Revolutionary Aesthetics and Interior Spaces
At a symbolic moment in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), the nameless protagonist finds himself glancing at the images on the wall in one of the Brotherhood field offices. They include a map adorned with a heroic Christopher Columbus and a poster, “The Rainbow of America’s Future,” depicting a romanticized picture of a multicultural U.S. But the most symbolic image on the wall is the portrait of Frederick Douglass. Perhaps more than any other African American, Douglass has been made an icon and lionized equally by both radicals and moderates alike as the embodiment of an American democratic potentiality. As social texts, the three images limn different, if not competing, visions of America; thus when the protagonist later walks into the field office only to find it empty and the Douglass portrait missing, the scene becomes a harbinger of the impending revolution about to erupt on the streets of New York City.
Ellison’s use of visual images in Invisible Man evinces a wider concern with aesthetics and interior spaces as represented in U.S. literature. In a novel that keenly and self-consciously foregrounds art—from Lucius Brockway’s making paint to Mary’s cast-iron figurines, from the bronze statue of the college founder to Clifton’s paper Sambo dolls—the question of aesthetics is central to the meaning of the story. If, as Lena Hill contends, different episodes of the novel can be seen as museums, many of these should be understood as the private gallery spaces of interior black life.1
Thinking about how African Americans conceived of interiority—its possibility, its elusiveness, the dimensions of its conceptual privacy that allowed it even to be imagined—illuminates the necessity of such a space when its physical correlative was often denied, unavailable, or being torn asunder. Here interior spaces are conceptualized in two specific ways. One way is to consider the forms of materiality: rooms, garrets, anterooms, and hideaways that emphasize the relationship between the exterior and the interior. The other way is to conceptualize interior spaces as the imaginative precincts of the mind; the innervision as the domain of the inside. These spaces were especially important for antebellum African Americans—as with, for example, the wooded area where Douglass and his counterparts plan their escape, Henry “Box” Brown shipping himself to freedom in a container, and Harriet Jacobs concealed in a garret—where interiority also signaled a kind of privacy. The dimensionality of these interior spaces, whether physical or psychological, allowed African Americans to imagine representations of themselves that counteracted their depictions in the public imaginary.
The three Brotherhood office images from Invisible Man not only accentuate the idea of interiority, they also underscore broader questions about how political dissent is captured in or represented as art. While the removal of Douglass’s portrait is meant to intimate a coming revolution in Ellison’s mid-twentieth-century U.S., throughout the nineteenth century writers and orators frequently invoked the iconography of George Washington to illuminate contemporary national crises. Washington’s image is taken up, in varying degrees and for different ideological purposes, by the poet Phillis Wheatley, the short story writer Washington Irving, and the novelists Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe. If the image of Washington was conjured to reassess a given crisis through the lens of the American Revolution, then so too was the image of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution. L’Ouverture was invoked by the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, the orator Wendell Phillips, the novelist Frank J. Webb, and the writer William Wells Brown, among others. Through the mid nineteenth century, both leaders were reiterated and refashioned again and again, making their iconography an example of a revolutionary aesthetic.
The term revolutionary aesthetic is used here to outline two primary definitions. In the most immediate sense, the revolutionary aesthetic suggests the composite cultural production in various art forms that take the historical event of a revolution as their topic, such that, for example, Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware and Robert Colescott’s 1975 George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware are both concerned with (re)interpreting the American Revolution. But, equally important, the revolutionary aesthetic is meant to evince an approach to the radical formal stylistics of art that self-consciously erupts former accepted conventions, such that, for example, the base, exaggerated caricaturing of Colescott’s oil painting is a profound departure from the luminous romanticism of Leutze’s work.
What follows is a consideration of how political subtexts are illustrated through the use of a revolutionary aesthetic that stages questions about the relation between iconography and interiority. Beginning with a reading of Phillis Wheatley and Scipio Moorhead, this essay underscores a particular relationship between interiority, visuality, and political revolution that is heightened further when one considers the various permutations in the iconography of George Washington and Toussaint L’Ouverture from the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth centuries. The permutation of these iconographies traces Washington’s image from Wheatley, Irving, Stowe, and Melville as well as a parallel series on L’Ouverture by Phillips, Webb, and James McCune Smith. By examining a number of different simulated portraits of Washington and L’Ouverture, this essay investigates the ways that writers and orators engaged the processes of visualization through literary and oratorical portraiture—a particular concern for African Americans who were preoccupied with the processes of visualization as an operation that allowed them to imagine themselves as part of the U.S. or, conversely, to fantasize about different alternative socialities altogether.
