© COPYRIGHT

by

Sarah Hines

2017

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For Laura Elizabeth

BREAKING THE MOLD OF TRUE WOMANHOOD: EXPRESSIONS OF FEMININE

AGENCY IN THE SCULPTURAL CAREERS OF ,

EDMONIA LEWIS, AND VINNIE REAM

BY

Sarah Hines

ABSTRACT

Harriet Hosmer, , and Vinnie Ream were successful female American sculptors active during the second half of the nineteenth century. As women in a traditionally male profession, they carefully negotiated their expressions of feminine propriety and their ambitions carefully. At a time when women were expected to act only within domestic spaces, these three women operated to varying degrees in the public sphere. Although they had to conform to the expectations of their patrons and meet standards of proper feminine decorum, each woman found ways to challenge cultural norms of femininity in their professional spheres and in their work. These three women performed different aspects of ideal femininity, each using it as a tool to create a sort of façade of “True Womanhood,” which often allowed them to continue to function with greater agency, having deflected attention from behavior that was considered too masculine. Consequently, the careers of Hosmer, Lewis, and Ream occupy spaces of tension and contradiction. Their work simultaneously resisted the restrictive conventions of femininity and conformed to standards of feminine propriety.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Helen Langa, for her insight and support, and for always pushing me to improve. I would also like to thank Dr. Andrea Pearson and Dr. Kim

Butler Wingfield for their encouragement and advice, as well as their genuine interest in this project. I am thankful to Grace Fiacre for her help with editing this thesis, and whose friendship has been essential to me during this project. I am grateful to the entire faculty of the American

University Art History department for the opportunity to present part of this project at the 14th

Annual Graduate Symposium in the . I am also indebted to Dr. Renée Ater, at the

University of Maryland, who first introduced me to the remarkable artists that are the subject of this thesis and who set me on the path of studying American art, which has proved to be incredibly rewarding. I am further grateful to my parents and my sister whose love, encouragement, and confidence in me have been invaluable throughout my time at American

University. Additionally, the community at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church has provided amazing support, as well as a place of respite from the pressures of school and work, without which this project could not have been accomplished.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1 CAPTIVITY, RESISTANCE, AND FEMALE EMPOWERMENT: NARRATIVES OF WOMEN’S STRENGTH IN THE WORK OF HARRIET HOSMER ...... 7

CHAPTER 2 AND AGENCY: REPRESENTATIONS OF BLACK WOMANHOOD BY EDMONIA LEWIS ...... 26

CHAPTER 3 PUBLIC ART AND THE FEMALE SCULPTOR: VINNIE REAM’S MONUMENTS TO CIVIL WAR HEROES ...... 44

CONCLUSION ...... 62

ILLUSTRATIONS ...... 64

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 90

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Harriet Hosmer in Her Studio, n.d. engraving (clipping from an unidentified periodical), The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University...... 64

Figure 2. J.J. Hawes, Portrait of Harriet Hosmer, n.d., carte de visite, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University...... 65

Figure 3. , The Greek Slave, modeled 1841-43, carved 1846, marble, , Washington D.C...... 66

Figure 4. “The Greek Slave, by Hiram Power [sic],” Illustrated News, August 9, 1951: 185...... 67

Figure 5. Erastus Dow Palmer, The White Captive, modeled 1857-58, carved 1858-59, marble, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York...... 68

Figure 6. Harriet Hosmer, Puck, modeled 1854, carved 1856, marble, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C...... 69

Figure 7. Harriet Hosmer, Daphne, modeled 1853, carved 1854, marble, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York...... 70

Figure 8. Harriet Hosmer, Medusa, 1854, marble, Detroit Institute of Arts...... 70

Figure 9. Harriet Hosmer, Zenobia in Chains, 1861, marble, St. Louis Museum of Art...... 71

Figure 10. Harriet Hosmer, , 1856, marble, Mercantile Library, St. Louis, Missouri...... 72

Figure 11. Stefano Maderno, St. Cecelia, 1600, marble, Santa Cecelia in Trastevere, ...... 72

Figure 12. Edmonia Lewis, The Old Arrow Maker and His Daughter, modeled 1866, carved 1872, marble, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C...... 73

Figure 13. Edmonia Lewis, The Marriage of Hiawatha, 1872, marble, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo Michigan...... 73

Figure 14. Hiram Powers, The Greek Slave, carved 1866, marble, Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY...... 74

Figure 15. Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, The Morning of Liberty, 1867, marble, Art Museum...... 75

Figure 16. Edmonia Lewis, , carved 1875, marble, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Gift of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc...... 76

Figure 17. John Quincy Adams Ward, The Freedman, modeled 1863, cast 1891, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York...... 77 v

Figure 18. Thomas Ball, The Freedmen’s Memorial, 1875, bronze, Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C...... 77

Figure 19. Edmonia Lewis, The Death of , carved 1876, marble, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Gift of the Historical Society of Forest Park, Illinois...... 78

Figure 20. William Wetmore Story, Cleopatra, modeled 1858, carved 1869, marble, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York...... 79

Figure 21. Vinnie Ream at work upon her Lincoln bust which rests upon the stand she used in the while President Lincoln posed for her, c. 1865, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C...... 80

Figure 22. , Miss Vinnie Ream, 1876, Oil on Canvas, 40 x 30 in., State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia Missouri...... 81

Figure 23. George Caleb Bingham, Portrait of Vinnie Ream Hoxie with a harp, 1876, Oil on Canvas, 41 x 51 in., Wisconsin Historical Society Museum Collection...... 82

Figure 24. Roman statue of Erato, 2nd century C.E., marble, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Denmark ...... 83

Figure 25. Vinnie Ream, , 1871, marble, Capitol Building, Washington, D.C...... 84

Figure 26. Antonin Mercié, Robert E. Lee, 1890, bronze, Monument Avenue, Richmond, Virginia...... 85

Figure 27. Sarah Fisher Ames, Abraham Lincoln, 1868, marble, Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania...... 86

Figure 28. Vinnie Ream, Farragut Monument, 1881, bronze, , Washington, D.C...... 87

Figure 29. Vinnie Ream Hoxie, photos of her : at work in her studio putting finishing touches on statue of Adm. , Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C ...... 88

Figure 30. Vinnie Ream and Son, Christian College, Columbia, Missouri, Records, 1836-1986, The State Historical Society of Missouri, Manuscript Collection-Columbia...... 89

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INTRODUCTION

In mid-nineteenth century America, most women who had an interest in creating sculpture were confined to activities that could be done without stepping outside of the domestic sphere and the conventions of feminine propriety, and therefore contented themselves with small-scale items such as cameo reliefs.1 However, a small contingent of female sculptors managed to have careers as relatively successful sculptors and their work differed little from their male counterparts. Focusing on three of these women, Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908),

Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907), and Vinnie Ream (1847-1914) I analyze how gender – and in the case of Edmonia Lewis race, as well – impacted these artists’ sculptural careers. Each chapter is devoted to a single artist and explores the individual conditions of her biographical context that influenced her career, as well as the unique ways each woman reconciled her femininity with her ambition in the construction of a public persona and often in the characteristics the works themselves.2

As new possibilities for women’s public and professional roles began to open up following industrialization and the , Hosmer, Lewis, and Ream took advantage of opportunities outside the home to develop careers as professional sculptors. First they sought to get training, and eventually were able to work alongside their male peers in a community of expatriate American and British artists in Rome. famously described the group of women sculptors in Rome as a “white marmorean flock,” that had alighted on the

Seven Hills of Rome. However, James’ dismissive remark equating women with birds or sheep

1 Melissa Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), 1-11.

2 While there were several other relatively successful female sculptors active during the same period, Hosmer, Lewis, and Ream are the best remembered. Because this project analyzes the public images and the success of each artist, selecting these artists based on their popularity and enduring legacy was an essential part of my process. 1

exemplifies the barriers many female sculptors faced as they attempted to be taken seriously as professional artists.3 Such attitudes continued to be a problem for the few women in America who sought professional careers as sculptors after the Civil War.

Historian Barbara Welter defines the standards nineteenth-century women were held to as the Cult of True Womanhood, a cultural conception that defined appropriate behavior for women and girls. The premise of the Cult of True Womanhood, sometimes referred to as the

Cult of Domesticity, was based on the assumption that women’s nature was inherently different from that of men.4 This so-called Cult of True Womanhood dictated the rules of propriety to which women were held. They were expected to be pious, submissive, pure, and domestic and it was their relationships to men that defined them to society. Women were regarded as naturally more pure and pious than men, and thus were expected to be nurturers and keepers of home and faith. They were expected to shape their lives according to these gender constructs, which encouraged them to conform to ideals of submissive femininity within the confines of patriarchal society. In the newly industrialized, and increasingly commercialized, world of the nineteenth century, the home was seen as a retreat for men from the busy world and women were expected to maintain this refuge for their husbands, fathers, and older sons, and to provide a stabilizing presence against a changing way of life.5 Home was also a space where women could exercise

3 Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, vol. 1 (: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), reprinted in Sarah Burns and John Davis, American Art to 1900: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of Press, 2009), 822.

4 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2, (Summer 1966): 151-152.

5 Joy Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 3.

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their moral influence by nurturing their children and supporting their husbands. 6 Since a woman’s morality was frequently regarded as the sole source of her authority in relation to men, her perceived innocence and piety were essential.7 Literature and ladies magazines, such as

Godey’s Lady’s Book reinforced this idea and closely associated high-spirited behavior with a woman’s ruin.8 Therefore, a women behaving in a manner that did not align with the ideals of

True Womanhood risked becoming morally suspect. Although these ideals restricted women significantly, this notion of separate spheres in some cases afforded women a moral authority over men.9 Women who challenged the Cult of True Womanhood thus had to contend with the loss of some of the qualities that gave them their perceived womanly superiority in moral terms.

Those genteel women who identified as professional artists were resisting many of the ideals that the Cult of Domesticity promoted. Only a few were ambitious enough to seek careers as professional sculptors. They typically chose not to marry, and as single women had to provide for themselves financially. If they erred too far outside the gender norms, they became morally suspect and risked losing patronage. The nineteenth century was a time

6 Jan Seidler Ramierez, “The Victorian Household: Stronghold, Sanctuary, or Straight-jacket?” in Domestic Bliss: Family Life in American Painting, 1840-1910, ed. Lee M. Edwards (New York: The Hudson River Museum of Westchester, 1986), 8.

7 These standards applied primarily to white middle- and upper-class women who did not have to work outside of the home.

8 Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 162.

9 Historian Paula Baker explains that prior to women’s achievement of suffrage, women had responsibility for the domestic sphere, while men acted in the public sphere as well as having ultimate authority over their homes and families as the primary earners and the owners of property. Men were involved in government and politics, while women played the role of the nation’s nurturers, giving them authority over philanthropy and social initiatives. Baker suggests that these roles did not necessarily mean that women had less influence before they were given the right to vote, but that it was an inherently different sort of influence than men asserted. They exercised some authority over the domestic realm and drew their power from operating in this separate sphere. See Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,” The American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (June 1984), 620-647.

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when female bodies in art, and indeed women in general, were most often viewed as the bearers of meaning, not the makers of it. By entering a profession commonly associated with men, women sculptors rejected some of the stark, essentialist differentiators between men and women.

Those women who did manage to make careers as sculptors thus negotiated their feminine roles carefully, exercising their independence while maintaining a sense of decorum and propriety, in an attempt to maintain the moral authority of True Womanhood. Although gendered restrictions were less rigorous for women living in the Roman expatriate community than in the United

States, female sculptors still had to be extremely mindful that their performance of femininity had a considerable impact on their own lives and on what they could convey in their art.

For instance, although Harriet Hosmer achieved a level of professional success equal to her male peers, it is clear that she was still bound to ideals of proper womanhood. As a white middle-class American woman living and working in Rome, she adopted a distinctive performance of pseudo-domestic femininity that allowed her to be independent while simultaneously allaying anxieties that she was stepping too far outside her gender role. Harriet

Hosmer produced that on the surface conformed to the prevailing taste for images of women as disempowered victims; however, her images of women resonate differently than those by male sculptors in the same period. Chapter One primarily considers Hosmer’s sculptures

Beatrice Cenci and Zenobia in Chains and compares them to The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers, in order to understand how Hosmer conformed to convention and how she departed from it. She depicted women who were punished for willingly stepping out of their place, even as she pushed the boundaries of True Womanhood herself.

Edmonia Lewis was one of the few African American artists to find any sort of professional success in the nineteenth century. Although she also was working in Rome, Lewis’s

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patrons were almost exclusively white American abolitionists who valued her racial identity as a vehicle to express their anti-slavery ideals. Her works conform to the tastes of her patrons in representing many abolitionist themes. However, Lewis’s work also indicates that she exercised her own voice and perspective, carefully creating pieces that both suited the needs of her patrons and demonstrated a degree of autonomy. Chapter Two focuses on Lewis’s ideal neoclassical sculptures and situates them intersectionally within gendered and racial discourses surrounding

Reconstruction. The primary goal of this chapter is to explore, to the extent possible, her feminine performance, complicated by her race, and the question of her own autonomy despite the obvious constraints established by the need to conform to her patrons’ expectations, and which were influenced by Lewis’s own experiences and political views.

