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I Am Adele Bloch-Bauer, I Am Hester Prynne

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I Am Adele Bloch-Bauer, I Am Hester Prynne University of Southern Maine USM Digital Commons All Theses & Dissertations Student Scholarship 2016 I AM ADELE BLOCH-BAUER, I AM HESTER PRYNNE Laurie Lico Albanese MFA University of Southern Maine Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/etd Part of the Fiction Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Nonfiction Commons, and the Women's History Commons Recommended Citation Lico Albanese, Laurie MFA, "I AM ADELE BLOCH-BAUER, I AM HESTER PRYNNE" (2016). All Theses & Dissertations. 279. https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/etd/279 This Open Access Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at USM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of USM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. I AM ADELE BLOCH-BAUER, I AM HESTER PRYNNE ____________ A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE STONECOAST MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING ___________ BY Laurie Lico Albanese June 2016 Abstract I AM ADELE BLOCH-BAUER, I AM HESTER PRYNNE is a compilation of fiction and nonfiction written at Stonecoast. This cross-genre thesis includes two excerpts from historical novels with female protagonists, and an essay on women’s historical fiction. For the study and creation of female-centered historical fiction I researched and wrote in a wide range of areas, both intellectual and temporal. First, I read and traced the emergence of female-focused American historical fiction that began with Nathaniel Hawthrne’s The Scarlet Letter, and continues today with historical fiction based in fact such as Lily King’s Euphoria and Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife and Circling the Sun. Second, I examined the origin of American feminist thought and literature from Margaret Fuller’s Women of the Nineteenth Century to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and beyond. Third, I researched fin-de-siècle Jewish Vienna at the dawn of the twentieth century to write and re-envisioned the life of the modern art patron Adele Bloch- Bauer (1881-1925) for the novel Stolen Beauty. Finally, I researched 19th century Concord, Massachusetts and the roots of Transcendentalism, as well as the 1848 Italian revolution, to draft a new novel in which I re-envision the relationship between Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne as it drives the creation of The Scarlet Letter in the years 1840-1850. This new novel is titled I Am Hester Prynne, and a small selection is included herein. iii Acknowledgements Many talented and generous teachers, staff and friends at Stonecoast contributed to the creation of Adele Bloch-Bauer’s voice in Stolen Beauty and to all of my work in this thesis. To Susan Conley, my generous, brilliant and outstanding thesis and third semester mentor, thank you for your guidance, enthusiasm, and for holding the torch at the finish line. Aaron Hamburger put Collette in my hands and helped me find Adele’s voice – for this amazing gift, I owe you a great debt. Jaed Coffin said, roughly, ‘why write that, when you can write this?’ and clarified so much for me. Robin Talbot, Matthew Jones, Justin Tussing, Suzanne Strempek Shea, Debra Marquart, Elizabeth Searle, David Anthony Durham, Ted and Annie Deppe on the faculty, and my friends Sally Donaldson, Vicki Hamlin, Julia Munemo, Shannon Ratliff, Clif Travers, Anya Mali, Ellie O’Leary, Maggie Almdale, Bill Stauffer, Lauren Liebowitz and the rest of the Howth gang, thank you for encouragement, camaraderie, and lots of kayaking, swimming, lobster, whiskey and Guinness. Friends, students and fellow teachers at The Writers Circle, I learn so much from all of you. Heather Schroder, thank you for recognizing what Adele’s story could be and for making it happen. Laura Morowitz, your friendship and scholarship mean the world to me. Finally, thank you always to my beloved husband Frank, amazing daughter Melissa, and extraordinary son John -- big-hearted and excellent readers, critics, travel companions, teachers, athletes and cooks. Our home and your love are at the center of my life and everything I do. I am so proud of you, and so grateful. iv Table of Contents Preface 1 Stolen Beauty 11 Voices from the Margins in Women’s Historical Fiction 110 I am Hester Prynne 119 Bibliography 132 v Preface I was ten years old when I learned that my Hungarian-born great-grandmother had been raised Jewish and not Roman Catholic as my sisters and I, and our parents, and all of my cousins and aunts and uncles had been raised. “I don’t go to church,” she said in her charming