Kindred Spirits: Phillis Wheatley, Visuality, and a Revolutionary Aesthetic
We might do no better in a discussion of revolutionary aesthetic and interior spaces than by beginning with one of the earliest writers in the African American literary canon: Wheatley. Wheatley has too often been at the center of a debate over whether her poetry was too deferential, too imitative, and, alas, too conciliatory about her condition as a slave in the U.S. But Wheatley’s poetry itself has been too little studied for its poetics, for its prosody, for its formal conventions as a work of art. Even the poem that has caused the greatest amount of consternation, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1773), for its ostensible capitulation to a bifurcated social logic of black/white, Christian/pagan, when visualized, when imagined, presents us with a different picture from what might be registered if we were only listening to the poem.
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.2
When restricted to the realm of the sonic, to the world of sound, it may seem as if Wheatley’s narrator is making a plaintive gesture to Christians that, although Negroes are black as Cain, someday they may be redeemed. But when we look at the poem as a visual artifact, its sublimated functionality as artifice—a sublimated operation of radicalism, no less, that structurally depends upon an act of envisioning—becomes all the more recognizable, all the more legible. The typographical use of italics, her stylization of the letter, to the atom, if you will, alters the relationship between the poem’s visual demarcation and its subsumed political meaning. The prefigured image of the “train” is created precisely by the insertion of a caesura between “Remember” and “Christians,” a caesura that fabricates a litany and produces the figurative cars of the “train,” “Christians” and “blacks” who are now linked together on an equivalent plane, indeed heading in the same direction on the same itinerary.
To claim such equality between black and white in 1773 would have indeed been radical; but the particular distinction I am drawing here is one that differentiates between the poem’s aural resonance and its visual resonance. When these two aspects are considered, the image of the poem yields a different meaning, perhaps even of Wheatley herself. By attending to Wheatley as a poet who self-consciously uses her genre to stylize a form of subversive art, we can better uncover a political aesthetic. But can this be extended to a revolutionary aesthetic? And, given our received image of Wheatley, would we be able to identify it?3 What would such a revolutionary aesthetic look like? What would it sound like? And, perhaps more important, upon what grounds would we be able to define the criteria for a revolutionary aesthetic?
An early articulation of a revolutionary aesthetic is intimated in “To S.M. a young African Painter, on Seeing his Works” (1773). The poem is written as an ekphrasis; that is, a poem about another form of art, most often painting. The opening couplet begins, “To show the lab’ring bosom’s deep intent, / And thought in living characters to paint” (The Poems, 104). Ekphrasis usually works in one of two ways: to explain or analyze what is happening in the painting or, alternatively, to derive meaning from the painting to influence a new (literary) work. But it is essential to recognize that there is a visual basis for ekphrasis that is enhanced by things only the mind can see.
Scipio Moorhead, the “S.M.” of the poem, was a slave of the Reverend John Moorhead and a fellow Boston artist. The ink drawing upon which the engraved frontispiece of Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) is based is commonly attributed to Moorhead, although the original has been untraced and no other works with his signature have been discovered.4 Moorhead had been trained as a painter by the reverend’s wife, Sarah Moorhead, who was well known in Boston as an art instructor.5 Although little is known of Moorhead, much of what is known has been filtered through his association with Wheatley; turning to her then might not only tell us about the formation of the early traditions of African American poetry and poetics but yield information about the field of early African American art. Wheatley’s decision to note Moorhead’s paintings of Aurora and Damon and Pythias, of all his works, suggests that they were versed in Greek and Roman mythology. If her poem “On Imagination,” also included in Poems on Various Subjects, is an early theory of poetics, then “To S.M. a Young African Painter” is more specifically an early history, if not theory, of an African American aesthetics.
Although Wheatley’s poem has the appearance of being merely the literary companion to Scipio Moorhead’s paintings, the image it generates depicts a different picture altogether. The poem does not describe the paintings themselves; that is, while Wheatley’s poem does not offer an interpretation of the scenes, it does take notice of the paintings’ animation, their almost genesis-like quality—“When first thy pencil did those beauties give, / And breathing figures learnt from thee to live” (104–5). In the middle of the first large stanza, Wheatley moves beyond the merely radical and into perhaps the revolutionary.
