Victorian Women Poets

Classics for Victorians: Response Yopie Prins (bio) The program booklet for the 2009 joint meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association and the British Association for Victorian Studies featured an image of The Greek Slave: there it stands, the controversial nineteenth-century statue by Hiram Powers, looking obliquely toward the conference title as if to ponder the possible readings of "Past Versus Present," and prompting us to read the relation between past and present—the "versus"—as another controversy. Modeled on Greek and Roman statuary, the classic repose of The Greek Slave is nakedly exposed to public view, posing in neoclassical white marble a recurring question for Victorians and Victorianists to contemplate. What is the appeal of this feminized, classicized figure to viewers, both then and now, and on both sides of the Atlantic? This very question is addressed by Elizabeth Barrett Browning as an imperative, even an admonition, to readers in her famous sonnet, "Hiram Powers' Greek Slave" (1850). Standing on the threshold between the temple of "Ideal beauty" and the "house of anguish," The Greek Slave (or rather the sonnet's reading of that figure) refuses the opposition of past "versus" present, and insists on the entry of the past into the present: They say Ideal beauty cannot enter The house of anguish. On the threshold stands An alien image with enshackled hands, Called the Greek slave! As if the artist meant her (That passionless perfection which he lent her, Shadowed, not darkened, where the sill expands) To so confront man's crimes in different lands With man's ideal sense; pierce to the center Art's fiery finger; and break up erelong The serfdom of this world! Appeal, fair stone, From God's pure heights of beauty, against man's wrong! Catch up, in thy divine face, not alone East griefs, but West; and strike and shame the strong, [End Page 52] By thunders of white silence, overthrown. (1–14) In response to what "they say"—an aestheticized view of a classical ideal often attributed to Victorian classicism—Barrett Browning suggests a more radical reading of "that passionless perfection" to reveal "the serfdom of this world." Between "that" and "this" world, between the ideal and the real, between antiquity and modernity, The Greek Slave is represented in the sonnet to confront us in the present tense. Although the statue is passively "called the Greek slave," here it is actively called upon to point "art's fiery finger" at viewers and at readers: "Appeal, fair stone." Through this rhetorical apostrophe, the sonnet animates a motionless (and seemingly emotionless) figure in order to mobilize a passionate response. The double meaning of "fair" turns an aesthetic into an ethical appeal "against man's wrong," exposing the unfair suffering of slaves everywhere, "not alone East griefs, but West." Thus the "alien image" of a Greek Christian woman enslaved by Turkish Muslims is made into a familiar figure within nineteenth-century abolitionist debates, as Barrett Browning invokes the statue's "thunders of white silence" to break the silence of its white viewers. Of course the controversy of The Greek Slave was (and is) precisely the appeal of, and to, its whiteness. Like so many other poems of the period, Barrett Browning's sonnet is responding not only to the statue itself but to other responses in Victorian England and America, where, as art historian Charmaine Nelson points out, "it was not just the subject and its imaginary and social contexts that were racialized, but the very practice of viewing itself" (111–12).1 The statue caused a sensation when it was first exhibited in London in 1845, and again at the Great Exhibition in 1851, where Barrett Browning was among the many thousands (including Queen Victoria herself) to see it in the central nave of the Crystal Palace. During a previous visit to Hiram Powers in 1847, Barrett Browning had already encountered The Greek Slave in his Italian studio, and later she wrote in his visitors' book: "It takes a soul / to move a body; it takes a high-souled man / To move the masses."2 But exactly how the bodies and souls of the masses were to be moved by...

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

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

Contents: Introduction, John Stokes 'A daughter of today': the socialist-feminist intellectual as woman of letters, Lyn Pykett Fictions of engagement: Eleanor Marx, biographical space, Carolyn Steedman Revisiting Edward Aveling, William Greenslade Eleanor Marx and Henrik Ibsen, Sally Ledger Eleanor Marx and Shakespeare, Gail Marshall Eleanor Marx and Gustave Flaubert, Faith Evans The genders of socialism: Eleanor Marx and Oscar Wilde, Ruth Robbins Socialist feminism and sexual instinct: Eleanor Marx and Amy Levy, Emma Francis 'Is this friendship?': Eleanor Marx, Margaret Harkness and the idea of socialist community, Lynne Hapgood A moment of being: Miss Marx, Miss Pater, 'Miss Ambient', Laurel Brake Radical voices: Eleanor Marx and Victoria Woodhull, Bridget Bennett 'Tantalising glimpses': the intersecting lives of Eleanor Marx and Mathilde Blind, Simon Avery Index.