Troubled Abstraction: Whiteness in Charles Dana Gibson and George Du Maurier

© Association of Art Historians 2011 733

Troubled Abstraction:Whiteness in Charles Dana Gibson and George Du Maurier Jennifer A. Greenhill

Blinded by the radiant glow of the Gibson Girl, ‘another moth’ falls prey to her

luminous charms (plate 1). With one arm shielding his eyes and the other outstretched,

a gentleman in evening dress drags himself toward this magnetizing female presence.

The American illustrator, Charles Dana Gibson, explored such scenarios of mystical

female power again and again in the images he produced for journals like Life, and

the folios that brought them together in sumptuous large scale.1 Indeed, like so many

other late nineteenth-century artists who concocted related visions of idealized

femininity, Gibson insists on his girl’s special position as a beacon of aesthetic power.

Her ‘mission’, as the artist explained it in an interview published in the New York Times in 1910, was not only to make men weak at the knees, but was also, and

fundamentally, to point American culture toward a racially evolved future. Invoking

a Darwinian rhetoric of natural selection, Gibson described the American girl who

had inspired his work for almost thirty years as a fi gure in process, en route to

‘eventual’ perfection. She would achieve this state by combining, he said, the ‘best

points of all those many races which have helped to make our population’. And yet

Gibson’s work rarely acknowledges the heterogeneity he takes to be so benefi cial.2

Beauty would only, it seems, truly register for Gibson if it were fundamentally white:

the ‘best part of [the American girl’s] beauty’, he maintained, ‘will and has come

from the nation of our origin – Great Britain’.3

While revealing the social and cultural exclusivity of his construction, this assertion

also draws attention to its relation to the ‘high-bred English girl’ of the illustrator

George Du Maurier.4 Robert W. Chambers confi rmed in 1905 that ‘one naturally recalls

Du Maurier’, when thinking of Gibson. In Du Maurier’s ‘social pictorial satire’ (as the

artist termed it), which appeared in Punch from the 1860s until the mid-1890s, as well

as the three novels he published late in his career – Peter Ibbetson (1891), Trilby (1894),

and The Martian (published posthumously in 1897) – Du Maurier trademarked an ideal

visual type that inspired Gibson’s own confections.5 Contemporary critics often noted

the resemblance by stressing that Gibson’s girl was the superior specimen – she was

more fl exible, more versatile, more explicitly modern.6 This verdict is surely owed to

the greater range of situations Gibson explored; as New Woman, his girl rode a bicycle

and could evade suitors with marvellous athleticism.7 She was, in other ways, too, a

fi gure in motion. As Martha Banta has argued, the Gibson Girl was ‘fl exible enough

to mutate absolutes, alter essences, and catch change within continuity’.8 She thus

encapsulated the modern by seeming to open up the fi xed contour, by existing as a kind

of proposition in the process of formulation.

Detail from Charles Dana Gibson, ‘The Weaker Sex. II’, c. 1903 (plate 15).

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2010.00844.xArt History | ISSN 0141-679034 | 4 | September 2011 | pages 732-753


Whiteness in Charles Dana Gibson and George Du Maurier

1 Charles Dana Gibson, ‘Another Moth’, in The Social Ladder, Drawings by Charles Dana Gibson, New York and London, 1902. Photo: Courtesy of the Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.

Taking a cue from Banta, this essay explores how Gibson’s one-upmanship

over Du Maurier is enacted at the level of line and, critically, the accentuation of

the blank, unmarked page (plate 2). Gibson’s programme of social advancement is

formulated through an aesthetic that put him fi rmly in the avant-garde, a reputation

that depended on his original treatment of the white page as a crucial element of his

minimalist designs. What is the social signifi cance of such stylistic and compositional

choices? If whiteness was critical to Gibson’s understanding of evolutionary

superiority, that complex of ideas was central in turn to the strategies of his black-

and-white imagery. As we shall see, Gibson would use whiteness, as an abstract value,

to distance himself from Du Maurier, to set himself apart as the ostensibly more

advanced, more evolved artist.

By focusing on the semiotic value of whiteness in Gibson’s art, my argument

extends the efforts of scholars to investigate the ways in which that rather imprecise

racial category visually signifi es. Building on the work of critical race theorists

who have for the past twenty years complicated the ‘unraced norm’ of whiteness,

art historians such as Angela Rosenthal and Martin Berger have demonstrated

how a ‘racialized perspective’ informs eighteenth-century portraiture, Civil War

era photography, architectural projects and much else.9 The great contribution of

this work is its attention to the social implications of seemingly unremarkable or

ostensibly incidental stylistic or iconographic choices.10 Typically white fi gures

within black-and-white illustration are delineated through an absence of line work,

as for example in Edward Kemble’s illustration to Marietta Holley’s Samantha among the Colored Folks (1894; plate 3). However, as I will argue, the whiteness of black-and-white

illustration is racialized in more elusive ways, even when it is dislocated, or partially

dislocated, from the fi gural. To be sure, the whiteness of black-and-white illustration

asks to be taken for granted as a natural component of the medium and, in most

cases, we probably should do just this – look through instead of at it. As Du Maurier

himself explained, illustration is a medium of ‘conventional symbols’, where hatch

marks are made to stand for ‘depth of shadow’, and whiteness signifi es comparative

brightness, or at times signifi es nothing at all – the void of the unarticulated page.11

But if, as has recently been argued, whiteness is a category that ‘operates by being


Jennifer A. Greenhill

“invisible”’, by being, that is, ‘so ubiquitous and entrenched as to appear natural and

normative’, it will only be known through an epistemological manipulation that

wrenches it out of the realm of the natural.12 As we shall see, for both Gibson and

Du Maurier, whiteness as a social value was critically bound up in, and constructed

through, an investment in that term’s aesthetic potential. In Gibson’s attempt to

distance his handling of the modern woman from Du Maurier’s rendition of the

same idea,13 evolutionary advancement is fi gured as a troubled abstraction which

nonetheless solidifi es his own claim to aesthetic superiority.

Drawing with FinishDu Maurier typically blots out the blank page; he rarely gives over much of the

composition to it (plate 4). He had a reputation for density, for a ‘wealth of execution’,

said the novelist Henry James, the illustrator’s friend and most astute critic.14 ‘Some

of these full-page pictures have an admirable breadth and vigor’, James said, referring

to the cuts that appeared in Punch, ‘though they sometimes strike us as rather too

black’. They are too black because they are fi lled with a thousand little lines cutting

here and then there, in long diagonals, short curves or squiggles that fi ll up the space,

doing their best to denote texture and depth within what James called ‘the narrow

limits of black and white’. This was ‘almost academic’ drawing, said James.15 Other

critics confi rmed James’s view,16 and contrasted Du Maurier’s work with that of the

man he replaced at Punch in the mid-1860s, John Leech.17 Leech would zig and zag

his lines with a free hand so that they appear somewhat coarse and slapdash next

to Du Maurier’s precision.18 ‘“Punch” had never before suspected that it was so

artistic’, said James, before the ‘fi nish and delicacy, the real elegance’ of Du Maurier’s

2 Charles Dana Gibson, untitled illustration in Pictures of People, New York and London, 1901. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.



drawings.19 The engraver who translated Du Maurier’s

compositions and prepared them for reproduction for

much of his career rarely had much room to interpret

since, as Marion H. Spielmann noted, Du Maurier’s

line was ‘too delicate, sympathetic, and precise to leave

room for anything but the strictest possible facsimile’.20

In an illustration from Gibson’s series of drawings

devoted to life in London, produced after a trip there

in 1896, the younger illustrator offers his take on

the master’s technique, on its taste and fi nish (plate 5). Gibson had visited Du Maurier once before when

he was just starting out, to show him his work and

ask for his advice; he reportedly introduced himself

by saying, ‘I draw and you have been my master for

years.’21 Gibson included a stand-alone portrait of Du

Maurier in Life in London and, in this image, at the far

right of a gathering of distinguished guests, including the novelist Anthony Hope and

possibly other English luminaries behind.22 In front of Du Maurier stands a woman

who spreads open a highly decorated fan, covering the illustrator’s body to set off his

face. Fans appear everywhere in Du Maurier’s drawing room scenes as the favoured

feminine accoutrement, whether folded or splayed out to frame the female form (see

plate 4). The train of the central fi gure’s dress spreads out on the fl oor behind her in

a fan-like formation. This is where the illustrator signs his name, as if to claim this

motif and acknowledge its signifi cance.

