scholarly journals (Un)Dress in Southworth & Hawes’ Daguerreotype Portraits: Clytie, Proserpine, and Antebellum Boston Women

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Margo L. Beggs
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
White Skin ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
True Womanhood ◽  
Societal Norms ◽  
Young America ◽  
Cult Of True Womanhood ◽  
Hiram Powers ◽  
White Elite

Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes (2005) is a monumental exhibition catalogue showcasing the work of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes. Together the partners established a renowned daguerreotype studio in mid-nineteenth-century Boston that catered to the city’s bourgeoisie. This paper seeks to unravel the mystery of dozens of daguerreotypes found in Young America, in which elite Boston women appear to be nearly nude. The unidentified women stand in stark contrast to the carefully concealed bodies of Southworth & Hawes’ other female subjects. Why would they expose themselves in such a manner before the camera’s lens? This paper attributes the women’s state of (un)dress to their deliberate emulation of two sculptures in the classical tradition: Clytie, a marble bust dating to antiquity, and Proserpine, a mid-nineteenth-century marble bust by American neoclassical sculptor Hiram Powers. This argument first reveals how a general “classical statue” aesthetic prevailed for women’s deportment in antebellum America, then demonstrates that the busts of Clytie and Proserpine had special significance as icons of white, elite female beauty in the period. Next, this paper makes the case that Southworth & Hawes devised a special style of photography deriving from their own daguerreotypes of the two statues, in which the women’s off-shoulder drapery was deliberately obscured allowing their female clientele to pose in the guise of these famous statues. The paper concludes by arguing that the women shown in these images could pose in this style without contravening societal norms, as these mythological figures were construed by women and men in the period to reflect the central precepts of the mid-nineteenth-century “Cult of True Womanhood.” Moreover, the busts offered sartorial models that reinforced standards of female dress as they related to class and privilege. By baring their flawless, white skin, however, the women positioned themselves at the crux of contentious beliefs about race in a deeply divided nation prior to the American Civil War.

The Home and the Asylum. Antebellum Representations of True Womanhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (54) ◽  
pp. 6-15
Author(s):  
Maria Kaspirek
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Original Material ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
True Womanhood ◽  
Psychological Theories ◽  
Cult Of True Womanhood

This paper presents an analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables regarding his depiction of the nineteenth-century ideals of femininity: the cult of true womanhood and domesticity. Drawing primarily on original material, it will be shown that emerging nineteenth-century psychiatry – asylum medicine – has strongly corroborated American ideals of femininity and their presumably restorative influence in cases of mental derangement. Hawthorne’s portrayals of women and madmen negotiate antebellum concepts of femininity and psychiatry, juxtapose the asylum against the home, and emphasize the author’s embeddedness in nineteenth-century medico-psychological theories.

Prologue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Women Slaves ◽  
Military Planning ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future War

This introduction explains that looming, a nineteenth-century term for a superior mirage, shows us how visions of the future war affected antebellum America. First, some spark, an event or object, captured people’s attention. Second, a unique atmosphere elevated and enlarged that spark, making it loom greater than reality. Before the Civil War was fought or remembered, it was imagined by thousands of Americans who peered at the horizon through an apocalyptic atmosphere. Third, observers focused on it and reported what appeared to be beyond the horizon. Popular forecasts rose from leaders but also women, slaves, immigrants, and common soldiers. These imaginings shaped politics, military planning, and the economy. The prologue identifies the two prevailing temporalities of antebellum America, anticipations and expectations, and calls for more historical attention to the diverse temporalities of past people.

