“To Mold in Clay and Carve in Stone”: Sculptural and Political Form in Margaret Fuller’s Italian Dispatches

Abstract

“To Mold in Clay and Carve in Stone”: Sculptural and Political Form in Margaret Fuller’s Italian Dispatches Mollie Barnes (bio) The first time I saw a bust of Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave at the Boston Public Library, I was shocked. As the mentee of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning scholar, I wondered if the statue’s meaning alters when we see the bust alone rather than the full-body version.1 Is the statue so iconic that even the abbreviated form evokes the details that make a slave a slave? Must those details be carved in stone, and visible, for the bust to mean the same thing as the notorious, full sculpture? I still wonder about the political difference between the statue and the bust when I read Margaret Fuller’s formal critiques of Powers’ other busts, especially one of John C. Calhoun, in the dispatches she published in the New-York Daily Tribune. To understand Fuller’s writing about Powers’ busts—and their reception histories and stories of transatlantic afterlives—we should first investigate how, if at all, Fuller’s antislavery sentiment affects her formal appraisals of the group she collects and curates across her late dispatches. Does she consider these formal achievements apart from the subjects that they represent? To put it baldly: how do we square her hesitation toward and criticism of the Greek Slave with her praise for the Calhoun, whatever her formal reasons [End Page 1] may be, given her increasingly fervent antislavery writing, and given her belief in the civic potential of busts and statues to educate the public throughout her 1849–50 writing? In the middle of a dispatch posted on 20 March 1849 and published 16 May 1849, Margaret Fuller turns sharply from Rome to the US and from the promise of a republic in Italy to a claim about sculpture, the artistic mode that she calls “the natural talent of an American.” “The facts of our history,” Fuller attests, “ideal and social, will be grand and of new import; it is perfectly natural to the American to mold in clay and carve in stone. The permanence of material and solid relief in the forms correspond to the positiveness of his nature better than the mere ephemeral and even tricky methods of the painter—to his need of motion and action, better than the chambered scribbling of the poet.”2 “He will thus record his best experiences,” she concludes, “and these records will adorn the noble structures that must naturally arise for the public uses of our society.” I take this passage as the inspiration and provocation for this essay that studies Fuller’s meditation on forms, especially sculpture, as a recursive preoccupation of her late journalism. As recent critical perspectives on Fuller’s Tribune articles, especially those by Sonia Di Loreto and Brigitte Bailey, emphasize, the sometimes fragmented, self-interrupting quality of her prose reflects important journalistic circumstances and artistic choices.3 Fuller’s language from spring 1849 dramatizes the very subjects that captured her geopolitical imagination during this period: complex temporalities with which she contended as a foreign correspondent reporting news that would be delayed to her readers by several weeks or even months. In fact, this very dispatch was published two months after Fuller posted it. She may not be the first Romantic writer to muse over representational crises (who should choose clay and stone over paint or ink? why?).4 Yet the fact that Fuller wonders over sculptural permanence in that March/May 1849 dispatch is [End Page 2] worthy of pause precisely because she is so self-conscious about her responsibilities as a transatlantic journalist at this turning point in American and Italian histories. In this essay, I study passages from Fuller’s late work in which her critique of expatriate sculpture suggests connections between aesthetic form and political and philosophical reform, especially related to slavery, in seemingly contradictory ways. As I demonstrate, Fuller’s studies of Thomas Crawford, Horatio Greenough, and Hiram Powers reveal her evolving antislavery consciousness in writing that purports to be about art. In fact, it is in these very moments, when she intimates that artistic or aesthetic form and political value may...