9780748693436 the Sculptural

Chapter 3 ‘Of marble men and maidens’: Sculptural Transformations In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860), another impor- tant sculpture by Praxiteles becomes the focus of desire. In their discussion of Hawthorne’s use of the visual arts in his works, Rita Gollin and John Idol trace his engagement with painting and sculpture in the exhibitions and galleries he encountered during his sojourn in Europe in 1853–60, which he detailed in his English, French and Italian Notebooks.1 From their observations, it is clear that, faced in these spaces with antique sculpture, Hawthorne, like George Eliot’s Dorothea and Thomas Hardy, felt overwhelmed by the burden of his- tory. Following a second visit to the British Museum he fi nds himself crushed by the ‘dead weight’ of the past that had struck him on the fi rst and wishes ‘that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt to lime’ (qtd in Gollin and Idol 1991: 72). Yet, once he becomes more familiar with the collections and discovers that he is no longer ‘weighed down by the multitude of things to be seen’, he is able ‘to discern “grace and nobility” even in the “battered and shattered” remains of Greek sculpture’ (Gollin and Idol 1991: 73).2 Gollin and Idol observe that, in time, Hawthorne came to prefer sculpture to painting, in part due to its realism, and that his appreciation of statuary improved with greater exposure to it, especially in Rome and Florence where he begins to engage in Pygmalionesque fantasies of animation. In Rome he admires ‘Michelangelo’s Lorenzo de Medici . because “after looking at it a little while, the spectator ceases to think of it as a marble statue; it comes to life”’: on one visit to the Vatican’s sculpture gallery, the Apollo Belvedere suddenly [seems] ‘ethereal and godlike; only for a fl itting moment, however, and as if he had alighted from heaven, or shone suddenly out of sunlight, and then had withdrawn himself again’. (Gollin and Idol 1991: 90) 66515_Pulham.indd515_Pulham.indd 110404 229/09/209/09/20 55:40:40 PPMM Sculptural Transformations 105 Figure 3.1 The Medici Venus, Hellenistic copy after original by Praxiteles c.370–330 BCE, Roman, fi rst century, marble (Galleria degli Uffi zi, Florence). Bridgeman Images His experiences with sculpture in Rome evidently affected his per- ception and recognition of statuary. In a diary entry dated 8 June 1858 in The French and Italian Notebooks, Hawthorne logs a visit to the Uffi zi, during which he pays special attention to the gallery’s statues. As he retraces his steps for his readers, he notes that its laby- rinthine rooms are fi lled with ‘many beautiful specimens of antique, ideal sculpture . Apollos, Bacchuses, Venuses, Mercurys, Fauns’ all of which are now so familiar to him that he can recognise them ‘at a glance’ (Hawthorne 1980: 296). But the Venus de’ Medici (Figure 3.1), the ‘mystery and wonder of the gallery’ appears to elude him and he seems unsettled at the thought of seeing her: I could not quite believe that I was not to fi nd the Venus de’ Medici; and still, as I passed from one room to another, my breath rose and fell a little, with the half-hope, half-fear, that she might stand before me. Really, I did not know that I cared so much about Venus, or any possible woman of marble. (1980: 297) 66515_Pulham.indd515_Pulham.indd 110505 229/09/209/09/20 55:40:40 PPMM 106 The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature Of his eventual encounter with the statue in the Tribune, he writes: She is very beautiful . and has a fresh and new charm about her, unreached by any cast or copy that I have seen. The hue of the marble is just so much mellowed by time as to do for her all that Gibson tries, or ought, to try, to do for his statues by color; softening her, warming her almost imperceptibly, making her an inmate of the heart as well as a spiritual existence. I felt a kind of tenderness for her; an affection, not as if she were one woman, but all womankind in one. Her modest atti- tude – which, before I saw her I had not liked, deeming that it might be an artifi cial shame – is partly what unmakes her as the heathen goddess, and softens her into woman. (1980: 297–8) In this description, time seems to have warmed the statue to life, effecting a transformation that in Ovid occurs at Pygmalion’s touch as the ivory seemingly softens, like the wax of Hymettus, and becomes fl esh (2008: X, ll. 288–93). In this passage, a similar transmutation occurs: the goddess melds into a universal symbol of womanhood and Hawthorne’s doubts concerning her modesty dissolve. But Haw- thorne’s passage also refers to another sculptural fi gure, John Gib- son’s Tinted Venus, which he had seen while on a visit