Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Ekphrasis and textual consciousness

1999; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 15; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02666286.1999.10443976

1943-2178

Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux,

Photography and Visual Culture

Abstract When Edwin Markham's ‘The man with the hoe’ first appeared in William Randolph Hearst's progressive San Francisco Examiner in January 1899, it instantly became an emblem of the burgeoning labor movement and this century's most famous ekphrastic poem (figure 1). Headed by a reproduction of François Millet's painting and flanked by advice to the lovelorn, homiletic essays, an article on why poisoners are usually women and a promotional squib by the editor on ‘'Professor Markham's virile verse’, the poem was read by the paper's working-class audience through the lens of its context. The speaker is clearly allied with the workers' cause, the newspaper — famous for taking on the unfair pricing practices of the Southern Pacific Railroad — a kind of soapbox, Millet's image of an exhausted laborer an ‘Exhibit A’ to rouse the crowds and instruct their oppressors. But when the poem was reprinted in 1916 as a tasteful limited-edition book of 300 copies meant for collectors, the context was so changed that in subtle but important ways the poem represented the image differently (figure 2). The audience projected here clearly differs, and a new prefatory ‘Comment’, while hammering home the poem's political point in high rhetoric, resituates the poet far from the soapbox, in a gallery, standing for an hour ‘before the painting’. The picture is not the image well-known to the public from newspaper reproductions, but a painting hanging on a wall, displayed by its new American owner. (There is no reproduction of it). Here, the context says, is a fellow gallery-goer warning those who visit art exhibits about the plight of the oppressed, calling on them to take heed. The rhetorical situation is suddenly delicate, the strategy complex, and it depends on the painting's being understood as an objet d'art, a respected icon of culture.