Hiram Powers' The Greek Slave, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
An extract of Chapter 18 of Matthew Bevis' 2013 Oxford Handbook of Victiorian Poetry, Rhyme, Rhythm, Violence: Elizabeth Barrett Browing on Slavery by Caroline Levine.
If ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point’ invites us to look for patterns of recurrence that reverberate across registers of experience, Barrett Browning's later poems about slavery, ‘Hiram Powers' Greek Slave’ (1850) and ‘A Curse for a Nation’ (1856) push her insights about repetitive form to an ambitious new conclusion. Writing against the assumption that each of us has a primary responsibility to our own community or nation, Barrett Browning makes the case that political responsibility travels because political forms themselves return -patterns of sameness-and-difference repeating across time and space. In recent years, many literary and cultural critics have urged a move away from formalism precisely because form is too abstract and generalizing. Stuart Hall, for example, writes scathingly that formalism ‘over-generalizes... so as to decontextualize and flatten out all the significant differences between the experiences of people in different situations, who are members of differing social and cultural groups, with access to different forms and quantities Of economic and cultural capital.’ But if Barrett Browning is right, to insist on understanding political situations as radically distinct from one another -singular rather than repetitive- allows one to miss the ways that unjust forms organize social experience across time and space.
In the late 1840s, an American sculptor named Hiram Powers exhibited a work called ‘The Greek Slave’ in the US and Britain. The sculpture was a huge success wherever it went: Near York, Washington, New Orleans, the Crystal Palace in London. The sculpture is crafted in white marble, suggesting a debt to ancient art. But in fact Powers' work had a closer referent: the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire that had taken place through the 1820s. Reports alleged that the Ottomans had sold Greek Christian women as slaves. Audiences praised the sculptor for conveying the dignity of a woman stripped to nakedness except for her Christian cross, rising above the shame of her condition with purity and faith.
But there was something brazenly missing in these admiring reports. With the exception of a few abolitionist periodicals and a famous satirical cartoon in punch, almost no one -including the visitors in New Orleans- bothered to connect Hiram Powers' ‘Greek Slave’ to North American slavery. With its conspicuous whiteness, its Christian cross, and its stylistic evocation of ancient Greece, Powers' work allowed visitors to express their horror at Greek enslavement while blithely ignoring a slavery that was closer at hand. In response, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote a sonnet that insists that we notice injustice wherever it appears:
They say Ideal beauty cannot enter
The house of anguish. On the threshold stands
An alien Image with enshackled hands,
Called the Greek Slave! as if the artist meant her
(That passionless perfection which he lent her,
Shadowed not darkened where the sill expands)
To so confront man's crimes in different lands
With man's ideal sense. Pierce to the centre,
Art's fiery finger! and break up ere long
The serfdom of this world. Appeal, fair stone,
From God's pure heights of beauty against man's Wrong!
Catch up in thy divine face, not alone
East griefs but West, and strike and shame the strong,
By thunders of white silence, overthrown.
The poem begins by reporting conventional wisdom: ideal beauty and suffering cannot inhabit the same space. Immediately, however, the poet complicates this claim: on the threshold of the house of anguish stands a figure that should not be there, does not belong —an alien image with enshackled hands ’Called the Greek Slave‘. A figure that gestures both to aesthetic beauty and to human suffering, the Greek Slave explodes the distinction between art and anguish, standing in a space between the two.
If the sculpture here gestures in two directions -both to art and to suffering- line 7 points in multiple directions: As if the artist meant her / To so confront man's crimes in different lands. This sudden move to different lands probably comes as a bit of a surprise. Only three lines earlier the figure is ‘Called the Greek Slave’, and there is no mention of anywhere other than Greece so far in the poem. But the end of this sentence calls the act of ‘calling’ into question. She may be called the Greek Slave, but it is as if the artist meant her to confront people in many lands. In other words, if we thought that the artist called the sculpture the Greek slave because he intended to represent a Greek slave, his intention takes a global detour: the title pointing to Greece but the sculpture itself pointing around the world. And in fact the rhyming patterns of the sonnet have been steadily moving us outward: the still sculpture, which ‘stands’, resonates with the opening out of the house Of anguish, which ‘expands’, inviting us to turn our attention to ‘different lands’. Rhyme, here, allows the still, single, particular art work to reverberate with a sprawling otherness, the inescapable similarity of the words binding them together despite their difference.
Line 8 brings another unsettling dislocation: ‘Pierce to the centre, art's fiery finger’, exhorts the poet. The centre of what, exactly? We have just been in different lands, and it is not possible to find the centre of a scattering. It is intriguing, too, that the word centre comes at the turn, or Volta, of the sonnet. This is not the exact middle of the poem, which would be one line above. Volta in Italian means turn, a moving centre or pivot. In this particular sonnet the volta is also thoroughly dynamic, since it is enjambed. If art is to pierce to a centre, then, it is a location in the middle of a global scattering, and at the shifting, pivoting turn of the poem's form. Of course, one plausible reading is that the centre refers back to the beginning Of the poem: back to the house of anguish, where art had been poised on the threshold. Now it is time to pierce to the centre, to find the hub or heart of human suffering but the inside of the house of anguish has also expanded suddenly here to become the serfdom of ‘this world’. The centre, then, is the centre of a globe which has no centre, the moving centre of suffering that is housed everywhere.