Gibson seems to be echoing this association by setting the fi gure of Du Maurier

against that highly worked fan, which relies on the high contrast between dark

blacks at the edges and the glowing, open white space at centre, a compositional

framework favoured by Du Maurier (see plates 6–8). Gibson thus enacts a kind of

homage to Du Maurier’s trademark technique – his dense, laboured vignettes devoted

to the activities of fashionable society and glorifying the ‘high-bred English girl’ in

particular. But this may be critique as well. The woman who holds the fan with an

air of circumspection as she glances in the other direction offers a decorative answer

to the fan’s dense and rigid organizational scheme in the puffy folds of her sleeve,

which sits at the same level. Further left, and rendered with an even freer hand, is

the costume of the woman who looks in the direction of Du Maurier. Signifi cantly,

it is here that Gibson makes his mark, gliding his signature through an abstract

network of lines perhaps meant to denote ruffl es or folds. If Gibson signs his portrait

of Du Maurier directly beneath the fi gure, so that it appears that his signature is

pinned beneath the leg of his idol’s chair, here in contrast he occupies a distanced

position (plate 9). Both illustrators were known, primarily, for their rendition of elite,

fashionable womanhood; here they meet in a kind of face-off, with Du Maurier

representing academic fi nish and Gibson situating himself, through his signature, at a

distanced remove to occupy a space that breathes a bit more, that foregoes crisp cross-

hatching for lines that spread out and open up to broad expanses of untouched page.

Artistic Dialect and AbstractionFrom the age of fi ve, Gibson had worked creatively with white, making it signify

materially by cutting silhouettes out of white paper which he mounted on black so

that their contours could be perceived (plate 10). A family photograph shows him with

one of these silhouettes, which were exhibited in New York when he was just a boy

3 Edward Kemble, ‘Felix and the Teacher’, in Marietta Holley, Samantha among the Colored Folks, New York, 1894, 143. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.



(plate 11).23 Before he drew, Gibson cut, and he did so by moving the paper instead of

the scissors, demonstrating an exceptional ability to hold the concept of the fi gure

in his mind as the paper danced around it.24 Gibson’s art was thus, from the start, in

a sense austere, even minimal – he would later say that all an illustrator needed was

white paper and black ink, nothing more.25 But the work also exhibited a remarkably

sophisticated sense of the fl exibility of formal economy.26 In his later illustrative

work, Gibson would continue to make whiteness signify and explore how forms

might emerge from the space between what is carved out or delineated. But he would

4 George Du Maurier, ‘Social Agonies’, Punch, 75, 27 July 1878, 35. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.

5 Charles Dana Gibson, ‘Distinguished Guests’, in London as Seen By Charles Dana Gibson, New York, 1897. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.



forego the sharp outline of the silhouette for broken

contours, in the service of design that works harder to

court abstraction.

At times this amounts to an oscillation between

dimensions, so that space reads in terms of both surface

and depth. In a page from the folio Pictures of People (1901), Gibson distances foreground from background

by contrasting the thick, juicy blacks used to defi ne

the fi gure with her back turned toward us with the

fainter lines that defi ne the fi gure facing her and which

trail off at the neck and sleeve (see plate 2). A double

perspective informs our view, so that it feels split: we

look slightly down on one fi gure while looking at the

other head-on. Because of this, and because Gibson

leaves the space between the two fi gures unarticulated,

he raises questions about their spatial location. Is the

face we see the mirror image of the face turned away

from us? Is this a distanced refl ection? The dark rings

of the glass, in the foreground left, may be picked up

just to the left of the woman’s hand, at centre. A dark

vertical line divides that arm, as it might if the arm

were pressed against the fl at surface of a mirror, next

to its refl ection. But the women’s postures are not that

close; one leans over, while the other sits upright. Are

they instead meant to be friends sitting across the table

from one another?

This seems to have been the case when the

composition appeared in Robert Grant’s The Art of Living (1895), a life handbook for the ‘smart set’. Gibson’s

illustration appears in the chapter treating house

furnishings with the caption ‘The modern dinner-

table’. The text surrounding the image complains

about the modern woman’s tendency to ‘crowd her

table with every article of virtu she possesses … until

one is unable to see at any one spot more than a square

inch of tablecloth’.27 Gibson’s image foregoes all of

this ornament to visually reinforce the text’s argument

for restraint. When he reproduced the composition in

Pictures of People, Gibson further economized by leaving

out the anchoring caption. Without the competition of the explanatory text, Gibson’s

airy signature at the bottom left achieves greater prominence as a kind of notational

scheme. The ‘C.’ and ‘D.’ of ‘C. D. Gibson’ break open to loosely frame unmarked

space, which also sits at the heart of the fi gural arrangement above. In this way

Gibson insisted that we focus on this aspect of the composition, its ambiguity and

semiotic fl exibility.

Gibson liked pictorial puzzles, but they most often appear to have a ready

solution. Indeed, this is crucial to the joke work of pictures like ‘Puzzle: Find the

Heiress’ from 1895 (plate 12), which asks the viewer to discern from the arrangement

of bodies the relative wealth and thus desirability of three women. The one

surrounded by three male suitors is the winner. More interesting is Gibson’s play



with degrees of fi nish in those two isolated fi gures; the leftmost one occupies a space

that is rather ornate in detail, while the central zone of the composition negates

this rhetoric, empties it out. Asking the viewer to begin reading at the left in order

to meet the visual punch line at the composition’s right edge, Gibson thus staged a

progression, a move from one zone, one aesthetic tactic, to the next.

Critics began to notice a change in Gibson’s art at this moment, in the mid-1890s,

after he had spent time in Paris, in 1893, and then in London, between 1895 and

1896. His work in these years became more ‘experimental’ said the critic and editor,

Charles Belmont Davis.28 Indeed, the woman whose back we glimpse in plate 2 has

a Toulouse-Lautrec-ian sort of élan as she dips down in her chair, her posture and

décolleté signalling a modern ease of being far removed from starched Victorian

constraints. Gibson’s fl uid style has the same self-assurance and openness about it.

