As Nature Formed It: Venus Sculptures and the ‘Natural’ Waistline in Dress Reform Discourse

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hallie M Franks
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Form ◽  
White American ◽  
Moral Perfection ◽  
Dress Reform

Abstract In the second half of the nineteenth century, ancient sculptures of Venus became models for the ‘natural’ waistline. Drawings of the Venus de Medici or de Milo were popular in texts published by American dress reformers, who advocated for the rejection of corsets and tight-lacing. This article takes as its subject these drawings and their simultaneous signification of multiple bodies: a specific sculpture, an idealized form, the ‘natural’ form of any female torso, and the supposedly superior physicality of the ancient Greeks. It argues that the elision of these various bodies is facilitated by the treatment of ancient sculptures as ‘truth-to-nature’ representations — images that are simultaneously ideal and faithful to the form produced by nature. This understanding is encouraged by drawings of the statues, which imply the comparability of sculpture and body. In this way, the sculptures enter dress reform discourse, serving as both a faithful representative of a now-lost ancient body and a kind of visual lexicon by which living women might revive ancient aesthetic and moral perfection. As constructions of aspirational physical ideals, the sculptures and the drawings of Venus are enlisted in a developing and deeply charged visualization of white American womanhood.

Blackface Abolition and the New Slave Narrative

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura T. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
The Self ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
First Person ◽  
White American ◽  
Political Turn

Since the 1990s, survivors of forced labor have been authoring first-person narratives that consciously and unconsciously reiterate the tropes and conventions of the nineteenth-century American slave narrative. These “new slave narratives” typically conform to the generic tendencies of the traditional slave narratives and serve similar activist purposes. Some of the most popular of the narratives have taken a particular political turn in the post-9/11 context, however, as neoliberal political agendas and anti-Muslim sentiments come to dominate the form and content of many of the African narratives that have been produced. This paper identifies a “blackface abolitionist” trend, in which the first-person testimonies of formerly enslaved Africans is co-opted by some politically motivated white American abolitionists to play a black masquerade, in which they adorn themselves with the suffering of enslaved Africans to thinly veil the self-exonerating and self-defensive crusade politics that motivate their engagement in anti-slavery work.

A Liberal before Liberalism: Karl Hermann Scheidler and the New Hegelians

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Charles Barbour
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Moral Perfection ◽  
Corporate Autonomy

This paper is the first substantial investigation in English or German of the work and career of the student of Jacob Fries, leader of the Burschenschaften, educational reformer, and professor of philosophy and law Karl Hermann Scheidler. It examines Scheidler's interventions into political and constitutional debates during the German Vormärz and argues that he developed a unique brand of liberal corporatism that has been overlooked or misunderstood by intellectual historians—one that attempts to bridge the gap between eighteenth-century natural law and nineteenth-century political nationalism by defending the corporate autonomy of the churches and universities, and by promoting a combination of public virtue and moral perfection that he dubbed “political Protestantism.” It emphasizes Scheidler's polemical articles against the “Hegel school” and the “New Hegelians” in Rotteck's and Welcker's Staats-Lexikon. It proposes that a detailed examination of Scheidler's work provides a clearer understanding of how liberalism emerged as a distinct political ideology during the Vormärz and how one strand of German liberalism defined itself against Hegelianism.

How Do You Say “God” in Dakota?

Numen ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Siems
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Deep Structure ◽  
Conceptual System ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
White American ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
Societal Norms ◽  
Translation Errors

AbstractThis essay explores some of the interpretive problems posed by the missionary work of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions among Minnesota's Dakota Indians in the mid-nineteenth century. Since “success” in conversion has often been defined largely in terms of Native American assimilation to white American societal norms, I argue that the Dakotas' acceptance of a Christianity that was preached to them in their own language poses a problem for understanding what “conversion” meant in this case. The difficulty of knowing what Christianity meant to the Dakotas, a difficulty I see as rooted in the problems attendant upon translation, can be illustrated by showing how distorted some of the missionaries' translations of Dakota religious ideas into English were. Their translation errors took two forms: the postulation of a similarity in reference between Dakota and English terms where it did not exist (as with the English words “god” and “spirit” and what the missionaries identified as their Dakota counterparts), or, conversely, the heightening of differences between Dakota and Protestant Christian religiosity (an effect achieved by associating Dakota terms with English pejoratives). I argue that what unites these two differing types of distortive translations is the missionaries' failure to understand the conceptual universe, or “deep structure”, underlying the Dakota language. And since they failed to perceive the holistic character of this conceptual system, the missionaries may have concluded that they had effected conversions among the Dakotas when they had only scratched the surface of Dakota religiosity.

Herman Melville’s Politics of Imperialism: Colonizing and De-Colonizing Spaces of Ethnicity

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel A. Blumenthal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Social Harmony ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
White American ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
Political Relationship ◽  
The One

There is, in Herman Melville’s works, a constant struggle to situate the narrative within the context of a racial and ethnic “Other.” Melville’s narrators—almost invariably white, Euro-American males—appear at times in tense opposition to, and at other times in social harmony with, the African, Native American, Polynesian, and Oriental presences in his texts. In essence, Melville situates these non-white characters against the dominantly-raced narrator as racial “Others.” This ethnic “othering” entails a dangerous politics of racial separation, hierarchizing, and colonization, yet simultaneously allows for and even encourages a social critique of nineteenth-century white American imperialist attitudes toward non-white peoples. Indeed, this is what makes Melville such a difficult figure to decipher both literarily and historically. By marking these races as alien and “other,” indeed by striving to “mark” them at all, Melville at once conducts a constructive anthropological study as well as sets the destructive foundation for a race-driven, American imperialist project aimed at alienated and “othered” races. Indeed, Melville constructs for his readership a difficult paradox; his texts on the one hand call for white intervention and colonization of ethnic and racial spaces, and on the other, they illuminate the counter-productivity of such colonization. What, then, was Melville’s relationship to the ongoing imperialist project of nineteenth-century America? To reach an answer to this question we will examine Melville’s political relationship to two Pacific Ocean land groups (the Marquesan Islands and the Sandwich Islands), establish a pattern to his paradoxical imperialist and anti-imperialist philosophies, and finally, construct a model of his international, inter-ethnic political philosophy.

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