! THE CULTURE OF EKPHRASIS IN AMERICA’S AGE OF PRINT, 1830-1880 by Christa Holm Vogelius A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirments for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in The University of Michigan 2012 Doctoral Committee: Professor Kerry C. Larson, Chair Professor Sara B. Blair Professor Julie Ellison Professor Yopie Prins ! © Christa Holm Vogelius 2012 ! ! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The members of my dissertation committee offered sustaining support and productively varied perspectives to the directions of this project. Thanks to Sara Blair, for her insights on visuality and the broader field into which art writing enters; Julie Ellison for her willingness to push my ideas and think creatively about drafts even at their roughest; and Yopie Prins, for her ability to draw out the strengths and suggest what this project could be in its ideal form. My deepest thanks go to Kerry Larson, who saw this dissertation through from its earliest stages, and offered throughout that combination of academic rigor, critical example, and unflagging support that every student hopes for from an advisor. I am indebted to many people and institutions at the University of Michigan and beyond. Rackham Graduate School at the English Department at the University of Michigan provided essential funding and support. The American Antiquarian Society and the University of Nottingham provided generous grants for travel and study. Eliza Richards at the University of North Carolina and Mary Lou Kete the University of Vermont, who on their brief visits to Ann Arbor listened to some iteration of this project, offered their insights and the example of their scholarship. John Fagg and Robin Vandome at the University of Nottingham read and commented on sections of my third chapter in ways that have helped me to think about its future forms. Members of the Visual Culture Workshop at U of M provided helpful feedback on an early draft of my first chapter. Gigi Barnhill and the staff at American Antiquarian Society offered books, coffee and archival thrills at a CHAViC summer seminar whose lessons continue to resonate. Anita Isreal of the Longfellow Historical Site went well beyond the call of duty in her generosity with her time, expertise and resources. Thanks also to the assistance of the staff at the University of Michigan Libraries, the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library and the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Family and the most familial of friends have been a continuous source of support. Thanks to Kirsten, Michael, Esben, Kristin and Margrethe for their frank and thoroughly Scandinavian brand of sanity. The histories and present lives of Edith Vogelius and Inger and Ove Schwartz are a constant source of inspiration. The Jackson clan has added an exuberance all its own to my life. And finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Korey Jackson, my own ideal reader, critic and friend. ""! ! ! TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..............................................................................................ii ABSTRACT…………..………………………………………………………………..…v CHAPTER INTRODUCTION: EKPHRASIS IN AN AGE OF PRINT…………………..1 Ekphrastic Theory and Its Others…………………………………………9 The Perfect and the Imperfect Copy……………………………………..13 Scenes of Ekphrasis……………………………………………………...20 ONE: LYDIA SIGOURNEY’S DIDACTIC EKPHRASIS........…………….25 Introduction………………………………………………………………25 Disciplinary Intimacy and Sigourney’s Domestic Education……………38 The Familiar and Familial Image………………………………………...44 The Reproduced Image…………………………………………………..63 TWO: “FOLDED UP IN A VEIL”: SOPHIA PEABODY HAWTHORNE’S FAMILIAL EKPHRASIS AND THE ANTEBELLUM TRAVELOGUE...81 Introduction………………………………………………………………81 Women’s Travel Writing and Its Baggage………………………………86 The Art of the Travelogue……………………………………………….93 Mr. E.’s “Reflective” Muse…………………………………………….100 Sophia’s Familial Ekphrasis……………………………………………109 Conclusion……………………………………………………………...117 THREE: LONGFELLOW, MICHAEL ANGELO, AND THE “MIDDLE- CLASS” CURATOR………………………………………………………….120 Introduction……………………………………………………………..120 Longfellow at Home……………………………………………………127 The Poetry of Collection ……………………………………………….135 Collecting Michelangelo………………………………..………………146 Michael Angelo’s Open Collection……………………………………..153 Longfellow in Pieces……………………………………………………164 """! ! FOUR: “GAZE ON”: OSGOOD, POE, AND THE VISUALIZATION OF ANTEBELLUM AUTHORSHIP………………………………………….....183 Introduction……………………………………………………………..183 Pygmalion’s “Golden Age”…………………………………………….191 Early Osgood and the Networks of Print……………………………….194 The “Osgood-Poe Affair”.……………………………………………...203 Pygmalion’s Retrospective……………………………………………..217 EPILOGUE…………..………………………………………………..