A.1 "My strength, my comfort, my intense delight”: women, art and lifewriting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Part 1

A.1 “My strength, my comfort, my intense delight”: women, art and lifewriting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Part 1

Thu Oct 27 / 9:30 – 10:30 / Debates Room, rm 2034, Hart House

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Charles Reeve, OCAD University

Like her contemporary Eugène Delacroix, British watercolourist Elizabeth Murray left the “West” in the early 1800s for the “Orient,” recording her adventures in extensive writings and images. However, while Delacroix’s journals and notebooks became widely celebrated, Murray’s account slid into obscurity—even though Delacroix’s journey lasted only six months and generated two articles, while Murray’s time in the region prompted her two-volume autobiography Sixteen Years of an Artist’s Life in Morocco, Spain, and the Canary Islands. Moreover, accounts by other women from that century—Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun; Elizabeth Butler—similarly languished, creating the sense that this era’s female artists neither left home nor published autobiographies. This panel aims to explode this misapprehension by convening discussions of lifewriting by women artists of the 1800s and earlier. We welcome proposals regarding all lifewriting forms (e.g. diaries, letters), with particular interest in accounts originating outside normative “Western” narratives, and/or regarding now-obscure autobiographies.

keywords: lifewriting, feminism, nineteenth century, self-representation, autobiography

A.1.1 “Alone Between the Boundless Ocean and the Boundless Sky”: Flora Tristan’s Travel Accounts as Political Activism

Anne Dymond, University of Lethbridge

Perhaps best known to art historians as Gauguin’s grandmother, Flora Tristan was an important mid-century feminist, union activist, and author of several volumes of travel writing. Published in 1838, Peregrinations of a Pariah is an autobiographical account of her year-long trip from France to Peru in 1833-34 and Promenades in London (1840) detailed her travels closer to home. Mary Louise Pratt’s foundational work on travel writing has shown that the genre was, unsurprisingly, gendered and linked to imperialism, but Tristan’s work is unusual in that it is through her travel writing that she developed and spread her nascent political philosophy. Prevented from inheritance from her Spanish-Peruvian father because of her status as illegitimate and unable to divorce her scoundrel husband, Tristan’s travels and resultant books were motivated by financial necessity caused by legal injustice. Yet she turned these personal challenges into a cogent critique of capitalism, employing the comparative method to address issues which might otherwise have been censored in France’s July Monarchy. Her interest in the global status of women’s rights led to a wider critique of capitalism. She drew parallels between the status of women under capitalism and its reliance on a system of racialized enslavement, and this led her to concern with worker’s rights more broadly conceived. In 1843 she published her most politically radical work, The Worker’s Union, which called for a single universal worker’s union open to all proletariat. To gain adherents to her utopian vision, she embarked on a solo tour of France, but died of typhoid while on tour, and thus her politicized travel writing from this trip was not published in her lifetime. Nevertheless, Tristan’s important work shows the potential of travel writing as a genre open to women and potentially linked to political activism.

Anne Dymond, (Ph.D., Queen’s 2000) is Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Lethbridge. Her recent book, Diversity Counts: Gender, Race, and Representation in Canadian Art Galleries (MQUP 2019) showed the importance of data-driven analyses in creating more just representation in Canadian museums. Earlier work focused on French anarchism in the nineteenth century and has been published in the Art Bulletin and elsewhere.

A.1.2 19^th-Century US Black Women Writing Art and Sensory Awareness

Joycelyn Moody, University of Texas at San Antonio

This panel presentation discusses pre-1900 African American women’s descriptions of beauty in theatrical, rhetorical, topographical, visual, corporeal, environmental, material, iconic, or other forms. It examines theories and depictions of beauty in print culture texts ranging from diaries, travel narratives, itinerant ministers’ and other spiritual writings, private personal correspondence, public correspondence to readers of the 19^th-century African American press, including Black-owned or Black-managed magazines and newspapers. This paper will further consider Black women’s aesthetics and their reports of recognition and/or admiration for artistic cultures, visually artistic, and natural beauty in a variety of life writing forms. The presentation aims to demonstrate the great breadth of ways African American women responded to both quotidian and exceptional artistic forms surrounding them in their daily lives as well as on occasional or extraordinary experiences. The 19^th-century Black women writers to be explored include Maria Stewart, Jarena Lee, Emilie Davis, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Jacobs.

keywords: Black women’s life writing, 19^th-Century US Black women, African American periodicals, Black women’s private writing, Black women’s material culture

Joycelyn K. Moody teaches African American literature and culture and Black Life Writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is a Professor of English and the Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature. During 2022-2023, she is also a Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Society and Culture at the University of Alberta. Her recent publications include chapters on Black print cultures and A History of African American Autobiography, from Cambridge UP.