Painting the dark side: art and the Gothic imagination in nineteenth-century America 9780520249875, 9780520238213

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of Illustrations (page vii)
Acknowledgments (page xiii)
Introduction (page xv)
1. Gloom and Doom (page 1)
2. The Underground Man (page 44)
3. The Shrouded Past (page 75)
4. The Deepest Dark (page 101)
5. The Shadow's Curse (page 128)
6. Mental Monsters (page 158)
7. Corrosive Sight (page 188)
8. Dirty Pictures (page 221)
Epilogue (page 247)
Notes (page 249)
Index (page 293)

Citation preview

( / offi ft FINE ARTS IMPRINT

THE AHMANSON FOUNDATION has endowed this imprint

to honor the memory of

FRANKLIN D MURPHY who for half a century served arts and letters, beauty and learning, in equal measure by shaping

with a brilliant devotion

those institutions upon which they rely.

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Published with the assistance of the Getty Grant Program. Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association of America.

The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Art Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Associates, which is supported by a major

gift from the Ahmanson Foundation.

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PAINTING THE DARK SIDE

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“4 PAINTING THE DARK SIDE E ART AND THE GOTHIC IMAGINATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

SARAH BURNS

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY + LOS ANGELES + LONDON

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

First paperback printing 2006 © 2004 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burns, Sarah. Painting the dark side : art and the Gothic imagination in nineteenth-century America / Sarah Burns.

p. cm—(The Ahmanson-Murphy fine art imprint) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-0-520-24987-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-5 20-24987-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Painting, American—rogth century. 2. Race awareness in art. 3. Stereotype (Psychology) in art. 4. Masculinity in art. 5. Art and mythology. I. Title. II. Series.

ND210.B87 2004

7§9.13'09'034—dc21 2003013276

Manufactured in Canada

I3 I2 If 10 09 08 07 06

io 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).®

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations \ vil Acknowledgments \ xiil

Introduction \ xv

1. Gloomand Doom \ 1 2. The Underground Man \ 44 3. The Shrouded Past \ 75 4. The Deepest Dark \ trot 5. Lhe Shadow’s Curse \ 128 6. Mental Monsters \ 158 7. Corrosive Sight \ 188

8. Dirty Pictures \ 221 Epilogue \ 247

Notes \ 249 Index \ 293

BLANK PAGE

ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES (FOLLOWING PAGE 100)

1. Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1828 2. Thomas Cole, Ruined Tower (Mediterranean Coast Scene with Tower), ca. 1832-36

3. David Gilmour Blythe, Art versus Law, 1859-60 4. David Gilmour Blythe, The Hideout, ca. 1860-63 5. Washington Allston, Belshazzar’s Feast, 1817/1843 6. Washington Allston, Tragic Figure in Chains, 1800

7, John Quidor, The Money Diggers, 1832 8. David Gilmour Blythe, Ole Cezer, ca. 1858-60 9. Jobn Quidor, Tom Walker’s Flight, ca. 1856

10. William Rimmer, Flight and Pursuit, 1872 tz. Elihu Vedder, The Lair of the Sea Serpent, 1864 12. Elihu Vedder, Fisherman and the Genie, ca. 1863

13. Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875

Vil

14. Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Temple of the Mind, before 1885 15. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Moonlight, early 1890s FIGURES

t. Thomas Cole, Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill), 1825 2 2. Thomas Cole, Hope Deferred Maketh the Heart Sick, 1828 6

3. Thomas Cole, Shipwreck Scene, 1828 6

4. Thomas Cole, The Storm, ca. 1827 8 5. Thomas Cole, Romantic Landscape, ca. 1826 II 6. Thomas Cole, Landscape with Tree Trunks, 1828 II 7. Thomas Cole, Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans,” Cora Kneeling

at the Feet of Tamenund, 1827 14

8. Thomas Cole, The Death of Cora, ca. 1827 15 9. George W. Hatch after Thomas Cole, “Chocorua’s Curse,” 1830 17 1o. Thomas Cole, Landscape Composition, Italian Scenery, 1832 20

11. Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation, 1836 20 12. David Claypoole Johnston, “Anti-Catholic Doings,” 1836 22 13. David Claypoole Johnston, “The Two Monuments,” 1836 22 14. John H. Bufford, Ruins of the Merchants’ Exchange, 1835 2.3 15. Thomas Cole, Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower 1838 27

16. John Constable, Hadleigh Castle, 1829 28 17. Thomas Cole, Untitled [Volterra], 1831 28 18. Thomas Cole, Rock in Connecticut, ca. 1827 30 19. Thomas Cole, Untitled (Landscape with Mountains), ca. 1831/32 31

ca. 1831/32 31 21. Thomas Cole, Past, 1838 35 20. Thomas Cole, Untitled (Landscape with Building Fragment),

22. Thomas Cole, Present, 1838 35

23. Thomas Cole, Simeon Stylites, ca. 1828 37 24. Thomas Cole, Mount Etna from Taormina, 1842 (detail) 37

25. Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Manhood, 1840 39 26. Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Old Age, 1840 AI 27. Thomas Cole, study for The Pilgrim of the World at the End of His

Journey, from The Cross and the World, ca. 1847 42 Vill ILLUSTRATIONS

28. David Gilmour Blythe, Temperance Pledge, ca. 1856-60 51

29. William Sidney Mount, Loss and Gain, 1847 52 30. David Gilmour Blythe, Good Times, ca. 1854-58 53 31. David Gilmour Blythe, Hard Times, ca. 1856-60 53

32. David Gilmour Blythe, The Urchin, ca. 1856 56 33. David Gilmour Blythe, Boy at the Pump, ca. 1858-59 57 34. David Gilmour Blythe, Conscience Stricken, ca. 1860 57 35. “The Total S’iety, A Comic Song,” sheet music cover, 1840 58 36. “A Brandy Smash,” published in Yankee Notions, May 1853 59 37. David Claypoole Johnston, “Every Man for Himself!” published in Joseph C. Neal’s Charcoal Sketches; or, Scenes in a Metropolis, 1844 59

38. David Gilmour Blythe, Man Putting on Boots, 1860 61

October 9, 1852 64 4o. David Gilmour Blythe, Post Office, 1859-63 65 39. “Evening Amusements in New York,” published in the Lantern,

September 9, 1860 67

41. “An Obstruction of the Tear (tier) Duct,” published in Yankee Notions,

42. David Gilmour Blythe, Street Urchins, ca. 1856-58 69 43. David Gilmour Blythe, A Match Seller, ca. 1859 71 44. David Gilmour Blythe, Prospecting, ca. 1861-63 73 45. Anonymous, Slave Revolt, mid-nineteenth century 85

46. Richard Newton, A Real Sans Culotte, 1792 88

1831 93

47. Washington Allston, Rocky Coast with Banditti, 1800 90

48. Washington Allston, Saul and the Witch of Endor, 1820-21 93 49. After Washington Allston, “Spalatro’s Vision of the Bloody Hand,”

Bloody Hand,” 1830 94

50. Washington Allston, Spalatro’s Head, for “Spalatro’s Vision of the

Stuyvesant, 1839 1O7

51. John Quidor, Antony Van Corlear Brought into the Presence of Peter

52. William Sidney Mount, Dancing on the Barn Floor, 1831 107 53. Gorgon, relief sculpture from the pediment of the Temple of Artemis,

Corfu, Greece, 600-580 B.C.E. ILO

54. Nicolino Calyo, Negro Dancer and Banjo Player, 1835 IIo

ILLUSTRATIONS 1x

55. “James Crow, Esq., of Kentucky; from a painting by Trumbull, in the Capitol at Washington,” published in Crockett’s

Yaller Flower Almanac for 736, 1836 112

January 31, 1852 Il5

56. Frank Bellew, “The Modern Frankenstein,” published in the Lantern, 57. Henry Louis Stephens, “The New Frankenstein: A Glimpse of the Horrible Fate in Store for Jeff Davis at the Hands of the Monster

‘Rebellion,’” published in Vanity Fair, May ro, 1862 116

24, no. 171 (1864) 117

58. “The Grave-digger,” published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine

59. “Sambo the Whitewasher,” published in Yankee Notions, October 1863 119

October 1863 119

60. “Pat Sambo the Whitewasher,” published in Yankee Notions,

61. John Quidor, The Devil and Tom Walker, 1856 122 62. “My Long Tail Blue,” sheet music cover, 1830s 124 63. John Quidor, Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, 1858 126

64. William Rimmer, Midnight Ride, 1830/ca. 1853 131 65. William Rimmer, Secessia and Columbia (Combat of Giants), 1862 134 66. William Rimmer, Dedicated to the 54th Regiment, Massachusetts

Volunteers (Warriors against Slavery), 1863 134 67. William Rimmer, Ob for the Horns of the Altar, 1867 136 68. Perilous Escape of Eliza and Child, \ithograph, 1850s 138 69. “Running Away,” published in Suppressed Book about Slavery, 1857 139

70. Thomas Moran, Slave Hunt, Dismal Swamp, Virginia, 1862 139

71. William Rimmer, Faces: Greek, Goth, Moor, ca. 1867 140

treatise on painting 143

72. “The Shadow Dance,” published in Samuel van Hoogstraten’s 1675

73. Henry Louis Stephens, “Substance and Shadow,” published in Vanity

Fair, January 21, 1860 143

74. Henry Louis Stephens, “The Highly Intelligent Contraband,” published

in Vanity Fair, April 26, 1862 145

75. Frank Bellew, “The Slave Owner’s Spectre,” published in Harper’s

Weekly, May 30, 1863 147

76. George Cruikshank, “The Pursuit of the Shadow,” illustration,

published in Peter Schlemihl, 1823 152

77, William Rimmer, Evening (The Fall of Day), 1869-70 156

xX ILLUSTRATIONS

78. Elihu Vedder, sketch for Fisherman and the Genie, ca. 1863 165

79. Elihu Vedder, The Questioner of the Sphinx, 1863 171 80. Elihu Vedder, The Sphinx of the Seashore, 1879 174

81. Elihu Vedder, Medusa, 1867 176

82. Elihu Vedder, The Young Medusa, 1872 176 83. Elihu Vedder, Perseus and Medusa, ca. 1875 177

84. Elihu Vedder, The Dead Medusa, 1875 178 85. “The Modern Sphinx,” published in Harper’s Bazar, May 1, 1869 183 86. Thomas Nast, “Get Thee Behind Me, (Mrs.) Satan,” published in