Vinnie Ream’s career was shaped by the changing opportunities that emerged for

American sculptors after the Civil War, finding it possible to create a professional career in the

United States. Americans commissioned commemorative sculpture in the post-war years far more frequently than they had in the previous decades, and as a result, Ream completed more commissions for monuments to male heroes of the Civil War than for decorative neoclassical works. Ream, who seems to have begun sculpting professionally primarily to gain a source of income for her family rather than out of pure artistic ambition, saw the opportunity for success in these new public commissions and pursued them, at times with great determination. For a young white woman working in this public role, the pseudo-domestic performance of femininity that had worked well for Hosmer and Lewis was not effective. Instead Ream capitalized on her feminine attributes and physical beauty to project a hyper-feminine persona that could allay anxieties about her very public role and her portrayal of male subjects as public heroes.

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These three women have been the subjects of various biographies and critical scholarship, situating their lives, careers, and artistic production within the field of nineteenth century sculpture. Earlier biographers tended to characterize these women as remarkable curiosities, aligning with how they were regarded in their own time. More recently, scholars have framed discussions of these artists within the contexts of social history and feminist scholarship.

These accounts have examined the marginalized identities of Hosmer, Lewis, and Ream, and explained how these women capitalized on opportunities for professional advancement despite the disadvantages they faced in comparison to male artists. Feminist scholars would often like to find unequivocal expressions of agency and allusions to the Women’s Rights Movement in the works of these fairly liberated women artists, but that is often not the case. Expanding upon the work of this body of scholarship, my project is equally rooted in biography, social history, and feminism in order to contextualize the careers of Hosmer, Lewis, and Ream against the notions of proper feminine decorum that were so ubiquitously expected of American women in the nineteenth century. I have chosen to focus on the most famous works by each artist: in order to effectively discuss how each one performed femininity and negotiated a career in the public sector, it was necessary to select the works that best exemplify the public persona of each artist.

By framing the discussion within the cultural values of the Cult of True Womanhood, I explore the contradictions inherent in how each of the three artists reconciled their resistance to the standards of femininity with their professional ambitions.

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CHAPTER 1

CAPTIVITY, RESISTANCE, AND FEMALE EMPOWERMENT: NARRATIVES OF

WOMEN’S STRENGTH IN THE WORK OF HARRIET HOSMER

The career of Harriet Hosmer offers an excellent example of the challenges faced by professional female sculptors. Hosmer was one of most successful female artists of the nineteenth century and is widely understood as an exceptional woman who pushed the boundaries of nineteenth-century femininity. During her career she created many ambitious and technically skilled large-scale works that established her parity with her male colleagues; however, unique considerations in her artistic choices can be discerned as she negotiated the tension between her gender and her profession.

The details of Hosmer’s biography shed light on her unconventional decision to become a professional sculptor. Examining the circumstances of her upbringing and education demonstrates that she had considerable support from progressive family and friends, which helped to foster her sense of ambition and encouraged her unusual choice to pursue sculpting professionally. Hosmer’s childhood was somewhat unique for a young woman in the nineteenth century and contributed to her choice to have a professional career. In response to the death of his wife and other children from tuberculosis, Dr. Hiram Hosmer encouraged his young daughter to live an active life with much time spent outdoors, hoping that the fresh air and exercise would guard her against illness.10 As an adolescent Harriet attended the Elizabeth Sedgwick School in

Lennox, Massachusetts, where she was introduced to other progressive women such as Frances

Ann Kemble, whom Hosmer credited with her inspiration for her decision to pursue a career as a

10 Cornelia Carr, “1830-1852,” in Harriet Hosmer: Letters and Memories, (London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1913), 1-3.

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sculptor.11 Hosmer’s chief patron throughout most of her career was Dr. Wayman Crow, a medical doctor and friend of her father’s from St. Louis, who facilitated her gaining access to anatomy lessons with Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, founder of the Missouri Medical College.

These anatomy lessons helped enable her to become a sculptor by allowing her to gain a familiarity with the human body, which was usually denied to women. These lessons provided her with the knowledge necessary to execute sculptural modeling of the human form successfully. Along with this essential support in her professional training, which enabled her to compete with male sculptors who had unproblematic access to study of the human body, Hosmer also often relied on Crow for financial support and facilitating commissions.12

As was the case for most American neoclassical sculptors, Hosmer found it necessary to travel to Rome in order to continue her study of sculpture at an advanced level. In setting up their studios in , which they viewed as a conduit to an Arcadian idyllic past, American sculptors had easy access to high-quality marble and skilled stonecutters, as well as canonical examples of Renaissance and Baroque sculpture, and classical remains, to study. Drawing inspiration from the aesthetic ideals of ancient Rome, they accessed the Vatican’s vast sculpture collection and were surrounded by classical art that informed their neoclassical practice.13 In steeping themselves in the ancient aesthetics, American sculptors entered into an imagined competition with these venerated precedents. Additionally, American expatriates interacted with

11 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 18.

12Harriet Hosmer, “Letter to Wayman Crow, Rome, January 9 1854,” in Harriet Hosmer: Letters and Memories, edited by Cornelia Carr (London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1913), 28. This passage highlights the importance of patronage for female sculptors; they were not entirely independent, but relied on the support of either family members or patrons for some of their financial support. This is important in understanding their need for conformation to expectations.

13 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 37-41.

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artists and writers from England who had also established expatriate colonies in Italy, fostering a creative community of Anglo-Americans abroad.

In Rome, where the Cult of True Womanhood was less pervasive, women did face fewer restrictions on their behavior than at home in America, and were permitted to somewhat relax the typical ideals of proper femininity.14 However, women who breached decorum did suffer serious consequences. A woman’s career could be ruined at the mere suggestion that she had taken part in an improper behavior. A female sculptor’s maintenance of her moral reputation was essential for her professional survival in Rome. One of Hosmer’s female colleagues, , suffered irreparable damage to her reputation when questions surrounding the propriety of her behavior emerged, after she was accused of having a secret romantic relationship with a man.

While Hosmer and her circle worked hard to maintain a fictive domesticity, Lander exhibited a more independent identity, which left her more exposed than her peers. As such, when she was accused of indecorous behavior she had no barrier of performed feminine propriety to shield her from such accusations. Although there seems to be no clear evidence that such a breach of decorum actually occurred, this is a good example of how heavily Hosmer and her female colleagues relied on how their community perceived them. Lander’s suspected ill morals were seen as contagious, causing other American expatriates to disassociate themselves from her.15

In a recent study of American women sculptors in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century,

Melissa Dabakis analyzes various aspects of their liminal professional situation tied to gender.

She points out that in comparison to painting, which women could do as a hobby, sculpting was seen as a profession. It required a studio and demanded significant physical engagement with the

14 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 4-5.

15 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 72-78.

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materials of art making.16 Female sculptors in Rome were very much professional artists, conducting transactions with buyers and managing teams of studio assistants. As a woman operating outside of traditional gender roles in the public eye, Hosmer became something of a curiosity in Rome. Records exist of Americans on the Grand Tour visiting her studio and regarding her with a sense of entertainment. Indeed, an undated newspaper illustration of

Hosmer at work in her studio illustrates the point that, as an exceptional woman sculptor, she is as much on display as the work of art (Figure 1).17

By blurring the line between traditional gender roles, Hosmer had to carefully negotiate her performance of femininity in order to maintain the moral authority associated with proper womanhood, while also claiming the typically masculine qualities of a successful artist. Those qualities included professional levels of skill gained from formal artistic training, to which women were typically denied access. Linda Nochlin has famously asserted that what historically prevented female artists from achieving the same recognition as their male counterparts was both the lack of access to formal training and the perception that they were not capable of artistic genius, which was a trait associated solely with men.18 Women could create art, but they were seen as decorators, rather than innovative artists capable of true artistic accomplishment.

Hosmer challenged both of these notions and stood out as a woman who was capable of competing with men. Her formal training in human anatomy through her family acquaintances was significant, allowing her first-hand experience with depicting the human body correctly,

16 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 1-11.

17 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 63.

18 Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988), 157.

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which women were typically barred from obtaining. This equal access elevated her work to the skill level of her male colleagues, forcing a reconsideration of her capacity for artistic excellence.

As noted above, one of Hosmer’s strategies for negotiating the gendered social anxieties tied to her professional identity was maintaining a semblance of domesticity in her own personal life to counterbalance her professional enterprise. She relied on this appearance of conventional femininity to shield her from any accusations of indecency that her public persona as a professional artist might invite. Hosmer lived among a community of female expatriate artists and writers, including another sculptor, , and her partner, the actress Charlotte

Cushman, forming a group that functioned as an alternative to a nuclear family. She also created a warm and inviting atmosphere in her studio and was known to refer to her works as her children, extending the metaphor of normalized femininity that she crafted for herself. 19 By maintaining a fictive domestic identity, she was able to counterbalance her professional success and convince people that she was not stepping too far outside expected feminine propriety.

Hosmer also carefully crafted her gender identity through the clothing she chose to wear. She dressed in tailored blouses, jackets, and caps, which were better suited for the physical labor of sculpting, but maintained a feminine appearance by wearing full skirts (Figure 2).20

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a close associate of Hosmer’s in Rome, recorded the following description of the sculptor in a letter to a friend. She describes the persona Hosmer projected as one more closely associated with the lifestyle of a bachelor than a young woman.

“I should mention too, Miss Hosmer... the young American sculptress, who is a great pet of mine and of Robert’s, and who emancipates the eccentric life of a perfectly ‘emancipated female’ from all shadow of blame by the purity of hers. She lives here all alone (at twenty two); dines and breakfasts at the cafes precisely as a young man would;

19 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 59-65.

20 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 74-75.

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works from six o’clock in the morning till night, as a great artist must, and this with an absence of pretension and simplicity of manners which accord rather with the childish dimples in her rosy cheeks than with her broad forehead and high aims.”21

According to Barrett Browning, Hosmer was able to negotiate the space between domestic femininity and her status as a professional artist through her moral standing, demonstrated by the

“purity” of her life despite its eccentricity. Notably, at the end of the passage she also describes one of the crucial elements of Hosmer’s performance of her gender, the child-like attributes that she adopted. Through this impishness, as it was sometimes described, Hosmer was able to deflect some of the anxiety that others had regarding her non-traditional lifestyle and performance of gender.

Dabakis notes that women also faced difficulty in maintaining a sense of artistic integrity in the eyes of the public when they employed studio assistants to rough-cut the marble forms for their sculptures. While the practice of hiring marble cutters was also widely applied by male sculptors, Hosmer often had to explain the fact that hiring assistants did not make her derivative or a pretender.22 In December 1864, Hosmer published an essay in the Atlantic Monthly, describing the process of sculpting she and her contemporaries employed. The essay was a response to accusations that she had others do her sculpting for her. She acknowledges the use of studio assistants, but makes it clear that this is not a practice unique to women. She commented:

“It is high time, in short, that the public should understand in what the sculptor’s work properly consists, and thus render less pernicious the representations of those who, either from thoughtlessness or malice, dwelling upon the fact that assistance has been employed, in certain cases, without defining the limits of that assistance, imply the guilt

21 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Letter to Mary Russell Mitford, 10 May 1854,” in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. F. G. Kenyon, Vol. 2 (New York, 1897), p. 166.

22 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 85.

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of imposture in the artists, and deprive them, and more particularly women-artists, of the credit to which, by talent or conscientious labor, they are justly entitled.”23

She makes it clear that the design was her own, and the studio assistants were merely transferring

Hosmer’s original design into marble in an exact replica of the model, just as they did for most of her male peers. The need for this defense of her artistic autonomy indicates the struggle she had, as a woman, contending with the notion that artistic genius was a uniquely male quality.24

In the shifting world of gender propriety and female ambition, it was common for artists and writers to turn to sentimental themes as a strategy to allay fears of social change and recall a time when gender roles were more strictly followed. Sculptors in particular used sentimental themes and neoclassical aesthetics to portray ideal figures in marble, a medium that was seen as both pure and enduring. By adopting a classicizing mode of representation, American artists invoked the perception of permanence that joining such an ancient tradition suggested.

However, imitating antiquity also required that Americans artists to find a way to use the nude or partially nude body as the primary vehicle through which they expressed meaning. Moreover, because of cultural constraints on the depiction of the female nude in nineteenth-century

American art, neoclassical American sculptors had to find strategies for negotiating their depiction of the human body without suggestions of overt sensuality. Thus, they commonly selected subjects that allowed them to imbue their figures with a moralizing and sentimental meaning.

23 Harriet Hosmer, “The Process of Sculpture,” Atlantic Monthly 14 (December 1864), reprinted in Sarah Burns and John Davis, American Art to 1900: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 823-824.

24Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 81-85. Hosmer, like her male colleagues, worked in clay and handed off the design to Italian stonecutters to transfer to marble. While several other female sculptors, such as , Emma Stebbins, and Edmonia Lewis carved their own marble to guard against accusations of inauthenticity, Hosmer insisted on maintaining the same studio practices as men. In 1858 Hosmer assertively claimed Zenobia in Chains as her own work. As rumors to the contrary circulated Hosmer went on the defense, insisting upon the authorial authenticity of her work.

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Neoclassical sculptors usually depicted figures from well-known narratives, typically drawn from history, the Bible, or literature. They relied on their audiences’ knowledge of these sources and situated their figures within this structure. They also expected their audiences to understand that each figure had a narrative association that implied past and future experience.

These implications determined the meaning of the work just as much as the sculpted form did.

Joy Kasson explains that the narrative subjects chosen by male sculptors often addressed underlying fears and anxieties about the changing roles of women in society, while also presenting morally sanctioned female nude bodies for male viewership.25

Hiram Powers set the standard for this type of work in 1848, when he presented

American audiences with The Greek Slave (Figure 3), the first full-length sculpture of a nude figure to be exhibited in America. Kasson attributes the enormous success of this piece to the fact that Powers provided a specific narrative context to shape the American public’s understanding of the figure. She argues that the American public accepted the nudity of this statue only because the accompanying narrative imbued the figure with a moralizing and sentimental meaning, which closely matched nineteenth-century perceptions of women’s nature as both physically weaker and yet morally superior to men.26

The pamphlets that Powers circulated characterized the woman as a Greek Christian who had been ripped away from her family and enslaved by Turks during the Greek War of

Independence (Figure 4). Powers’ story depicts the figure as transcending her captivity through her piety and Christian virtue, in spite of the fact that she is about to be sold as a slave, likely into

25 Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 76-77.

26 Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 49.

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a Turkish harem.27 Powers presented the American public with a provocative image of a nude woman in chains but managed to shift the narrative to one about a moral and pious woman who had been forcefully taken from her home and family. He portrayed the figure as simultaneously provocative and chaste; she stands exposed and chained to a post, but her downturned face supposedly indicates her modesty, while her upright stature indicates her composure, fortitude and Christian virtue. Kasson interprets this figure as a victim of lost domesticity and argues that it is was also an attempt to reinforce notions of the innately pious nature of women.28 Dabakis expands on this, postulating that the captive narrative offered a way for Victorian Americans to explore the consequences suffered by a woman who existed outside the boundaries of ideal femininity.29 The authority that male sculptors, such as Powers, allowed their female subjects was tied to the patriarchal culture of True Womanhood, posing them as innocent victims aligned with the ideals of domesticity and uplifting morality, while at the same time making them erotically appealing to the male gaze.

Americans embraced Powers’ narrative and the work became widely popular; soon other artists began making variations on the same theme. Erastus Dow Palmer created The White

Captive in 1858 (Figure 5), addressing American anxieties more directly by depicting a woman captured by Native Americans, thereby bringing the narrative closer to home.30 Kasson explains that this captive narrative played into Americans’ anxieties over the changing roles of women, reasserting the value of domesticity and masculine protection.31 Americans treated these

27 Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 50.

28 Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 73.

29 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 69.

30 Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 78.

31 Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 73-77. 15

subjects with a sentimental morality that reaffirmed their view of the world, with women and men firmly entrenched in separate spheres.

Hosmer and other American women who sought careers as sculptors faced the added challenge of how to present the female body without being either improperly sensual or self- referential. Hosmer was caught between the need for artistic professionalism, which required artists to depict the ideal human body with anatomical accuracy, and the need to maintain proper decorum, which dictated that women not be exposed to the indelicate sight of flesh. She had to contend with the inherent sensuality of marble depictions of an unclothed body, particularly in relation to women’s figures; female sculptors thus tended to seek a compromise between presenting female bodies in ways that emulated antique sculpture, while also affirming their own feminine propriety. By carefully curating her own performance of femininity, Hosmer was able to maintain an image of unquestionable propriety, which permitted her to avoid being perceived as indecorous for depicting the nude form. This allowed her to maintain her identity as a successful professional artist, while also shielding her from moral reproach.

In her early works, Hosmer at times conformed to conventional gendered motifs. Hosmer established herself as a commercially successful artist, capable of securing serious patronage through ornamental busts and conceit pieces such as Puck, sculpted in 1854 (Figure 6). Though this piece’s narrative content is relatively uncomplicated, the artistic talent obvious in the execution of the sculpture established Hosmer’s standing as a professional artist who was, at least in terms of technical execution, the equal of her male colleagues. The piece, drawn from

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, depicts the imp Puck as a mischievous putto sitting atop a toadstool, caught in the act of throwing an oversized beetle while he whimsically wears a shell on his head. This conceit piece closely aligns with what was considered appropriately

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feminine, emphasizing a decorative, rather than a narrative quality. These pieces were Hosmer’s first foray into commercial success and it is not surprising that nineteenth-century viewers readily accepted this category of works from Hosmer, since they were consistent with the contemporary view of women as decorators rather than serious artists.32

Fortunately, the sources of preferred neoclassical subjects--literature, the Bible, and history--were also considered appropriate subject matter for women. With this wide range of themes to choose from, Hosmer could carefully select the stories she wished to depict. These narratives gave sculptures a context – a past and a future to be combined with the depicted present. It is through the choices of which stories and which moments in the narrative to depict that Hosmer introduced an alternative to the captive narrative. Sculpted the same year as Puck,

Hosmer’s pendant busts Daphne (Figure 7) and Medusa (Figure 8), in contrast, represent early attempts at conveying feminine agency. Dabakis establishes that Hosmer constructed meanings that supported her interpretation of female agency by emphasizing certain details of the traditional mythic narratives while ignoring others.33 The choice to depict these two particular mythological figures as pendants can therefore be read as demonstrating Hosmer’s attempt to create a narrative of female agency. Both portray female characters that were unattainable to men. Daphne, who metamorphosed into a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s advances, represents the virtue of celibacy.34 The bust conveys a sense of composure and autonomy, as compared to

Bernini’s famous Apollo and Daphne, which represents Daphne fleeing her admirer as an object of male desire. Like Daphne, the character Medusa is one who, even more radically, resists the

32 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 59-60.

33 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 49.

34 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 49.

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male gaze. However, while most artistic representations of Medusa present a grotesque monster, having been defeated by the hero Perseus, and often only as a severed head, Hosmer treated her

Medusa with considerable sympathy. She presented Medusa as a beautiful young woman who is in the process of metamorphosing into the Gorgon. In Hosmer’s rendition, Medusa, a victim of

Athena’s wrath, occupies the role of protagonist instead of Perseus.

At the same time that she introduced these narratives of agency, Hosmer also conformed to the taste for certain conventional aspects of neoclassical portrait busts in order to appeal to potential patrons, who often purchased them as decorative objects for domestic settings. Hiram

Powers often sold bust versions of his popular full-length pieces, such as The Greek Slave,

Proserpine, and Eve Disconsolate in order to bring in additional income from patrons looking for more modestly sized pieces. Like Powers’ busts, both Daphne and Medusa feature beautiful idealized women with prominently displayed nude breasts, which traditionally sold more readily than busts with drapery.35 Thus, in order to ensure commercial success, Hosmer created sculptures that could serve as objects of the male gaze, even as she manipulated the narratives to convey female agency.

In addition to these smaller ornamental pieces, Hosmer also created several ambitious large-scale figural sculptures. Two depictions of captive women, Beatrice Cenci, sculpted in

1856 (Figure 9) and Zenobia in Chains, sculpted in 1861 (Figure 10) were loosely based on

Powers’ successful captive motif. However, Hosmer modified the theme and created a new kind of captive narrative, intended to convey female agency rather than fear and submission. Yet even while Hosmer sought to resist the narratives of demure and submissive women, she also strategically adhered to nineteenth-century gender norms in order to ensure commercial success.

35 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 61.

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This ambition resulted in the production of figures that seem to simultaneously resist and submit to male authority. Response to this kind of complex formulation could vary; patrons and viewers wishing to see only moral dignity could easily do so, but there is also a subtext of inherent female power.

Both Beatrice Cenci and Zenobia in Chains present stories that were popular in the 1850s and ‘60s, and audiences would likely have understood them within their associated narrative contexts. Beatrice Cenci depicts a young Italian noblewoman who was executed as a murderess, a story that was popularized in the nineteenth century by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Cenci’s father had raped her and she, finding no support from the papal authorities, took matters into her own hands by plotting, along with her stepmother and her brothers, to have him killed by two of the family’s vassals. Hosmer chose to depict Cenci sleeping peacefully in her cell the night before her execution, invoking a sense of serene resignation and acceptance of her sentence, due to the conviction that her crime was a justified one of self-preservation. Zenobia in Chains depicts a famous third-century, widowed Queen of Palmyra, whose story was recounted by various authors from the Roman Empire through the nineteenth century. She ruled alone after her husband’s death and led an uprising against the Roman Empire during the third century A.D., but was defeated and taken captive by the Emperor Aurelius and paraded through the streets of

Rome in chains. It is notable that Hosmer chose these two captive narratives in particular, since each focuses on women who had rebelled against male authority.

Hosmer depicts Beatrice Cenci asleep in her cell awaiting her execution for the crime of murder, safely contained within the walls of prison. Consistent with the cultural norms codified in Powers’ captive narrative, her figure expresses both moral piety and a potential erotic appeal to the male gaze; the rosary Cenci clutches signifies her piety and readiness to face heavenly

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judgment for her actions, while her garment slips down to expose her breast. However, through the implied past of the narrative, Hosmer implicitly addresses the dangers for women living in a male dominated society. Vivien Fryd argues that with Beatrice Cenci, Hosmer was implicitly criticizing the Cult of True Womanhood by demonstrating the consequences that the ideal of submission had for her subject.36 Cenci’s father, to whom the standards of ideal womanhood dictated she should submit, targeted her with sexual violence, and when she retaliated to defend her reputation and honor she was condemned to death.

Hosmer’s sculpture of Beatrice Cenci bears a striking resemblance to Maderno’s 1600 depiction of Saint Cecilia from the Church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere in Rome (Figure 11), which Hosmer almost certainly would have seen as she explored the artworks preserved in local churches. The early Baroque piece depicts the reclining body of the martyred St. Cecilia lying on a stone slab, supposedly in the position in which the saint’s preserved remains were discovered when her tomb was opened in 1599. Beatrice Cenci’s pose echoes Cecilia’s; lying on a slab of stone with her body slightly curved as her knees bend forward. They also wear similar cloth headdresses, which modestly cover their hair. The visual connection between Beatrice

Cenci and Maderno’s Saint Cecilia calls forth a sense of purity associated with the saintliness of

Cecelia’s death, but also evokes the grisly fate of beheading, which both women shared.

However Saint Cecilia is depicted after her death, bearing the mark of the axe on her neck, while

Hosmer chose to depict Cenci asleep before her execution, with her face visible. In comparison to Saint Cecilia, Beatrice Cenci depicts a figure who, though asleep, is still quite clearly, if only temporarily, full of life and who still exercises a degree of agency over her own fate, even if that control is only over her soul, rather than her body.

36 Vivien Green Fryd, “The ‘Ghosting’ of Female Relations in Harriet Hosmer’s Beatrice Cenci.” The Art Bulletin 88, no. 2 (June 2006): 303.

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With Zenobia in Chains, Hosmer presents a more explicit foil to The Greek Slave.

Zenobia stands defiantly upright, carrying her own chains in a modification of the original narrative in which her chains were so heavy that they had to be carried for her by her captors as they paraded her into Rome. This sculpture is in many respects the antithesis of The Greek

Slave. Many contemporary sources presented Zenobia as a victim of her own ambition, who stepped too far outside of her natural role as a woman, and suffered the consequences of that transgression. However, Hosmer refused to cast Zenobia only as a victim.37 Although she is a prisoner, Zenobia is shown striding forward, holding her chains as if they were simply part of the folds of her gown, and wearing a crown, symbolizing her continued queenly status. Her columnar and solid presence, and strong physicality as she advances toward captivity, suggest a defiance of authority despite her physical incarceration. While Beatrice Cenci presents the figure as an object of the male gaze, this more mature work challenges it. It is reasonable to speculate that in 1861 Hosmer was a more established sculptor, and therefore had more latitude to express herself in her work.

Anna Jameson, an early feminist scholar, wrote two books that provide accounts of influential women throughout history: Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns and The Lives of Celebrated Female Sovereigns and Illustrious Women, which include narratives of both

Zenobia and Beatrice Cenci.38 These texts can enhance our understanding of nineteenth-century

37 Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 153. Kasson cites that, according to Lydia Child, Hosmer refused to see Zenobia as a vulnerable captive, instead regarding her as a regal woman unwilling to submit to her captors.

