The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (43 page)

For artists and their buyers who love the human form, nude models are vital. Even a modestly dressed statue must begin with reliable anatomy. Thomas Ball and Hiram Powers argued poverty drove young women to shed their rags. Moreover, they claimed, the models had chaperones, lest anyone impute base motives.

No less provocative were the young American women who roamed the city unsupervised. Given some knowledge of sin and a moral compass to guide them (rather than the protective shield of innocence), they shaped their lives with a measure of freedom not likely in New England. The Puritan reaction to such liberty was wonder, denial, or prudish reproof – yet curiosity about loose rules drew more than one moral reader to
The Marble Faun.

Its author and his family, who lived in Italy from 1857 to 1859, did not immerse themselves in local culture. They preferred the company of other New Englanders, such as the sculptor Louisa Lander. Twenty-two years younger than the novelist, thirtyish, and unmarried, Louisa had arrived about two years earlier. Among things they had in common, they were all from Salem, MA – the village famous for dispatching witches in 1692 and 1693.

Nathaniel Hawthorne admired her breezy lifestyle and expressed broad gusto for her talent.
[687]
He sat for his portrait bust unaccompanied in her studio and without giving it a second thought.

Her affectionate portrayal depicted him bare-chested in the neoclassical style, youthful, and without the fearsome mustache he sported at various times. To romantic viewers, it might evoke a seductive essence.

He was so pleased with it he wrote to Boston in ecstatic praise. “Even Mrs. Hawthorne is delighted with it, and, as a work of art, it has received the highest praise from all the sculptors here, including [the dean of English sculptors, John] Gibson….”
[688]

Bursting with pride, Louisa sped to America to solicit more commissions. She left local artisans to copy her work in marble.

In her absence, the art colony buzzed that she had lived “on uncommonly good terms with some man.”
[689]
Worse, someone claimed she shed all to pose like a local model.

When she returned in November, she found William Story (also a Salem native) mustering other American sculptors to confront and judge her. They demanded she answer allegations of impropriety.

She angrily refused to meet them.

The all-male panel responded by shredding her good name.

Nathaniel wilted at the possibility of lurid insinuations. Unable to meet her gaze, he ordered his servants to turn her away at the door. His wife Sophia, an artist herself, who once embraced her as a family friend, erased her name from his journals. Their teenage daughter Una lurched into a grave depression accented by malaria and typhus. Their son Julian later denied Lander’s portrait of him, claiming an unknown American redirected the Italian carvers while she was away.
[690]
It was an accusation as far-fetched as it was inventive in the context of cover-up.

Nathaniel never gave any hint of the scandal in
The Marble Faun,
which turned on sins of his imagination. Knowing his readers’ weakness, he went on to idealize daring American gals abroad. His characters evoke a fragile purity as they denounce nudity in flesh and stone. He matched the tainted blood of Miriam with sin and mortal shame. He granted Kenyon, the sculptor, a ripe creative gift and Hilda the capacity to make excellent copies while the Italian, Donatello, radiated earthy charm and Catholic guilt. Filtering out the realities of Rome’s artist colony, his cast included no naked models or mean gossips.

For Louisa, rejection by the dear Hawthornes must have been a particularly cruel surprise. Rather than stay and seek a more casual society, she abandoned Rome far more quickly than Edmonia fled Oberlin – then she moved again, deserting New England for Washington DC.

Shock waves of her rejection must have jolted her peers in Rome. Harriet Hosmer, whose name appears in Hawthorne’s preface, and others survived with the knowledge that they had not strayed so far from home that liberties were infinite. Tittle-tattle could still hurt them.
[691]

Edmonia had tolerated worse treatment at Oberlin. Scars of 1862 and 1863 – and gossip about Louisa – could remind her to beware. They surely honed her focus and forced her to set severe limits to her behavior, her image, and her work. She could not afford a repeat.

Even friendly mentors could not be trusted. Mrs. Child had turned on her. Charlotte Cushman had dropped her. Anne Whitney, jealous of her fame, was nosy and potentially spiteful. After blurting out her dismay at her brother living with a “squaw,” Edmonia shielded him with excuses meant to deflect the prying New Englander.