Harper’s Weekly, February 17, 1872 184 87. Elihu Vedder, The Phorcydes, 1868 186 88. “The Body Snatchers, A Recent Actual Occurrence in the Vicinity of New York City,” published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,

April 18, 1868 193

89. “To the Surgeon,” Civil War valentine, ca. 1861-65 195 90. Henry Louis Stephens, “A Hint for State Surgeon-Generals,” published

in Vanity Fair, July 5, 1862 197

91. Fernando Miranda, “Hospital Circumlocution—Even Charity Must Be Barred Out,” detail, published in New York Daily Graphic,

January 15, 1885 198 92. William Hogarth, The Reward of Cruelty, 1751 200 93. “Chien fixé sur la table a vivisection,” published in Claude Bernard’s

Lecons de Physiologie Opérative, 1879 203

of Granada, 1870 206

94. Henri Regnault, Execution without Judgment under the Moorish Kings

September 1879 210

95. After Thomas Anshutz, “Dissecting Room,” published in Scribner’s,

96. Thomas Eakins, Differential-Action Study: Man on Ladder, Leaning on Horse’s Stripped Hind Leg, While Second Man at Left Looks On,

platinum print, 1885 212

97. Eadweard Muybridge, Local Chorea, Standing, published in Animal

Locomotion, pl. 557, 1887 214

Mask, Pose 1, ca. 1883 215

98. Thomas Eakins, Naked Series: “Brooklyn No. 1,” Female with Dark

99. Emanuel Leutze, The Poet’s Dream, by 1840 225 roo. “The Emigrant’s Dream,” published in Yankee Doodle, March 20, 1847 225

ILLUSTRATIONS Xi

tor. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Toilers of the Sea, ca. 1883-84 230 102. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Lord Ullin’s Daughter, 1890s 232 103. Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Lorelei, early to mid-1890s and later 232

104. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Curfew Hour, 1880s 241

X11 ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

y voyage into the dark side of American nineteenth-century art would have run aground

Miho ago had it not been for the support of many colleagues and friends. The book had its origins in the mid-1990s, when the dark side of Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic ignited my curiosity. Work on this project proceeded haltingly, however, until it was my privilege to spend two years

at Stanford University, where I enjoyed munificent institutional, material, and intellectual support, along with the time to research and write several chapters. I am grateful beyond measure to Wan-

da M. Corn and Alexander Nemerov for inviting me to teach in the Department of Art and Art History during my first year there, and I am much indebted to the Stanford Humanities Center, where I was a fellow during the second. At Stanford, it was my good fortune to enjoy a sustained and inspiring dialogue with fascinating colleagues and talented students, whose ideas, knowledge, and suggestions helped me to clarify, focus, and refine my thinking. I owe a special thanks to Wanda,

too, for her role as “matchmaker” between me and the University of California Press and for her perpetual generosity. It is ironic that a book on the dark side should have come out of a time so bright.

Many others have made indispensable contributions to this book. Above all, I owe an enormous measure of thanks to Dr. Terri Sabatos, Elizabeth Kuebler-Wolf, Patricia Smith Scanlon, and Kelly Ingleright-Telgenhoff, my supersleuth Indiana graduate assistants, whose resourcefulness, per-

Xi

sistence, energy, ingenuity, and good cheer helped to solve countless problems, seek out innumerable facts, and track many an elusive picture. Colleagues here at Indiana and elsewhere facilitated the work in different ways. I owe special appreciation to Bruce Cole for his unfailing support dur-

ing the years he chaired the Department of History of Art at Indiana University. Susan Rather, Melissa Dabakis, Scott Dimond, and Darrel Sewell all provided opportunities to deliver versions

of the Eakins material while the work was in progress. Jeffrey Weidman was most helpful with questions on William Rimmer, as was Charles Colbert, and Bruce Chambers graciously answered queries on David Gilmour Blythe. Bruce Robertson, Paul Staiti, and Bryan Jay Wolf read the man-

uscript with scrupulously critical attention. Their plenteous and thoughtful comments helped me

to produce what I hope is a much better book. Stephanie Fay has been a model of patient and meticulous editorial acumen from start to finish. Finally, as ever, I want to acknowledge the intellectual inspiration and sustaining friendship of Michele Bogart, Vivien Fryd, Barbara Groseclose, Barbara Miller, Robbie Reid, Eric Rosenberg, Janice Simon, and Ellen Handler Spitz. Without them,

the last few years would have been a lot less fun and interesting.

Xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

~— INTRODUCTION FE

THE ART OF HAUNTING

y training as a historian of American art was based on a canonical narrative that still com-

Morne authority. In this narrative, the most representative, most “American,” painting was the celebration of landscape as type and emblem of national identity. Significantly, the most Amer-

ican of all landscape genres was so-called luminism, in which all-pervading light took on the status of transcendental signifier, standing in for the divine, and for the divinity in nature. Light flooded

the grandiose paintings of the Hudson River school; light blazed in the sunset skies of Frederic E. Church and sparkled in the canvases of the American Impressionists. The genre painters we stud-

ied likewise produced radiant, mythic images of daily life: farmers harvesting, children romping in sunny fields. When race entered the picture, it seldom had a threatening edge. Black men and women appeared on the margins as harmless, often laughable figures. If violence occurred, it was far off on the western frontier, where Indians slaughtered buffalo and threatened pioneers. We now

know all too well how selectively (and for what political and cultural ends) such images represented the American scene. Notwithstanding, they still constitute the mainstream of our historical inquiry, although the emphasis has shifted from celebration to interrogation.! Scholars tended to explain the many exceptions to the rule of sunny-side up as just that, rank-

ing those artists with oddballs and misfits who, for whatever contrary reason, broke out of the mold. Indeed, the title of Abraham Davidson’s 1978 study, The Eccentrics and Other American

XV

Visionary Painters, says it all.2 The “eccentrics,” whose art bears little resemblance to that of “main-

stream” painters, lingered at the margins of American art history, unincorporated into the larger canonical picture. By and large, I accepted that model, though I always nursed a secret preference

for the oddballs. It was not until I began to think about Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic (see Plate 13) that I stumbled into the boneyard of American art history. Admired and praised in the twentieth century as a powerful and uncompromising masterpiece

of American realism, this portrait of a distinguished surgeon in action excited controversy in its earliest years; ambivalence toward the painting persisted long after the hullabaloo had subsided. A full quarter century after its first appearance in public the art critic Sadakichi Hartmann found it both morbid and macabre. As late as 1931 the critic Frank Jewett Mather was describing The Gross Clinic as a “witches’ kitchen,” where a “beneficent magus” presided over “eager young men”

clutching at the patient’s “gashed thigh” in a mysterious ambience of “general black fustiness.”° Looking back at the virulent critical reaction in 1879, when the painting was on display at the Society of American Artists in New York, I discovered the same pattern. What could account for such

disgust before a work many now consider a monumental and unparalleled representation of modern surgical achievement? Was there another side, a darker side, to The Gross Clinic and the artist who made it?

My research strongly suggested that there was. If Eakins—a canonical artist if ever there was one—had a dark side did this hold out possibilities for reconsidering those oddballs and eccentrics so far from the center?* That is, if Eakins’s dark side was as much a part of him as the systematic, scientific, fact-finding sensibility that structured his work and constituted his image as an authentically American genius, then why not revisit the eccentrics and reconsider them in relation to the

mainstream? Why not regard their visual production as equally “American,” with equally compelling things to say about America in the nineteenth century? Was there a way to connect artists otherwise widely separated, socially, geographically, and chronologically? And were there other canonical painters besides Eakins who ventured into the dark side? I knew that there was a substantial and rapidly expanding body of history and criticism on the

gothic tradition in American literature, stretching from the novelist Charles Brockden Brown in the eighteenth century, through Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville in the nineteenth, to William Faulkner and beyond in the twentieth. Why was there no similar corpus of work on a gothic tradition in American art? How could the gothic in American culture be limited to one medium? Was it possible to trace a gothic strain in the history of American art, ty-

ing together misfits and mainstream painters? And how might the answers to those questions alter the contours of the American art-historical canon? I determined to find out. In this book, I explore and interpret the dark side: the gothic imagination in nineteenth-century American painting.

XV1 INTRODUCTION

My “gothic” is at some remove from the “Gothic” architectural and decorative style that en-

joyed a romantic and ecclesiastical revival in the nineteenth century. It is also at some remove from the English literary gothic tradition initiated by Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliff, and “Monk”

Lewis. The gothic novel in England was the product of an age in upheaval. Centering on themes of terror, mystery, and the supernatural, gothic tales mapped the struggles and desires of the self, haunted by the dark forces of the ancestral past or oppressive feudal institutions. Fictions of a turbulent era, these narratives featured wicked monks and corrupt aristocrats as villains bent on per-

secuting innocent maidens and brave youths. Their landscapes were brooding and their settings ruinous or sublime: rotting castles, labyrinthine dungeons, medieval fortresses on crags. In the pic-

torial arts, the Swiss-born painter Henry Fuseli achieved perhaps the epitome of gothic expression

in works such as the memorable Nightmare (1781; Detroit Institute of Arts), with its swooning woman, scowling incubus, and ghostly nag’s head peering through theatrical curtains. Early in the nineteenth century, English and Continental artists explored other gothic themes: ruined churches, apocalyptic disasters.° What had all this to do with America? Born out of revolution, the young country had no ruins and (in comparison with the Old World) only a shallow past—and what seemed an infinitely bright

future. As a product of the Enlightenment, it meant to be a republic of reason, dominated by neither church nor king. Tradition and culture still bound independent America to England, but there

was little to foster the transplantation of the English gothic to American soil. Yet it did take root here, shifting shape in response to different and varying sets of historical and social circumstances.