38 Anna Jameson, Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns and Illustrious Women, (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, 1831); Anna Jameson, Lives of Celebrated Female Sovereigns and Illustrious Women, (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1870). Zenobia is discussed in both versions, but the account of Beatrice Cenci only appears in the 1870 publication. Given that Jameson and Hosmer were well acquainted, it is reasonable to assume that Hosmer might already have been familiar 21

perceptions of the two female characters. In her description of the two women, Jameson takes care to emphasize their beauty alongside their strength, which serves to maintain their femininity according to nineteenth-century standards.39

The Irish Protestant Jameson’s account of Cenci reads as an epic tragedy, with the

Papacy characterized as equally as villainous as Cenci’s abusive stepfather. However, she seems unable to decide if Beatrice was a virtuous and beautiful young woman forced into drastic action or a manipulator who incited others to carry out the crime on her behalf. Ultimately she condemned Beatrice’s crime, although she ranked it as less serious than the crimes of her father and the immorality of the Vatican in carrying out her punishment. Jameson described Zenobia first in the context of her marriage to King Odenathus, praising her for her role as an exceptional queen consort. She explained that after the death of her husband Zenobia claimed the crown for herself, as her sons were still too young to rule. She was called Queen of the East and extended the borders of her empire through military conquest. As Jameson describes, the Emperor

Aurelius objected to the idea of a female sovereign challenging the borders of his empire and laid siege to Palmyra. After finally capturing Zenobia he had her paraded through Rome as a sort of beautiful and exotic trophy alongside the material spoils of war. Jameson’s interpretation of these two narratives falls short of Hosmer’s much more sympathetic renderings. Even as she pays tribute to these women by including both in her second volume, Lives of Celebrated Female

Sovereigns and Illustrious Women, she continues to define them as wife or daughter and her accounts of the two women continue to perpetuate the victim narrative.

with the ideas Jameson communicates in the later text, regardless of the fact that her account of Beatrice Cenci was published after the completion of Hosmer’s sculpture.

39 Jameson, Lives of Celebrated Female Sovereigns and Illustrious Women, 25-36, 155-176.

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In contrast, Hosmer chose to sculpt versions of the two historical women as figures whose actions resisted traditional feminine roles. Her sculptures are not unfettered from patriarchal conventions; in the moments she depicted the women are chained or confined, and in the implied future narrative they suffer the repercussions of their actions, whether imprisonment or execution. One might view these circumstances as punishment for their actions in claiming power in a male-dominated world. However, in order for these sculpted figures of women to express any sense of agency, while still conforming to the societal expectations of gender norms, that power had to be in the figure’s past, rather than actively unfolding in the depicted scene;

Zenobia in Chains and Beatrice Cenci each, necessarily to a degree, depict a disempowered woman. For a female artist such as Hosmer to portray a woman at the height of her power would not have been acceptable, but audiences were familiar enough with the stories of both women to understand the context of agency within the narrative. And while their futures certainly imply violence, they seem less vulnerable than the viewer might expect. Perhaps this is because their captivity is a direct result of the actions they took against male authority, as opposed to The

Greek Slave, where the figure is merely a victim of circumstance.

Like The Greek Slave, both of Hosmer’s captives depict women meeting their fates with resignation and dignity, thereby transcending the emotional frailty often associated with women.

Yet their strength of conviction is arguably quite different from the quality of passive resignation emphasized in Powers’ work. Nonetheless, their actions were seen as directly contributing to their own downfall because they broke with nineteenth-century ideals of femininity. This demise can be categorized as what Gabrielle Gopinath terms the “feminine sublime.” She aligns this notion of the sublime with spirituality and morality, and argues that it is a poetic tactic used in literature and art of the period to admonish a female character for her non-normative behavior

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and to return to her to a state of moral propriety.40 By invoking values similar to those of the feminine sublime, Hosmer was able to present depictions of strong female characters while making them acceptable to a nineteenth-century audience by virtue of their present vulnerable situation. Ultimately, the female subject must be brought once again under male control and dwell once more within the confines of feminine propriety.

While American audiences accepted the narrative of The Greek Slave that Powers provided to them in his printed pamphlets, largely without question, female artists did not attempt to have the same level of control over the reception of their work. Hosmer relied on her audience having a familiarity with the source narratives, and used the framework embedded in those narratives to convey messages of feminine strength. These works represent relatively powerless women, but the way Hosmer constructed each narrative has the power to suggest a degree of agency, even while the figures exist within the confines of proper gender roles. She chose to emphasize Zenobia’s and Cenci’s dignity in the face of defeat, conveying their power despite their captivity. Additionally, by portraying women who stood up to male authority,

Hosmer was making a statement about female power. By attempting to manipulate the narrative and meaning for her works, Hosmer could imply alternate meanings that transcended normal expectations of femininity without overtly challenging gendered decorum.

Hosmer’s images of Zenobia in Chains and Beatrice Cenci present her subjects as multifaceted individuals, capable of great power, but also extremely vulnerable to male authority. These are not the one-dimensional images of women whose only attribute is their moral dignity and erotic physicality. Instead these are multifaceted women with compelling pasts and daunting futures. While men typically portrayed women as they wished them to be,

40 Gabrielle Gopinath, “Harriet Hosmer and the Feminine Sublime,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 1 (2005): 69-71.

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Hosmer depicted women as complex individuals capable of independence and strength, but also subjected to the male dominated world of the nineteenth century.

Although she achieved professional success, Hosmer herself was still bound to ideals of proper womanhood and the need to accept the dictates of decorum in order to achieve professional success; thus she did to some extent promote the very ideals of True Womanhood that she implicitly eschewed in her own life. Ironically, she depicted women who were punished for willingly stepping out of their place, even as she herself pushed the boundaries of True

Womanhood. While the assertions of female agency made by Hosmer do foreshadow the suffrage movement, they do not fully participate in it. These are individual assertions of authority, rather than claims made on behalf of all of womankind. Hosmer is quoted as stating,

“I don’t approve of bloomerism and that view of woman’s rights, but every woman should have the opportunity of cultivating her talents to the fullest extent.”41 She was not interested in full- scale reform, but certainly wished to be allowed to live her own life as she pleased. As a female sculptor relying on male patronage for financial security, the promotion of female agency had to be done subtly and within the confines of convention. Hosmer’s work reflects this tension between a desire to resist male authority and an ambition that required her to work within its confines.

41 Harriet Hosmer, “Harriet Hosmer to [?], Rome, March 1851,” in Voicing our Visions: Writings by Women Artists, ed. Mara R. Witzling (New York: Universe, 1991), 52.

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CHAPTER 2

ABOLITIONISM AND AGENCY: REPRESENTATIONS OF BLACK

WOMANHOOD BY EDMONIA LEWIS

Like Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis faced the challenge of making a career as a female sculptor and, in the process, also pushed against the dictates of the Cult of True Womanhood.

However, Lewis also faced additional professional challenges and restrictions due to her racial identity, since she was both Native American and African American. Her works reflect a unique tension between expectations associated with a person of her race and gender, and her professional ambitions. Given that there is very little extant material written by Lewis herself, it is not always possible to determine the extent to which each of these factors influenced her artistic choices. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify a unique strain between the societal conventions linked with her race and gender, and her professional ambitions, in her works, particularly within the intersectional contexts of postbellum racial tensions and nineteenth- century gender constructs. Although by the time Lewis began to sculpt the goal of emancipation had been legally achieved, the ideals of abolitionism were still relevant to artists. Americans still faced the challenge of integrating formerly enslaved individuals into a predominately white society. Edmonia Lewis’s work reflects this difficulty, particularly with respect to the position of black women in the new postbellum society.

With so few records written by the artist herself, it is often necessary to rely on critical reception; however, those accounts are necessarily complicated by the writers’ individual agendas. For example, Lydia Marie Child, one of Lewis’s most important patrons, wrote as a contemporary of Lewis with the intention of using Lewis’s work to support the cause of abolitionism. In contrast, art historian Kirsten Pai Buick has written with the intention of

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liberating Lewis from solely race-based evaluations in her recent critical biography of Lewis.42

Both of these perspectives are valuable to understanding the constraints of Lewis’s race and gender on her career. By situating Lewis within the context of the Boston abolitionist circle that served as her primary patron base, this chapter endeavors to consider the ways in which Lewis intentionally addressed the subject of race during the Reconstruction period, together with the societal standards of femininity for African American women. While her ambition required her to address subjects that appealed to white abolitionist patrons, close analysis of her work also reveals that she conveyed her own perceptions of the racial issues in America through her sculptures.

Very little is known about the details of Lewis’s childhood or the factors that prompted her to pursue a career as a sculptor. She was born in 1844, the daughter of an African American father and a part-Chippewa Indian mother.43 Both of her parents had died by the time she was nine years old, after which Edmonia and her older brother Samuel lived for several years with their maternal aunts near Niagara Falls. During this time, she helped them in their business of producing Native American crafts and souvenir items marketed to tourists – presumably her first experience with catering her artistic production to the tastes of white Americans. After Samuel reached adulthood he took over responsibility for Edmonia’s care and provided for her education while he went west to California in search of work. Although she was educated at institutions known for their inclusive enrollment policies, Lewis found that racial bias continued to have an

42 Kirsten Pai Buick, Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

43 The Chippewa people are also sometimes referred to as the Ojibwa or people. This group is native to the northern United States and , primarily in the area surrounding the Great Lakes. I use the term Chippewa here because it is more common in the United States, while Ojibwa is common in Canada.

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impact on her ability to assimilate at each school. She attended New York Central College, a

Baptist abolitionist school, from 1856 to 1858, leaving because she was considered wild, although it is unclear if this departure was her own choice or if she was compelled to leave.44 In

1859, Lewis enrolled in , the first college in the United States to admit both black and female students. It was likely at Oberlin that Lewis received her first formal artistic training.45 However she was not permitted to graduate because she was implicated in a scandal in which two female housemates, both white women, were “poisoned.”46 As a result of this accusation Lewis was beaten, arrested, and brought to trial, after which she was cleared of the charges. However, though she won the trial, her reputation was not so easily repaired and she was later accused of theft. Although she was again acquitted, she was prevented from registering for her final term of coursework.47 Clearly her cultural identity as an outsider and her association with so-called wildness, whether real or more likely invented, prevented her from fully integrating into the New York Central College or Oberlin communities, no matter how progressive they claimed to be.

Leaving Oberlin one semester shy of graduation, Lewis pursued her growing interest in sculpture in Boston, a city known for its network of abolitionists, hoping to find support for her fledgling artistic career and to restore her reputation after her troubles at Oberlin. In Boston she produced a letter of introduction from her Oberlin contacts to and thus

44 Buick, Child of the Fire, 5. The term “wild” is often associated with Lewis during this period of her life and may derive from her Chippewa name, Wildfire. Thus it is somewhat unclear if this term is entirely ascribed to her by others or if she invoked the name as a way to articulate her outsider status.

45 Buick, Child of the Fire, 6. Buick explains that in the Young Ladies’ Department at Oberlin, Lewis received training equivalent to a women’s seminary. This would have included drawing lessons.

46 According to Kirsten Pai Buick, the word “poisoned” seems to indicate simply that they consumed alcohol and spent time without a chaperone in the company of men.

47 Buick, Child of the Fire, 4-11

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gained access to the Boston abolitionist community. She began her training with the sculptor

Edward A. Brackett and during this early period Lewis worked primarily on portrait busts of prominent Boston abolitionists, including Garrison, , and Colonel Robert Gould

Shaw. Lewis relied primarily on the patronage of Boston abolitionist society for income, as they were some of the only American art patrons interested in purchasing work made by African

American artists. With their support, Lewis left for Italy in 1865 to join the expatriate circle in

Rome and continue her study of sculpture. She was met there with an environment less influenced by racial politics, and by a group of Americans who were largely sympathetic to the ideals of abolitionism.48

Although the racial tensions of the United States were not felt to the same degree in Italy,

Lewis’s career still revolved around her American patrons. As discussed in Chapter One, female sculptors usually relied a great deal on patronage to support their bids at professional careers.

While Hosmer could turn to a personal network that included family friends, such as Wayman

Crow, for financial support and patronage, Lewis relied on the good will of abolitionists who were interested in supporting talented as a vehicle to promote their cause – by demonstrating that African Americans were capable of conforming to mainstream white society. Their support of abolitionism notwithstanding they generally perceived themselves as superior to African Americans and expected Lewis to conform to their vision of proper political activism, as well as feminine propriety.

Buick discusses how Lewis’s presence in Boston and the shaping of her sculptural training were influenced by abolitionist patronage. She suggests that this abolitionist group was able to “recast [Lewis’s] public persona so that nothing remained of the debacle,” molding

48 Buick, Child of the Fire, 13-18.

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Lewis’s image to something that satisfied their goal of presenting skilled and educated black men and women to the public.49 They described her as a talented artist, but more importantly emphasized that she was a person of color in order to counter racial stereotypes of African

Americans as lazy or uneducated. They did not, however, allow Lewis control of her own public image.50 Moreover, Lydia Marie Child, an outspoken female abolitionist and one of Lewis’s chief patrons, found it necessary to provide Lewis with unsolicited aesthetic advice. She apparently felt that Lewis was naïve, on the basis of her upbringing among what she perceived as less cultured peoples, and in need of the input of a cultured, and importantly white, advisor.

