Literature, Art and Slavery: Ekphrastic Visions
Carl Plasa
Published:
2023
Online ISBN:
9780748683550
Print ISBN:
9780748683543
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Literature, Art and Slavery: Ekphrastic Visions
Carl Plasa
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Carl Plasa
Pages
95–128
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Published:
October 2023
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Plasa, Carl, 'The Secret Afterlives of Dido Elizabeth Belle', Literature, Art and Slavery: Ekphrastic Visions (
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Abstract
This chapter examines three texts (two short stories and one short poem) all written in response to David Martin’s Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray (c. 1779), a painting highly unusual for its time in its sisterly juxtaposition of a young mixed-race woman and her white counterpart. The first of the stories is ‘Dido Elizabeth Belle—A Narrative of Her Life (Extant)’ (1995) by Leonora Brito, while the second is Emma Donoghue’s ‘Dido’ (2002). The poetic response that rounds out the chapter in a brief coda is Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s ‘Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, Free Mulatto, and her White Cousin, the Lady Elizabeth Murray, Great-Nieces of William Murray, First Earl of Mansfield and Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench’ (2020). Despite their shared visual source, there are marked differences between these three texts, with Jeffers broadly maintaining a nuanced focus on the painting itself and its interracial dynamics, while Brito and Donoghue move quite extravagantly beyond the image that quickens their narratives, conjuring lives and possibilities for Dido radically removed from the scene in which she originally appears.
Keywords: David Martin, Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle, Leonora Brito, Emma Donoghue, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Subject
Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
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