As the poem reaches its final three lines, the sculpture, which has been frustrating and multiplying its referents, is asked to move in opposing directions. The poet exhorts the sculpture to catch suffering upward and to throw strength down; it is asked to address ‘not alone / East griefs but West” -presumably, that is, not only Ottoman, but also US, slavery. Even the famous and paradoxically thunderous ‘White silence’ of the last line points in two opposing directions, both toward the whiteness of the marble sculpture and toward the white audiences who refuse to speak out against slavery.
The title Of Barrett Browning's poem might seem to point in one direction, then, toward a sculpture by Hiram Powers. But the sculpture in turn points to Greek slavery, which then points us not only east to Turkey but also west, to US slavery, and then, ultimately leads us to the ‘serfdom of this world’. Up and down, east and west, the poltical power of art is to point away from itself in multiple directions. If we understand powerful social institutions and hierarchies as forms, as Barrett Browning does in ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point’, then this insistence on a dispersed indexicality begins to make sense. To point to one place and one place only is to miss the fact that the violent form of slavery repeats itself in at least two contexts: modern Greece and the United States. Slavery is, after all, a pattern of relations, a model for organizing society and labour -a form: sorting humans into owners and Objects, and entitling possessors to legal and economic power over their objects; it is a portable kind of organization, capable of imposing itself on experience across centuries and continents. In ‘The Runaway Slave’, Barrett Browning worked through resemblances among multiple kinds of social and aesthetic organization, making sense of the violent, contradictory, divisive patterns of US slavery through patterns of echoing similarity and difference. In ‘Hiram powers' Greek Slave’, she follows this formal insight to a frightening new recognition: as a formal patterning of sameness and difference. Slavery itself can reverberate across the world.
At the same time that Barrett Browning is urging attention to the form of slavery as it travels around the world, she is writing in a poetic form that also travels, organizing experience across time and space: the fourteen-line sonnet. Barrett Browning opts for the Petrarchan form, which ends in a sestet rather than a couplet. Notably, her rhyme scheme here is even more repetitive than many sonnets in this Italian tradition: the concluding sestet, which usually rhymes two three-line pairs (cde cde), here rhymes the first, third, fourth, and sixth lines (cdc cdc), producing a relentless, uncompromising echo effect, and drawing the already repetitive rhymes close in an extra couplet (lines 10-11) that is not a routine feature of Italian sonnets. At the same time, the poem is highly enjambed, and its syntactical complexity makes it almost impossible to read in a steady forward fashion. If a reader needs to double back to make sense of the poem's meaning, it becomes difficult to hear the rhyme, no matter how repetitive it might be. Formally, then, Barrett Browning seems to point in multiple and even opposing directions, just as she does politically: she gives us a highly traditional poetic form, and points the reader both toward that form and away from it, both toward the resonating patterns of the rhymed words and away from them. Fascinated by patterns of repetition and difference, the coupling of rhymes that can be both pulled close together and pushed surprisingly far apart, Barrett Browning thinks through the political impulse towards separation in a form that relentlessly joins as much as it distinguishes.
This interest in sameness and difference is again important for understanding slavery. It is crucial to recognize that slavery is not exactly the same from place to place. It's repeated with differences, like rhymed words -echoing but not identical. In the Greek context, for example, slavery does not sort people by colour, as it does in the United States' context. But Barrett Browning suggests that to allow the particularity of Greek slavery to hide from us its likeness to African slavery is itself the gravest of mistakes. To understand white slaves as fundamentally different from black ones frees us to care about the one and to ignore the other. If we insist on feelings of difference, we miss the kinships that take shape on the level of form.
I have noted that the sonnet form, like slavery, travels and repeats, structuring experience according to its strict form across contexts. This may sound like a trivializing of slavery, but Barrett Browning's example suggests instead that a habit of thinking through repetitive, portable aesthetic patternings may help us to see how political violence, too, is patterned and transportable. Like slavery, the sonnet form inhibits and confines. Like slavery, it can have many contents -beauty and suffering, blackness and whiteness. And like slavery, it is not a natural or a necessary form but an artificial one, a crafted pattern of relationships. Unlike the slave, the sonneteer has the freedom to move in and out of her form constraints, and in this case she resists confinement as much as she embraces it, expanding the form beyond its focus on a single moment to point to all of the world's suffering. But like the slave holder or citizen, the poet makes -and therefore has the power to remake- relationships. Literary critics interested in politics have tended to think of social and political life as the ‘real’, set against the carefully crafted artifices of literary art. But if we consider the panopticon or the timetable or slavery as forms of social organization, we can see that our usual distinctions between real social forms and unreal aesthetic ones does not hold. Both literary forms and social formations are equally real in their capacity to organize experience, and both are equally unreal in being artificial, contingent constraints that can be remade. Thus the portable, repetitive patterns of rhyme, rhythm, and the sonnet offer crucial insights into slavery without collapsing all experience into a single, flattened, unthinking sameness. And Barrett Browning suggests that an attention to reverberating formal similarity, which goes in all directions, produces a better, more responsible political and poetic thinking than a rigid embrace of local particularity.