Scholarly Writing #2, Part 2: Liberty Embodied: The Iconography of Catharine Macaulay and Phillis Wheatley

Macaulay as Libertas: The Classical Republican Image

Beyond the material components of her third volume of History that I examined last week, its artistic components shed light on Macaulay’s portrayal as a staunch defender of liberty. Indeed, the frontispiece of her third volume features a portrait of Macaulay in profile as Libertas, engraved by Italian-born artist Giovanni Cipriani after a sketch by radical English politician Thomas Hollis, made at her husband’s request. [1]

The image of Macaulay was modeled in the fashion of the Roman goddess Libertas from a medal of Caius Cassius, one of the assassins of Julius Caesar, as a reminder to readers of the connection between her account of the virtues of the English defenders of liberty and the history of Rome. Macaulay, as Hollis explained to American readers, “is presented in the print in the character of the Libertas on the Roman denarius stricken by Brutus and Cassius after the exit of Julius Caesar, the tyrant, and the reverse of that denarius sheweth those heroes, attended by their lictors, going to sacrifice to Liberty.” [2] Indeed, for Hollis, the ideal of liberty and the uncompromising republican virtue of the first Brutus were inseparable, and Macaulay ought to have been iconographically associated with both. [3] The image of Macaulay as the Roman Libertas was famous by itself, frequently reproduced, and serves as an exemplary representation of Macaulay as the public face of London opposition. 

Macaulay’s facial features were often described as classically republican. Her sister-in-law noted her as having “a nose somewhere between the Grecian and the Roman.” [4] She is garlanded with oak, which associated her with a specifically British form of liberty and associated her as the heir of the Commonwealth heroes she celebrated in her History. This analogy of British patriotism to Roman republican virtue suggests Macaulay’s desire to be portrayed as a historian working in forms of heroic commemoration as well as endorsing herself as someone who ought to be historically commemorated. She gazes ahead somewhat detached, perhaps a similar rebuff to the tyranny of the Stuarts as Marcus Brutus’ coin was intended for Caesar. Following her History’s fourth volume, covering the reign of Charles I, this link was made more explicit when Macaulay wrote that she covered Charles’ death with “the stoicism of the first Brutus.” [5]

Macaulay’s portrait thus linked her to the republican virtues of Marcus Brutus, masculine virtues of Roman heroism. For her admirers, this association confirmed both her intellectual authority and her patriotism. Her tone—across her History, her pamphlets, and her letters to British and American correspondents—was rational, resolute, and public-spirited, qualities coded as masculine in eighteenth-century political culture. Like Brutus, whose uncompromising virtue led him to regard the good of the public before that of his own sons, Macaulay’s patriotism could be seen in the character that was unfeeling and unfeminine. Yet Macaulay’s power as a republican icon also depended on her femininity. Her gender allowed her to personify Liberty itself, a symbolic role unavailable to men.

Hollis recognized this duality: Macaulay’s elegant prose coexisted with her fierce republican convictions. In Cipriani’s engraving, the contrast between her severe profile and delicate adornments (a garland, a necklace) suggests this balance between the feminine elegance of Macaulay’s writing as coexisting with the masculine nature of its content; Hollis could connect republican liberty to the modern liberal ideal of progress. Just as the principle of republican liberty is enhanced by the liberal polish of society, Macaulay’s tough republican profile is moderated by its feminine details. [6] As Libertas, Macaulay united these values into one embodied ideal.

Hollis was not the only artist to depict Macaulay in classical garb. In the mid-1760s, Macaulay sat for the portrait painter Catherine Read (1723-1778), who portrayed her in silky, vaguely classical drapery, seating amongst works that helped to inspire her writing, including the Magna Carta (which rests in her hand), Milton’s Political Works, and Sydney’s On Government. Along with the stories of having immersed herself in the authors of antiquity that she could find in her father’s bookshelves, depicting Macaulay in classical guise spoke to her authority as a historian and commentator as informed by the ideals of Roman republicanism. 

Comparative Case Study: Phillis Wheatley and the Constraints of Representation

Hollis was not the only artist portraying a famous female writer in the Atlantic world, either. In this next section of the writing, I find it might be fruitful to compare Macaulay’s portrait to that of Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved poet in Boston whose poetry engaged with revolutionary rhetorics of freedom as a means of linking the struggle of American revolutionaries with that of enslaved people in America. Her work engaged with the same Enlightenment and classical languages that shaped Macaulay’s politics but from an entirely different social position.

