Sharon Worley

This study examines how authors responded to the Haitian Revolution with revisionist narratives that seek to support empire or rebellion, while focusing on the ethical ramifications of colonialism and slavery in the Americas. Narrative texts include Leonora Sansay’s Secret History, or the Horrors of Santo Domingo, Germaine de Stael’s Mirza, Fanny Burney’s The Wanderer, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Sanditon, Harriet Martineau’s The Hour and the Man, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poems, "A Curse for a Nation" and "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point."  Additional authors include Lucien Bonaparte, Chateaubriand, Raynal, Edmund Burke and Rousseau. Each author’s narrative is examined within the context of the cultural and political factors that influenced the author, as well as any personal ties to the abolitionist movement or to the institution of slavery.
https://ethicspress.com/products/revisionist-and-feminist-narratives-on-empire-slavery-and-the-haitian-revolution

This study extends from the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799 to the first unification of Italy in 1861, and presents insights into the work of feminist authors who responded to the Italian Risorgimento in their writings, including novels, poetry and non-fiction political analyses. The narratives of these women form a cohesive view of emerging feminism in the nineteenth century in response to the Italian Risorgimento. A number of American and British women who lived in Italy (Emma Hamilton, Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Barrett Browning), as well as Italian women (Eleonora Fonesca Pimentel and Cristina Belgiojoso), participated directly in the developing events of the Risorgimento revolutions for Italian independence and unification, while British, French and American authors who travelled to Italy, including Mary Shelley, George Sand, Marie d’Agoult (Daniel Stern) and Edith Wharton joined their cause and rallied support for democracy, civic justice and gender equality. These authors promoted gender equality through their feminist narratives and political analyses of the Italian Risorgimento.
Cambridge Scholars Press, 2022.

This website provide links to articles about individuals and works from the Risorgimento period. It focuses on the contributions of British and American authors and artists in Italy who responded to Risorgimento politics in their work.
https://
napoleoni-iii-anglo-italian-circle-during-risorgimento.com

Italy attracted British and American authors and artists in the nineteenth century who sought to study the past while witnessing modern history in the making. The shadow of Napoleon I’s empire never left the nineteenth century and continued to haunt the histories and wars that followed. The empires of Napoleon I and his nephew, Napoleon III, set the stage for the pendulum swing of time from revolution to its antithesis, empire. The Anglo-Italian style developed as a reaction to these empires, the widespread devastation caused by imperial power, and the monuments it created. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Hosmer, William Wetmore Story, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Vernon Lee and Edith Wharton responded to recurring themes in Italian Risorgimento politics and culture in the post-Napoleonic Risorgimento period. Their unique contributions align them with a style that is distinguished by the themes of national independence, feminism, abolition of slavery, and republicanism. They perceived their own time in terms of parallel dimensions in which the past and present converged in national histories at home, in America and England, and in Italy, their new ideal state. The language of their new nationalism evolved from the chronological study of Ancient Rome to the Renaissance and the style of revolution, empire, and neoclassicism, while their perspective was largely shaped by a reactionary contrast between the empires of Napoleon I and Napoleon III, and an ideal state they envisioned for Italy.

Love letters during the Napoleonic wars were largely framed by concepts of love which were promoted through novels and philosophy. The standard texts, so to speak, which were written by major authors who inherited this Enlightenment bearing, responded to the emerging concepts of love found in novels and philosophical essays. Love among this Napoleonic coterie is unique because it demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between the love letter and the romantic novel. Germaine de Staël, Juiette Récamier, Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, Lady Emma Hamilton, Napoleon Bonaparte and his brother, Lucien Bonaparte, were the authors and recipients of some of the most passionate love letters of this period. They were also avid readers of the newly emerging genre of the romantic novel, and many of them were also authors of such works where they projected their personal romances onto the characterization of their fictional heroes and heroines. In addition, these authors had lived through the recent French Revolution and the Terror. Imprisoned during the Revolution, or branded as emigrés upon their return to Paris, their mature adult lives were spent in the shadows of the Napoleonic wars in which they shifted political loyalties as the specter of Napoleon’s powers grew from First Consul to Emperor of Europe. The looming threat of war ignited the depths of their passions and inspired their intellectual analysis of love, happiness and suicide. Their evolving concept of love was a romantic, all-consuming passion which gripped the lovers in fatal embraces. This book’s analysis of their love letters and romantic novels reveals the emerging political landscape of the period through extended metaphors of love and patriotism.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0773442456/ref=dp_olp_all_mbc?ie=UTF8&condition=all
Worley’s book brings a new perspective on the intellectual debates in the development of nationalistic movements leading up to the Risorgimento in Italy. Her study reveals how the efforts of key feminine ideologists established the roots of Italian reunification through artistic patronage. The salons of these important women enabled daring artists to walk that fine line between creativity and treason as they politicized their art.

