Exhibiting Slavery in Hiram Powers's Greek Slave, Uncle
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TRANSATLANTIC TECHNOLOGIES OF NATIONALISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: EXHIBITING SLAVERY IN HIRAM POWERS’S GREEK SLAVE, UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, PUDD’NHEAD WILSON, AND KING LEOPOLD’S SOLILOQUY by JOY CLAIRE BRACEWELL (Under the Direction of Tricia Lootens) ABSTRACT In the nineteenth-century, world’s fairs offered scenes of mass spectacle in which the utopian possibilities of technological advances and empire seemed to promise limitless national progress; the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London marked the beginning of this trend and the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago was another important instance. At the same time that Great Britain and the United States hosted their respective displays of cultural and technical power, the issue of abolition largely became a way to celebrate the moral capital of each nation. This dissertation examines how representations of slavery intersected discourses of national progress in key artistic and literary texts that were produced in conjunction with these exhibitions. I argue that, while these exhibitions formed narrow definitions of who and what might be deemed “British” or “American,” the media encircling them provide significant sites from which to understand how visual technologies played a mediatory role between the formation of mass culture and the display of enslaved persons. The circulation of Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave and illustrated editions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin at mid-century emphasized the contradictions and convergences among the currents of reformism, elitism, and middle-class formation in relation to abolitionism in the print culture of Great Britain and the United States. Two months after the Columbian Exposition, the publication of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson in the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine offered a surprisingly nuanced treatment of racial relations in the post-Reconstruction transatlantic publishing market. In 1895, the appearance of E. J. Glave’s diary entries in the Century accentuated how narratives of technological and post-abolition progress provided a background from which to elide the significance of the atrocities in the Congo, a trend that Mark Twain “exploded” by indulging in extreme spectacle and sensation for his 1905 exposé, King Leopold’s Soliloquy. In charting the display of enslaved persons in crucial media and print productions in the latter half of the nineteenth century, this dissertation considers how these texts interacted with the world’s fairs with which they had close connections, and how they resisted, integrated, and sometimes generated new technologies of nationalism. INDEX WORDS: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Columbian Exposition, Great Exhibition, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Illustrations, Mark Twain, Mass Culture, Middle Class, Nationalism, Periodicals, Photography, Reformism, Technology, Transatlantic, Slavery, Victorian, Visual Culture, Whiteness TRANSATLANTIC TECHNOLOGIES OF NATIONALISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: EXHIBITING SLAVERY IN HIRAM POWERS’S GREEK SLAVE, UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, PUDD’NHEAD WILSON, AND KING LEOPOLD’S SOLILOQUY by JOY CLAIRE BRACEWELL B.A., University of Georgia, 1999 M.A., University of Tennessee, 2002 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 Joy Claire Bracewell All Rights Reserved TRANSATLANTIC TECHNOLOGIES OF NATIONALISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: EXHIBITING SLAVERY IN HIRAM POWERS’S GREEK SLAVE, UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, PUDD’NHEAD WILSON, AND KING LEOPOLD’S SOLILOQUY by JOY CLAIRE BRACEWELL Major Professor: Tricia Lootens Committee: Doug Anderson Richard Menke Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2012 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My heartfelt thanks go to Tricia Lootens for her informed and sympathetic insight throughout this process; she is an inspiration to me both as a person and a scholar. Also, to Doug Anderson and Richard Menke, my sincere appreciation for their patience, knowledge, and guidance. I am grateful for the opportunities to travel to conferences, conduct research, and otherwise expand my vision provided by the English Department and the University of Georgia. I thank my parents, Ron and Judy Bracewell, for their help in every way imaginable. In addition, I have benefited from the kindness and reassuring presence of my “in-town” brother and sister-in-law, Mark and Charity Bracewell, as well as the “telescopic” support of Nathan and Tara Bracewell. I am also indebted to the wonderful friends who have helped me pick myself up and dust myself off many times along the way. It makes me glad to know of the many ways that people I have met and people I hope to meet acknowledge their limitations and their powers, and try to do what they can. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................... iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................1 2 “MAN’S CRIMES IN DIFFERENT LANDS”: THE TRANSATLANTIC DISPLAY OF HIRAM POWERS’S GREEK SLAVE...............................19 3 “IN A LIVING DRAMATIC REALITY”: PICTURING SLAVERY IN BRITISH EDITIONS OF UNCLE TOM’S CABIN ...................................59 4 DETECTING RACE AFTER TRANSATLANTIC EMANICPATION: TECHNOLOGIES OF ENSLAVEMENT IN PUDD’NHEAD WILSON.96 5 SENSATIONALIZING THE UNSPEAKABLE: EVIDENCING ATROCITY IN THE CONGO FREE STATE .............................................................132 6 CODA............................................................................................................168 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................181 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Remembering numerous issues of Punch in which Abraham Lincoln was caricatured and both the North and the South were derided, Henry James wrote in 1883 that a reader seeking American “types” would find them most frequently portrayed in the three-penny weekly from 1861-65, “in which, during the long, weary years of the War, the primitive pencil of Mr. Tenniel contributed, at the expense of the American physiognomy, to the gayety of nations” (60).1 In this passage acknowledging the high cost of the Civil War, James’s language shows the currency of the idea that the body, and especially the head and face, could express inner states or carry the signs of national character; James’s comments also emphasize the lasting mental impact of representations of the “national physiognomy.” On May 6, 1865, however, three weeks after Lincoln was assassinated, the tenor of coverage about the conflict in the periodical had changed abruptly. Punch ran a cartoon by John Tenniel that drew on the highly charged iconography of nationalism and slavery to depict a scene of British solidarity with the American people, ennobling the cause of the Civil War.2 “Britannia Sympathises with Columbia” pictures the two nations mourning the death of the president, while an unshackled slave sits in sorrow on the ground at the foot of Lincoln’s body. Unlike previous depictions of Lincoln in Punch, in this image the President’s “grotesque” appearance is veiled. Both of the “national” female figures participate fully in the ritualistic trope of the deathbed scene, gathering closely around the 2 deceased. Bent in anguish and bereft of her customary symbolic accoutrements, Columbia leans over the head of the laid-out corpse, while helmeted Britannia lays a wreath on the body. Like the formerly enslaved figure, Columbia yields to the load of grief, while Britannia stands tall, serving the function of an idealized, perfected emblem of dignified sovereignty. By honoring such a tragic loss, no doubt this image provided a “sympathetic” and refreshing reminder of Anglo-American bonds. Yet this scene also displayed the highly charged exchanges between expressions of patriotism, especially in transatlantic alliances, and representations of slavery in the latter half of the nineteenth century. While movingly rendering the grief of the formerly enslaved, the composition marginalizes the black figure in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture. Against this figure, the two manifestations of each country function within the allegorical semiotics picturing women as embodiments of abstract principles, encoding the sanctity of the nation within a femininity of neoclassical whiteness.3 In a sense, the illustration reasserts the imagery of slavery to form a transatlantic alliance by updating the familiar visual abolitionist rhetoric of the eighteenth century Wedgwood emblem of a kneeling slave with the inscription, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” “Britannia Sympathises with Columbia” shows the “rebirth” of the United States into a new moment of nationalism in which the United States could join with Great Britain in claiming the moral capital of abolitionism. Within the pages of Punch, this Tenniel creation emphasizes the convergence of illustrated modes with narratives of post-abolition nation-building—upon the subjected blackness of the slave. 3 Transatlantic subjects were often featured in Punch, and as James’s recollections demonstrate, the periodical was also disseminated across the Atlantic, along with the consumerist fare of capitalism.4 New transportation technologies and improvements in printing led to the escalating insertion of images into the texts that nineteenth-century readers