In this project I follow directions traveled by the literary and cultural historians who in recent decades have historicized the American gothic. Leslie Fiedler’s landmark study Love and Death in

the American Novel remains important, even though scholars have, with good reason, criticized his figuration of American gothic as an exclusively masculine genre centering ona “flight from so-

ciety to nature, from the world of women to the haunts of womanless men.” For Fiedler, American gothic was “a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation.” But as Teresa Goddu notes, Fiedler translated the “dark spectacles” of the gothic into the “more meaningful symbolism of psychological and moral blackness.” That is, he sought mythic, universalizing transcendence for the gothic in America and, although he discussed racial conflict and oppression,

gave comparatively little weight to the racial, political, and economic meanings that have more re-

cently engaged scholarly energy. Nonetheless, his vision of the haunted American literary landscape moved criticism into new territory, both troubling and shadowy.’ These shadows have lengthened over the panoramic expanse of our history as scholars continue

to dismantle the myths of America as an enlightened and progressive republic. In Nightmare on Main Street, Mark Edmundson examines the resurgence of the gothic in the millennial 1990s, track-

INTRODUCTION xvil

ing it everywhere, from the insatiable public appetite for violence and horror to repressed-memory syndrome and Goth subcultures. Focusing on the antebellum decades, David S. Reynolds, in Be-

neath the American Renaissance, explores the cultural “basement” of the period and argues that canonical writers, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman, tapped into a teeming, murky world of popular fascination with sex, crime, vice, and perversion. Although Reynolds is concerned

with literary form more than social critique, his research shows how vast a chamber of horrors underlay the polished surfaces of American literary culture. In Murder Most Foul, Karen Halttunen focuses more specifically on a pervasive, enduring public fascination with horrific, savage criminality, from the earliest years of settlement.®

I also draw heavily on the important work of Toni Morrison and Teresa Goddu on the subject of race. Although I focus on the social, the sexual, and the psychological, the racial is an overwhelming and compelling presence in the territory I explore. The institution of slavery and, more generally, racial oppression and violence have haunted and disfigured history and society alike. In

“Romancing the Shadow,” Morrison insists urgently that we must recognize the connotations of the “darkness” that pervaded American romantic expression. “Black slavery enriched the country’s creative possibilities,” Morrison writes. “For in that construction of blackness and enslave-

ment could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination.” Even the Enlightenment can be understood only in relation to the institution of slavery: “the rights of man and his enslavement.” Whiteness, the fundamental term of American identity, means nothing with-

out its foil of blackness. The “Africanist” presence in our literature, therefore, is a “dark and abid-

ing” one that shaped the “imaginative and historical terrain upon which early American writers journeyed.” Yet more often than not this presence, unmentionable for many reasons, appeared in

a vocabulary “designed to disguise the subject.”? , In Gothic America, Goddu examines “a number of sites of historical horror—revolution, Indian massacre, the transformation of the marketplace—[but] is especially concerned with how slav-

ery haunts the American gothic.” Gothic stories, she argues, intimately connected to the culture producing them, “articulate the horrors of history.” The nation’s narratives “are created through

a process of displacement: their coherence depends on exclusion. By resurrecting what these nar- , ratives repress, the gothic disrupts the dream world of national myth with the nightmares of history.” Oozing into other genres and appearing in unlikely places, the gothic brings “the popular, the disturbing, and the hauntings of history into American literature.” !° In the course of my research, I came to realize that similar gothic patterns infused American visual culture. Above all, the Africanist presence identified by Morrison could be glimpsed in a variety of disguises, some obvious, others oblique. Where graphic caricature spoke bluntly of racial

XVIll INTRODUCTION

tension and unease, the language of painting was characteristically indirect and required careful unraveling to reach the racial dimension. Slavery was not the only divisive and explosive American social ill. Pernicious inequities of gender, class, and ethnicity also found utterance in gothic visual speech. But slavery and its legacy, looming large in our history, stand for all. In these pages,

therefore, slavery is the keystone of my gothic arch.

The scholarly works that have informed my own thinking point clearly to a radically alternative vision of America, haunted by specters of otherness: psychological, familial, social, and especially racial. Yet they focus almost exclusively on the printed word. Even when they include illus-

trations from the period—pictures from trial pamphlets, grotesque political cartoons, and the like—those pictures amplify or reinforce the argument of the text rather than define a gothic visuality. Painting the Dark Side, by contrast, imports the gothic into the realm of the visual. I seek to broaden and complicate our ideas of the gothic and its meaning in nineteenth-century American visual culture—especially in painting. I define this “gothic” as the art of haunting, using the term as container for a constellation of themes and moods: horror, fear, mystery, strangeness, fantasy, perversion, monstrosity, insanity. The art of haunting was an art of darkness, often literally: several of the artists I study shared a dark style, characterized by gloomy tonalities, deep shad-

ows and glaring highlights, grotesque figures, and claustrophobic or chaotic spaces. The gothic is hardly limited to such visual traits, however; we see it in Elihu Vedder’s sunstruck beaches and the highly descriptive and strictly controlled drafting of William Rimmer or Thomas Eakins. If there is

no consistent set of gothic conventions, what connects these disparate works across the nineteenth century?

Beyond the question of style, the gothic is a mode of pictorial expression that critiques the Enlightenment vision of the rational American Republic as a place of liberty, balance, harmony, and

progress. Gothic pictures are meditations on haunting and being haunted: by personal demons, social displacement (or misplacement), or the omnipresent specter of slavery and race. They ex-

plore the irrational realms of vision, dream, and nightmare, and they grapple with the terror of annihilation by uncontrollable forces of social conflict and change. Gothic pictures trade on terror, ambiguity, and excess while inverting or subverting the status quo. They conjure up disturbing spectacles of grotesque bodies in which the monstrous, the animal, and the anomalous threaten the social construction of the normal. They push and occasionally dissolve boundaries designed to segregate social and cultural space, crisscrossing between high and low, elite and popular, painting and caricature. The dark side remains for the most part unknown, although several studies in addition to David-

son’s Eccentrics have done significant work in mapping the territory. Bryan Jay Wolf uses deconstruction and psychoanalysis to probe gothic dimensions in the art of Washington Allston, Thomas

INTRODUCTION XIx

Cole, and John Quidor, who also figure large in Painting the Dark Side. David Miller explores the image and connotations of the swamp, which he construes as the dark side of the nineteenth-cen-

tury American landscape both in painting and in literature. Michael Fried dips into certain dark and haunted regions of Thomas Eakins’s psyche, and, more recently, Gail E. Husch has revealed the cultural meanings embedded in the disaster genre, which enjoyed a great resurgence in the years

from 1848 to 1854.'! Rich in ideas, these studies are also highly selective, focusing on a specific period, artist, genre, or method.

I want to account for the gothic pictorial imagination in a broader and more unified historical, social, and cultural framework. But my narrative does not weave itself into a seamless whole, nor does the book function as a systematic, all-inclusive survey of the gothic in nineteenth-century art.!* My aim is to suggest how the gothic, in its many forms, gave certain artists—in and out of the

mainstream—a potent, fluid language for dealing with darker facets of history and the psyche that seldom intruded into the optimistic domains of more conventional landscape and genre painting.

Gothic pictures stand as visual metaphors for an ever-shifting tangle of secrets, obsessions, fears, and dread. In them disquieting forces, impossible to address directly, find expression in disguise, and things kept in the dark return in the form of veiled, coded, or elliptical messages. Elihu Vedder, for example, could never have expressed outright in a painting his hidden fears of female

power. But his images of colossal sea serpents, dead Medusas, and devouring Sphinxes allowed him to displace and distance those terrors, to push them to the dark side, where veils of fantasy shroud a raw anxiety. Nor could the Boston painter Washington Allston acknowledge his identity as a slaveholding southerner in any acceptable, pictorial form. His gigantic unfinished opus Belshazzar’s Feast (see Plate 5) gave him a covert channel for managing a past that never ceased to haunt him. There was more to it than personal expression, however. Were the pictures by these artists and others I investigate merely visual diaries, written in code and dedicated to the exorcism of personal

demons, they might be very interesting indeed, but would remain unconnected—a diverting array of tormented psyches and guilty consciences. Instead, however, on the gothic picture plane the per-

sonal and the political interlace in complex ways. Vedder’s serpents, Medusas, and Sphinxes ref-

erence not only his own anxieties but also those of middle-class masculinity, socially adrift and threatened by the destabilizing forces of emergent feminism. Allston’s fear and guilt were also the

fear and guilt of a white society—North and South—stained, haunted, and torn by the curse of slavery. Gothic picture were slates on which the cultural unconscious inscribed itself in cryptic symbols and expressed itself in terms at once subjective and social, private and public. This is the gothic

strain, the gothic pattern, that I trace in Painting the Dark Side. The gothic in my account (as in Fiedler’s) is an almost exclusively masculine province, one in

xX INTRODUCTION

which images map the terrain of white male anxiety, fear, and repression. Social, economic, and political tensions splintered nineteenth-century American life into myriad shards as opposing groups sought to gain or aggrandize power. For men, art became one of the sites where these conflicts and

others simmered or raged. Women artists and artists of color were in the extreme minority through most of the century, and few, if any, ventured into the gothic visual territory I survey here. For such

groups literature served as the vehicle of gothic expression while men colonized the pictorial domain. White masculine status and identity, far from stable and unified, constantly faced social, political, and economic challenges. Those may partly explain why male artists manufactured gothic

visual languages to express (and repress) their fears or deployed the gothic vocabulary in acts of pictorial and social transgression. All were haunted by visions of social cataclysm and fantasies of

regression and personal dissolution. The dread of losing control—or the delights of surrender— permeated the space of the gothic picture. Another connecting thread besides whiteness ties together the eight painters I study. All were,

in one way or another, outsiders. Cole was an immigrant who never rooted himself deeply in the soil of his adopted country. Allston was a displaced southern aristocrat trying to conceal his pro-

foundly southern roots in a quintessentially northern town. Blythe and Quidor were at the extremes of marginality, socially, economically, and even geographically. Vedder was a cultural mi-

grant, adrift in wartime New York and subsequently a permanent expatriate, Rimmer a man of precarious balance, always on the brink of poverty and madness. Ryder, a working-class outsider,

sedulously cultivated the weirdness that fascinated his largely middle-class clientele. Eakins, a Philadelphian of respectable family and impeccable professional credentials, though he might seem the odd man out here, willfully made himself an outsider. His provocations to the status quo ranged from the gory Gross Clinic to the flagrant pursuit of nudity in the service of art. Pushed to the mar-

gins, these painters stood on the brink and gazed down into frightening depths.