Still may the painter’s and the poet’s fire
To aid thy pencil, and thy verse conspire!
(105)
Wheatley makes a trope of the word conspire here, moving the word into a circular orbit within the domain of the poem. The contextual meaning of the word conspire as it relates to the dominant theme of the poem reveals that Wheatley is speaking of a shared corporeality between her and Moorhead, the painter and poet “breathing together.” This representation of Wheatley and Moorhead might be thought of as a precursor to Asher B. Durand’s later painting, Kindred Spirits (1849), with its depiction of William Cullen Bryant and Thomas Cole, only in living color.
Wheatley ensconces the more revolutionary impulse of what could be called a proto-black cultural nationalism—an early form of cultural nationalism that (somehow) simultaneously makes overtures to the notion of an elite class of artists and to the black diaspora—by making the express political import of her poem secondary to the ostensible primary one of aesthetics as the alchemy of his pencil and her verse. The common definition of the word conspire is to “combine privily for an evil or unlawful purpose; to agree together to do something criminal, illegal, or reprehensible; especially in the form of a plot,”6 reflecting a deeper connection for Wheatley and Moorhead beyond simply their bond as artists. Her recognition in the second stanza of Damon and Pythias reiterates the sense of communion she feels with Moorhead; in Greek mythology Damon offered himself as collateral for punishment by death as a guarantee that Pythias would return to receive his sentence. Damon and Pythias may have been examples for Wheatley’s ideas about loyalty and fidelity and also archetypes for her notions about transposition and transubstantiation, for what could communicate the idea of an interior space more profoundly than the idea of sharing the same psychology and corporeality as someone else? If Wheatley’s poem, then, can be said to have a revolutionary subtext, that subtext might best be identified as, after James Baldwin, the fire next time.
The latent revolutionary aesthetic of “To S.M. a Young African Painter, on Seeing his Works” is further heightened when one speculates about the publication history of the poem itself. The poem was not listed in the original 1772 proposal for Poems on Various Subjects, and one wonders if Wheatley imagined the volume as having a kind of physicality itself, a dimensionality where her own revolutionary aesthetic could be privily secreted between the manuscript pages as an interiorized space only to be later revealed in public at printing.7
Head of State
Indeed, one of the earliest examples in the iconography of Washington came from the hand of none other than Wheatley herself. The “Poetical Essays” section of the Pennsylvania Magazine: or American Monthly Museum of April 1776 features Wheatley’s poem and letter to Washington.8 The magazine’s editor, Thomas Paine, wrote: “The following LETTER and VERSES, were written by the famous Phillis Wheatley, the African Poetess, and presented to his Excellency Gen. Washington” (Wheatley, The Poems, 164). In her accompanying letter, Wheatley wishes his “Excellency all possible success in the great cause [he is] so generously engaged in” (165), an indication of her keen awareness of the American Revolution and its potential significance to the condition of U.S. blacks both free and enslaved. Invoking the muse for inspiration and imploring the “celestial choir” (166) to echo her call, Wheatley exalts Washington as military general as well as his efforts to liberate the American colonies from England.
Shall I to Washington their praise recite?
Enough thou know’st them in the fields of fight.
Thee, first in place and honours,—we demand
The grace and glory of thy martial band.
Fam’d for thy valour, for thy virtues more,
Hear every tongue thy guardian aid implore!
(167)
But Wheatley’s poem is actually less a consecration of Washington himself than it is a panegyric on the epochal turn toward “freedom’s cause” (166). In the poem, Wheatley mentions Eolus and Columbia, invoking the latter in both its classic sense and as the personification of America. As she had with “To S.M. a Young African Painter,” Wheatley’s use of classical references was a way for her to limn a revolutionary aesthetic, figured here as something embodied by America but not contained by it.9
While Wheatley offers her poem in the midst of the American Revolution, when the iconography of Washington as a heroic or national figure is not foregone, Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” furnishes an example of the varied use of literary portraiture in the iconography of Washington. Published in 1819, Irving’s tale tells the story of Rip Van Winkle, a quaint villager of the Catskill Mountains, who, after stumbling off and falling asleep under a tree, wakes up twenty years later to find that his wife has died. Unaware that the American Revolution has occurred, Rip piques the chagrin of the villagers when he declares his loyalty to King George III.
