Greek Slave Research Articles

Fluid Boarders and Naughty Girls: Music, Domesticity, and Nation in Joyce’s Boarding Houses

This essay redresses a critical neglect of Joyce’s “The Boarding House” by identifying the boarding house as a key domestic site and national symbol in Joyce’s work. The structure of the boarding house reenacts Ireland’s twelfth-century colonial-origin story and poses a threat to the romantic nationalist vision of the Irish home and the quest for a nation purged of the stranger. Polly Mooney, the landlady’s daughter, performs “I’m a Naughty Girl” from the opera A Greek Slave , and the full song reveals how Joyce links home and nation through the figure of the “naughty girl.” The boarding house represents a commercial and commodified domestic space that depends upon the entry of the stranger and rejects the ideals of female sexual purity. Joyce’s reintroduction of the characters from “The Boarding House” in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses indicates the centrality of this domestic site to the debate between Bloom and the Citizen over the definition of a nation. In his repeated use of the figure of the lodger and his representation of home as temporary and transient for many Dubliners, Joyce acknowledges Ireland as irretrievably and irreversibly open.

Exhibiting Race ‘under the World's Huge Glass Case’: William and Ellen Craft and William Wells Brown at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace, London, 1851

This article examines the performance, representation and reception of images of American slavery prompted by fugitive slaves William Wells Brown and William and Ellen Craft's visit to the Great Exhibition in London, where they displayed themselves alongside American sculptor Hiram Powers' Greek Slave. In order to appreciate the visual rhetoric and modes of spectating-upon which the fugitive slaves drew, the author examines their performative intervention in the context of other nineteenth-century performances and displays of racialised bodies.

At Home in the Crystal Palace: African American Transnationalism and the Aesthetics of Representative Democracy

At Home in the Crystal Palace:African American Transnationalism and the Aesthetics of Representative Democracy Stephen Knadler (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution "Above all, an American slave auction must be there, with William and Ellen Craft on the block, Henry Clay as auctioneer, and the American flag floating over it." From "American Slavery in the World's Fair," by Henry C. Wright, Liberator, 28 February 1851, 36. Images: "The Virginian Slave," from Punch 20 (1851): 236; The Greek Slave, sculpture by Hiram Powers, 1851 copy from the 1841 original, marble, 165.7 × 53.3 × 46.4 cm., Yale University Art Gallery. [End Page 328] I have a very strong desire (which I have smothered in my own breast, as it has been idle to cherish it, on many accounts) to visit England this summer, and be one of the universal multitudes at the World's Bazaar. What a miracle of contrivance, skill and taste is the building in which it is held! It ought to be allowed to remain as long as iron and glass can defy the storms of time or the fate of empires. Whatever drawbacks there may be about this exhibition, (and I have no doubt there are many), I am convinced that it will do much toward hastening the days of universal reconciliation, when nation shall no longer lift up sword against nation, and there shall be none to molest or make afraid. —William Lloyd Garrison, letter to Elizabeth Pease (23 June 1851) The individual living in a political order … with mimetic representation need never step outside him or herself, need never see the world from an other point of view, and can therefore afford to remain a stranger in the political order. Mimetic representation stimulates the creation of a political order where nobody really encounters anybody else, because all believe that they live in a mimetic harmony with the collectivity. —F. R. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics (1996) At the end of his 1852 slave narrative, James Watkins recounts his lecture tour among abolitionist audiences in England, Ireland, and Scotland. Despite his exhausting schedule, Watkins [End Page 329] Click for larger view View full resolution "Opening of the Great Industrial Exhibition of all nations, by her most gracious majesty Queen Victoria and his royal highness Prince Albert, on the 1st of May, 1851." Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LCUSZ62–93899. [End Page 330] informs his readers, he took time out to attend the 1851 Great Exhibition of All Nations at the famed Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London (the first world's fair), with its 100,000 displays from around the world. "Oh how I wish," Watkins goes on to declare, "that all my enslaved brethren had had their freedom to see such a sight and the opportunity. I always long for my joys to be shared by them."1 It would be easy to trivialize this remark as little more than a vague regret over the slave's lack of leisure and amusement. However, during the run of the exhibition between May and October 1851, many black abolitionists, like others in the antislavery community, including William Lloyd Garrison, saw the Crystal Palace as a preeminent Victorian Era symbol of a new internationalism. Even the fugitive slaves and free men and women of color who were not granted the opportunity to visit could follow the unprecedented event closely in Frederick Douglass' Paper, which highlighted the importance of the World's Fair throughout the summer in its "Foreign Items" column."2 While nineteenth-century historians extensively parsed the fair's role in the social control of capitalist labor and in the legitimation of colonial empires,3 diasporic African Americans, either as part of their transatlantic antislavery work or labor migrations, would re-appropriate the Crystal Palace—using it as a key trope to imagine a public space of cosmopolitan subversion that would complicate ideas of representative citizenship. Bypassing the nationalistic representational logic on display in the manufactures and arts of many nations, writers such as Josiah Henson and William Wells Brown were witness to an aesthetic democracy in which what stands in for or represents the nation and its people...