From the beginning, I wondered if there was a way to bring the emerging gothic pattern in nineteenth-century painting into line with the gothic strain in American literature. As the work progressed, the figure that came back again and again in different guises was that of Edgar Allan Poe, although Hawthorne and Melville both make appearances here, along with the earlier gothic novelist Charles Brockden Brown. In The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables

(1851), Hawthorne probed the personal, familial, and social dimensions of the past as a haunting weight on the present. Brown’s haunted landscapes suggest an approach to Cole’s, and Melville in Benito Cereno (1856) produced an elaborate metaphor for the haunting presence and evil of race in America. Yet it was Poe who, like the repressed, kept returning. Poe, as Goddu has noted, fits awkwardly with a national literary canon, functioning most often as “the demonized ‘other’ who must be exorcised from the ‘mainstream’ of our ‘classic’ American

INTRODUCTION xxi

literature.”!° To integrate him, Goddu argues, literary historians and critics resorted to tactics designed to transcend Poe’s region (the South) and its politics. Thus despite his reputation Poe’s stand-

ing in the canon remains problematic. As outsider and southerner haunted by personal demons and racial fears, Poe offered a striking pattern for understanding the gothic facets of the nineteenth-

century American painters I chose to study. Indeed, for the pictorial gothic Poe turned out to be a hall of mirrors, offering up the possibility of complex, multiple reflections. Like Allston, Quidor,

and Rimmer, he spoke of the horrors of slavery and the nightmare of racial fears in elliptical, metaphoric language fraught with images both terrifying and bizarre. Displaced, dispossessed, a

would-be southern aristocrat, Poe seemed an intriguing reference point for Thomas Cole, a displaced Briton stranded somewhere between gentleman and lowly artisan. As a downwardly mobile inebriate hopelessly defeated by the culture of the marketplace, Poe furnished a striking parallel to David Gilmour Blythe, spiraling downward, increasingly out of control. Indeed, like all the

painters in this book, Poe struggled in the unrestrained capitalist economy of urbanizing, industrializing America and, like most of them, fell victim to it. Like Blythe, he explored the dark side

of modernity and the modern urban wilderness; like Ryder at the century’s end, he probed the gothic layers of modern subjectivity: the guilty conscience, the tortured mind. Poe, more than any

other writer, haunts both the gothic pictorial imagination and this book. The narrative that follows falls into three sections. The first, embracing Cole and Blythe, ventures into the gothic spaces of nature and the metropolis. The centerpiece or keystone section examines the racial fears and fantasies embedded in works by Allston, Quidor, and Rimmer. The last section is a voyage into gothic pathologies of mind and body in the art of Vedder, Eakins, and Ryder. My approach varies, depending on focus, but each chapter revolves around one or two “puzzle pictures,” and each attempts to discover the key, or keys, to their gothic secrets. Because I view

these pictures as haunted ground, inhabited by demons both personal and social, biography plays

a crucial role here. Where possible I identify personal crises or conflicts that might return to the canvases in pictorial disguise. In a complementary move, I examine the historical landscape—social,

political, cultural—for signs of trauma, danger, rupture, and dread; that is, repressed, disturbing, or taboo material that might reappear, in masquerade, within the space of the gothic picture. Though

the biographical and the social occur in varying proportions from chapter to chapter, they work together to open up hidden layers and suggest gothic meanings.

My turn to biography involves risk. It is something like walking a postmodern art-historical plank. That is, sooner or later (following in the footsteps of the artists I examine here) Iam bound

to tumble into the depths. Beyond certain concrete markers—birth date, father’s occupation, education, date and duration of marriage, date of death—biography furnishes a rich body of unreliable evidence, and a life story may be subject to variation in successive retellings. Even a subject’s

XXll1 INTRODUCTION

diaries or letters or the recollections of relatives, friends, and enemies give us no more than selective, distorted, deceptive, and contingent slices of a life irretrievable in its totality. And in the case of David Gilmour Blythe and John Quidor, only scraps of evidence can be found. All this means that I often journey into the foggy reaches of speculation. Nevertheless, I cannot imagine writing this book without biography. In recent years, art historians have tended to privilege the external social matrix, market forces, and the discourses of race, class, and gender as devices to excavate art’s meaning. The artist, operating at the intersection of social and historical forces, is also their product and their tool, a creature of limited agency enjoy-

ing only the most illusory of freedoms. I do not dispute the importance and utility of that model, and it is fully operational here. Taken to an extreme, though, it can reduce art to the function of a machine for meaning, predictably decodable (or predictably ambiguous). As I ventured further and

deeper into the research for Painting the Dark Side, | was drawn again and again into the artists’ private lives, so richly and strangely textured (or riddled) with obsessions, illusions, quirks, weak-

nesses, disappointments, and secrets. Surely those leaked out, somehow, onto the surfaces of the gothic picture or seeped up from its depths. Not to factor in that dynamic—however fluid, elusive,

and ultimately indeterminate—would only flatten the lattice of public meaning and private feeling that constitute the gothic. I am not in sympathy or complicity with the eight painters I study here; I do not seek to excuse them or explain away their mistakes, delusions, bigotry, and flaws. I

will say, though, that they continue to fascinate me, and that, in the end, may be one of the principal reasons for this book. In Painting the Dark Side, finally, I did not set out to overturn the established canon or to erect

another in its place. The book is not a counternarrative or carnivalesque inversion of the status quo. Rather, it expands and complicates the canon and suggests productive ways of rethinking it. Inclusive rather than exclusive, it makes new sense of artists hitherto considered misfits while revealing darker dimensions in the work of canonical masters and patrolling the spongy borderlands where popular visual culture and the elite medium of oil so often mixed, mingled, and traded places.

More than anything else, Painting the Dark Side seeks to add strangeness and shadow to the familiar well-lit terrain of nineteenth-century American art. Only if we consider the dark side, indeed, can we better comprehend the light.

INTRODUCTION Xxill

BLANK PAGE

“oI OE GLOOM AND DOOM

ne cloudy August day in 1836, the painter Thomas Cole (1801-48) noted in his journal that

Or. weather made him so melancholy that “all life, the past and the future,” seemed to lie beneath a shroud of gloom. “I often think,” he went on, “that the dark view of life is the true one.”

Cole frequently had such thoughts. In his diary, letters, prose writings, and poems, the words “sloom,” “melancholy,” and their various analogues appear again and again, from his first days as a landscape painter to the end of his life. Rays of sunshine did penetrate the shadows. His marriage to Maria Bartow, three months after that gloomy August day, proved a great source of contentment. The growth of strong religious feeling in middle age gave him a bulwark against despair.

Yet dread, sadness, and hopelessness plagued him. As a young man, he wrote of the “darkness, doubt, and fear” that lay beyond the future’s “dim horizon.” In 1841 that future was still blank and mysterious, “lost in gloom.” His forty-sixth birthday, on February 1, 1847, conjured up once again his old, persistent vision of eternity as an unfathomable, dark gulf yawning before him.’

Gloom and ruin were recurrent themes in Cole’s art as well. Although he alternated between brooding pessimism and sunny moods, the darker vision always returned. Death cast a pall over his earliest ventures into landscape. The trees in his Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill), one of the paintings that launched Cole’s career in New York after a summer sketching trip into the mountain wilderness (Fig. 1), stand leafless around dark, still waters, their trunks naked and branches

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David Gilmour Blythe, Ole Cezer, ca. 1858-60. Oil on canvas, 1454 x 11". Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Gift of Mary D. Barnes and Lawrence Dilworth in memory of their mother, Helen Thompson Dilworth. Photo: Richard A. Stoner.

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John Quidor, Tom Walker’s Flight, ca. 1856. Oil on canvas, 26 x 33". Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

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William Rimmer, Flight and Pursuit, 1872. Oil on canvas, 18°8 x 26". Bequest of Miss Edith Nichols, 56.119. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Reproduced with permission. © 2000 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved.

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PLATE I1

Elihu Vedder, The Lair of the Sea Serpent, 1864. Oil on canvas, 21 x 36%". Bequest of Thomas Gold Appleton, 84.283. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Reproduced with permission. © 2000 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved.

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William Sidney Mount, Dancing on the Barn Floor, 1831. Oil on canvas, 25 x 30". Long Island Museum of American Art, History and Carriages. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ward Melville, 1955.

