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Original Copy: Ekphrasis, Gender, and the National Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Literature . By Christa Holm Vogelius

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This thought-provoking book presents a compelling account of the theoretical matrices surrounding copying and originality in literary productions of the 19th-century United States. More specifically, it proposes to examine literature that appears in relation to the concept of ekphrasis, that, as it points out, has not typically been attached to forms of feminine writing or writings by people of color. In traditional terms, the ways that literature incorporates visual forms stands in for a form of curation that develops even as it imitates or copies visual literacy.The introduction sets out the terms for the study. Beginning with an analysis of the moving portrait (ascribed initially to Guido Reni) of Beatrice Cenci, Vogelius inserts an epitaph from Mark Twain. Sarcastic as ever, Twain wonders if anyone would care about the painting if they didn't know the dark story of incest and patricide that lies behind its title. Twain comments that viewers who did not know the story behind the picture “would inspect it unmoved.” For him it “shows what a label can do.” That assertion becomes the starting point for this fine study. What does a label do? Expanding outward to consider the place of the same painting in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, Vogelius asks about the position of what were assumed to be well-known images within literary productions, and within the reactions of a reading as well as a viewing public.Knowing that not all literary descriptions led to a clear visual referent, Vogelius asserts that “ekphrasis in the age of print is a copy continually dislodged from its point of origin, a copy in a hall of mirrors” (3). The book further claims that the dissemination of ekphrastic representations is “inherently political” and often works in the service of nationalist ideology. The work therefore “argues for the significance of mediation” and, indeed, paradoxically, of imitation, “to the development of an American literature” (3). Each of the authors examined worked with some concept of the copy. The idea of the copy develops within a form of “feminization” of American culture, something that the book seeks to consider outside the limits of a study of women writers. Instead, the author proposes to examine “femininity as a floating signifier” (4).In her thorough review of critical interpretations of nationalism, gender, and 19th-century American culture, Vogelius draws on and repeats Judith Butler's adage that gender “is a kind of imitation for which there is no original” (8). Further, she asserts that the “works in this project are united by a meta-reflection on the act of artistic creation” (8). This self-consciousness in the age of nation-building leads her to look at Homi Bhabha on “colonial mimicry” (9). She quotes Ivy Wilson on how visuality became a means of manipulating the public sphere, “as an iteration of democratic representation itself” (8). The presumptive fixedness of the nation state, however, meets a deep challenge in the coda's attention to Claudia Rankine's Citizen. And the motif of, as well as the instability of, the ship carries through and sometimes disorients the idea of nationalism. Vogelius turns from Paul Gilroy's classic work The Black Atlantic to look at how the fractured mobility of the ship is riffed on by Christina Sharpe in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016). To lose any idea of being a citizen in this examination of 19th-century reflections on ekphrastic mirroring threads through the book's attention to poetry, copybooks, and journals.The art object seen through concepts of ekphrasis operates as “intermediary” between writer and audience. Location descriptors for such an intermediary position invoke a kind of tertiary alterity. The book cites the philosopher Jaques Ranciere (in The Emancipated Spectator) calling out “a third thing that is owned by no one, whose meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them” (qtd. in Vogelius 12). For W. J. T. Mitchell, the American critic of mimesis writing in Picture Theory, ekphrasis performs “a menage a trois in which the relations of self and other, text and image, are triply inscribed” (qtd. in Vogelius 12). For this author, the concept of ekphrasis matters because it is “centered on the active participation of the American spectator-citizen in the creation of a national artistic canon” (12).The book's declared focus is on ekphrastic examples from 1830s to 1880s. A rather significant event barely mentioned (except in the chapter on Hawthorne) is the American Civil War, arguably the greatest challenge to nationalism if not to artistic representation within that time period. That elision can be understood as part of the book's emphasis on New England writers and the culture of New England nationalism, yet it stands out. The first chapter looks at Phillis Wheatley Peters and what Vogelius calls “antebellum remediation.” The analysis looks at Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), yet, as she admits, Vogelius spends much more time on the “paratextual,” including useful details on copybooks. Wheatley Peters, she notes, seems “to always exist on the verge of historical forgetting and continuous historical rediscovery” (45). In the second chapter, titled “The Fusion of the Races Among Us,” the book treats “aesthetic nationalism” and Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844). The quotation from Fuller about “fusion” goes on to say that such fusion “will not rise till this nation shall attain sufficient moral and intellectual dignity” (qtd. in Vogelius 67). Four of Fuller's students wrote journals that survive in various libraries, and the chapter pays careful attention to the one by Mary Ware Allen, archived at the American Antiquarian Society (73). The journal for Summer on the Lakes is at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the book reproduces a page of handwriting that launches Fuller's explorations (81).The 1860s in Europe dominate the third chapter, on Sophia Peabody Hawthorne and what Vogelius calls “familial ekphrasis” in the work Notes in England and Italy (1869). This account was Sophia Hawthorne's only published work and focuses on her family's travels in Europe. Meaning is “folded up in a veil” for Sophia (qtd. in Vogelius 104). The question remains if it was the distaste that her husband Nathaniel had for women writers that kept her from publishing this work until after his death. As Vogelius notes, “Only 27 women's travelogues were published before the Civil War, in contrast to the 168 that appeared after the War” (106). The fourth chapter looks at a different kind of art collection in what she refers to as the “middle-class” curator, with specific attention to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his unfinished verse drama Michael Angelo. Vogelius asserts that “Fragmentation is a clear component of Longfellow's framing of the national” (136). She cites Richard Grusin on remediation: “the incorporation of one medium into another in a manner that reshapes both media” (136). The book closes with a brief coda on what she calls “ekphrastic citizenship” developed through a reading of Claudia Rankine's Citizen (2016). Throughout the work Vogelius calls attention to splendid minutia such as the copybooks to be found in archives and celebrates the uncertainty about authorship in the age of the copy. The value of her questions, so carefully annotated and posed, makes this interrogation of citizenship and belonging to an archive of copyists well worth reading.
DOI: 10.1162/tneq.a.1020
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4417060766
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