If “Rip Van Winkle” subsumes an ostensible uncertainty about the revolution, this uncertainty is translated through Irving’s depiction of the village’s new aesthetic. The former village inn was replaced by hotel with broken windows mended with old hats and petticoats. On top of a pole, the new flag of the stars and stripes remain strange and incomprehensible to Rip. But it is the portrait hanging on the hotel sign that denotes the shift in political sensibility. Far from an interior space, the placement of the image atop the hotel sign is meant to be inculcated by the public at large. “He recognized on the sign, however, the ruby face of King George, under which he had smoked so many a peaceful pipe, but even this was strangely metamorphosed. The red coat was changed for one of blue and buff, a sword was stuck in the hand of a scepter, the head was decorated with a cocked hat, and underneath was painted in large characters, GENERAL WASHINGTON.”10 The scene depends upon a certain presupposition that attire can be read as a sign of political affiliation; the blue coat replaces the red, the sword the scepter. As an emblem of royalty, the removal of the scepter signals to Rip that the country is no longer under monarchical rule. Irving’s story abbreviates the American Revolution by compressing its temporal spatiality, illustrating the transformation from colony to nation as a shift in dress with the metamorphosis of George III into George Washington.11
In Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852), Stowe takes the experimentation with literary portraiture even further than Irving; where he uses the technique to compress national time, Stowe uses it to imagine a different national temporality. When we are first introduced to Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe’s cabin and made privy to its interior and its contents, we notice something curious about the inventory. Stowe has her narrator ask that we enter the dwelling. “In fact, that corner was the drawing-room of the establishment. In the other corner was a bed of much humbler pretensions, and evidently designed for use. The wall over the fireplace was adorned with some very brilliant scriptural prints, and a portrait of General Washington, drawn and colored in a manner which would certainly have astonished that hero, if ever he happened to meet with its like.”12 Their cabin is, ostensibly, a proper home—only in miniature. What is the relationship here between the interior and the exterior, between the political and the aesthetic, indeed between the black and the white? For, as Edith Wharton will later announce in The Decoration of Houses (1898), “Rooms may be decorated in two ways: by a superficial application of ornament totally independent of structure, or by means of those architectural features which are part of the organism of every house, inside as well as out.”13 The disjunction between the inside of Aunt Chloe’s and Uncle Tom’s cabin and the outside produces, by Wharton’s criteria, an anomaly, an asymmetrical aesthetic—if, in fact, aesthetic is the term that one could use to describe the slave quarters. That is, if aesthetic is meant as the strict congruence of style, then Aunt Chloe’s and Uncle Tom’s cabin is not aesthetic; but, if the term signals the sensory capacities of affect, then their cabin could indeed have an aesthetic insofar as it expresses how they feel about their own state relative to the nation.
Perhaps the most conspicuous element about this scene is the description of Washington having been “drawn and colored” and retouched, as it were. Here, the notion that the architectural features of a home should have a complementarity both “inside as well as out” is abrogated, allowing for the imagining of a subversive politics that could be featured inside a black interiority separate from its external housing. It seems precisely here in the recesses of the innervision, in the interior spaces, where the revolution is indeed being imagined. For, like Frederick Douglass, who correlates Madison Washington in his short story “The Heroic Slave” (1853) to Patrick Henry and George Washington, the image of the first president in the “drawing-room” of Aunt Chloe’s and Uncle Tom’s cabin reinterprets the relationship of race to the birth of the nation, and, in this respect, Stowe advances a revolutionary aesthetic insofar as the scene contests the dominant understanding of art and politics.14
The manipulation of the iconography of Washington to reassess the meaning of racialization and nation formation is also depicted in Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). In the early pages of the book, after Ishmael has fastened onto the idea of joining a whaling ship, he becomes acquainted with his roommate Queequeg. Simultaneously enthralled and frightened, intrigued and alarmed, Ishmael cannot help but stare at Queequeg; an ocular obsession all the more fixated by Queequeg’s fancifully tattooed body that is both an indication of his seeming savagery and a visible sign of stenciled artistry. But when Ishmael stares at Queequeg, he disaggregates the body from the head; for while the body may have the intricate markings of being from another world, Queequeg’s head reminds Ishmael of Washington. “It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”15 Ishmael’s vision of Queequeg as Washington hovers between an interpretation of the Pequod as a ship of state that promotes a radical democratic potentiality of equivalent subjectivity and an illustration of the nascent imperial designs of the early U.S.16
Furthermore, the association of Queequeg to Washington illuminates the ideological if not political meanings of interiority when one recalls it is precisely in the privacy of their shared quarters, in the chapter “A Bosom Friend,” that has Ishmael fancying an image contoured by a “queer” revolutionary aesthetic.17 While Stowe racializes Washington to intimate the revolutionary impulse underlining black political thought, even in a seemingly innocuous domesticated household, Melville’s depiction signals how the revolutionary aesthetic invoked here is precluded from yielding iconographic portraiture to liken Queequeg as a more permanent figurative head of state by the end of the novel when the Pequod is dashed into oblivion and only Ishmael remains.