He started out in the fi ne-line technique of Du Maurier, but by the mid-1890s he

turned toward a freer use of black and white, which critics like Davis saw as a stylistic

advancement. Gibson, Davis said, ‘gradually drew away from his fi ne-line drawing,

and told his story in a few bold strokes where he would formerly have used an

hundred’.29 Critics appreciated the ‘expressiveness’ and ‘unusual strength’ of his line,

particularly since it was produced by (as Gibson described it) the ‘cruel’ medium of

pen and ink. ‘[T]here is no more exacting medium of expression than pure line’, said

one writer, ‘there are none of the accidental effects of colors blending into each other

which sometimes surprise the painter himself and are beyond his best ability.’ Unlike

painting, you could not ‘fake’ pen and ink: ‘it is hard-and-fast and irrevocable’.30

These accounts testify to the changing status of illustration during the late

nineteenth century, when the medium attracted better artists and began to be seen

as a legitimate – and not just pot-boiling – alternative to painting (despite the way

Henry James presented it in his short tale, ‘The Real Thing’ of 1892).31 Advances

in printing showcased draughtsmanship and gave illustrators greater control over

their fi nished products. With photoengraving, the

camera replaced the artist-engraver as the intermediary

between the pen-and-ink sketch and the published

image.32 Thus, Gibson and other illustrators working

around the turn of the century had technical

advantages over their predecessors.33 Critics presented

him as an uncompromising minimalist fi rmly in the

avant-garde, ‘in advance of his fellow-workers’ Davis

confi rmed.34 Gibson had learned, he said, ‘to make

one line tell as Kipling does an adjective’.35 Through

his economical use of line, Gibson opened up line’s

potential to signify on its own and in multiple

directions – as outline but also as distance, say; and

what was not touched by Gibson’s line is as signifi cant.

The untouched page, which links and

simultaneously distances the two women in plate 2 is the

indeterminate, syntactical centre of the image. Because

it asks to be read as a marker of spatial distance, or the

zone of some unarticulated ‘content’, the unmarked

area acts like an abstraction – some formal device

that frustrates mimetic clarity and thus promotes the

viewer’s engagement in the image’s construction.

This void that anchors Gibson’s delineation of his two

6 Detail of Gibson, ‘Distinguished Guests’.

7 George Du Maurier, ‘Annals of a Retired Suburb’, Society Pictures from ‘Punch’, vol. 1, London, 1891, 108. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.

8 George Du Maurier, ‘A Pathetic Appeal’, Society Pictures from ‘Punch’, vol. 1, London, 1891, 107. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.

9 Charles Dana Gibson, ‘George du Maurier’, in London as Seen By Charles Dana Gibson, New York, 1897. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.



subjects therefore assumes great signifi cance as a kind of compositional linchpin

and interpretive cue. It might also be the true subject of his work. If we can extend

the contemporary critic’s literary analogy to Kipling, we might think of Gibson in

relation to Henry James, who was somewhat critical of Du Maurier’s technique, as I

have suggested.

In The Later Style of Henry James, Seymour Chatman examines the critical function of

abstraction and ‘abstractness’ in the novelist’s late work – qualities usually credited as the

causes of the late work’s ‘diffi culty’.36 Although James produces abstraction in myriad

ways, I am most interested in the way an ideological construct – like freedom, say –

can occupy this space as an idea suffi ciently abstract to elude easy comprehension.

The characters within the novels work hard to discern the signifi cance of these ideas

in relation to the fi gure with which they are associated, but they often falter. Take

a passage from The Wings of the Dove (1902): ‘On all grounds, at any rate, the relation

between Kate and freedom, between freedom and Kate, was a different one from

any he [Densher] could associate or cultivate, as to anything, with the girl who had

just left him to prepare to give herself up to him.’37 Kate, yoked to the abstraction,

freedom, becomes a kind of unknown. Densher fl ips the two terms in his mind –

freedom and Kate – but clarity does not emerge from the conceptual rearrangement.

(That third term, Milly, an American contrast to Kate, only complicates matters

further.)38 Abstractions in James often ‘occur in important syntactical positions

like that of grammatical subject’, Chatman explains. ‘Indeed, it often seems as if

James created characters as anchors for abstractions’, he writes, rather than using

abstractions as constitutive of his characters.39 The character, as it is delineated,

does not matter as much, then, as the abstractions that butt up against and extend its

contours, opening them up so that they evade precise location.

Abstraction in Gibson cannot be said to arise from a fi eld of discursive

misdirection, as it often does in James. But his attempt to focus the viewer’s attention

on the ends of his lines and the space between them is a contemporary analogue

for James’s project. By evacuating his compositions of the dense line work that had

defi ned Du Maurier’s imagery, Gibson gives the bright space of the blank page a

new kind of presence and potential to signify. In a compelling analysis of Alexander

Cozens’s work, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn argues that white spaces push a sketch

away from ‘iconic representation’; that is, they leave ‘something to the imagination’,

allow the mind to play with and supplement the visual information.40 Understood

in this way, the white spaces of Gibson’s work come even closer to James’s literary

abstractions. Both writer and illustrator leave the ‘syntactic completion’ of ideas open

10 Charles Dana Gibson, silhouette, in Fairfax Downey, Portrait of an Era as Drawn by C. D. Gibson, New York, 1936, 6.



and invite reader/viewer participation.41

Other illustrators like Phil May, at Punch (whom

Gibson also memorialized in his London series)

and Penrhyn Stanlaws at Life, also avoided elaborate

linear description and worked against the previous

generation’s tendency to see mark-making as the surest

route to signifi cation.42 In a Life cover from 1899, for

example, Stanlaws – a Scottish artist who worked in

New York before moving on to a directorial career in

Hollywood – uses the sparest outlines to delineate his

fi gures and draws attention to this by highlighting the

alternative: a kind of description that convincingly

communicates refl ections of light and volume in

the hair of the fi gure at the far right (plate 13). Phil

May would do something similar in the contrasts he

presented between fully worked faces and cartoonishly

simplifi ed fi gures. Both illustrators draw attention to

their stylistic departures from the mimetic standards

that black-and-white illustrators had perfected in

their quest to approximate three-dimensional form

and chromatic variation within the limitations of the

medium. Although the contrasts set up in ‘Puzzle: Find

the Heiress’ might be related to these efforts, Gibson

was less interested in contrasting alternatives of fi nish

– as Stanlaws and May seem to have been – than in

foregrounding aesthetic progress as a fl exible idea, as

something in motion.

That these graphic artists of the 1890s drew

attention to these sorts of stylistic choices suggests the

value of trademarking a unique style in this period,

which generated signifi cant stylistic variety. Illustrators

in the 1890s enjoyed more fi nancial success, celebrity

and opportunity than ever before, as the demand for illustrated literature and

journalism increased exponentially. But they were also an embattled group who

had to work against growing concerns that there were simply too many pictures in

books and magazines, as well as complaints that illustrations distracted from textual

information and were, perhaps worse, often of poor quality. Because illustrators

commonly crossed the boundaries between art, reportage, and commercial

advertising, the need to distance one’s work from one camp or another was built

into membership in this diverse community of artists.43 By drawing attention

to the voice of the individual artist, illustrators like Gibson moved the medium

into a new golden age. The English illustrator Walter Crane explained the graphic

artist’s choices in Darwinian terms, which signals how much survival depended on

stylistic innovation. ‘By a kind of “natural selection”’, Crane said, ‘we fi nally arrive

at a choice of line’, which would be different for every artist due to ‘natural bias …

personal character and preferences’. Based on these specifi cs, ‘a kind of evolution

goes on’ in the artist’s technique. He fi nds that he is ‘led to repeat a particular kind

of stroke, a particular degree of line’, and thus formulates an individual style ‘by

which his work is instantly known, like a friend’s handwriting’.44 This was the

artist’s particular ‘dialect’, Crane said, and critics employed this rhetoric to explain

11 ‘Charles Dana Gibson cutting silhouettes at eight years of age’, in Fairfax Downey, Portrait of an Era as Drawn by C. D. Gibson, New York, 1936, 11.



