Wilderness Imagery As Representation of Spiritual
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
37 INTO THE WOODS: WILDERNESS IMAGERY AS REPRESENTATION OF SPIRITUAL AND EMOTIONAL TRANSITION IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE DISSERTATION Presented to the Graduate Council of the University of North Texas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By Janet Poindexter Sholty, B.A., M.A. Denton, Texas August, 1997 Sholty, Janet Poindexter, Into the Woods: Wilderness Imagery as Representation of Spiritual and Emotional Transition in Medieval Literature. Doctor of Philosophy (English), August, 1997. 233 pp., 8 illustrations, references, 329 titles. Wilderness landscape, a setting common in Romantic literature and painting, is generally overlooked in the art of the Middle Ages. While the medieval garden and the city are well mapped, the medieval wilderness remains relatively trackless. Yet the use of setting to represent interior experience may be traced back to the Neo-Platonic use of space and movement to define spiritual development. Separating themselves as far as possible from the material world, such writers as Origen and Plotinus avoided use of representational detail in their spatial models; however, both the visual artists and the authors who adopted the Neo-Platonic paradigm, elaborated their emotional spaces with the details of the classical locus amoenus and of the exegetical desert, while retaining the philosophical concern with spiritual transition. Analysis of wilderness as an image for spiritual and emotional transition in medieval literature and art relates the texts to an iconographic tradition which, along with motifs of city and garden, provides a spatial representation of interior progress, as the medieval dialectic process provides a paradigm for intellectual resolution. Such an analysis relates the motif to the core of medieval intellectual experience, and further suggests significant connections between medieval and modern narratives in regard to the representation of interior experience. The Divine Comedy and related Continental texts employ both classical and exegetical sources in the representation of psychological transition and spiritual conversion. Similar techniques are also apparent in English texts such as Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon elegies, in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, and Troilus and Criseyde, and in the northern English The Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. These literary texts, further, include both ideas and techniques which are analogous to those of visual arts, where frescos and altarpieces show the wilderness as metaphor for transition, and where manuscript illuminations relate this visual concept to texts. Thus, the wilderness as a landscape of personal crisis becomes in the Middle Ages a significant part of the representation of interior experience in painting and in literature. Copyright by Janet P. Sholty 1997 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS .... .......... v....................... Chapter 1. THE ICONOGRAPHY OF WILDERNESS LANDSCAPE ....... 1 2. FROM CALYPSO'S ISLAND TO BRENDAN'S WHALE: THE SOURCES OF WILDERNESS ICONOGRAPHY ....... 13 3. "SONNY, WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE..." THE MEMORY OF A FRONTIER WILDERNESS ......................... 68 4. THE ANCIENT FOREST AND THE DARK WOOD: THE WILDERNESS OF THIS LIFE ....................... 117 5. THE THICKETS OF THE HEART.......................... 168 6. CONCLUSION ......................................... 202 APPENDIX..................................................207 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................. 211 iv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Page 1. Asher Durand, Kindred Spirits............................. ...... 2 2. Utrecht Psalter:Psalm XXXV (36) . 82 3. Utrecht Psalter: Psalm LVI (57)................................. 84 4. Utrecht Psalter: Exodus 15. 1-19 . 85 5. Utrecht Psalter: Psalm XLI (42)..............................85 6. Bonaventura Berlinghieri, The St. FrancisAltarpiece .................. 149 7. Giotto, St. FrancisReceiving the Stigmata ........................... 150 8. Frontispiece: Troilus and Criseyde ................................ 