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8 - Moral authority as literary property in mid-nineteenth-century print culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

By
Susan Ryan
Edited by
Dale M. Bauer
Susan Ryan
Affiliation:
University of Louisville
Dale M. Bauer
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

The Liberator, which covered Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1853 tour of England in minute detail, described in its June 10 issue a London antislavery event at which Stowe had appeared as guest of honor: “The assembly filed past Mrs. Stowe, exchanging courtesies, and afterwards adjourned to supper, where a marble bust of Mrs. Stowe, by Bernard, was exhibited” (“Mrs. Stowe,” 91). The sheer oddity of these attendees encountering Stowe and her marble likeness in rapid succession intensifies the contrast between the cool, white stillness of the bust – suggestive of remoteness, authority, purity, status – and the live, conversant, dare I say mildly frumpy author before them. The juxtaposition collapses time, preempting the long process of canonization that would ordinarily precede the commissioning of an author's bust, a static object calculated to signify his or her timelessness. Their coexistence also undermines the customary distance between presence and reputation, the bust reminding guests of Stowe's preeminence in the world of letters and of social reform, even as she eats her dinner among them.

This marble rendering – signifying a moment at which Stowe becomes literally iconic – both indexes and asserts the synergy among her popularity, her literary status, and her moral authority, insofar as the author's celebrity in England was, in the early to mid-1850s, inextricable from her antislavery advocacy via fiction. But the terms of those linkages, within and beyond English abolitionist circles and the Liberator's readership, are not entirely clear.

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The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature , pp. 165 - 184
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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