Gibson’s particularity. Gibson’s ‘artistic dialect … is not the suggestion of a brogue,

not the indication of a recent immigrant’, said one commentator in 1901, but was

instead ‘essentially genteel, cultured [and] fashionable’.45 By collapsing Gibson’s

social position into his work, critics demonstrated the period’s inclination to read

racial and ethnic identity not only at the level of iconography, but also at the level of

expressive or stylistic approach. Gibson’s style appeared to advertise an artist not only

culturally and socially but also ethnically evolved. It thus crucially reinforced his art’s

focus on evolved white bodies (an exclusive club to which he himself could claim

membership).

Whitishness and IndeterminacyBorn in Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1867, Gibson could trace his heritage back to the

earliest English settlers and he merged easily with English high society when visiting

London.46 That critics read this heritage into his dialect is therefore unsurprising.

Collier’s, the publishing house that made Gibson the highest paid illustrator in the

United States when he signed a contract with them in 1903, promoted the art by

promoting the racial ‘stock’ of the man.47 This rhetoric likewise informed the

reception of his work in England. His art was written ‘in honest Anglo-Saxon’,

said Spielmann.48 Life, the journal with which Gibson began his career, likewise

favoured the Anglo and urbane, although it liked to make the case that American

democracy was far removed from the Old World’s caste hierarchies and aristocratic

snobbery. Indeed, Gibson had himself mocked the Anglomania of his day within

the pages of Life, in a cartoon from 1888 which shows an American dandy aping

the style of a British aristocrat.49 By the turn of the century, the American imitation

of Britain would extend beyond sartorial affectation into fi elds of geopolitical

12 Charles Dana Gibson, ‘Puzzle: Find the Heiress’, in Drawings by Charles Dana Gibson, New York and London, 1895. Photo: Courtesy of the Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.



contestation. The American Reverend Josiah Strong had linked the two countries on

the basis of their expansionism as early as 1891: ‘This mighty Anglo-Saxon race’, he

wrote, ‘though comprising only one-thirteenth part of mankind, now rules more

than one-third of the earth’s surface, and more than one-fourth of its people.’50

The controversial successes of the USA and Britain a few years later in Cuba, the

Philippines and South Africa, seemed to seal Anglo-Saxon supremacy, which Life promoted, despite its misgivings about the ideology fuelling this expansion.51 This

ambivalence is evident in a William Walker cartoon, ‘The Anglo-Saxon’s Mission’,

which critiques the circumstances of this new Anglo-American bond (plate 14). In

order for the Anglo-Saxon mission to be fulfi lled, other races would have to fall back,

be assimilated or, as Walker suggests, annihilated.52

In its effort to complicate the closing gap between the USA and Britain, Life stressed the heterogeneity of the American populace, which connected the country

to ‘all peoples around the globe’.53 Gibson seemed to support this view when he

13 Penrhyn Stanlaws, ‘Getting Acclimated’, cover of Life, 28, 19 November 1896. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.



told the Times that his girl combined ‘the best points of all those many races which

have helped to make our population’. Indeed, Gibson called specifi cally on Israel

Zangwill’s hit play of 1908, The Melting Pot, when he explained his girl’s mission.54

Zangwill, an English Jew and son of eastern European immigrants, portrays the USA

as a site where markers of European difference would be melted away, although he

seems to have been himself somewhat ambivalent about this process.55 ‘America is

God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and

re-forming’, the play’s protagonist argues.56 By not standing out racially or ethnically,

immigrants would more readily assimilate into American society. Progressives like

Theodore Roosevelt deployed this rhetoric to demonstrate the American system’s

benevolence. But this paternalism also of course masked the violent realities of

imperialism and the anxious desire to maintain Anglo-American political and social

supremacy at home.57

Gibson’s notion that the American girl of the future would combine the best points

of the races but look essentially white fi ts with this rhetoric. His statement has the ring

of tolerance but cannot help but be informed by the period’s racist paternalism. At

times, Gibson’s work appears to refer obliquely to the imperialist project, particularly

when his woman fascinates or lords it over submissive subjects. Displacing power

from the male body by making it crawl toward enlightenment or, alternatively, beg

for mercy, Gibson recasts imperialist power relations as a gendered interaction. The

unforgiving searchlight of manifest destiny, colonizing the dark corners of the earth,

becomes the aura encircling an angel (see plate 1); the big-stick wielding new world

power becomes a New Woman daintily prodding her diminutive captive (plate 15). In

these images and many others, Gibson’s women are larger than life superior beings

who have evolved above and beyond their male counterparts.

14 William Walker, ‘The Anglo-Saxon’s Mission?’, Life, 34, 26 October 1899, 330–1. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.



Woman is the fi gure for the inscription of racial politics in Gibson’s art, and he

uses her in a variety of ways. In ‘Her Nightmare. How She Saw Herself’ from 1896,

for example, Gibson uses the female fi gure to make a Social Darwinist argument

about the perils of standing out too sharply instead of blending in (plate 16). The

woman in this illustration stands off to one side of a room fi lled with gentlemen

who ignore her presence (at least this is how the caption tells us she experiences

the scene). With her brow anxiously raised and the right side of her face and neck

disfi gured by heavy shadow, this is the girl made to seem ungainly, made to stand

out as frozen and unnaturally statuesque – voided, it would seem, of life. Although

Gibson marked this fi gure out as a material presence with unyielding, uninterrupted

contours, he nevertheless fi gured her as a kind of social void. If ‘[becoming] too

visible [marked one] out for extinction’, as Martha Banta has argued of racial and

ethnic minorities at the turn of the century, Gibson’s art internalizes this Darwinian

principle – thematically, here, and in other works at the level of design.58 In plate 2, he

opens up the familiar compositional and narrative frameworks to push into another

type of space – a kind of unknown or potentiality that depends explicitly on the

indeterminacy of whiteness.

This indeterminacy was especially evident in American legal discourse of the

period, which, in response to applications for naturalization, attempted to discern

who precisely qualifi ed as a ‘white person’. In Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998), Matthew Frye Jacobson charts the shifting

conceptual and perceptual boundaries of whiteness in American history as the

category narrowed and expanded in response to immigration patterns, scientifi c

discourse, the political climate, and so on. The judge for an 1878 case concerning

15 Charles Dana Gibson, ‘The Weaker Sex. II’, c. 1903. Pen-and-ink drawing, 29 × 23 in. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Department. Photo: Library of Congress.



a Chinese immigrant, for example, admitted that ‘[t]he words “white person” …

constitute a very indefi nite description of a class of persons.’ But, he maintained,

‘one would scarcely fail to understand that the party employing the words “white

person” would intend a person of the Caucasian race.’ The ‘Mongolian or yellow

race’ should not be included in ‘the white or whitish race’, he argued. The use of the

term ‘whitish’ here is revealing. The term ‘Caucasian’ was supposed to clarify the

vagueness of the category ‘white persons’ and situate race as an inalienable biological

fact. But ‘whitish’ put the burden back on phenotype and muddied already imprecise

racial boundaries (and the equally imprecise ways of measuring the ostensible

distance between them). Those who argued for the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon

did so, then, against the backdrop of this imprecision. Whiteness would remain

an abstract idea in the courts into the twentieth century – it would evade precise

location.59 Deployed as a means of identifying and codifying individuals, it only

raised further questions. Although it functioned as an exclusionary construct, then,

whiteness maintained remarkably fl exible contours.60

Excursions into the ImpossibleGibson’s art – which, as I have suggested, connotes ‘progress’ through its

experimental use of the blank page, through its play with the indeterminacy of

that white space – intersects with these discourses. However distanced his visual

experiments might seem from these social and political concerns, they weirdly

echo the structural logic of conversations about whiteness around the turn of the

century.61 Race would seem to be irrelevant in this imagery, which sublimates racial

politics, but that is precisely why it is so effective as an argument about the aesthetic

superiority of whiteness. Du Maurier may help us to see better how this works.