Stately Portraits; or, The Iconography of Toussaint L’Ouverture
If Stowe and Melville redraw the image of the American Revolution’s most iconic figure to illuminate the mid-nineteenth-century slavery crisis as a political predicament endemic to the founding of the U.S., then other nineteenth-century writers and artists reconceptualized the Age of Revolution itself as a historical epoch by portraying Toussaint L’Ouverture as a competing icon. L’Ouverture was the leader of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) that liberated the then-colony of St. Domingue from French imperial rule to become the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere. As the slavery debate escalated in the 1850s, the Haitian Revolution was interpreted as a warning sign of what might happen in the U.S. should black slaves decide to revolt. Stowe stages this fear in a conversation between Augustine and Alfred in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Melville does much the same by naming the slave ship the San Dominick in Benito Cereno (1855). But the reinscription of the Haitian Revolution as a revolution proper, and not simply an insurrection, depended upon a certain shift in its various representations through the iconography of L’Ouverture as a figurehead.
Perhaps the most well-known attempt to depict L’Ouverture specifically as an icon was Wendell Phillips’s speech, which he delivered in 1861 on the eve of the Civil War. Phillips opens his speech by proclaiming that he will offer his audiences in Boston and New York a “sketch” of L’Ouverture that is at once a biography and an argument. Phillips contends that, when the record of history is set straight, L’Ouverture will rank above the Greek Phocion, the Roman Marcus Junius Brutus, the French Marquis de Lafayette, and the American George Washington. By comparing him to such figures, Phillips fashions L’Ouverture as a transhistorical figure, someone who is at once classical and modern.
The oratorical stylistics of his speech might be understood not simply as an example of the structures of classical rhetoric with a subsumed mode of argumentation but perhaps also as a mode of aesthetic embellishment that attempts to artistically portray L’Ouverture. “If I stood here tonight to tell the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the lips of Frenchmen, who find no language rich enough to paint the great captain of the nineteenth century. Were I here to tell you the story of Washington, I should take it from you hearts—you, who think no marble white enough to carve the name of the Father of his Country. I am about to tell you the story of a negro who has hardly one written line.”18 Phillips’s speech is almost too conspicuous in its efforts to make an icon of L’Ouverture. The aestheticization of this iconography depends upon a translation of Phillips’s verbal cues into the visual, from the oratorical arts into the material arts. L’Ouverture deserves, Phillips implies, language richer than that used to “paint” Napoleon and richer than that to carve Washington’s name upon white marble edifices. But Phillips’s speech can only have that iconography interiorized in the mind’s eye of his audience where the image of L’Ouverture can be envisaged.
