exhibitions. Imagining a past, present, and future as well as an emotional context for a fictional subject, audiences participated in the production of meaning and revealed many of their own assumptions. Fervent believers in the equivalence between words and images, they saw in art ob jects representations of the world as they understood it.