There is a moment when Du Maurier departs from his usual technique, when

he too investigates the communicative potential of the unmarked page to make it

16 Charles Dana Gibson, ‘Her Nightmare: How She Saw Herself’, Life, 27, 21 May 1896, 410–11. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.



unusually palpable. In Punch during the 1880s, Du Maurier dedicated a series to the

activities of the Brown family, who coat their bodies in ‘luminous paint’ in order to

continue their leisure pursuits after nightfall (plate 17).62 ‘A Brilliant Idea’, reads the

legend for this image published in October 1881, which depicts the Browns and their

friends dancing in the dark as spectral presences possessing otherworldly brightness.

In the place of the detailed cross-hatching that defi nes Du Maurier’s work – we see

a residue of this in the fi gure of the musician at the far right – each of the luminous

bodies is described through a limited number of thin black lines framing expanses of

white. If whiteness is a naturalized category that can only be known if it is wrenched

out of the realm of the ‘natural’ and into the space of the unfamiliar, Du Maurier’s

series makes this process explicit by suggesting that whiteness becomes visible only

when it is made to seem strange, when its ‘lightness’ is made into a tangible property.

He may have been inspired by electric lighting, which began to colonize the night

sky of urban centres around this time. The image owes as much, however, to Du

Maurier’s aesthetic predilections and utopian goals, which imagined a future world

of perfect beauty according to precisely these sorts of mechanical contrivances.

Indeed, this image epitomizes what James called ‘du Maurier’s fantastic’, his

‘excursions into the impossible’.63 If white supremacy is a ‘mystical idea’, as Laura

Wexler has argued, nowhere is this more apparent than in Du Maurier, where

whiteness is always fantastic, majestic, and otherworldly.64 James thought Du Maurier

17 George Du Maurier, ‘A Brilliant Idea’, Punch, 81, 22 October 1881, 182. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.



had a ‘peculiar perception of the look of breeding, of race’, but the artist seemed

always to take this perception too far, so that his high-bred English women were all

‘monotonously’ and ‘colossally fair’. The ‘English form … was above all’, James said,

‘a great length and a great straightness, a towering brightness.’65 Even when he tried

for variety, Du Maurier couldn’t help falling into the same pattern.66 These were the

fi gures he loved to draw. With the exception of the lead character in Trilby, he in fact

rarely depicted the lower classes, whom he found aesthetically wanting.67 (It is of

course signifi cant and perhaps not surprising that Trilby quickly rises up the social

ladder to fulfi l the destiny of greatness encoded in her height. As she does so, she

becomes magically paler, her eyes brighter, and her teeth whiter; she becomes, as

Sarah Gracombe has pointed out, more ‘properly “English”’.68 ) When Du Maurier

worked in racial or ethnic variety – as he did in Trilby through the crudely stereotyped

Jewish maestro, Svengali – he did so in order to reinforce his ideal through the

comparison.

In Du Maurier’s last novel, the science fi ction fantasy, The Martian (1897), his

obsession with towering brightness takes a weirdly eugenic turn.69 Although

eugenic ideas informed social theory well before the nineteenth century, the term –

drawn from the Greek for ‘wellborn’ – was coined in the early 1880s by the English

polymath Sir Francis Galton. Inspired by Darwin’s theory of natural selection and

fuelled by the application of these ideas by the Social Darwinists, Galton considered

how man could assist nature in selecting the fi ttest by controlling reproduction.70

Eugenic thinking took hold in several countries around the turn of the century, but

it fl ourished especially in Britain and the USA.71 Indeed, the more radical supporters

of the ‘Anglo-Saxon mission’ in both the UK and the USA viewed eugenics as a

viable means of ensuring its success. Although the Gothic edge of this project is

unmistakable, supporters of eugenics in this period optimistically asserted that it

would ‘save the world’ from the kind of decline and degeneration that theorists like

Max Nordau saw as already under way.72

This is the view promoted in The Martian. The partially blinded protagonist of the

book, Barty Josselin, can see more than most and perceive beauty more fully too, and

this ability inspires his tireless promotion of aesthetic perfection through selective

breeding.73 Those who might pass on physical fl aws, he feels, should not reproduce.

The narrator of Du Maurier’s novel, who is a kind of inferior double of Barty, plays

this role. He will not procreate because he wants to avoid passing on physical defects

like his crooked nose. Barty is himself, however, very good for breeding. Born to

a French woman and an English Lord, he combines the best of their traits to stand

at over six feet tall with an athletic build and classical features. (There’s a bit of

autobiographical hubris here, as this somewhat doubles Du Maurier’s own genetic

make-up.)74 Barty is indeed special: he discovers after nearly committing suicide over

his bad eye that he has the ability to see internally into space. He communes with a

female presence from Mars – aptly named Martia – who colonizes his mind and body

in order to help him to achieve his intellectual destiny. While he sleeps, she writes

best-selling books in his own hand – books as infl uential, we are told, as Darwin’s

Origin of Species. Once her work with him is complete, she is reborn as his daughter in

order to stimulate the continued development of the race, which, like that on Mars,

‘is still developing towards perfection with constant strain and effort’.75

With this interplanetary narrative, Du Maurier followed writers like Edward

Bellamy and H. G. Wells, who hypothesized about unknown realms and the look of

the future in these years.76 But Du Maurier’s vision is profoundly conservative where

that of Wells is not. In A Modern Utopia from 1905, Wells critiques utopian literature



that makes perfection a goal, rails against ‘Anglo-Saxonism’, and denounces the

‘new arbitrary and unsubstantial race prejudices … shaping policies’.77 In his utopia

there would be no perfection, no racial purity, no ‘state breeding of the population’.

One could, furthermore, only classify peoples and types provisionally, since ‘ideas

of a modern Utopia imply everywhere and in everything, margins and elasticities,

a certain universal compensatory looseness of play’.78 In the place of this open-

ended social model, Du Maurier offered infl exible categories, as at least one critic

pointed out in reviewing The Martian. ‘[H]is fondness for tallness has grown so morbid

a passion that all good people are tall, all wicked people short’, said one English

reviewer, pointing out the starkness of Du Maurier’s categories and his problematic

limning of physical and moral characteristics.79

But I’m not sure that this assessment does justice to the complexity of Du

Maurier’s aesthetic ideal, which had deep personal signifi cance for him. Like

the protagonist of The Martian, Du Maurier had been suddenly and mysteriously

blinded in one eye; this occurred in 1857 while he was drawing from a female

model. Thereafter, the fear of total blindness, he said, ‘poisoned his existence’.80

In his literary work, this anxiety at times bubbles up in what he calls ‘uncalled-for

digression[s]’ about the ‘beautiful human eye!’ that ‘star’, which ‘lets the broad white

light of infi nite space … into one pure virgin heart, to be fi ltered there! and lets it

out again, duly warmed, softened, concentrated, sublimated’.81 His illustrated work

at times buzzes with the same anxieties. That the illustrator would imagine a level

of brightness in The Browns series that he would never have been able to witness

himself because of his sensitivity to light makes it into a kind of personal fantasy

about what it would mean to see in such an intense way. Working in his illustration

toward the kind of aesthetic and social perfection championed by the characters

in his novels, Du Maurier invested bright whiteness with personal meaning as an

indication of evolutionarily advanced vision.

