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Description: The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s
A charming miniature attributed to Jean-Antoine Laurent, dated ca. 1795...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.133-153
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00338.9
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4. Muslin’s Materiality
A charming miniature attributed to Jean-Antoine Laurent, dated ca. 1795 (fig. 117), depicts a blond woman in a garden, wearing a simple neoclassical dress with a drawstring neckline and short sleeves. With a straw hat slung over her elbow, she presents herself as natural, authentic, and at ease. But this portrait represents her as not just a fashionable woman, but as a fashionable white woman. The blond wig and madras-cloth sash were just two of many elements of neoclassical dress that specifically articulated the wearer’s racialized whiteness. As we shall see, muslin’s materiality enmeshed neoclassical dress with race as it negotiated conceptions of freedom, nature, primitivism, and transparency.
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Description: Portrait of a Young Woman by Laurent, Jean-Antoine
Fig. 117. Attributed to Jean-Antoine Laurent, Portrait of a Young Woman, ca. 1795. Watercolor on ivory, 6.3 × 7.3 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Blondness was a hair color associated with fair-skinned people, and pallor was already, as we have seen, a marked characteristic in contemporary beauties. In fact, blond wigs were a passionate fad in Paris immediately post-Thermidor, when fashion was resurgent after the repressions of the Terror.1Blond wigs were particularly popular in 1794–5, the year immediately following the end of the Terror in France, which is the basis for my assumption that the sitter in fig. 117 is wearing a wig. Amann 2009 analyzes the shifting meanings of the blond wig in plays staged during the fad, particularly in relation to the issues of trust and authenticity in political life post-Terror. Such wigs were expensive since blond hair was scarce, and rumors flew that the new plethora of wigs was due to the abundant hair salvaged from the severed heads of guillotine victims. Madame Tallien was the credited innovator of this trend; a print after a miniature portrait by Jean-Baptiste Isabey (fig. 118) shows her with white skin, bare breast, skimpy muslin dress, and blond wig. The fashion for blondness was likely connected to its long associations of youthfulness and eroticism; it also represented an artificially “natural” way to wear a light head, after powdered coiffures had become discredited by their association with the old regime.2Amann 2009; on hair powder, see Barrell 2006, pp. 145–209.
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Description: Portrait of Teresa de Cabarrus, also known as Madame Tallien by Unknown
Fig. 118. After Jean-Baptiste Isabey, Portrait of Teresa de Cabarrus, also known as Madame Tallien, [1794] 1895. Colored lithograph, dimensions unknown. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
The “whiteness” of blond hair might otherwise be unremarkable, except that it is paired, in Laurent’s miniature (fig. 117) and elsewhere, with plaid madras cloth. The portrait includes two types of madras: a red and green check is used to sash the sitter’s waist, while a blue shawl with a striped border forms her backdrop. Madras cloth, still a part of traditional dress in the West Indies today, was used as slave currency (fig. 119). Woven in south India, the cloth was imported to England where it was banned from wide sale by laws designed to protect the domestic textile industry. It was instead auctioned off to slave traders who used it to barter for enslaved people in West Africa and to clothe them in the Caribbean, one of the few markets within the British and French empires where it could be legally sold.3Tulloch 1999 and Evenson 2008. What, then, is madras cloth doing on the body of a white Frenchwoman in a garden in 1795?
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Description: Sari by Unknown
Fig. 119. Woven cotton sari with red checks and red, orange, and green bands, ca. 1855. Fabricated in Arni, Tamil Nadu, India; labeled “Madras, 1855” in slip book. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
In this chapter, I will argue that living statues in neoclassical dress participated in an emerging conception of racialized whiteness. Yet they did so not, as is sometimes claimed, by simply mapping whiteness onto classicism, but, perhaps unexpectedly, via their invocation of the plantation culture of the West Indies. Elements of neoclassical dress, such as the adoption of “slave textiles” like madras as fashionable accessories, spectacularized and thematized whiteness, and contrasted it with its abject other, blackness. Yet at the same time, the idea of metamorphosis inherent in the living statue undermined racial binaries and provided space to explore the possibility of a spectrum of embodiment. The polychromy of wax was invoked as an alternative to classical white marble as the metaphorical medium for the living statue, allowing for hybridity, malleability, and transformation, even as its uncanny realism disturbed the boundary between death and life. In what follows, I will focus on the paradoxes of race and color as embedded in the material facts of the living statue, considering the ramifications for freedom, classicism, and modernity within the larger cultural impetus to blur the distinctions between life and art.
NEOCLASSICAL BODIES AND THE ANXIETY OF ABJECTION
Neoclassicism’s pristinely white, smooth, and coherent bodies helped assuage the anxiety of abjection. The abject, in psychoanalytic theory, is the part of the self that must be disavowed and distanced, because it threatens the necessary fiction of a whole and cohesive subjectivity.4On abjection in art, see Kristeva 1982 and Arya 2014; in neoclassicism in particular, see Siegel 2000. It helps draw a bright borderline between “I” and “not I,” but as such it can never be permanently excluded, for it is always needed to define the self, in a structure of legitimation and subjectification. For example, heterosexuality cannot exist without the creation of an abject other, homosexuality, to constitute itself; whiteness requires blackness.5See Butler 1993 and Foster et al. 1994. Even as it is continually suppressed and disavowed, then, the abject is also continually re-presented, even re-constituted.
While the content of the abject varies by culture, bodies and body fluids, death and deformity, marginalized people and the spaces they inhabit are often abjected, and the female, and especially the maternal, are sites of abjection par excellence. Religious ritual is commonly employed to grapple with, contain, and dismiss the abject, as in the Christian cult of Mary or its rite of Communion, in which body and blood are ritually consumed. But art is perhaps the most important mechanism for dealing with abjection, especially in secular modernity—indeed, theorist of the abject Julia Kristeva argues that processing abjection is one of the main purposes of art.6Kristeva 1982. Yet like all repressions, the abject cannot be completely contained, even by these powerful signifying systems.
Both neoclassical art and contemporary aesthetic theory were heavily invested in suppressing abjection. A neoclassical sculpture such as John Flaxman’s 1790 Cephalus and Aurora (fig. 120) is formally arranged to frame and showcase the smooth marble body of an ideal male. Although the story of Cephalus and Aurora features lust, abduction, carnality, jealousy, and ultimately murder, Flaxman’s sculpture follows classical principles of restraint, employing elegant gestures, emotionless features, and even the small penis indicative of the classically self-controlled man.7See Dover 1978, and for a provocative and dissenting view, Beck 2018. Cephalus’s body is a smooth envelope of marbleized flesh, framed by contrast with the wrinkled clothes of Aurora and the swag of drapery behind him. Unveiled for the viewer’s anxious apprehension, his body is complete, contained, and virtuous.