Quidor’s painting illustrates this horrid moment, pulling out all the gothic stops for maximum effect. Tree branches twist and curl like claws; rocks cast weird shadows; and Knipperhausen’s fire

emits a spooky glow that freezes each figure in an attitude of absolute terror. Behind them, blackest night veils the landscape while a sliver of moon peeks over the buccaneer’s rugged ledge. Quidor

meticulously reproduced the costumes described by Irving: Wolfert wore a “large flapped hat tied under the chin with a handkerchief of his daughter’s” and his wife’s long red cloak, which she had flung about his shoulders. Knipperhausen’s green spectacles, black velvet cap, cocked hat, and long,

dark robe also follow Irving’s description. But what of Sam? For this figure Irving provided only the sketchiest outlines. He is old; his hair is grizzled. He has a round black face and—when terrified—

white goggling eyes. As mentioned, Irving likens him to a hobgoblin at one point and makes a sim-

ilar allusion in the money-digging scene, when any beholder “might have mistaken the little doc-

tor for some foul magician .. . and the grizzly-headed negro for some swart goblin, obedient to his commands.”!° The connection between the “goblin,” the black arts, and, by extension, diabolical powers is unmistakable. Goblins, however, are stunted, dwarfish creatures. Quidor’s Sam, by contrast, is a hulking giant. This Sam is monstrous. Old he may be, but he has the body of a young black Her-

cules. As David Bjelajac observes, the black man in the painting is “stereotypically identified”

with dark creatures from the underworld, such as the frog perched opposite him on the hole’s rim.‘ That beast is the painter’s own contribution to the narrative, illustrating Sam’s amphibious nature. Denizen of the ooze, the frog also reminds us of the fisherman’s nickname: Mud Sam. The body

of Quidor’s Sam is splotched with mud: a smear on the knees of his breeches and a large stain on his bottom. But the dirt is not only on the surface. Black as the pit from which he crawls, Sam him-

self, like the golem of Jewish legend, might be a monster made from mud and given life by the in-

fernal spells of the magician who now stands quaking as the creature he has summoned emerges from the depths. At one level The Money Diggers satirizes the new market conditions of Jacksonian America at a time when speculation was rampantly on the rise. At another, it is, as Bryan Jay Wolf describes it, “a tableau inverting the Enlightenment vision of man” that is acted out by “crea-

tures of the dark.” Sam is the image of darker energies, and the black pit the “true subject of the painting.” Wolf, however, does not view the black pit or the “darker energies” in racial terms, instead pursuing a Freudian reading in which the pit symbolizes the depths of a “private, gothic, and inherently unsocializable” self.!7

While Wolf’s reading offers a new light on the psychodynamics of The Money Diggers, it does not address the racial question. Yet in the painting itself, the white light of Knipperhausen’s pungent fire, brilliantly etching Sam’s contours, illuminates the fearsomeness of the black body, a source

108 THE DEEPEST DARK

of terror in its own right. Note the way that body is put together. Wolfert and Knipperhausen are anatomically coherent, if ludicrous in their craven posturing. Sam, in contrast, is misshapen, his massive torso so contracted that his limbs seem to sprout from it like the legs of a spider. His crooked

left arm mirrors the hind leg of the squatting frog. He faces in opposite directions at once, half of him stretching and straining forward, but his head swiveling 180 degrees on his beefy shoulders. Mouth agape and eyes staring, his face is a nightmarish mask. What has come from the pit is not the gold the two men desired, but a monstrously disordered and disorderly black body.

In Quidor’s work, the black body was never anything but disorderly and dangerous. Another

example, the dancing black man in Antony Van Corlear Brought into the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant, was Quidor’s own invention; this figure does not appear in Irving’s story.'® Ragged and barefoot, coattails flying and hands waving, he surrenders himself to the trumpet’s vibrations.

Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg and cane fence him off from the rest of the room and from our space. He would seem quite harmless were it not for his face, where the ingratiating smile of black def-

erence has metamorphosed into the mask of the Gorgon (Fig. 53). Wide, rubbery, and intensely red, that smile is more grimace than grin. It is not the mouth alone that produces the effect, however, but the jumbled expressive coding of the whole face. Compare the figures in Nicolino Calyo’s Negro Dancer and Banjo Player (Fig.

54), in which musician and dancer sport the conventional entertainer’s grin, their features harmonizing to produce an innocuous effect, with wide-open eyes and arched brows. Quidor’s dancer,

by contrast, narrows his eyes and knots his brows in a ferocious scowl. This face, like the body of Sam the fisherman, is incoherent, monstrous, and, accordingly, unpredictable.

The mismatched halves of Sam’s body and the dancer’s face convey the anxiety and ambivalence that so thickly clouded the issue of black presence in white America, North and South, during the antebellum years. Other than what the visual evidence tells us, we have no way of knowing Quidor’s views on African Americans, slavery, and freedom. He produced these images, however,

during the decades when, as Leonard Cassuto notes, American society was “heating to a boil that would, in less than a generation, become uncontrollable.” !” In the North, abolitionism and the blackface minstrel show emerged almost simultaneously in the 1830s and developed into powerful agents of social action and expression. The growth of abo-

litionism, largely a middle-class movement, precipitated a mounting series of murderous attacks on its leaders and mob violence against black neighborhoods. Racism was particularly virulent among the working classes of the North. The wildly successful minstrel show, which catered to such audiences, was structured on the volatile mix of attraction and repulsion that characterized working-class attitudes toward African Americans. But the majority of abolitionists were ambivalent too, seeing in slave nature a mix of childlike innocence and fearsome savagery. With one foot

THE DEEPEST DARK IO9

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in working-class culture and the other tenuously planted in middle-class ground, Quidor was in all likelihood as ambivalent as his cohorts on either side. Even if his subjects, inspired by Irving, were not about blackness per se, his grotesque and monstrous black men betray his own unease.?° For all the extravagance and distortion of his figural style, Quidor was a skillful draftsman. Acquainted with academic conventions, he studied and borrowed liberally from prints. His blacks, however, had no parallel or source in academic painting; they came straight from the rowdy precincts

of the cartoon. The popular English illustrator George Cruikshank was one of his models. Closer to home, depictions of black men in the working-class illustrated almanacs, such as those promiscuously published under the name of Davy Crockett, exhibited the same unrestrained, callous energy. To be sure, the Crockett almanacs abounded in grotesque characters, white and black, crudely

drawn, engraved, and printed. But, given the climate of racism that prevailed in the 1830s, when the almanacs were highly popular, their caricatures of black men appear particularly savage.’!

Consider the woodcut “James Crow, Esq., of Kentucky; from a painting by Trumbull, in the Capitol at Washington,” published only a few doors from Quidor’s studio in New York (Fig. 5 5).77

Although the figure sports a shirt, vest, and tie, his features are scarcely human. Smashed together

are mouth, bulbous nose, and beady eyes, little more than white slits. Like the face of Quidor’s dancer, this one is a contradictory jumble. By itself, the mouth can be read as smiling. In combination with the lowered brows and squinty glare, however, the smile becomes a snarl. Easel painting and crudest woodcut alike betray anxiety and confusion in the representation of the black body.

Like their brethren in the almanac business, writers of cheap pamphlet novels also endowed their black characters with ludicrous or horrific deformities. City exposés and mystery stories routinely portrayed black men as either savages or clowns. Relegated to menial toil as chimney sweeps

or bootblacks, they “lay drunkenly on the stoops, cavorted about the streets partially nude, or frothed at the mouth as they battled in the gutters like wildcats.” Entirely typical is “Nick, the negro” in Samuel Young’s Pittsburgh tale, The Smoky City. Denizen of the most squalid haunts and aide-de-camp to hardened gangsters, Nick has a “most villainous” face. “His low forehead receded above, and projected singularly over his full red eyes; his countenance was black—so black

that charcoal must succumb to it. In his eye was a singular leer, of a deep designing order.” So filthy is Nick that his once-white trousers have become as black as he is, and his coat is “ragged and torn.”?° It is in the work of Edgar Allan Poe that we encounter the most troubling and morbid figurations of racial monstrosity. The shift from popular fiction to Poe is a lateral move rather than a step up, in the sense that Poe’s black men are equally grotesque. Poe is a particularly interesting

case, since he identified in fantasy with the southern ruling class. He shared in its paternalistic justification of slavery and condemned abolitionists as rabid and dangerous fanatics. In early man-

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hood he lashed out against the neglect of his benefactor, John Allan: “You suffer me to be subjected to the whims & caprice, not only of your white family, but the complete authority of the blacks.”*4 Such subjugation of white under black was the stuff of trauma.

Although blacks were seldom more than bit players in Poe’s writings, when they did appear, they were either grotesque clowns or dangerous ogres, or, like Nick the negro, a blend of both. In

“The Journal of Julius Rodman,” the old slave Toby is hideous, with “swollen lips, large white, protruding eyes, flat nose, long ears, double head [i.e., an indentation in the crown], pot-belly, and bow legs.” The black Pompey, in “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” is shrunken and deformed;

he has no neck, and his ankles, improbably, are “in the middle of the upper portion of the feet.” In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the perpetrator—a huge and bloodthirsty orangutan—serves

as a stand-in for the black murderer whose deeds, reported in the Philadelphia Saturday News, served as impetus for Poe’s story. Indeed, the disguise is thin. When the detective Dupin ferrets out

the orangutan’s role in the murders, the animal’s owner, a seaman, confesses the circumstances of its escape and subsequent rampage. Returning home after some “sailor’s frolic,” he discovers the

ape wielding a razor and trying to shave. He flourishes his whip in an effort to subdue the creature, but it bounds out of the room and into the street, brandishing the deadly blade. Subsequently,

Ii2 THE DEEPEST DARK

as the sailor watches helplessly, it invades the apartment of a mother and daughter and kills them

in a vicious frenzy. Once it sees its master, and thinking “no doubt of the dreaded whip,” the animal cowers, all passion spent. The tale allegorizes white fear of violent black revenge.*>