Reviews

“Worley’s expert handling of both literary and artistic materials relevant to Stolberg’s circle, in relation to aesthetic movements and political strife and the connections she weaves throughout vividly capture, from a gendered perspective, changing trends and dynamics in that period, indicating new perspectives on traditional knowledge.”
Professor Nancy Isenberg,
Department of Foreign Languages, Literature and Culture,
Faculty of Letters and Philosophy,
Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Rome, Italy

“This is an important study of interactions between Madame de Staël and Louise Stolberg and their coterie of friends. To my knowledge, no such published work exists yet. Dr. Worley has done an excellent analysis of the contribution of Enlightenment writers to nationalism and romanticism. This is a must read for the scholars who are interested in the intellectual foundation of the study of nationalism, especially in Europe.”
-Dr. Nupur Chaudhuri,
Professor, Department of History & Geography,
Texas Southern University

“Dr. Worley’s perceptive insights about feminist historiography in post-Revolutionary Europe make this book a welcome addition to the collection of any reader or researcher interested in the momentous events that occurred in France and Italy in the early 19th century.”
-Diana Reid Haig,
Author, ‘Walks Through Napoleon & Josephine’s Paris’

Visit my website; I am also an artist member of the Galveston Art League, Lonestar Art Guild-Lake Houston Area Artists and Museum of the Americas who paints acrylic seascapes of Lake Houston, Galveston, Florida Keys, Amalfi Coast, etc.
Bid on my art at the upcoming HCCS.edu Bedichek-Orman Auction Nov 6, 2021
https://www.facebook.com/sharon.worley.315/

https://www.hccsfoundation.org/BedichekOrman?fbclid=IwAR3wtBKmiKpMkWf6VP8yHkVSZBiR-vw_y4Yj5rNQnQnVu0aQcyWPdFy9BI4

In her Society in America (1837), Harriet Martineau expressed the sentiments of the growing feminist abolitionist movement that championed the Black heroes of the anti-slavery movement while making analogies to white women’s lack of civic rights. In her The Man and the Hour (1841), she presents the point of view of the leader of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), Toussaint Louverture, as a conscientious leader seeking to free his people from white colonial oppression. The popularity of this fictional biography lags to this day behind key abolitionist fictional works, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), largely because of the violent history of race-based Haitian massacres committed by both blacks and whites against one another. In her fictional biography of Toussaint, Martineau seeks to condemn the institution of slavery and at the same time offer a revisionist view of the Haitian leader as one who, ironically, abhors violence. At the same time, Martineau’s portrayal of Toussaint in her fictional biography also makes comparisons with the Black leader’s nemesis, Napoleon Bonaparte, as well as Jesus, to whom he aspires to emulate, as models. Martineau’s novel represents a remarkable feminist achievement in presenting the Haitian Revolution from the perspective of its hero, Toussaint Louverture, and in giving him a revisionist biography with a hagiographic status. Martineau’s novel was written at the beginning of her career as a sociologist and political activist.

Harriet Martineau expresses the sentiments of the growing feminist abolitionist movement that championed the Black heroes of the anti-slavery movement while making analogies to white women’s lack of civic rights. In her The Man and the Hour (1841), she presents the point of view of the leader of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), Toussaint Louverture, as a conscientious leader seeking to free his people from white colonial oppression.

Germaine de Staël's Corinne (1807), set in Napoleonic Rome and Florence includes extended references to Classical Roman, Italian Renaissance and Neoclassical artworks and architecture. Her purpose in writing the novel was to revive the early Republican ...

Germaine de Stael's most enduring romantic relationship was with Benjamin Constant. She had a daughter, Albertine, by him and despite their numerous affairs with others, they maintained their friendship and devotion to one another. Their friendship was based upon their mutual interests and political ideology. They were both romantic novelists and political analysts. Constant's activity in the Tribunat of Napoleon's Consulate was supported by Stael's salon, and the views he expressed were an extension of her politics. An examination of their love letters and romantic novels set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars reveals the authors' conflation of romantic love with political freedom, and their desire to maintain their independence in the face of Napoleon's tyrannical empire from which they were exiled.