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Description: Cephalus and Aurora by Flaxman, John
Fig. 120. John Flaxman, Cephalus and Aurora, 1790. Marble, 146 × 102 × 67 cm. Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, UK
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Description: Cephalus and Aurora, detail by Flaxman, John
Detail of Fig. 120. John Flaxman, Cephalus and Aurora, 1790. Marble, 146 × 102 × 67 cm. Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, UK
We have already addressed in Chapters Two and Three the power of outline and contour in neoclassical culture, and discussed women’s appropriation of strong contour in their development of neoclassical dress, as well as the connection between contour and the scientific and aesthetic ideas of vitalism and sensibility. But outline and contour are also strong borderlines between being and non-being, subject and fragment, bodied and disembodied. The language of austerity, purity, and masculinity that often surfaced in discussions of outline and contour hints at its power in assuaging the anxiety of abjection.8For a thoughtful engagement with both sharp contour and fuzzed shadows, see Betzer 2013. Indeed, the hysteria over the category confusion between neoclassical outline and the procreative female body in the 1793 pad fad demonstrates the work this aesthetic project was performing.
Contemporaries believed that art formed those who looked at it—not only morally, but also physically. This was a theory with roots in Aristotle, but reaffirmed in the eighteenth century, including by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his influential Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). Indeed, such power required government oversight of the arts to avoid abject cultural disaster:
The visual arts, in particular, besides the inevitable influence they exert on the character of a nation, are capable of one effect that requires the close attention of the law. Beautiful statues created by beautiful people reacted back on them, and the state was indebted to beautiful statues for its beautiful people. In modern times the susceptible imagination of mothers seems to express itself solely in monsters.9See Gustafson 1993, p. 1091; translation by Gustafson.
Contemplating virtuous, complete, and unified artistic representations of the human body could serve as a ritual of self-subjectification, feeding the beauty and morality of the soul while simultaneously repressing the anxiety of fragmentation and dissolution. In the case of Flaxman’s Cephalus and Aurora, the sculpture was the centerpiece of a theatrical domestic space designed to stage a stable identity. Thomas Hope purchased the sculpture from Flaxman while in Rome and designed a room around it in his fashionable London home, visited by many artists and published in his book, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (fig. 121), considered the first book on interior design in English.10See the monumental Watkin and Hewat-Jaboor 2008. Anchoring the room on axis with the viewer’s entry, the sculpture was surrounded on three sides by mirrors that not only reflected different views of the piece, but also reflected the viewer to himself, in mutual apprehension with the sculpture. Perhaps as a thrilling contrast, Hope included a fragmented marble arm, believed to be from the Parthenon, in a glass case to the right of Flaxman’s sculpture.11Watkin 2008, p. 38. The rest of the room was draped with orange curtains edged in black, with the ceiling painted sky blue, creating the effect of a life-size classical vase in which the figural decoration has been turned inside out with the viewer lodged inside, looking up at the sky above. The iconography of the room’s decoration was meant to evoke Ovid’s “saffron-robed Aurora, dispelling the darkness with her morning light,” reinforcing Enlightenment dreams of wholeness and the banishment of darkness and fragmentation.12Watkin 2008, p. 37. Hope’s private theatricalization of a sculptural encounter in his Aurora Room created an immersive experience in which the viewer’s own body had been swallowed by the unity and perfection of classical art, and yet was reassuringly reflected back to him in an array of glittering mirrors.13Lajer-Burcharth 1999 and Grigsby 1998 discuss mirrors, reflections, and seeing oneself in reflected works of art as both a vanguard form of artistic display and an important tool for subjectification in the 1790s.
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Description: Aurora Room by Hope, Thomas
Fig. 121. Thomas Hope, Aurora Room, from Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (London), 1807, pl. 7. Engraving and etching, 47 × 30.5 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Hope’s design attempts to correct the problem of eighteenth-century culture and art identified by Lessing: it was fragmented, monstrous, and feminized, and shaped by the deforming and inferior imagination of women. Indeed, Lessing argues, women’s engagement with art required the “attention of the law” because their sensitive imaginations deformed the children they produced with their bodies. Perhaps it is not incidental, then, that his most enduring analytical concept, the “pregnant moment,” or the moment of maximum tension in a narrative, is both gendered and procreative. Flaxman’s sculpture has a pregnant moment: it exhibits the free and self-contained body of Cephalus just before he is forcibly restrained and abducted by Aurora—her hands are on him, but only lightly (fig. 120, detail). Like a pregnant body, a sculpture in a pregnant moment carries both tension and poignancy; it is a last moment of wholeness on the brink of danger, division, and possible disintegration.14Gustafson 1993, p. 1087, notes how Lessing’s analysis of the Laocoön sculpture posits the snakes as the abject within the sculpture itself, threatening to fragment and disunify the bodies of Laocoön and his sons: “While the abject may appear to lie completely outside the boundaries of narcissistic unity, it actually surrounds, penetrates, and entangles those boundaries.” Lessing’s key aesthetic concept imports the abject body of the procreative woman into his narrative to define, by contrast, the highest point of subjective and aesthetic unity in the work of art.
While men’s contemplation of great art ennobles their souls and unifies their subjectivity, women’s contemplation of great art does not, according to Lessing; it affects only their bodies, causing them to produce the “beautiful people” who in turn produce a great society.15Lessing’s clear implication is that women cannot benefit from this process of subjectification because they lack a unified imago to contemplate: “She who cannot attain the status of a subject remains an object.” Gustafson 1993, p. 1093. Yet there is ample evidence, as we have seen in this book, that women understood the case differently. Despite being cast as the abject others in this cultural narrative, women embraced the idea of the moral and social power of neoclassicism, and aimed to intervene in it as subjects and producers, not merely reproducers. Women’s self-construction and self-exhibition as living sculptures participated in this visual economy of contemplation and subjectification, despite their exclusion by its founding theorists. Draping themselves in white muslin that exposed their bodies as whitened, marmoreal, sculptural nudes, women employed neoclassicism to aestheticize their own abjection and transmute their reviled bodies into prestigious and moral works of art that both represented and formed their subjective unity.
