| Summary: | Nestled among the classified ads on the back page of the January 21, 1860, issue of Harper's
Weekly is a cartoon that marks a moment of anxiety in the public life of the New York
middle class on the eve of the Civil War. Set in the increasingly illegible streets of the rapidly
changing city, this fragmented lithograph represents, in two frames, four women—two
white, one black, one unidentifiable—walking on a pavement during and after the passing of
an omnibus. Harper's published the image, titled Study from Nature, in a moment when
issues of citizenship, civic capacity, and national belonging were rapidly coming to the
forefront of public consciousness, especially in New York, which was a nexus for feminist,
abolitionist, and black manhood suffrage movements.
The pages Study from Nature sits among are spatially analogous to the physical environment
of the street. Similarly, the image mimics the spatial experience of a viewer standing in that
street, at once describing and formally manifesting the visual change that was at the core of
riew challenges to urban legibility. In this respect, the image serves both as a guide for the
viewer and as a visual puzzle that re-presented to that viewer many of the changes in vision
that inhabitants of the city were experiencing—changes that occurred alongside the rise of
industrial commercialism, increasing urban density, and developments in fashion,
architecture, and systems of urban transport.
I argue that Study from Nature participated in a set of regulatory discourses that produced
and responded to concerns over the visual metamorphosis of free black and bourgeois white
women, their increasing freedom to move about in metropolitan space, and their mounting
resistance to ideologies that denied them subjective personhood. Emphasizing civility and
sartorial self-discipline, Study from Nature attempted to order the intractable bodies
circulating within it, creating a comic, admonitory fantasy of fear and subjugation. Through
satire, the cartoon imposed punishment for acts that transgressed performative standards of
race and gender, thereby depoliticizing social relations and deflecting the conflicts and
inequities of New York society onto the individual inhabitants of the street. === Arts, Faculty of === Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of === Graduate
|
|---|