In 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte sought to impose an absolute political authority as First Consul for life, and emperor in 1804. A network of women authors connected with Germaine de Stael in Paris, Coppet, Berlin, and Florence maintained salons and addressed political conflicts in their novels, correspondence and theory. Nationalist histories, written by salon members, reinforced their unified political agenda by emphasizing the heroic acts that guaranteed national freedom. Semiotics became the primary means of political propaganda and persuasion in the absence of legislative debate and women's suffrage. As Napoleon expanded the boundaries of his empire throughout Europe, Neoclassicism became the dominant mode of imperial design expressed through Roman imperial motifs in monuments he erected throughout Paris. Romanticism, by contrast was favored by the resistance movement in women's literary salons. Faced with an enforced political impotence imposed by society, women turned to l...

With the publication of Roderick Hudson in Atlantic Monthly in 1875, Henry James anticipates the Freudian theory of the ego, super-ego and id. Through the impulse to create, James defines the will as the artist’s desire to achieve self-actualization. But this will is in conflict with society’s social mores and responsibilities. Consequently, the artist is doomed to a limbo world in which the will creates idealized representations of nature, without – like Pygmalion -- having the ability to bring his creation to life. In describing the aesthetic pleasures of visual perception, James tacitly acknowledges pioneering research in perceptual cognition and makes the transition to emerging psychological theories of the subconscious will and desire. James reevaluates the purpose of art in an increasingly commercialized society that depends upon aesthetics for its viable existence and cohesion without providing the tangible means of supporting the emerging artist.

To gather together and keep these bonds, these links in the continuing story of man upon our particular part of the earth....is the sole reason for the existence of the Cape Ann Historical Association and its collection.1 The New England coast is dotted with historical societies which house collections of artifacts and antiques marking the passage of time and documenting the achievements of their host town residents. These living time capsules came into vogue in the late nineteenth century as the foreign trade which formerly provided the primary source of livelihood for harbor towns diminished and the accoutrements of sail-powered shipping became outmoded. The ports which once provided entry for overseas manufactured goods previously unavailable domestically became symbols of a bygone romantic era in which ancestors sailed to exotic destinations. This economic fact together with a sense of national history, which had been created over the brief duration of a century, encouraged the creation of these social repositories. The historical society not only provided a popular means for defining community identity, but also enabled local families to participate in the national historical process by contributing relics from their own economic and genealogical past. Few, of these towns, however, were fortunate enough to count among their residents an artist of Fitz Hugh Lane's talent and stature who recorded with such precision both the idealistic spirit and the actual structure of the town's pre-industrial state. Gloucester's sense of historical identity was first articulated by Lane's contemporary John James Babson, who published his comprehensive history of Cape Ann in 1860. The meticulous detail of Lane's Gloucester paintings was matched in Babson's voluminous work which traced the region's history from its earliest seventeenth century English settlers to their present day descendents. Like many of Cape Ann's residents, both Lane and Babson could trace their ancestry back to early settlers. Babson was descended from a Salem widow and midwife Isabel Babson who came to Gloucester after 1637. Lane was descended from a blacksmith Samuel Lane whose family had left Falmouth, Maine and were given grants of land on Cape Ann by 1708. Both Babson's History and Lane's paintings represent significant historical markers. Created in the period preceding the eve of the Civil War, they served to document the growth and expansion of Cape Ann from its inception as part of an English colony to a prosperous town in an independent union. Lane presented Gloucester as an idyllic microcosm of the United States. Between the years 1925 and 1971 the Cape Ann Historical Association assembled the largest and finest collection of work by the Gloucester marine artist Fitz Hugh Lane (1804-1865). This was accomplished primarily under the leadership of Alfred Mansfield Brooks (1870-1963), a retired art history professor who served as the Museum's president from 1940 to 1951 and curator from 1951 to 1963. Brooks was descended from a prominent class of seafaring families known as the "Codfish Aristocracy." Many of these families traced their ancestry to the earliest English settlers of this country's oldest fishing port. Following the Revolution they amassed their wealth through foreign trade and fishing. Lane captured the prosperity of these seafaring families in paintings of Gloucester Harbor which included merchant ships and fishing schooners like those they owned and sailed. These families purchased paintings by Lane which were passed on to their descendents together with family portraits, ship portraits, souvenirs from overseas voyages and other historical artifacts. Brooks knew many of their descendents and encouraged them to donate their Lane paintings to the Museum. Like Brooks, they also donated family heirlooms which served to illustrate every aspect of the rich culture Lane represented in his art. The early members of the Association passed on an oral history together with their heirlooms from an era which changed dramatically from the time they were children. …