Response

the program booklet for the 2009 joint meeting of the north american victorian studies association and the British association for victorian studies featured an image of The Greek Slave: there it stands, the controversial nineteenth-century statue by Hiram Powers, looking obliquely toward the conference title as if to ponder the possible readings of “Past versus Present,” and prompting us to read the relation between past and present—the “versus”—as another controversy. modeled on Greek and roman statuary, the classic repose of The Greek Slave is nakedly exposed to public view, posing in neoclassical white marble a recurring question for victorians and victorianists to contemplate. What is the appeal of this feminized, classicized figure to viewers, both then and now, and on both sides of the atlantic? this very question is addressed by elizabeth Barrett Browning as an imperative, even an admonition, to readers in her famous sonnet, “Hiram Powers’ Greek slave” (1850). standing on the threshold between the temple of “ideal beauty” and the “house of anguish,” The Greek Slave (or rather the sonnet’s reading of that figure) refuses the opposition of past “versus” present, and insists on the entry of the past into the present:

A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America

Despite its widespread popularity in antebellum America, phrenology has rarely been taken seriously as a cultural phenomenon. Charles Colbert seeks to redress this neglect by demonstrating the important contributions the theory made to artistic developments in the period. He goes on to reveal the links between the tenets of phrenology and the cultural ideals of Jacksonian democracy. As Colbert demonstrates, virtually every important figure of the American Renaissance expressed some opinion of phrenology, whether or not they embraced it. Its proponents included many artists eager to support a cause that enhanced the status of their profession by endowing the human form with extraordinary significance. Colbert reviews the careers of Hiram Powers, William Sidney Mount, Harriet Hosmer, Asher B. Durand, and Thomas Cole, among others, in light of their responses to phrenology. Powers's Greek Slave , for example, can be seen as a model of the physical and moral perfection available to those who adopted the phrenological program, a series of dictates on everything from diet to mental and physical exercise. By creating portraits, genre scenes, ideal figures, and even landscapes that embodied the theory's teachings, Colbert shows, artists endeavored to enlist their audience in a crusade that would transform the nation. Originally published in 1997. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Mind in Matter in History: Viewing The Greek Slave

Mind in Matter in History: Viewing The Greek Slave

What if Astyanax had Survived?: War, Children, and Youth

What, then, might have happened to Astyanax had he survived? He might have become a Greek slave and accepted his lot, or he might have felt loyalty and an obligation to his Trojan ancestry and organized acts of revenge. Depending on his personal characteristics and the people and the community that raised him, a number of outcomes are possible. The fact that after 3000 years we know little more than did the Homeric bards, however, gives us reason to be humble. There is evidence that each experience of loss or violence is additive and reduces coping ability. Although the psychologic disturbances of children and youth exposed to war do appear less intense than might have been expected, as Garmezy and Rutter noted in 1985, it is impossible to know the cost, the vulnerabilities that have been veiled, and what might have been. Perhaps the most remarkable thing is how some children seem able to transcend their misfortunes and even to be steeled by them. Coles has recorded how a 6-year-old, African-American girl, initiating school desegregation in New Orleans in the face of mob violence and daily threats to her life, told him that if she managed to get through with some success, she had an explanation: "It will be because there is more to me than I ever realized."