While Phillips manipulated the oratorical arts as a proxy for the material arts, James McCune Smith’s lecture on L’Ouverture was perceptibly less adorned and more literal in its didactic intention. Twenty years before Phillips delivered his famous speech, McCune Smith delivered a lecture at the Stuyvesant Institute for the benefit of the Colored Orphan Asylum in 1841. A graduate of the local New York African Free School himself, and, later, the University of Glasgow, McCune Smith was one of the foremost African American intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Comparing L’Ouverture to “Leonidas at Thermopyae” or “Bruce at Bannockburn,” McCune Smith declares these events to be necessary study for “every American citizen.”19
Among the many lessons that may be drawn from this portion of history is one not unconnected with the present occasion. From causes to which I need not give a name, there is gradually creeping into our otherwise prosperous state the incongruous and undermining influence of caste. One of the local manifestations of this unrepublican sentiment is, that while 800 children, chiefly of foreign parents, are educated and taught trades at the expense of all the citizens, colored children are excluded from these privileges.20
His speech here extends a critique of the latent social formations promulgating the caste system in the U.S. as an antidemocratic or “unrepublican” practice. Slavery was not only unethical, a moral stain against the nation because, among other violations, it promoted a caste system; it was also anathema to the underlying political tenets of a professed democracy. It is only in the last line of Smith’s speech that it becomes something less of an anecdote and something more prophetic when he notes L’Ouverture had been taught to read while a slave—a suggestion that there may yet be a L’Ouverture among the ranks at the Colored Orphan Asylum if only they were afforded the opportunity to be educated.
Both McCune Smith and Phillips use oratory as a form of illustration. Their illustrations almost invert the literal definition of iconography as “picture writing” into an aesthetic practice instead of “writing picture” in their attempts to offer a visual biography and narrative of L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution. While “picture writing” could be thought of as the didactic use of the visual arts to convey narrative meaning, “writing picture” underscores the use of the expository textures of oratory and narrative that more specifically attempt to craft the visual correlative of an image, an act that is especially perceptible in orations that seek to sketch “character.” Manipulating the aesthetic practice of iconography, these writers deployed this history as an allegory for the contemporary crisis of U.S. chattel slavery. U.S. intellectuals, as early as Smith’s speech, began depicting L’Ouverture as an exponent of the antislavery movement. The iconography of L’Ouverture compared him to a number of historical figures including Oliver Cromwell, the Duke of Wellington, and, sometimes, Napoleon Bonaparte.
If both McCune Smith and Phillips used the verbal cadences of speech to create auditory reverberations that would linger in the chambers of the mind, then Frank J. Webb used literature to approximate portraiture. Webb was an African American writer whose 1857 novel, The Garies and Their Friends, depicts the story of the Garies, a well-to-do interracial family comprising a white husband and his “mulatta” ex-slave-turned-wife, as they leave the South for Philadelphia. In the North, the Garies are situated between Philadelphia’s black and white communities, represented in stark terms by the white Stevens family and the black Ellis family. Joining McCune Smith and Phillips in trying to make an icon of L’Ouverture, Webb made particular use of literary portraiture.
While the speeches of McCune Smith and Phillips amounted to a kind of oratorical portraiture, Webb uses literary portraiture to deploy a doubly mediated moment of representation. Like Irving and Stowe, Webb’s novel calls attention to paintings and drawings specifically as visual artifacts simulated in narrative fiction. These moments are accentuated by their double mediation, one where readers not only visualize the characters of the story in their own mind but are compelled to see through the eyes of these characters to perceive what they are viewing.
At an important moment in the novel when the Garies are trying to reestablish their lives by resettling in Philadelphia, they rent a home from Mr. Walters, one of the city’s most affluent and wealthy African Americans. While walking through the home, Garie halts in the parlor, arrested by an image he sees on the wall.
“So you, too are attracted by that picture,” said Mr. Walters, with a smile. “All white men look at it with interest. A black man in uniform of a general officer is something so unusual that they cannot pass it with a glance …. That is Toussaint l’Ouverture and I have every reason to believe it to be the correct likeness …. That looks like a man of intelligence. It is entirely different from any likeness I ever saw of him. The portraits generally represent him as a monkey-faced person, with a handkerchief about his head.”21
Walters’s comments to Garie about representation, that he has “every reason to believe it to be the correct likeness,” circumscribes portraiture as an aesthetic form whose artistry is tied to its claim about authenticity and accuracy more than its embellishment. It is significant that it is a portrait with its focus on the head and the face, because the image functions to counteract the discourse stemming from contemporary phrenology about blacks as simians or a subspecies, intimated here in Walters’s note that portraits of L’Ouverture “generally represent him as a monkey-faced person.” But, in suggesting that the portrait “looks like a man of intelligence,” Walter’s comments also understand aesthetics as a mode of representation that can translate the interior domain and render it externally visible. Here attire designates social position—the uniform as a political emblem works against black caricature.