Poe published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket only a year before Quidor painted his menacing black dancer. In this tale, bodily blackness becomes the medium of terror, destruction, and death in a fateful voyage to the farthest southern reaches of the globe. The story begins with a stowaway, a mutiny, and a shipwreck. The desperate survivors encounter a Dutch vessel and think they will be saved. As the vessel approaches, they see a “stout and tall man, with a very dark skin,” who smiles constantly, displaying “a set of the most brilliantly white teeth.” The

vessel draws closer, and they reel under the assault of a powerful, suffocating stench. All on board are putrescent corpses; the smiling man, a black-faced, eyeless, lipless cadaver. Later, in extreme southern latitudes, they encounter a race of brawny, thick-lipped, coal black savages, clad in shaggy

black hides. Terrified of whiteness, these savages at first befriend the travelers but later massacre nearly all of them by engineering a landslide. Huge numbers of the natives pursue Pym and his two

remaining companions. “In truth,” declares Pym, “from everything I could see of these wretches, they appeared to be the most wicked, hypocritical, vindictive, bloodthirsty, and altogether fiendish

race of men upon the face of the globe.” Escaping in a canoe with one black prisoner, they find themselves swept with terrible velocity through a milky ocean, toward a vast curtain of watery va-

por on the horizon. The black prisoner dies of fright, but they hurtle on. Finally, the awful veil opens to reveal a stupendous shrouded figure of “the perfect whiteness of the snow.”?°

Poe’s fantastic visions of hideous, savage, deathly blackness (and its opposite) take us to the point where South and North converged. Despite their deep-seated differences, both sides traded in images of black monstrosity, the embodiment and projection of hatred, guilt, and fear. For many,

slavery in the abstract was the monster. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 prompted the Albany Evening Journal to lament the undoing of what the Founding Fathers had put into place

to “guard the domain of Liberty.” This wall had now been “flung down by the hands of an American Congress, and Slavery crawls, like a slimy reptile over the ruins, to defile a second eden.” In

the South slave owners in constant dread of slave rebellion insistently characterized their bondsmen as subhuman aliens, too degraded and brutal to be entrusted with freedom. Antiabolitionists,

north and south, warned that emancipation of the slave population would have the most dire results for the free white labor market, throwing mechanics and workingmen out of their jobs in pref-

erence for the cheaper and more subservient black. Perhaps in part that fear underlay descriptions of black men’s purported bloodlust. As one of the pamphlet novels claimed, blacks desired “not so

much to kill as to observe the blood of a victim fall drop by drop, as to note the convulsive look of death, as to hear the last throttling rattle in the throat of the dying.”*7

THE DEEPEST DARK Il3

Visions of the black man as a new model of Frankenstein’s monster incorporated the full mea-

sure of white horror and fear. Mary Shelley’s famous novel, published in 1818, was widely read

and often reprinted. It was first adapted for the stage in 1823. Onstage, as H. L. Malchow has noted, the monster became a stereotype, an image of the dark Other. An engraving in the I/lustrated London News (January 1850) shows a dainty Frankenstein in flowing academic robes quailing at the sight of the creature, hulking, black, and seminude. In caricature, Malchow notes, Franken-

stein’s monster (ethnically stereotyped as an apelike Irish workingman) commonly served as a metaphor for radicalism during reform agitation in the early 1830s, the Chartist era, and the mid186os.7°

In the United States the monster unmistakably took on the character of the powerful, dreadful,

and relentless black giant whose awakening portended disaster for all. Frank Bellew’s “Modern Frankenstein” appeared in the New York humor magazine Lantern in 1852 (Fig. 56). This targets Horace Greeley, the fiery antislavery editor of the New York Tribune. Greeley-Frankenstein pro-

claims his triumphant creation of a living, sentient human creature out of an assortment of body

parts. He turns and sees, to his horror, the monster of emancipation, climbing down from the pallet where it has been cobbled together. Cringing, the abolitionist stares up in dread as the crea-

ture, an enormous black man bare to the waist, glowers, showing a mouthful of sharp teeth as he prepares to rise to his full height. The monster rose again in Henry Louis Stephens’s Vanity Fair cartoon, “The New Frankenstein:

A Glimpse of the Horrible Fate in Store for Jeff Davis at the Hands of the Monster ‘Rebellion.’” In this instance, monster and maker are of equal size (Fig. 57). The president of the Confederacy, though, flails helplessly in the grip of the black colossus who lifts him like a rag doll over an abyss

billowing with thick smoke. This monster, clad only in a loincloth, is muscular and well proportioned. We cannot see his face, but two tufts of hair standing up from the top of his head subtly suggest devilish horns. The cartoon itself, easy to read, is not so subtle: the fearsome thing 1s about

to pitch Davis into the fiery pit of death and eternal damnation. Although the wrathful creature nominally stands for rebellion rather than for slavery per se, his darkness unmistakably links one with the other. Both of the Frankenstein cartoons associate blacks with death. The monster, a rude assemblage

of mismatched pieces, is a creature of and from the grave. Looming over the puny white man in “The Modern Frankenstein,” the creature incarnates the threat of destruction that many feared, should the nation rend itself into warring halves. In the Vanity Fair cartoon, the monster is of and from the infernal abyss into which he flings his victim. In both, the black man is at once agent and embodiment of white doom.

I14 THE DEEPEST DARK

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Absent the whitewash, Quidor’s Mud Sam is an aggregate of such connotations. Like Franken-

stein’s monster, he is a hideous assemblage of mismatched parts. He is jet black: as black as the sun-baked corpses on the drifting Dutch vessel Pym encounters in midocean. Like Blythe’s Cezer he seems a denizen of the depths. Not by accident does he climb out of a black pit. Directly above his head, his rumpled jacket lies under a gravedigger’s pickax, next to a liquor bottle. Above these objects is the ghastly visage of the drowned buccaneer, lit not by the flames—which veer in the op-

posite direction—but by the pallid light of the rising moon. Sam’s side of the picture is in every way the darker side. But Mud Sam’s own blackness may be even more sinister. In the nineteenth century (if not earlier) a long-standing tradition of marrying blackness and the devil fused with the image of the African

American male, slave or free. The color black had acquired negative connotations of sin and dark-

ness in the early Christian era. Conventionally opposed to light as the symbol of goodness and grace, blackness as an idea at first had no links to skin color. As Jan Pieterse has pointed out, in time it gained such associations, becoming the color of the devil and demons. During the Crusades,

black became part of the “enemy image” of Muslims, generating the tradition of the devil “as the Black Man and the black bugaboo.”*? Marcus Wood notes that this basic color symbolism was very much alive in the eighteenth cen-

tury. Although “not all... black bodies are in fact African,” the black man’s symbolic status remained fluid, hovering “between devil and African.” ** In the United States, the black man might

not always be a devil, but the devil was almost invariably a black man. This personification had

deep roots in Puritan culture. Jonathan Edwards preached that the raven “by its blackness represents the prince of darkness. Sin and sorrow and death are all in Scripture represented by dark-

ness or the color black, but the Devil is the father of sin, a most foul and wicked spirit, and the prince of death and misery.” In his autobiography, one Robert Bailey recalled that his mother told

him never to lie, because if he did, a “great black ugly clubfooted man called the Devil” would take him to hell. After subsequently misbehaving, the boy had a vision of “a great black some-

thing in the shape of a man, with horns on his head; and with a loud voice saying ‘I will catch you.’” In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe described the black cook on the Gramputs

as “a perfect demon.” Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter wove analogies between the baleful Chillingworth—the Black Man—and the devil, a Black Man who haunts the forest, on the prowl for souls.*° Most notably, Washington Irving represented the devil as a fiendish and powerful black man in “The Devil and Tom Walker,” which furnished Quidor with subjects for two paintings in the 18 50s.

The story unfolds in colonial Massachusetts, early in the eighteenth century. Tom, a notorious skinflint, wends his way home one day through a dreary, treacherous swamp, the site of an old In-

I20 THE DEEPEST DARK

dian fort. Drawing near this place, Tom stumbles on a half-buried skull, cleaved by a tomahawk.

As he picks it up, a gruff voice bids him leave it alone. He looks up to see “a great black man” seated opposite on a tree stump and dressed in rude half-Indian garb, belted with a red sash. His face is “dingy, and begrimed with soot,” as if he had been toiling at a forge. He has a “shock of coarse black hair” standing out from his head in all directions, and he carries an ax on his shoulder. Very quickly, Tom surmises that the stranger is the “Old Scratch” himself. After various plot twists and machinations Tom, in exchange for his soul, reaps a hoard of buried pirate treasure and becomes a wealthy moneylender in Boston. As he grows older, he begins to dread the ultimate out-

come of his bargain and embraces religion. On a hot summer afternoon, he is in his counting room, about to foreclose on a mortgage. Point-

ing out that the usurer has already made a great deal of money out of him, Tom’s ruined victim begs for a reprieve. Tom loses patience and exclaims, “The devil take me... if [have made a farthing!” At that moment, three loud knocks sound on the door, and there stands a black man “holding a black horse, which neighed and stamped with impatience.” He has come for Tom. Although Tom shrinks back, he is defenseless. “The black man whisked him away like a child into the saddle, gave the horse the lash, and away he galloped, with Tom on his back, in the midst of the thun-

derstorm ... his white cap bobbing up and down; his morning-gown fluttering in the wind, and his steed striking fire out of the pavement at every bound. When the clerks turned to look for the

black man he had disappeared.” *° Even though Irving at the outset notes that the devil is neither African nor Indian, he refers to him consistently as “the black man.” This is a key to deciphering the coded references to race in Quidor’s Devil and Tom Walker and Tom Walker’s Flight (Fig. 61; see Plate 9). In the first paint-

ing, Tom has paused on his way through the gloom of the densely overgrown swamp. His walking stick leads our eyes to the grisly skull, which gazes up at Tom with its empty sockets. On the

far right, the black man with his ax sits on a tree stump and fixes Tom with a menacing glare. A path of light leads directly from quizzical Tom to the leering devil: we know from it that Tom is headed for hell. The woods are doubly haunted: by the vanquished and vanished natives and by the satanic bogeyman who bars the way. Tom Walker’s Flight is much wilder. It vividly suggests the power of darkness, embodied in the devil and his horse. These two figures dominate the composition, steed and demon in perfect counterpoint. Mane and tail streaming, the ebony charger rears, eyeballs glaring white and nostrils blasting hot breath. There is a saddle but no bridle, only a lead rope, snapped and fluttering free, its other

end still fastened to the hitching post at left. Grinning gleefully, the devil stands blocking the door of Tom’s brokerage office, his legs spread wide. The angles of his up-flung arms echo the ramping

lines of the horse, while his backward cant pulls in the opposite direction, like a visual slingshot