COTTON, CREOLES, AND PLANTATION FASHION
The abjection of the enslaved black body and the plantation culture it inhabited stalked neoclassical dress, which could not escape the material traces of its manufacture. Wool was not only widely produced in Europe but also had centuries of nationalistic meaning attached to it in Great Britain, while silk had longstanding national craft traditions in both England and France.16Indeed, in the United Kingdom Parliament, the Lord Speaker of the House of Lords sits on a woolsack, as he (or previously the Lord Chancellor) has since the fourteenth century. By contrast, cotton muslin was a modern and imperial textile, the product of global networks and industrial innovation. Cotton fiber was grown in India, the West Indies, Asia Minor, Brazil, and parts of Africa.17The southern United States would not become a leading cotton producer until the 1820s or so. On cotton, see Lemire 2011, Riello 2013, and Beckert 2014. Indian-made fine muslins and printed calicoes began to enter the European market in the seventeenth century and were impossible for European producers to rival. Both Britain and France banned such imports in the early eighteenth century in order to protect their domestic textile industries, although these regulations were flouted to varying degrees. It was not until the 1770s that several key inventions changed the scale and quality of cotton spinning and weaving in Europe, allowing them to approach the quality of Indian textiles and inaugurating the Industrial Revolution.
Cotton also played a vital role in the eighteenth-century slave trade. Finished cotton cloth was a desirable commodity in exchange for slaves in West Africa, and found a ready local market in the West Indies. In turn, those slaves were used not only for the much larger and more established sugar industry, but also for the production of raw cotton that would then be exported to the emerging factories in Liverpool and Manchester. This triangular trade accelerated in the 1780s, as a previously small cotton textile industry struggled to meet growing global demand and the price for raw cotton rose sharply. The Ottoman Empire could not increase production sufficiently, despite dragooning thousands of Greek laborers to work on cotton farms; India’s rich harvest was protected by the East India Company for the use of their skilled Indian weavers. West Indian planters were the logical focus: they controlled suitable land and had long experience producing crops with slave labor.
As West Indian planters stepped in to fill the growing demand for raw cotton, exports quadrupled between 1781 and 1791.18Beckert 2014, pp. 89–90. This growth was fueled by the import of thousands of African slaves—during the height of the cotton boom, nearly 30,000 slaves per year to Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) alone. Indeed, by the 1780s, the majority of cotton sold in markets around the world was produced by African slaves.19Beckert 2014, p. 94. Thus, the desire for cotton not only fueled the key innovations of the Industrial Revolution but also ingrained slavery in the emerging system of modern global capitalism. The same white muslin that glossed some bodies as natural and classical, whole and unfragmented, caused other bodies to be enslaved and endangered.
Although neoclassicism was the style associated with revolution in France and Enlightened and liberal values elsewhere, neoclassical dress’s associations with slave culture were simultaneously openly cultivated. Several of the women most famous for wearing extreme versions of neoclassical dress in France—the so-called Merveilleuses—were themselves Creoles from the West Indies. These included Fortunée Hamelin, born to sugar planters in Saint-Domingue, and Joséphine de Beauharnais, future wife of Napoleon, raised on a sugar plantation in Martinique. In fact, the simple round gown of white muslin was itself a West Indian invention, well documented in the paintings by Agostino Brunias of Caribbean life (fig. 122).20On Brunias and the chromatic variety of the people he depicted, see Lafont 2016 and Kriz 2008. In addition, the habit of caring for the textile by frequent washing with a “blueing” agent like indigo to accentuate its whiteness was also a West Indian practice; in his visual taxonomy of costumes of people around the world, Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur portrayed laundresses in Saint-Domingue both wearing and washing white muslin and madras cloth (fig. 123). Indeed, the distinctive brilliance of white cotton blued and bleached in Saint-Domingue caught the eye of Marie Antoinette in 1782 and helped to inaugurate the fashion for the robe en chemise.21Chrisman-Campbell 2015, p. 192; Steele 2017, p. 41.
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Description: Caribbean Women in Front of a Hut by Brunias, Agostino
Fig. 122. Agostino Brunias, Caribbean Women in Front of a Hut, ca. 1770–80. Oil on canvas, 30.5 × 22.9 cm. Museo Carmen Thyssen, Málaga, Spain
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Description: Costumes de Différents Pays, Blanchisseuses de St. Domingue by Grasset de...
Fig. 123. Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur and Labrousse, Blanchisseuses de St. Domingue, from Costumes de Différents Pays, ca. 1797. Hand-colored engraving, 19.7 × 14 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Several of these Creole-neoclassical fashion elements can be observed in a 1786 portrait of a black woman painted in Saint-Domingue (fig. 124). Clad in a loose, white round gown, the woman wears madras plaid as a headwrap and prominent gold hoop earrings. Gold hoops had long been connected with black bodies and New World marine discovery.22For example, Jacopo Zucchi’s 1560 painting The Discovery of America features opulent displays of coral, pearls, and shells on the white figures, while the black-skinned figures in the painting wear gold hoop earrings. See Pointon 2009, p. 110. By the eighteenth century they were associated with Creole culture, both enslaved and free, and were taken up by white women as fashionable accessories in the 1790s; Madame Tallien wore them with her blond wig in 1794 (fig. 118, detail).
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Description: Portrait of a Haitian woman by Beaucourt, François
Fig. 124. François Malépart de Beaucourt, Portrait of a Haitian Woman, 1786. Oil on canvas, 69.1 × 55.6 cm. McCord Museum, Montreal
The headwrap was another distinctively West Indian garment that became absorbed into neoclassical fashion. First mandated by sumptuary laws as a way to mark the free colored woman, the headwrap was appropriated by women of all colors and classes in the West Indies and worn in a variety of forms and folds, both in madras plaid and plain muslin.23White 2010, p. 41. The headwrap was not a symbol of slavery, nor only used when a woman was working, as other scholars have sometimes asserted. Catholic charity worker Juliette Toussaint wears a madras headwrap with coral jewelry (fig. 125). Born enslaved in Saint-Domingue, Toussaint’s freedom was purchased by her husband, who remained enslaved to his French owners but nonetheless earned a fortune as a coiffeur in New York City during the 1790s.24Juliette Toussaint’s husband, Pierre Toussaint, was beatified by Pope John Paul II; see Deborah Sontag, “Canonizing a Slave: Saint or Uncle Tom?” New York Times, February 23, 1992.
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Description: Portrait of Teresa de Cabarrus, also known as Madame Tallien, detail by Unknown
After Jean-Baptiste Isabey, Portrait of Teresa de Cabarrus, also known as Madame Tallien (detail of fig. 118), [1794] 1895. Colored lithograph, dimensions unknown. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
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Description: Mrs. Pierre Toussaint (Juliette Noel, c. 1786–1851), detail by Meucci,...