to Harriet Hosmer’s studio and to which he appears to have been attracted, though unsettled by the impropriety of the statue’s life-like colouring. Of Gibson’s Venus, Hawthorne writes: The tint of the Venus seemed to be a very delicate, almost imperceptible shade of yellow, I think, or buff . I must say that there was something fascinating and delectable in the warm, yet delicate tint of the beautiful nude Venus, although, I should have preferred to dispense with the colouring of the eyes and hair; nor am I at all certain that I should not, in the end, like the snowy whiteness better for the whole statue. Indeed, I am almost sure I should; for this lascivious warmth of hue quite demor- alizes the chastity of the marble, and makes one feel ashamed to look at the naked limbs in the company of women. (1980: 157) Following a further visit to the Uffi zi, Hawthorne juxtaposes the two statues once more in his thoughts; he fi nds that the Venus de’ Medici’s charm ‘does not diminish on better acquaintance’ and wonders how, given that the Venus is ‘incapable of decay and death’ and will be ‘as young and fair as long as a beautiful thought shall require physi- cal embodiment’, any sculptor ‘has had the impertinence to aim at any other presentation of female beauty’ (1980: 308). He goes on to declaim that, while he ‘means no disrespect to Gibson or Powers, 66515_Pulham.indd515_Pulham.indd 110606 229/09/209/09/20 55:40:40 PPMM Sculptural Transformations 107 or a hundred other men who people the world with nudities’, the world ‘would be all the richer if their Venuses, their Greek Slaves . were burnt into quicklime’ leaving only the Venus de’ Medici ‘as our image of the beautiful’ (1980: 308). Hawthorne’s privileging of the antique Venus at the expense of her contemporary counterpart anticipates Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s ‘Dialogue between Two Venuses’ where Praxiteles’ Venus is consid- ered the superior sculpture. However, Hawthorne’s preference for the Venus de’ Medici may have less to do with the glories of ancient sculpture than with an aversion to neoclassical statues such as those of Gibson and Powers whose nudity may have seemed gratuitous to him, and unsanctioned by pagan religion.3 Writing of Hawthorne’s disapproval of nude statuary, Henry James observes: The plastic sense was not strong in Hawthorne; there can be no better proof of it than his curious aversion to the representation of the nude in sculpture. This aversion was deep-seated; he constantly returns to it, exclaiming upon the incongruity of modern artists making naked fi gures. He apparently quite failed to see that nudity is not an incident, or accident, of sculpture, but its very essence and principle; and his jeal- ousy of undressed images strikes the reader as a strange, vague, long- dormant heritage of his straight-laced Puritan ancestry. (1883: 161) For James, then, Hawthorne’s distaste for contemporary ‘nudities’ is based on his puritanism, yet his concerted engagement with the sculptural body – both antique and modern – in The Marble Faun (1860) suggests complex negotiations of desire that eschew this simple explanation, and the novel’s Roman setting, replete with galleries, public sculpture and sculptors’ studios, offers an interesting location in which to explore the clash between pagan and contemporary culture that causes Hawthorne such unease. Hawthorne’s Roman Romance Notably, Rome – and Italy more broadly – also features in James’s own exploration of creative and sexual desire in his early novel, Rod- erick Hudson (1875).4 Italy has often featured signifi cantly in the nineteenth-century American imagination and the list of American authors who have written about Italy, in either journals or literary works, is long enough to merit a comprehensive study; indeed, the critic Nathalia Wright has argued that ‘no other foreign country has 66515_Pulham.indd515_Pulham.indd 110707 229/09/209/09/20 55:40:40 PPMM 108 The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature fi gured so provocatively in American fi ction’ (1965: 29). For nineteenth-century American tourists, Italy held a special fascination and, in particular, Rome’s architectural layers, and plethora of antiquities offered a close encounter with the European cultural heritage that had nourished their ancestors, and that their own country could not match. The number of American visits to Rome rose considerably in the nineteenth century, increasing from approximately 200 in 1835, and 1,000 in 1840, to 30,000 by 1900 (Brodhead 1990: xiii). For one of these tourists, Henry Leland, Rome is the ‘antithesis’ of America; it is ‘all of the past’ and ‘full of lessons’ (1863: 3).

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