Yet whiteness is an inherently unstable category, both as a social ideal and as an

aspect of illustrative design. The Browns series speaks evocatively to Du Maurier’s

fantasy of a kind of supersight that could, if only temporarily, defeat the dark. Like

the protagonist of The Martian, they are a superior race of beings who adapt to and

transcend the limitations of their environment. But as night’s artifi cial candles,

they will eventually burn out to blend back into the darkness they so unnaturally,

for a spell, defeated. Their powers are thus fundamentally fragile. If Du Maurier’s

investment in bright whiteness insists on its futuristic otherworldliness, and hence

unattainability, as a social ideal – if (that is) the aesthetic in Du Maurier wears its

ideological signifi cance openly – his art may help us to see the social implications of

Gibson’s formal choices.

ConclusionGibson’s experimental use of the blank page, his investment in it as organizing

principle of his art and sign of his position in the avant-garde, weirdly reinforces his

evolutionary vision of a future when racial and ethnic variables would be sloughed

off to reveal an increasingly purifi ed – that is, for Gibson, Anglofi ed – American

woman. The rare appearance of an African-American fi gure, in ‘The New Hat’

(1906), makes the racial imbalance that structures Gibson’s art explicit (plate 18). Here

six women move across the compositional space, from right to left, with varying

degrees of energy, determination and grace. Although they are distinguished by class

and by age, fi ve are racially unifi ed through the contrast presented by the last lady in

line. In this scheme, the African-American is just one more of Gibson’s types, socially



integrated by the way she relates formally to the rotund woman four fi gures in front

of her. But, bringing up the rear, she exists almost as an afterthought, the last stage of

this scrambled Darwinian diagram. Bookending the other side of the composition

is that Gibson Girl, whose features echo those of the woman at centre, whose own

balanced proportions signal evolutionary superiority. The leftmost fi gure’s form is

not contained like the rest, however; her left sleeve breaks open to the white page, to

denote perhaps distance or separation. Gibson favoured this descriptive mode in plate 2, where he stretched its potential in a closed circuit where race would seem to be

irrelevant, sloughed off, out of view.

This is the key difference between Gibson’s work and Du Maurier’s, which

formulates white supremacy in awkwardly original terms as a futuristic and

otherworldly mechanical contrivance. Gibson, by contrast, sublimates racial politics.

The apparent irrelevance of race is, of course, the fundamental power of Gibson’s

art as an argument about the aesthetic superiority of whiteness. Through the ease of

effort communicated by Gibson’s style, that superiority appears as a kind of given, an

inevitability, a powerful bourgeois ‘myth’ in the terminology of Roland Barthes.82

The notational character of Gibson’s compositions amplifi es the familiarity of the

concept as already processed, already ostensibly known.83 But the notational, which

also functions as a kind of abstraction, works in other ways as well. It evokes the thing

in process, in the midst of formulation. As Martha Banta puts it, the Gibson Girl is ‘the

dream at the point of coming true’.84

Gibson’s elision of whiteness and progress – both in his illustrations and in his

assertion that his ideal girl drew together the ‘best points’ of ‘many races’ – is abstract

18 Charles Dana Gibson, ‘The New Hat’, in Our Neighbors, New York and London, 1906. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.



NotesI am grateful to Eric Segal, Ruth Iskin, Susan Fillin-Yeh, Emily Burns, David Peters Corbett, Jules Prown and Bryan Wolf for giving me the chance to test out parts of this material at various venues. I also thank John Fagg, Jason LaFountain, Sarah Monks, Alex Nemerov, Susan Power, Jennifer Roberts, Irene Small, Terri Weissman, and Cécile Whiting for their challenging and insightful questions and suggestions. Diana Post graciously allowed me to reproduce Gibson’s silhouettes and Elizabeth Milroy made this possible by putting me in touch with the artist’s family. Adam Thomas and Amy Weber provided critical research assistance and Diana Zion and Helena Richardson assisted with illustrations.

1 On Gibson’s career, see Fairfax Downey, Portrait of an Era as Drawn by C. D. Gibson, New York, 1936. See 383 for a list of these folios. See also

Frederick W. Morton, ‘Charles Dana Gibson, illustrator’, Brush and Pencil, 7, February 1901, 283–4.

2 Several scholars have noted the limitations and exclusivity of Gibson’s

formulation of the modern woman. See, for example, Martha H.

Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915, Urbana and Chicago, IL, 2005.

3 Edward Marshall, ‘The Gibson Girl analyzed by her originator’, New York Times, 20 November 1910.

4 Marshall, ‘The Gibson Girl’.

5 Robert W. Chambers, ‘Ave Atque Vale, Gibson!’, Collier’s, 21 October

1905, 14. ‘In his range of types [Gibson] has been nearer du Maurier

than [other English illustrators]’, echoed S. N. C. ‘Future of Charles

Dana Gibson’s work’, Brush and Pencil, 16, November 1905, 167.

6 Although Gibson had his detractors – some questioned the humour of

his jokes or critiqued the derivativeness of his drawing room scenes,

which owed much to Du Maurier – most American and British critics

marvelled at his precocious talent and stressed his originality. See,

for example, Arthur Hoeber, ‘A century of American illustration’,

Bookman, 8, February 1899, 541–2; and Charles Belmont Davis, ‘Mr.

Charles Dana Gibson and his art’, The Critic, 34, January 1899, 48–55.

For texts comparing Gibson and Du Maurier, in addition to those

cited above, see ‘Mr. Gibson and his girls’, The Critic, 22, 17 November

1894, 335; ‘An American illustrator’, The Academy, 55, 24 December

1898, 514; Marion H. Spielmann, ‘On Charles Dana Gibson – Apostle

of American beauty and humour’, Magazine of Art, 1 (new series),

January 1903, 16–18; [Robert Bridges], Charles Dana Gibson: A Study of the Man and Some Recent Examples of His Best Work, New York, 1905; Marshall,

‘The Gibson Girl’; Downey, Portrait of an Era, 86–7. See also the series of

‘Anglo-American Vignettes’ comparing these two ‘widely different

schools of illustration’, which appeared in Life between 6 February

1896 and 23 April 1896.

7 See, for example, ‘One of the disadvantages of being in love with an

athletic girl’, in C. D. Gibson, The Social Ladder, New York and London,

1902, n.p. Du Maurier’s woman was, in contrast, mostly confi ned to

the drawing room. Frederick Dolman, ‘Keene and Du Maurier: The

men and their methods’, Strand, 28, October 1904, 439–40 explains

that Du Maurier was ‘practically restricted to interior subjects’

because of his ‘sadly defective sight’, which I discuss later in this essay.

For Du Maurier’s account, see his ‘Social pictorial satire – Part II’,

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 96, March 1898, 513.

8 Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History, New York, 1987, 213.

9 Martin A. Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture, Berkeley, CA, 2005; Angela Rosenthal, ‘Visceral culture: Blushing and

the legibility of whiteness in eighteenth-century British portraiture’,

Art History, 27, September 2004, 563–92. She cites Richard Dyer on the

‘“unraced” norm … against which all difference is measured’ on 567.

10 Other scholars who have attended to the structuring principles of

black and white material (with compelling results) include Michael

Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization, Minneapolis, MN, 2008; Caroline Arscott, ‘Stenographic notation:

Whistler’s etchings of Venice’, Oxford Art Journal, 29, 2006, 371–93;

Charles Rice, ‘Seeing whiteness in colour’, in John Tercier, ed.,

Whiteness, London, 2000, 197–218; and Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, ‘In

black and white’, in Norman Bryson, ed., Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France, Cambridge, 1988, 131–53.