accent. “I go to synagogue.” It was Easter Sunday, circa 1969. I was standing in her old house in Seaford, Long Island, looking through a peephole into a delicate candy Easter egg the size and shape of a football. Inside the decorated egg, which my great- grandmother held for me, little white bunnies and their well-dressed offspring frolicked among pastel-colored flowers and houses made of spun sugar. “But you celebrate Easter,” I said. “No. I celebrate Passover,” she said quietly. That was all. My young age, and the circumstances of the holiday, kept my many questions from rising to the surface My father later said he’d been told the same thing when he was a child, but no one seemed eager to talk about my great-grandmother’s early life. As time went by, everything about that day came to seem magical but also imaginary -- a fragile confectionary of a pastel memory. Eventually, I learned this much: Regina Solitar, daughter of the Hapsburg Empire, had been born and raised Jewish in Budapest. She was a teenager when she followed her older brothers to America, where she fell in love with an 1 Italian barber named Gennaro Falcone. Her family disowned her when she married him. Her Judaism, along with the rest of her past, had been vanquished and replaced by a life of raising Italian-American children, making a living as a seamstress and finally, quilting for her family. Although we never spoke of it again, I felt a great kinship with my great- grandmother and her Judaism. Long after she passed away I held onto the secret desire that I might one day write a story about a Jewish woman who immigrates to America and raises her family here. Maria Altmann, Gustav Klimt and Adele Bloch-Bauer gave me that opportunity when Dr. Laura Morowitz, a brilliant art historian who is also my dear friend and co-author of The Miracles of Prato, suggested a novel about Gustav Klimt. That was in 2010. A few months later my brother-in-law, John Albanese, gave me a stack of Art & Antiques magazine, where I found Salomon Grimberg’s article about Klimt and Adele’s alleged love affair. Slowly, I recognized my chance to write a novel about two Jewish heroines who had grown up, like my great-grandmother, separated from their faith and yet bound to it in ways both beautiful and terrifying. From this, my novel Stolen Beauty was born. But it wasn’t simple, and it wasn’t easy. To write a fictional story about real people is no small challenge. Klimt, Adele and Maria proved worthy of the burden my fictional scrutiny put upon them, and I will address, later, what it takes to create a vibrant, believable female protagonist based upon the life of a real woman. Stolen Beauty required years of reading and 2 research into the art, architecture, lifestyle and politics in fin-de-siecle Vienna. Many books, court records, news accounts and films informed the story, including extensive records that Maria Altmann’s lawyer, E. Randolph Schoenberg, made available on line for a time, as well as Portrait of Adele Bloch- Bauer by Sophie Lillie and Georg Gaughusch, The Lady in Gold by Anne-Marie O’Connor, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna by Carl E. Schorske, The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, and A Nervous Splendor by Frederic Morton. I also highly recommend the documentary films The Rape of Europa and Maria’s Story. During these years of research I travelled to Vienna and also to Budapest. In Vienna I walked the streets and rode the tram from the Margareten District where Maria lived, to Schwindgasse where Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer lived. I waited in line to climb the narrow staircase into Freud’s original home office, where I studied his collection of ancient artifacts and considered their influence on art and the psyche in the early years of the Secession, the birth of modern psychology and the unleashing of long-repressed impulses borne of that world. All of this helped me construct the timelines of Adele and Maria’s lives and to realistically depict and imagine the milieus and settings of the novel – from fin de siècle Vienna and Jewish life in the Hapsburg Empire, through the roots of anti-Semitism that culminated in the atrocities of World War Two and the mass emigration of Jews to America. In the spirit of storytelling, I strove to create a canvas large enough to convey the timelessness of art and the passionate desire for life and liberty that 3 united Adele and Maria. Just as I held my great-grandmother’s Easter egg up to my eye and imagined another world there, I tried to do the same with this story -- evoke the legacy of family, art and memory, while telling an exciting and true tale of creation, destruction and survival.
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