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Ben-Hur and the spectacle of empire
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Storey, Mark (2015) Ben-Hur and the spectacle of empire. Studies in American Fiction, 42 (1). pp. 85-102. doi:10.1353/saf.2015.0004
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/saf.2015.0004
Abstract
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For visitors to Manhattan in the last days of the nineteenth century, there could have been few more spectacular sights than the Dewey Arch. Occupying a prime spot in Madison Square, the eighty-five-foot-tall structure—flanked by six decorated columns and adorned in flamboyant beaux-arts sculpture—had been designed by Charles L. Lamb to commemorate Admiral George Dewey’s victory in the Battle of Manila Bay just a few months before. As crowds gathered on September 29, 1899 to witness the parade in Dewey’s honor (not far from another and now more famous triumphal arch, this one for George Washington), the symbolism of the Dewey structure could hardly have been more resonant. It had been partly modelled, like Washington’s, on the Arch of Titus in Rome; completed in 85CE by the Emperor Domitian to commemorate his brother Titus (and in particular Titus’s victory at Jerusalem in 70CE), it was, like most Roman triumphal arches, a confident testament to the irresistible might of Rome’s imperial reach. The Dewey Arch, in a similar vein, was built to celebrate a moment of military victory, a battle which had seen U.S. forces destroy the Spanish flotilla and all but secure the Philippines as an overseas territory. It was, in David Brody’s words, the “material manifestation of America’s newfound interest in displaying the vast possibilities of empire.” Much of the violent reality of the battle is naturally enough absent from the arch’s jingoistic and idealised sculptural adornments, representing what the National Sculpture Society called the “four patriotic steps”: patriotism, war, triumph, and peace. It is this absence, this imposing statement of apparently benevolent and progressive intervention, which makes the Dewey Arch a pertinent starting point here. By way of overt iconography as well as implied analogy, the arch brought the implications of Roman imperial history into the center of modern America, and yet even as it did so it served to reinforce and perpetuate a long history of imperial denial.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects: | E History America > E151 United States (General) P Language and Literature > PS American literature |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Wallace, Lew, 1827-1905. Ben-Hur, Imperialism in literature | ||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Studies in American Fiction | ||||||
| Publisher: | Johns Hopkins University Press | ||||||
| ISSN: | 0091-8083 | ||||||
| Official Date: | 2015 | ||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 42 | ||||||
| Number: | 1 | ||||||
| Number of Pages: | 18 | ||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 85-102 | ||||||
| DOI: | 10.1353/saf.2015.0004 | ||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
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