Marmoreal Sisterhoods: Classical Statuary in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing

Abstract

This article examines the deployment of statuary in nineteenth-century women’s poetry. It considers the importance of classical sculpture in the work of the Romantic writer Felicia Hemans before proceeding to examine its significance in poems by later Irish and American poets including Frances Sargent Osgood, Emily Henrietta Hickey, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Eliza C. Hall, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, and Emma Lazarus. Focusing primarily on the Pygmalion myth and how it is overtly or covertly evoked in their works, it argues that their literary engagement with sculpture permits ways in which mythical women, in particular Pygmalion’s Galatea, may be reclaimed and reinvented for subversive and liberatory purposes.