Child also believed that Lewis was too ambitious, attempting projects beyond her skill level, and expressed her dissatisfaction with several of Lewis’s works.51

The few letters written by Lewis that do survive, sent to , reveal

Lewis’s dependence on this group of patrons. In the letters, Lewis expresses thanks to Mrs.

Chapman and her associates for monetary contributions and also indicates her need for her contacts in Boston to serve as brokers for the sale of her work.52 Additionally, patrons often provided funds to secure the costly marble needed for the works. Given this reliance on abolitionists for financial support and Child’s position as a self-proclaimed critic of Lewis’s

49 Buick, Child of the Fire, 12.

50 Buick, Child of the Fire, 12-17.

51 Buick, Child of the Fire, 12-15. Child spoke up against Lewis’s decision to sculpt a portrait bust of , thinking her too inexperienced to attempt the likeness of such a well-esteemed man. She also declined to promote Lewis’s Forever Free when it arrived in the United States, believing it to have been an undertaking that surpassed her skill level. Luckily for Lewis, Elizabeth Peabody, another well-known abolitionist, stepped in to defend it.

52 Edmonia Lewis to Maria Weston Chapman, February 5, 1867; May 6, 1867; and May 3, 1868, Boston Public Library Anti-Slavery Collection.

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works, it appears that Lewis was intensely aware of the necessity of catering to the tastes of her white patrons in order to achieve financial and professional success.

By maintaining an awareness of her abolitionist audience’s preferences, Lewis tailored her artistic choices to appeal to her potential buyers. There was an incentive for Lewis to depict the sorts of figures that would appeal to this specific group of patrons if she wished to achieve professional success. Although Lewis’s choice of subject matter was therefore somewhat more constrained than Hosmer’s, Lewis’s oeuvre does indicate that she put thought into her choice of subjects and chose themes that called attention to the plights of African American women. She felt compelled to depict figures that shared her ethnic identity because white abolitionist patrons perceived a sort of authenticity in an African American and Native American artist depicting images of African American and Native American subjects. According to Buick, Lewis refrained from portraying her female figures with racialized features, only using that indicator for her male figures.53 Another scholar, Albert Boime, argued that her avoidance of representing women with racialized features may also have been an attempt to elicit more sympathy for the subjects by depicting them as mixed-race or white, which would likely have resonated more strongly with white audiences.54

Lewis’s strategic catering to her patrons’ racial and gendered expectations is evident in two initial idealized sculptures, The Old Arrow Maker and his Daughter (Figure 12) and The

Marriage of Hiawatha (Figure 13), both modeled in 1866. These works were inspired by Henry

Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem , which recounted the adventures of a

53 Buick, Child of the Fire, 73.

54 Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 156. Boime quotes extensively in this chapter from a black writer named Freeman Henry Morris Murray. Murray stated, “a ‘white’ slave would attract more attention and excite far more commiseration than a black one or one less white than ‘white.’”

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Chippewa warrior, Hiawatha and his love interest, Minnehaha. It is telling that her depictions of

Chippewa figures come from literature, and do not illustrate her own experience living with her maternal aunts. She seems to have deliberately chosen to depict figures based on a work of literary fiction written by a white man for white readers. Lewis’s decision to depict Chippewa subjects through the lens of Longfellow’s text demonstrates that she was invested in making her sculptures palatable to white audiences, presenting them as white people expected them to be, not as she had truly experienced Native people during her time living with her mother’s family.

Her patrons valued the perceived authenticity that came from an artist depicting figures that matched her own racial identity, but apparently did not value true authenticity. This strategy reveals that Lewis understood what her patrons expected of her. They wished her to present works of art that simultaneously mirrored her own ethnic identity and conveyed an image of native peoples that affirmed the Anglo-American idea of what Native Americans should be, sentimentalized and non-threatening.

Given that Lewis was involved with the Boston abolitionist circle and was part African

American herself, it is not surprising that she also addressed the issue of slavery and emancipation in her work. She was not, however, the first sculptor to allude to slavery in ideal sculpture. Some audiences, primarily abolitionists, interpreted Powers’ The Greek Slave as a critique of American slavery.55 One patron went so far as to commission a version in which the chains that bind the figure’s hands have been replaced by manacles that resemble those that an

American slave would have worn (Figure 14). While most viewers were willing to overlook the problematic connection between an image of an enslaved white woman and the enslavement of people of African descent in the United States, some people did capitalize on the popularity of

55 Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 66-68.

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the work to draw attention to the issues of slavery and abolitionism. As Kasson has argued, one of the factors that made The Greek Slave resonate with the American public was the poignancy of the woman torn away from her home, her husband, and her family.56 This denial of domestic roles was a reality for enslaved women. While some enslaved women performed domestic tasks, the families they cared for were not their own. Abolitionists often made the argument that slavery tore apart families and robbed people of the moralizing effects of a nuclear family structure. As Buick argues, a benefit of emancipation to the formerly enslaved was the ability to participate in family life.57 Therefore, for African American women, domesticity was an additional facet of freedom and may have been embraced by some in the African American community, even by women seeking to exercise feminine strength.

Lewis’s Forever Free, sculpted in 1867 (Figure 15) and Hagar, sculpted in 1868 (Figure

16) directly address prominent abolitionist themes concerning the role of formerly enslaved women, though primarily through the lens of white abolitionist ideas rather than her own experience as a person of color. They also represent a shift in subject matter, from the literary- inspired Song of Hiawatha works of 1866 to something more directly related to her identity and perhaps to her political concerns. After emancipation, black women had to find ways to integrate into society. Ideally this meant conforming to the white, middle-class standards of the

Cult of True Womanhood, but formerly enslaved women faced the challenge of reconciling their survival of sexual abuses at the hands of their white masters with the requirement of purity that ideal femininity required. As literary scholar Beth Maclay Doriani argues, black women’s ability to survive abuse was seen as excluding them from the white standard of True

56 Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 55-56.

57 Buick, Child of the Fire, 55-56.

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Womanhood. Popular literary works frequently described women who succumbed to seduction with an ensuing loss of innocence and purity that resulted in the death of the frail, compromised young victim.58 This notion of frail womanhood was fundamentally incompatible with a woman’s ability to survive abuse. Additionally, feminist historian Catherine Clinton explains that sexual violence was a continuing problem during Reconstruction in the South and one that captured the attention of abolitionists. White men continued to victimize African American women, and some were subject to a greater degree of violence after emancipation, because they lacked protection under the law as they were no longer considered property that needed to be preserved. Therefore, the need for a husband to serve as protector was even more vital, not only for their respectability but also for actual safety.

All of these factors may have influenced how Lewis conceptualized the figures in

Forever Free, subtitled The Morning of Liberty, which depicts an African American couple in the imagined moment of emancipation. The man, unclothed to the waist, stands with his right hand on his female companion’s shoulder and his left hand raised to display his broken shackles in a gesture somewhere between celebration and thanksgiving. The woman is fully clothed in a long dress and kneels beside her companion with her hands clasped in front of her in a prayerful gesture. Judith Wilson notes that Forever Free was one of the first representations of emancipation by an African American artist.59 Previous representations of emancipation, such as

Thomas Ball’s Freedmen’s Memorial, commemorated the emancipator, rather than the freed slave. Forever Free, like John Quincy Adams Ward’s Freedman (Figure 17), was unique in

58 Beth Maclay Doriani, “Black Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century America: Subversion and Self- Construction in Two Women’s Autobiographies,” American Quarterly 43, no. 2 (June 1991), 204-206.

59 Judith Wilson, “Hagar’s Daughters: Social History, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-U.S. Women’s Art,” in Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists, ed. Jontyle Teresa Robinson (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1996), 99.

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providing a representation of emancipation without the presence of a white emancipator.60

Although the composition of the sculpture echoes Ball’s Freedmen’s Memorial (Figure 18) with one figure standing and one kneeling, the crucial difference between the two is that the male figure depicted in Forever Free stands upright with full dignity and authority, transforming the role of the standing Lincoln in Ball’s work, while the woman kneels in gratitude, not towards her emancipator but towards heaven.

As Buick argues, the unique situation of gender relations within the newly emancipated

African American population provides an explanation for why Lewis may have chosen to depict the woman in Forever Free as adopting a submissive stance. In the context of gender roles taken on by recently emancipated slaves, the companionship depicted between the man and the woman might actually be a signifier of the new benefits of freedom. While black women had to conform to the Cult of True Womanhood valued by white society, the domestic relationships African

American women entered into after emancipation were not seen to be quite as confining as they could be for white women. Although the female figure seems distinctly subordinate to her companion, the context of a domestic relationship may, in fact, have been an indicator of the woman’s increased agency. Rather than subjugating women to continued oppression at the hands of a slave master, marriage for a free black woman indicated both proper social status and subordination to her husband, but also a new state of empowerment in a legitimate married partnership, one in which she had authority over her own children and the protection of her husband.61 The gestures made by the figures also demonstrate the solidarity and partnership

60 Kirk Savage, “Molding Emancipation: John Quincy Adams Ward’s ‘The Freedman’ and the Meaning of the Civil War,” Art Institute of Museum Studies 27, no. 1 (2001), 31-32. Savage discusses the important point that John Quincy Adams Ward’s Freedman shows the moment of emancipation, but without the presence of a white emancipator, which gives dignity and agency to the subject.

61 Buick, Child of the Fire, 55-57.

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between man and woman.62 With emancipation men were able to reclaim the masculinity that had been denied them under slavery and they were able to assume a role as heads of their families, which allowed women to enter the domestic sphere. The figures also express pious gratitude, which aligns them with white middle-class morality. The woman falls to her knees in a position of thanks, and the man raises his hand toward heaven. This relates to the Christian subtext of abolitionism and conforms to the gender conventions of the Cult of True

Womanhood.63

Lewis’s Hagar can also be interpreted within this context of gender conventions regarding slavery and emancipation. Abolitionists would have understood the figure of Hagar as a reference to the sexual abuses enslaved women faced. The sculpture depicts the Old Testament story of Hagar, the Egyptian bondswoman who was given to Abraham by his wife Sarah in order that he might father a child although Sarah was barren. In abolitionist interpretations of the narrative, Hagar is usually coded as black because she was an Egyptian, and therefore African, slave. The sculpture depicts Hagar cast out into the wilderness by her mistress, Sarah, in an act of jealousy. Buick argues that Hagar is a reflection on the plights of enslaved women, ripped from their domestic structure, and therefore vulnerable to abuses with no husbands to protect them.64 Lewis, involved in the Boston abolitionist circle, would have been familiar with Harriet

Jacobs’s 1861 book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written By Herself. The book brought to light many of the abuses female slaves faced and modeled a woman fighting to shape her own

62 Buick, Child of the Fire, 58.

63 Ruth Bogin and Jean Fagan Yellin, “Introduction,” in Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994): 5-6.

64 Buick, Child of the Fire, 71.

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femininity.65 Lewis was not ever a slave, nor was she directly descended from slaves, so this popular account may have informed her understanding of what life for former female slaves entailed. With this additional context in mind, Hagar may also represent the very real struggle of single motherhood that freedwomen faced. Many black women experienced the sale of their partners and were never reunited; alternatively, some bore children by their white masters and so could not depend on a male partner for support, particularly after they and their children were no longer considered the property of the fathers.

The persona of female abolitionist was one that held certain contradictions. They campaigned under the motive of Christian morality and employed the argument that emancipation would restore proper gender roles, however, abolitionists were also public women with a political agenda. Ruth Bogin and Jean Fagan Yellin both describe the difficulty that black women encountered in actually gaining a voice in abolitionist circles.66 Abolitionists also called attention to the sexual violence perpetrated against enslaved women, which was considered inappropriate for respectable women to discuss.67 To address the issue of violence against black women meant that Lewis took a bold stand for their rights, but did not break with the ideals of many white female abolitionists.

In 1876, Lewis created her most ambitious work, The Death of Cleopatra (Figure 19), which departed from the established white abolitionist model of garnering sympathy for African

Americans reflected in her earlier works. Instead, Lewis’s The Death of Cleopatra makes a bolder statement. The sculpture certainly contains references to abolitionism and emancipation,

65 Doriani, “Black Womanhood,” 201-203.

66 Bogin and Yellin, “Introduction,” 10-11.

67 Bogin and Yellin, “Introduction,” 5.

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but these seem to come through more clearly in Lewis’s voice, rather than accommodating the tastes of her white patrons. Lewis depicted Cleopatra seated on a throne with the venomous asp still in her hand, as her head is tossed back indicating the moment of her self-induced death.