11 Du Maurier, ‘Social pictorial satire’, 507. Walter Crane made similar

claims in Of Line and Form, London, 1900, 28. I thank Morna O’Neill for

pointing me to Crane’s text.

12 Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica and

Matt Wray, eds, The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, Durham, NC and

London, 2001, 10.

13 See Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s equation of the Gibson Girl with Du

Maurier’s Duchess of Towers in Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl, 31.

14 Henry James, ‘Du Maurier and London society’, Century, 26, May

1883, 56. On the friendly rivalry between James and Du Maurier, see

Jennifer A. Greenhill, ‘Illustrating the shadow of doubt: Henry James,

blindness, and “The Real Thing”’, in Catriona MacLeod, Véronique

Plesch and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, eds, Elective Affi nities: Testing Word & Image Interactions VI, Amsterdam and New York, 2009, 261–80.

15 James, ‘Du Maurier and London society’, 56, 53; and Henry James,

‘George du Maurier’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 95, September 1897,

600.

16 Dolman, ‘Keene and du Maurier’, 441; W. Delaplaine Scull, ‘George

du Maurier, Romanticist’, Magazine of Art, January 1892, 230.

17 Dolman, ‘Keene and du Maurier’, 439–41. See also Henry James,

‘George du Maurier’, in Partial Portraits, London, 1888, 327–72, esp.

348.

18 See Du Maurier’s description of Leech’s technique, in ‘Social pictorial

satire’, 507.

19 James, ‘Du Maurier and London society’, 54.

20 Marion H. Spielmann, The History of ‘Punch’, London, Paris and

Melbourne, 1895, 513.

21 See Downey, Portrait of an Era, 84. Before being published in book form,

these drawings were published in ‘London as seen by C. D. Gibson’,

Scribner’s, 21 and 22, February 1897, 182–7; March 1897, 370–5; April

1897, 494–9; May 1897, 626–31; June 1897, 758–63; and July 1897,

82–7. 22 See J. A. Reid, ‘Charles Dana Gibson and his work’, Art Journal, February

in the extreme. Imagining what ‘will’ and ‘has’ infl uence(d) her beauty, his argument

occupies two temporal registers to situate his creation somewhere in between. In

these ways, perhaps, Gibson loosened up Du Maurier’s rigid polarities, putting them

in motion. And yet Du Maurier’s and Gibson’s projects are not so different. In reacting

against his predecessor’s overworked density, Gibson learned how to make whiteness

material. But because he formulated it as an abstraction, he located it as an unknown,

as an ideal not yet realized, and this ends up tying him to Du Maurier in ways that

have not yet been acknowledged. Whiteness is, for both of these artists, materially

unstable – it oscillates between visibility and invisibility, between substance and

void, to powerfully evoke the ambiguity built into the idea of evolutionary progress

and the complications of its registration in black-and-white illustration.



Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, New York, 1891, 210.

51 For a short time around the turn of the century, statesmen and

cultural critics seriously debated the value of bringing the ‘English

race’ back together in a ‘common nationality’. See A. V. Dicey, ‘A

common citizenship for the English race’, Contemporary Review, 71,

April 1897, 457–76; Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. edn, New York, 1959, 172–83; and Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American Relations, 1895–1904,

East Brunswick, NJ, 1981. See also Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Cambridge

and London, 1998, 205–13, on the uses and abuses of the ‘ideological

banner of Anglo-Saxon supremacy’.

52 See Josiah Strong’s prediction in ‘The Anglo-Saxon and the world’s

future’, 225, that ‘this race … is destined to dispossess many weaker

races, assimilate others, and mold the remainder, until … it has

Anglo-Saxonized mankind’. Martha Banta, ‘The company one

keeps’, in Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841–1936, Chicago, IL and London, 2003, 183–229, discusses Walker’s cartoon

and Life’s ambivalence about American imperialism.

53 Banta, Barbaric Intercourse, 190.

54 Marshall, ‘The Gibson Girl’.

55 See Joseph H. Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Work of Israel Zangwill, Tuscaloosa, AL and London, 1990, 5. On Zangwill’s complex

play, see Werner Sollers, ‘Melting pots’, in Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, Oxford, 1986, 66–101.

56 Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto, 194.

57 See Amy Kaplan, ‘Black and blue on San Juan Hill’, in Amy Kaplan and

Donald E. Pease, eds, Cultures of United States Imperialism, Durham, NC,

1993, 219–36, for an insightful consideration of how the politics of

social mixing and hierarchies at home were played out on foreign soil

during the war with Spain.

58 Banta, Imaging American Women, 230. Banta is referring to Thorstein

Veblen’s social theory about the conspicuously useless here; she

explores the visibility of racial and ethnic minorities in her second

chapter, ‘Looking for the “best” type’, 92–139. See esp. 105–9.

59 For a discussion of this court case and others, see Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, esp. 227–9.

60 Indeed, Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, makes the case that

whiteness should, at various points in the country’s history, be seen as

inclusionary. See, for example, 39–40 on the 1790 naturalization law

granting citizenship to ‘free white persons’.

61 My thinking on the interrelation between structural forms of the

social and the aesthetic owes much to Wai-chee Dimock’s ‘Rightful

subjectivity’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 4, 1990, 25–35, esp. 28–9.

62 I also discuss this image in Greenhill, ‘Illustrating the shadow of

doubt’, 261–80. I thank Editions Rodopi for allowing me to reprint

parts of my argument about it here.

63 See James, ‘Du Maurier and London society’, 54.

64 See Laura Wexler, ‘The fair ensemble: Kate Chopin in St. Louis in

1904’, in Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, Durham, NC and London, 2006, 271–96, esp.

282–3.

65 See James, ‘Du Maurier and London society’, 55, 56; James, ‘George

du Maurier’, 597.

66 See Du Maurier, ‘The illustrating of books. From the serious artist’s

point of view – II’, Magazine of Art, 13, 1890, 372.

67 Richard Kelly, The Art of George du Maurier, Basingstoke, 1996, 24. Henry

James complicates this view in Partial Portraits, 357, 359, 363.

68 Sarah Gracombe, ‘Converting Trilby: Du Maurier on Englishness,

Jewishness, and culture’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 58, June 2003,

75–108, esp. 85.

69 ‘Selective breeding was one of du Maurier’s favourite hobby horses’,

writes Leonée Ormond, George Du Maurier, Pittsburgh, PA, 1969, 488.

70 ‘Eugenics co-operates with the workings of nature by securing that

humanity shall be represented by the fi ttest races. What nature does

blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and

kindly’, said Galton in his 1909 collection, Essays in Eugenics, quoted in

Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives, Nashville, TN, 1968, 27.

On Du Maurier’s imagery as Galtonian, see Spielmann, The History of ‘Punch’, 510.

71 See Mark B. Adams, ed., The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France,

1900, 44.

23 See Downey, Portrait of an Era, 6–13; and Banta, Imaging American Women, 212.

24 See Christine Terhune Herrick, ‘The Gibson Boy. (Paper-cuttings by

Charles Dana Gibson when a boy.)’ St. Nicholas; an Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks, 23, February 1896, 268–72.

25 ‘Beginners are worried needlessly over the quality of paper and ink

to be used. It is only necessary that one should be white and the other

black.’ ‘A Letter from Mr. Gibson’, Collier’s, 15 October 1904, 11.

26 Banta, Imaging American Women, 212, likewise notes that Gibson’s

‘compositions make adroit use of the white areas of the page’. He

was, she writes, ‘a master of the pure forms carved out of space by the

strong lines of his pen’.