Fig. 125. Anthony Meucci, Juliette Toussaint (detail), ca. 1825. Watercolor on ivory, 8.3 × 6.7 cm. New-York Historical Society, New York. 1920.5
As cropped curls and natural hair supplanted the frizzed, padded, and powdered headdresses of the 1780s, turbans and headwraps were widely adopted by fashionable European women in the 1790s. The Creole headwrap became the signature accessory of the Directoire hostess Juliette Récamier, and was depicted in most representations of her, including the famous bust by Joseph Chinard (fig. 126). Although it may not look distinctively Creole to our eyes, contemporaries explicitly identified it as such, crediting it as “the source of her glory”:
Every day, morning and evening, . . . in the midst of all sorts of finery, . . . there was to be seen a young woman of bewitching beauty and perfect figure, dressed in white and wearing on her head the white knotted handkerchief which Creoles call a vehoule. It was Mme. Récamier. . . . The vehoule was a great success, and Mme Récamier having likewise attained celebrity and purchased M. Necker’s fine house in the Chaussée d’Antin, she found herself the goddess of a charming place, the hostess of a good table, and the Aspasia to a group of men of rank and wit. . . . The white vehoule brought all this about.25“Tous les jours, matin et soir, . . . au milieu de l’émulation des modes, . . . on voyait assise une jeune femme, d’une beauté ravissante et d’une taille à server de modèle, vêtue en blanc et coiffée en blanc de ce mouchoir noué sur le front que les créoles appellant vehoule. C’était Mme Récamier. . . . La vehoule fit fortune, et Mme Récamier ayant, elle aussi, fait fortune et acheté la belle maison de M. Necker dans la chaussée d’Antin, elle se vit la divinité d’un séjour charmant, l’hôtesse d’une table élégante et l’Aspasie d’un cercle d’hommes de rang et d’esprit. . . . La vehoule blanche opéra tout cela.” Frénilly 1908, p. 92.
But the most distinctive element of slave-inspired neoclassical fashion was madras. Madame Tallien wears a madras handkerchief as a knotted sash in her prison portrait of 1796 (fig. 145), about which more will be said in Chapter Five. A 1795 illustration in the London-based Heideloff’s Gallery of Fashion (fig. 127) shows a woman wearing a madras handkerchief as a fichu, while an 1801 plate from Paris-based Journal des dames et des modes (fig. 128) depicts a woman in a dress made entirely of madras cloth. White women also wore madras as headwraps, as evidenced by a French fashion illustration (fig. 129) and an English miniature portrait (fig. 130).
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Description: Bust of Madame Récamier by Chinard, Joseph
Fig. 126. Joseph Chinard, Bust of Madame Récamier, after 1801. Marble, 60.6 × 33.7 × 23.5 cm. RISD Museum, Providence. 37.201
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Description: Morning Dress, detail by Unknown
Fig. 127. Morning Dress, fig. 75 (detail), from Heideloff’s Gallery of Fashion, November 1795. Hand-colored etching and engraving, 34 × 26.5 cm. Beinecke Rare Books Library, Yale University
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Description: Toquet à Pointes, Robe de Madras by Unknown
Fig. 128. Toquet à Pointes, Robe de Madras, from Journal des dames et des modes, Costume Parisien, An 9, 10 janvier 1801. Hand-colored engraving, 18.5 × 11.3 cm. Morgan Library and Museum, New York
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Description: Fichu-Madras Robe de Perkale by Unknown
Fig. 129. Fichu-Madras Robe de Perkale, fig. 1558, from Journal des dames et des modes, Costume Parisien, 20 avril 1816. Hand-colored engraving, 18.5 × 11.3 cm. Morgan Library and Museum, New York
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Description: Georgian Era Lady with Up-Swept Hair by Unknown
Fig. 130. Unknown, Lady with Upswept Hair, ca. 1800. Watercolor on ivory, 7 × 5.7 cm. Tormey-Holder Collection
Clearly these sartorial gestures—the muslin round gown, the hoop earrings, the madras cloth, the headwrap—added up to a deliberate reference to the visual and material culture of the West Indies. This cultural appropriation is in many ways a familiar story: a mainstream culture borrows symbols from a marginalized culture to enjoy the edgy cool of its significations without the consequences of its lived reality.26Indeed, some of the symbols even remain the same: in August 2011, Italian Vogue published a (widely criticized) feature on the trend for “slave earrings,” noting that “the most classic models are slave and creole styles in gold hoops.” In March 2017, Latinx women at Pitzer College spray-painted “White Girl, take off your hoops!!!” on a college wall dedicated to free speech and protest, and emailed the student body asking white women to stop appropriating this element of “black and brown culture.” See <https://claremontindependent.com/pitzer-college-ra-white-people-cant-wear-hoop-earrings> (accessed August 22, 2018). But we should aim to understand the attraction of such appropriation more precisely. What exactly did Creole culture signify to Europeans in the 1790s, and what did it mean to layer its particular associations atop neoclassical fashion’s other significations of classicism, artistic culture, and vitalist sensibility?
The term “Creole” was itself equivocal. Some used it to refer to the white plantation owners alone, while others intended the term to describe the entire multiracial mix of inhabitants of the West Indies.27On Creole culture and its perceptions in the eighteenth century, see Wilson 2003, pp. 129–69; and Randhawa 2008. White Creole ladies were admired for a chic that paralleled that of consumptives in its sickly glamour; they were especially pale and gothically beautiful, with a listlessness caused by the hot climate and their austere diet:
In their diet, the Creole women are, I think, abstemious even to a fault. Simple water, or lemonade, in which they indulge, and vegetable mess at noon, seasoned with cayenne pepper, constitutes their principal repast. The effect of this mode of life, in a hot or oppressive atmosphere, is a lax fibre, and a complexion in which the lily predominates rather than the rose. To a stranger newly arrived, the ladies appear as just risen from the bed of sickness. Their voice is soft and spiritless, and every step betrays languor and lassitude . . . they have, in general, the finest eyes in the world; large, languishing, and expressive.28Edwards 1801, vol. 2, pp. 12–13.
The Creole woman’s desirable slightness and pallid beauty were accentuated by contrast with the black bodies that surrounded her. But Creole women also had a reputation for lustiness; as a saying went: “Creole misses, when scarcely ten,/ Cock their eyes and long for men.”29Moreton 1793, pp. 108–9. J. B. Moreton attributed the immodest hedonism of white Creole women to their frequent fraternization with black and brown people: If you surprise them [at home], as I have often done, you will be convinced of the truth of this assertion, that Ovid, with all his metamorphoses, could not match such transformations: instead of the well-shaped, mild, angelic looking creature you beheld abroad, you will find, perhaps, a clumsy, greasy tomboy, or a paper-faced skeleton, romping, or stretching and lolling, from sofa to sofa, in a dirty confused hall, or piazza, with a parcel of black wenches, learning and singing obscene and filthy songs, and dancing to the tunes.30Moreton 1793, p. 109.
In addition, the women’s own mutability and shallowness inflamed their lust:
Their little hearts are a sort of tinder, that catch fire from every spark who flatters their vanity, and whispers them soft nonsense: --they are pliable as wax, and melt like butter; and though naturally delicate in their texture, they are fondest of strong, stout-backed men.31Moreton 1793, pp. 109–10.