Like Hosmer’s Zenobia in Chains, Lewis’s The Death of Cleopatra presents a woman who willfully stepped outside of ideal gender constructs, claiming her position as a monarch and who subsequently suffered the consequences of this transgression.

Although Lewis typically tailored her works to a white audience, presenting visions of otherness that they wished to see, Lewis presents an alternative to this pattern with The Death of

Cleopatra. Although the piece was publically exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial

Exposition in 1876, a decade after the end of the Civil War, issues of racial equality were still deeply relevant as the country continued to grapple with Reconstruction, reconciliation, and integration.68 Thus, The Death of Cleopatra may reflect Lewis’s frustration with the limited success of the abolitionist model at achieving racial equality after emancipation had been realized. The story of Cleopatra, and Egyptology as a whole, was widely popular at the time, and had been employed by abolitionists to equate slaves with the descendants of the great civilization of Egypt. Nineteenth-century audiences would have understood Cleopatra’s

Egyptian identity as African, and therefore would have understood the sculpture within the context of the pursuit of racial equality.69 Although Cleopatra was descended from the

Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty, rather than of African descent, abolitionists cast Cleopatra as a black African. This association of Egypt with blackness was designed to uplift African

Americans in service of promoting racial equality.

68 Susanna W. Gold, “The Death of Cleopatra/The Birth of Freedom: Edmonia Lewis at the New World’s Fair,” Biography 35, no. 2 (Spring 2012), 321.

69 Gold, “The Death of Cleopatra,” 332-333. 38

William Wetmore Story’s popular depiction of Cleopatra (1860) adopts this strategy of connecting blackness to the greatness of the Egyptian civilization (Figure 20). He rejects the traditional imagery of Cleopatra as a femme fatale and instead presents her as restrained and stoic. However, although he acknowledges her regal status, this is not a powerful woman.

Subdued and contemplative, the figure considers her fate, in an almost melancholic mood.

Within the narrative context familiar to Victorian viewers, the sculpture depicts a moment after

Cleopatra has recognized her fate and is deliberating her demise. Critics interpreted the figure’s melancholic contemplation as reflecting on the fate of Africans as a whole, and can thus be understood in an abolitionist context.70 However, as sympathetic to African Americans as the sculpture may have been, it does present a female figure known to exert power over men brought back under male authority. Given the popularity of Story’s sculpture, its comparison to Lewis’s version was inevitable.

In contrast to Story’s contemplative figure, Lewis’s The Death of Cleopatra is formally much more dramatic. Lewis opted to depict the Egyptian queen in the moment of her death, with the venomous asp still in her hand. This reference to suicide resists any allusion to the sentimentality that Victorian audiences often associated with death as a peaceful slumber. Not only does Lewis’s version of Cleopatra craft her own fate, but she also enacts the punishment upon herself. There is drama in her death rather than stoic acceptance – a far cry from the future narrative in which she has no control over her own person. In this dramatic scene Lewis imagines Cleopatra as claiming the ultimate authority over her own body. Although the queen

70 Charmaine Nelson, “The Black Queen in the White Body: Edmonia Lewis and the Dead Queen,” in The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 149-150.

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meets her demise, Lewis emphasizes that in doing so she controls her own destiny, rather than waiting for the imprisonment and humiliation that she, like Zenobia, would otherwise face.

Lewis may have seen in Cleopatra the model of a powerful black woman who resisted male authority. In Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns (1831), Anna Jameson describes

Cleopatra as a powerful woman, using her intellect and beauty to make her own way in a world dominated by men.71 However, Jameson described Mark Antony’s wife Octavia, whom he cast aside for Cleopatra’s sake, with the language of True Womanhood, and states that Octavia protested the war that her brother Octavius waged against on her behalf.72

Facing incarceration at the hands of Octavius, Antony killed himself to avoid capture. After the suicide of Antony, Cleopatra resolved to kill herself as well, rather than submit to captivity at the hands of Octavius.73 Jameson makes it clear that the war resulting in Cleopatra’s death was the consequence of Antony’s forsaking his marriage vows to Octavia in order to be with Cleopatra.

For Lewis, as an African American woman, there was a lot at stake in depicting captivity.

Unlike Hosmer’s Zenobia in Chains, in Lewis’s The Death of Cleopatra the Egyptian queen kills herself before she could be paraded as a prisoner of war, thus denying her enemies the opportunity to dispossess her dignity. Lewis further removes the figure of Cleopatra from the status of True Womanhood, as Cleopatra has just committed suicide, and thereby cannot be brought back under proper male control as were the women shown in Hosmer’s Zenobia in

Chains and Beatrice Cenci. Lewis’s depiction of this figure who exists outside of the confines of

71 Jameson, Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), 14-25.

72 Jameson, Memoirs of Female Sovereigns, 32.

73 Jameson, Memoirs of Female Sovereigns, 40-46.

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proper gender roles contradicts the motif of women as submissive wives in Forever Free, while at the same time stressing the dire consequences of her political and sexual agency.

In this depiction, we might also view Lewis as rethinking the conventional abolitionist ideals that she had previously represented. Rather than promoting abolitionist messages, Lewis conveys a more powerful conception of the attainability of freedom for black women. With

Cleopatra’s Roman protector, Mark Antony dead, she faced indignity at the hands of her captors.

She was left with only two options, captivity or death. By choosing death on her own terms she claimed the ultimate authority over her own body, through painful suicide. However, Charmaine

Nelson associates The Death of Cleopatra with Lewis’ fears of the inevitability of continued racial oppression in America. She argues that the act of Cleopatra’s suicide indicates that freedom may only come when the soul is freed from the body.74 More specifically, Lewis responds to the realities that many enslaved women faced: continued indignity and sexual abuse.

Rather than depicting the idealistic goals of abolitionism, Lewis presents a more dramatic, but more realistic scenario demonstrating the extreme price of true freedom amidst the continued racial oppression of a failed Reconstruction.

Lewis’s work was extremely innovative in the ways in which she explored the consequences for women, particularly African American women, who did not fit the traditional model of True Womanhood. Hagar represents the objectification and sexual abuse of enslaved women who had often been viewed as both as sexual objects and as breeders, and who existed both for use by men and for the production of new generations of slaves.75 In contrast to the character of Hagar, Cleopatra is not a helpless character who was used by men. Instead, she

74 Nelson, “The Black Queen in the White Body,” 170.

75 Nelson, “The Black Queen in the White Body,” 165-166.

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ruled as Egypt’s sovereign monarch. However, both women were ineligible for the status of

True Womanhood, and unlike Hosmer, Lewis does not depict scenarios in which they have been brought back under male authority. Lewis was able to authoritatively depict these women for two reasons. First, because they were both coded as black by nineteenth-century viewers, and so were not expected to be able to fully live up to the standards of white, middle-class ideal femininity, and second because Lewis maintained unimpeachable personal morals. She did not marry, and as far as is known never had a romantic relationship; given that she was reputed to be a devout Catholic, it is reasonable to assume that she did not have any sort of sexual relationship outside of marriage.76 This important difference between the female figures Lewis depicted and her own life further allowed her to distance any autobiographical references from interpretations and criticism of her work. Her apparent celibacy provided an important barrier between her subjects and herself, which was essential to maintain an unimpeachable image of propriety, even as she sculpted women who fell outside the boundaries of the Cult of True Womanhood.

Lewis’s success and her work reflect her marginality in interesting and often contradictory ways. Her identity was one of a cultural outsider; she was a person of color, but she was neither fully African American nor fully Native American. In order to have a career as a sculptor, Edmonia Lewis had to conform to her white abolitionist patrons’ expectations. Her career was in some ways an extension of their cause, an instrument through which they could express their ideals. Much of her work suggests that she was deeply interested in conforming to the tastes of her patrons, who valued her racial identity as a vehicle to express their abolitionist ideals. However, Lewis’s work also indicates that she exercised her own voice and perspective,

76 Buick, Child of the Fire, 25-27. Buick discusses Lewis’s Catholic faith as additional aspect of her identity, which made her somewhat of an outsider in the Protestant-dominated United States. However, in Rome her Catholic identity was one factor that helped her to escape some of the restrictions on her race and gender that she had encountered in the United States. 42

carefully creating pieces that both suited the needs of her patrons and demonstrated a degree of autonomy. She called attention to the plights of African American women, and with Forever

Free depicted the African American man as an empowered protector. She strategically maintained distance from her work, in order to avoid having her own biography associated too closely with the figures she depicted. This distance was necessary for her to maintain her status as a professional sculptor. That Edmonia Lewis was able to establish a career as an internationally recognized sculptor at all is remarkable. This success demonstrates that Lewis, despite the limitations imposed on her by virtue of her gender and her racial identity, was not only a skilled artist but also a shrewd businesswoman who understood that it was necessary to cater to the raced and gendered conventions expected by her patrons and viewers.

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CHAPTER 3

PUBLIC ART AND THE FEMALE SCULPTOR: VINNIE REAM’S

MONUMENTS TO CIVIL WAR HEROES

The career of sculptor Vinnie Ream was profoundly shaped by Americans’ desire to commemorate the Civil War through public art.77 Following the war, Americans struggled to find ways to recover from the deeply divisive conflict, and from the shock of the unprecedented assassination of an American president. Public sculpture quickly emerged as an effective strategy for promulgating public memory of the conflict, in an attempt to find a collective emotional resolution to the pain of civil war. Given this commemorative impulse, which was robust in the nation’s capital, some sculptors found it beneficial to establish their studios in

Washington D.C., rather than in Italy. Thus, unlike Hosmer and Lewis, Ream was able to sustain a career in the United States.

For Ream, working in this public role, the pseudo-domestic performance of femininity that had worked effectively for Hosmer and Lewis was not well suited to her situation. Although

Ream’s work itself was no more innovative than that of her contemporaries, she developed unique strategies for negotiating a professional career as a woman in a field dominated by men, in ways that were unconventional and helped her attract attention and renown. Although Ream achieved recognition and notoriety for her progressive performance of femininity, she created rather conventional pieces that conformed to standard tastes for neoclassical sculpture. Her ideal works fit closely within the model established by male artists such as William Wetmore Story, while her commemorative works achieve accurate likenesses of their well-known subjects. While

77 The name Vinnie is short for Lavinia. Ream used this nickname because she shared a first name with her mother. Ream seems to have used this diminutive form almost exclusively through her professional career. Although modern readers may tend to associate this moniker with the male name Vincent, nineteenth century audiences are not likely to have experienced similar confusion.

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Hosmer and Lewis channeled their expressions of agency through their artwork, Ream communicated autonomy through her own public image.

She unapologetically participated in the public sphere, even getting involved in

Washington, D.C. politics in order to secure her commissions. She made little pretense at participating in the proper behaviors associated with the Cult of True Womanhood. Instead, as

Dabakis has observed, she embodied the spirit of the emerging Women’s Rights Movement.78

Nonetheless, at the same time, she fashioned her public image to fit some aspects of femininity and worked to reshape the discourse of the masculine artist in order to allow space for her own identity as a woman. However, she was not pious, pure, or submissive. Instead, she capitalized on her physical beauty, her diminutive stature, and her artistic charms to project a hyper- feminine persona when interacting with men, in an apparent strategy for allaying their anxieties about her active role in the public sphere. Rather than deflecting attention from her gender as

Hosmer and Lewis had done, Ream embodied feminine charm and sensuality, while at the same time campaigning for her own promotion in the public sphere of politics.79 This gendered behavior was a successful tactic that Ream employed to deflect suspicion of her working in a distinctly masculine sphere.

An understanding of Vinnie Ream’s origins is essential to situating the development of her career. She was born in 1847 in Madison, Wisconsin and lived for the first several years of her life in the relatively unsettled border states, where despite the uncertain life of the frontier

Ream was encouraged to develop her artistic and musical talents. She attended Christian

78 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 182. It is important to note, however, that Vinnie Ream did not actually embrace the women’s suffrage movement. While some in the movement were eager to champion her, others attacked Ream for being narcissistic and self-promoting.

79 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 189.

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College in Columbia, Missouri, where she received a traditional education for women of the period, though Ream specifically focused on art and music. Although people suggested that someone with Ream’s talent should be encouraged to study art in Europe, her family could not afford to send her abroad and in 1861 she settled with her family in Washington, D.C. The situation of the Reams’ limited financial means is crucial to understanding the shaping of Vinnie

Ream’s career. Although Ream often relied on her social connections to advocate on her behalf or to supply opportunities, her approach to sculpture was as a professional method of providing income. At first, due to her family’s stretched finances, she and her sister began working outside the home in positions newly open to women due to the labor shortage caused by the Civil War.

Since the war had opened civil service jobs to women, Ream was able to secure a position with the United States Postal Service in order to supplement her family’s income.80 In addition to working as a postal clerk, she also served as a nurse during the Civil War.81 Her work outside the home prompted Ream to be independent and she learned to build her career on her own merits and her own connections.

