'Go west, all you intrepid souls
With heart and winged feet!'
The Lady Columbia started as the personification of America in an allegorical and mythologized painting by John Gast (1872). Entitled American Progress, she embodies the ideologies of 'manifest destiny' and the 'spirit of the frontier' in the march toward westward expansion and settlement. Made into an engraved version for wide distribution in the late 19C, the notions of manifest destiny and frontier spirit were brought to the general public and, through repetitive use and visualization, were embedded in its collective consciousness.
Through the associative power between image and wording, the Lady Columbia becomes an early example of that specific rhetoric known as 'American Exceptionalism', and the kind of symbolic anchoring which Roland Barthes expounds on in his essay The Rhetoric of the Image. How did this Lady fare through time? As a divine figure of enlightenment and progress for pioneers and settlers marching westward from the east, her role as the personification of America remained unchallenged till Uncle Sam, then Lady Liberty, supplanted her in the early 20C. In fact, popular myths often couple the stern-faced 'Uncle' with the 'Lady Columbia'. Can it be a coincidence that, by the time, she has been supplanted by Lady Liberty in the 1920's, Columbia herself will have been given a new identity in the motion pictures industry? Follow her on her fascinating journey through the centuries. |