Scholars have often tied Wheatley’s radicalism to her evangelical Christianity or even the American Revolution. I contend it is also her classicism that allowed her to be an effective political actor. Indeed, literate readers of Wheatley’s world knew that the battles of the present, including the political struggles over Britain’s empire, were undertaken in the idioms of the secular (ancient and Anglo) and sacred (Jewish and Christian) past. In fact, it was during Wheatley’s lifetime that Greco-Roman antiquity became labeled by its heirs in Europe and North America as “classical,” often bearing association with an elite and high status. [7] This Greco-Roman antiquity, one claimed by the West as a cultural ancestor, transformed into a symbolic shared point of origin that was crucial in defining both the Western ‘self’ and the non-Western ‘other.’ [8] This classical past also became a tool of exclusion, racialized as the birthright of Europe and denied to Africans and their descendants. [9] Nonetheless, careful attention to her actions suggests Wheatley accomplished something a woman – and perhaps, only an enslaved woman – could have done. She balanced religious, classical, and secular political idioms, effectively forcing the issue of the relationship of slavery and race to the Revolution and American identity. [10]

Educated by her enslavers, John and Susanna Wheatley, she learned English, Latin, and perhaps Greek. [11] By fifteen she was publishing poems; by nineteen, she sought subscriptions for her first volume. With the patronage of Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon, Wheatley published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in London in 1773—the same city where Macaulay often published.

Comparative Study: Seeing Liberty

Read’s portrait of Macaulay and Wheatley’s Poems frontispiece share striking visual parallels. Both women are contained in an oval whose framing restricts the extent of their gaze outward; both are in thoughtful contemplation; both are shown with books and a quill, symbols of their intellectual and creative process. Both images are ultimately moderated by familiar iconographic elements to allow viewers to read both women within longstanding cultural traditions, although they both broke free from normative intellectual traditions in their own ways. Yet the differences between them are telling.

Whereas Macaulay is allowed a classical garb that creates a direct allusion to antiquity, Wheatley is now allowed such a direct reference. Instead, one must rely on her poems to transport them to the ancient past. Whereas Wheatley’s books have no title or legible writing, Macaulay’s do. The viewer is forced to be distanced from Wheatley’s writing process in this respect, while they can directly engage with Macaulay’s. Most importantly, while Wheatley is labeled as a “Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston,” Macaulay is merely labeled with her own name (the two smaller names are that of Hollis and Read). Ultimately, the artwork depicts Wheatley as closed off, hard to fit within a Western cultural tradition, whereas it allows Macaulay a more free expression of her engagement with that same tradition. 

Still, Poems was a dramatic success of transatlantic publication once it was printed, testifying to the transatlantic community Wheatley had garnered and the themes of her poems that resonated with readers, including, but not limited to political expression and patriotism. Though the image was engraved and printed in London, it became one of the most recognizable book illustrations from America’s early literary history. [12] The visual inclusion of a frontispiece clearly and directly conveyed to readers that Wheatley’s book not only deserved to be published but that it warranted an expensive embellishment, as well.

On the one hand, the engraving represented a significant public, political act: it carried with it revolutionary implications. A Black woman reading, writing, and publishing poems was enough to splinter social order in notions of racial difference. Like the poems, if offered quiet refutation of the false claim that Black persons could not be respectable writers and persons. In short, the portrait was “the emblem of the book as a whole and its public manifestation of her participation in the discursive sphere itself.” [13]

On the other hand, while the frontispiece may have been revolutionary in some respects, several of its elements seem to limit the aforementioned implications. The frontispiece emphasized Wheatley’s African heritage and her inferior status by containing her within an oval whose framing words seems to restrict the extent of her gaze outward in thoughtful contemplation. Conservatively dressed and seated at an expensive table so that the viewer only had access to the parts of her that are part of the creative process, the image of Wheatley is moderated by familiar iconographic elements that encourage readers to view Wheatley within long standing cultural traditions. [14]

Wheatley’s table, for example, a common object in the home of Boston’s elites, extends a leading portrait convention typical in late eighteenth-century Boston. However, Wheatley’s table is not welcoming. It is distinctly small and angled away from the view, suggesting the uniqueness of Wheatley’s own book, which, as Megan Walsh writes, hardly fit comfortably into the bookshops and libraries of colonial America. [15] And although they represent a glimpse into her compositional practice, the items on Wheatley’s table offer the viewer little. No title or writing is legible on her book or the paper in front of her, creating a further distance between her and the viewer. Thus, the frontispiece depicts Wheatley as a genius closed off, the tea table reminding readers Wheatley was seen to be much like the table at which she wrote – a valuable luxury in the Wheatley household. In other words, Poems encouraged readers to visually inspect Wheatley herself. An object exclusive to the book form, and a first in the depiction of enslaved authors, Wheatley’s frontispiece encouraged readers to scrutinize her identity in a way no other image could. [16]