………232 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………237 "#! ! ABSTRACT The Culture of Ekphrasis in America's Age of Print, 1830-1880 by Christa Holm Vogelius Chair: Kerry C. Larson This dissertation examines the verbal representation of the visual arts in poetry, prose and nonfiction works throughout the expansion of nineteenth-century print publishing. The advancement of print technologies after the 1830s meant that engravings—in books, in magazines, and as freestanding prints—were increasingly accessible to middle-class consumers. In turn, genres of writing that worked to describe, critique and expound on these visual images also proliferated, in forms including travelogues, lyrics, verse drama, and art criticism. But the literary description of artwork did more than supplement imagery: it directly confronted developing ideas of authorship in the age of print. This dissertation highlights understudied ekphrastic works by popular nineteenth-century writers, arguing that this genre of art description provides unique insight into authorship and audience in an era of expanding literary production. Each of the four chapters locates a specific scene in the cultural history of ekphrasis, using archival and print sources to show the central role that art description played in defining shifting literary relationships during this period. Precisely at the moment that the falling costs of image reproduction reduce the pragmatic function of art description, ekphrasis proliferated to reflect on the new modes of reading that these technologies allowed. Lydia Sigourney’s ekphrastic lyrics, including “The Last Supper”(1834) and “Power’s Statue of the Greek Slave”(1854), stress the close bonds between author and reader, and use imitation as a key term in the relation between artwork, author and audience. Sophia Hawthorne’s travelogue Notes in England and Italy (1869) balances art and family description to maintain a distinction between Hawthorne’s personal and authorial personae. Henry Longfellow’s posthumously published Michaelangelo: A Fragment (1883) shows the author’s eclectic (and publicly accessible) home art collection as a model for an inclusive literary mode. And Edgar Allan Poe and Fanny #! ! Osgood’s exchange of works around the Pygmalion myth trace Osgood’s gradual retreat from familiar intimacy with her readers. Through these principal works, this dissertation locates often-overlooked popular ekphrasis as essential to defining nineteenth-century relations between authors and audiences. #"! ! Introduction Ekphrasis in an Age of Print In Rome, people with fine sympathetic natures stand up and weep in front of the celebrated ‘Beatrice Cenci the Day before her Execution.’ It shows what a label can do. If they did not know the picture, they would inspect it unmoved, and say, ‘Young girl with hay fever, young girl with her head in a bag’ -Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883 (314). Guido Reni’s portrait of Beatrice Cenci, a simple, shadowed image of an adolescent girl looking back at the viewer over her shoulder, was one of the nineteenth- century’s most popular subjects for ekphrasis, the literary description of a visual work of art.1 It inspired, among many other responses, a play by Percy Shelley and pivotal narrative moments in novels by Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In this sense, Mark Twain’s dig at the sentimental labeling of the work also speaks to these ekphrastic representations, which by the 1880s had become cultural touchstones. Twain, in suggesting that the unmediated Cenci portrait is only improperly legible to the casual viewer, hits on the apprehension surrounding the growing presence of mute and ambiguous images in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, an apprehension to which ekphrasis as a genre was a partial response. The first part of the nineteenth century was, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 This definition of the term ekphrasis (from ek-phrassein, “to speak out, tell”) includes prose and verse responses to traditional art objects including painting, sculpture and prints (Scott 1). $! ! as Henry James writes, “the age in which an image had, before anything else, to tell a story”— but as the inscrutably bleary-eyed Cenci portrait suggests, the image sometimes failed (2: 76). Textual labels in the form of ekphrasis as well as other art writing could correct the interpretive instability of the image by providing a narrative context, however out-of-proportion to the facts of the image. In spite of the focus on the museum in much criticism of nineteenth and twentieth-century ekphrasis, the context for Twain’s sense of the image as reliant on text can be found most clearly in the American periodical, where the Cenci portrait and many others like it lived a parallel existence.2 Print culture in the early part of the nineteenth