27 Robert Grant, The Art of Living, New York, 1895, 101.

28 Davis, ‘Mr. Charles Dana Gibson and his art’, 55.

29 Davis, ‘Mr. Charles Dana Gibson and his art’, 53–4. On Gibson’s early

fi ne-line technique in the manner of Du Maurier, see Downey, Portrait of an Era, 86.

30 See Thomas E. Curtis, ‘The humorous artists of America. – I’, Strand, 23, March 1902, 306; Morton, ‘Charles Dana Gibson, illustrator’, 280;

and Robert Bridges, ‘Charles Dana Gibson: An appreciation’, Collier’s, 34, 15 October 1904, 13.

31 On the rising status of illustrators, see William A. Coffi n, ‘American

illustration of to-day, fi rst paper’, Scribner’s, 11, January 1892, 106; and

Michele H. Bogart, ‘The problem of status for American illustrators’,

in Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art, Chicago, IL, 1995, 15–78.

James’s illustrator saw things differently in ‘The Real Thing’. See

Henry James, Complete Stories, 1892–1898, New York, 1992, 34.

32 See Banta, Imaging American Women, 212.

33 S. N. C., ‘Future of Charles Dana Gibson’s work’, 167, notes changes in

‘[m]ethods of drawing and printing’. See also a comparison between

techniques employed at Punch and Life, specifi cally, in Robert Bridges

(‘Droch’), ‘The fi rst years’, Life, 81, 4 January 1923, 23.



36 Seymour Chatman, The Later Style of Henry James, Oxford, 1972, 2. I thank

John Fagg for pointing me to Chatman’s study.

37 See Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, vol. 2, 1902; reprint New York,

1909, 89.

38 ‘Milly was forward, as might be said, but not advanced; whereas Kate

was backward – backward still, comparatively, as an English girl –

and yet advanced in a high degree.’ James, The Wings of the Dove, vol. 2, 89–90.

39 See Chatman, The Later Style of Henry James, esp. 22–3.

40 Lebensztejn, ‘In black and white’, 142.

41 Chatman, The Later Style of Henry James, 86, suggests that ‘a thoughtful, a

puzzling-out attitude’ is ‘the kind of reading that James wanted’, and

that certain terms or ideas are ‘diffi cult not only because [they are]

abstract but because [their] syntactic completion is left to the reader’.

42 For a thoughtful analysis of May’s technique, see Ernest Knaufft,

‘Drawing for illustration’, The Art Amateur, 40, January 1899, 35–6. See

also Simon Houfe, Phil May: His Life and Work, 1864–1903, London, 2002.

On Stanlaws, see Thomas E. Curtis, ‘The humorous artists of America

– II’, Strand, 23, April 1902, 445.

43 See Neil Harris, ‘Pictorial perils: The rise of American illustration’,

in Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America, Chicago, IL and London, 1990, 337–48; and Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art.

44 See Crane, Of Line and Form, 49, 24.

45 Morton, ‘Charles Dana Gibson, illustrator’, 279.

46 See Downey, Portrait of an Era, 231–2. A review of London as Seen by Charles Dana Gibson in The Academy, 52, 11 December 1897, 523, argued that

‘Gibson was at his best in ‘Society’ scenes’, and was ‘not truly himself

except among swallow-tailed coats and low necks’.

47 See [Robert Bridges], Charles Dana Gibson: A Study of the Man and Some Recent Examples of His Best Work, n.p. See also Bogart, Artists, Advertising and the Borders of Art, 26; and Downey, Portrait of an Era, 274–86.

48 Spielmann, ‘On Charles Dana Gibson’, 15.

49 See Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America, New Haven and London, 1996, 102.

50 Rev. Josiah Strong, ‘The Anglo-Saxon and the world’s future’, in Our



Brazil, and Russia, New York and Oxford, 1990. The two international

congresses on eugenics, in 1912 and 1921, convened in London and

New York, respectively. See Problems in eugenics: papers communicated to the fi rst International Eugenics Congress held at the University of London, July 24th to 30th, 1912, London, 1913 and Scientifi c papers of the second International Congress of Eugenics: held at American Museum of Natural History, New York, September 22–28, 1921, Baltimore, MD, 1923.

72 In 1909, a leading advocate of eugenics in Britain, Caleb Williams

Saleeby, affi rmed that eugenics would ‘save the world’. G. R. Searle,

Eugenics and Politics in Britain, 1900–1914, Leyden, 1976, 1, quotes

him and suggests ‘these words capture the mood of exuberant

optimism within a movement which seemed about to sweep

aside all the obstacles in its path. A similar state of affairs existed

in America.’ William H. Schneider, ‘The eugenics movement in

France, 1890–1940’, in Adams, ed., The Wellborn Science, 69, argues

that eugenics was, in part, a reaction to the notion that Western

industrial society was in decline, which Max Nordau famously

declared in Degeneration. Published initially as Die Entartung in 1892 and

translated into English three years later, Degeneration was extremely

controversial but it solidifi ed a language – already in circulation –

for denouncing dangerous or apparently amoral tendencies in art.

Although Du Maurier looked suspiciously on the aesthete’s excesses,

he seems to have nonetheless been interested in the potential social

uses of artifi ce, of (as the consummate aesthete, Whistler, might say)

surpassing or improving upon nature. For an excellent and concise

discussion of aestheticism, degeneration, and Du Maurier’s role in

conjoining those terms, see Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 79–119.

73 George Du Maurier, The Martian: A Novel, New York, 1897. See especially

304: ‘Barty’s senses were not as other men’s senses. With his one eye

he saw much that most of us can’t see with two; I feel sure of this.’

For a concise summary of the text, see Richard Kelly, George du Maurier, Boston, MA, 1983, 125–53.

74 Kelly, The Art of George du Maurier, 1–14, provides a concise summary of

the artist’s background. See also Ormond, George Du Maurier.75 Du Maurier, The Martian, 368.

76 Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887, Boston, MA, 1888; H.

G. Wells, The Time Machine, London, 1895. Du Maurier is of course

also drawing on the late nineteenth-century fascination with the

similarities between Earth and Mars, which the spectroscope made

newly visible. See Paul Fayter, ‘Strange new worlds of space and time:

Late Victorian science and science fi ction’, in Bernard Lightman, ed.,

Victorian Science in Context, Chicago, IL and London, 1997, 256–80, esp.

268–73.

77 H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, London, 1905, 328–9.

78 Wells, A Modern Utopia, 182, 262, 265, 270. See also Marvey N.

Quamen’s insightful ‘Unnatural interbreeding: H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia as species and genre’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 33, 2005,

67–84. Wells, on 202, also denounces the ‘contemporary woman of

fashion’ who acts, much like Gibson’s Girl, as a ‘stimulant rather than

a companion for a man’.

79 See the review of Du Maurier’s book in The Saturday Review, 84, 9

October 1897, 398. See also ‘A great amateur’, The Academy, 53, 18 September 1897, 69–71.

80 See Du Maurier, ‘Social pictorial satire’, 513–14; and Addison Bright,

‘Mr. Du Maurier at home’, The Idler, 8, December 1895, 415–16.

81 Du Maurier, Trilby, New York, 1894, 265–6.

82 Roland Barthes, ‘Myth today’, in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers,

New York, 1972, 109–59.

83 I thank John Fagg for suggesting that I consider the relation between

the notational and the already known in Gibson’s work.

84 Banta, Imaging American Women, 213.

Troubled Abstraction: Whiteness in Charles Dana Gibson and George Du Maurier

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