Hermeneutics of the Fable

Hermeneutics of the Fable Eva-Maria Metcalf (bio) Annabel Patterson . Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Roland Barthes once described the myth of the political Left as poverty stricken: "It does not know how to proliferate; being produced on order and for a temporarily limited prospect, it is invented with difficulty. It lacks a major faculty, that of fabulizing. Whatever it does, there remains about it something stiff and literal, a suggestion of something done to order" (Mythologies, 1957, 147-48). But political discourses have not always been devoid of fabulizing. In Fables of Power, Annabel Patterson shows that the barrenness and intentionalism of political prose was enhanced effectively in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England by the richness and poetry of the Aesopian fable canon. Patterson mainly explores the sociopolitical dimension of the fable, although she does not entirely neglect its poetics. With her methodological approach, Patterson aims to create a productive link between literary and historical research in which each benefits the other. Although it is not directly concerned with the fable's role in children's literature then or now, this study nonetheless offers the scholar of children's literature valuable historical insights into the appropriation and hermeneutics of the fable. Moreover, Patterson's treatment of the topic touches on issues of dissemination, control, manipulation, and encoding of information in popular narratives that are of equal interest to children's literature. Patterson's intentions and insights reach beyond the narrow confines of early modern England. In the introductory and concluding chapters, she traces the origins and functions of the fable from Phaedrus to La Fontaine in order to recover the impact and importance of the Aesopian tradition. Specifically, she intends to correct our underestimation of the fable's function in early modern English culture. In the first chapter, "Aesop's Life: Fathering the Fable," Patterson uses Planudes's rendition of Aesop's life as a metafable. Her analysis provides [End Page 238] the reader with a compelling introduction to the historical and contextual nature of narrative and myth making, which responds closely to social and cultural shifts in society. She asks us to read Aesop's Life as a symbolic narrative that functions as a test of civilized thought in its diverse and, at times, contradictory appropriations. Over time, we are shown, the refinement of European tastes led to a less confrontational aesthetic and a purified ethic. The concreteness of scatological humor—Bakhtin's "material bodily principle"—that existed in Planudes's Life vanished, since it was no longer in tune with the sensibilities of the time. With it disappeared the tension in Planudes's version, which is based on the crass juxtaposition of the bodily principle of scatological humor and the spiritual principle of philosophical arguments. The adaptive and purposeful rewriting of Aesop's Life reached a high point—and an aberration—in the Scottish Aesop from 1570-1571, in which Aesop appeared not as a misshapen black slave but as a "beautiful, white-gowned, white-haired and presumably white skinned" Roman of noble blood (31). Patterson takes issue with Hegel's dictum "prose starts with the slave" because of the fact that he associated the fable with the socially and artistically primitive. But the association of fable and slave proves to be significant indeed in her analysis of the Aesopian fable as a genre. Early in the book, she asks why and how a black and disfigured Greek slave's name could become tied to our Western fable canon when fables—familiar to all Greek children—predated Aesop and when Aesop himself had not collected the tales. Her answer is inspired by Joseph Jacobs—the nineteenth-century authority on fables, editor of Caxton's Aesop, and, according to Patterson, "one of the greatest deconstructors of 'Aesopus auctor'"—who stated that Aesop's "connection with the Beast-Fable originally consisted in its application to political controversy under despotic government" and that "Aesop's name was associated with the Fable because he made use of it as a political weapon" (17). Expanding on Jacobs' arguments, Patterson defines the fable as a generic medium of subversive dissent with emancipatory qualities. It thus becomes...

Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture.

When 19th century Americans looked at a statue of a nude woman in chains, or a shipwrecked mother and child, what did they see? author argues that there was a connection between the popularity of artworks such as these, which derive from a sentimental literary culture, and the rapidly changing social, economic, and political environment that was beginning to raise questions about women's nature and role in society. By exploring the once-popular genre of ideal sculpture, with its focus on female subjects and its insistence on narrative content, Kasson is able to shed light on conventional assumptions about gender roles, as well as the tensions that lay behind these beliefs. Kasson reconstructs the intellectual, aesthetic, and literary contexts in which these sculptures were viewed and traces the social history of their production and reception. She shows that sculptors and audiences repeatedly idealized women as fragile, endangered, and vulnerable. Immoral or powerful women, such as Eve, Pandora, or Medea were presented in a web of sentimental narrative that hinted at moral redemption in order to reassure viewers that woman's true nature would remain domestic and maternal. Kasson looks closely at a number of sculptures that exemplified these themes - from Hiram Powers' The Greek Slave to works by the most prominent female sculptor of the period, Harriet Hosmer.

A Greek Slave in Majorca in 1419-26: New Documents

A Greek Slave in Majorca in 1419-26: New Documents

Hiram Powers's "Greek Slave:" Emblem of Freedom

Hiram Powers's "Greek Slave:" Emblem of Freedom

The Greek Slaveby Hiram Powers: High Art as Popular Culture

Hiram Powers, a neoclassic sculptor who lived and worked in Florence, Italy, was one of the first American artists to gain an international reputation in the 19th century. His celebrity was almost entirely due to his creation of the sculpture The Creek Slave and the attendant fame and fortune she accrued. It has been said that this work of art was viewed by more people than any other in 19th-century America.

The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers: High Art as Popular Culture

The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers: High Art as Popular Culture

A Minor Poet Meets Hiram Powers

Perhaps no American sculptor of his generation won such applause as Hiram Powers. Tuckerman's enthusiasm, to be sure, is so characteristic of that generous if none too critical annalist as to weigh only lightly in the scales.1 To his plaudits we may add those of Hawthorne,2 of C. Edwards Lester,3 himself a minor sculptor, and of Henry W. Bellows.4 Lester indeed tells us that the Old World recognized Powers as worthy of standing beside Michelangelo and Thorvaldsen,5 and that Thorvaldsen, who visited Powers' studio in Florence, said “The entrance of Powers upon the field constituted an era in art.”6 To be sure, not every one shared these views. The Cosmopolitan Art Journal in 1860 found little to praise in the Greek Slave,7 but in this was out of tune with its day. Jarves also failed to share the enthusiasm of his contemporaries,8 but these dissenters were exceptions to the rule.