White women of means enjoyed the presumption of virtue. Vinnie Ream, who lived with her parents even in Rome, lamented “that ‘romantic love’ should ‘remain unknown’ to her”
[692]
while flaunting her sexuality to get what she wanted. An acute shortage of men and an abundance of platonic beliefs, public restraint, white lies, and outright denial united to shelter a range of options within upright Boston marriages. Consider Anne Whitney and Abby Manning, Hatty Hosmer and Louisa Ashburton, Charlotte Cushman with a parade of female lovers that ended with Emma Stebbins
.
[693]
Consider the record of other upstanding celebrities – such as Frank Leslie with Mrs. Squier or Rev. Henry Ward Beecher with Mrs. Theodore Tilton (until exposed by public scandal) – who enjoyed odd arrangements under mantles of blue-nose propriety.

As a colored woman, Edmonia labored under different presumptions: popular notions of an animal nature and the curse of the Negro wench. William Story, for example, mocked the lusty Lord Byron by sketching him “‘as he might have been,’ showing a very pronounced negro type,” according to Julian Hawthorn.
[694]

Respectable colored women compensated for such myths, by hewing to an opposite extreme.
[695]
Schooled in prim modesty during her years at Oberlin, Edmonia easily rose above scary stereotypes.

Of a ripe young age and rarely cited in the company of anyone, Edmonia had more to prove than anyone else did. Her vulnerability certainly led her to mass her own heavy clay for Laura Bullard’s eyes in 1871. When forced by market demand to hire male carvers, she followed Hatty’s lead and hired many.

Isolation also solved a practical question. Women aspiring to be professional artists had no business marrying, as Hatty pointed out (Her vow of celibacy covered her native lack of sexual interest in men).
[696]
A driven artist could not be obliged to follow and obey, all rights subordinated, and all expressions subject to control – unless she were, like Isabel Cholmeley, very rich, aggressive, and her husband oddly tolerant. Having children could add painful conflicts. Vinnie Ream turned her energy away from art by choice when she married in 1878 to become a mother and Washington hostess. She picked up her tools again late in life to model the Cherokee linguist, Sequoyah. Many other women also rejected marriage and children – but not necessarily lovers – to give themselves a career.

Few were as instantly famous as Edmonia. None represented two maligned races with hopes of changing the social order. Edmonia’s militant idealism required steely integrity and stainless purity. While adventuring socially and stoking controversy, she could not tinker with her public honor.

To be above suspicion, she would have needed to be without sin. Any hint of moral lapse, even false signs, such as nudity or hints of eroticism in her works, could thwart high goals. In short, she was not free in her studio, in Charlotte Cushman’s parlor, or even in her own bedchamber. It seems certain that, if she had ever strayed, some rival of her art or a foe of her message would have sniffed it out and aired awkward details with glee.

Mrs. John Jones of Chicago admired Edmonia as an ideal woman who did all she could do – with neither the vote nor a man. That was, she said, her idea of suffrage.
[697]
Despite a single documented attack on her femininity (discussed below), no record has been found to suggest Edmonia was truly close to any woman or man – except her brother who lived thousands of miles away.
[698]

If Edmonia had a failing, it was for spirits that could numb her pain. She dismissed the strict injunctions of McGraw and Oberlin after a year in Italy. Thanks perhaps to her fondness for alcohol, she survived a cholera epidemic during her second summer in Rome. The expatriate set had already fled summer’s heat and the perennial threat of malaria. Grim carts rumbled through the streets, stopping at each door to call, Bring out your dead! They collected six people next door, even one in her own building.

Altogether, six thousand people fell to a germ that spread literally from hand to mouth. Scientists had discovered the cause of the disease more than a dozen years earlier, but even sophisticated travelers remained ignorant of it. In city streets that doubled as sewers, visits to local fountains ran obstacle courses of filth, flies, and foul puddles. Drinking wine, brandy, or hot tea was safer than fresh water.