One of the most intriguing yet elusive areas of scholarship concerning the 19th century marine artist Fitz Hugh Lane (1804-1865) is the connection between his luminist style and Ralph Waldo Emerson's (1803-1882) transcendental philosophy. This influence has been observed in Lane's depictions of the New England coast enveloped in soft atmospheric hues of meditative stillness, which seem to provide an aesthetic counterpart to the romantic nature philosophy of his contemporary Emerson.1 Cape Ann served as the inspiration for some of Lane's greatest luminist paintings. After the artist returned from Boston to Gloucester permanently in 1848, he continued to paint landscapes and seascapes of the area for the rest of his life. Emerson frequently lectured in Gloucester during the same period, and recorded the profound impact which the region had on him. As two major cultural figures in the 19th century American Renaissance, Lane and Emerson have been the primary focus of scholarly attention and numerous studies and exhibitions. A less traveled path which forms a tangential but subordinate area of interest is the question of audience. A survey of references to Emerson and transcendentalism by Gloucester residents who patronized Lane provides new insights into context of meaning their literature and art held for ordinary citizens. Oftentimes relegated to the anonymity of unpublished or outdated materials in the archives of small historical societies, the writings of relatively undistinguished local residents assume greater significance in the absence of extant records of the artist's own intentions. While Lane's thoughts on transcendentalism are unavailable, those of his friends, patrons, clergymen and others are extant in a number of sources. These primary historical sources, many of which have never been published or discussed in a secondary or modern source, serve to illuminate a variety of nuances in the philosophical lens through which Lane's paintings were perceived by his contemporaries. In recognized scholarship, Lane's general proximity to Emerson in time, place and mood has been deemed sufficient to acknowledge a literary and visual correlation between the philosopher's views on nature and the artist's representation of nature, while the lack of any documentary evidence has precluded the attribution of a direct causal relationship between the two. Nonetheless, ascribing a literary source to a non-narrative visual product remains tenuous without a verbal indication by the artist that he or she intended to illustrate a specific program of aesthetic philosophy. One can only state with certainty that the literary expressions of romantic nature philosophy and the reflection of nature in the luminist style were inspired by a common aesthetic response to the New England coastal region in which Lane's hometown of Gloucester, Massachusetts is situated. The beauty of Cape Ann was a common point of reference for its residents and anyone who viewed Lane's paintings could appreciate them on some aesthetic level. Whether this aesthetic quality also took on a metaphysical significance tempered by Emersonian philosophy depended upon the philosophical or denominational orientation of the viewer. There were broadly divergent opinions about Emerson which ranged from outright ridicule to cautious acceptance with crucial reservations. Emerson's idiosyncratic philosophy was not easy to digest, and was regarded by many as a radical concept which challenged contemporary economic and religious beliefs. As such, the term "transcendental" sometimes took on pejorative connotations. As we shall see, outward opposition to transcendentalism in certain social circles was overcome through the ministry of the Universalist Reverend Amory Dwight Mayo (1823-1907). Mayo was inspired by Emerson's writings, but distinguished his beliefs from those aspects of transcendentalist philosophy which his audience found offensive. The most essential aspects of Emerson's philosophy which Mayo found compatible with his own theology were his belief in the divinity of nature and its reflection in art. …

“Lucien Bonaparte’s La Tribu Indienne, ou Edouard et Stellina, Germaine de Staël’s “Zulma”, and Chateaubriand’s Atala:  Colonialism and the Enlightenment Paradox of Freedom.” DYNAMICS AND POLICIES OF PREJUDICE, edited by Guiseppe Motta, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018
Conference Proceedings Sapienza University Rome
ISBN-13:
978-1-5275-0862-0

Germaine de Staël’s most enduring romantic relationship was with Benjamin Constant. She had a daughter, Albertine, by him and despite their numerous affairs with others, they maintained their friendship and devotion to one another. Their friendship was based upon their mutual interests and political ideology.  They were both romantic novelists and political analysts. Constant’s activity in the Tribunat of Napoleon’s Consulate was supported by Staël’s salon, and the views he expressed were an extension of her politics. An examination of their love letters and romantic novels set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars reveals the authors’ conflation of romantic love with political freedom, and their desire to maintain their independence in the face of Napoleon’s tyrannical empire from which they were exiled.

