AMBIVALENT STATES: ANGLO-AMERICAN EXPATRIATES IN ITALY FROM 1848 TO 1892 by MOLLIE ELIZABETH BARNES (Under the Direction of Tricia Lootens) ABSTRACT This dissertation studies Anglo-American expatriates who address, or pointedly don’t address, the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy. I argue that the ambivalence writers associate with Italy is important, not just because it upends allegiances normally understood as simply republican or as simply anti-republican, but also because it challenges the ways we read the mood of the period and the ways we define emerging nation-states. I frame the dissertation with Margaret Fuller, who argues that this mid-century moment forced her to reconcile seemingly incompatible allegiances to “Art” and to the “the state of the race” or “the state of the people.” Anglo-American Italophiles were, in fact, often overwhelmed by ambivalence in the wake of the mid-century revolutions; and expatriate writers often realized allegiances to politics and to aesthetics, to republicans and to anti-republicans. I trace Anglo-American expatriates in three cities (Rome, Florence, and Venice) and across two generations (1848–1870 and 1871–1892), and I divide the dissertation into three diptychs: chapters one and two are about Rome; chapters three and four are about Florence; and chapters five and six are about Venice. The first half of each diptych shows how mid-century writers weren’t defined by unequivocal republicanism or unequivocal anti-republicanism but by a much more elusive disposition: politicoaesthetic ambivalence. I argue that this ambivalence intensifies in the years just following the unification of the peninsula. The second half of each diptych shows how the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy became a mythology. Yet expatriate writers often demonstrate the ways that Italy resists an arcadian mythology and the ways the Risorgimento didn’t lead—inevitably—to the Unification of Italy. While this dissertation studies Italy specifically, it also studies the ways that Italy upended Anglo-American expatriates’ ideas about nations and nationalisms. By the turn of the century, many writers were still haunted by mid-century histories, historiographies, and the ongoing fragility defining the peninsula. Italy became, then, a nerve center for renderings of statehood, nationhood, and civic belonging; this nexus for the patriotic imaginary inspired writers to place politics, aesthetics, and often misguided humanitarian desires in unexpected conversation with one another. INDEX WORDS: 1848, Italy, Grand Tour, Risorgimento, Unification, Expatriatism, Transatlanticism, Transnationalism, Ambivalence, Aesthetics, Politics, Nineteenth-Century Travelogues, Nineteenth-Century Letters, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Casa Guidi Windows, George Eliot, Middlemarch, Margaret Fuller, Dispatches, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, Henry James, The Princess Casamassima, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Vanitas: Polite Stories, “The Legend of Madame Krasinska,” Effie Ruskin, Effie in Venice, John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice AMBIVALENT STATES: ANGLO-AMERICAN EXPATRIATES IN ITALY FROM 1848 TO 1892 by MOLLIE ELIZABETH BARNES BA, Agnes Scott College, 2006 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2012 © 2012 Mollie Elizabeth Barnes All Rights Reserved AMBIVALENT STATES: ANGLO-AMERICAN EXPATRIATES IN ITALY FROM 1848 TO 1892 by MOLLIE ELIZABETH BARNES Major Professor: Tricia Lootens Committee: Roxanne Eberle Richard Menke Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2012 iv DEDICATION for my mom and my dad, Barbara and Dale Barnes, and for my sister, Hannah Barnes v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are countless teachers between the pages of this dissertation, and their intellectual generosity has made each word in each sentence possible for me to write. I am grateful to every single one of them. My most heartfelt thanks belong to Tricia Lootens, my major professor, whose kindness, graciousness, and unwavering commitment to good work have sustained me. I am grateful to Professor Lootens for prodding me at just the right moments in just the right ways, while always granting me a real sense of liberty with this dissertation. Professor Lootens has changed the ways I read, and the ways I make that reading matter. She brings Margaret Fuller’s and George Eliot’s beautiful words to life for me, and I am thankful to have had her as my mentor these last six years. In her ever-gentle ways, she has helped me to articulate why I love what I love so much. Above all, I thank her for instilling in me a faith—and