‘This Lotus Spell is Intenser’: sources and selections in Emma Stebbins’s The Lotus-Eater

Abstract

Emma Stebbins’s untraced statue The Lotus-Eater (c.1857–60) purports to illustrate Alfred Tennyson’s poem of the same title, in turn derived from an episode in the Odyssey of Homer. This essay addresses the tension between Stebbins’s sculpture and Tennyson’s text. It brings to the discussion a body of antique visual and literary material to which Stebbins had access, images of and references to Antinous, the youthful and tragic lover of the Emperor Hadrian. Although the great flowering of Antinous scholarship and critique for queer men developed later in the nineteenth century, this study argues that the material was readily available for Stebbins, particularly through the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the objects in Rome, where she worked; later authors, such as John Addington Symonds, developed their commentary and fiction on Antinous from the same sources. The article brings together the thematic and visual resonances, references, and overlaps between the texts and images. It uses close attention to the formal qualities of the sculpture and the content of Tennyson’s poem to consider roads not taken, and how those options demonstrate the ambiguity in Stebbins’s finished sculpture: that is, its lack of clear moral or didactic content through its selection of the lotus-eater and Antinoan imagery, rather than a martial or moralizing figure from the poem. It demonstrates the complexity and subtlety of Stebbins’s selection of sources for her sculpture, and her rich, multivalent play between texts and images.