B.1 “My strength, my comfort, my intense delight”: women, art and lifewriting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Part 2
Thu Oct 27 / 11:00 – 12:30 / 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
B.1.1 Complicating the Woman Artist: Transnationalism and the Art-Life Dilemma in May Alcott Nieriker’s Last Diary
- Julia Dabbs, University of Minnesota Morris
May Alcott Nieriker (1840-1879) is primarily known today as the inspiration for the character of the artistic Amy March in sister Louisa May Alcott’s semi-autobiographical novel Little Women. Yet in actuality she was a pathbreaking American artist who not only found success in the Paris Salon but also encouraged other young women of modest means to follow in her footsteps through her published travel writings. Recently Alcott Nieriker has become the subject of greater scholarly attention, but there still has been minimal examination of her unpublished autobiographical writings -- which has not been the case for her writer-sister, philosopher-father, or social worker/feminist-mother.
In this paper I will focus on Alcott Nieriker’s last diary, which she wrote as a thirty-eight- year-old newlywed who had recently moved from England to France with her Swiss husband. Two themes stand out in these writings, and will be traced here: 1) Alcott Nieriker’s strongly-expressed Transnational identity, evident as she seeks to justify her hasty marriage and the decision to remain in Europe, while in the process criticizing American domestic life; and 2) Alcott Nieriker’s fervent desire to continue her career as an artist, despite societal expectations that she should now focus on domestic duties (further complicated by May becoming pregnant this same year). Through an analysis of these themes, we get a better sense of the challenges that an expatriate woman artist faced, especially as she experienced life changes that could easily derail her career; yet why is this type of material regularly overlooked by art historians? In addition to exploring this question, I will situate my interpretation of Alcott Nieriker’s comments in relation to ideas brought forth in Boter/Jensen/Scott-Smith’s Unhinging the National Framework: Perspectives on Transnational Life Writing (2020) as well as in scholarship concerning women artists and life writing.
keywords: transnationalism, women artists, nineteenth-century American art
Dr. Julia Dabbs, Distinguished University Teaching Professor of Art History at the University of Minnesota Morris, has been researching and publishing on historical women artists for nearly two decades, perhaps most notably in her book Life Stories of Women Artists, 1550-1800: An Anthology (Ashgate, 2009). Her interest in primary sources relating to women artists has extended to the nineteenth century in recent years, focusing on the travel and art writings of May Alcott Nieriker. Dabbs has published two scholarly articles and an essay on Alcott Nieriker, as well as a book, May Alcott Nieriker, Author and Advocate: Travel Writing and Transformation in the Late Nineteenth Century (Anthem Press, 2022). Dabbs is currently working on two other book projects concerning the art and writings of Alcott Nieriker.
B.1.2 Performing Selves: A Study of Binodini Dasi's Self Narratives
Niyati Shah, Pandit Deendayal Energy University
Binodini Dasi, a 19th century Bengali theatre artiste, belonged to the first generation of women actors who played women on stage when these roles were the exclusive domain of men. Binodini Dasi's My Story (1912) and My Life as an Actress (1924) record her personal life and her experiences in the world of theatre. In this paper I attempt to read these texts as offering glimpses of an alternative history of 19th century Bengali theatre. Beginning with examining Dasi's decision to write two lives-the lived and the performed-this paper will focus on the spoken and the unspoken, the written and the unwritten, the explicit and the implicit aspects of her work to reflect upon how life writing as a genre can offer a unique perspective for the writing/reading of history.
keywords: self narrative, performance, women actors, 19th century Bengali theatre
Niyati Shah is an Assistant Professor at the School of Liberal Studies (SLS), Department of Languages, Literature and Aesthetics, Pandit Deendayal Energy University (PDEU), Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Her research interests include Narrative Studies, Performance Art and Gender Studies. Her doctoral research is located on the intersection of the performative self, autobiographical narrative, early modern Indian theatre and gender studies. Currently, she is interested in intermediality, visual-textual auto/biographical representation, and memory and archive.
B.1.3 The World of the Studio in Victorian Women Artists’ Lifewritings
Alison Syme, University of Toronto
Victorian women artists travelled to see the world, study, and make art just as their male counterparts did, sometimes in defiance of their families' wishes, and almost always with transformative effects on their artistic practice, style, and views. As importantly, though, the world came to them, at home and in their studios. People of diverse classes and backgrounds—models, sitters, students, friends, colleagues, prospective purchasers, journalists, and photographers—came through their doors, along with artists’ materials, props, nonhuman animals, and less tangible visitants in the form of legal and reputational issues. Julie Codell has justly argued that in their autobiographies, British women artists active in the later nineteenth century “presented themselves ... as assertive agents thoroughly comfortable in the public spaces they inhabited as professionals.”1 In the semi- private space of the studio, though, Victorian women artists navigated a wide and sometimes threatening world with the potential to destabilise their personal boundaries and professional poise. Drawing on letters, diaries, and memoirs by Henrietta Ward, Louise Jopling, Joanna Boyce, and others, this paper considers how Victorian women artists used writing as a tool to process their position in a wider world at home.
1 Julie Codell, The Victorian Artist: Artists' Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870–1910 (Cambridge: University Press, 2003), 11.
Alison Syme is Associate Professor of Modern Art at the University of Toronto and author of A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art (Penn State, 2010). One of her current projects is a four-volume, co-edited collection of primary sources on the Victorian artist.