This paper proposes a basic conflict between Biblical gendered role models and the emergence of the genre of the women’s novel.  The seduction novel more accurately portrayed the conflicts facing women and their choices, while Biblical prototypes fostered unrealistic goals for women. By focusing on the wedding ceremony as an expression female fulfillment, it examines women's education and professions in conflict with popular role models, or anti-types, promoted through the genre of the sentimental and seduction novel.

Abstract With the publication of Roderick Hudson in Atlantic Monthly in 1875, Henry James anticipates the Freudian theory of the ego, super-ego and id. Through the impulse to create, James defines the will as the artist’s desire to achieve self-actualization. But this will is in conflict with society’s social mores and responsibilities. Consequently, the artist is doomed to a limbo world in which the will creates idealized representations of nature, without – like Pygmalion -- having the ability to bring his creation to life. In describing the aesthetic pleasures of visual perception, James tacitly acknowledges pioneering research in perceptual cognition and makes the transition to emerging psychological theories of the subconscious will and desire. James reevaluates the purpose of art in an increasingly commercialized society that depends upon aesthetics for its viable existence and cohesion without providing the tangible means of supporting the emerging artist. Keywords: Henry James, William James, Art Criticism, American

Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810) was a leading German Romantic artist whose iconography represents a transition from the Neoclassical iconography of classical mythology and allegory to an abstract semiotic system of signs based on a mystical interpretation of nature. An admirer of Herder's theory of language, Runge's iconography was representative of a trend among Romantic artists to promote nationalism and cultural values through the implementation of formal epistemological systems in the medium of art. Runge's individual iconography reveals a synthesis of rational and mystical systems of knowledge that emphasizes Herder's concept of the German Volk as a unique cultural identity, and presents an analogy between the creation of the cosmos, the organic origins of language, and the conception of the German Volk. Runge's iconography expresses the nationalist sentiments and linguistic theory of Herder that formed the basis of German propaganda movements during the Wars of Liberation, 1807–1815.

In her Society in America (1837), Harriet Martineau expressed the sentiments of the growing
feminist abolitionist movement that championed the Black heroes of the anti-slavery movement
while making analogies to white women’s lack of civic rights. In her The Man and the Hour
(1841), she presents the point of view of the leader of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804),
Toussaint Louverture, as a conscientious leader seeking to free his people from white colonial
oppression

The portrayal of women in the Napoleonic era in art and literature ranges in genre from the erotic nude to fictional heroine to the state portraits of aristocrats and politicians, and their wives and children.  From the sensuous portrayals of Pauline Borghese as Venus (1808) commissioned from Antonio Canova by Napoleon’s sister, Pauline, to Ingres’ Grand Odalisque (1814), commissioned by Queen Caroline of Naples, also Napoleon’s sister, the erotic feminine was charged with both feminist and sexist political overtones.  The court portraits of the Napoleonic queens of Italy reinforced roles of women as both administrators and dynastic founders.  In state portraits, Napoleon’s sisters Elise, Pauline and Caroline were often portrayed with their children, fulfilling the roles of mother and titular dynastic queens. In reality, however, they managed the administrative affairs of state and engaged in the activities of collecting archeological artifacts and commissioning works of art.  In the context of sensual nude eroticized feminine, the neoclassical ideal acquired neo-Platonic connotations.  They communicated a subliminal code of nationalism or imperialism in propaganda strategies facilitated by anti-Napoleonic salons or official Napoleonic French satellite courts.  To salon hostesses who opposed the spread of Napoleonic imperialism, such as Louise Stolberg or Germaine de Staël, the idealized feminine was synonymous with liberty. In the guise of the classical muse or fictional character, Corinne, she continued to represent the allegory used during the French Revolution.  Her image reappeared in neoclassical art commissions as well as literature, such as in de Staël’s novel, Corinne (1807).  By contrast, neoclassical idealism in official Napoleonic commissions represented the reinstatement of empire and its classical iconology.