Edmonia dealt with the epidemic in her own way, focused on work and dreaming about her fans in New England. She quipped to Anne Whitney that she kept both Bible and brandy
by her bedside. If one gave out, I can take up the other!
[699]

***

The American colony, dominated by Protestants, romanticized the kindly Pope Pius IX, calling him ‘Pio Nono.’ They blamed corruption, illiteracy, and most of all immorality on Cardinal Antonelli. Never a priest, he saw no need for the vow of celibacy – nor did many of Rome’s clergy. People joked, “if you wanted to go to a
brothel
you must go in the daytime, for at night they were full of priests.”
[700]

In 1867, Rome became tense with armed skirmishes as the recently unified Italians aimed to take Rome and end papal rule. As Italy struggled with civil war, Edmonia was shocked to see foreign troops, sent to protect the Pope, meddling in the affairs of Rome. She became quite excited. When asked where they were headed, she answered with a gesture so wild she lurched and fell into a deep hole.
[701]

Not all newsmen saw Edmonia as a hero. Her success drove some of them mad. Out-of-control editors trumpeted commissions of $50,000, some adding she was to be married.
[702]
A marriage rumor circulated among Democrats who sneered and expressed horror at racial mixing.
[703]
No man was ever named. Republicans fired back, chiding Southerners for suckling at colored women’s breasts and then raping them.

Not one of the rumors can be believed. Any $50,000 commission would have produced a job of considerable size and challenge – not to mention the fuss of real publicity and the supercharged envy of her peers. Vinnie Ream’s
Farragut
commission, awarded in 1872 at only $20,000, stood ten feet tall and took near as many years to finish.

Nearly all writers emphasized Edmonia’s mixed blood. To her fans, it was a myth-busting club. To others it was a code for frail, flawed, and impure: Born with the vices of both races, said the bigots, and the virtues of neither.

After Edmonia departed the public scene, the world seemed bent on defeating her remarkable story. Harriet Hosmer suffered similar attacks. Many historians ignored all female artists.
[704]
Those who felt obligated to mention Edmonia’s work cherry-picked the word “repellant” from William J. Clark’s essay while rejecting his certain admiration.

Sixty-eight years after John Mercer Langston memoired his most interesting cases, Geoffrey Blodgett revisited the events surrounding Edmonia’s trial as a piece of Oberlin history in an article for the
Journal of Negro History.
The “news” of scandal spawned lurid gossip that quickly upstaged her professional triumphs. She had kept the episode more secret than her subversive Centennial strategy or her childhood religion.

New lies hammered an altered image into the public consciousness. Words like “mannish” and “masculine” skulked into nearly all modern descriptions of her. This modern delusion traces to her fleeting association with lesbian feminists Hosmer and Cushman, but we found only one contemporary description.

The smear appeared in Boston, where friends of Maria Child had never forgiven her boldness. It seems traceable to Rome, where Edmonia called out bigots and provoked resentment by trespassing on men’s turf. The
Transcript
had covered her enthusiastically until her Boston gaffe. This brief note appeared in early 1873 under the heading, “From Foreign Files.” We quote in full:

Miss Lewis, the colored American sculptress in Rome, is short, stout, and rather fine looking. Her hair, which is slightly curly, is parted on the side and cut short. She dresses in a short black skirt and roundabout jacket, and wide rolling collar. Her appearance is masculine and her voice hard and gruff.
[705]

Historians make choices, supposedly based on careful reviews of evidence. The uncommon reference to a “short” skirt should have raised their eyebrows, but they must have liked this slander because they spread the word like a modern viral video.

Other accounts should have prevailed. About the same time, the
San Francisco Chronicle
wrote,

She is of medium hight [
sic
] and well proportioned outline. Her eyes are black, but not of that piercing style which frightens while it charms. They seem to beam with a wild, soft radiance, which places one quite at his ease in an instant. Her hair is jet black, and very nearly straight. She wears it loose, and it falls about her head in slightly wavy lines, which invests her with a classical air.… She was dressed in a plain linen suit, and wore an unpretentious necktie. Her voice is singularly mild and pleasant; it rings in the ear like soft music, and her words are accompanied with such an air of real gentility that one could never weary of listening to her.
[706]