Ream also used her beauty and charm to move within ranks of society more genteel and more influential than her own. She benefitted from building this network of personal connections. She befriended Major James S. Rollins, the U.S. Representative for Missouri’s

Ninth District, where Christian College was located, and in 1863, Rollins introduced Ream to

Clark Mills, the renowned D.C. sculptor best known for his equestrian statue of .

Rollins invited Ream to sit for a portrait bust by Mills, an experience that Ream described as the

80 Edward S. Cooper, Vinnie Ream: An American Sculptor (Chicago: Chicago First Review Press: 2009): 3.

81 Glenn V. Sherwood, A Labor of Love: The Life & Art of Vinnie Ream (Hygiene, Colorado: SunShine Press Publications): 1-17.

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initial impetus for her desire to learn sculpting.82 She claimed that this first encounter in a sculptor’s studio immediately compelled her to take up the practice of sculpture, and apparently she found instant gratification and evidence of a natural skill when she herself tried this form of art. She reported, “As soon as I saw the sculptor handle the clay, I felt at once that I, too, could model and, taking the clay, in a few hours I produced a medallion of an Indian chief's head, which so pleased the Major that he carried it away and placed it on his desk in the House of

Representatives.”83 Ream quickly became an apprentice to Mills, training in his studio in the afternoon after her work at the Post Office was complete. In Mills’ studio she attracted the attention of many important politicians in Washington, D.C., who viewed her as something of a curiosity – given the combination of her female identity, her attractive and lively manner, and her apparently prodigious skill at sculpting. In 1866 she left her position at the Post Office and became a full-time, professional sculptor.

Because Ream’s career was primarily based in Washington, D.C., rather than in Italy, the political climate during the Civil War and the Reconstruction period influenced her oeuvre and her strategies for negotiating femininity more directly than it did Hosmer’s or Lewis’s career choices. She interacted directly with politicians in the capital city and forged a network of influential contacts, among these the men who made decisions regarding the recipients of government arts commissions. Additionally, Ream did not shy away from promoting herself and

82 Sherwood, Labor of Love, 18. Clark Mills’ statue of Andrew Jackson (1852) stands in Lafayette Park directly in front of the White House. It is famous for being the first bronze sculpture cast entirely in the United States.

83 Vinnie Ream Hoxie, “Lincoln and Farragut,” The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman's Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U. S. A., 1893, edited by Mary Kavanaugh Oldham (Chicago, Ill: Monarch Book Company, 1894): 603.

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campaigning for the results she wanted.84 It seems likely that her direct involvement with these decision makers helped her to win commissions over more experienced and well-known sculptors. However, this lobbyist persona also made her a public figure, and thus subjected her to criticism, since women were not conventionally involved in public life.

Ream strategically emphasized her skills in more traditionally feminine artistic traditions as part of a public image that enabled her to be accepted as a female sculptor. By highlighting her involvement with art forms that were considered appropriate for women, Ream encouraged the public to regard her as a model of feminine artistic virtue. She was well regarded for her musical talents, which she had cultivated as a young girl at Christian College and she became popular among Washington, D.C. society for her skill at music composition and poetry. These talents helped to align Ream’s artistic endeavors with feminine grace and virtue, which enabled her to expand her artistic practice to sculpture in a way that appeared appropriately feminine. In an essay entitled “Vinnie Ream’s Musical Life” an unknown author described music as, “her recreation from the sterner art of sculpture....”85 By drawing attention to these musical and poetic talents, Ream pushed the rhetoric on her art-making toward something that was feminine and graceful, and which her skill at sculpture simply expanded upon. Admirers commented on her youth, beauty, and aesthetic abilities, making her the subject of a number of laudatory poems and songs. Interestingly, the word genius appears often in these poems, which is an unusual term to be applied to a woman at that time.86 However, an ode entitled “Birth of a Genius Child,”

84 Anita Miller, “Introduction,” in Edward S. Cooper, Vinnie Ream: An American Sculptor (Chicago: Chicago First Review Press: 2009): ix.

85 “Vinnie Ream’s Musical Life,” Box 5, Vinnie Ream and R.L. Hoxie Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

86 Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” 153-156.

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hints that Ream’s genius may have been the result of divine inspiration rather than her own merit.

“But a spirit called from out the air, and whispered to the sleeper there; With voice as sweet as Sappho’s tune, ‘Sleeper make me slumber more Thy days of dream must now be o’er For Genius claims thee for her own.’” 87

Casting Ream as the recipient of this divine gift helped to situate her within the tradition of feminine creativity.

As Dabakis notes, Ream also made use of the rising popularity of photography as a tool for her self-promotion.88 She engaged in a vigorous publicity campaign to market herself and her image. She sold photographs of herself in order to boost prospective patrons’ familiarity with her work and as noted above, she used her social connections to build a network of supporters.89 In 1865, shortly after her entry into the profession of sculpture, Ream circulated cartes de visite of herself posed in the studio with her bust of Lincoln (Figure 21).90 The photograph depicts Ream standing next to the completed plaster bust, looking directly out at the viewer. The bust dwarfs her petite form and her femininity is emphasized through her long curls

87 S.W., “Birth of a Genius Child,” Box 5, Vinnie Ream and R.L. Hoxie Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

88 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 187.

89 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors. 187

90 Ream’s mentor, Clark Mills, had some skill at promoting a positive public image for himself. He successfully took credit for the casting of his statue of Andrew Jackson, the first bronze sculpture to be fully cast in the United States, although the Prussian foundryman Carl Ludwig Richter provided the majority of the expertise for the project. For further information see John Phillip Colletta, “’The Workman of C. Mills’: Carl Ludwig Richter and the Statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Park,” Washington History 23 (2011): 2-35.

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and full-length gown, over which she wears a knee-length smock that is cinched at the waist to emphasize her feminine figure.

Two portraits of Ream, painted by George Caleb Bingham, both dated 1876, exemplify this public image that Ream crafted for herself. The first portrait recreates Ream’s early carte de visite displaying herself and the bust of Lincoln (Figure 22). In this portrait, the feminine shape of her smock is accentuated and its white fabric takes on a luster that seems too fine to be merely a protective layer worn in the studio. Additionally, Bingham depicted Ream as looking older than in the original carte de visite, perhaps to lend her an air of authority that comes with experience and maturity. The second portrait depicts Ream wearing a toga-like white gown and sitting at a harp, which she was known to play (Figure 23). Although the painting does have a basis in reality, the image casts Ream in the type of a classical muse – perhaps Erato, the muse of

Love Poetry – which would seem to align with the body of poetry that admirers dedicated to

Ream (Figure 24). By invoking the idea of a muse, Bingham aligned Ream simultaneously with art and femininity.

Ream’s cultivation of an appropriate feminine public persona was crucial for her ability to obtain commissions for important public monuments. As noted above, there was a great postbellum demand for sculpture to publically commemorate the heroes of the conflict and government commissions were lucrative. As such monuments became increasingly popular, their subjects expanded beyond images of elite individuals to include more democratic subjects.91 This increase in accessibility of commemoration allowed monuments to serve as

91 Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 4-5. Savage explains that the cultural changes that resulted from the Civil War prompted a revision of the role of commemorative sculpture. Whereas before the Civil War public commemoration was reserved only for governing elites or military heroes, Savage attributes the need for closure after the traumatic conflict with the popularization of public commemoration, including common man memorials.

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vessels for public memory; as a result the commissions for memorial sculpture shifted from the private sector to the public. Public philanthropic committees and state and local governments became the organizations responsible for commissioning sculpture and the process for awarding commissions became more democratic as well. Competitions were held to decide which sculptor would create a particular monument. This merit-based system of awards opened up the opportunity for women to submit their designs, although often they had to campaign to prove the superiority of their submissions despite their gender.92

In 1866 Congress commissioned a sculpture of Lincoln to commemorate the venerated, recently deceased president in the Rotunda of the Capitol Building (Figure 25). Although nineteen artists, including Harriet Hosmer and Ream’s mentor Clark Mills entered the competition, Ream had the advantage of having already created a portrait bust of President

Lincoln, which was modeled from life. At that time, regular citizens had much more direct access to the President of the United States. Ream is reported to have persistently petitioned

Lincoln in person at the White House in order to secure the opportunity for a portrait study sitting.93 Only three years after beginning to sculpt, Ream became the youngest artist (at age eighteen) and first woman to be awarded a United States government commission. She pursued such public commissions with the help of her social and professional network in Washington,

D.C. For instance, the contacts she made in Congress through her friendship with Rollins and her apprenticeship to Mills undoubtedly helped her secure this first commission.94

92 Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 5.

93 Sherwood, Labor of Love, 23.

94 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 187.

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As Kirk Savage explains, the competition for the commission to complete the official sculpture of Lincoln proposed by Congress was deeply political and reflected regional interests.95

Ream campaigned within Congress for the commission and benefitted from the support of

Congressman Thaddeus Stevens who proposed the project be awarded to her, based on the merit of her close likeness of Lincoln. However, Senator Charles Sumner opposed awarding the commission to her on the grounds of her lack of experience, and instead supported William

Wetmore Story. Other Congress members valued Ream’s origins in the Midwest, suggesting that this gave her an air of self-taught skill and the youthful energy of the frontier. Indeed, this western origin story aligned Ream with Lincoln himself. Inundated with requests from artists to create his likeness, Lincoln had at first been hesitant to grant her request for a sitting, but Ream’s humble means were reportedly what convinced him to allow her to sculpt her original portrait bust.96 Despite the initial award of the commission, Ream faced scrutiny for her political maneuvers and public status and had to continually work to maintain a decorous public image.97

Just as she sought to exploit conventional feminine roles in her public performance, she also took a very conventional and traditionally patriarchal approach to depicting Lincoln as an important

American hero. The document in his right hand implies Lincoln’s role as the celebrated emancipator, paired with the statue’s serious contemplative expression, aligns Ream’s depiction with the popular imagination of Abraham Lincoln.

Although Ream became known for producing this official sculptural likeness of Lincoln, her political affiliations were not fixed. Capitalizing on her fluid political and regional identity,

95 Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 81-83.

96 Cooper, Vinnie Ream, 17-19.

97 Melissa Dabakis, “Sculpting Lincoln: Vinnie Ream, Sarah Fisher Ames, and the Equal Rights Movement,” American Art 22, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 86-89.

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she pursued opportunities in the South as well, including the commission for a monument to

General Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia. Savage asserts that Ream “won the 1877 competition by producing an exacting likeness of Lee (the model does not survive) and by mobilizing a network of Southern congressmen to lobby on her behalf.”98 However, Ream’s success in manipulating the political system to her benefit met a barrier in the form a philanthropic women’s committee that participated in the commissioning process, and cost her the commission for the Lee monument. This women’s group hoped that the monument would convey transcendent aesthetic qualities, not simply the likeness of Lee. Because Ream participated in the political process of lobbying for the commission this ladies’ group considered her incapable of achieving the lofty morality they sought.99 Although the governor of Virginia,

James Kemper, sponsored the official commission, the ladies’ committee had considerable influence over the selection process. The women on this committee were from elite Southern families and derived their influence from their claim to be authorities on culture and gentility.

The committee firmly believed that the memorial needed to exemplify the moral virtue that many

Southerners saw in the memory of Lee. Although Ream’s model recreated an excellent likeness of the general, the ladies’ committee saw her involvement in the political sphere as something that disassociated her from the status of True Womanhood and thereby disqualified her from the ability to sculpt the noble memorial they had in mind.100 Instead, the commission went to a

French artist, Antonin Mercié (Figure 26).

98 Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 145.

99 Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 145.

100 Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 138-147.

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Ream’s particular blend of professionalism and femininity was at odds with the gender conventions that were typically associated with commemorative sculpture. These conventions associated men with the technical processes of commissioning and implementing monumental works of public art, while women influenced taste and culture. Those who advocated on behalf of Ream saw in her that which they valued in their national identity – hard work that could transform humble origins into success and prosperity. Those who criticized Ream saw a lobbyist who manipulated those in power with her charm and beauty.101 While women were allowed a traditional role in commemorative projects as members of the committees that commissioned sculpture, Ream took on the traditionally masculine role of sculpting the actual work, which was seen as a challenge to the customary limitations on women’s public activities.102 According to

Paula Baker’s analysis of the relationship of American women to politics prior to women’s achievement of suffrage, the notion of separate spheres actually provided women with relative authority over the domestic and socio-cultural realms.103 While men acted in the public sphere, women played the role of the nation’s nurturers, giving them prominent voices in the contexts of philanthropy and social initiatives. Baker suggests that these roles did not necessarily mean women had less influence before they were given the right to vote, but that it was an inherently different sort of influence than men asserted.104 Ream’s involvement with the implementation of commemorative sculpture challenged this notion of separate spheres and may have been perceived as threatening the role that women traditionally played in the commemorative process.

101 Gregory Tomso, “Lincoln’s “Unfathomable Sorrow”: Vinnie Ream, Sculptural Realism, and the Cultural Work of Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century America,” European Journal of American Studies 6, no. 2 (2011): 1.