Moreton’s account unmasked the Creole as a sham. Although she may appear like a properly “mild” English girl, with her companion “black wenches” she is greasy, romping and singing obscene songs in a “dirty confused hall.” Everything about her is unstable and unfixed; she is a “paper-faced skeleton” whose heart catches fire like tinder, is as pliable as wax, and melts like butter. Although Ovidian metamorphoses are a common feature of the living statue, even Ovid has nothing on this woman’s transformations, Moreton says.
Creole women’s changeability and lusty hedonism were a colonialist version of the metamorphosis that women thematized when they presented themselves as living statues, and their bacchantism was more dangerous. The contagion of the West Indies, with its hybrid culture based on slavery, had engendered women who may seem attractive at first, but who are really dirty, lusty, unstable horrors. The statues they resembled are not cool, smooth, solid, white marble, but soft, pliable, uncanny colored wax.
WAX STATUES AND CHROMATIC VARIETY
Wax sculptures were themselves a prominent feature of eighteenth-century visual culture. Long deployed to make effigies, ex-votos, and death masks, wax had an ancient association with death and memorialization, and wax figures would have been commonly seen in churches across Europe in the early modern period. Realistically modeled body parts were offered as prayers and gifts of thanks for healing and displayed in chapels or even hung from the ceilings of churches. But many churches were swept clean of such displays over the course of the eighteenth century, as tastes and practices changed.32Grootenboer 2013, p. 7, notes that, in 1785, Leopold, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, ordered all the votives to be cleared from Tuscan churches because they were obscuring the frescoes. Instead, wax figures proliferated as a medium for popular entertainment and relief portraiture in the period. Samuel Percy’s Lady Barrington (fig. 131) shows the naturalistic potential for the medium. The wax relief portrait bust is set against a satin ground with a green wax curtain protruding beyond the frame into the space of the viewer, a gesture that further enhances the reality effect of the subject’s tinted skin and up-to-date fashionable costume.33Viewers were instructed specifically how to interact with this portrait; on the back of the panel is written: “To see these portraits to advantage hold the top of the frame parralell [sic] to the window so that all the features have equal light and shade.” Audiences thrilled to the strange lifelikeness of such reliefs and statuary, and anatomists employed the medium to teach without the need for dissection. Women entrepreneurs—from Patience Wright, the first American sculptor, to the famed Madame Tussaud—were particularly associated with wax modeling in the period, perhaps because of the lingering skepticism among critics and theorists about the material as a properly artistic medium. Yet wax, inexpensive and portable, allowed new classes of people to commission sculptural portraits of themselves or loved ones.34Pilbeam 2003, p. 15.
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Description: Lady Barrington by Percy, Samuel
Fig. 131. Samuel Percy, Lady Barrington, 1809. Wax, 18.4 × 14.6 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Wax statues are a key plot device in Samuel Jackson Pratt’s 1790 play, The New Cosmetic; or, The Triumph of Beauty, A Comedy, which explicitly connects the liminality of the Creole West Indies with the ideal of the woman as living statue, and produces an alternative Pygmalion myth for the colonialist age.35Pratt 1790; for analysis, see Rosenthal 2004 and Gwilliam 1994. As the play opens, Mr. Lovemore has just arrived in Antigua in pursuit of a rich sugar planter’s daughter, Louisa Winstone, whom he had previously met and spurned in England, a decision he now regrets. His initial impression of the island is that it was crackling with fireworks, but he soon realizes that what he was hearing was the crack of the overseers’ whips. Meanwhile, Louisa panics when she hears that Lovemore has arrived, for she has turned “brown as a gipsy” since her return—a transformation other characters attribute partly to the hot sun and partly to Louisa’s lusty behavior: “in short [you] ogle the red coats so much, that they no doubt contributed with the rays of the sun, to toast you into your present crisp and brown complexion.” (p. 15) While she hopes Lovemore will appreciate her more “durable” charms, in fact he is repulsed when he sees her and vows to return to England. A companion agrees with Lovemore’s assessment, saying, “I loved the girl once, when she was white, but never thought of her after she became a Mulatto.” (p. 30) Throughout these opening scenes, the play represents the moral depravity of Creole culture as mirrored by the physical decay of Louisa from white, English beauty into brown, lusty ugliness. Skin color is not fixed into races, and can be altered; yet whiteness is unwaveringly aligned with moral and physical beauty.
Louisa’s cousin overhears her lamenting Lovemore’s rejection, and promises to turn her white again through a magical, but painful, potion that will slough the darkened skin off her face. “And will it make me as rosy and lily-like as ever?” asks Louisa (p. 37). For that, she is willing to suffer, imagining that when they see her, men will say: “You are like a perfect Venus rising out of the sea.” (p. 38) The recipe has two ingredients: cashew nuts, the produce of India, and rum, by-product of the Caribbean sugar industry. The nuts and rum must be crushed and steeped together, then applied to the skin in a strange colonialist poultice that burns, but ultimately whitens the skin of the user. Plantation culture thus taints the white people who participate in it, but the searing contrast between black/brown and white also paradoxically produces the very whiteness that it endangers.
The procedure is successful. Louisa and her father decide to reveal her transformation in a sculpture gallery, in a gambit that recalls the climactic scene of The Winter’s Tale. Louisa poses as a statue, and her father, in on the joke, invites Lovemore to come and view his works of art before he returns to England: “Keep to the pedestal,” he urges his daughter, “and as soon as he comes be as composed as death.” (p. 58) Yet these sculptures are not white, but rather are waxworks made in a variety of racial skin tones—as old Winstone says: “white, black, and yellow.” (p. 62) One of them even memorializes a slave he had flogged to death. “He haunted my conscience for ever after,” the old planter says; “he appeared at night by my bedside, and in short troubled me so much, that in order to appease the fellow’s ghost I erected this to his honour.” (p. 60) Hearing this, Lovemore imagines that God has darkened this man’s daughter as a punishment: “Heaven I see has revenged the old man’s severity, and for a slave killed has returned him a daughter burned; for a black lost, a mulatto gained.” (p. 61)
Predictably, Lovemore is entranced by the “sculpture” of Louisa, and asks her father: “Would you be so obliging as to permit me to touch this wax, for upon my soul the artificial vermilion of the lips looks so much like real, balmy, benign true blood, that I am almost tempted to kiss them. If I gaze longer, like the statuarist of old I shall forget myself, and fall in love with a piece of wax. I will! I must! Thou sweetest piece of artificial nature!” (p. 62) At this invocation of Pygmalion, Louisa startles and knocks over her pedestal, coming to life and revealing the trick.