184 V CHAPTER I THE ICONOGRAPHY OF WILDERNESS LANDSCAPE "These are the Gardens of the Desert, these / The Unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful ... " (1-2). To William Cullen Bryant, and to the landscape artists of the Hudson River School, partly inspired by Bryant's verse, nature was a sign of and a means to spiritual experience. Asher Durand's painting "Kindred Spirits" (1849) [Fig. 1] shows Bryant and the Hudson River landscape painter Thomas Cole in conversation on a bluff overlooking a wilderness vista sweeping away to the west. Durand uses the figure of wilderness space to represent the aspirations of a young nation, expecting the reader or viewer to read in the text of nature the promise of the New World (Novak 38-39). In his "Letters on Landscape Painting," Durand explains that the technique of representation is "...but the language and the rhetoric which expresses and enforces the doctrine" (66). Unlike the American romantics, medieval poets and painters rarely found charm or inspiration in an expanse of wilderness landscape. However, though different in their content, their doctrine, the romantic and medieval artists shared a similarity in representative concept: They viewed nature as a text to be read; they represented spiritual crisis in the icon of wilderness landscape; and they figured individual psychological development as movement within landscape. 2 Fig. 1. Kindred Spirits, Asher Durand. The New York Public Library. Time: Special Issue. Ed. Robert Hughes, Spring 1997, 11. 3 Just as American artists like Asher Durand, Frank Church, and Thomas Cole ' medieval artists produced paintings with symbolic as well as naturalistic elements, assembled conventional scenic elements more for sentence than for realism. In European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Ernst Robert Curtius says, "Medieval descriptions art of nature are not meant to represent reality" (183), further explaining that Romanesque does not conform to any concept of naturalistic representation. In fact, however, representative naturalism only dominates the art and literatature of the mid-nineteenth century, and even then naturalism requires selection, which implies both artifice and interpretation. In the Renaissance, with its new "realism" of representation, does Sandor Botticelli's Venus Risingfrom the Foam (c. 1500) represent a real woman (or even a real goddess)? It is most unlikely that any such woman lived in his neighborhood, and if she did, she certainly did not dress like that. Botticelli's painting represents an ideal of feminine beauty which was only distantly related to "life" and was closely related to the views and preconceptions of his day. Similar points could be made about Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) or Mattel's Barbie TM, both representations having little to do with real women and everything to do with the artists' cultural notions. It is not, therefore, surprising that the medieval artist or poet elected to omit some details in order to reveal others, and to exaggerate some features to illuminate their ideas. In particular, the medieval artist, as well as the medieval writer, was concerned almost exclusively with interior experience. In a culture in which the state of the soul was of paramount importance, the meticulous representation of physical details was beside the point, a distraction. Rather than saying that the medieval artists or poets were uninterested in or 4 say that they were more unable to represent reality, it would be more accurate to recording physical detail. interested in representing spiritual or emotional reality than in interior experience, the artist or In pursuing this interest in the representation of fantastic animals. writer frequently resorted to dreams, visions, drolleries, grotesques, and But most frequently he--or she--pictured interior experience in terms of space, and transition between one state and another as passage within or between spaces. Thus, the in the castle, the city, and the garden came to be the loci of emotional events represented manipulated in order to guise of physical description, and description which had been remarked illuminate the emotional rather that the physical reality. Though less frequently representing emotional or by scholars, the wilderness too became a significant icon for of this discussion. spiritual transition, and the evolution of that motif is the subject Although the icon of wilderness is pervasive in medieval art and literature, the techniques of representation did not develop uniformly. As a general rule, the narrative description of landscape evolves before a corresponding development of detail in and characters are painting. 2 In the west, early manuscript illuminations actions conventionally represented against a solid background of gold or blue, or against a trellis the use of or grid pattern, settings which center attention on the event or character without in a spatial setting. However, by 800, at the Carolingian School at Aachen, illuminators, imitation of antique models, use architectural space defined by columns, arches, and windows to represent hierarchy and relationship. 3 Also part of the Carolingian tradition, the Utrecht Psalter (c. 820) uses wilderness elements--rocks, trees, and water--to define the space between one experience or one episode and another. 4 The use of wilderness as 5 boundary continues well into the fifteenth century, and in most instances, the development of representative detail