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As with most of Marietta Holley's "Josiah Allen's Wife" tales, Samantha at the World's Fair comprises equal parts travelogue, feminist diatribe, Yankee dialect.
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Hence, the clock time that increasingly regulated everyday life overlay a repository of historical time. When Howells toured the Centennial Exhibition, the spatial mapping of temporal relations was a prevalent theme.

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The idea of a modern civilization presented by the exhibitions synthesized time and space, making time as expansive as the spaces of the exhibition buildings and grounds. Thus, the Centennial made available to visitors a symbolic geography of positioning and belonging within a grand scale of space and time, dimensions whose connection was signified through the uncanny displacement of the name for a period of time onto a space. Nineteenth-century constructions of monumental time suggest that such grand temporal visions are inspired by problems of population, by the need for narrative structures to manage the movement of people as populations across historical time.

As Armstrong and Tennenhouse argue, our understanding of the novel as a genre that privileges individual consciousness must be supplemented by acknowledging the ways in which important varieties of the novel focus on human beings on the scale of populations. While the English domestic novel imagines how human beings acquire agency as subjects within liberal political and economic frameworks, another tradition, influenced by the writings of Thomas Malthus whose Essay on Population was first published in , imagines the circulation of groups of human beings through transnational networks of trade.

While the domestic novel provides an important script for the way in which political liberalism constructs the heterogeneous desires of individual subjects, the novel of population produces the equally vital blueprint by which the modern state manages large groups of inhabitants of national space. Indeed, the development of the theme of population in a variety of American writings and other cultural productions, not just novels, set in diverse locations and created in different periods of the nineteenth century, provides a running counterpoint to the focus on individual moral and psychological development characteristic of the domestic novel.

The admission of California and Oregon as new states on the Pacific coast just before the war and the post-War reintegration of the former Confederate states into the union were followed by technical achievements such as the transcontinental telegraph and railroad. Thus, the centennial era was a period of reformulation of the national relationship to continental space.

The interest of the early American novel of population in describing how populations could move into and through national space was joined by a new preoccupation in other literary and cultural productions with questions of how populations could move through national and historical time. The Centennial Exhibition as a whole became a focal point for such themes. In producing an imagined identity of group belonging, sliced into identifiable demographic groups and coupled with individual passivity, the Centennial Exhibition treated the American people as a population, employing and extending the logic provided by the novels of population that Armstrong and Tennenhouse describe.

Painted on a nine-foot by thirteen-foot canvas, and developed in stages over a period of many years, this immense work represents American history as a massive structure culminating in the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, depicted at the center top of the image [figure 2]. The different towers in the painting incorporate depictions of significant events from American history, but, as many critics have noted, the representation of historical events is non-linear. The events of the Revolution, for example, are spread all across the painting on different towers.

Art historian Paul Staiti has argued that the arrangement of the events depicted in the lower section of the painting can be interpreted typologically, and since Field was an active member of an evangelical protestant church this is likely to have been his intention Staiti, , However, in the context of the other representations of monumental time from the same period, it is also striking to observe how this painting, even if this is not its primary intended message, represents a progression from a heterogeneous, messy, and very human past spread out across space, to a lofty future defined by a rigid industrial geometry devoid of human presence.

The lower section of the painting depicts human beings actively creating national history. Oil on canvas. The Morgan Wesson Memorial Collection. Photography by David Stansbury. Permission granted by the Springfield Museum. Field had begun the painting in , but he added the depiction of the heavenly railroads around the Centennial grounds in when the Exhibition opened.

1893 Book Samantha At The Worlds Fair By Josiah Allens Wife

It seems that this event provided the resolution that he had been seeking in creating his chaotic but millenarian depiction of American history. The connection between a religious millennium and the technological utopianism of the Centennial Exhibition makes clear the import of the vertical movement of the painting: the transport of a certain population—in this case, the blessed citizens of America—from a messy past, across a border, and into a future in which that population paradoxically disappears amidst the harmonious operation of machinery.

Thus, her portrayal of the exhibition must have shaped the impressions of many who never visited the site. In a sense, such representations of the Exhibition became as important to the public perception of it as the buildings and grounds themselves; and readers would have found here again an emphasis on the relative emptiness of the grounds as well as the sense of orderliness and tranquility that seems to result from the lack of pressing humanity.

The description of this transcendent figure is left completely abstract; besides the use of the female pronoun, there is no indication of any specific form of embodiment. In its abstraction, this figure contrasts with the sensuous presence of the machinery as described by Holley and other commentators. Samantha feels that she does not belong in Machinery Hall, and desires to flee, yet this is the place where she produces a much more tangible representation of the future. In contrast, when she tries to imagine a human figure striding forward into the national future, she can only conjure the most intangible of images.

The act of entering the Exhibition grounds constitutes the kind of border crossing that Armstrong and Tennenhouse see in the earlier novels of population, but in this case the boundary is one demarcating a new experience of time. Although both Howells and Buel describe large numbers of visitors to these two major exhibitions, both writers emphasize the way in which these large crowds were dwarfed by the great scale of the exhibition grounds.

Because of their grand scale, the grounds and buildings seemed empty despite their many visitors. Though staged two decades apart, these exhibitions are linked thematically as commemorations of culturally important spans of time: the years of national independence, and the years since the first voyage of Columbus to America.

Thus, the preoccupation of exhibition planners and visitors alike with the vast spaces of the exhibition grounds reflects an equally strong interest in significant expanses of time.