The play afflicts all the male characters with confusion about the line between death and life, body and statue, black and white. After the reveal, Louisa ridicules her lover’s fantasies about women as white statuary, saying to him: “In England you compared me to alabaster; just now you thought me a piece of wax-work: but it is the way of all mankind, whatever they imagine us at first, they find us mere downright flesh and blood.” (p. 67) Lovemore protests that his lack of imagination about her potential for transformation was the problem: “If I had any idea you could have been so metamorphosed, I vow and protest I would have taken more pains to deserve your love.” (p. 63) In retaliation for being mocked by his companion, Mr. Whitmore, Lovemore lunges at him and in the scuffle knocks over one of the wax statues. “Murder! My image! My image! Death,” cries the rich planter, confusing effigy and human, art and life. When the men apologize, the planter retorts: “Damn your compassion, for it spares things neither animate nor inanimate.” Yet his own compassion is badly misguided, favoring art over life: as payment for the damage to his statue, he demands “a dozen field negroes.” (p. 71)
Dark skin is a punishment in this story, but it is not immutable. Nor is the condition of enslavement: in a subplot, one of Lovemore’s friends entices a slave, Quacou, to try the whitening poultice, reflecting: “There’s a secret for you: set them about skinning their faces, and in a little time they will shake off the yokes and the fetters of servitude.” (p. 39) Yet in a twist, both the white friend and Quacou misapply the potion and end up with black and white mottled faces. At the end, the play concludes with Lovemore professing his “enslavement” to Louisa, now that he is in love with her again; thus, as she became white, she also became the master. Throughout this play, white becomes black, black becomes white, slaves become masters, and masters, slaves. Statues come to life as lost lovers, broken statues are mourned as dead companions, and the ghosts of murdered slaves are appeased by their sculptural representations. Mutability and transformation are both celebrated and feared.
As a colonialist Galatea, this living statue is white not because she emerges from classical marble or ivory, but because she is created white and free in contrast to her black slaves. And yet the certainty of her whiteness and her freedom are continually undermined. Indeed, the whitening in this story is artificial and misguided; Louisa chastises her lover for mistaking her for alabaster when she is really flesh and blood. Rather than deploying a marble sculpture gallery as a plot device, the play’s use of the uncanny realism of wax instead brought focus to the spectrum of color in flesh—”white, black, and yellow”—and its disquieting, yet liberating, malleability.
Wax paradoxically represented both truth and deception: the word “sincere” comes from the Latin for “without wax,” referring to the practice of concealing chips and flaws in pots with colored wax.36Pilbeam 2003, p. 10. But the difference between “vulgar” sensational wax sculpture and refined marble sculpture was not as vast as theorists might have preferred. Antonio Canova, whose sculpture was frequently acclaimed as the pinnacle of neoclassical refinement, employed colored wax to animate the surfaces of his marbles, to add gentle color to lips and cheeks, or even to tint the entire body, especially of female figures.37See Bindman 2014 and 2016, and Ferando 2016. Such surface treatments have usually been cleaned away and are no longer visible on his sculptures. But this practice disturbed many contemporaries, who found that it undermined what was essential about sculpture—its emphasis on three-dimensional form rather than surface—and made it too appealing to amateurs, too vulgar. Perhaps like Emma Hart’s attitudes or Creole women in white dresses, Canova’s waxed marbles failed to contain the abjection of the female body. Treating the surface of the marble like a skin, Canova’s works provoked the upsetting thought of the guts and blood and viscera that might lie beneath.38Ferando 2016. It also associated the neoclassical living statue with skins that were not white, translucent, nor marbleized, but colored, sensitive, and alive.
UNMASKING THE LIVING STATUE
The questions of who was entitled to subjectivity, liberty, and citizenship, and whether skin color was included in the answer, animated political culture in the 1790s. An abolitionist campaign to end the slave trade in Britain roiled public discussion until Parliament defeated the motion in 1791. That same year, Saint-Domingue experienced the largest slave revolt in history, leading to the abolition of slavery on the island and eventually to the creation of the nation of Haiti. Meanwhile, after their defeat in Parliament, Quakers and other abolitionists organized a sugar boycott that had wide efficacy, reviling sugar as a luxurious product of brutal human exploitation that implicated the morality of those who consumed it. Sugar boycotters proudly proclaimed on their sugar bowls (fig. 132) that their household only used sugar produced by free labor in India, somewhat dubiously held out as a land of freedom by contrast with the West Indies.
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Description: Sugar bowl by Unknown
Fig. 132. Creamware sugar bowl, ca. 1825. The bowl is inscribed on the reverse in gilt copperplate: “East India Sugar not made By Slaves. By Six Families using East India, instead of West India Sugar, one Slave less is required.” Ceramic, height 11.8 cm, diameter (rim) 10.8 cm, diameter (base) 8.2 cm. Museum of London
Europeans were thus accelerating the enslavement and domination of nonwhite cultures even as they were expanding concepts of individual freedom, equality, and rights—a conflict that worried some and was completely glossed over by others. Race science, led by the publication of new editions of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s influential taxonomy, On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, during the 1790s, helped suppress the tensions between these two pursuits by assuring white people that they were essentially different (and, it was usually implied, superior) to other people of the world (see figs 156160).39See Bindman 2002, p. 197, and Painter 2010, pp. 75–87, on the history of this text and its different editions. Blumenbach did not assert a hierarchy of the races, but other scientists did use his taxonomy to assert white supremacy. Neoclassical dress participated by appropriating the cultural symbols of an oppressed group that was increasingly recognized as categorically distinct, and layering these over references to antiquity.40See also Allen 2011 on the way the Black Venus served both to reify white superiority and to undermine it, revealing cultural anxiety about blackness, beauty, and desire. In so doing, they gained the depraved glamour, consumptive sickliness, and scandalous aura of plantation culture, as well as a heightened sense of their own whiteness by contrast with the black culture of the original wearers.
James Gillray surfaced these tensions and unmasked the act of appropriation with a 1796 caricature that transformed a pallid neoclassical lady into a richly colored Africanized woman. La Belle Espagnole, ou la Doublure de Madame Tallien (fig. 133) caricatures a fashion plate (fig. 134) that had appeared a few days earlier in Heideloff’s Gallery of Fashion, purporting to capture the fashionable dress worn “at the Opera by a Foreign Lady of Distinction” who, despite Gillray’s title, was not Madame Tallien.41It is uncertain whom the original fashion plate depicts; uniquely among Nicolaus Heideloff’s fashion plates, it purports to represent a specific woman. “La Belle Espagnole” was the stage name of a tightrope dancer who performed for years at Sadler’s Wells; however, it is unlikely that a former kitchen maid turned ropedancer would be referred to as a “Lady of Distinction” and fashionably attired at the opera. The Morning Post and Fashionable World recorded a “Spanish Lady, so much admired for her matchless beauty,” at the opera in February 1796, and this is perhaps the beauty memorialized by Heideloff’s. Although Madame Tallien was a Spanish woman of French descent, she was not in London in February 1796; indeed it was reported in the British papers that month that she would shortly be traveling from Paris to Spain to visit her father, who had recently come into a large fortune. Fashion and politics collided in her appearance, according to a contemporary news account:
A Spanish Belle of Beauty, rather masculine, made an impressive appearance at the Opera . . . The singularity of her Amazonian dress, which was black and scarlet, and a circulating buzz that she was related to the Republican consort of Tallien, secured her the whole stare of the boxes, and so discomforted the puny phalanx in Fop’s Alley that TERROR was with them “the order of the evening!”42Kentish Weekly Post, January 29, 1796; see the lively account of this incident at <www.themisfortuneclub.com/2017/09/la-belle-espagnole.html> (accessed November 11, 2018).