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It is not difficult to tease out the metaphorical drift of the tale. Wilson and his double are two halves of the same person, a mind divided, good self and bad in unending conflict. Wilson can no more flee his double than he can step out of his skin. The triumph of the bad self over the good—

THE SHADOW’S CURSE 149

or desire over restraint—inevitably results in dissolution and death. The alter ego is the ego. As Kenneth Silverman notes, doubling is extensive in Poe’s tales. Many of his heroes and heroines are difficult to distinguish from each other and often have the physical and mental traits of Poe himself.°*

Is the wraith in Flight and Pursuit the fugitive’s double? Long ago, James Thomas Flexner sug-

gested that the two figures were “aspects of the same man,” the ghost a deadly alter ego.*> The wraith doubles and mirrors its quarry, its cant and stride precisely paralleling those of the fleeing desperado. The specter is nebulous, veiled, translucent; the fugitive sharply drawn, exposed, strained,

and terrified. The ghost has a weapon poised and ready, the fugitive a dagger in his belt. The ap-

parition is pale, the fugitive swarthy. We can almost imagine Rimmer’s fugitive crying out, like William Wilson, “I fled in vain. My evil destiny pursued me as if in exultation.” Freud might say that in Flight and Pursuit we witness the return of repressed events in “bizarre and disturbing forms.”

The painting itself is the uncanny double of The Midnight Ride, which in turn references the Rimmer family’s bizarre legacy and the grip of fears that neither Rimmer nor his father was ever able to loose. Whether that legacy had any basis in fact is beside the point: to the Rimmers it was real.

If the ghost is one kind of double, what of the enigmatic forked shadow that falls across the floor on the right? Without it, there would be little of the electrifying tension that triangulates fugi-

tive, specter, and shadow. Indeed, the shadow is so significant in this suspended pictorial narrative

that it reverses the conventions of left-to-right textual reading, demanding that we step into the picture on the right and join the pursuit with our eyes. The psychologist Charles A. Sarnoff sees Flight and Pursuit as an “exceptional painting” because it contains a “protagonist shadow.” “It is

so amorphous,” he writes, “it can represent so many things. . . . Without the benefit of verbal modifiers or explanations, the appearance of a shadow in visual representations expresses something ominous and threatening.” What might that “something” be?*4 The world of nineteenth-century fantasy, in fact, abounded in protagonist shadows, symboliz-

ing death and all manner of evils. Two scenarios available to Rimmer offer particularly striking parallels to the topos of his picture: Adelbert von Chamisso’s popular moral fantasy The Wonderful Tale of Peter Schlemihl (first published in 1814) and George MacDonald ’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance (1858). Peter Schlemibl is the story of a man without a shadow. The hero sells it to a man in gray in ex-

change for a bottomless purse of gold. He soon discovers that without a shadow he is nobody, a freak: others shun him or try to do him harm. Later he discovers that the man in gray is the devil, who in exchange for the shadow demands that Schlemihl surrender his soul. Refusing to comply,

Schlemihl hurls the purse into an abyss, and the devil vanishes. Forever shadowless and alone, Schlemih! wanders the world in a pair of seven-league boots, studying and measuring the earth.°°

150 THE SHADOW’S CURSE

George Cruikshank’s illustrations appeared in the 1823 English edition and again in an edition of 1867. One of them gives graphic life to an episode in which Schlemihl desperately attempts to catch a stray shadow. He is crossing a sandy plain when he hears a rustling noise and looks around;

no one is there, but “in the sunny sand there glided past me a human shadow, not unlike my own, which wandering there alone seemed to have got away from its possessor.” Longing to claim the shadow as his own, Schlemihl launches himself after it, thinking that if he can only attach it to his feet it will stay. “The shadow, on my moving, fled before me, and I was compelled to begin a stren-

uous chase of the light fugitive. . . . It flew towards a wood, at a great distance, in which I must, of necessity, have lost it. I perceived this—a horror engulfed my heart, inflamed my desire, added wings to my speed. ... I came continually nearer, I must certainly reach it.” Suddenly the shadow turns and faces him. Schlemihl tackles it, only to realize that he is grappling with an invisible body, which then materializes as the devil.°*° Cruikshank’s “Pursuit of the Shadow” is an almost perfect inversion of Rimmer’s formula (Fig.

76). Instead of a bewildering Moorish palace, the setting is an alien wilderness. Schlemihl, a mirror image of Rimmer’s fugitive, runs from left to right, one foot on the ground, the other extended

behind, one arm reaching out in front, and coattails flying. The shadow, a stick figure stretched along the path, flees toward the gloom at the edge of the pitch-black forest, just as Rimmer’s fugitive races pell-mell toward the dark haven of the sanctuary. Schlemihl is about to lunge at his quarry

in a last attempt to hold it fast; the shadow in Flight and Pursuit is about to engulf the figure flying

ahead. Cruikshank shows a man shadowing a shadow; Rimmer a shadow shadowing a man. Cruikshank’s drawing indicates graphically that man and shadow belong together. In the space

between them is the story of an eerie and profoundly unsettling rupture. Schlemihl is a man split in two, desperately seeking to unite one part of himself with the other. The man in Rimmer’s paint-

ing is equally intent on outdistancing whatever darkness so swiftly narrows the gap that still divides them. But does he elude a part of himself, or some unknown entity?

Another evil shadow plays a major role in George MacDonald’s Phantastes. MacDonald (1824-1905), a Scottish cleric, lecturer, and prolific writer of imaginative tales and novels, is not

well known today, but in the nineteenth century, he was famous in the English-speaking world. His writing was warmly received in the United States, and when he visited the country in 1872, he

enjoyed celebrity treatment in Boston and New York. For all his Calvinist heritage, MacDonald

was intensely drawn to mysticism and magic. As one biographer reports, he read widely in the Kabbalah and pored over the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. He may even have attended Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lecture on Swedenborg, delivered in London in 1848.3’ Rimmer and Emerson,

in turn, intersected in Concord in the late 1840s, when Thomas Rimmer was confined there during his decline. Swedenborg, fountainhead of the American Transcendentalist doctrine of corre-

THE SHADOW’S CURSE I5I1

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section campaign as the fountai nch experimental physiology loomed large in the antivivisecti modern science. Majendie had played a vital

pervade the heartless cruelty thatd jendi fundamental tmaterial facts of life andBernard, d Wwwhww k ife aneath. h. Hipupil His Claude

tablishing experi | physi wd the modern and purely objective method for disclosing th perimental physiology as the modfor jectdisclosing

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loswot thea oremost experimental physthe time who died , Bernard (who died in 1878) acquired a | |1 w ee ching ; | rge international following through ions, and publicati whiwhich promulgated del of lent! illain in antivivisection li

eons ed a model of progressive scientific objectivity that tifled all feelingginin thethe disi disinterest erested pursuit of truth.

. Med out icine, first published imself, the modern researchin fel1865, w Ww is influential In his infl ial Introducti y ofof Experimental uction to the Study E

cher, as a superman of frigid rationality,y,who whoviviewe

ZOO CORROSIVE SIGHT

the science of life as “a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing

through a long and ghastly kitchen.” Nothing was too terrible to deter such a scientist from his quest: A physiologist is not a man of fashion, he is a man of science, absorbed by the scientific idea which he pursues: he no longer hears the cry of animals, sees the blood that flows, he sees only his idea and perceives only organisms concealing problems which he intends to solve. Similarly, no surgeon is stopped by the most moving cries and sobs, he sees only his

idea... . Similarly again, no anatomist feels himself in a horrible slaughter house: under the influence of a scientific idea, he delightedly follows a nervous filament through stink-

ing, livid flesh, which to any other man would be an object of disgust and horror. After what has gone before we shall deem all discussion of vivisection futile or absurd.”4

Opponents of vivisection ferociously targeted this model of scientific detachment. Its impervi-

ous cruelty disturbed them as did—even more—the corrupting effects of the spectacle of suffering. Viewers of such spectacles, like those at a public execution or a bullfight, risked addiction to secret, powerful thrills experienced only in the presence of pain. The resulting pleasure acted like a drug on the senses. It often happens, argued a contributor to the Boston journal Our Dumb An-

imals, “that medical students, corrupted by hospital teaching, imbibe such a love of it that when they visit their homes they practice it for its own sake.” The love, need, and greed for cruelty, instilled by hospital training and laboratory practice, produced the heartlessness that infected mod-

ern medicine and society alike. Calling vivisection rooms “earthly hells” and “torture-chambers of science,” in her polemical treatise, Bernard’s Martyrs (1879), Frances Cobbe identified the cardinal vice of the modern age: “the Vice of Scientific Cruelty,” distinguished not by its heat but by an inhuman coldness. Modeling himself on Bernard, the most notoriously cruel of all the vivisec-

tors of the Continent, the new experimental physiologist was “calm, cool, and deliberate, understanding the full meaning and extent of the waves and spasms of agony he deliberately inflicts.” This passion, which Cobbe named “the new Vice,” possessed “not the ignorant but the cultivated, well fed, well dressed men of science.” Appearances to the contrary, it was these men and not “some

wretched, filthy brute” who inflicted “these horrors—the bakings alive of dogs, the slow dissections out of quivering nerves.”*>