Shared Legacies

Both women, in their distinct ways, embodied liberty. Macaulay’s republican virtue and Wheatley’s classical poetics each transformed the visual and intellectual languages of freedom. If Macaulay personified Liberty in the mode of Brutus, Wheatley’s image and verse redefined what liberty could mean when voiced by an enslaved African woman. Together, they expanded the iconography of freedom for the Atlantic world.

My comparison of Macaulay and Wheatley is not unique: in the years Macaulay published the early volumes of her History, she was often grouped with other women writers, patrons, and artists of diverse class, political, and religious affiliations. Macaulay was featured in numerous celebratory groupings including Mary Scott’s Female Advocate (in which she is asked to excuse the narrator’s ‘fond presumption) and Hannah More’s Search after Happiness (where she is cited as evidence of the woman of learning’s conventional 76 moral and feminine virtues). [17] Most famously, she was included in Richard Samuel’s painting of the “Nine Living Great Muses of Britain,” pictured at the top of this chapter. Under Brittania’s statue and backed by a wreath of oak, Macaulay sits in the center of the print, unfurling the scroll of history for the attention of her fellow British muses. 

In addition to her artistic depictions, Macaulay’s work had a distinctive place in the literary market. The scholarly nature of her History distinguished it from others and Macaulay was not hesitant to allow for her publication of her History in the 1760s to be exploited for its money-making potential. The early volumes were first produced as expensive and exclusive quarto volumes, given to prominent readers. In the mid-1760s, as she rose to fame, Macaulay also experimented with other formats: a marketable octavo edition and popular serialization of the first free volumes in weekly numbers at a shilling a piece. [18] By the late 1760s she was playing interested publishers against one another, selling shares in forthcoming volumes to the Dilly brothers for a notoriously large sum. [19]

As her Histories received a special place on the literary market, Macaulay also moved to writing political pamphlets which reflected on the values of liberty and natural rights she claimed in her historical philosophy, as well. In future reflections, I will begin to discuss some of her political pamphlets and letter writing that engaged her with other political thinkers on either side of the Atlantic.

Words Cited

1. Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 66.
2. Kate Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, 62 cited as TH’s annotation to CM, The History of England, 2nd edn. (London, J. Nourse, 1766), i, HL.
3. Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, 63.
4.  Ibid., 100.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., 71.
7. Naoise Mac Sweeney, The West, 262.
8.  Ibid., 263. 
9. Ibid., 264.
10. David Waldstreicher, “Women’s Politics, Antislavery Politics, and Phillis Wheatley’s American Revolution,” 148.
11. Mac Sweeney, The West, 254. In Wheatley’s Boston, no Black children could be counted among the more than 800 students enrolled in the city’s two grammar or Latin schools and the three vocational schools (Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 18). Instead, Wheatley gained her classical education through access to canonical texts made available to her at the Wheatley home and from neighbors’ libraries (Shields and Lamore, New Essays on Phillis Wheatley, 36).
12. Megan Walsh, The Portrait and the Book: Illustration and Literary Culture in Early America, 63. Advertisements for Wheatley’s book all mentioned the inclusion of her frontispiece author portrait. Printed in the Massachusetts Gazette on April 16, 1773, the first American advertisement for the volume also emphasized its material format, and declared that the volume was “to be neatly printed in 12 mo. on a new Type and a fine Paper, adorned with an elegant Frontispiece, representing the Author” (Walsh, 73).
13.  Astrid Franke, “Phillis Wheatley, Melancholy Muse,” 225.
14.  Ibid., 229. It is also necessary to note that the dark string around Wheatley’s neck subtly reminds viewers of her enslaved status; enslaved persons typically were depicted wearing collars to signify whose servant they were. Strings also recall the common association to enslaved persons and collared pets (Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage, 111).
15.  Walsh, The Portrait and the Book Illustration and Literary Culture in Early America, 78.
16.  Ibid., 73.
17.  Mary Scott, The Female Advocate: A Poem Occasioned by Reading Mr. Duncombe’s Feminead (London: J. Johnson, 1774); Hannah More, The Search After Happiness: A Pastoral Drama, 3rd edn. (Bristol: S. Forley, 1774), 44.
18.  Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, 100.
19. Ibid.