Samantha At The World’s Fair | Marietta Holley, Josiah Allen’s Wife

The spaces of these exhibitions were intended to evoke a sense of historical monumentality; and their success is attested by the descriptions of visitors. The January, cover of Scientific American featured a drawing of a proposed 1, foot high tower for the Centennial Exhibition [figure 3]. Though the tower was never built, the drawing anticipates the inscription that would appear at the entrance to the Egypt Section by juxtaposing the modern tower with the pyramids.

The drawing also juxtaposes the tower to other monuments such as the United States Capitol, one of the tallest buildings in America, and the Gothic cathedral at Cologne, Germany and the dome of St. Their height made these structures appropriate context for the illustration of a tower that would have been the tallest in the world by far. The tower, in contrast, represents the future through its open metal framework, within which not a human figure can be found. Indeed, the lack of human figures is a notable but easily overlooked aspect of the drawing.

Buildings such as capitols and cathedrals are centres of human activity; it would be difficult, however, to imagine what human activities might take place within the Centennial Tower. Entering through any of the numerous portals, we presently find ourselves at the spot where Columbia avenue is intercepted by the transverse nave, each fifty feet in width. Here, in the centre of the great circular court which surrounds the point of intersection, flanked by the exhibits of the United States, of Germany, Great Britain, and France, the first thing that strikes the eye is a clock tower of elaborate design, 40 feet square at the base and in height, with four entrance ways, separated by corner pavilions.

From one of these pavilions, stairways lead to the third floor, with access by ladders to the clock floor above. The clock, which serves as the official timepiece of the department, is worked by electricity, with dials seven feet in diameter, and above it, on still another floor, is a chime of bells, set in motion by its machinery, and whose music may be heard afar over the waters of the White City, the bells being set in motion by its machinery and by a keyboard in the jewelry section, with which it is connected by electric wires.

Bancroft, , Not only did this tower dominate Columbia Avenue, the major street running the length of the immense Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building, its mechanism also regulated, via electrical wires, a whole network of other clocks stationed at different places throughout the White City. Indeed, the Self-Winding Clock Company constructed the tower in order to advertise the usefulness of its master-slave system in regulating labor and commerce on a national scale.

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This representation of monumental time thus celebrates the nation as a utopia comprised of technological marvels and natural forces such as electricity that seems to require no human antecedent or continuing presence, except perhaps as slaves devoid of agency. The feeling of abstraction from self described here captures something of the enigma of the movement of population through the exhibitions.

Since the Education was written a decade later, the reiteration of these tropes suggests their power to shape and define memories of the Exhibition, even in so careful and critical an observer as Adams. All of these clocks featured similar combinations of patriotic icons, moving historical figures, astronomical indicators, and relatively small but functional clock faces. They were constructed by craftsmen who usually worked alone, many of them immigrants to the United States.

They typically toured small-town America, and were not usually displayed at the great exhibitions of the era.

Samantha Fish at Paste Studio NYC live from The Manhattan Center

By the s a few corporations had begun to see marketing potential in these novelties, and the Chicago Exposition featured not only the tower of the Self-Winding Clock Company but also the massive, twenty-foot high Century Clock of the Waterbury Watch Company. The thirteen-foot tall structure incorporates moving miniatures, cosmological measurements, and symbols of American nationalism into the theme of passing time represented by the functional mechanical clock at its center [figure 5].

The clock must have been completed around , since it features a moving procession of American presidents that concludes with Benjamin Harrison. The clock also includes a number of other miniature human figures as well as small panel paintings of important historical events.

However, as in many of the representations of clocks and machinery at the great exhibitions, in the Great Historical Clock human beings are present only in miniature, and the significance of their activities is thrown into question. As the clock moves, the mechanical figures enact vignettes suggestive of the relationship between present time and history.

For example, one set of miniatures depicts continental troops marching in review before George Washington. Washington reviews these latter-day presidents, measuring them against his eternal standard. The cyclical progression of presidents before the unchanging Washington suggests that the appearance of change within historical time is an illusion; in contrast to the flux of human activity in everyday life, national time progresses on a scale too vast to perceive.

The Great Historical Clock of America, about Allegorical figures representing the days of the week rotate above the US coat of arms. Paintings illustrate scenes from the American past, such as the pilgrims landing at Plymouth and Fulton piloting the Clermont up the Hudson.


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Depictions of the four ages of man infancy, childhood, maturity, and old age rotate above the clock face, while below cycle the phases of the moon. The design of The Great Historical Clock represents the progress of the nation away from the mythic past, through time, and into the future as an amalgamation of individual days, soldiers, stars, moons, presidents, and hours.

In their idealisations of modern womanhood, white, middle-class female fair organisers grasped hold of the queen, explicitly white in the case of French- Sheldon but generally implicitly so, to draw attention to themselves and to affirm their commanding presence. I conclude that white queen rhetoric and visual iconography made lasting impres- sions on visitors to the Columbian Exposition and thus had an important impact on the ideology of modernity the fair helped forge.

She shines equally well as hostess at an intellectual social function in her own drawing room, or as sole leader and commander of a caravan of black men in the wilds of Africa. French-Sheldon spoke at the Congress of Women and, like many contributors, she won several awards, one for her collection of artefacts and one for the design of her palanquin. To the delight of the audience gathered in the Transporta- tion Building to attend a reception held in her honour, French- Sheldon appeared decked out in the extravagant gown she claimed had so entranced African leaders.