In scenarios of pain envisioned by Cobbe and other antivivisection campaigners, the surgeon or vivisector was invariably male, and the victims female, or at least feminized by their helpless-

ness and pain. The pathetic dogs strapped to operating tables, illustrated in Bernard’s Martyrs, represented but a step on the way to even more monstrous cruelty to women and children “for the

CORROSIVE SIGHT 2OT

sake of science” (Fig. 93). According to the historian Coral Lansbury, Dr. George Hoggan’s ac-

count of the canine victims in Bernard’s laboratory roused the public to unprecedented fury in 1875: “Even when roughly grasped and thrown on the torture trough... they would continue to lick the hand that bound them till their mouths were fixed in the gag, and they could only flap their

tails in the trough as the last means of exciting compassion.” Bernard, of course, proceeded to carve them up, presumably with relish. Cobbe got to the nub of the issue: “I am persuaded that what ...is described .. . as the ‘Joys of the Laboratory’ are very real ‘joys’ to the vivisector; that is, Schadenfreude—Pleasure in the Pain he witnesses and creates.”7° Did such images and associations lie behind the hostile reception of Eakins’s painting in 1879? Is it going too far to associate Gross—a benevolent, humane lifesaver—with the heartless fiends conjured up by the antivivisectionists? On the surface, Gross does not fit the pattern. The patient on the table lies in a drugged sleep that renders him (or her) unconscious of present pain, and Gross, far from dismembering, is in the process of saving the afflicted limb. But once again, we must look

at the scene from the vantage point of the layperson. As the historian James Turner has argued, even though few medical scientists (i.e., experimental physiologists) in the last third of the century

practiced medicine, in the public mind they were closely identified with physicians by the aims of their work, a connection cemented by the medical societies’ unanimous defense of vivisection. Thus

the surgeon shared in the brutality of the vivisector, and in his schadenfreude. Whether Gross was “really” the very opposite of such a profile was, from this perspective, quite beside the point. The

surgeon, the dissector, and the vivisector all were cut from the same cloth. Indeed, it is obvious that like Bernard’s impassive surgeon, Gross—not to be stopped by the “most moving cries and sobs”—sees “only his idea.”*”

Some of Gross’s own statements and practices suggest that he had more in common with the heartless vivisectionists than may at first appear. Early in his professional life he had “sacrificed” nearly one hundred dogs in research on the nature and treatment of intestinal wounds. He claimed that the experiments had entailed a “great sacrifice of feeling. Jam naturally fond of dogs, and my sympathies were often wrought to the highest pitch, especially when I happened to get hold of an unusually clever specimen. Anaesthetics had not yet been discovered, and I was therefore obliged to inflict severe pain. The animal while under torture would often look into my eye, as if to say ‘Is

it possible you will torment me this way? What have I done to deserve all this ... ??” Gross vigorously defended his aims as lofty, selfless, and laudable. Had they been less worthy, “I should consider myself a most cruel, heartless man, deserving of severest condemnation.” Progress in the healing art had more than justified the means; the work of Majendie and others put to flight “the ill-timed

sentimentality of the societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, which have made so much

ado about this matter.”°

202 CORROSIVE SIGHT

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FIGURE 93.

“Chien fixé sur la table a vivisection,” published in Claude Bernard’s Lecons de Physiologie Opérative, 1879.

Gross’s rationale for the use of anesthetics (when they became available) on human subjects was

strikingly congruent with that of the vilified physiologist Emanuel Klein, who in 1875 admitted to the Royal Commission on Vivisection (in England) that he used anesthetics only as a convenience and had no regard at all for the agonies of experimental animals. For Gross, the alleviation of pain

and suffering was at best secondary: “Anaesthetics... by placing the patient in a passive condition, give the surgeon a control over him which he could not possibly obtain in any other manner,” wrote Gross in his widely used System of Surgery. He believed that children required anesthetics no more on account of their tender sensibilities than because it immobilized them, making

them “perfectly quiet and tractable” and enabling the surgeon to “deliberately proceed.”*? His drug of choice was problematic as well. By the 1870s many physicians had begun to substitute ether for chloroform, which was so risky that a contemporary writer blamed it for 80 percent of the deaths caused by anesthetics. Gross nonetheless favored this drug as a more effective means of subduing the poor and retarded subjects on whose bodies a great deal of experimental surgery

was carried out. The patient in Eakins’s Gross Clinic, in fact, has been immobilized in just such a fashion.°° What “selfish end” might have found gratification in wielding the bloody scalpel flourished so

CORROSIVE SIGHT 203

dramatically in The Gross Clinic? The walls of Gross’s discipline seem unbreachable. Yet unguarded

fissures allow a glimpse of inner conflict. Gross described surgery as “a most corroding, souldisturbing profession,” a “terrible taskmaster, feeding like a vulture upon a man’s vitals,” all too often making him unfit for normal family life. The tools of the trade themselves emblematized the

corrosion and gnawing anxiety. In his Autobiography Gross wrote, “Persons have often come to me saying they had understood that I was very fond of using the knife .. . nothing could be more untrue or unjust. I have never hesitated to employ the knife when I thought it was imperatively de-

manded ... but that I have ever operated merely for the sake of display or the gratification of some selfish end is as base as it is false.” Gross’s evident need to refute such assumptions publicly suggests his awareness of the scalpel’s connotations and his desire to distance himself from the image

of the surgeon or vivisector habitually pursuing secret, dreadful pleasures. At the same time, he took pains to assure his public that he was a man of feeling, plagued by incessant worry about the lives he held in his hands: “What other profession or pursuit is there that involves so much men-

tal anguish, so much awful responsibility, so much wear and tear of mind and body?” Source of intractable anxiety, the cutting of flesh was also an act of absolute power over the body, alive or dead: one of Gross’s passions, indeed, was dissection.?! Spectators in 1876 or 1879 had no access to Samuel Gross’s emotional life or inner struggles. All the same, his portrait by Eakins seems to allude perversely to the very things Gross wanted to

deny. The painting is a theatrical and exciting display of pain and gore. Bright spotlighting fixes the gaze compellingly on the spectacle of the patient’s blood-flecked thigh, scored like a roast ready

for the oven, and on the surgeon, whose crimson-lacquered fingers compete for attention with his

lofty cranium. All else is plunged in shadow, rendering the operating room a stage set, its action suspended at a moment of high tension. Thus treated, clinical procedure takes on the quality of a mysterious, compelling ritual. A well-dressed man of science, Gross is as calm, cool, and deliberate as Frances Cobbe’s archfiend, the experimental physiologist. His expression—eyes narrowed

and blank, teeth glinting between parted lips—is inscrutable but hardly reassuring. The patient, like one of Bernard’s dogs, is “bound” by Dr. Briggs’s tenacious grip and “gagged” under that thick, toxic wad of cloth. No matter that the sleeper’s quivering nerves are at this moment insen-

sate. The pain of the picture is all in the looking: in making the connection between the sharpedged, bloody blade in the doctor’s fingers and the deep, raw, distended cut in the defenseless thigh.

If the patient felt nothing, the painting inexorably set viewers’ nerves aquiver while accentuating the cold and sinister detachment of the doctor’s pose. All this suggests why the lone woman in Gross’s surgical theater generated such disgust and apprehension and why the Tribune’s critic found it shocking that the Society of American Artists had

chosen to hang the painting where all could see it. What could be more disturbing to a Victorian

204 CORROSIVE SIGHT

audience than the potential of such a spectacle to corrupt innocent eyes, to plant in sentimental hearts the terrible seeds of schadenfreude?’ It was no accident that large numbers of women were involved in the antivivisection movement. Second-class citizens, unable to achieve full autonomy

in a patriarchal society, they tended strongly to relate to and even identify with the sufferings of creatures under the vivisector’s knife or the surgeon’s scalpel. Stand-in for a whole class of power-

less subjects—dogs, children, women—the “mother” in Eakins’s Gross Clinic articulates the ago-

nies visited on the dumb and the weak in the quest for knowledge.*’ As the “additional element of horror,” she amplified the fear, nausea, and revulsion that gripped so many beholders of the picture.

Without the blood, though, other details would not signify in quite the same way. As the Tribune’s critic indignantly observed, the professor, with “bloody lancet in bloody fingers,” gave the finishing touch to a profoundly sickening scene. Why did the blood, more than anything else, ex-

cite so raw a response? The painting is nowhere near as gory or macabre as many a French academic showpiece. Nonetheless, when the critic Susan N. Carter saw The Gross Clinic in New York,

she thought at once of the French painter Henri Regnault’s Execution without Judgment under the Moorish Kings of Grenada (Fig. 94): Many of our readers will recall to mind Reynaud’s painting of a decapitation in the gallery of the Luxemburg, and will remember the fiendish expression of the murdered man as he gazes up with a look still full of life into the face of his murderer. Pools of blood cover the

floor, and their truth to nature renders this one of the most disgusting of modern works of Art. The picture of the dissecting-room by Eakins has many of the same revolting fea-

tures, and the surgery and the red dabblings were not offset ... by the great skill shown in the beautiful modeling of the hands.

Many American viewers associated Gallic art with perversion of one kind or another, including a

marked taste for whatever was ghastly, painful, and gory. The diarist George Templeton Strong,

for example, had powerful reservations about the illustrator Gustave Doré: “I think [he] represents the highest (or lowest) type of Parisian art, which delights in sensuality and (by some inscrutable law) loves carnage and torture as an inverted or perverted sensualism. It is certain that he—Doré—is brutalized by the atmosphere he breathes.”>* French art, in other words, had the same effect on its makers (and presumably viewers) as surgery and vivisection were thought to have on their practitioners. Yet French painting was for those

very reasons magnetically fascinating. The same Centennial Exposition that banished The Gross Clinic from the halls of art admitted extravagantly gory French works such as George Becker’s Rizpah Protecting the Bodies of Her Sons from Birds of Prey (1875; location unknown). This gi-

CORROSIVE SIGHT 205

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