In Gillray’s treatment, the lady’s cropped curls expand to become an afro, her nose is broadened, her lips are thickened, and her skin is tinted dark. The gold hoop earrings she wears in the original print remain, but their West Indian referent is spelled out literally: behind her, a framed landscape is labeled “Havanna.”
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Description: La belle espagnole, ou, La doublure de Madame Tallien by Gillray, James
Fig. 133. James Gillray, La Belle Espagnole, ou la Doublure de Madame Tallien, 1796. Hand-colored etching, 30.9 × 21.7 cm. Lewis Walpole Museum, Yale University
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Description: New Dress, in the Roman Style, Introduced at the Opera by a Foreign Lady of...
Fig. 134. New Dress, in the Roman Style, Introduced at the Opera by a Foreign Lady of Distinction, fig. 87, from Heideloff’s Gallery of Fashion, February 1796. Hand-colored etching and engraving, 34 × 26.5 cm. Beinecke Rare Books Library, Yale University
This caricature is the “doublure de Madame Tallien.” For Gillray, the “doublure” was a physiognomic revelation of a person’s true character; he used the term again in 1798 in a well-known satire of the leading Whig politicians (fig. 135). In French, doublure is a fashion term, referring to the lining of a garment—its underlayer.43Doublure also has other meanings, including understudy (theatre) and dubbing (as in film, for instance). In this satire, then, Gillray unmasks the act of appropriation: what is described in the fashion periodical as a “new dress, in the Roman style” is revealed instead as West Indian—the Indo-Afro-Caribbean base that underlay the industrial and colonialist superstructure.
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Description: Doublûres of characters, or, Striking resemblances in phisiognomy by Gillray,...
Fig. 135. James Gillray, Doublures of Characters; or striking Resemblances in Phisiognomy, 1798. Hand-colored etching, 26.3 × 36.2 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
John Raphael Smith’s A Lady Holding a Mask (fig. 136) is also a racialized unmasking, yet it inverts Gillray’s imagery in order to assert the contiguity of whiteness, Europeanness, beauty, authenticity, and classicism. A curious update on the trope of the masquerade portrait, Smith’s pastel gives the black mask caricatured African features—a broad nose and thick lips—setting up a strong contrast with the pale-faced woman in a white neoclassical gown. The unmasked woman in her muslin dress is both authentic and beautiful, qualities emphasized by a contrast with the ugly and false mask.
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Description: Woman Holding a Mask of a Black Man by Smith, John Raphael
Fig. 136. John Raphael Smith, A Lady Holding a Mask, 1795–1800. Pastel on wove paper, 33.7 × 26.7 cm. Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
Indeed, a colored stipple engraving published in Paris in 1803, Mirate Che Bel Visino (fig. 137), argued that the natural beauty of neoclassical dress really only made sense on a white woman.44Apparently this image resonated with contemporaries: a watercolor copy on ivory is in the Royal Museums Greenwich, London; and the print was the model for a 1845 painting by American artist Harriet Cany Peale titled Her Mistress’s Clothes (private collection). Here, a white woman has dressed up her servant (or slave?) in fashionable dress and jewelry, and holds the black woman’s face before the mirror in a way uncannily similar to how Smith’s woman held her black mask. The contrived contrast is between the black and the white, the fashionably gussied up and the nonchalantly attired, the “ugly”—the black servant is missing a front tooth—and the beautiful. “Look, what a beautiful little face,” the title tells us, ironically, and the viewer is meant to smile; despite the effort she has made, the beautiful face really belongs to the white woman looking back at us, not the ludicrously clad black woman draped in cameos and white muslin. Neoclassical dress, here, is as strange and unnatural on a black woman as a black mask is on a white woman. Whereas Gillray’s caricature mocks white women’s pretentions to classical virtue by demonstrating that they are really just dressed like “mulattas,” slaves, and Creoles, the French stipple engraving insists that the two races are categorically different—white and black, classically beautiful, and unfortunately inferior—and that fashion cannot obscure these facts. Where the French print insists on distinction, Gillray sees only a provocative commingling. In one case, neoclassical dress contains layers of significations that imply a spectrum of embodiment; in the other, it is unequivocally European, natural, and white.
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Description: Mirate Che Bel Visino by Mécou, André Joseph
Fig. 137. André Joseph Mécou after Louis Sicardi, Mirate Che Bel Visino, 1803. Colored stipple engraving, 31.4 × 24.3 cm. Beinecke Rare Books Library, Yale University
Neoclassical dress was thus as modern as it was classical. Cotton’s material origin as a fiber grown by dark-skinned and often enslaved people and spun by urban factory workers clung to the finished textile and inflected its representational meaning. Even as the white muslin neoclassical dress attempted to transform modern, European bodies into classical exemplars, it was also deeply layered with meanings about imperial power, industrialization, and racialized whiteness. The white women who wore neoclassical dress in the 1790s were thus attempting to yoke together diverse discourses. On one level, they fashioned themselves as statues in order to claim the inheritance of classicism and embody a truly aesthetic life in which they had creative agency and subjective freedom. Yet by layering over these ideas the elements of slave fashion and Creole culture, women were both evoking the dangerous, sexualized glamour of the West Indies, and insisting on their own whiteness and freedom by contrast with the abjection of slavery. In the end, however, the fluidity that was at the heart of the concept of the living statue, always metamorphizing from stone to flesh, art to life, implied instability. The bodily categories of race, skin color, and freedom could be altered—they were as pliable as wax—and this provided space for both the horrors of abjection, and the hopefulness of a more egalitarian future.