then at crucial moments a renewed faith—in research as meaningful work. I know that I couldn’t have finished this degree—and, perhaps much more importantly, I couldn’t have enjoyed the process of finishing this degree—without her. I feel grateful to have had the support of the nineteenth-century trifecta at the University of Georgia. I want to thank Roxanne Eberle and Richard Menke for their constancy as teachers, as readers, and as advocates. I am grateful to Professor Eberle for talking with me about the nuances of writers as various as Felicia Hemans and Effie Ruskin, for helping me to envision the shapes of chapters in their infancies, and for embodying the kind of warm professionalism that I strive toward. I am grateful to Professor Menke for reminding me to bask in the details (both literary and literary historical) that make close reading a pleasure, for granting me the chance to vi learn how to teach in his classroom, and for reminding me to cherry pick so that I’d always be writing what I most wanted to be writing. I am fortunate to have had Kris Boudreau’s enduring mentorship and friendship over the last six years: she helped me to feel at home in Athens, Georgia; and even from Worcester, Massachusetts, she has helped me to realize who I want to be in my professional life. Michelle Ballif, Barbara McCaskill, and Sujata Iyengar have been important professional role models, and I am grateful to them for helping me to be part of their vibrant intellectual communities. I will always think of Agnes Scott College as my intellectual and my spiritual home away from home. I’d like to thank Charlotte Artese; Steve Guthrie; Linda Hubert; Peggy Thompson; and especially Christine Cozzens, who believed in me as a student and as a tutor and as a literary pilgrim, and who always saw that I was a Victorianist at heart; Rachel Trousdale, who introduced me to George Eliot and who taught me to read ecstatically; Willie Tolliver, Jr., who introduced me to Henry James and who taught me that the meaning of life is in novels as much as it is in the cells and in the molecules I was studying in those pre-medicine classes. Professor Tolliver is the inspiration for this dissertation in many ways, not only because he taught me about the complexities of patriotism and of expatriatism in my first college literature class, but also because he taught me to be exacting with my work. I strive to become for my students what these professors at Agnes Scott College and at the University of Georgia continue to be for me. I’d also like to thank some of my friends from my Decatur years and from my Athens years and beyond: Julia Charles for being one of my oldest and dearest friends, and for helping me spell myself out, long after our days as third-floor-Winship, main-floor-McCain-Library compatriots; Nicole Camastra for her strength and for her wit over countless breakfasts, dinners, and trips to the farmers market; and Amber Shaw for being the very best reader and the very best vii friend I have had these last six years, for being the only person who will ever send me text messages in the voice of Hyacinth Robinson, and for teaching me grace at moments when gracelessness would have been easier. Little Ruby Chanticleer, the sweetest cat in Georgia, has kept my lap warm, my books and papers ruffled just right, and my sense of humor in check. Above all, I am thankful to my mom, to my dad, and to my sister: my most faithful teachers and the most important people in my life. I want to thank my dad, who taught me what it means to work on papers, and my mom, who taught me what it means to read books about people, just people. Thank you for teaching me to do my best work night after night at the kitchen table; for showing me the world beyond California and Iowa and Georgia; and for making sure I would be able to have and to love this education, long before I knew where I would find myself. For Hannah I feel a kind of infinite gratitude I can hardly begin to measure, even in the language shared only between sisters: hundreds and thousands and millions of chocolate salmon will never do. I love you all—first—most—best—and always. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION Ambivalent Politics, Ambivalent Aesthetics, and Risorgimento Grand Narratives............1 CHAPTER 1 Rome, 1848–1870 “Intervals between Two Breaths”: Crises of Repose from Fuller to Hawthorne........31 2 Rome, 1871–1892 “Experiments in Time”: the Risorgimento, the Unification of Italy, and Present Tenses in Middlemarch ...............................................................................................95 3 Florence, 1848–1870 Meaningful “Discrepancies”: Twofold Exposition in Casa Guidi Windows