102 Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 135-150.

103 Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society,” 620-647.

104 Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society,” 622–625.

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The career of Sarah Fisher Ames offers the perfect example of a female sculptor who, unlike Ream, approached her sculptural practice with a strict adherence to notions of ideal womanhood. Ames was part of the elite social class and thus was not reliant on her sculptural production for income. She and Ream both sculpted portrait busts of Lincoln (Figure 27); however, she did not approach sculpting as a profession. Instead, she used the money earned from the sale of her work to benefit charity, thereby distancing herself from the commercial aspect of her practice. Dabakis notes that Ames’s intent was to create affordable plaster busts that would allow as many Americans as possible to purchase their own image of Lincoln, and she intended to donate the proceeds for the care of the orphans of Civil War soldiers.105 Ames’ alignment of her work with charity and domestic commemoration encouraged critics to praise her for the tenderness and sentimentality with which she depicted Lincoln, allowing her to maintain a foothold firmly in the sphere of womanliness and work within the dictated system of gender norms. Ream, in contrast to Ames, became a sculptor in order to provide her family with financial support and her career was motivated by her need for commercial success. This resulted in Ream becoming a public figure who was actively involved in the political sphere in order to pursue lucrative commissions, while Ames was able to restrict her sculpting enterprise to the sphere of proper womanhood.

However, Ream’s emphasis on cultural ideals of graceful femininity, which she emphasized in constructing her professional persona, helped to modify criticism of her ambition.

She described the experience of modeling the statue of Lincoln in her studio in the Capitol

Building under the observation of prominent statesmen thus: “Only for their sympathetic kindness, I would never have had the heart to take up and carry on the work, which was

105 Dabakis, “Sculpting Lincoln,” 82.

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herculean for my fragile shoulders.”106 In her 1929 article “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” psychoanalyst Joan Riviére recorded her observations of how professional women working in academia in the 1920s negotiated their interactions with male colleagues, and this provides a useful framework for analyzing Ream’s expression of her femininity. Riviére explains that the women in question needed to do everything normally required of a socially-proper domestic woman, while at the same time performing professional functions at least as well as their male counterparts. However, she also describes them as apologetic, compensating for their capability with expressions of exaggerated femininity and acts of deference to their male colleagues. She suggests that the masquerade of femininity was uniquely targeted at men.107 Ream’s flattery of men and her self-deprecation indicate that she was behaving in a similar manner in order to ensure that she was not perceived by the men around her as overly threatening or too masculine.

Her success, particularly while working on a government commission in the most political public space in the nation, relied on her counterbalancing her ambition with a satisfactory performance of femininity.

In 1873, Ream once again pursued a prestigious government commission; the project to create a memorial to the Civil War naval hero, Admiral David Farragut, in Washington, D.C.

(Figure 28). Ruth Bohan gives a detailed account of the creation of Ream’s Farragut

Monument, explaining that again the competition for the commission, overseen by Congress, was highly politicized. In order to secure the commission Ream had to once again work within the capital’s system of political connections. When the original competition held to decide the recipient of the commission did not result in a clear winner, Ream ultimately had to lobby for the

106 Ream Hoxie, “Lincoln and Farragut,” 605.

107 Joan Riviére, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929): 303- 313.

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award. This lobbying effort made her an even more public figure and thus subjected her again to negative criticism – especially since, as a woman, she was not supposed to be actively involved in public life. Ultimately, her persistent pursuit of the commission and personal friendships with

General William T. Sherman and Mrs. Farragut won her the project.108

As Bohan explains, once Ream commenced modeling she seemed determined not to let her gender affect the quality of her work. Like her male professional peers, she started the project by studying the nude form, to establish the correct underlying framework for a realistic depiction of the clothed form. The practice of a woman artist studying the male body was viewed as outside of the realm of proper femininity at the time, but Ream seems to have done so without great incident, although other prominent female sculptors, including , faced difficulties securing commissions to sculpt men. Whitney entered and won the 1875 contest to select the artist who would commemorate Senator Charles Sumner in the Capitol

Building. The contest was blinded and Whitney won on the merit of her model’s likeness to the

Senator, but when her identity was revealed, the selection committee rescinded the award, as it was not thought appropriate for a woman to sculpt a man’s body.109 Eleanor Tufts, in an article on this issue, emphasizes how female artists working in the nineteenth century were highly discouraged from studying even female nude bodies and she explains that this Victorian aversion to a woman sculpting a man, particularly his legs, disqualified Whitney from gaining the official commission.

108 Ruth L. Bohan, “The Farragut Monument: A Decade of Art and Politics, 1871-1881,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C., 49 (1973/1974): 209-231.

109 Eleanor Tufts, “An American Victorian Dilemma, 1875: Should a Woman Be Allowed to Sculpt a Man?” Art Journal 51, vol. 1 (Spring 1992): 51-54.

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The specifics of Ream’s work with live models are unknown and it remains unclear how she gained license to work from the nude when so many female sculptors before her had found this proscription to be one of their biggest obstacles. However, it seems that the practice was publically known, because Ream’s justification for her use of nude models is recorded. When a reporter visiting her studio remarked on her use of nude models, she reportedly responded by saying, “The Lord modeled a good many people in the nude.’” Reportedly, the remark was widely quoted.110 Later in her career Ream elaborated on her practice of sculpting from nude studies, stating, “to have a correct conception of the human figure is the great essential in sculpture... For each statue I have given two years of study and work to the completion of the nude figure in every detail before putting on the drapery....” She further defended this practice by claiming, “the nude figure may be chaste and classic – the draped figure may be refined or vulgar.”111 This justification of sculpting from the nude by claiming chastity and classicism shows Ream’s ability to skillfully manipulate the rhetoric of sculptural practice in order to suit her purposes; she was able to maintain a sense of decorum, even as she pushed the limits of what was traditionally considered appropriately feminine.

Ream also appears to have cleverly manipulated social conceptions of the sculptor as artist to align more closely with her own female identity. She seems to have succeeded by convincing the public that women were well suited to sculpting, conceiving of it as a lofty calling. Speaking to the International Council of Women in 1909, Ream delivered an address titled, “The Field of Sculpture for Women” in which she stated:

110 Sherwood, A Labor of Love, 30. The statue was of Ream’s brother, Bob Ream’s wife Anna, who was of Chickasaw heritage.

111 Vinnie Ream Hoxie, “The Field of Sculpture for Women,” Box 5, Vinnie Ream and R.L. Hoxie Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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“It is eminently a field for women; no one has ever questioned that the eyes are as true, the thoughts as noble, the touch as delicate as with men, and the field of sculpture is unlimited – that meadow of delight is full of flowers to be plucked; the harvest promises to be great and the workers are few; but sculptors must be born, not made.”112

She also emphasized the need for a sculptor to have natural talent, thus validating her place in the profession as someone who had achieved initial success with very little formal training because of her innate abilities. Ream also described her role in creating commemorative public works in a sentimental way, speaking of the satisfaction brought to her by Mrs. Farragut’s approval of her sculpture of the Admiral, stating, “And this was my best reward – my work had reached her heart.”113 By aligning commemoration with such an idealistic sentiment honoring familial memory, Ream brought sculpture closer to the domestic sphere of emotional care, and thus to qualities associated with feminine virtue.

Ream likewise defended the place of women in the field of sculpture, arguing, “It has been urged against sculpture for women that it may alienate them from their homes and their home duties. Not at all – every beautiful thought is developed and every noble inspiration makes home and dear ones dearer, the home more artistic, the hearth brighter. Women have at last burst their bonds.”114 By making this idealistic statement, Ream both shifted the rhetoric of commemoration from the celebration of military heroism to sentimentality and elevated the emotional qualities of sculpture to align with the supposed moral superiority of the female sex.

Through these strategies, she effectively legitimized her ability as a woman to create official monuments to either political or military heroes.

112 Ream Hoxie, “The Field of Sculpture for Women.”

113 Ream Hoxie, “The Field of Sculpture for Women.”

114 Ream Hoxie, “The Field of Sculpture for Women.”

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Ream continued to emphasize her essential qualities of demure womanhood as she worked on the Farragut Monument. A photograph of her working on a plaster model of the

Farragut sculpture in her studio emphasizes the grand scale of the project and juxtaposes it against Ream’s diminutive form, made smaller by her crouched position (Figure 29). Her seemingly incongruous presence beside this massive figure must have amused viewers and helped to promote her status as a charming curiosity.

Another significant element in Ream’s professional success was her ability to convince patrons that she was the appropriate channel through which to commemorate American heroes of the Civil War. Born in one of the Western Border States and a woman, Ream was viewed as representing the entrance of those on the margins into the dialogue of national identity for the first time. Ream also benefitted from advances in the Women’s Rights Movement, which opened up opportunities for women’s professionalism, including their ability to have a career outside of the home. However, her personal views did not always closely align with the mainstream Women’s Rights Movement. According to Dabakis, she was both championed by and vilified by supporters of women’s suffrage and had to largely forge her own individual path.115 Women who saw the power of the supposed moral superiority of womanhood attacked

Ream for abandoning the virtues of ideal femininity, while champions of women’s suffrage held her up as a model of independent womanhood.

There was, therefore, a tension within the identity that Ream projected to the public through images of herself, discussion of her practice, and the reality of her actions. While on the surface Ream’s persona conformed to ideals of femininity and grace, this façade was designed to deflect attention from her activity in the public sphere. Eventually, her professional goals were

115 Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 188.

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reshaped when she married Lieutenant Richard Hoxie in 1878, and her sculptural practice took a back seat to the responsibilities of a wife and later a mother. She only returned to sculpture late in her life. Perhaps this withdrawal was shaped by the encouragement of her husband to devote more of her attention to the demands of their household, or perhaps it stemmed in part from a diminished ability to perform the same sort of hyper-femininity that had been successful in garnering the support of influential men, due to her marital status. After her marriage she did, however, continue with her musical pursuits, which aligned more closely with proper matronly ideals. A photograph of Ream sitting at a harp with her young son at her feet exemplifies her continued interest in promoting an artistic persona (Figure 30). Sculpture, however, required too much of a public presence for Ream to maintain her professional career with the decorum expected of a respectable married woman. Ultimately, her successful career relied on the same principles as Hosmer’s and Lewis’s did, based on a shrewd understanding of her audience and the tailoring of her performance of femininity to meet public expectations.

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CONCLUSION

This thesis examined the careers of Hosmer, Lewis, and Ream in order to analyze how they negotiated marginalized identities and professional ambitions in their personas and in their works. It evaluated their differing strategies for finding the necessary balance between the two that allowed them to achieve success despite their unconventional lives and professional pursuits.

It also explored the contradictions inherent in these women’s professional ambitions and their resistance to contemporary concepts of ideal womanhood. These two aspirations were often at odds, and in order to achieve financial success, they had to create works that would meet their patrons’ expectations of ideal femininity, and for Lewis her race as well. In order to reconcile the seeming incompatibility between these two concepts, each of these artists found ways to circumvent and resist the standards of submissive femininity quite subtly, in order to avoid suspicion as a woman operating in a masculine sphere.

These three sculptors have been of interest to feminist scholars, who have studied the biographies and oeuvres of Hosmer, Lewis, and Ream as remarkable examples of women working alongside men in the nineteenth century. At the outset of this project I expected to find clear indicators of alignment with the Women’s Rights Movement and expressions of resistance to the Cult of True Womanhood; however, ironically, I found that quite often these three women avoided publically aligning themselves with contemporary views affirming women’s rights.

While scholars have aligned these artists with the Women’s Rights Movement, noting their unusual independence and their activity within the traditionally masculine profession, this thesis takes a deeper look at the tensions inherent in their positions. I have addressed how the expectations of their patrons and audiences required these women to adhere strategically to conventions that may have run counter to their personal beliefs. This ambition required them to maintain façades of feminine decorum, although their pursuit of success itself was outside the 62

model of True Womanhood. There is ample room for further research, particularly with regard to the public reception of the works of art discussed here, and teasing out with greater precision the complex and potentially conflicting ways in which the gendered and racial identities of the artists impacted audience views of their art in terms of reception. By examining the careers of

Hosmer, Lewis, and Ream within the context of the strategies they employed to navigate limitations imposed upon them by nineteenth-century gender constructs, I hope to bring the remarkable nature of their achievements into clearer focus, while also underscoring the often contradictory nature of female agency in the nineteenth century.

63 ILLUSTRATIONS

Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations for this thesis are only available in the hard copy version that is on file in the Visual Resources Center in the Katzen Arts Center at American

University.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival Materials

Boston Public Library, Anti-Slavery Collection, Boston, MA.

Vinnie Ream and R.L. Hoxie Papers. Manuscript Division. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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Tufts, Eleanor. “An American Victorian Dilemma, 1875: Should a Women Be Allowed to Sculpt a Man?” Art Journal 51, no 1 (Spring 1992): 51-56.

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