Equally important to the representation of L’Ouverture imagined in the portrait is its placement in the Walters house itself. The image is properly placed within the spatial logic of the home. The house in which the portrait exists is quite different from the image of George Washington in Aunt Chloe’s and Uncle Tom’s cabin; indeed, their class positions are altogether different, and, in some respects, the interior and the exterior of the Walters home have a congruence. As Edgar Allan Poe notes in “The Philosophy of Furniture” (1840), most paintings merely relieved “the expanse of [wall]paper,” and most of these paintings were merely “landscapes of an imaginative cast—such as the fairy grottoes of Stanfield, or the lake of the Dismal Swamp of Chapman.”22 Webb accentuates literary portraiture as a political strategy that attempts to contextualize U.S. abolitionism within a larger hemispheric framework of black resistance.
Paint the White House Black
A little more than 150 years after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the image of a colored George Washington that could only be intimated in Stowe’s novel was conspicuously rendered on the cover of the New Yorker magazine. Drew Friedman’s drawing features a portrait of Barack Obama, on the eve of the presidential inauguration, in the likeness of Washington. Taking the image of Washington on the dollar bill as a cue, Friedman represented Obama in three-quarter profile wearing a wig similar to the ones associated with the Founding Fathers.
Appearing on newsstands on the week of the inauguration itself, the New Yorker cover was, in some respects, a correction to its earlier iconography of the Obamas, which figuratively placed them outside (at least politically) the nation. The July 21, 2008 cover, titled “The Politics of Fear,” featured a Barry Blitt drawing of the Obamas in the Oval Office as subversives—Michelle Obama as an Angela Davis–type black militant and Obama presumably as an Islamacist. Vanity Fair riffed the New Yorker in August 2008 with a cover of Cindy and John McCain in a similar setting and poses with noticeably less stereotypical, although equally caricatured, appearances. Blitt’s drawing, while seemingly meant as satire, invoked, in essence, the wrong series of icons. In drawing Michelle Obama as an Angela Davis figure, Blitt’s image resurrected a history of militant black nationalism in the U.S. associated with the Black Panther Party that many Americans would rather forget. Likewise, his representation of Obama as an Islamacist, perhaps most visibly associated in the U.S. with Osama Bin Laden, threatened to castigate the then-presidential nominee as unpatriotic. In both instances, Blitt’s drawing associated the Obamas with revolutions that have been interpreted as anathema to the nation.
But the politics of Blitt’s drawing were complicated, made especially so because of its focus on iconography. It may have seemed that Blitt was caricaturing the Obamas, but the image might also have been a critique of the innumerable misrepresentations propagated by the Republic right wing. In that respect, the cover was not a caricature at all but, rather, a deeply ironic commentary on right-wing attempts to caricature Obama.23
The cover for the January 26, 2009 issue of the New Yorker, where Obama is transfigured as Washington, then, is an example of how the semiotics of iconography can underwrite political representation, if not national subjectivity. It not only consecrates Obama as the first black president but likens his election to the (re)birth of the nation and essentially depicts him as a Founding Father immediately after the Revolution. It also harks back to Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” with Obama replacing George W. Bush (as Washington replaced King George III). Indeed, Obama himself invoked a kind of revolutionary aesthetic when developing the particular lexicon that formed the grammar of his political program. Importantly, this lexicon emphasized the word change, a necessary prefiguration of any political revolution, especially pronounced during the election when one recalls the discourse about the previous administration being a regime. If Obama’s election was indeed an ostensible revolution, then it was one where the aesthetics of idiomatic terms like hope, progress, and change came together in public as the writing on the wall of a reimagined America.
Notes
1. See Lena Hill, “The Visual Art of Invisible Man: Ellison’s Portrait of Blackness,” American Literature 81, no. 4 (2009): 775–803. Hill’s essay expands one of the central ideas of Robert Stepto’s reading of Invisible Man; see From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, 2d ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 177.
2. Phillis Wheatley, The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, ed. Julian D. Mason Jr., rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 53.
3. The debate about Wheatley’s political views on slavery have a long and contested history in African American and literary criticism. Although generally heralded throughout the nineteenth century, Wheatley began to be increasingly criticized for not rendering an explicit condemnation of slavery in her poetry. James Weldon Johnson wrote that “one looks in vain for some outburst or even complaint against the bondage of her people, for some agonizing cry about her native land.” James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), xxvii. This view was extended during the Black Arts Movement with critics such as Vernon Loggins. Loggins wrote that “she neglected almost entirely her own state of slavery and the miserable oppression of thousands of her race.” Vernon Loggins, The Negro Author (Port Washington: Kennikat, 1964), 24. More judicious assessments of Wheatley have been offered by Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (New York: Basic Civitas, 2003).
4. Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 44.
5. Wheatley, The Poems, 104n.
6. OED, s.v. conspire.
7. Wheatley, The Poems, 104n.
8. Ibid., 164n.
9. As Thomas J. Steele notes on Wheatley’s personification of America as Columbia, “The figure of Columbia, two deities joined into a single new character, thereby serves as an adept unification of two historical figures, George Washington and Phillis Wheatley—the “father of his country” and the mother of black American literature.” Thomas J. Steele, “The Figure of Columbia: Phillis Wheatley Plus George Washington,” New England Quarterly 54, no. 2 (June 1981): 266.
10. Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle,” in The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, ed. Charles Neider (New York: Da Capo, 1998), 12.
11. This scene from Irving’s story has been much discussed. See, among others, Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 124–25; Steven Blakemore, “Family Resemblances: The Texts and Contexts of ‘Rip Van Winkle,’” Early American Literature 35, no. 2 (2000): 187–212; and Bruce Burgett, “American Nationalism—R.I.P.,” American Literary History 13, no. 2 (2001): 317.
12. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (New York: Penguin, 1981), 68.
13. Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses (New York: Scribner’s, 1897), xix.
14. Importantly, Douglass’s story makes use of literary portraiture in depicting Madison Washington. When Listwell, the benevolent white who dedicates himself to abolitionism, sees Madison in the woods, he says that the escaped slave’s image was “daguerreotyped” in his mind. Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave, in Three Classic African-American Novels, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Signet, 2003), 35.
15. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (New York: Norton, 2002), 55.
16. For a reading of Queequeg cannibalistically developed as an example of Melville’s “ruthless democracy” where no man was less than another, see John Stauffer, “Melville, Slavery, and the American Dilemma,” in Wyn Kelley, ed., A Companion to Herman Melville (New York: Blackwell, 2006), 220; for a reading of the scene as a sign of U.S. burgeoning imperial designs, see Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 86.
17. Queer is meant here to prefigure the way that Melville explicitly uses the term in the novel as an indication of something being amiss, imbalanced, or unknown, as in Stubb’s conversation with Ahab in chapter 29, but also the latent homoeroticism of the novel as with the chapters “A Bosom Friend” and “A Squeeze of the Hand.”
18. Wendell Phillips, “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” in Speeches, Lectures, and Letters (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1892), 468–94.
19. James McCune Smith, “Lecture on the Haytien Revolutions,” in John Stauffer, ed., The Works of James McCune Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 44, 46.
20. Ibid., 46–47.
21. Frank J. Webb, The Garies and Their Friends (New York: AMS, 1971), 122–23.
22. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Furniture,” in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James Albert Harrison (New York: Crowell, 1902), 107–8.
23. If blogs can be used as an index, the majority of comments on the cover did not see it as satire—something that Rachel Sklar noted in her review of the incident, writing that “presumably the New Yorker readership is sophisticated enough to get the joke, but still,” stating that it would nonetheless anger a great many people. Rachel Sklar, “Yikes! Controversial New Yorker Cover Show Muslim, Flag-Burning, Osama-Loving, Fist-Bumping Obama,” Huffington Post, July 13, 2008. Barry Blitt defended the cover, writing, “I think the idea that the Obamas are branded as unpatriotic (let alone as terrorists) in certain sectors is preposterous. It seemed to me that depicting the concept would show it as the fear-mongering ridiculousness that it is.” See “Barry Blitt Defends His New Yorker Cover Art of Obama,” Huffington Post, July 13, 2008. New Yorker editor David Remnick reiterated the same sentiment, that it was meant as satire. David Remnick, “It’s Satire, Meant to Target ‘Distortions and Misconceptions and Prejudices” About Obama,” Huffington Post, July 13, 2008. In the same week that Vanity Fair released its August 2008 issue, it also posted on its Web site the online blog “Politics and Power” where it acknowledged that it was remixing the New Yorker. “Vanity Fair Covers The New Yorker,” Vanity Fair 22 (July 2008).