An Appreciation of Sir Alexander Cunningham’s Explorations at Taxila in the Light of His Methodological Framework

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 140-148
Author(s):  
Ifqut Shaheen ◽  
◽  
M. Ashraf Khan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Data Collection ◽  
Conceptual Understanding ◽  
Archaeological Survey ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
Archaeological Methods

Indian archaeology adopted sounder and viable conceptual tools for fieldwork in the later nineteenth century. The name of Sir Alexander Cunningham, the two times head of Archaeological Survey of India, is of special significance in this connection. This paper particularly focuses on his methods for archaeological survey and data collection. In the first place, Cunningham’s arrival into India has been traced. Next, his archaeological methods and approach have been delineated. It is followed by outlining what Cunningham did at Taxila especially in line with his conceptual understanding. Finally, all this has further been related to the intellectual environs of the time.

The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the Spectacle of the Sublime

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain McCalman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
Virtual Reality Technology ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
William Beckford ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Drury Lane

Abstract In the autumn of 1781, shortly after being elected to the British Academy of Art as a landscape painter, Alsatian-born artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg was hired by the wealthy young aesthete William Beckford to prepare a private birthday spectacle at his mansion in Wiltshire. De Loutherbourg, who was also chief scenographer at Drury Lane theatre and the inventor of a recent commercial “moving picture” entertainment called the Eidophusikon, promised to produce “a mysterious something that the eye has not seen nor the heart conceived.” Beckford wanted an Oriental spectacle that would completely ravish the senses of his guests, not least so that he could enjoy a sexual tryst with a thirteen year old boy, William Courtenay, and Louisa Beckford, his own cousin’s wife. The resulting three day party and spectacle staged over Christmas 1781 became one of the scandals of the day, and ultimately forced William Beckford into decades of exile in Europe to escape accusations of sodomy. However, this Oriental spectacle also had a special significance for the history of Romantic aesthetics and modern-day cinema. Loutherbourg and Beckford’s collaboration provided the inspiration for William to write his scintillating Gothic novel, Vathek, and impelled Philippe himself into revising his moving-picture program in dramatically new ways. Ultimately this saturnalian party of Christmas 1781 constituted a pioneering experiment in applying the aesthetic of the sublime to virtual reality technology. It also led Loutherbourg to anticipate the famous nineteenth-century “Phantasmagoria” of French showman, Gaspard Robertson, by producing in 1782 a miniature Gothic movie scene based on the Pandemonium episode in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

scholarly journals "A Jewish Maestra and a Lady too": Reflections on Femininity in the Career of Ethel Stark

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria N. Rachwal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Jewish Woman ◽  
Critical Dimension ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
True Womanhood ◽  
Cult Of True Womanhood

Ethel Stark (1910–2012) was one of the most important conductors and concert violinists in Canada in the Twentieth century. This article highlights how an Austro-Canadian Jewish woman who lived outside the constraints of conventional domesticity, both navigated through and defied the ideals of the “Cult of True Womanhood” and spearheads a movement of feminism in music. I argue that Stark’s exposure to Jewish cultural traditions of social justice and womanhood in her childhood formed a critical dimension of her feminist activism later in her life, and in particular in the founding of The Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra (1940).

Poe

2018 ◽  
pp. 49-69
Author(s):  
Lesley Ginsberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Public Cultures ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
Performed Identities ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches Poe’s life through his letters with reference to historical contexts that shaped letter writing in antebellum America, Poe’s interests in handwriting and “Autography,” the relationship between letter writing and antebellum authorship and celebrity, and shifts in Poe’s voice across multiple letters and recipients. In his letters, Poe performed identities ranging from the wronged son, the victim, the lover, and the literary genius. Poe’s epistolary “rhetoric of dread” may be linked to his lyric poetry. As scholars of letter writing in the nineteenth-century United States attest, letters were not “private documents.” Rather, they were “self-conscious” artifacts “circulating between friends and strangers.” Poe’s letters were written when the distinctions between privately circulated manuscripts and public cultures of print were destabilized. His letters to women are studied in this chapter as is the issue of poverty haunting his letters. Finally, Poe’s letters also document his desire for editorship of a magazine and his participation in the business of publishing in antebellum America.

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