The sentimental education of Mary Edmonia Lewis: Identity, culture, and ideal works.

Abstract

This dissertation is about the American sculptor, Mary Edmonia Lewis (1844 after 1911). Because so many of her works are lost and so much of her biography at this point is missing, reconstructing the breadth of Lewis's career is impossible. Therefore, this study will consider the extant body of Lewis's ideal work, the bulk of which she created between 1866 and 1876. Despite the many unanswered questions about Lewis, she remains a compelling figure. However, the paucity of archival records allows for imaginative readings of Lewis's art as it relates to her life. Whether she is regarded as an activist or exotic, the assumption that her art represents a full and uncomplicated expression of her identity has persevered since the nineteenth century. This dissertation will explore the complexities of her choice of subject matter, manner of execution, and the artistic and social contexts in which those choices were performed. Of particular importance to this study has been the scholarship of Clifford Geertz and Michael Baxandall. As a cultural anthropologist and semiotician, Geertz's analysis of culture as a system of signs that remain legible helped to keep Lewis and her endeavor in focus, while Baxandall, a social historian of art and a semiotician, provided a structure for contextualizing Lewis's sculpture. Cultural anthropology, semiotics, gender and race studies, social history, biography, and the traditional tools of art history (formal analysis, iconology, and iconography) have informed this dissertation. I contend that her works formed part of an intricate web of relations, that they were a cultural achievement and that they do not adhere to any concerted agenda on Lewis's part. In fact, not all of her subjects meant the same things to her. In Lewis's art, we decipher a kaleidoscope of responses, from questioning, to conflicted, to concession towards an education that emphasized the sanctity of family and domesticity. In her ideal works created in Rome, we can begin to understand how culture shaped her, the inescapability of it, and how it educated her in the interpolated Cultures of True Womanhood and of Sentiment.