 
1     Blond wigs were particularly popular in 1794–5, the year immediately following the end of the Terror in France, which is the basis for my assumption that the sitter in fig. 117 is wearing a wig. Amann 2009 analyzes the shifting meanings of the blond wig in plays staged during the fad, particularly in relation to the issues of trust and authenticity in political life post-Terror. »
2     Amann 2009; on hair powder, see Barrell 2006, pp. 145–209. »
3     Tulloch 1999 and Evenson 2008. »
4     On abjection in art, see Kristeva 1982 and Arya 2014; in neoclassicism in particular, see Siegel 2000. »
5     See Butler 1993 and Foster et al. 1994. »
6     Kristeva 1982. »
7     See Dover 1978, and for a provocative and dissenting view, Beck 2018. »
8     For a thoughtful engagement with both sharp contour and fuzzed shadows, see Betzer 2013. »
9     See Gustafson 1993, p. 1091; translation by Gustafson. »
10     See the monumental Watkin and Hewat-Jaboor 2008. »
11     Watkin 2008, p. 38. »
12     Watkin 2008, p. 37. »
13     Lajer-Burcharth 1999 and Grigsby 1998 discuss mirrors, reflections, and seeing oneself in reflected works of art as both a vanguard form of artistic display and an important tool for subjectification in the 1790s. »
14     Gustafson 1993, p. 1087, notes how Lessing’s analysis of the Laocoön sculpture posits the snakes as the abject within the sculpture itself, threatening to fragment and disunify the bodies of Laocoön and his sons: “While the abject may appear to lie completely outside the boundaries of narcissistic unity, it actually surrounds, penetrates, and entangles those boundaries.” »
15     Lessing’s clear implication is that women cannot benefit from this process of subjectification because they lack a unified imago to contemplate: “She who cannot attain the status of a subject remains an object.” Gustafson 1993, p. 1093. »
16     Indeed, in the United Kingdom Parliament, the Lord Speaker of the House of Lords sits on a woolsack, as he (or previously the Lord Chancellor) has since the fourteenth century. »
17     The southern United States would not become a leading cotton producer until the 1820s or so. On cotton, see Lemire 2011, Riello 2013, and Beckert 2014. »
18     Beckert 2014, pp. 89–90. »
19     Beckert 2014, p. 94. »
20     On Brunias and the chromatic variety of the people he depicted, see Lafont 2016 and Kriz 2008»
21     Chrisman-Campbell 2015, p. 192; Steele 2017, p. 41. »
22     For example, Jacopo Zucchi’s 1560 painting The Discovery of America features opulent displays of coral, pearls, and shells on the white figures, while the black-skinned figures in the painting wear gold hoop earrings. See Pointon 2009, p. 110. »
23     White 2010, p. 41. The headwrap was not a symbol of slavery, nor only used when a woman was working, as other scholars have sometimes asserted. »
24     Juliette Toussaint’s husband, Pierre Toussaint, was beatified by Pope John Paul II; see Deborah Sontag, “Canonizing a Slave: Saint or Uncle Tom?” New York Times, February 23, 1992. »
25     “Tous les jours, matin et soir, . . . au milieu de l’émulation des modes, . . . on voyait assise une jeune femme, d’une beauté ravissante et d’une taille à server de modèle, vêtue en blanc et coiffée en blanc de ce mouchoir noué sur le front que les créoles appellant vehoule. C’était Mme Récamier. . . . La vehoule fit fortune, et Mme Récamier ayant, elle aussi, fait fortune et acheté la belle maison de M. Necker dans la chaussée d’Antin, elle se vit la divinité d’un séjour charmant, l’hôtesse d’une table élégante et l’Aspasie d’un cercle d’hommes de rang et d’esprit. . . . La vehoule blanche opéra tout cela.” Frénilly 1908, p. 92. »
26     Indeed, some of the symbols even remain the same: in August 2011, Italian Vogue published a (widely criticized) feature on the trend for “slave earrings,” noting that “the most classic models are slave and creole styles in gold hoops.” In March 2017, Latinx women at Pitzer College spray-painted “White Girl, take off your hoops!!!” on a college wall dedicated to free speech and protest, and emailed the student body asking white women to stop appropriating this element of “black and brown culture.” See <https://claremontindependent.com/pitzer-college-ra-white-people-cant-wear-hoop-earrings> (accessed August 22, 2018). »
27     On Creole culture and its perceptions in the eighteenth century, see Wilson 2003, pp. 129–69; and Randhawa 2008. »
28     Edwards 1801, vol. 2, pp. 12–13. »
29     Moreton 1793, pp. 108–9. »
30     Moreton 1793, p. 109. »
31     Moreton 1793, pp. 109–10. »
32     Grootenboer 2013, p. 7, notes that, in 1785, Leopold, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, ordered all the votives to be cleared from Tuscan churches because they were obscuring the frescoes. »
33     Viewers were instructed specifically how to interact with this portrait; on the back of the panel is written: “To see these portraits to advantage hold the top of the frame parralell [sic] to the window so that all the features have equal light and shade.” »
34     Pilbeam 2003, p. 15. »
35     Pratt 1790; for analysis, see Rosenthal 2004 and Gwilliam 1994. »
36     Pilbeam 2003, p. 10. »
37     See Bindman 2014 and 2016, and Ferando 2016. »
38     Ferando 2016. »
39     See Bindman 2002, p. 197, and Painter 2010, pp. 75–87, on the history of this text and its different editions. Blumenbach did not assert a hierarchy of the races, but other scientists did use his taxonomy to assert white supremacy. »
40     See also Allen 2011 on the way the Black Venus served both to reify white superiority and to undermine it, revealing cultural anxiety about blackness, beauty, and desire. »
41     It is uncertain whom the original fashion plate depicts; uniquely among Nicolaus Heideloff’s fashion plates, it purports to represent a specific woman. “La Belle Espagnole” was the stage name of a tightrope dancer who performed for years at Sadler’s Wells; however, it is unlikely that a former kitchen maid turned ropedancer would be referred to as a “Lady of Distinction” and fashionably attired at the opera. The Morning Post and Fashionable World recorded a “Spanish Lady, so much admired for her matchless beauty,” at the opera in February 1796, and this is perhaps the beauty memorialized by Heideloff’s. Although Madame Tallien was a Spanish woman of French descent, she was not in London in February 1796; indeed it was reported in the British papers that month that she would shortly be traveling from Paris to Spain to visit her father, who had recently come into a large fortune. »
42     Kentish Weekly Post, January 29, 1796; see the lively account of this incident at <www.themisfortuneclub.com/2017/09/la-belle-espagnole.html> (accessed November 11, 2018). »
43     Doublure also has other meanings, including understudy (theatre) and dubbing (as in film, for instance). »
44     Apparently this image resonated with contemporaries: a watercolor copy on ivory is in the Royal Museums Greenwich, London; and the print was the model for a 1845 painting by American artist Harriet Cany Peale titled Her Mistress’s Clothes (private collection). »
4. Muslin’s Materiality
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